Mark 13 is sometimes known as the “Little Apocalypse.” It’s the chapter in Mark, as well as paralleled in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, that speaks about the destruction of the temple. Because of that, it has become an anchor point when looking at a possible dating for the Gospel of Mark.
The question here is, does this passage describe the destruction of the Temple, which would place it after 70 A.D., or is it making a prediction, and is unaware of the actual destruction, which would place it prior to 70 A.D.
There really are three main stances here. First, it shows no awareness of the First Jewish War, and is describing an earlier event, with the possible dating being around 45 A.D. The Second is that it shows an awareness of the First Jewish War, and that it’s being written during that time period. However, because of a few specific details, which we will discuss, it’s not aware of the actual Temple destruction, but can see the writing on the wall. The dating here is usually 68-69 A.D. Then there is the late dating where the Temple destruction is well known, that the First Jewish War is in the past. The dating here is right around 80 A.D.
These three dating schemes, the lower, middle, and higher, is where most scholars fall, with the middle dating being preferred. For instance, if you open up the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, it gives preference to a dating around the First Jewish War, saying most scholars opt for this.
There are other, more fringe ideas as well. The idea that it was written in regard to the Bar Kokhba Revolt, as the authors take, would be one such view. Some scholars do argue this position, such as Hermann Detering. While I won’t be diving into his article, “The Synoptic Apocalypse,” right now, it is something that’s on my list for the future.
Now, to be clear, it being a fringe idea doesn’t necessarily discount it. But it means we have to be more careful with it. It has the burden of proof. We should still consider it, which is why I will dive into it in the future, but we generally don’t expect it to flip the consensus. Instead, if it’s a solid argument, it should make us reconsider the consensus, and explore it more.
I mention all of this because we have to realize that a single citation, and then a relatively brief treatment of the topic, isn’t enough to make a real impact. This is a subject that has been debated, and refined seriously for over a century. It’s something that has been critically examined, and reexamined multiple times. Over the course of all of this, we have seen shifts in trends and what the consensus is, so the needle can move. But it requires effort, and quality scholarship.
What Britt and Wingo have done here is not that. It’s not serious. It doesn’t tackle the issue. It cites one source, relies on a shoddy analysis, and then makes unsupported claims. With that said, let’s dive into what they do have.
Right off the bat, they do mention that the Little Apocalypse is generally considered to be discussing the destruction of the Temple. But they claim that the text fits better with the events of the 130s, which I’m assuming they mean the Bar Kokhba revolt. They further state that their stylometric evidence supports this view. It should be obvious by now that their stylometric evidence does no such thing. Nor could it.
This claim, that their stylometric analysis could even suggest such really questions what they know about stylometry. This is a common theme in their work. Stylometry does not show the date of a text, nor can it show that it fits better within one event over another.
There’s another issue with their stylometric analysis though. Mark 13 stands by itself. No other Gospel verse is near it. That shouldn’t be the case. Matthew 24 and Luke 21 are parallel texts to Mark 13. Running just the chapters of the Gospels through Stylo places Matthew 24 and Mark 13 exceptionally close, with no real distance between them, while Luke 21 is close but still distinct.
Not that this means much because when we look at Mark 13, there aren’t even 100 unique words. It tops out at just 80. Luke’s is even worse, with just 70 unique words. Matthew is the only one that hits over 100 unique words, but then we have to bump it up to 115. Yet, 42 of those are used just two times. And if we were to actually properly tag words, so that we aren’t double or triple counting words because of different cases or different accent marks, those numbers decrease considerably.
This does raise questions about their methodology and how it impacts results. In my own analysis, it’s clear that the Mark and Matthew passages are associated. This makes sense as they are parallel texts, with Matthew most likely borrowing the tradition from Mark. I ran Stylo as they suggested, based on their methodology. So why doesn’t their own results show anything similar? Is it because they include more texts besides the Gospels? If so, the fact that this would skew the results in such a significant manner is troublesome. It shows how fickle their results are.
Stepping beyond their analysis, how do they back up their late dating? They start off with Mark 13:14, the Abomination of Desolation. It may be worth quoting the entire verse here:
14 “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains;”
Britt and Wingo say this makes no sense for 70, but does with Emperor Hadrian in the 130s, as he “put a statue of himself and Jupiter on the Temple Mount.”
Now, I have to preface all of this by saying that much of the Bar Kokhba Revolt is still unknown. Unlike the First Jewish War, when the Temple was destroyed, and we had a contemporary historian, Josephus, writing in depth on it, we have very little with the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Our sources are much later, with Cassius Dio and his “Roman History,” which poses some significant problems, which will be discussed below, as well as Eusebius.
To highlight how little we have, it wasn’t until the 1950s that documents were discovered in the Judaean Desert that revealed that the Jewish leader’s name was Simon ben Kosiba. The title, Bar Kokhba, was most likely given to Simon by Rabbi Akiva, and probably derives from the Star Prophecy in Numbers 24:17.
Which means that we have to be cautious while speaking about the Bar Kokhba Revolt. This is especially true when we deal with Hadrian and what he may and may not have done to the Temple Mount.
Hillel I. Newman, in his article, “The Temple Mount of Jerusalem and the Capitolium of Aelia Capitolina,” really helps to break some of this down. What Newman does here is present a survey of the arguments, as well as critiques, of the most significant arguments regarding the question of whether or not Hadrian set up a temple to Jupiter, and his female companions, Juno and Minerva, on the Temple Mount or on some other location in Jerusalem.
Newman does side with the view that this temple to Jupiter was in fact built on the Temple Mount. What is less certain though is what statues were placed here. For this discussion, it doesn’t necessarily matter, and for the sake of this conversation, we don’t dwell on that issue.
Now, while it doesn’t really matter what specific statues were placed on the Temple Mount, and there’s good reason to doubt that a statue of Hadrian was placed there, what does matter is when any such statues may have been placed on the Temple Mount.
Part of the problem here, as highlighted by Yaron Z Eliav, in his article, “The Urban Layout of Aelia Capitolina: A New View from the Perspective of the Temple Mount,” is that we have very little archeological evidence about the Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, which was built over the largely ruined city of Jerusalem.
This lack of evidence has led Eliav to argue that the Temple Mount wasn’t even included in Aelia. During this Roman period, no archeological evidence exists for any structure there. There is also a lack of repairs to the stairways and walls during that period.
Looking at the literary evidence, we don’t fare much better. Without Dio, who was writing nearly a century later, we would have no evidence that the Temple Mount was included within Aelia. And as Eliav points out, the focus of this new Roman city largely shifted from being centered on the Temple Mount, as it had been during the Second Temple Period, and more northwestward. Even roads were laid out to detour around the Temple Mount.
This wouldn’t necessarily prevent statues, or even a temple being placed on the Temple Mount. But it does say we don’t have strong evidence for either. It would also suggest to us that the redevelopment of the Temple Mount was not of immediate concern. We have to remember that the Temple Mount would have been filled with debris after the Temple was destroyed, as was the entire city of Jerusalem.
After the first Jewish Revolt, as Menahem Mor, in his article, “Are there any new factors concerning the Bar-Kokhba revolt,” shows, from 70 A.D., Jerusalem had been under direct Roman control. It had largely sat in ruins from that time forward.
With all of that in mind, while we have to proceed with caution, as Eliav says in his article, “Hadrian’s Actions in the Jerusalem Temple Mount According to Cassius Dio and Xiphilini Manus,” “the history of Jerusalem in this period is secure: The growth of the city was slow and it remained unfortified for over a hundred and fifty years until the end of the third century.”
This growth, as Eliav suggests, happened really after the “last trumpet blast of the Bar Kokhba revolt faded away.” Putting this all together, it would mean that if there was a statue placed on the Temple Mount, it most likely wouldn’t have been set up there until 135 A.D. at the earliest, after the main phase of the Bar Kokhba revolt. This would mean that it could not have been the beginning of the war, nor was it really a major factor at all, and thus would not fit Mark 13:14.
There is a bigger issue here though. The idea that a statue, or temple, being set up on the Temple Mount started the Bar Kokhba revolt rests on the testimony of Cassius Dio, in the 69th book of his Roman History. It reads:
“At Jerusalem he founded a City in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the God he raised a new Temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war of no slight importance nor brief duration, for the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there.”
Dio didn’t write this though. As mentioned above, Dio would have written Book 69 around a century after the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Book 69 is only known from a synopsis written by the monk Xiphilinus around the 1060s.
Xiphilinus, as Eliav points out, paraphrased Dio’s words, so he’s not directly quoting them, and is known to have worked carelessly and often wasn’t attentive to details. Further, Eliav argues that Dio’s original version has been lost, and what we have left bears the stamp of a Christian writer.
Mor goes further and dismisses Dio’s passage as being too late and bent by theological motivations. More importantly, Mor points out that if the creation of Aelia Capitolina as a whole was a cause for the outbreak, the response by the Jewish forces is rather surprising. If desolating Jerusalem, or the Temple Mount was the major issue, one would expect that the focus of the revolt, or at least a noticeable effort of it, would have been to conquer the city and purify it. This never occurred though.
Instead, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount specifically, don’t really factor in. If this supposed desolation was so important that it led to revolt, the fact that Jerusalem really doesn’t play into the war itself doesn’t make much sense.
Adding to these issues is the context of Mark 13:14. As Britt and Wingo point out, this passage is harkening back to Daniel. However, they get a good deal wrong here as well. So let’s break this connection down.
Daniel 9:20-27 is largely a revision of a prophecy in Jeremiah 25. Daniel reinterprets this prophecy, and in doing so, it fits with the actions of Antiochus IV, who placed an altar to Zeus Olympios in the Temple. Britt and Wingo claim that this is the only other time that the phrase, abomination of desolation, is used. That is false.
In Daniel, we have two other references, Daniel 11:31 and Daniel 12:11. In these two passages, the phrase is slightly altered to “the abomination that desolates,” but the claim is still the same.
Beyond Daniel, we also have 1 Maccabees 1:54-57, where we see the phrase that is often translated as “desolating sacrilege,” but literally translated is “abomination of desolation.”
Now, in each case, the reference is back to Antiochus IV and his actions around 167 BC. Those actions weren’t simply setting up a statue though. The abomination is twofold: sacrificing unclean animals and the erection of an altar. All of this occurred in the Temple. The Temple is the key portion here.
We see this more clearly when we look at 2 Maccabees 6. Verse 5 alludes to this abomination as well, and as a whole, we see how the Temple was defiled. It’s this desecration as a whole that in part led to the revolt against Antiochus. There is more to the picture here, as there were more oppressive actions by Antiochus that had a major impact, such as the burning of copies of the Torah, outlawing Jewish religious practices, and forcing Hellenization.
The actions in the 130s by Hadrian don’t resemble this really at all. There is no Temple to speak of. Without a Temple, there can be no abomination of desolation. There can be no desecration of the Temple.
How Britt and Wingo can conclude that “this is an intentional, direct parallel between the two historical incidents,” is well beyond me. The parallels simply aren’t there. More so though, the idea that this was intentional is neither supported nor rational. Are they implying that Hadrian looked at the actions of Antiochus and decided to intentionally replicate them? We can safely rule out that possibility.
The authors continue this argument by looking at Mark 13:18, where Jesus says, “Pray that it may not be in the winter.” They claim that this is meaningless when it comes to the events of 70 AD, but it makes sense for the Bar Kokhba Revolt as the Roman Troops had taken time off during a winter to regroup.
There are multiple problems with this. First, as we discussed above, if a statue was placed on the Temple Mount, the evidence points to it being after the revolt ended. So it doesn’t fit the chronology in Mark. But if we ignore that, we do find a few winters during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. We see this in the First Jewish Revolt as well. It should be of no surprise as both lasted multiple years. So multiple winters would have come and gone, and in both cases, we could arbitrarily pick some sort of event during one of those winters to make it make sense, as Britt and Wingo did.
For the Bar Kokhba Revolt, this arbitrary event that the authors point to is that during one of the winters, the Roman troops partially withdrew to regroup. However, this doesn’t fit with what verse 18 states. The prayer is that when the people of Judea must flee to the mountains, that it won’t be in winter. Roman troops regrouping does not fulfill this. There is no connection.
Their next point is that because there was more extensive damage and slaughter during the Bar Kokhba Revolt, this event is the one more likely to be referenced. This fails logically. The argument only works if you already conclude that Mark was written after the Bar Kokhba Revolt. So it’s largely circular.
But we can look at this more deeply. Josephus tells us that, during the First Jewish Revolt, some 1.1 million died in Jerusalem alone, but we can spread this out for total war losses. Cassius Dio, reporting for the Bar Kokhba Revolt, said that 580,000 men were slain. Both numbers are probably exaggerations, and we have to factor in that the population of Judea was lower during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. So it’s hard to definitively say which revolt was more deadly or saw the most slaughter.
From the First Jewish Revolt, around 95,000 Jews would be taken into slavery, while around 100,000 after the Bar Kokhba Revolt would be enslaved. These are rough estimates, so again, we don’t have one clearly being more devastating.
Then we have the topic of destruction. With the Bar Kokhba Revolt, much of Judea was destroyed. For the First Jewish Revolt, many towns remained, but we still see a good amount of destruction not only in Judea, but also in Galilee. Most important though, we see the destruction of not just Jerusalem, but the Temple. This destruction changed the Jewish world at a fundamental level.
Britt’s and Wingo’s argument here just isn’t valid; it’s based on a logical fallacy, and at best, it is historically questionable. What about their next argument, that the warning of false prophets and messiahs fit better with the Bar Kokhba Revolt?
To be fair, they do mention that Mark 13:21-22, the verses about the warning, could also apply to the First Jewish Revolt, but they favor a Bar Kokhba Revolt reading because it was led by a figure some saw as the messiah, as well as his religious teacher, Rabbi Akiva. However, we can find such figures throughout this time period.
They finish off this portion of their argument by saying that there are other aspects of the Little Apocalypse that fit in the context of the 130s, but without mentioning them, they can simply be dismissed. And as we saw above, the similarities they do mention simply don’t hold up.
After all of that though, Britt and Wingo paint themselves into a corner. They start off by claiming that while they show that Mark 13 shows up separated from the rest of Mark, what they don’t show is that Matthew 24 and Luke 21 also show up removed from their respective texts. I’ve already explained why this is an issue, but the fact that they also don’t show us any of this is a big red flag. Once again, it’s a trust me bro moment.
They then contrast this argument with claiming that Marcion’s Gospel and Acts show up completely separated. This argument is of no consequence, but it does give us a chance to do some comparisons, as both Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 7 showcase some of the chapters of Acts.
What we find when we compare these two exhibits is that they don’t match. That both exhibits reconfigure how the chapters of Acts line up with each other. More so, the connections that Exhibit 1 shows with Mark and Luke are now gone. This could be that the dendrogram in this instance was flipped.
Or it may be something more serious. They clearly didn’t add Luke to the analysis, because it would have shown up right along with Marcion’s Gospel. So what else did they exclude from this analysis? Or did they only run Acts and Marcion’s Gospel? And why don’t they show the entire dendrogram? We can clearly see in Exhibit 7, that there is at least one more branch that isn’t being shown.
As a quick aside, Britt and Wingo have mentioned elsewhere, including in our live discussion on TikTok, that the reason they don’t include all of the dendrograms is due to the limited space in their book. This is complete nonsense. They have a website. They could easily have posted the dendrograms on their website, and added a link to them in their book. As excuses go, it’s lame.
Considering all of this, we have a lot of reasons to be concerned about their methodology here. They clearly are picking and choosing what they run, as well as what they display. This is clear manipulation of the data, which means their results are of no regard. We can’t trust them.
This gets worse when we consider that we can’t even trust their reading of their result. When we look at Exhibit 7, what we clearly see is that Marcion’s Gospel, chapters 20-24, are separated from the rest of their text. It’s part of a distinct branch.
Ironically, these chapters include the Little Apocalypse. This observation poses a massive problem for Britt and Wingo, who are trying to build a case for Marcion’s Gospel as being the original one. But the critique they level at they Synoptic Gospels, that this Little Apocalypse is separated from their own text, is a critique that equally applies to Marcion’s Gospel.
All of this once again points to Britt and Wingo not only having a flawed methodology, but that they lack background information about stylometry, and thus their arguments are not valid.
The biggest issue though is that it seems as if they didn’t read Luke 21, or the equivalent in Marcion’s Gospel. Britt and Wingo make the claim that it was Marcion’s Gospel that first included the Little Apocalypse.
Using Matthias Klinghardt’s translation here, we see a few major issues. First, 21:6 specifically relates all of this to the destruction of the Temple. That is what begins this entire discourse, that Jesus states that at some time, not a stone will be left upon another.
But if we ignore this, we have another issue. 20:20 states, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then you will know that its desolation is near.” 20:24 then states, “And they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives to all pagan nations, and Jerusalem will be crushed by the Gentiles.”
We don’t see these details in Mark, which is a bit more vague about all of this. But Marcion’s Gospel, and Luke, clear up much of the possible ambiguity. Here, it becomes quite clear that we are looking at the First Jewish Revolt, which ended with the destruction of the Temple.
What makes this most clear is the fact that there is a discussion of Jerusalem at all. During the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Jerusalem plays no real part. As we discussed, Jerusalem had been razed to the ground, and was occupied by the Romans for decades.
More so, it wasn’t surrounded by Roman armies. There was no siege of Jerusalem during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Nor could it have been crushed, as it had been crushed decades ago. All of this clearly rules out the Bar Kokhba Revolt as the time period.
Instead, it clearly places the First Jewish Revolt as the event that is being described, as it was during this revolt that Roman troops would lay siege to Jerusalem, and when they crushed it.
If, as Britt and Wingo claim, that Marcion’s version is the earliest, then it means that the Little Apocalypse as a whole clearly originates with the First Jewish Revolt. In short, by taking their view seriously, what we come out with is a view that invalidates itself.