Matt 23:39 (RE: Michael Brown debate)

[darinhouston]

That's pretty compelling (to me).

Daniel,

I am going to have to continue agreeing with Jarrod. I also do not see the irony of which you speak. The view I presented above is the view I held for many years prior to my hearing of preterism, so it isn't influenced by any such prejudices. I was a dispensationalist for years, and do not remember ever seeing a reference to the second coming in this verse...even though my teachers probably did.

The reference to seeing Jesus that I gave from John 14 is very pertinent, and I don't know whether you looked at it. It was in the upper room, perhaps the day after the statement we are discussing had been uttered publicly. This latter statement—very much on the same theme of unbelievers not "seeing" Jesus any more—was made privately to the disciples:

John 14:19-23:

19 “A little while longer and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also. 20 At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. 21 He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”

22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?”

23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him."

[DanielGracely]

Greetings Jarrod and Steve (and Darin?),

There was a problem in my formatting a response, for which I apologize. Much earlier in the day (11 hours ago or so) I left off editing my response and headed to work, forgetting that I had already submitted a response that would show up, and possibly be responded to before I returned and edited it . In fact, it was a response I hadn't written very well, nor thought out to my satisfaction. Truth is, I'm not entirely satisfied with what I have just submitted a few moments ago, feeling that I'm not quite expressing what I'm aiming at. I don't usually have that problem. (Explaining irony is sometimes difficult, though.) So you might want to 'reread' that response, since I've changed it.

I do hope to get back to your objections, but wanted to throw out my apology in the meantime, since I'm not quite sure exactly what it was that I wrote, to which you've responded. However, I trust my latest response above is at least fairly similar in content to what you saw. Apparently, this is why on some sites you see responses which include the entire quote of someone else, lest it change in the meantime, for reasons either legitimate (general tightening and editing) or illegitimate (changes to save one embarrassment). Unfortuantely, I find this practice of wholesale quoting tedious and irritating, since it crowds up a page with fewer responses and forces readers to frequently hit the additional page links. But I do understand why it seems a necessary evil sometimes. Still, I'm glad it's not practiced here as a general rule. Makes for easier reading.

[steve7150]

You won't see me any more until and unless you do so."

If He meant more than this, it is not clear to me. There is no obvious reference to the second coming.
steve






Except Jesus only used the word"until" which could mean "unless" but could mean "until the time God has chosen."

[DanielGracely]

Jarrod,
No need to apologize or clarify that the natural reading was according to your own view. I think it’s understood when someone speaks that this is so. I was merely drawing particular attention to it to make a point of my own.

I do think the statement of Christ is a deliberate mimicry (perhaps “mimicry” isn’t the best word) of the crowd, to say that there would be a 'do-over' again. I think I understand why you don’t feel that way.

Steve,

I’m not exactly sure where you’re going with John 14. If you mean that Jesus is saying the world will see him no more forever, and that therefore Israel as a nation won’t see him again, I would say: (1) the language is not so strong as to insist that Christ meant that the world would not see him forever, but should be understood in the more temporal sense. That is, I don’t see this phrase as necessarily meaning anything more than if I told a close friend that I was moving from NJ to California and so wouldn’t see him anymore, that that would necessarily mean I wouldn’t see him ever again; (2) that the context of "the world won't see me anymore, but you will see me" assumes a physical beholding by sight. So I think it could mean “see” in the normal sense if not taken with undue force (since the "world" did see Jesus in Gethsemane, before Pilate, etc). That is, Jesus could be saying that those disciples who he declared “clean” during the Last Supper would see him shortly, i.e., after His resurrection, but that He would not show Himself openly to the world after His resurrection. After all, Jesus does seem to make a distinction “see” and “manifest” in the verses which follow; (3) that therefore I don’t think these verses in John 14 disprove what I have said about Matthew 23:39, nor that Dr. Brown is incorrect about a future, national Israel repenting en masse.

HOWEVER, I think this exchange between us points to another matter which warrants attention. It is that any position can be argued so that it is consistent with itself. This is what is going on now. As goes our hermeneutic, as Jarrod points out, so goes our interpretation. In fact, I would go even further and argue that the premise IS the conclusion of any argument. This is the problem with arguments of this nature, i.e., of futurism verses forms of preterism. I engaged Duncan some time ago about this on another thread. I pointed out your complaint to Normal Geisler, that Geisler was wrong to claim you weren’t taking certain passages literally, because he refused to understand that to take poetry or hyperbole “literally” was not to take it necessarily literally at all. Thus your complaint that Geisler disallowed genres you felt should be properly recognized, and that it was he, Geisler, who refused to understand what linguistically was happening in certain passages, and their (in your view) proper application to New Testament apocalyptic genre.

But as I pointed out to Duncan, surely even the non-believing German Higher Criticism of the 19th century could have claimed the same high ground about “genres”. But because this point is a long one, I will take the liberty of quoting my response to him in my next response here.

In short, I feel the easiest way out of the morass of each side (whether futurism or preterism) arguing its premises as the conclusions, is to go outside the Bible to see if history and archaeological records can help settle the issue. I don’t mean to suggest there isn’t a proper way to divide the Word. There is. But where both sides are essentially talking past each other, it seems the stalemate won’t be broken by both sides looking at one passage after another and offering opposing comments, since each side is entrenched separetly about what genres exist, and where they are operational.

[DanielGracely]

Steve, Jarrod, Darin, et al,

The following is a comment I made to Duncan on another thread under the Ecclesiology section. It certainly doesn't cover everything. But it does go a little ways toward explaining what I personally feel is a strong, if not the strongest, hurdle for preterism to overcome. For if one grants the kind of interpretation of biblical and extra-biblical historical records I list below, it would seem to lead to the natural conclusion that John's mention of two fourty-two month periods, in which (at least) one is stated as 1260 days, would support a 360-day year as Genesis 7 and 8 describe. Furthermore, while I don't endorse everything Immanuel Velikovsky advocated in his landmark and controversial 1950 book, Worlds in Collision, I don't fault him in his conclusions into ancient calendars, which show that none of them indicate an intercalated month prior to the 8th century BC, whether Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Chinese, etc. Okay, here was my response to Duncan:

Duncan,

Unfortunately, oftentimes a discussion about hermeneutics doesn’t solve anything. On another site earlier this week, I tried (in a rather despairing comment) to explain why this was the case:


The problem, then, is that each group believes it is the only group properly identifying genres. Thus the partial preterist Steve Gregg on his Narrow Path ministries website, in his back-and-forth exchange with futurist Norman Geisler, says Geisler is wrong about preterists not following the historical-grammatical hermeneutic. Partial-preterists, claims Gregg, DO use the historical-grammatical hermeneutic; but because they more frequently and properly recognize the genres of hyperbole, poetry, and apocalyptic literature—when futurists do not—naturally the resulting interpretations look different. But (I say) somewhere in all this fray one wonders if either group realizes that even the German Higher critics of the mid-19th century would have claimed the same holy ground in the historical-grammatical hermeneutic argument. After all, wouldn’t they have said they ably identified the genres of myth and legend compilations of which nearly all the ‘historical’ narratives of the Old Testament and especially the Torah consisted?

But, of course, you are right, Duncan. Ultimately, the correct hermeneutic will yield the truth. But since every hermeneutical approach can be argued in a way that is consistent with its own presuppositions, it seems that testing them all to find the true one requires something beyond mere consistency of argument.

But before continuing, let me say that, until recently, I never expected to argue eschatology. I was about 20 when my Dad and uncle got into a terrible argument with another Christian who didn’t share their particular eschatological view. (I’m nearly 53 now.) This really turned me off. And besides, in some ways I’ve always found Revelation very confusing, especially since the Eastern tendency not to explain things in a strictly linear format seems foreign to me (no pun intended).

In the end, it all came through the back door for me. It began in October, 2010, when I found myself doubting my faith in a way I hadn’t experienced in many years. Oddly enough, I knew I had no real reason for doubt. And yet, when I looked at old film slides of semi-desert in Israel, taken by my Dad and uncle when they took my sister and me to the Holy Land when I was 13, I found myself looking at all this barrenness, and asking myself: “Really? A man named Jesus walked this arid plain of clod and brush and did miracles?” It didn’t help that my Dad and uncle were now deceased. For though they were not perfect men; their ideals were genuine. And I think not having the benefit of hearing them talk about spiritual things had a slowly corrosive effect on my spirits.

Anyway, I decided to study the prophecy in Daniel about the coming of Messiah, to see if could prove the Bible’s superiority over other scriptures held to be sacred or profound. I had heard about the prophecy, of course; in fact, I had been named for the prophet. But I had to know if the prophecy would hold up to what I personally felt was a high burden of proof. I thought the whole matter would probably take a week of study, maybe two. In the end, it took nearly all of 2011 to think it through, and then to write up the results in a book. And yet even then I had only aimed to show the historical record of the first 69 weeks. Because that’s all I was concerned with at the time—looking for supernatural proof of the Bible’s superiority, through fulfilled prophecy.

Re: my study of this prophecy, I had heard that the 69 weeks supposedly ended on the Day of Triumphal Entry. When I first heard this, I thought the claim probably came from some overzealous dispensationalist. Still, I thought it worth testing. Now please bear with me here (I know I’m running long), because what follows explains the hermeneutic I’ve chosen. Anyway, it occurred to me that if it were true that when Jesus said that the Jews should have known, “at least in this thy day” the things that pertained to their peace, and that dispensationalists were correct that 483 years of 360 days had transpired from the time the word went forth to restore and build Jerusalem to an Anointed Prince [understood by them to be the Messiah], that Jesus was therefore implicitly stating that the Jews should have been counting down 360-day years for all those centuries. But why ever would the Jews have counted years in so unorthodox a fashion? For nothing in the prophets had ever so instructed them. Oddly enough, I never remember this criticism being raised against dispensationalists, even by their critics.

Well, the thought occurred to me that IF dispensationalists were right, then perhaps something in Jewish history could have alerted the Jews to count off Daniel’s prophecy in 360-day years. But what could it be? At some point the 70-year Exile came to my mind, and I wondered, “What it the Exile had actually been 70 years of 360 days?” Out of curiosity I divided the amount of days (70 x 360) into the length of normal years. To my surprise I found it came to almost exactly one year shy of 70 normal years; or 69 years and 2 days. Therefore such a length of Exile arguably could have made the Jews ask why their Exile had ended almost exactly one year shorter than what they expected. And from there they could have made the connection with statements in Genesis chapters 7 and 8, about 5 months equaling 150 days during the Flood, implying a 360 day year at the time of Creation. Putting this all together, the Jews therefore could have reasoned that the Messiah, when he came, would enact a wide agenda of restoration—not just of repentant hearts back to Him, but even of the earth and moon to where they had once been, when they more simply “told the seasons.”

Well, it was an interesting hypothesis, but was there any evidence?

And so I began to study biblical and extra-biblical records to determine the length of the Exile. I’ll spare you the details of my research in this particular comment, but I found that the longest the Exile could have been was about 69 years, 16 days (Tishri, 606 BC to Tishri, 537 BC). I realized this window of time could accommodate an interval of 69 years and 2 days, and that therefore the Jews could have theorized from this fact that perhaps they should also count Daniel’s 483 years similarly. Of course, this would only be for the purpose of counting off years until the Messiah, since otherwise the Jews would continue to observe their usual lunar-solar calendar, lest they fail to observe their festivals in their proper seasons.

Much later, I realized a 69 year and 2 day Exile would explain why Daniel, arguably the most learned man in Babylonian and Jewish culture, was searching the scrolls re: the number of years Jeremiah assigned to the Exile, despite what must have been common knowledge among all believing Jews that the number of years was 70. Apparently, the decree of Cyrus came about a year earlier than what Daniel had expected.

Anyway, long story short, after studying records pertaining to Artaxerxes’ ascension year, along with when in 14 instances the 5th century BC Jews at Elephantine reckoned Nisan, Nehemiah’s reckoning from Tishri instead of Nisan regarding monarchial years, W.E. Filmer’s article (in a theological journal published by Oxford) on the likely year of death of Herod the Great, and so forth, led me to conclude that the 69 weeks ran from (Julian) April 6, 444 BC to April 27, 33 AD.

And so it is this conclusion that has led me to a hermeneutic in which I believe the 70th week of Daniel lies in the future. I especially think this, since John in Revelation describes two periods of 42 months, each of which is 1260 days (meaning a 360 day year). And so, I believe Revelation is essentially historical, despite its rather surrealist prose heavily laden with metaphor. And I think John’s vision may have had a dream-like quality not entirely dissimilar to the kind of dreams we ourselves have, in which real persons are sometimes combined with absurd actions.

Finally, I realize I have not given you enough information to judge the correctness/incorrectness of my conclusions about the historical record, which forms the basis of my hermeneutic. But at least this is a sketch of some of the reasons for the hermeneutic I have chosen.

[DanielGracely]

Steve, Jarrod, Darin, et al,

The following is a comment I made to Duncan on another thread under the Eschatology section. It certainly doesn't cover everything. But it does go a little way toward explaining what I personally feel is a strong, if not the strongest, hurdle for preterism to overcome. For if one grants the kind of interpretation of biblical and extra-biblical historical records I list below, it would seem to lead to the natural conclusion that John's mention of two fourty-two month periods, in which (at least) one is stated as 1260 days, would support a 360-day year as Genesis 7 and 8 describe, and, further, comprise the last 70th week of Daniel, in which all 490 years were meant to be understood as 360-day years. Also along these lines, while I don't endorse everything Immanuel Velikovsky advocated in his landmark and controversial 1950 book, Worlds in Collision, I don't fault him in his conclusions about ancient calendars, which show that none of them indicate an intercalated month prior to the 8th century BC, whether Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Chinese, etc., suggesting that from creation until somewhere in the 8th century BC the earth's orbit around the sun was 360 days.

There are at least two possible corrections to my comment to Duncan. First, since writing it, I have come to realize that an Exile of 360-day years would have been a closer quid pro quo to the kind of Sabbath years the Jews failed to observe than what ‘normal’ years of 365+ days would have been. This is because the majority of Jewish disobedience to rest the land took place prior to the 8th century BC. The Jews disobeyed the command 490 times in about 800 years. Second, it seems possible that Daniel may have suspected that the Exile would be years of 360-days, since it appears he lived only 150 years or so after the change in earth’s orbit, and, if truly learned in the Babylonian sciences, would have known that the first time the Babylonians observed the metonic cycle (235 lunar months = 19 years, within 2 hours) was in 747 BC, the last reigning year of Uzziah (according to my own synchronization of the Hebrew kings), in whose time the Bible tells us there was a great earthquake. Perhaps, then, the earthquake was a result of a meteor strike elsewhere on the earth, which affected the orbit of the earth around the sun. If that is the case, Daniel may NOT have been surprised when Cyrus issued his decree to end the Exile about a year ‘early’.

Also, in reading my comment I see that I made no mention of the years of the Exile, which ran from Tishri, 606 BC (Jehoiakim's 3rd year) and the first day of Cyrus' 2nd year of reign, which fell on the 1st of Tishri, 537 BC. I don't give a full explanation below of how these years are derived, but can give it in another response if someone wants to double my math and my assumptions.

Okay, here was my response to Duncan.


Duncan,

Unfortunately, oftentimes a discussion about hermeneutics doesn’t solve anything. On another site earlier this week, I tried (in a rather despairing comment) to explain why this was the case:

The problem, then, is that each group believes it is the only group properly identifying genres. Thus the partial preterist Steve Gregg on his Narrow Path ministries website, in his back-and-forth exchange with futurist Norman Geisler, says Geisler is wrong about preterists not following the historical-grammatical hermeneutic. Partial-preterists, claims Gregg, DO use the historical-grammatical hermeneutic; but because they more frequently and properly recognize the genres of hyperbole, poetry, and apocalyptic literature—when futurists do not—naturally the resulting interpretations look different. But (I say) somewhere in all this fray one wonders if either group realizes that even the German Higher critics of the mid-19th century would have claimed the same holy ground in the historical-grammatical hermeneutic argument. After all, wouldn’t they have said they ably identified the genres of myth and legend compilations of which nearly all the ‘historical’ narratives of the Old Testament and especially the Torah consisted?

But, of course, you are right, Duncan. Ultimately, the correct hermeneutic will yield the truth. But since every hermeneutical approach can be argued in a way that is consistent with its own presuppositions, it seems that testing them all to find the true one requires something beyond mere consistency of argument.

But before continuing, let me say that, until recently, I never expected to argue eschatology. I was about 20 when my Dad and uncle got into a terrible argument with another Christian who didn’t share their particular eschatological view. (I’m nearly 53 now.) This really turned me off. And besides, in some ways I’ve always found Revelation very confusing, especially since the Eastern tendency not to explain things in a strictly linear format seems foreign to me (no pun intended).

In the end, it all came through the back door for me. It began in October, 2010, when I found myself doubting my faith in a way I hadn’t experienced in many years. Oddly enough, I knew I had no real reason for doubt. And yet, when I looked at old film slides of semi-desert in Israel, taken by my Dad and uncle when they took my sister and me to the Holy Land when I was 13, I found myself looking at all this barrenness, and asking myself: “Really? A man named Jesus walked this arid plain of clod and brush and did miracles?” It didn’t help that my Dad and uncle were now deceased. For though they were not perfect men; their ideals were genuine. And I think not having the benefit of hearing them talk about spiritual things had a slowly corrosive effect on my spirits.

Anyway, I decided to study the prophecy in Daniel about the coming of Messiah, to see if could prove the Bible’s superiority over other scriptures held to be sacred or profound. I had heard about the prophecy, of course; in fact, I had been named for the prophet. But I had to know if the prophecy would hold up to what I personally felt was a high burden of proof. I thought the whole matter would probably take a week of study, maybe two. In the end, it took nearly all of 2011 to think it through, and then to write up the results in a book. And yet even then I had only aimed to show the historical record of the first 69 weeks. Because that’s all I was concerned with at the time—looking for supernatural proof of the Bible’s superiority, through fulfilled prophecy.

Re: my study of this prophecy, I had heard that the 69 weeks supposedly ended on the Day of Triumphal Entry. When I first heard this, I thought the claim probably came from some overzealous dispensationalist. Still, I thought it worth testing. Now please bear with me here (I know I’m running long), because what follows explains the hermeneutic I’ve chosen. Anyway, it occurred to me that if it were true that when Jesus said that the Jews should have known, “at least in this thy day” the things that pertained to their peace, and that dispensationalists were correct that 483 years of 360 days had transpired from the time the word went forth to restore and build Jerusalem to an Anointed Prince [understood by them to be the Messiah], that Jesus was therefore implicitly stating that the Jews should have been counting down 360-day years for all those centuries. But why ever would the Jews have counted years in so unorthodox a fashion? For nothing in the prophets had ever so instructed them. Oddly enough, I never remember this criticism being raised against dispensationalists, even by their critics.

Well, the thought occurred to me that IF dispensationalists were right, then perhaps something in Jewish history could have alerted the Jews to count off Daniel’s prophecy in 360-day years. But what could it be? At some point the 70-year Exile came to my mind, and I wondered, “What it the Exile had actually been 70 years of 360 days?” Out of curiosity I divided the amount of days (70 x 360) into the length of normal years. To my surprise I found it came to almost exactly one year shy of 70 normal years; or 69 years and 2 days. Therefore such a length of Exile arguably could have made the Jews ask why their Exile had ended almost exactly one year shorter than what they expected. And from there they could have made the connection with statements in Genesis chapters 7 and 8, about 5 months equaling 150 days during the Flood, implying a 360 day year at the time of Creation. Putting this all together, the Jews therefore could have reasoned that the Messiah, when he came, would enact a wide agenda of restoration—not just of repentant hearts back to Him, but even of the earth and moon to where they had once been, when they more simply “told the seasons.”

Well, it was an interesting hypothesis, but was there any evidence?

And so I began to study biblical and extra-biblical records to determine the length of the Exile. I’ll spare you the details of my research in this particular comment, but I found that the longest the Exile could have been was about 69 years, 16 days (Tishri, 606 BC to Tishri, 537 BC). I realized this window of time could accommodate an interval of 69 years and 2 days, and that therefore the Jews could have theorized from this fact that perhaps they should also count Daniel’s 483 years similarly. Of course, this would only be for the purpose of counting off years until the Messiah, since otherwise the Jews would continue to observe their usual lunar-solar calendar, lest they fail to observe their festivals in their proper seasons.

Much later, I realized a 69 year and 2 day Exile would explain why Daniel, arguably the most learned man in Babylonian and Jewish culture, was searching the scrolls re: the number of years Jeremiah assigned to the Exile, despite what must have been common knowledge among all believing Jews that the number of years was 70. Apparently, the decree of Cyrus came about a year earlier than what Daniel had expected.

Anyway, long story short, after studying records pertaining to Artaxerxes’ ascension year, along with when in 14 instances the 5th century BC Jews at Elephantine reckoned Nisan, Nehemiah’s reckoning from Tishri instead of Nisan regarding monarchial years, W.E. Filmer’s article (in a theological journal published by Oxford) on the likely year of death of Herod the Great, and so forth, led me to conclude that the 69 weeks ran from (Julian) April 6, 444 BC to April 27, 33 AD.

And so it is this conclusion that has led me to a hermeneutic in which I believe the 70th week of Daniel lies in the future. I especially think this, since John in Revelation describes two periods of 42 months, each of which is 1260 days (meaning a 360 day year). And so, I believe Revelation is essentially historical, despite its rather surrealist prose heavily laden with metaphor. And I think John’s vision may have had a dream-like quality not entirely dissimilar to the kind of dreams we ourselves have, in which real persons are sometimes combined with absurd actions.

Finally, I realize I have not given you enough information to judge the correctness/incorrectness of my conclusions about the historical record, which forms the basis of my hermeneutic. But at least this is a sketch of some of the reasons for the hermeneutic I have chosen.