Thanks for your quick response. What I was saying was that the internal evidence of the Markan apocalypse may weigh against it being a vaticinium ex eventu, that there is nothing in 13:4-37 that really demands a date after AD 70....whereas there are other details (such as the flight occurring after the installation of the abomination in v. 14, the timeframe of winter in v. 18, etc.) that suggest that the original author did not know what happened in AD 70. What we have in ch. 13 of Mark is an apocalyptic scenario based on Daniel that could have been written anytime before AD 70, and which may have a better sitz im leben (setting in life) in the situation following the crisis of AD 40 which in fact expected something very close to Mark 13:14a, i.e. a desecration of the Temple (along the lines of Daniel 11:31, 1 Maccabees 1:54, 2 Maccabees 6:2, and 2 Thessalonians 2:4) rather than its destruction. The author of Mark embedded this apocalypse in a narrative frame that presumes a literal destruction of the Temple (v. 1-2), but that doesn't necessarily point to a date after AD 70 either. Josephus, for instance, described a Jesus ben Ananias who beginning in AD 62 anticipated the destruction of Jerusalem. The Christian belief that God has abandoned the Temple (as did Jesus ben Ananias, cf. the saying in Matthew 23:37-39, Luke 13:34-35, which has a partial parallel in Mark 11:9), when coupled with the Roman practices of evocatio and devotio deorum in military sieges (such as what happened in Carthage in 146 BC), could naturally made it seem inevitable during the revolt of AD 66-70 that the Temple was going to be destroyed. It's still possible of course that Mark wasn't published until after AD 70, although the text attested by Matthew suggests that Mark was perhaps published in variant editions.
What did Jesus mean by "this generation"
by Fisherman 31 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Bible_Student777
He meant THAT generation. Anytime someone has to spew clouds of convoluted "scholarly" mental gymastics and verbal contortions, it's usually to make a verse or verses mean the exact opposite of what they actually say. Jesus meant the people he was speaking to, the people of THAT "genea." Sheesh.