The Last Days According to Jesus

Excerpt:
What Did Jesus Teach on Mount Olivet?

The Olivet Discourse takes its name from the place where Jesus delivered it. This discourse is recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew (chapter 24), Mark (chapter 13), and Luke (chapter 21). This is the longest teaching discourse recorded in the Gospel of Mark. “In the Gospel of Mark there is no passage more problematic than the prophetic discourse of Jesus on the destruction of the Temple,” says William L. Lane. “The questions posed by the form and content of the chapter and by its relationship to the Gospel as a whole are complex and difficult and have been the occasion of an extensive literature.”1 What Lane says of Mark could also be said of Matthew and Luke.

Biblical scholars have questioned the authenticity of the discourse, which has been called “the small apocalypse.” Vincent Taylor cites this theory, which has been adopted by many critical scholars: “The suggestion is that, in anticipation of the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem, some unknown Christian edited a small Jewish or Jewish-Christian apocalypse as a kind of fly-sheet to give encouragement and hope to the Christians of his day, and incorporated therewith eschatological sayings of Jesus.”2

Other theories have claimed that the discourse is either completely inauthentic or reflects the work of a later redactor (“editor”), who fused together different strands of an oral tradition that originated in the teaching of Jesus, but not in the homogeneous form found in the Gospels themselves.

About the Book:
This book deals with the Olivet Discourse of Jesus, recorded in its most complete form in Matthew 24-25, and in more abbreviated form in Mark 13 and Luke 21. The stated purpose of the book is “to evaluate moderate preterism and its view of eschatology” (page 24). In general, preterism believes that the kingdom is a present reality, in contrast to dispensationalism, which Sproul says “regards the kingdom as yet future” which “will not come until the parousia” (the second coming of Christ) (pages 23-24). But Sproul distinguishes between two distinct forms of preterism: 1) radical preterism, which holds that all future prophecies in the New Testament have already been fulfilled (including the parousia), and 2) moderate preterism, which holds that while many prophecies in the New Testament have already been fulfilled, some crucial prophecies have not yet been fulfilled. The principal concern of the book is to evaluate preterism, and in particular these two forms of preterism, in regard to the interpretation of such verses in the Olivet Discourse as Matthew 24: 34 (“Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled”), as well as other verses in the NT with specific time-frame references with respect to the coming of Christ, such as Matthew 10:23 (“Verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come”).

Throughout his book, Sproul interacts with a book first published in 1887: The Parousia: A Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord’s Second Coming, by J. Stuart Russell. Sproul regards Russell as “perhaps the most important scholar of the preterist school” (page 24), whose “chief concern was the time-frame references of NT eschatology, particularly with respect to Jesus’ utterances concerning the coming of the kingdom and to Jesus’ Olivet Discourse” (page 24). Sproul says that “the central thesis of Russell and indeed all preterists is that the NT’s time-frame references with respect to the parousia point to a fulfillment within the lifetime of at least some of Jesus’ disciples,” with some preterists holding to a “primary fulfillment in AD 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem) and a final fulfillment in the yet-unknown future” (page 25).