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 DID JESUS SAY HE WAS COMING BACK? As usual, it depends on who you ask. According to traditional Christian understanding, yes. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus predicts that the temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and desecrated, amid terrible carnage (which happened in AD 70). He goes on to say this: "At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. He will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens" (Mark 13:26-27). On the other hand, liberal theologians in recent centuries have said that Jesus would never have talked like that, and that the early church put such words in his mouth when they wrote the Gospels, to reflect their own belief in his second coming. However, such sceptics usually also say that Jesus cannot really have predicted the fall of Jerusalem, so the passage must have been written after it happened – which makes it somewhat bizarre for Mark to say that Jesus would come back at the same time. It would be like me predicting that Jesus would come back in the year 2000. On yet another hand, there is a respectable scholarly opinion that the whole thing is simply a misunderstanding of what Jesus says in the Gospels. He talked, in picturesque language sometimes, about his coming, about God's return to Israel, and about the future destruction of Jerusalem – and later readers have muddled or misinterpreted these teachings as predicting his own second coming. St Paul was far more expansive about Jesus's second coming. He proclaimed that Jesus would return to remake the heavens and earth, and judge the world, and he seems to have expected it imminently. Read what he said for yourself in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. More questions about Jesus' teaching |
Picture: 19th-century Bible illustration. |
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