Until August of 2022, the year 70 AD was just another year in ancient history to me. It held no special significance other than I knew that a Roman army destroyed Jerusalem, and Jews and Christians were scattered throughout the empire. I could infer God’s purpose of separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all, but in terms of His salvific plans, I didn’t see any connection. And I don’t ever remember being taught in over four decades of my Christian life that there was any redemptive-historical significance to the horrific fall of Jerusalem. And horrific only begins to describe it. The ancient historian Josephus describes it in disgusting, often stomach turning detail. I’m sure I learned something about it in seminary, but whatever it was, it wasn’t memorable.
Then in that fateful month very much to my surprise, as those who read me often will know, I embraced postmillennialism. Up to that day I thought it was a completely discredited eschatological position. I found out I had rejected it for the same reason most others do: I was completely ignorant of what it really taught. If there is a way to know less than nothing about a topic, I knew that much. Yet I thought it was some kind of joke, until I learned it most certainly is not. I’ve learned since then that whatever critics think they know about it is always wrong, and I mean one hundred percent of the time. I have not found one single solitary steel man among those criticizing it. What I find is an abundance of straw men, question begging, and non sequiturs. That’s a lot of logical fallacies! And for whatever reason, postmillennialism lends itself to that. Before we get into the meat of the significance of AD70, let me tell you why I rejected the post-mill position, and every critic I’ve encountered seems to do so for the same reasons.
The Rejection of Postmillennialism
After my Christian youth when I was born-again into the thoroughly dispensational premillennial environment of the late 1970s, I eventually became pan-mill, as in it will all pan out in the end. Up to that point I engaged in “newspaper eschatology,” and all of the predictions about future events supposedly contained therein. Eventually it just came to seem like futile guess work and conjecture. Because of that I came to assume we can’t really know anything definitively about how things will end, so we just need to trust God who apparently didn’t to see the need to communicate that stuff clearly. Oh, how wrong I was! But we learn, hopefully.
Then in 2014 I was exposed to a solid case for amillennialism, and saw that just maybe God did communicate these things more clearly than I had realized. Unfortunately, this perspective on “end times” seemed to make me more pessimistic about the human race and life in this fallen world. The a-mill position teaches that the wheat and tares (weeds) grow up in the field of this fallen earth, and that good and evil are in perpetual conflict until the end. Given the seemingly ever present suffering and misery we see in the world, it’s not surprising I turned into a pessimist, as do most a-mills I’ve encountered. They, like our premillennial and dispensational brothers and sisters, see things growing increasingly worse until , as David Chilton puts it, “Christ returns at the last moment, like the cavalry in B-grade westerns, to rescue the ragged little band of survivors.” That’s basically what I believed because that’s what I thought these positions taught, and what I still think they do.
In studying postmillennialism, I learned something powerful that completely changed my perspective. Lorraine Boettner in his book, The Millennium, contrasts this idea of a conflict between good and evil, with the conquest of good over evil. It didn’t take long for him to convince me the latter is the biblical take on the nature of reality in our fallen world. Christ did not come to earth, die, rise again, ascend to the right hand of God, and send his Holy Spirit, to just pluck a few embers out of the burning fire of fallen humanity. Rather, he came to conquer the sin that destroys everything in His creation. That not only has profound effects on individuals saved from sin, but also in the communities they build, starting with families and extending out from there into society and cultures. Isaac Watts in the great Christmas hymn Joy to the World put it poetically best:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.
The entire hymn is about Christ’s rule and reign on earth, not just in the hearts of his people or in the church, but over everything!
Unfortunately, until I learned what it really was, I thought postmillennialism was a late 19th and early 20th century version of liberal Christian and secular progress. Man in his hubris with the light of science and technology would conquer the world and usher in the kingdom of God. It was clear from my pre, pan, and amil perspectives, science and technology could never overcome sin in the heart of man, so postmillennialism was a delusion. William Jennings Bryan echoed what many Christians believed prior to World War I, and what many equate with postmillennialism today:
Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.
After he said this, in the 20th century some hundred million people died or were killed in the name of progress, and postmillennialism was tarred with the Bryan version of “progress.” That, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with a biblically rigorous postmillennialism.
Futurism, Preterism and AD70
Unfortunately, because of the perversion of postmillennialism at the hands of Christian liberals and secularists, the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 eventually turned from being a profound redemptive-historical pivot point, to an historical curiosity.
The growth of the “new premillennialism” of J.N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren would in the 20th century turn into the dominant Evangelical eschatology of dispensationalism. This eschatology necessitated a futuristic interpretation of the Olivet discourse (Matthew 24:1–25:46; Mark 13:1–37; Luke 21:5–36) and the Book of Revelation, meaning the events that Jesus and John spoke about would not happen in the first century Jewish-Roman context, but at some time far off into the future. Amillennialists believe the same thing because when I embraced that eschatology for eight years that’s what I was taught and believed. Now it seems abundantly clear to me from a postmillennial perspective that a preterist interpretation makes the most sense of the texts and the historical facts on the ground.
The events Jesus spoke about, and most of the events John refers to (called partial preterism), have already happened. The word preterist comes from the Latin word for past, so this view is a contrast from the futurist view. Learning about the preterist view can almost cause one a case of intellectual whiplash. It makes my neck kind of ache just thinking about it given how unexpected it was after four plus decades as a Christian.
The debate about Revelation relates to the dating when John wrote it. For most of my Christian life I accepted “the consensus” of a later date, in the 90s AD, because the “experts” all seemed to believe that. I didn’t realize their motivations for deriving that perspective were primarily driven, known or not, by their eschatological assumptions (I wrote a piece last year about this, Eschatological Assumptions and AD70). If one takes a futuristic view of Jesus’ teaching in the Olivet Discourse, then it makes sense to see Revelation in the same way. So whatever evidence there is for the late date becomes dispositive, meaning it’s basically a slam dunk. Then last year I read Before Jerusalem Fell by Ken Gentry on the dating of the Book of Revelation, and I was shocked at how weak the evidence for the late dating was. I suppose a plausible case can be made, but to me the internal evidence, the actual content of the book itself, what John wrote, is dispositive, and slam dunk would describe it well—like a Michael Jordon tongue out in your face dunk. I was kind of shocked, really, not least because I had so easily accepted the later dating all these years.
The debate about the Olivet Discourse turns on how one chooses to interpret this verse in Matthew 24:
34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
The debate is over what Jesus meant when he told them that all the things he was describing, not some of the things, would happen in “this generation.” It seems pretty straight forward, that it was the generation of the people he was speaking to when the words came out of his mouth. It’s a stretch to say Jesus meant “some generation in the far off future when these far off future events are going to occur.” It’s crazy to me that very serious people actually try to make that case, but they do and it’s what most Christians believe because of their eschatological assumptions. These people admit some of what Jesus was speaking about happened in the first century, but Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He says clearly, “Until all these things have happened.” So it’s either all in the past, or all in the future; there is no other option. Reading it the way Jesus intended, and his hearers would have understood, points to AD70, no pretzel logic required.
I would encourage anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions and not just take another’s word for it to read Gentry’s book, and for the Olivet Discourse and AD70 I would suggest two other books. The first is a little book from the early 19th century called, The Destruction of Jerusalem by George Peter Holford. He lays out in exacting detail how the historical record proves the preterist interpretation. The other is a book by R.C. Sproul called, The Last Days According to Jesus. Skeptics who have been trying to discredit the Bible for well over 200 years have argued that Jesus was predicting all these events, and since they didn’t happen Jesus was not who he claimed to be. The futurist position is one way to deal with it, but we don’t have to distort the text or Jesus’ words to address the critics’ lies. Preterism will do that nicely. Now let’s move on to some theology.
The Judgment of AD70
Unfortunately, because of the futurist focus on “end times” prophetic passages, the theological significance of the destruction of Jerusalem gets lost in the shuffle. That event, however, was a profound turning point in the history of redemption, of God’s plan to redeem His people and his entire creation. It took me a while on my postmillennial journey to figure this out. Theologically this has to do with God’s judgment upon His people, and what that meant for His redemptive plans.
In the discourse, everything turns on the meaning of the disciples’ question, “what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” People often take the Greek word for age, aión-αἰών, to mean world, so Jesus was telling the disciples about the end of the world. What comes into our minds when we hear that phrase? Likely a dystopian hell we’ve seen in a thousand movies. If one reads Revelation futuristically with that mindset, it certainly appears that way. But that is not what Jesus is referring to. I have a critically important question most Christians seem to miss. To whom was Jesus sent? And for whom was Jesus’ ministry? It was first the Jews, and only after that Gentiles, the rest of us.
The first passage confirming this message comes in Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out the 12.
5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.
Jesus confirms this in Matthew 15. The headline of the passage in our Bibles says, “The Faith of a Canaanite Woman.” God is using a heathen woman from a people with a lot of historical baggage for the Jews to make a theological point. She is screaming out for Jesus to heal her daughter of demon possession, and Jesus makes his mission clear:
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
Notice Jesus says “only.” It’s news to most Christians that the gospels are not about us! They are about God coming to His people, sending His anointed one to them, their Messiah. Only when he was rejected did the message extend out to the Gentiles. If you read through the Old Testament, but especially the prophets, this dual message is clear. Yahweh is consistently declaring blessing and judgment on His people, but eventually that blessing is to extend to the nations as he promised Abraham and the Patriarchs. It seems the blessing would not break out to the rest of the world until judgment came.
That judgment to come, what we see happen in AD70, was declared by John prior to the Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Given my futurist eschatological assumptions, I completely missed that John is clearly declaring judgment to come upon the Jews. I thought John was mistaken like many Jews were about Jesus. His first coming wasn’t in judgment, but in mercy and grace. Judgment was for his second coming. That’s how I read the Olivet discourse as well, but Jesus is clearly speaking of Jerusalem where “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
Yahweh was in a legal covenant relationship with His people with the stipulation of blessing for obedience, and curses for disobedience. We see this laid out in detail in the Pentateuch, and played out in Israel’s history, declared in excruciating details in the prophets. Reading Jesus’ words in the Olivet Discourse from a preterist perspective is not at all a stretch, but in fact fits the entire flow of the historical narrative perfectly.
The Theological Significance of AD70
The Jews were promised salvation from sin and death from the very beginning when God told Adam and Eve the woman’s seed (offspring) would strike or bruise (crush in the NIV) the serpent’s head. When the covenant is revealed to Abraham, Paul confirms this seed refers not to offspring in general, but to Christ (Gal. 3):
16 The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.
All through Israel’s history, God communicated his redemptive plans in signs and symbols, or types and shadows as the theologians put it. These were concrete illustrations of the forgiveness of sin to come pointing beyond themselves to a greater truth, to the one who is The Truth in which redemption is found. When he came to fulfill all the promises, the Jewish religious leaders who represented the nation rejected the fulfillment for the types and shadows as if they were the thing, as if the blood of bulls and goats could do anything. The entire book of Hebrews was written to convince first century Jewish Christians of the superiority of the New Covenant. In chapter 8 quoting Jeremiah 31, the writer says:
13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.
This could be considered a prophecy of the coming destruction of the temple. Hebrews was written while temple still stood because the writer was trying to convince Jewish Christians not to go back to the Old Covenant way of doing things. That was a possibility at the time he wrote. It seems the Jewish nation, including Jewish Christians, would not get the message that a new and superior way of salvation had appeared until God made the message clear. AD70 and the utter destruction of Jerusalem made it undeniably clear.
From that moment the Jewish religion changed completely. It was no longer the Mosaic religion of atonement for sin in sacrifice, but a moralistic religion of works. Jewish Christians now had to realize the former way was dead, over and gone forever; they could never go back. It was either Judaism or Christianity, the law or salvation by grace through faith, man’s works of futility or God’s transformational power in Christ in the human heart. God’s kingdom had now come in a completely different way than any Jew had foreseen. After Jesus had risen from the dead he told his disciples in Luke 24 that the entirety of Israel’s history found in Scripture, our Old Testament, was about him. Once the temple fell, God declared his covenant had been fulfilled in his Son, his kingdom come, His will now being done on earth as it is in heaven. Israel’s futility was ended, and in Christ alone would be found this good news of God (I Cor. 1):
30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
Now with God’s law put in His people’s minds and written on their hearts (Jer. 31), God’s kingdom would no longer be limited to a tiny point of light in the Middle East. We read these prophetic words from Habakkuk 2:
14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
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