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BOOKS:  BIBLICAL STUDIES (1500BC-AD70) / EARLY CHRISTIAN PRETERISM (AD50-1000) / FREE ONLINE BOOKS (AD1000-2008)

FIGHTING FOR SUPREMACY:

AD30/33 VS. AD68/70
(ALSO AD 312 or 135 or 79)

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones “Christ is fulfilling the law on the cross, and unless you interpret the cross, and Christ’s death upon it, in strict terms of the fulfilling of the law you have not the scriptural view of the death upon the cross.”  (Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p. 168)

Was 70 CE a Watershed in History? | J.J. WetsteinJohann Harenberg

STUDY ARCHIVE

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EARLY CHURCH

Ambrose
Ambrose, Pseudo
Andreas
Arethas
Aphrahat
Athanasius
Augustine
Barnabus
BarSerapion
Baruch, Pseudo
Bede
Chrysostom
Chrysostom, Pseudo
Clement, Alexandria
Clement, Rome
Clement, Pseudo
Cyprian
Ephraem
Epiphanes
Eusebius
Gregory
Hegesippus
Hippolytus
Ignatius
Irenaeus
Isidore
James
Jerome
King Jesus
Apostle John
Lactantius
Luke
Mark
Justin Martyr
Mathetes
Matthew
Melito
Oecumenius
Origen
Apostle Paul
Apostle Peter
Maurus Rabanus
Remigius
“Solomon”
Severus
St. Symeon
Tertullian
Theophylact
Victorinus

HISTORICAL PRETERISM
(Minor Fulfillment of Matt. 24/25 or Revelation in Past)

Joseph Addison
Oswald T. Allis
Thomas Aquinas
Karl Auberlen
Augustine
Albert Barnes
Karl Barth
G.K. Beale
Beasley-Murray
John Bengel
Wilhelm Bousset
John A. Broadus

David Brown
“Haddington Brown”
F.F. Bruce

Augustin Calmut
John Calvin
B.H. Carroll
Johannes Cocceius
Vern Crisler
Thomas Dekker
Wilhelm De Wette
Philip Doddridge
Isaak Dorner
Dutch Annotators
Alfred Edersheim
Jonathan Edwards

E.B. Elliott
Heinrich Ewald
Patrick Fairbairn
Js. Farquharson
A.R. Fausset
Robert Fleming
Hermann Gebhardt
Geneva Bible
Charles Homer Giblin
John Gill
William Gilpin
W.B. Godbey
Ezra Gould
Hank Hanegraaff
Hengstenberg
Matthew Henry
G.A. Henty
George Holford
Johann von Hug
William Hurte
J, F, and Brown
B.W. Johnson
John Jortin
Benjamin Keach
K.F. Keil
Henry Kett
Richard Knatchbull
Johann Lange
Cornelius Lapide
Nathaniel Lardner
Jean Le Clerc
Peter Leithart
Jack P. Lewis
Abiel Livermore
John Locke
Martin Luther

James MacDonald
James MacKnight
Dave MacPherson
Keith Mathison
Philip Mauro
Thomas Manton
Heinrich Meyer
J.D. Michaelis
Johann Neander
Sir Isaac Newton
Thomas Newton
Stafford North
Dr. John Owen
 Blaise Pascal
William W. Patton
Arthur Pink

Thomas Pyle
Maurus Rabanus
St. Remigius

Anne Rice
Kim Riddlebarger
J.C. Robertson
Edward Robinson
Andrew Sandlin
Johann Schabalie
Philip Schaff
Thomas Scott
C.J. Seraiah
Daniel Smith
Dr. John Smith
C.H. Spurgeon

Rudolph E. Stier
A.H. Strong
St. Symeon
Theophylact
Friedrich Tholuck
George Townsend
James Ussher
Wm. Warburton
Benjamin Warfield
Noah Webster
John Wesley
B.F. Westcott
William Whiston
Herman Witsius
N.T. Wright
John Wycliffe
Richard Wynne
C.F.J. Zullig

MODERN PRETERISTS
(Major Fulfillment of Matt. 24/25 or Revelation in Past)

Firmin Abauzit
Jay Adams
Luis Alcazar
Greg Bahnsen
Beausobre, L’Enfant
Jacques Bousset
John L. Bray
David Brewster
Dr. John Brown
Thomas Brown
Newcombe Cappe
David Chilton
Adam Clarke

Henry Cowles
Ephraim Currier
R.W. Dale
Gary DeMar
P.S. Desprez
Johann Eichhorn
Heneage Elsley
F.W. Farrar
Samuel Frost
Kenneth Gentry
Steve Gregg
Hugo Grotius
Francis X. Gumerlock
Henry Hammond
Hampden-Cook
Friedrich Hartwig
Adolph Hausrath
Thomas Hayne
J.G. Herder
Timothy Kenrick
J. Marcellus Kik
Samuel Lee
Peter Leithart
John Lightfoot
Benjamin Marshall
F.D. Maurice
Marion Morris
Ovid Need, Jr
Wm. Newcombe
N.A. Nisbett
Gary North
Randall Otto
Zachary Pearce
Andrew Perriman
Beilby Porteus
Ernst Renan
Gregory Sharpe
Fr. Spadafora
R.C. Sproul
Moses Stuart
Milton S. Terry
Herbert Thorndike
C. Vanderwaal
Foy Wallace
Israel P. Warren
Chas Wellbeloved
J.J. Wetstein
Richard Weymouth
Daniel Whitby
George Wilkins
E.P. Woodward
FUTURISTS
(Virtually No Fulfillment of Matt. 24/25 & Revelation in 1st C. – Types Only ; Also Included are “Higher Critics” Not Associated With Any Particular Eschatology)

Henry Alford
G.C. Berkower
Alan Patrick Boyd
John Bradford
Wm. Burkitt
George Caird
Conybeare/ Howson
John Crossan
John N. Darby
C.H. Dodd
E.B. Elliott
G.S. Faber
Jerry Falwell
Charles G. Finney
J.P. Green Sr.
Murray Harris
Thomas Ice
Benjamin Jowett
John N.D. Kelly
Hal Lindsey
John MacArthur
William Miller
Robert Mounce

Eduard Reuss
J.A.T. Robinson
George Rosenmuller
D.S. Russell
George Sandison
C.I. Scofield
Dr. John Smith
Norman Snaith
“Televangelists”
Thomas Torrance
Jack/Rex VanImpe
John Walvoord

Quakers : George Fox | Margaret Fell (Fox) | Isaac Penington

PRETERIST UNIVERSALISM | MODERN PRETERISM | PRETERIST IDEALISM

The Significance of A.D. 70

Significance of AD30 | AD70 | AD135 | AD312 | Christian History’s Preterist Assumption

“It is no exaggeration to say that the Fall of Jerusalem is the most significant national event in the history of the world.”
The arch of Titus and Spoils of the Temple

“I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace full of horrors. Four emperors perished by the sword. There were three civil wars; there were more with foreign enemies; there were often wars that had both characters at once. There was success in the East, and disaster in the West..” Tacitus’ “Histories” (I.2)

“It has been a standard feature of Christian preaching through the ages that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was really God’s decisive punishment of the Jewish people for their rejection of Jesus, who died around the year 30.”  (Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament) “No matter what view of eschatology we embrace, we must take seriously the redemptive-historical importance of Jerusalem’s destruction in A.D.70.” (R.C. SproulLast Days According to Jesus, 26)

 

David Biale (2003)
“From a strictly religious point of view, the destruction of the Second Temple marked the beginning of a new era without Temple sacrifices, an era that continues to this day.” (Cultures of the Jews: A New History, p. 305)

Gerard Israëand Jacques Lebar (1970)
“When, in the year 70 AD, the legions of Titus besieged and sacked Jerusalem and razed the temple — the symbol of Jewish national independence — they touched off a chain reaction.” (When Jerusalem Burned: The Catastrophic Day when the Romans Destroyed the Great Temple and Jerusalem Itself, Fr., 1970)

Eric M. Meyers (2003)
“The destruction of the Temple necessarily had cataclysmic political and religious consequences.  Because the Temple had functioned as a political and well as cultic center, its loss left a vacuum into which the rabbis would move.”

“The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. constitutes, in most analyses, a watershed event for the Jews of antiquity.  The elimination of the center, source of spiritual nourishment and preeminent symbol of the nation’s identity, compelled Jews to reinvent themselves, to find other means of religious sustenance, and to adjust their lives to an indefinite period of displacement.” (Cultures of the Jews: A New History, p. 117)

“The loss of the Jerusalem Temple also meant that the Jewish religion had to transform itself from a Temple-based, sacrificial cult to a culture rooted in domestic and local practices.” (Cultures of the Jews: A New History, p. 163)

“The possibility that certain books might not be included in the canon and the institution of a category of “external books” (sefarim hitzonim) were the product of the rabbinic belief that prophecy had ceased with the destruction of the Temple.” (Cultures of the Jews: A New History, p. 167)

 

“It is, in fact, a sign and notable proof of the coming of the Word that Jerusalem no longer stands”

Athanasius (345)
“He was like those sent by the householder to receive the fruits of the vineyard from the husbandmen; for he exhorted all men to render a return. But Israel despised and would not render, for their will was not right, nay moreover they killed those that were sent, and not even before the Lord of the vineyard were they ashamed, but even He was slain by them. Verily, when He came and found no fruit in them, He cursed them through the fig-tree, saying, “Let there be henceforth no fruit from thee” [Matt. 21:19]; and the fig-tree was dead and fruitless, so that even the disciples wondered when it withered away.

Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet: “I will take away from them the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the scent of myrrh, and the light of a lamp, and the whole land shall be destroyed” [Jer. 25:10]. For the whole service of the law has been abolished from them, and henceforth and forever they remain without a feast.” (St. Athanasius, Letters [vi])

“So the Jews are indulging in fiction, and transferring present time to future. When did prophet and vision cease from Israel? Was it not when Christ came, the Holy One of holies? It is, in fact, a sign and notable proof of the coming of the Word that Jerusalem no longer stands, neither is prophet raised up nor vision revealed among them. And it is natural that it should be so, for when He that was signified had come, what need was there any longer of any to signify Him? And when the Truth had come, what further need was there of the shadow? On His account only they prophesied continually, until such time as Essential Righteousness has come, Who was made the Ransom for the sins of all. For the same reason Jerusalem stood until the same time, in order that there men might premeditate the types before the Truth was known. So, of course, once the Holy One of holies had come, both vision and prophecy were sealed. And the kingdom of Jerusalem ceased at the same time, because kings were to be anointed among them only until the Holy of holies had been anointed. Moses also prophesies that the kingdom of the Jews shall stand until His time, saying, “A ruler shall not fail from Judah nor a prince from his loins, until the things laid up for him shall come and the Expectation of the nations Himself.” And that is why the Savior Himself was always proclaiming “The law and the prophets prophesied until John.” So if there is still king or prophet or vision among the Jews, they do well to deny that Christ is come; but if there is neither king nor vision, and since that time all prophecy has been sealed and city and temple taken, how can they be so irreligious, how can they so flaunt the facts, as to deny Christ Who has brought it all about?.. What more is there for their Expected One to do when he comes? To call the heathen? But they are called already. To put an end to prophet and king and vision? But this too has already happened. To expose the Goddenyingness of idols? It is already exposed and condemned. Or to destroy death? It is already destroyed. What then has not come to pass that the Christ must do? What is there left out or unfulfilled that the Jews should disbelieve so light-heartedly? The plain fact is, as I say, that there is no longer any king or prophet nor Jerusalem nor sacrifice nor vision among them; yet the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of God, and the Gentiles, forsaking atheism, are now taking refuge with the God of Abraham through the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. (Incarnation, Ch. VI )

Chrysostom
“For I will ask them, Did He send the prophets and wise men? Did they slay them in their synagogue? Was their house left desolate? Did all the vengeance come upon that generation? It is quite plain that it was so, and no man gainsays it.” (Homily LXXIV)

“But of wars in Jerusalem is He speaking; for it is not surely of those without, and everywhere in the world; for what did they care for these? And besides, He would thus say nothing new, if He were speaking of the calamities of the world at large, which are happening always. For before this, were wars, and tumults, and fightings; but He speaks of the Jewish wars coming upon them at no great distance, for henceforth the Roman arms were a matter of anxiety. Since then these things also were sufficient to confound them, He foretells them all.

Therefore He saith, they shall come not by themselves or at once, but with signs. For that the Jews may not say, that they who then believed were the authors of these evils, therefore hath He told them also of the cause of their coming upon them. “For verily I say unto you,” He said before, “all these things shall come upon this generation,” having made mention of the stain of blood on them. ” (Homilies)

Cyprian (250)
6. That the Jews should lose Jerusalem, and should leave the land which they had received.
In Isaiah: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers shall devour it in your sight; and the daughter of Zion shall be left deserted, and overthrown by foreign peoples, as a cottage in a vineyard, and as a keeper’s lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a city which is besieged. And unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we should have been as Sodoma, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.”[5] Also in the Gospel the Lord says: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldst not! Behold, your house shall be left unto you desolate.”[6] (THREE BOOKS OF TESTIMONIES AGAINST THE JEWS., 6)

Eusebius (314)
“And all this prophecy of what would result from their insolence against the Christ has been clearly proved to have taken place after their plot against our Saviour. For it was not before it, but afterwards from that day to this that God turned their feasts into mourning, despoiled them of their famous mother-city, and destroyed the holy Temple therein when Titus and Vespasian were Emperors of Rome, so that they could no longer go up to keep their feasts and sacred meetings. I need not say that a famine of hearing the Word of the Lord has overtaken them all, in return for their rejection of the Word of God; since with one voice they refused Him, so He refuses them.” (EusebiusDemonstratio Evangelica, X)

“When, then, we see what was of old foretold for the nations fulfilled in our own day, and when the lamentation and wailing that was predicted for the Jews, and the burning of the Temple and its utter desolation, can also be seen even now to have occurred according to the prediction, surely we must also agree that the King who was prophesied, the Christ of God, has come, since the signs of His coming have been shewn in each instance I have treated to have been clearly fulfilled.” (Demonstratio Evangelica (Proof of the Gospel) ;  BOOK VIII)

“If any one compares the words of our Saviour with the other accounts of the historian (Josephus) concerning the whole war, how can one fail to wonder, and to admit that the foreknowledge and the prophecy of our Saviour were truly divine and marvelously strange.” (Book III, Ch. VII)

“It is fitting to add to these accounts the true prediction of our Saviour in which he foretold these very events. His words are as follows: “Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day; For there shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.” The historian, reckoning the whole number of the slain, says that eleven hundred thousand persons perished by famine and sword, and that the rest of the rioters and robbers, being betrayed by each other after the taking of the city, were slain. But the tallest of the youths and those that were distinguished for beauty were preserved for the triumph. Of the rest of the multitude, those that were over seventeen years of age were sent as prisoners to labor in the works of Egypt, while still more were scattered through the provinces to meet their death in the theaters by the sword and by beasts. Those under seventeen years of age were carried away to be sold as slaves, and of these alone the number reached ninety thousand. These things took place in this manner in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, in accordance with the prophecies of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who by divine power saw them beforehand as if they were already present, and wept and mourned according to the statement of the holy evangelists, who give the very words which be uttered, when, as if addressing Jerusalem herself, he said: “If thou hadst known, even thou, in this day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a rampart about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee and thy children even with the ground.” And then, as if speaking concerning the people, he says, “For there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations. And Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” And again: “When ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh.” (Book III, Ch. VII)

“And the people of the governor that cometh will destroy the city and the holy place.” Meaning that the city and the Holy Place arc not only to be ruined by the leader to come, whom I have identified in my interpretation, but also by his people. And you would not be far wrong in saying, too, that the Roman general and his army arc meant by the words before us, where I think the camps of the Roman rulers are meant, who governed the nation from that time, and who destroyed the city of Jerusalem itself, and its ancient venerable Temple. For they were cut off by them as by a flood, and were at once involved in destruction until the war was concluded, so that the prophecy was fulfilled and they suffered utter desolation (400) after their plot against our Saviour, which was followed by their extreme sufferings during the siege. You will find an accurate account of it in the history of Josephus.” (Demonstratio Evangelica;  BOOK VIII)

Hippolytus of Rome (3rd Century)
30. Come, then, O blessed Isaiah; arise, tell us clearly what thou didst prophesy with respect to the mighty Babylon. For thou didst speak also of Jerusalem, and thy word is accomplished. For thou didst speak boldly and openly: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by many strangers. The daughter of Sion shall be left as a cottage in a vineyard, and as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.”

What then? Are not these things come to pass? Are not the things announced by thee fulfilled? Is not their country, Judea, desolate? Is not the holy place burned with fire? Are not their walls cast down? Are not their cities destroyed? Their land, do not strangers devour it? Do not the Romans rule the country? And indeed these impious people hated thee, and did saw thee asunder, and they crucified Christ. Thou art dead in the world, but thou livest in Christ.” (Fragments of Dogmatic and Historical Works)

Irenaeus (174)
CHAP. IV.–ANSWER TO ANOTHER OBJECTION, SHOWING THAT THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM, WHICH WAS THE CITY OF THE GREAT KING, DIMINISHED NOTHING FROM THE SUPREME MAJESTY’ AND POWER OF GOD, FOR THAT THIS DESTRUCTION WAS PUT IN EXECUTION BY THE MOST WISE COUNSEL OF THE SAME GOD.
1. Further, also, concerning Jerusalem and the Lord, they venture to assert that, if it had been “the city of the great King,”(12) it would not have been deserted.(13) This is just as if any one should say, that if straw were a creation of God, it would never part company with the wheat; and that the vine twigs, if made by God, never would be lopped away and deprived of the clusters. But as these [vine twigs] have not been originally made for their own sake, but for that of the fruit growing upon them, which being come to maturity and taken away, they are left behind, and those which do not conduce to fructification are lopped off altogether; so also [was it with] Jerusalem, which had in herself borne the yoke of bondage (under which man was reduced, who in former times was not subject to God when death was reigning, and being subdued, became a fit subject for liberty), when the fruit of liberty had come, and reached maturity, and been reaped and stored in the barn, and when those which had the power to produce fruit had been carried away from her [i.e., from Jerusalem], and scattered throughout all the world. Even as Esaias saith, “The children of Jacob shall strike root, and Israel shall flourish, and the whole world shall be filled with his fruit.”(1) The fruit, therefore, having been sown throughout all the world, she (Jerusalem) was deservedly forsaken, and those things which had formerly brought forth fruit abundantly were taken away; for from these, according to the flesh, were Christ and the apostles enabled to bring forth fruit. But now these are no longer useful for bringing forth fruit. For all things which have a beginning in time must of course have an end in time also.

2. Since, then, the law originated with Moses, it terminated with John as a necessary consequence. Christ had come to fulfil it: wherefore “the law and the prophets were” with them “until John.”(2) And therefore Jerusalem, taking its commencement from David,(3) and fulfilling its own times, must have an end of legislation(4) when the new covenant was revealed.”

Justin Martyr (150)
CHAP. XLVII.–DESOLATION OF JUDAEA FORETOLD. That the land of the Jews, then, was to be laid waste, hear what was said by the Spirit of prophecy. And the words were spoken as if from the person of the people wondering at what had happened. They are these: “Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. The house of our sanctuary has become a curse, and the glory which our fathers blessed is burned up with fire, and all its glorious things are laid waste: and Thou refrainest Thyself at these things, and hast held Thy peace, and hast humbled us very sore.”(6) And ye are convinced that Jerusalem has been laid waste, as was predicted. And concerning its desolation, and that no one should be permitted to inhabit it, there was the following prophecy by Isaiah: “Their land is desolate, their enemies consume it before them, and none of them shall dwell therein.”(7) And that it is guarded by you lest any one dwell in it, and that death is decreed against a Jew apprehended entering it, you know very well.(First Apology, Ch. 47.)

Lactantius (3rd Century)
“But He also opened to them all things which were about to happen, which Peter and Paul preached at Rome;  and also said that it was about to come to pass, that after a short time God would send against them a king who would subdue the Jews, and level their cities to the ground, and besiege the people themselves, worn out with hunger and thirst. Then it should come to pass that they should feed on the bodies of their own children, and consume one another. Lastly, that they should be taken captive, and come into the hands of their enemies, and should see their wives most cruelly harassed before their eyes, their virgins ravished and polluted, their sons torn in pieces, their little ones dashed to the ground; and lastly, everything laid waste with fire and sword, the captives banished for ever from their own lands, because they had exulted over the well-beloved and most approved Son of God. And so, after their decease, when Nero had put them to death, Vespasian destroyed the name and nation of the Jews, and did all things which they had foretold as about to come to pass.” (Divine Institutes, Book IV)

“Also Zechariah says: “And they shall look on me whom they pierced.” Amos thus speaks of the obscuring of the sun: “In that day, saith the Lord, the sun shall go down at noon, and the clear day shall be dark; and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and your songs into lamentation.” Jeremiah also speaks of the city of Jerusalem, in which He suffered: “Her sun is gone down while it was yet day; she hath been confounded and reviled, and the residue of them will I deliver to the sword.” Nor were these things spoken in vain. For after a short time the Emperor Vespasian subdued the Jews, and laid waste their lands with the sword and fire, besieged and reduced them by famine, overthrew Jerusalem, led the captives in triumph, and prohibited the others who were left from ever returning to their native land. And these things were done by God on account of that crucifixion of Christ, as He before declared this to Solomon in their Scriptures, saying, “And Israel shall be for perdition and a reproach to the people, and this house shall be desolate; and every one that shall pass by shall be astonished, and shall say, Why hath God done these evils to this land, and to this house? And they shall say, Because they forsook the Lord their God, and persecuted their. King, who was dearly beloved by God, and crucified Him with great degradation, therefore hath God brought upon them these evils.” For what would they not deserve who put to death their Lord, who had come for their salvation? (Divine Institutes, Ch. 46)

Origen (2nd Century)
“I challenge anyone to prove my statement untrue if I say that the entire Jewish nation was destroyed less than one whole generation later on account of these sufferings which they inflicted on Jesus. For it was, I believe, forty-two years from the time when they crucified Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem.” (Contra Celsum, 198-199)

“Therefore he, also, having separated from her, married, so to speak, another, having given into the hands of the former the bill of divorcement; wherefore they can no longer do the things enjoined on them by the law, because of the bill of divorcement. And a sign that she has received the bill of divorcement is this, that Jerusalem was destroyed along with what they called the sanctuary of the things in it which were believed to be holy, and with the altar of burnt offerings, and all the worship associated with it… And what was more unseemly than the fact, that they all said in His case, “Crucify Him, crucify Him,” and “Away with such a fellow from the earth”? And can this be freed from the charge of unseemliness, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children”? Wherefore, when He was avenged, Jerusalem was compassed with armies, and its desolation was near, and their house was taken away from it, and “the daughter of Zion was left as a booth in a vineyard, and as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, and as a besieged city.” And, about the same time, I think, the husband wrote out a bill of divorcement to his former wife, and gave it into her hands, and sent her away from his own house, and the bond of her who came from the Gentiles has been cancelled about which the Apostle Says, “Having blotted out the bond written in ordinances, which was contrary to us, and He hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross;” for Paul also and others became proselytes of Israel for her who came from the Gentiles.” (Matthew, Book 2., sec. 19.)

Tertullian (200)
CHAP. VIII.– OF JERUSALEM’S DESTRUCTION. “Accordingly the times must be inquired into of the predicted and future nativity of the Christ, and of His passion, and of the extermination of the city of Jerusalem, that is, its devastation. For Daniel says, that “both the holy city and the holy place are exterminated together with the coming Leader, and that the pinnacle is destroyed unto ruin.”(7) And so the times of the coming Christ, the Leader,(8) must be inquired into, which we shall trace in Daniel; and, after computing them, shall prove Him to be come, even on the ground of the times prescribed, and of competent signs and operations of His. Which matters we prove, again, on the ground of the consequences which were ever announced as to follow His advent; in order that we may believe all to have been as well fulfilled as foreseen.

“Therefore, when these times also were completed, and the Jews subdued, there afterwards ceased in that place “libations and sacrifices,” which thenceforward have not been able to be in that place celebrated; for “the unction,” too,(6) was “exterminated” in that place after the passion of Christ. For it had been predicted that the unction should be exterminated in that place; as in the Psalms it is prophesied, “They exterminated my hands and feet.”(7) And the suffering of this “extermination” was perfected within the times of the lxx hebdomads, under Tiberius Caesar, in the consulate of Rubellius Geminus and Fufius Geminus, in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April,(8) on the first day of unleavened bread, on which they slew the lamb at even, just as had been enjoined by Moses.(9) Accordingly, all the synagogue of Israel did slay Him, saying to Pilate, when he was desirous to dismiss Him, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children;”(10) and, “If thou dismiss him, thou art not a friend of Caesar;”(11) in order that all things might be fulfilled which had been written of Him.” (An Answer to the Jews 8.)

“No matter what view of eschatology we embrace, we must take seriously the redemptive-historical importance of Jerusalem’s destruction in A.D.70.”
R.C. Sproul

Henry Alford (1868)
‘We may observe that our Lord makes “when the Lord cometh” coincide with the destruction of Jerusalem, which is incontestably the overthrow of the wicked husbandmen. This passage therefore forms an important key to our Lord’s prophecies, and a decisive justification for those who, like myself, firmly hold that the coming of the Lord is, in many places, to be identified, primarily, with that overthrow.” (On Matt. 21:33-46)

David Brown (1858)
“Those who have not directed their attention to prophetic language will be startled if I answer, The coming of the Lord here announced is his coming in judgment against Jerusalem – to destroy itself and its temple, and with them the peculiar standing and privileges of the Jews as the visible Church of God..”

John Calvin
“Inconsequence of the obscurity of this passage it has been twisted in a variety of ways. At the end of the ninth chapter I have shewn the impossibility of its referring to the profanation of the Temple which occurred under the tyranny of Antiochus; on this occasion the angel bears witness to such a complete destruction of the Temple, as to leave no room for the hope of its repair and restoration. Then the circumstances of the time convinces us of this. For he then said, Christ shall confirm the covenant with many for one week, and shall cause the sacrifices and oblation to cease. Afterwards, the abomination that stupifieth shall be added, and desolation or stupor, and then death will distill, says he, upon the astonished or stupefied one. The angel, therefore, there treats of the perpetual devastation of the Temple. So in this passage, without doubt;, he treats of the period after the destruction of the Temple; there could be no hope of restoration, as the law with all its ceremonies would then arrive at its termination. With this view Christ quotes this passage in Matthew 24, while he admonishes his hearers diligently to attend to it. Let him who reads, understand, says he. We have stated this prophecy to be obscure, and hence it requires no ordinary degree of the closest attention. First of all, we must hold this point; the time now treated by the angel begins at the last destruction of the Temple. That devastation happened as soon as the gospel began to be promulgated. God then deserted his Temple, because it was only founded for a time, and was but a shadow, until the Jews so completely violated the whole covenant that no sanctity remained in either the Temple, the nation, or the land itself. Some restrict this to those standards which Tiberius erected on the very highest pinnacle of the Temple, and others to the statue of Caligula, but I have already stated my view of these opinions as too forced. I have no hesitation in referring this language of the angel to that profanation of the Temple which happened after the manifestation of Christ, when sacrifices ceased, and the shadows of the law were abolished. From the time, therefore, at which the sacrifice really ceased to be offered; this refers to the period at which Christ by his advent should abolish the shadows of the law, thus making all offering of sacrifices to God totally valueless. From that time, therefore. Next, from the time at which the stupefying abomination shall have been set up. God’s wrath followed the profanation of the Temple. The Jews never anticipated the final cessation of their ceremonies, and always boasted in their peculiar external worship, and unless God had openly demonstrated it before their eyes, they would never have renounced their sacrifices and rites as mere shadowy representations. Hence Jerusalem and their Temple were exposed to the vengeance of the Gentiles. This, therefore, was the setting up of this stupefying abomination; it was a clear testimony to the wrath of God, exhorting the Jews in their confusion to boast no longer in their Temple and its holiness.”  (Commentary)

Ignaz von Döllinger
“Thus, after a siege unparalleled in the history of war, fell this noble city, the beloved Jerusalem, after it had flourished, under the protection of Heaven, more than two thousand years. The miserable citizens, who had not been carried away in chains, or crucified around the walls of Jerusalem, wandered forlorn over their once happy land. Their descendants, after a vain attempt, in the reign of Adrian, to rebuild their city, were scattered amongst the nations of the earth, where their children may, to this day, be seen, distinct from the nations with whom they live. The seat of the Jewish religion had fallen; the city of sacrifice had been destroyed; that implacable enemy of Christ, the sanhedrim, had been annihilated; it had become evident, even to the most darkened eye, that the time had arrived, in which the Church should spring forth, as the young plant, from the dead seed of Judaism, and should, in a short time, become the vast tree, spreading its branches over the whole earth.”

Alfred Edersheim
“[The] tribulation to Israel [was] unparalleled in the terrible past of its history, and unequalled even in its bloody future was about to befall them. Nay, so dreadful would be the persecution that, if Divine mercy had not interposed for the sake of the followers of Christ, the whole Jewish race that inhabited the land would have been swept away. There should have been no flesh saved.” (Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, two-volume ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, [1883] 1971) 2:449)

Jonathan Edwards (1736)
“Thus there was a final end to the Old Testament world: all was finished with a kind of day of judgment, in which the people of God were saved, and His enemies terribly destroyed.” (vol. i. p. 445)

“‘Tis evident that when Christ speaks of his coming; his being revealed; his coming in his Kingdom; or his Kingdom’s coming; He has respect to his appearing in those great works of his Power Justice and Grace, which should be in the Destruction of Jerusalem and other extraordinary Providences which should attend it.” (Miscellany #1199)

Philip Mauro (1921)
“It is greatly to be regretted that those who, in our day, give themselves to the study and exposition of prophecy, seem not to be aware of the immense significance of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which was accompanied by the extinction of Jewish national existence, and the dispersion of the Jewish people among all the nations. The failure to recognize the significance of that event, and the vast amount of prophecy which it fulfilled, has been the cause of great confusion, for the necessary consequence of missing the past fulfilment of predicted events is to leave on our hands a mass of prophecies for which we must needs contrive fulfilments in the future. The harmful results are two fold; for first, we are thus deprived of the evidential value, and the support to the faith, of those remarkable fulfilments of prophecy which are so clearly presented to us in authentic contemporary histories; and second, our vision of things to come is greatly obscured and confused by the transference to the future of predicted events which, in fact, have already happened, and whereof complete records have been preserved for our information.”

“Yet, in the face of all this, we have today a widely held scheme of prophetic interpretation, which has for its very cornerstone the idea that, when God’s time to remember His promised mercies to Israel shall at last have come, He will gather them into their ancient land again, only to pour upon them calamities and distresses far exceeding even the horrors which attended the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This is, we are convinced, an error of such magnitude as to derange the whole program of unfulfilled prophecy.”  (Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation)

Thomas Newton (1754)
“As a general in the wars (Josephus) must have had an exact knowledge of all transactions, and a Jewish priest he would not relate them with any favour of partiality to the Christian cause. His history was approved by Vespasian and Titus (who ordered it to be published) and by King Agrippa and many others, both Jews and Romans, who were present in those wars..He designed nothing less, and yet as if he had designed nothing more, his history of the Jewish wars may serve as a larger comment on our Saviour’s prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem.” (Newton, p. 433)

Stafford North (1998)
“Just as Daniel predicted, in 70 A.D., forty years after the anointed one was cut off, the Roman armies marched on Jerusalem.  After a siege of 134 days, designed to weaken resistance, the Roman army broke through the walls, destroyed the city and burned the temple.  Then, they put their ensigns over the eastern gate of the temple and offered sacrifices to them. (Josephus: War VI, vi. 1 [316]).

There could not have been a more precise fulfillment of the prophecies of both Daniel and Christ.  The city was destroyed and desecrated.  Even the stones of the temple were cast down and not one remained upon another.”  (Armageddon Again? A Reply to Hal Lindsey, Oklahoma City, OK: Author, 1991, p. 47-48)

Philip Schaff (1877)
“The destruction of Jerusalem would be a worthy theme for the genius of a Christian Homer. It has been called “the most soul-stirring of all ancient history.” But there was no Jeremiah to sing the funeral dirge of the city of David and Solomon. The Apocalypse was already written, and had predicted that the heathen “shall tread the holy city under foot forty and two months.” (p. 397-398)

“A few years afterwards followed the destruction of Jerusalem, which must have made an overpowering impression and broken the last ties which bound Jewish Christianity to the old theocracy. . . .

“The awfiul catastrophe of the destruction of the Jewish theocracy must have produced the profoundest sensation among the Christians. . . . It was the greatest calamity of Judaism and a great benefit to Christianity; a refutation of the one, a vindication . . . of the other. It separated them forever. . . . Henceforth the heathen could no longer look upon Christianity as a mere sect of Judaism, but must regard and treat it as a new, peculiar religion. The destruction of Jerusalem, therefore, marks that momentous crisis at which the Christian church as a whole burst forth forever from the chrysalis of Judaism, awoke to a sense of maturity, and in government and worship at once took its independent stand before the world.” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. I, pp. 403-404)

C.H. Spurgeon (1868)
“The destruction of Jerusalem was more terrible than anything that the world has ever witnessed, either before or since. Even Titus seemed to see in his cruel work the hand of an avenging God.” (Commentary on Matthew, p. 412)

Truly, the blood of the martyrs slain in Jerusalem was amply avenged when the whole city became veritable Aceldama, or field of blood.” (Commentary on Matthew, p. 412,413)

Dom Toutee (1790)
St. Chrysostom shows that the destruction of Jerusalem is to be ascribed, not to the power of the Romans, for God had often delivered it from no less dangers; but to a special providence which was pleased to put it out of the power of human perversity to delay or respite the extinction of those ceremonial observances.” (St. Cyril)

John Wesley (1754)
“Josephus’ History of the Jewish War is the best commentary on this chapter (Matt. 24). It is a wonderful instance of God’s providence, that he, an eyewitness, and one who lived and died a Jew, should, especially in so extraordinary a manner, be preserved, to transmit to us a collection of important facts, which so exactly illustrate this glorious prophecy, in almost every circumstance.” (Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament)

William Whiston (1737)
“Josephus speaks so, that it is most evident he was fully satisfied that God was on the Romans’ side, and made use of them now for the destruction of the Jews, which was for certain the true state of this matter, as the prophet Daniel first, and our Saviour himself afterwards had clearly foretold. (See Lit. Accompl. of Proph. p. 64, etc. (Wars of the Jews, VI,II,1)

N.T. Wright (1996)
“One of the main reasons, I suppose, why the obvious way of reading the chapter has been ignored for so long must be the fact that in a good deal of Christian theology the fall of Jerusalem has had no theological significance. This has meant not only that Mark 13 is found puzzling, but also that all the references to the same event elsewhere in the gospels — even where it stares one in the face, as in Luke 13:1-5 — have been read as general warnings of hellfire in an afterlife, rather than the literal and physical divine-judgment-through-Roman-judgment that we have seen to be characteristic of Jesus’ story.” (Jesus and Victory of God, pp. 343-344. Fortress Press, 1996).

 

 

Bishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1670)
“They have their book which they name Talmud, that is, doctrine, which they regard no less than the Scripture itself.  It is a collection of tracts and sentences of their doctors; and though the parts comprising that great work be not all of equal antiquity, the latest authors quoted in it lived in the earliest ages of the Church.  There, amidst numberless irrelevant fables, which take their rise for the most part after the time of our Lord, we find some beautiful remains of the ancient traditions of the Jewish people, and proofs that might convince them. And first, it is certain from the admission of the Jews, that the Divine vengeance did never more terribly nor more manifestly declare itself than in their last desolation.”

“Let us remember only what Jesus Christ had foretold them.” (Continuity of Religion)

Adam Clarke (1837)
“I conclude, therefore, that this prophecy has not the least relation to Judas Maccabeus. It may be asked, to whom, and to what event does it relate? .. to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish polity; which in the Gospel is called the coming of Christ and the days of vengeance, Matthew 16:28Luke 21:22.” (Isaiah 65, p. 513)

P.S. Desprez (1854)
“The Lord came, as he said, to destroy Jerusalem, and to close the dispensation.” (The Apocalypse Fulfilled Preface, p. vi).

“NO scriptural statement is capable of more decided proof than that the coming of Christ is the destruction of Jerusalem, and the close of the Jewish dispensation.” (The Apocalypse Fulfilled, p.9)

Gary DeMar (1999)
“All the signs listed in Matthew 24 have reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D.70.”(Last Days Madness, GA: American Vision, p., 124)

F.W. Farrar (1882)
“the Fall of Jerusalem and all the events which accompanied and followed it in the Roman world and in the Christian world, had a significance which it is hardly possible to overestimate. They were the final end of the Old Dispensation. They were the full inauguration of the New Covenant. They were God’s own overwhelming judgment on that form of Judaic Christianity which threatened to crush the work of St. Paul, to lay on the Gentiles the yoke of abrogated Mosaism, to establish itself by threats and anathemas as the only orthodoxy. Many of the early Christians and those especially who lived at Jerusalem were at the same time rigid Jews… No event less awful than the desolation of Judea, the destruction of Judaism, the annihilation of all possibility of observing the precepts of Moses, could have opened the eyes of the Judaisers from their dream of imagined infallibility. Nothing but God’s own unmistakable interposition – nothing but the manifest coming of Christ – could have persuaded Jewish Christians that the Law of the Wilderness was annulled.” (The Early Days of Christianity, p. 489, 490)

“It was to this event, the most awful in history – ‘one of the most awful eras in God’s economy of grace, and the most awful revolution in all God’s religious dispensations’ – that we must apply those prophecies of Christ’s coming in which every one of the Apostles and Evangelists fixed these three most definite limitations – the one, that before that generation passed away all these things would be fulfilled; another, that some standing there should not taste death till they saw the Son of Man coming in His kingdom; and third, that the Apostles should not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come. It is strange that these distinct limitations should not be regarded as a decisive proof that the Fall of Jerusalem was, in the fullest sense, the Second Advent of the Son of Man which was primarily contemplated by the earliest voices of prophecy” (ibid., Vol. 2, p. 489)

Kenneth Gentry
“The A.D. 70 catastrophe results from Christ’s prophetic word, corroborating His Messianic authority in a dramatic way. AD. 70 proves His prophecyto be not only a true word from God (Deut. 18:22) but a judgment word against God’s people. The disciples’ request for a “sign” marking out “the end of the age” (Matt. 24:3) sparks the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and 25. Up through 24:34, Jesus focuses on Jerusalem’s destruction: The devastation of the holy city and conflagration of its holy house become “‘the sign of the Son of man in heaven”‘ (v. 30, KJV). Thus, when the first-century holocaust explodes upon Israel, it definitively signifies the divine authority of the One now in heaven (cf. Matt. 26:59-64Luke 23:20-31). Too many Christians miss the meaning of Jesus’ cloud-coming in Matthew 24:30 for two reasons. First, they are unfamiliar with Old Testament apocalyptic passages wherein divine judgments appear as cloud-comings (Isa. 19:1). Second, they overlook the interpretive clues in Matthew 24: mention of the temple’s destruction (v. 2), the Judean focus (v. 16), and the temporal proximity of all the events between verses 4 and 34 (v. 34). Indeed, Jesus warns the very men who sit in judgment over Him: “‘Here after you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven”‘ (Matt. 26:64b).  This is certainly how the ancient church read Matthew 24. Referring to A.D. 70, Eusebius highlights “the infallible forecast of our Saviour in which He prophetically expounded these very things” (Ecclesiastical History, 3:7:1).” (Tabletalk Mag., December 2001)

“The final collapse of Jerusalem and the Temple.. Through these events the Jews were to “see” the Son of Man in His judgment-coming in terrifying cloud-glory: clouds are symbols of divine majesty often entailing stormy destruction.   The members of the Sanhedrin and others would experience such in their life times (Matt. 26:64Mark 9:1; cf. Rev 1:7 with Rev 1:1,3).” (ibid. 348)

“The nature of the event has to do with a ‘Cloud-Coming’ of Christ. It is necessary here to understand the Old Testament backdrop for a proper comprehension of the matter. The Old Testament frequently uses clouds as indicators of divine judgment.” (Before Jerusalem Fell; Bethesda, MD: Christian University Press, 1997; p. 121)

James Stuart Russell (1878)
“There are not a few who seem to think that if our Lord’s prophecy on the Mount of Olives, and the predictions of the apostles of the coming of Christ in glory, meant no more than the destruction of Jerusalem, and were fulfilled in that event, then all their announcements and expectations ended in a mere fiasco, and the historical reality answers very feebly and inadequately to the magnificent prophecy. There is reason to believe that the true significance and grandeur of that great event are very little apprehended by many. The destruction of Jerusalem was not a mere thrilling incident in the drama of history, like the siege of Troy or the downfall of Carthage, closing a chapter in the annals of a state or a people. It was an event which has no parallel in history. It was the outward and visible sign of a great epoch in the divine government of the world. It was the close of one dispensation and the commencement of another. It marked the inauguration of a new order of things. The Mosaic economy, which had been ushered in by the miracles of Egypt, the lightenings and thunderings of Sinai, and the glorious manifestations of Jehovah to Israel, after subsisting for more than fifteen centuries was now abolished.. It was not an isolated fact, a solitary catastrophe, it was the center of a group of related and coincidental events, not only in the material, but in the spiritual world; not only on earth, but in heaven and hell; some of them being cognizable by the senses and capable of historical confirmation, and others not.” (The Parousia, pp. 546, 547)

R.C. Sproul  (1998)
“No matter what view of eschatology [the doctrine of the Last Days] we embrace, we must take seriously the redemptive-historical importance of Jerusalem’s destruction in A.D. 70.” (The Last Days According to Jesus, p. 26)

“The coming of Christ in A.D.70 was a coming in judgment on the Jewish nation, indicating the end of the Jewish age and the fulfillment of a day of the Lord.  Jesus really did come in judgment at this time, fulfilling his prophecy in the Olivet Discourse.” (The Last Days According to Jesus, p. 158)

“The most significant, redemptive, historical action that takes place outside the New Testament, is the judgment that falls on Jerusalem, and by which judgment the Christian Church now emerges as The Body of Christ.” (R.C. Sproul, Dust to Glory video series, 1997)

“Russell’s book has forced me to take the events surrounding the destruction of jerusalem far more seriously than before, to open my eyes to the radical significance of this event in redemptive history.  It vindicates the apostolic hope and prediction of our Lord’s close-at-hand coming in judgment.  My view on these matters remains in transition, as I have spelled out in The Last Days According to Jesus.  But for me one thing is certain:  I can never read the New Testament again the same way I read it before reading The Parousia.  I hope better scholars than I will continue to analyze and evaluate the content of J. Stuart Russell’s important work.” (“Forword,” in  The Parousia (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999)

“..the greatest single event of a thousand years, and religiously significant beyond anything else that ever occurred in human history.”

S.G.F. Brandon (1951)
“The apparent cruciality of this event for Christianity has been the subject of our investigation, and the conclusion has been reached that that cruciality is a fact of profound historical significance for the understanding of the nature of Christian Origins. It would indeed not be an exaggeration to say that Christianity was in a certain sense reborn as a result of the Jewish catastrophe of A.D. 70… in the overthrow of the Jewish state the old wine-skins of Judaism were burst asunder and perished, liberating the new wine to flow freely abroad and to reach maturity in places more congenial to the original genius of its creator. Thus we may conclude that, after the Resurrection experiences, the next most crucial event in the life of the Christian Church was the overthrow of the Jewish nation, which was dramatically epitomized in the destruction of its holy city of Jerusalem in A.D. 70” (The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, pp. 249, 251)

Tony Campolo (1988)
“Jesus told his disciples that their generation would not pass away before everything that needed to be fulfilled for His return would take place. I do not believe the Lord was wrong. I am convinced that by A.D. 70 everything was in place for the return of Christ, and that it has been right for Christians to expect His return ever since that time …. I must point out that for centuries Christians did not see any need for the restoration of the state of Israel or the rebuilding of the temple … for the return of Christ” (20 Hot Potatoes Christians are Afraid to Touch, p.233).

James Burton Coffman (1984)
“It is most likely that this has no reference whatever to the Second Coming of Christ.  The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D.70, only five years after our epistle, was the greatest single event of a thousand years, and religiously significant beyond anything else that ever occurred in human history.” (Commentary on James, 1 & 2 Peter, p. 231)

William Cox (1966)
“We know that the great tribulation of A.D. 70 brought the Jewish state to its complete and final end.” (p. 103)

Dr. Burnett Hillman (1925)
“It is impossible for us to realise the shock of A.D.70 to a community in which Jewish and Gentile members alike had been reared in the profoundest veneration of the immemorial sanctity of the Holy City and the Temple.” (The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, p. 516)

David Hocking (2005)
“Preterists believe that the promise of our Lord’s Second Coming began to be fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Some believe that the prophecies mentioned above were fulfilled in the Second Century AD at the time of the Second Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire at the time of Emperor Hadrian. Some preterists hold that the prophecies were fulfilled during the first three centuries AD as God wages war on the enemies of the Church (which they argue include Israel and Rome!) resulting in the “Christianization” of the Roman Empire under Constantine.” (What is Preterism?)

G.W.H. Lampe (1984)
“Jewish Christianity, as well as Gentile, had by this time established its own identity. . . . During the war and in the ensuing three or four decades . . . the separation of the Jewish Christians from Judaism became complete… the main principles of the Christian position had been established against Judaism well before the first Jewish war ended.. the decisive event which vindicated Jesus as the Christ, the Lord, the Son of God, was not the destruction of his enemies but his resurrection from the dead and his exaltation to God’s right hand.”

“From the letter to the Galatians Christians had learned that they were children of the Jerusalem which is ‘above’, the community which, because it enjoys the freedom of the Spirit, stands over against its antithesis, the earthly Jerusalem which is in servitude to the Law (Gal. 4:25–6, cp. Phil. 3:20). The foundations, once again, had been laid for the later development of the theme of the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ in Hebrews (12:22), the ‘new’ or ‘holy’ Jerusalem which, according to the Revelation of John (3:12; 20:9; 21:2), is to descend from heaven and in which the presence of God will not be focussed or localised in any temple, and for the reinterpretation by the Fourth Evangelist of the idea of a holy place, established by God for worship, in terms of community which worships in the Spirit and truth (John 4:21–3). Paul had already taught that the holy temple of God, indwelt by the Spirit, is the congregation of Christian people, the temple of the living God in which his presence assures the fulfilment of the covenant promise, ‘I will be their God and they shall be my people’ (I Cor. 3:16–172 Cor. 6:16); and Paul had also shown that in a secondary sense each individual believer is the temple of the indwelling Holy Spirit (I Cor. 6:19). In this ark of Christian theology, too, the foundations of later developments, such as the teaching of Eph. 2:21 and I Pet. 2:5, and, through a combination of the themes of the ‘temple of the Spirit’ and the ‘body of Christ’, of John 2:21, had been firmly laid in the years before the Jewish war.”  (“A.D. 70 in Christian Reflection,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, 156-158.)

Jack P. Lewis (1976)
All these things (panta tauta) is a crux of interpretation (cf. 23:36; 24:2,3,34).  What it includes is uncertain.  He is near could just as well be ‘it is near’ and refer to the summer (vs. 32), that is, to the doom of Jerusalem.” (The Gospel According to Matthew, Part 2; Living Word Commentary: Sweet Publishing, p. 128)

Jim McGuigan (1991)
“I can’t remember when I didn’t  think Matt 24 all referred to Jerusalem’s fall” (A.D.70 Revisited, 75.)

Robert Roberts  (1855)
“The parousia, or proximity, of the Son of Man to Jerusalem in the crisis of its overthrow was to be in the lifetime of that generation, according to the words of Jesus, who said, “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” (The Signs of the Son of Man’s Presence at the Destruction of Jerusalem) 

A. R. Tippit
“The concept of Israel as the chosen people does not imply a certain divine favoritism, as some seem to think, but an opportunity of grace, a calling that involved the assumption of the servant role among the nations. It was the fact that they had interpreted themselves as special objects of God’s favor, and rejected the servant role, that led to their own rejection.” (Church Growth and the Word of God)

David Turner (1989)
“‘This generation’ applies to Jesus’ contemporaries who lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem; ‘all these things’ (Matt. 24:34) is limited by the contextual fig tree analogy to the events marking the course of the ages, particularly the events of A.D.70.” (“The Structure and Sequence of Matthew 24,” Grace Theological Journal 10 (Spr 1989): 3-27, p.3)

 

 

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

William Drool Killen (1859)
“Nero died A.D. 68, and the war which involved the destruction of Jerusalem and of upwards of a million of the Jews, was already in progress. The holy city fell A.D. 70; and the Mosaic economy, which had been virtually abolished by the death of Christ, now reached its practical termination. At the same period the prophecy of Daniel was literally fulfilled; for “the sacrifice and the oblation” were made to cease, [168:5] as the demolition of the temple and the dispersion of the priests put an end to the celebration of the Levitical worship. The overthrow of the metropolis of Palestine contributed in various ways to the advancement of the Christian cause. Judaism, no longer able to provide for the maintenance of its ritual, was exhibited to the world as a defunct system; its institutions, now more narrowly examined by the spiritual eye, were discovered to be but types of the blessings of a more glorious dispensation; and many believers, who had hitherto adhered to the ceremonial law, discontinued its observances. Christ, forty years before, had predicted the siege and desolation of Jerusalem; [169:1] and the remarkable verification of a prophecy, delivered at a time when the catastrophe was exceedingly improbable, appears to have induced not a few to think more favourably of the credentials of the gospel. In another point of view the ruin of the ancient capital of Judea proved advantageous to the Church. In the subversion of their chief city the power of the Jews sustained a shock from which it has never since recovered; and the disciples were partially delivered from the attacks of their most restless and implacable persecutors.” (The Ancient Church)

Edgar Allen Poe  (1850)
“No more,” responded Abel-Phittim,–”no more shall we feast upon the fat of the land–no longer shall our beards be odorous with frankincense–our loins girded up with fine linen from the Temple.” (Tale for Jerusalem)

Joseph Wood (1906)
“Inspiration is that which is of universal application. If any utterance is only for an age, and local in its interpretation, we do not regard it as inspired. The Psalms, for instance, were mostly suggested by local considerations, the trials, the joys, the experiences of David and others, under peculiar circumstances. But, nevertheless, we feel as we read them that they pass beyond the limits of the local and the individual— they belong to humanity—they are true of human nature and life everywhere. Or take Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem. It was spoken at Jerusalem about Jerusalem, and in a manner which seemed limited to Jerusalem. But had the prophecy been true only of that city of sorrows, it would never have been regarded as inspired. Whereas Christ’s principle was this : that the doom pronounced on Jerusalem was universally applicable, and that it was but a style and specimen of God’s judgment everywhere. The judgment comes wherever there is evil grown ripe for judgment, wherever corruption is complete. And the gathering of the Roman eagles to the carcase is but a specimen of the way in which judgment at last overtakes any city, any country, and any man in whom evil has reached the point where there is no possibility of cure. We who have lived through the last fifty years have seen the eagles gathered together in Naples, in America, in France, in Bulgaria. The Lord’s judgment on Jerusalem has been fulfilled many times—it was not simply of local but of universal application.” (The Bible, what it is and is not, p. 97)
Date:19 Jun 2002Time:17:11:33

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Looks like you put a lot of work into this, I didn’t realize that there was this much historical documentation. Thanks for the insight.

Date:27 Jul 2002Time:22:45:37

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Then He said to His disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.” (Lk. 17.22) The contradiction between this verse and Matt 24, luke 21, matt 16 27&28 mark 9,1 requires interpretation other than what the plain text apears to say to reconcile them. What are the days of the Son of Man? Is it refering to his second advent? If so these verses contradict, unles we remove the time frames of “this generation” or “some standing there would not taste death” or atribute the comming of the Son of Man in his kingdom to something no more than an insignifacant preview such as the transfiguration. I have come to the point of where if truth hinges on speculation or opinion then it is a waste of time. In frustration I am ready to throw it all out. I am weary of arguing with my self over these verses. I would like to say that the days of the Son of Man are different then his comming in his kingdom, but I have no scripture for that so its all a waste of time. Both ends are faulty. My search for truth is fruitless, the promise of seek and you shall find unfulfilled. I shall give up the search before I go mad.

Date:29 Aug 2002Time:06:15:50

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I have NEVER read such poisonous crap in my life!

Date:17 Sep 2002Time:11:32:02Remote User:

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I have been studying dispensationalism for many years. Though it does open the scriptures in many ways, it also poses many new paradoxes. I have always noted with curiosity the disregard and disinterest given the destruction of the temple in year 70. All through my study this has nagged at me like an itch I can’t reach. I intend to spend as much time as is required to come to a full understanding of the preterist position. This site will greatly assist me and I am very greatful to those that have labord to place all this info online at my disposal. Thank you and God bless you. Will Blalock

Date:21 Oct 2002Time:13:12:15

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These comments just prove that early Christian history affirms that they saw the destruction of Jerusalem as fulfilled as depicted by Jesus. What is noticeably lacking is any connection of this event with a “coming” of the Lord. I hope that other discerning readers noticed this. It is quite disingenous then to label such writing as unqualified “preterist.” And I am an orthodox (read non-heretical unlike the vile poison distributed at this site in lethal doses) preterist but I want to treat the historicial documents fairly and this is not fair treatment.

Date:26 Oct 2002Time:20:56:50

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All seem to miss the words of Isaiah, which predict that the King must be descended genetically from King David. It would be logical to look for the most royal man alive, See Isaiah 22:22 and when found, he is the King, the Christ. In Isaiah 63 that same prophecy has the Lord unable to find anyone worth saving, and in anger he treads the winfat, staining his pure ghost like resurrected body – garments, in the blood of the sour grapes of mankind, i.e. all corrupted. The throne of David is everlasting, according to the bible, and so the only throne of Judah, not the Jews, as they are Kazars of Russia, and not genetically linked to Judah’s kingly line, must look at the descendants of Zedekiah who was taken to Tara Ireland by Jeremiah, 583 BC. The throne was to merge with the Irish and end up in Scotland. History of the British is controlled by Freemason hold on the throne, but one line of genetic royalty continued via the lions of King William I. the Lion, who had two wives, the first producing King Alexander II and he the father of King Alexander III, who died without offspring. This did not automatically lead back to the half brother of Alexander II< who was much older than King William’s youngest son by Isabel D’ Avonal, his name was Henry, as via D’Avonal, was a direct descendant of William I. the Conqueror and therefore more royal than any other heir. By 1290 there was a vacant throne and this called 13 Competitors to vie for the throne, one was Patrick Golightly, the grandson of Henry who sir named by William I. the Lion, his father as Henry Golightly. The eventual blood bath saw Robert Bruce, a Freemason (Templars) emerge as they believe Jesus did not die on the cross and married Mary Magdalene and his children by her, became the Fisher kings and descend to the royals of Europe, the insane bunch of kings who are the same monsters who murdered all in their path. I could not trace the Golightly line until the Internet came to the world, and become available from 1998 when search engines made available more information. At that time, I had researched the family line of Golightly and Marshall, (MARESCHAL) as in those times, first cousins always married and second cousins were not permitted as it caused insanity. But politics caused the marriages of kings to women of second cousin genetics and insanity is rife. While all this interbreeding was going on, power struggles and wars kept the true genetic line from the eyes of the kings who would have killed off that line had they been vocal. Freemasonry was a child of Knight Templars that ran head long into the Catholic Church and Talmudic Jews infiltrated both. This began the assault on truth as the Jews from Russia had taken hold of an opportunity to developed with the occult teaching of the same thoughts that had devoured the Pharisee’s at the time of Jesus. John 8:44. Today we see a Germanic Franco hold on the throne of David, being England and the Antichrist must therefore come out of this Roman religion of monetary dominance, intermingled with the World Order and Jewish control of the banks, in as much that the false Jews of the Bilderbergers, International finances and the UN, contrived wars from ancient times to now, where a problem is started economically, then the solution presented and then the hero’s ride in and save humanity, which is just what they planned from the start. The International Monetary Fund and INDONESIA for example, occurred when the price of kerosene was raised and this cooking fuel, caused riots in Jakarta, that spread to the factories and a general strike, then the University students, then the army rises up to quash it, and then a military takeover and then the IMF insists that the laws must protect corporations, 43 billion set aside on a slow dribble into the economy and the government relents to corporate law. The latest blast was by the CIA to persuade Australians to join the US and go to war against Iraq. as 69% oppose it. Australia has been set up electronically via Telstra and pine Gap, to monitor the entire world and be the head quarters of the New world Order in Canberra after the contrived revamp of electronic equipment to ‘handle’ the Olympics in 2000, the reality to get Australians to pay for the surveillance equipment and allow the CIA at Pine Gap to install an 8 kilometre aerial straight down into the thickest part of the worlds crust, to use slow vibrations of the Australian continent to disperse water vapour away from the land and cause a massive drought, throwing farmers into the banks who greedily take the farm, as Australia is prophetically the Ephraim son of Joseph, to bring forth the Messiah, the Christ. As of 1998, I could not trace the name Golightly on the web, so I started a quest for people with that name to trace their genetics, postulating that any descent of the first Henry Golightly must be the true royal family. To my surprise the ball has rolled along gathering moss, and today there are chat rooms dedicated to the genetic link to Henry and king William I. the Lion and King William I. the Conqueror. They became soldiers, scouring the ancient books and we emerged with dates of birth, pedigree of D’Avonal, and so on, to emerge with the most royal man alive Brian Leonard Golightly Marshall, who has been bombarding the internet with pages like, who controls what, NASA did not land a man on the moon, Charles is the murderer of Diana and why, biblical codes, an explanation of the Great pyramid and how the Freemason’s have implemented the prophetic time line called the year = 1 pyramid inch, and caused wars to align with it, ending with September 11 2002, it ending with the Jewish New Year, exposing the Jewish Talmud as being the occult secret religion of BABYLON, Predicted by Jesus, that has devoured the world and America, installed the Skull and bones men as presidents, who, out of Yale University they sprang and invented the CIA who downs planes, blowers up government buildings, creates Mayhem in remote places and blames the Muslims, move nations to war, control ALL TV, music, books, movies even Walt Disney studios. Overall the TV pop eyed public are brain washed with fluoride poring out of big city taps to soak the 90% our brains are made up from, to the bodies that carry it at 70% water, to make one dull, stupid and ill, and then have the Insurance corporations insure you, the hospitals mistreat you, the control of Colloidal silver as a natural remedy and cure for all things from Cancer to Arthritis and the drug companies creating virus’s and then a vaccine. All revealed by a man who says he is Christ, Brian Leonard Golightly Marshall, an Australian, the most royal man alive, unable to find more than a few souls who believe him. Pathetic but true.

Date:08 Nov 2002Time:14:33:19

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I think the preterist view is heresey

Date:18 Dec 2002Time:08:50:53

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This is rather intriguing information. I have learned through my studies that 90% of biblical interpretations point to a pre-millinial tribulation preceded by a rapture of the true church. After much thought and prayer, I have considered the possibilty of a rapture occurring during the 3 1/2 year Great trubulation before the Day of the Lord. This is the first time that I have seen a view that points out that biblical prophecies referring to the end times have already been fullfilled. To be honest, I am “up in the air” until I can do more research. The arguments for both seem to be inconsistant. The argument against one is the same against the other…. Do we interpret these prophecies literally or spiritually? The Preterist view seems to argue against a literal interpretation of Jesus returning and ushering in 1000 years of Jesus’ reign. At the same time it argues that other events that were prophecied occured literally in 70 AD. The popular view seems to take “this generation” as symbolic of the generation asscociated with birth pang signs. (It seems that Jesus was referring to his literal generation) On the other hand, every possible symbol is converted into some literal occurrance that can be fit into two 3 1/2 year periods of time. The timing of the Rapure of the church is also sketchy at best. The Rapture occurance is taken quite literally. I must admit that your site has opened my mind to the possibility that 70AD is a major part end time prophecy fullfulled. However, it may be quite possible that this has left many prophecies undone. This leaves me with the opinion that neither opinion is completely correct. It is more likely that both views have credibilty. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Praise the name of Jesus our Lord!

Date:21 Jan 2003Time:11:50:04

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I think you are a bit dishonest in listing some of the name that you do on your web site. It “creates” the appearance that they are (full) preterists. For example, I know that John Owen believed in a literal (yet future) coming of Christ, resurrection, and end time judgments. I know that RC Sproul is a partial preterist. Phil Bowersox

Date:11 Feb 2003Time:20:13:11

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I thought I was the only one in the world who believed that the first and second comings of Jesus were to the same generation in the first century. For many years I have been reading my bible only and discovered that it presented a different narriative than what I heard preached in the Gentile christian churches. In the last few months I have learned quite a bit about Preterism.

Date:05 Mar 2003Time:16:49:22

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This is a great site guys. It is full of truth and sound hermeneutics. I am a full preterist and I love it. No one ever has answers to my questions about a future coming of Christ, and I am at a Bible college! The message is getting out here; we are making a change and a difference. Keep up the good work. Don’t ever give up no matter what people say and do to you. We must endure for the truth. Scipture is God’s Word. We must stand by it, not men’s interpretation. Where the Scriptures speak, we speak. Where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent. The Scriptures have spoken about Christ’s return and His installment of the New Covenant, New Heavens, and New Earth which we live in. It is silent about a future coming.

Date:10 Mar 2003Time:07:53:44

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hi, I live in Egypt.. I’m Christian Coptic Orthodox & we need these studies in Arabic because it’s very useful for all, will you?!

Date:02 Apr 2003Time:20:43:57

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Thank you for opening my eyes to preterism/partial preterism – a very viable alternative to dispensationalism’s contrived teachings concerning 1. the rapture 2. the antichrist 3. the great tribulation 4. armageddon 5. the millennial reign

Date:08 Apr 2003Time:04:32:40

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Dear Lien Notsur in reply to your post on January 26, 2003 06:00 PM Post a comment It is all a matter of genetics. In the book of Isaiah, the prophet predicted two Messiah’s. The two individuals are the same person, but one dies and one resurrects. The first was Jesus, April 3rd 33 AD or 3 days after the 3rd day in the 33rd year. <P> Jesus was rejected by the Pharisee’s because Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness and leader of the Essene Jews in Qumran, as revealed by the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by the deceased John Allegro. He was murdered after he defied the Catholic watchers in the Vatican and took his finding public on the BBC Radio in England. <P> The second part of the Isaiah prophecy, has this same man resurrected 1943 years later, and we find where I came to be, for my parents conceived my presence on April 6th 1943. <P> This union was not a fluke, only God could have manipulated the births and marriages and subsequent pregnancies among the descendants of a family tree that was caused to remain aloof to the lesser royals of Europe. <P> Out of the genetics of these true royal descendants, could the most royal man be born. <P> We have then, the suffering crucified Messiah proving resurrection than ascension to God, witnessed by people who were so convinced, they marched singing hymns of joy into the lions dens in Rome. <P> Apart from this, God has proven in time, sunlight and moonlight, the identity of myself via the number 888. <P> In the ancient languages, each letter has a value, and we can calculate the value of the name Lord, Jesus and Christ, which is 800, 888 for Jesus and 1480 for Christ. <P> I began to notice that I was not a normal child, seeing ghosts, hearing God talk to me and telling me to do certain tasks.<P> After 40 years I had become used to it, gathering the tools to cinch up the beast. <P> My brother was born on February 25th 1935, a man of vulgar habits and an atheist womanizer. This fits for biblically the older brother always rejects God and God can be witnessed to change the inheritor, as he did with Zedekiah when he was murdered by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. His daughters were taken to Ireland and carried on the line of David. <P> 8.88 years after my brother was born, I was born.<P> The sunrise to moonrise for Sydney on January 11th 1944 was 888 minutes. <P> 8880 days later, I was in Port Alberni Canada and my daughter was born, the sunlight for that location on May 4th 1968 was once again, 888 minutes. <P> Governments are dominated by the strongest cult, and Australia, Canada, England, United States, bow before several gods, but primarily Freemasonry. <P> There is a saying about politicians, if their moths are moving, they are lying. <P> Over my lifetime, I have walked in and out of courts, beckoning the law to record what I do. <P> God told me to mint 1600 one dollar coins here in Australia in 1985. They average 8.88 grams. I was arrested and found guilty by Justice Web in the Federal Court. <P> Some months later, I was commanded to take charge of a Freemason businessman who was attempting to defraud me, and in a moment, the tables were turned as in a panic, he gave me a blank cheque saying to fill it out myself. <P> The point was that I was charged some months later, faced the court and was out on bail. <P> I was told to return to Canada where I began to manipulate myself into the system, my wife charged me with uttering a death threat and this set the cat among the pigeons. <P> This brought in the medico’s who tested me for months, to be dismayed by the results. Finally an Israeli agent came to me as a friend and administered cyanide. Dr. Hanson he called himself. <P> It was he who returned to my trailer, to see I was still alive, dismayed he declared I was Christ, which I answered, who did you expect? <P> This firmly made the announcement to the powers behind the governments, Satanists, who could do nothing to stop me. <P> I returned to Australia, faced the second fraud charge, and was found guilty by 12 men and women on the Jury. <P> On December 4th 1999 a book tumbled into my hands open at page 255, the Australian Mercantile Law, written in London in 1827. <P> That page contained the very law I was charged with, but the twist, the vowels add up to 3168. Lord Jesus Christ. <P> Now I have no ax to grind in saying this, and reveal it as an ongoing persistence as me name pops up all over the web in forums like this. Most people abuse me, but it is the children to come who will read these words in the years to come, and the outcome is certain. <P> I have many miracles to reveal in this way, and will do so in the months and years to come.<P> Kindest Regards Brian Leonard Golightly Marshall Being born in Sydney to the true royal families, was also a prophecy, Isaiah predicted it, ‘a small child would lead them.’ <P> I was around 3 when I noticed the strange ability to perceive and see spirits. By 4 I concluded that all adults were lacking in the area of existence. <P> Jesus on the other hand, was expected and tutored until the age of 12, constantly told he would die on the cross. <P> One day, while playing in the school yard in the convent St Bernard’s Nuns. <P> Tow older boys were arguing, one said Jesus was a Pharisee, the other no, a Sadducee. <P> At that moment, the air opened up revealing memory of the moment I was told that we were Essene. <P> I was young, 5 years old, looking up at my mother Mary, she was wearing black with a sky blue veil around the inside of her black hood. <P> She said that I must not tell anyone where we were going, that we were Essene and would be in danger if the Jews found out. <P> I turned to see Joseph walking between two smaller men, discussing intensely some topic. <P> As I was 6, the date was 1950. <P> The Vatican had not obtained the Dead Sea Scrolls at that time, as they were servants of the Devil, for the same scrolls reveals Paul as the agent of the Pharisee’s who was sent6 into the meek to divert the power of Jesus resurrection, but that was 15 years after Jesus died. <P> Paul said Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, had this been so, that would have meant Jesus made a mistake with the 12 apostles, the same many were murdered by Paul. <P> Paul said Jesus identified himself and begged him to tell him why Paul persecuted him. <P> Had this been the case, that would have been the second coming of Jesus. <P> Of course it was a set up, Paul took the news of Jesus to the non Jews, when the commandments to the true apostles, was to go not to the gentiles but go to the lost sheep. <P> The Gospels never mention Paul, even through they were written after Paul wrote his tales. No apostle mentioned Paul as the new spreader of the word, while the Dead Sea Scrolls did, calling him the LIAR, they man of Perdition. <P> In Isaiah 22:22 he predicts that there would be an offspring born of the family of David, and he would be a key. He would ascend the throne and all of the world governments would be laid on his shoulders. Isaiah 22:22. <P> The King James bible was ordered translated by King James, he was a Freemason and in doing so, opened the numbers for me to find 400 years later. He had sprung a trap, the numbers can only be solved by a genetic coincidence and reveal myself. <P> Based on the assumption that life is the ultimate gift, overcoming its terror is the price we all must pay. Since m

any years ago, the blows I received opened my eyes to immortality, for man certain death experiences were miraculously prevented as if the air parted and time stopped, I became an observer. <P> The task manifest in my mind, that if I was the resurrected Jesus, I would have no one to help me, as the catholic prays states, that Jesus descended into hell, where I must get him out, oddly myself. <P> The codes in the bible are primarily revealed in the numbers, numbers that fitted my own very reluctant existence. I have waited until now to reply, as it is now past the 3rd or April and Saddam has suffered the tremendous attack against himself and his family. A diabolical act as one beast sets upon another. <P> To come is the move against Israel, and in answer too your previous question, that the Christ has to be born after Israel was formed, is true. <P> You see Israel was invented by the Lucifer worshipping Jews and cemented in history on November 2nd 1917. <P> Lord Rothschild, the head of the Lucifer Zionists, arranged with Lord Balfour to have England hand over Israel to the Zionists after world war 2, which was yet to occur. <P> To get the Yahweh loving anti Jesus Jews of Europe to Armageddon, the holocaust plans were set in motion and Hitler invented. <P> At the end of the war, Israel was given to the Jews, they not realizing it was a trap. <P> By 1996 the population was 717 people per square miles, and the 717th word alphabetically of the New Testament is Armageddon, see James Strong’s concordance on the Internet. <P> It is intended to be above the mentality of the innocent, but within the grasp of the saints who seek me, fir I tell you the truth.<P> In this regards I have proven that NASA never sent a man to the moon, and it was the US military who brought down the twin towers and sent a Patriot missile into the Pentagon. <p> It is no coincidence that the Pentagon was precisely 60 years old, to the minute, that this occurred in 1999 September 11. <P> These monsters poison the worlds water with fluoride, and so I invented Miracle Water to combat it. <P> Is it not strange that I, their most royal accuser, is not dead? They know they can not kill me because I am Christ. The name Golightly, via my mother, is a direct descendant of both King William I. The Lion of Scotland and King William I. The Conqueror of England, as is my Father Reginald Marshall. Brian Leonard Golightly Marshall

Date:19 May 2003Time:23:51:29

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In response to the free mason born in 1943 claiming to be Christ: “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Behold, here is the Christ,’ or ‘There He is,’ do not believe him. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect. Behold, I have told you in advance. So if they say to you, ‘Behold, He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out, or, ‘Behold, He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe them. For just as the LIGHTNING comes from the east and flashes even to the west, SO WILL BE THE COMING OF THE SON OF MAN BE. Matt. 24:23-27 Those passages state clearly, you are a false prophet and not the christ.

Date:16 Jun 2003Time:20:41:04

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The Preterits ignore one major fact. God calling his Jewish people back to “the land” reforming the nation of Israel recognized by the United Nations in 1949. . Few Gentiles were saved/ joined to Israel prior to the CRUCIFICATION at which time God started engrafting the Gentiles and started cutting off the people of Israel which was completed in 70 A.D. thereafter few Jews being added to the church just as before few Gentiles were saved. . But the times of the Gentiles is coming to a close when ALL Israel will be saved. Hence God has began re-engrafting the Jewish people (& the nation of Israel) back on the natural olive tree (in 1949 by re-establishing the Jewish people in the only real estate ever deeded by the living God to any people) and at CHRIST’s 2nd return (yet future to rule and reign over the entire earth 1,000 years – “All Preterits have to explain this away also”) may begin at the 70th or 80th birthday of the nation of Israel in God’s sight on HIS calendar. Folks you don’t BIND God with man’s time table/thinking of “soon,” “quickly,” for God is not a creature bound in or by time as fallen men’s minds think. . A day to YaHWeH is as a thousand years to mankind. For a man to “very soon and Quickly” finish college, build a house, or get married. . . two days is FAST, very FAST. So it is with God around 2,000 years to God is REAL FAST. We need to hear and think and believe the scriptures as the giver God intends us to see it instead of as some 2Timothy2:17 Hymenaeus / Philetus false teachers preach it. Send email comments to: modesty@lakeozark.net with Preterit FOR or AGAINST in the subject line. Here praying for you.

Date:26 Jun 2003Time:10:55:13

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Re: the fella below who said Luke 17:22 being a contradiction with the rest. Go back and read it again, realizing Jesus was essentially saying: ‘Times are coming where you’ll really want to see the Son of Man but you won’t…DON’T fall for the imposters’. In other words there’d certainly be a time between 30-70 A.D when they would really want those days there but they aren’t coming until the appointed time. This makes sense. Further, it’s inconceivable that Luke would have contradicted himself just a couple of chapters later where he reiterates the Discourse. Had he been trying to ‘explain his way around it after the fact’, he would have jumbled around the discourse or not included it at all. Hope you don’t give up in your search friend, Blessings.

Date:05 Jul 2003Time:15:38:00

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Being an amateur historian, I always have thought the siege and destruction of the Jewish Nation in 70 A.D. was an event of historical significant importance. But it is from reading Holy Scripture, that one readily finds God had always used Gentile nations to either punish or to bless the Hebrew people. For their sin of idolatry and breaking of God’s covenant, The Houses of Israel and Judah were lead into Assyrian and Babylonian captivity. Likewise, King Cyrus was prophesied by God to use the power of the Persian empire to again free the House of Judah from Babylonian captivity and to rebuild Jerusalem and resurrect Temple worship. So it’s no surprise to me the Roman empire was simply carrying out the divine dictates of a wrathful God in finally destroying an insolent people for their rejection, and betrayal to death of His Son. But when you listen to, or view, any so-called Christian cable station, you never get this simple and direct point of view. In fact, the events of 70 A.D. are little mentioned, and if they are, are cited without any spiritual perspective. So how has this time honored Christian doctrine, cited by your numerous authors of both past and present centuries, become so anathema today. To say the least, the sound of the silence is quite deafening. J.P.

Date:03 Mar 2004Time:06:48:46

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You quote from Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. You quote just enough to make them look like they are preterist in belief. All these men were avowed premellennialist. You need to read more and not just stop where you want to.

Date:11 Mar 2004Time:00:38:31

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just had to add for everyone who is screaming because people are being “shown as preterists”: This page has to do with the “Significance of AD 70.” Just because some of the people quoted were may or may not have been preterist, does not mean that they didn’t recognize the significance of AD70. They did, in one way or another, and so they are quoted. That’s all that is attempting to be said on this page.

Date:03 May 2004Time:11:13:34

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I believe that Jesus, when He spoke of the Kingdom of God coming into the earth, was speaking of a Kingdom that is composed of our acceptation of Grace, that by Grace accepted by our faith, we can instantly enter into the Kingdom of God. WHEN Jesus noted “The Kingdom of God is within you,” this is what He referred to! Beyond doubt, I believe Jesus/Yeshua will be found in the air, within a decade, for the commotions from this planet, the dishonesty and lusts of every sort, and this even from men and women who have the burdens of the nations on their shoulders, yet they refuse to go to their God, and daily seek His face, that He might bring them a right temperament, thus ensuring their nations are doing all that can be done for the people that they have been put into office by. Unless Mashiach does come again, and that soon, the entire planet will be one huge mass of contradiction and chaos, and satanic influences will work through the leaders, to bring about the Satanic Reign of Planet Earth, which will cater to the carnal desires of the rich and famour, and crucify those who love Jesus, and live according to the words that He spoke.!

Date:07 Jun 2004Time:10:11:34

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“…no one is in danger of defending a heresy if one maintains the view that the single and total perfecting of the human person in ‘body’ and ‘soul’ takes place immediately after death, that the resurrection of the flesh and the general judgement take place ‘parallel’ to the temporal history of the world; and that both coinside with the sum of the particular judgements of individual men and women.” Karl Rahner, “The Intermediate State,” in “Theological Investigations,” 17:14-15…as quoted on pg. 66, “Responces to 101 Questions on Death and Eternal Life,” by Peter C. Phan.

Date:05 Aug 2004Time:20:08:26

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70 AD ends the nation of Israel – Jesus wept, knowing that unavoidable incoming doom was so near. Now – we wait in the wilderness for the times of the gentiles to be completed and for the restoration of Israel to begin with the onset of the soon to be king, the son of David.

Date:18 Aug 2004Time:14:50:45

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it is horrible i hate this

Date:15 Sep 2004Time:11:01:29

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You fail to note that the “Sons of Zadok” or Essenes had long before discounted Temple worship. You also fail to note that, according to Christian legend, the “Judaic Christian” followers of James the Just, i.e. Zadok, were allowed to escape to Pella. The story is undoubtedly more complicated and most now lost. Finally, the Gospels are all widely thought to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem, so the prophecies were self-fulfilling, as many of the so-called prophecies of the Old Testament were, if the datings of the books are correct. You attmept to put God in a box and assert you can understand Him. How about some humility.

Date: 16 Feb 2006
Time: 18:51:39

Comments:

Bible was profound and we need to be careful. I think that there is a spiritual ennemy, devil, that is fighting against the manifestation of Truth. Sometimes, he makes us pay attention to what is not worthy.  Here is what I think personnally. It seems that the disciples of our Lord asked at least two different questions (read and analyze well the questions): one concerns the destruction of Jerusalem and the second concerns the end of the world. I think that Luke 21:6 & Luke21:12-24&Luke21:32 address the first question and Luke 21:8-11 & Luke 21:25-31&Luke21:33-36 address the second one. It seems that hebrew discourse organization is different from English one. This might explain some confusion. It’s also useful to take into account the Old Testament because it is the same HOLY SPIRIT who is operating.

May our Lord JESUS continue to enlight us! HE will never forsake us!

Date: 04 Jul 2007
Time: 10:44:44

Comments:

my pastor has been speaking about this. he is my spiritual father and i totally trust in him. i believe that we are living in the kingdom right now!

Date: 14 Oct 2008
Time: 16:12:52

Comments:

About 6 years ago a friend sent me the book “Last Days Madness” by Gary DeMar. I was bewildered. It was amazed. I had always had serious questions about the way Revelation and Jesus’ predictions have been interpreted… But just left them alone. But his book opened up a whole new paradigm for me. It was very liberating, however still left me with some unanswered questions. I was excited yet a little frustrated. Trying to talk of it to other Christians was also very agonizing for I realized how very steeped in certain ways of thinking we have become, not ever even questioning why we believe the way we do. A left this intriguing new paradigm for about 2 years. I picked it up again and this time went full force into it, asking God to show me truth. I have since been on a journey with Him that has been and continues to be sooooo liberating and free. I love Him and love our journey together. This web site is awesome. I pray that the old false, misleading, deceiving and bondage-
What a magnificent God, a magnificent God-plan, for us in His Son’s Kingdom. God passionately desiring to dwell in and have His kingdom in the earth in our flesh bodies. Thanks for all the work that has gone into this site. From one who is “Loved and a Lover of God, my ‘Ishi’. (Hosea 2:16)

Date: 02 Feb 2009
Time: 12:48:46

Your Comments:

hello, this is a great site… i was looking at your comments and i couldnt help but notice some of the negativity toward your beliefs, now im no historian but i know God and his love… with that in mind… i encourage you to keep pressing on as jesus did, his message wasnt popular either… but nowhere in the bible have i seen jesus preaching rapture, maybe he would have been more popular if he did… anyways… remember God is a creator, what sense would it make for him to take us to heaven and damn everyone else who’s not saved to hell… and if god is spirit, why would he come and establish a natural kingdom, it doesnt make sense, the real issue is the wrong religious mindsets that have been passed down to us since schofield decided to write his own reference bible in the late 1800s that was never contested and now is one of the most massed produced reference bible in the world… the issue is people are too lazy to get in the face of God for themselves, they want their pastors to know God for them, thats the real problem… THE KINGDOM IS HERE, love you guys.
Caleb Robertson

Date: 18 Dec 2010
Time: 14:20:41

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This site seems to give a wide range of latitude to opinions of others! Some writers to the blog seem angry at this. The missreading of Matthew 24 in the 21st Century is widespread. (The difficulties are apparent) Paragraph markings are disregarded and the Chapter is read in sequence. (incorrectly) I am still looking for answers, and to me the 70 AD date seems momentous, and “ALL” Israel is NOT Israel…for those that change the wording in Romans 11:26, to mean THEN ALL Israel…instead of SO all Israel set up a “Fake: salvation en masse for an Unbelieving Political entity (Modern Day Israel) The forming to National Israel (1948) has little or nothing to with the words “This Generation” in Matthew 24:34, as He is repeating His wording from Matt. 23:36!!!! (Regarding the impending Desolation of Jerusalem) P.S. If the Lord wanted to make known the Time of His 2nd Coming, He wouldn’t have spent so much time “confounding the wisdom of the wise.” 1 Cor.1:27 D.L.