Did Jesus Predict the End?

A prophecy with a deadline

Did Jesus expect the end to come within the lifetime of his earliest followers? Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21 make that question difficult to avoid. Jesus speaks about the Temple being destroyed, terrible suffering, disturbances in the heavens, and the coming of the Son of Man. He also says that “this generation” will not pass away before “all these things” take place (Mark 13:30). Any interpretation that places the entire discourse thousands of years in the future has to explain what that deadline meant to the people who first heard it.

Preterism takes the first-century setting seriously. It understands much of this prophecy as having been fulfilled in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD. There is good reason to begin there, since Jesus was speaking to people living in a particular historical world, not simply describing events for readers in our own time. But that leaves another question: does the destruction of Jerusalem also account for the resurrection of the dead, final judgment, and the completion of God’s kingdom? Those claims need to be examined on their own terms.

What preterism gets right

The Synoptic accounts begin with the Temple. Mark describes its coming destruction, while Luke is more explicit about Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, its inhabitants being killed or taken captive, and the city being trampled by Gentiles (Luke 21:20–24). The Jewish-Roman War provides an obvious historical setting for these descriptions. Historians can still debate whether Jesus spoke every line precisely as the Gospels preserve it, or whether the evangelists shaped earlier predictions in light of the war. Either way, the events of 70 AD belong in the discussion.

The imagery also comes from an established Jewish prophetic tradition. Isaiah 13 describes judgment against Babylon in terms of a darkened sun and stars, while Isaiah 34 and Ezekiel 32 use comparable imagery when describing the downfall of nations and rulers. Such language did not always mean that the physical universe was about to be destroyed. That makes a nonliteral reading of some elements in Mark 13 quite plausible, although the imagery alone cannot establish that everything in the discourse was fulfilled in 70 AD. Prophetic symbolism can also describe events understood as genuinely supernatural.

The Son of Man and the problem of sequence

Daniel 7:13–14 is especially important here. In Daniel’s vision, one like a son of man approaches the Ancient of Days and receives authority. The movement is toward the divine throne; the passage does not explicitly describe a figure descending to earth. That gives real support to interpretations of Jesus’ coming on the clouds as a description of his vindication or enthronement. Mark 14:62, which brings together Daniel 7 and Psalm 110, makes this possibility worth taking seriously.

The difficulty is that Mark 13:26–27 also describes angels gathering the elect. This could draw on the restoration of scattered Israel, but it can also be read as a final apocalyptic intervention. Matthew 24:29 places the cosmic signs “immediately” after the tribulation, while Luke 21:24 refers to the “times of the Gentiles” and handles the sequence differently. These accounts are closely related literary witnesses, rather than three independent transcripts of the same speech. We should pay attention to their differences instead of forcing them into a single timetable that none of them clearly supplies.

The strongest challenge to full preterism

Full preterism becomes much harder to defend when we turn to Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15, he is responding to people who question whether the dead are raised. He argues from Christ’s resurrection, discusses the kind of body the resurrected will have, and looks toward the transformation of mortal existence. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, Paul addresses believers who have already died and places their resurrection within the future hope shared by the living. His concern is not easily reduced to a change in Jerusalem’s covenantal status.

Full preterists sometimes understand resurrection primarily in corporate or covenantal terms, with the old order passing away and the new one taking its place. Paul certainly has room for corporate categories; his comparison of Adam and Christ is an obvious example. But that does not remove his concern with people who have died, or with the transformation he describes in 1 Corinthians 15. If the resurrection Paul anticipated was completed through the events of 70 AD, that interpretation needs to be argued from Paul’s words rather than assumed because it fits a larger system.

Early Christian writings add to the problem. First Clement 24–26 speaks of resurrection as a continuing hope and connects it to Jesus’ resurrection. If the letter is correctly dated to the late first century, as it commonly is, its author was writing after 70 AD without treating the general resurrection as something already completed. The final chapter of the Didache also anticipates an apocalyptic coming and resurrection, although disagreement over its date limits what we can conclude about its relationship to the Temple’s destruction. These texts do not make full preterism logically impossible, but they do make its historical case more difficult.

The challenge to partial preterism

Rejecting full preterism does not settle the question in favor of partial preterism. A partial-preterist interpretation can distinguish the near-term judgment of Jerusalem from a future resurrection and final consummation. That is a coherent theological reading, and there are textual arguments that can be made for it. Still, the distinction has to come from the passages themselves. Mark’s reference to “this generation” and Matthew’s use of “immediately” cannot simply be passed over by placing a long interval between the events.

There is another possibility that deserves an honest hearing. Jesus’ earliest followers, and perhaps Jesus himself, may have expected an apocalyptic transformation that went beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and would occur within their lifetimes. Paul’s language of urgency, together with the New Testament’s repeated expectation of divine intervention, makes that historically plausible. Yet the question of what the Gospel authors present is not identical to the question of what the historical Jesus said. To argue that Jesus personally predicted an apocalypse that failed to arrive, we would need to make that further historical case rather than treat the Gospel accounts as direct transcripts.

What happened after 70 AD?

Christians continued to expect things that had not yet happened, even as they interpreted Jerusalem’s destruction in light of Jesus’ warnings. First Clement 23 cautions against doubting divine promises simply because their fulfillment has not yet appeared. Second Peter 3 addresses people who question the promised coming and responds by appealing to God’s patience. The dates of these writings and the circumstances they address remain matters of debate, so neither should be made to prove more than it can. But neither plainly announces that every eschatological promise was fulfilled when the Temple fell.

The surviving sources suggest that early Christian expectations were not governed by one uniform timetable. Jerusalem’s destruction could be seen as a moment of judgment and vindication while believers continued to look forward to the resurrection and the renewal of creation. Later theology developed ways of relating these expectations to one another, but the historical task is to ask how the earliest writings speak of fulfillment, anticipation, and delay. We should be careful about reading a fully developed system back into authors who did not present one.

Conclusion

Preterism offers an important correction to interpretations that detach New Testament prophecy from its first-century setting. The Temple’s destruction is central to at least some of the Synoptic discourses, and the Jewish prophetic background gives us good reasons to read some of their imagery symbolically. The argument becomes less convincing, however, when 70 AD is made to account for the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the defeat of death. Paul’s letters and the continuing expectations reflected in early Christian writings create serious problems for that claim.

Partial preterism remains a defensible Christian interpretation, provided its distinction between Jerusalem’s judgment and a future consummation is demonstrated rather than presumed. There is also a serious historical alternative in which early Christians expected more to happen, and sooner, than eventually did. That possibility should not be dismissed simply because it creates theological difficulties. At the same time, it cannot establish on its own that every prediction in the Gospels originated with the historical Jesus.

My judgment is that the first century explains a great deal of the prophetic material, particularly the warnings about Jerusalem. But it does not convincingly explain everything, and partial preterism still owes us an account of those passages that sound as though the larger apocalyptic expectation was imminent. That leaves us with a real interpretive problem, even if we conclude that full preterism has not solved it.

Primary texts and further reading

Primary texts: Daniel 7; Isaiah 13 and 34; Ezekiel 32; Mark 13–14; Matthew 24; Luke 21; 1 Corinthians 15; 1 Thessalonians 4; 1 Clement 23–26; Didache 16; 2 Peter 3.

Allison, Dale C., Jr. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (1998).

Collins, Adela Yarbro. Mark: A Commentary (2007).

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination, 3rd ed. (2016).

Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (2014).

Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism (1985).

Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God (1996).

Gentry, Kenneth L., Jr. Before Jerusalem Fell (1989).