The year AD 70, is very important for several reasons. First, the obliteration of the Old Testament Jewish nation, the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. Since many events of AD 70 were prophesied in the Bible, that year is also important in relation to the accuracy and the authority of the Bible. You may certainly trust your Bible. It is indeed the living word of God!
When Israel ceased to be a nation and the Temple was demolished in AD 70, those events fulfilled what Jesus said would happen in His own generation, just as Jesus predicted, Matthew 24:2, Mark 13:2, Luke 19:44 and 21:6. Not one stone of the Temple was left upon another.
This was unthinkable. The stones of the Temple weighed five tons each with even some weighing many times more.
This has to be one of the most remarkable predictions made by anyone. It would be like predicting the city of Brisbane would be would cease to exist within the lifetime of some of us reading this article. Imagine by some unforeseen event, Brisbane is completely destroyed within 40 years.
But it is more remarkable that from the perspective of theology, one very important thing to understand is that within the destruction of the Temple, the age-old Jewish system of Temple sacrifices for sin instituted by God Himself, ended forever. This was the end of the Old Covenant age. This is critically important. The sacrificial system was a central part of the Jewish covenantal system.
The New Covenant was an event that had been foretold in the Old Testament. For example, in Jeremiah 31 “behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah”. Similarly see Isaiah 42:6, 59: 20-21, 61:8, Ezekiel 37:26.
In the New Testament book of Hebrews, we read how God was fulfilling his promise of a new covenant. Hebrews quotes that same verse from Jeremiah in chapters eight, nine and ten.
But there are many in Christendom who have come to a different conclusion. Of course, the conclusion that disagrees with the views held by most of those around you is always difficult, but God calls us to embrace truth, no matter what the cost.
We must consider up front are the challenges that are made to the authority of the Bible and even to the credibility of Christianity itself. The Bible will give its indications not only of what events would happen, but when they would happen, concerning the timing of fulfilment of key prophecies.
Sceptics give two lines of argument in an attempt to show that the Bible is not authoritative. The first is that the prophecies were written after AD 70 and backdated to make Jesus look good about His prediction of the temple’s destruction.
The second charge is that certain of Jesus’ predictions, assuming that He really did make them in advance, especially that his second coming, did not occur in the time frame that He predicted. In other words, Jesus predicted that He would return within His own generation, making Him a false prophet.
They say look around you: where is the evidence today? We are all still here. The world has not ended. He has not come to reign the world from a rebuilt Jerusalem. Evil reigns everywhere.
These are serious challenges to the credibility of the Bible that Christians must answer, not ignore.
First, did Jesus really make the prediction of the destruction of the Temple, or did the writers of the New Testament, writing after the fact, put words in his mouth. Sceptics, including some of the liberal persuasion within the church itself, sometimes say they’ll add it. They say that the prediction by Jesus was so prescient that it must have been written after the fact.
But the primary evidence provided by these sceptics is simply that the prediction was too correct. One charge is that people who hold this view are not thinking the issue through, nor explaining the text, carefully examining the text. We challenge liberal Christians, especially on this. Do they really think the writers of the NT doctored the texts? If that is so, can you trust anything the Bible says?
Nowhere does any NT writer mention the destruction of the temple as a past event. It is always mentioned as a future event. When the author of Hebrews wrote his epistle the temple was still functioning.
His predictions given, as we see, have now happened. Sorry, not only were his predictions given as statements that were made to his contemporaries before they took place, but the New Testament writers themselves looked forward to the events He predicted and not back on it. There is no evidence that the New Testament writers colluded in predicting the fall of the Temple after it happened.
We note there are no embellishments in the Bible of the details of what actually happened in the temple, in Jerusalem and the nation of Israel. if the New Testament had been written after AD 70, and the writers abstained from any description of these spectacular events, it would have been like writing a history of the destruction of the Twin Towers by terrorists in 2001 without including any details of the events surrounding it. Who was involved? How many were killed? emotions or detail, feelings of people at the time, etc. Actually, it would be more problematic than that. It would be like writing a history of a major international city during the lives of eyewitnesses who saw its total destruction without mentioning dramatic details of its destruction.
Remember, not only was the Temple destroyed, but all of Jerusalem itself. if the New Testament was written after AD 70, the writers certainly would not have resisted discussing the events of AD 70 in the past tense and describing the horrific deed in detail of AD 70 of the of the war. The prophecies are specific enough to clearly identify them with AD 70, but not nearly as specific as they would have been if they had been written after the fact, when, for example, Josephus wrote in amazing detail of the events that took place around AD 66-70.
Indeed, if the prophecies were written after the fact, the problem would be even more dramatic. It would be if several writers, who did not have the benefit of modern communications, all writing historical accounts after the total destruction of a major city, somehow conspired to leave out the crucial events of the history of the city’s destruction!
Many Christians dismiss these passages by assuming he must have not really meant what he seems to have said. They don’t believe Jesus but admit that the apostles—Paul, Peter, James, etc took him at face value about when he would return!
The ‘end of the age’ for Jews meant the end of the Mosaic age, the end of sacrifices in an earthly temple!
We cannot invent a Jesus to suit ourselves. We must not present an unreliable Jesus to the world.
It seems like every Christian in the world today except futurists, know that the apostles predicted the Parousia would occur in the first century generation. Futurists shut their eyes to this critical challenge—wilfully blind and deaf to the war in the world raging.
The ‘end of the age’ for Jews meant the end of the Mosaic age, the end of sacrifices in an earthly temple!
Do they, and you dear reader, think you/they know better than Jesus and the writers of the New Testament?
There are none so blind as one who will not see.
Ian Thomson 