R.C. Sproul

I have found that very vexing for this very reason, that I don't think anything more clearly proves that.

the identity and integrity of Jesus Christ, then these specific prophecies that he made unquestionably years before the events take place, and he made predictions of events that were utterly unthinkable to Jewish people.

They thought that the temple was indestructible, and not only was the temple indestructible with a Herodian stone and everything, but the holy city of Zion would never perish under the protection of their God.

And yet Jesus specifically and unquestionably predicted those events before they took place.

That is astonishing.

And the thing that's so ironic is that the very text that should function as proof positive of the trustworthiness of Christ and of the biblical documents has become the text that the critics have turned on its head and used to repudiate the trustworthiness of the New Testament and of the integrity of Jesus because he didn't come back.

back in that timeframe.

Now, how have conservatives and evangelicals dealt with this?

Usually by saying that the word generation in the Olivet Discourse

It does not refer to a span of life or to a group within a particular timeframe, but rather refers to a type of people.

That is, they take the word generation and they say what Jesus really meant was this kind of people that we're encountering here every day will still be around until I come back.

And all these things are going to happen before these kinds of people, these generations pass away.

I personally think that is a possible interpretation of the Scripture, but I think it is so remote and so unlikely that it appears to any sober critic of the New Testament that it's a pure grasping at straws, because the way in which the term generation is used consistently throughout the Gospels is not in that manner, but with specific reference to a particular age group of people.

Others have looked at that text and say that what Jesus is saying when he says, all these things, that he only is incorporating in the all these things, the first two elements of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple, and he's kind of telescoping history together by including broadly his return.

Now another theory, the theory that I evaluate and find in some ways wanting in my book, is the theory that's called full preterism that teaches that actually Jesus did return in 70 AD and that all of the future prophecies with respect to the coming of Christ actually took place when Jesus returned in judgment on Jerusalem, though it was invisible.

And the argument that the preterists use at this point is that the language of future prophecy, even as found in the prophets, for example, in the Old Testament, whenever an event of divine judgment is predicted,

Catastrophic imagery is used commonly, upheavals and turbulence in the heaven.

For example, when God visited wicked cities in the Old Testament, the prophets described that in terms of the moon turning to blood and so on, the same kind of language that is used with respect to the coming of Jesus.

They believed that Jesus came in judgment to judge the Jewish nation in 70 AD.

That was for all purposes the end of Judaism and the distinctive innovation of Christianity as a group that was distinguished from Judaism rather than a sect within Judaism.