"But the Pauline view gave way to the Jewish Christian expectation when the tolerant policy of fifty years was changed into a fierce hostility against the Church of Christ, and so there was revealed in Rome the beast with the iron teeth " of the Book of Daniel. This change appeared in the Neronic persecution of the year 64. The monster who sat upon the throne of the Roman world, the murderer of his brother, his mother, and his legal wife, the incendiary of his own capital, in order to turn away popular indignation from himself, inflicted on the Christians in Rome the most frightful tortures, which surpassed the horrors of Antiochus Epiphanes, and the news of which convulsed Christian circles everywhere. Now they recognised the last enemy, that final fruit of hostility to God which must call down from heaven the Judge of the world. And thenceforth the signs of the times were crowded together in a remarkable way. Three years after the beginning of that persecution, insurrection broke out in the East and West at the same time, in Gaul and in Judea, and its flames laid hold of Rome also ; Nero perished forsaken by all, and with him ended the Julian race ; the framework of the Roman Empire cracked at every joint. And at the same time the iron Vespasian encompassed rebellious Jerusalem ; the judgment of God which Jesus had predicted for the city in which the prophets were murdered, and which the Christians viewed as the beginning of the judgment of the world, was in sight. How could Christian prophecy at such a moment doubt that the coming of the Lord was at the door ? All the signs of it seemed to be present. And the story which ran through the excited East, that the monster Nero was not dead ; that he had fled to Parthia, and would soon return with an immense army, and take vengeance on apostate Rome (Tacitus, Hist. ii. 8), furnished the prophetic fancy with the most expressive figure for the personal Antichrist, in whom one looked for the concentration of Rome's opposition to Christ. Nero redivivus in his dying and his miraculous revival, the distorted, dœmonic counterpart of the dead and risen Son of God, must be the Prince of the world, who as Satan's instrument would bring about the final conflict between the divine and its opponents, and call down from heaven the judgment of the world. These are the facts and feelings of the time from which the Apocalypse of John proceeded, and by which it is to be explained." (pp. 349,350)

"It is not hard to reckon which Roman king, that is, emperor (for the East called the Roman emperor king), is meant ; five, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, have been, the sixth is, that is, Galba, under whose rule, therefore, the seer writes ; a seventh is to come, and continue for a short space, presumably Vespasian, in whom the author, writing in the East, might already perceive the next ruler. But the " beast" is the eighth as well as one of the seven, that is, one who was, and is to come again, the Nero redivivus of current expectation, whose march of vengeance from the Euphrates, in covenant with the ten kings against the revolted Rome, is fancifully described in chap. xvi . 12-21. It may be said that the clearness of this explanation leaves nothing to be desired, and that all other attempts at explanation as contrasted with it are arbitrary, feeble, and lifeless. Even in chap. xiii., where it first appears, we have the same twofold meaning of the beast as an emblem of the Roman Empire and of Nero." (p. 351)

"At this point, then, the seemingly invincible difficulties of the eschatological discourses of Jesus become acute, and appearances strongly favour the view that Jesus, seeing the judgment of God coming upon Israel and Jerusalem, and having reason to expect it within a generation, conformed to the Jewish view of the world, and contemplated the catastrophe of Judaism in immediate connection with the catastrophe of the world. But though such a view would be conceivable in a national Jewish prophet who considered Israel and Jerusalem the pivot of the history of the world, there are very weighty reasons against it in the case of Jesus, apart from dogmatic considerations. First, that well-attested saying, which as a confession of Messianic ignorance is proof against suspicion of later falsification : " The day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the Son" (Mark xiii. 32 and parallels). This saying cannot be reconciled with the other which stands naively beside it, "This generation shall not pass away till all these things shall be fulfilled," by making it mean that Jesus disclaimed only the power of fixing the year or the day, but approximately placed it within a generation. "

§ 4. The Final Picture Of The Judgment Of The World (Vol 2, 193)

A gloomy picture of the history of the world in its closing stage forms the foreground to this promise of the parousia. A distress unequalled will immediately precede the second coming of Messiah (Matt. xxiv. 21). The disciples of Jesus will be hated by all the world for His name's sake ; the unrighteousness of the world and the oppression of believers will reach their climax (Matt. xxiv. 9, 12). The love of many disciples will wax cold; they will go astray, and hate and betray one another (Matt. xxiv. 10, 12). Others will fall into fanatical errors; false prophets and saviours will appear, seeking to win faith for themselves by signs and wonders, and will declare the return of Christ the end of time, so that if it were possible even the elect must be deceived. But they are not to believe these fanatical assurances, not even regard as signs of the end of the world the universal convulsions in the history of the world, wars, earthquakes, and pestilence. One sign alone is sure, that the gospel must be preached in the whole world for a witness to all nations, that the message of salvation must do its work in the world of history (Matt. xxiv. 4, 7, 14). In those days will God's attitude towards His Church appear like that of an unrighteous judge who refuses to do justice to a poor, shamefully persecuted widow. But the Church, like that widow, should not desist from importuning the eternal Judge, who will at last be moved to procure her help suddenly (Luke xviii. 1-8).

So will the day of the Lord be delayed for the waiting and persecuted; but at length it will come suddenly, for the days of the great affliction will suddenly be shortened for the elect's sake (Matt. xxiv. 22). It will come when it is least looked for, as a thief in the night (Matt. xxiv. 29, 43 ; Luke xii . 39, 40). It will break upon the Jewish people while they are in the hottest persecution of the disciples of Jesus (Matt. x. 23). All at once, the abomination of desolation will appear in the holy city, as predicted in the Book of Daniel (Matt. xxiv. 15), and will announce the fall of the desecrated Jerusalem; for " wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together," the vultures who tear it to pieces (Matt. xxiv. 15, 28). [We are reminded of the events in Palestine which followed one another in the years between sixty and seventy, the persecution in which James the Just and others fell a sacrifice, the scenes of uproar and party slaughter in Jerusalem and the temple, and the Roman eagles which completed the judgment on the nation which had morally become a corpse.]  It will break upon the world at the very moment when it feels most secure, as the Flood came in the days of Noah, and as the rain of fire in the days of Lot. Men will be planting and building, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, when all at once the judgment will fall on them (Matt. xxiv. 37, 39 ; Luke xvii. 26 f.). And so the second coming of the Lord appears as a sudden catastrophe in the world and in history, which redeems those who are ready but devours those who are not ready, even though they belong to the Church (Luke xvii. 32 f.; Matt. xxiv. 40-42),—a catastrophe in which those only stand who with singleness of heart seek for the salvation of their souls, and who do not look back like Lot's wife on the earthly things which they have to leave (Luke xvii. 31,33; cf. Matt. xxiv. 16). [The exhortations which Matthew interprets literally, and refers to the flight of the Christians in the siege of Jerusalem, were probably at first meant in the symbolic sense in which Luke xvii. has strikingly repeated them.] But however sudden this catastrophe may be, it will be quite manifest and unmistakable. The Church should not therefore put any faith in fanatical assurances that Christ is here or there, in the desert or in an inner chamber (that is, in a corner), because His actual coming to judgment will be as powerful and startling as when " the lightning flashes from one end of heaven to the other" (Matt. xxiv. 25-27). The sun and moon will pale before " the sign of the Son of Man " appearing in the heavens; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken (Matt. xxiv. 29, 30); the sea and the waves will roar, and an unspeakable suspense will seize men regarding the things that are coming (Luke xxi. 25, 26). And then will they all see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, attended by His holy angels, in His power and glory, and will beat their breasts in the consciousness of their guilt as they recognise in Him their Judge (Matt. xxiv. 30 ; Mark xiii. 26 ; Luke xxi. 27). But He will send forth His angels with loud sounding trumpets to gather His elect from the four winds, not merely the living, but— as the trumpet with its awakening call signifies—those also who sleep in the bosom of the earth (cf. 1 Thess. iv. 16); for then shall be gathered the whole Church of the elect to share in His kingly glory, and be united with Him in judging the world (cf. Matt. xix. 28 ; Luke xxii. 30 ; 1 Cor. vi. 2, 3).

§ 5. The Destruction Of Jerusalem

The thoroughly poetical character of this picture of the. end of the world is clear as day. It is not history such as ever has or will take place in bare fact; it is ideal history evolved from the idea that the contrasts of good and evil, wheat and tares, must ripen in the world, and that when the opposition to God in the world has reached its climax, the judgment of God must break out over it. And yet this conception, which alone is true to the nature of all genuine prophecy, gives rise to doubt, for in Christ's discourses the epic of ideal prophecy is mixed up with the Jewish wars and the destruction of Jerusalem. Have we not here the prediction of a definite historical event, and must we not regard the whole as a foretelling of actual history. [Mark has indeed (ix. 1) changed the words—offence manifestly being given by them ; but even John xxi. 22, 23 must be taken as an echo of them.] And if we are compelled to take it thus, is not the whole prediction false, as the destruction of Jerusalem took place without involving such a universal disturbance of the history of the world, and especially without bringing with it the judgment of the world ?

It cannot honestly be denied that the first evangelist has identified the catastrophe breaking upon Israel in the years between sixty and seventy, with the last affliction and the crisis of the crisis of the history of the world, and has attached the immediate signs of Christ's return to judge the world with a evdea>s fierd to the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. xxiv. 16, 21, 29); and if Mark and Luke strive to relax somewhat this connection, they only show how embarrassed they were by the picture furnished in their common source. Moreover, Jesus also (Matt. x. 23) incontestably makes the return of the Son of Man coincide with the historical catastrophe of the Jewish nation; in Matt. xvi. 28 there is likewise given a saying of Jesus, which in its natural sense directly assures some of the listening disciples that they will live to see His coming again to judgment (ver. 27);    and, finally, in. the three repetitions of that great eschatological discourse, the words appear: ...genea... (Matt. xxiv. 3 4 ; Mark xiii . 30 ; Luke xxi. 32). In accordance with this, as we may see from the whole New Testament, the early Church expected the Lord's return within a generation, and even hoped themselves to see it (cf. Jas. v. 3, 9 ; 1 Pet. iv. 7 ; Rom. xiii. 11; 1 Cor. vii. 29 f., xv. 51, 52 ; Rev. i. 1, xxii. 12, etc.). At this point, then, the seemingly invincible difficulties of the eschatological discourses of Jesus become acute, and appearances strongly favour the view that Jesus, seeing the judgment of God coming upon Israel and Jerusalem, and having reason to expect it within a generation, conformed to the Jewish view of the world, and contemplated the catastrophe of Judaism in immediate connection with the catastrophe of the world. But though such a view would be conceivable in a national Jewish prophet who considered Israel and Jerusalem the pivot of the history of the world, there are very weighty reasons against it in the case of Jesus, apart from dogmatic considerations. First, that well-attested saying, which as a confession of Messianic ignorance is proof against suspicion of later falsification : " The day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the Son" (Mark xiii. 32 and parallels). This saying cannot be reconciled with the other which stands naively beside it, "This generation shall not pass away till all these things shall be fulfilled," by making it mean that Jesus disclaimed only the power of fixing the year or the day, but approximately placed it within a generation. Though the editor of the prophetic sayings in Matt. xxiv., Mark xiii., may have in this way quieted himself about the contradiction, an interpretation of day and hour so insipid and so alien to the prophetic style is inconceivable in the mind of Jesus. The conjecture rather forces itself upon us that the two declarations, which exclude each other, referred originally to two different objects of prophecy, the words, " day and hour knoweth no man " to the time of the judgment of the world, the words " this generation will not pass away " to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus elsewhere deals very differently with the two future events. He says most decidedly of the judgment of God on Jerusalem, " it will come upon this generation" (Matt. xxiii. 36). It is to Him essential that the generation which will fill up the measure of the sins of the fathers, will also have to taste the full measure of the divine wrath (cf. Matt. xxiii. 34-39; Luke xi. 50, 51, xiii. 1-9, xxiii. 28-31). But He Himself speaks quite differently of the end of the world in Matt. xxiv. He warns against hasty expectations; He insists that wars and rumours of wars, and the rising of one people against another, by no means signify that the end is near, and He only allows one fact to be seriously regarded as a sign of the end, viz. that the gospel has been preached to all nations. Did He confine the accomplishment of that world-wide task to one generation ? We have express evidence of the contrary. In the Parable of the Vineyard (Mark xii. 1-12; Matt. xxi. 33-46; Luke xx. 9-18) it is said in conclusion, "The lord of the vineyard will miserably destroy those wicked men, and commit his vineyard to others who will render him the fruits in their season," that is, to the Gentiles, or the Christian Church detached from the Jewish commonwealth. And in the Parable of the Marriage Supper of the King's Son, which immediately follows in Matthew, the rejection of the gospel on the part of the Jewish authorities passing into open hostility, and the divine judgment which that calls forth, are described in words which unmistakably allude to the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. xxii. 7). But after the punishment of the " city of murderers " the end, the judgment of the world does not follow, but messengers are sent forth anew to call in the people from the streets and lanes, that is, the Gentiles, instead of the unworthy guests ; and only after this has been done, and the house is full, does the king come in to see his guests and expel the unworthy; that is, only then does the judgment of the world begin. According to this, the spirit of Jesus clearly saw beyond the near judgment of God on Judaism, not the immediate end of the world, but a growing history both of the world and the Church, the greatest fact of which should be the calling of the nations of the world to the kingdom of God. But if that is so, how are we to explain the traditional form of His utterances about the parousia as set forth above, which fix His second coming within one generation ? and how are we to explain the view held by the whole apostolic age ?

§ 6. The Parousia As A Historical Process

The consideration of this question may perhaps lead us deeper into the understanding of the thoughts of Jesus about His second coming. The synoptic tradition has preserved to us a remarkable saying of Jesus before the Sanhedrim which does not fit into the conception of His second coming as following close upon the destruction of Jerusalem:

(Matt. xxvi. 64 ; cf. Mark xiv. 62; Luke xxii. 69). In the first place, these words put beyond doubt what we might have supposed from their prophetic style and their derivation from Dan. vii. 13, that the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven is not a visible coming from the visible heavens. The coming in the clouds of heaven would no more be seen with the bodily eye than His sitting at the right hand of power. But as the ... (whose meaning is also confirmed by Luke) refers assuredly to both the participles dependent on ..., Jesus here describes His coming in the clouds of heaven as something of which His deadly enemies are to become sensible, "henceforth," that is, immediately after His apparent defeat, as something that from the time of His death is to affect the whole history of the world. When His judges and murderers, the authorities of Israel, are compelled to note a few weeks after His death that their victory was but a seeming one, that He who was ignominiously slain by them lives and rules from heaven, and that He has returned with spiritual power to the world from which they fondly imagined they had expelled Him for ever, then would they see Him coming in the clouds of heaven, and sitting at the right hand of power. This idea of His second coming, so startlingly prominent in this passage, the thought of it as a triumphant return to the world which had expelled Him—a return beginning from His death and advancing from victory to victory—may not, perhaps, have been so clearly and distinctly before the soul of Jesus from the first. The thought of His second coming in glory was called up in His soul by the other thought of His shameful death, and so it may have appeared to Him as belonging to an indefinite but not a remote future, and embracing, though under a veil, all that should come after His death to perfect His work on earth; and many of His prophetic words above alluded to may have been conceived and spoken before this new thought had fully taken shape. But as He revolved this idea in His mind, and the historical fulfilment of it came nearer, it became more fully developed and more distinct, so far as that is possible in a prophetic view; the indefinite point extends into a line in which a beginning and an end with something lying between may be distinguished. In other words, Jesus comprehended the realisation of the kingdom of God, which is generally represented by the prophets as momentary, like a flash of lightning, rather as a process of growth, a historical development; and according to the same law He consciously viewed also the future completion of His work as a course of history, achieved not in a single act, but in an advancing series of acts. Testimonies to this may be found also in addresses to the disciples only inferior in importance to those last words before the Sanhedrim. The repeated proverbial statement, " Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together," manifestly expresses a general law which is fulfilled in the history of the world, not once but again and again ; and the way in which Jesus (Luke xvii. 37) answers the question of the disciples, irot), Kvpie, that is, where will Thy coming to judgment be ? with this general law, gives the meaning, wherever there is anything ripe for judgment. With that agrees, further, His speaking of the days of the Son of Man in the plural (Luke xvii. 22). The rjfiepai Tov viov Tov dvdpa>irov, of which the disciples in their future applications would fain see even one, cannot, according to grammar and context, be the past days of the Messiah on earth, but must be the future judicial rjfiepa in the plural. And this attests the presentiment of Jesus, that more than one judgment day of God and of His anointed is coming ; that the future history of the world will be filled with such epochs, in which the triumphant glory of the Son of Man, and the impotence and nothingness of all world-powers coming into conflict with Him, will be made clear. Certain main elements of that future course of history must now have stood out prominently in the consciousness of Jesus; the triumphant issuing of His life from death, and its immediate entrance into the life of His Church; further, His triumph in the world, Judaism breaking down before Him on the one hand, and heathendom opening itself to Him on the other; lastly, the final overcoming of all powers opposed to God, of evil and death, and the setting up of God's eternal kingdom. All these essential elements of His triumphant progress, in which, stage after stage, the world opposed to God is judged, were wrapped up as in a seed in Jesus' simplest view of His coming; all could be conceived and predicted under this one name. But, under the conditions of all prophecy, each stage was not seen as something apart, they were felt and described as so many phases of the whole according to the suggestion of the moment. And this made the description necessarily imperfect, and even the sense of words was not always the same." (201)

The Apocalypse of the Gospels

1. Authenticity And Difficulties

These very difficulties have recently driven men to the declaration that a great part of these eschatological discourses of Jesus is not genuine. It has become a favourite assumption among critical theologians that especially the prophetic discourse in Matt. xxiv. and its parallels did not in large measure originate with Jesus Himself; it is a short apocalypse, which, arising in the troubles before the Jewish war, was attributed to the divine (Luke xi. 49), and so to Jesus Himself, and thus came to find a place in the Gospels which were then taking shape.1 This hypothesis has really nothing to support it; that short apocalypse is a mere production of the critical imagination; no evidence of its existence can be found. But even if it had existed it would still be inconceivable how in a circle possessed of a first-hand tradition of Jesus' words Jewish predictions of quite recent origin could at once have been accepted for genuine sayings of Jesus, and been incorporated into the Christian Gospels then being formed. The essential contents of the great prophetic discourse, Matt. xxiv., Mark xiii., Luke xxi., belong to the original document common to our Gospels, which must have been composed about the beginning of the Jewish war (cf. Mark xiii. 14; Matt. xxiv. 25). Other prophetic sayings, contained in the first and third Gospels, manifestly sprang from the apostolic collection of sayings, and therefore the descent of the synoptic prophetic addresses from Jesus' own lips is certified on as good authority as the Parables of the Kingdom or the Sermon on the Mount. The difficulties which they present to us in their traditional form must be solved in another manner and by other means than by cutting the knot, which, besides, would not remove all difficulties. They must be solved, above

all, by remembering the peculiarity of all prophecy, and by considering how imperfect must be the prophet's own view and expression, and how imperfect also must be the hearers' comprehension and report of it. We must apply to the predictions of Jesus what Paul says of the necessary limits of all prophecy (1 Cor. xiii. 9-12); it is not a seeing face to face, but a seeing in a glass; from it, therefore, no perfect knowledge can spring, nothing but a child's thought in comparison with a man's. Even He was, in regard to the future, a prophet looking in order to learn, not God who knows all; and this He Himself expressly acknowledged in the words, too little considered, " The day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the Son, but the Father only " (Mark xiii. 32 ; Matt. xxiv. 36). The prophet does not see the shape of the future development, but only its idea and ideal truth; and even this he does not see as an abstract thinker, but as an inspired poet; he sees it in emblem and image, or rather, in a changing series of images, always in a riddle, as Paul says. An artist who paints the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment knows that his form is unreal, but takes it as the only form in which he can represent an idea which he believes to be true; and the prophet is subject to the same law. And if he does not write his visions down, but tells them, as Jesus did, on various occasions, and using different images, to disciples who are children in apprehension, it is evident that, however faithful the disciples are, the repetition will lead to new imperfections and errors. These errors may be corrected to-day, and the ideas contained in the images may be known, but the actual facts of the future we can no more describe than Jesus Himself could.