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Olivet discourse

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The Olivet discourse or Little Apocalypse is a passage found in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew Mark and Luke occurring just before the narrative of Jesus's passion beginning with the Anointing of Jesus. In the narrative is a discourse or sermon given by Jesus on the Mount of Olives, hence the name. According to most scholars, the versions of the discourse in Matthew and Luke are based on the version in Mark.

There may be no context that has become the focus of more controversy than the Olivet discourse. In each of the three gospel accounts, it contains a number of statements which at face value appear to refer to future events, and most modern Christians interpret as having been intended as prophecy. The topics involved are:

  1. The future destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
  2. Tribulation in Israel and the nations of the world
  3. Various signs of the coming of the Son of Man

The setting on the Mount of Olives is also thought by some scholars not to have been incidental, but a quite deliberate echo of a passage in the Book of Zechariah which refers to the location as the place where a final battle would occur between the Jewish Messiah and their opponents.

Two divergent views

There are two extremes relative to Matthew 24 which must be addressed.

First, there is the notion, advocated by the proponents of “realized eschatology,” also called preterism, that all (or, at least, most) Bible prophecy, including everything within Matthew 24 (e.g., the second coming of Christ, the judgment day, and the end of the world), has already been fulfilled in the event of Jerusalem's destruction by the Romans in A.D. 70. The major components of the A.D. 70 dogma notion is refuted by Wayne Jackson in a 2005 book

A second major doctrine is Futurism. It tends to view the Olivet discourse as a sort of end-time manual which allows one to determine the characteristic events, and therefore the general time, at which the Lord will return to initiate his “millennial reign”, i.e. the Kingdom of God. In his popular book, The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, Hal Lindsey argued that prophetical information in Matthew 24 indicates that the “generation” witnessing the “rebirth of Israel” is the same generation that will observe the fulfillment of the “signs” referred to in – and that would be consummated by the second coming of Christ in approximately 1988. He dated it from the “rebirth of Israel” in 1948, and took a generation to be “something like forty years.” Lindsey later stretched his forty-year timetable to as long as one hundred years, writing that he was no longer certain that the terminal "generation" commenced with the rebirth of Israel.

Content

Destruction of the Temple

According to the narrative of the synoptic Gospels, an anonymous disciple remarks on the greatness of Herod's Temple, a building thought to have been some 10 stories high and likely to have been adorned with gold, silver, and other precious items (Kilgallen 245). However, the narrative goes on to state that Jesus says that not one stone would remain intact in the building, and the whole thing would be reduced to rubble.

Following this the disciples asked for a sign, "When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" The disciples likely assumed that the destruction of the temple, and the end of the world, would occur at the same time. The Master sought to correct that impression: first, by discussing the Roman invasion and then by commenting on his final coming to render universal judgment ().

Jesus first warns them about things that would happen that should not be interpreted as signs:

Then Jesus identifies the beginning of birth pangs (some older translations read sorrows):

Then He described more birth pangs which would lead to the coming Kingdom.

Jesus then warned the disciples about the Abomination of Desolation "standing where it does not belong." The Gospel of Matthew and Mark add "- let the reader understand -". This is generally considered to be a reference to a passage from the Book of Daniel (and ).

As unlikely as some of these prophetic declarations may seem to the skeptic, each of them was fulfilled by the time Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70, according to preterism.

Although the passage in the Book of Daniel claims to be a prophecy dictated to Daniel by Gabriel during the Babylonian captivity, some modern scholars believe that the Book was pseudepigraphically written in the mid second century BC, and that rather than being a genuine prophecy the passage was a postdiction, written as a polemic against the shrine to Zeus set up in the temple in 168 BC by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, which had a pagan altar added onto the Altar of Holocausts (Brown et al. 624 and Miller 44). Exactly how the synoptics meant it to be reinterpreted or interpreted, however, is a matter of debate. Some Christians think it to be a successful prophecy about Titus's destruction of the temple in AD 70 (see preterism); others think it to be a reference to a future Antichrist (see futurism); while some others see it as another vaticinium ex eventu about Caligula's attempt to put a statue of himself or of Jupiter into the temple in AD 37-41

Great Tribulation

After Jesus described the "abomination that causes desolation", he warns that the people of Judea should flee to the mountains as a matter of such urgency that they shouldn't even return to get things from their homes. Jesus also warned that if it happened in winter or on the Sabbath fleeing would be even more difficult. Jesus described this as a time of "Great Tribulation" worse than anything that had gone before.

Jesus then states that immediately after the time of tribulation people would see a sign, "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken" ().

The statements about the sun and moon sound quite apocalyptic, it appears to be a quote from the Book of Isaiah (). The description of the sun, moon and stars going dark is also described by the Old Testament Joel. Joel wrote that this would be a sign before the great and dreadful Day of the Lord ().

Some scholars think that the intended audiences of the Synoptic Gospels were meant to be aware that these were quotations, and where they were from, and that by using these two quotations together, the Roman domination of Israel was deliberately being compared to that during the Babylonian captivity of six centuries previous, and that it was being predicted that the Roman empire would fall, and the domination end, just as Babylon had.

Coming of the Son of Man

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus states that after the time of tribulation and the sign of the sun, moon and stars going dark the son of man would be seen arriving in the clouds with power and great glory. Jesus would be accompanied by the angels and at the trumpet call the angels would gather the elect (God's chosen) from the heavens and the four winds of the earth ().

Some Christians have seen this as a prediction of Roman tyranny being overcome by Christianity. Christianity did eventually become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire remained Christianized until its fall to the Turks in 1453, although large portions of its former territory, such as Greece, remain largely Christian to this day.

For the Christians who read the text more literally, this is taken to refer to the Second Coming. In modern times, supporters of the more literal readings tend to also be politically conservative, and argue that it is the UN, or the EU, or that some Middle Eastern confederacy is the fourth empire of that will "devour" the world.

The synoptics also describe Jesus as stating that "the elect" would be gathered together from across the earth and heaven. His actual wording is that they would be gathered "from the four winds, from the furthest part of the earth to the furthest part of heaven." Although most scholars, and almost all Christians, read this as meaning that the gathering would include people not only from earth but also from heaven, a few Christians, mostly modern American Protestant Premillennialists , have interpreted it to mean that people would be gathered from earth and taken to heaven - a concept known in their circles as the rapture. Most scholars see this as a quotation of a passage from the Book of Zechariah in which God (and the contents of heaven in general) are predicted to come to earth and live among the elect, who by necessity are gathered together for this purpose (). According to the ancient gnostics, this passage was to be interpreted as implying that the teachings of the son of man would automatically bring those who heard and fully understood them (the elect) together.

Imminence

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus stated that when you see all these signs the Kingdom would be right at the door. He went on to say that this generation would not pass'' until all these things had happened.

This has historically been one of the hardest passages to resolve with a literal interpretation of the text, since at face value it would seem to imply that the disciples would still need to be alive today, and so awkward legends arose suggesting that the disciples that Jesus was speaking to did not die but remain alive, eventually merging into legends like that of a Wandering Jew and of Prester John. Indeed, C. S. Lewis called this "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible". More scholarly explanations for how this could be justified have concentrated on the fact that, in Koine Greek, the word used for generation can also be used to mean race, "type", or "sort." For example Jesus spoke about an "evil and adulterous generation" that would seek after a sign. The Bible also speaks of the "generation of the righteous", "the generation of them that seek Him" etc. Clearly the meaning of these expressions is not that all people living at one time or of a certain race were upright or evil, etc. "Generation" is used to express the common type. A common "genesis", a common root. and so the verse could just mean that Christianity, the "generation" to which the disciples belonged, would still be in existence, or even just that humans would be.

Clearly some of the disciples themselves misunderstood this point. In the earliest known Christian document, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul seems to envisage that he and the Christians he was writing to would see the resurrection of the dead within their own lifetimes: "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep." (). Some argue that the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians was forged, essentially for the sole purpose of contradicting the first epistle. . However, in Philippians he talks about going to Christ as death.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is described as saying that the kingdom will not come by watching for it, and it will not be something to be physically pointed to (Thomas 113, see also , ), and that the new world is already here but that people just can't see it (Thomas 51). In Jesus states to Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world, see also New Covenant (theology).

In modern times, most scholars and Christians think that Jesus in the Olivet Discourse is just using the apocalyptic language of his time symbolically, as many Jewish prophets did. Nevertheless, throughout history there have been many groups who read the discourse literally, and Christian thought has always included groups who say that the end of the world is near, some even giving exact dates which have since come and gone without an intervening end of world (see also Second Coming).

See also

Notes

References

  • Brown, Raymond E An Introduction to the New Testament Doubleday 1997 ISBN 0-385-24767-2
  • Brown, Raymond E. et al. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary Prentice Hall 1990 ISBN 0-13-614934-0
  • Kilgallen, John J. A Brief Commentary on the Gospel of Mark Paulist Press 1989 ISBN 0-8091-3059-9
  • Miller, Robert J. Editor The Complete Gospels Polebridge Press 1994 ISBN 0-06-065587-9
  • Blomberg, Craig. Jesus and the Gospels, Apollos 1997.
  • Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God, Fortress 1996.



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