Can Preterism Put an End to Christian Zionism?
Part 3

Peter was martyred by Nero sometime between 64 and 67. Peter’s martyrdom is not mentioned in Acts, which implies that Acts had already been published and distributed.

3,153 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

The early vs. late Debate

Biblical scholars are divided over when the Synoptic Gospels and the Book of Revelation were written. John’s Gospel is certainly later, and may even have been written after Revelation, but the debate does not address when John was written, since that gospel is so different from the others.

There are two schools of thought on this subject. The early school argues that the Synoptics and Revelation were written before the Roman-Jewish War started in 66, while advocates for the later dates posit they were written after 70 AD.

Advocates for the late dating suppose that the early Christians would have been too busy getting organized to develop a canon, and thus the prophecies in the Olivet Discourse were added after the Roman-Jewish War to strengthen the case for Christ. Late advocates also point out that many definitive histories of more recent historical events are written several decades after the fact. In doing so, late advocates must ignore the reports and stories that were recorded during the event itself, and which become the definitive history. Many scholars argue that the sayings of Jesus were put down in the Q Source, a hypothetical collection of stories of Christ’s ministry which Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew from. The Q Source could have been written in 40 AD at the earliest.

There are several ideological conclusions that follow from the late date theory. The only one which will be examined here is that pertaining to “Judeo-Christian” ideology and Christian Zionism. If the Synoptics were written after the destruction of Jerusalem, then the agony of the Jews in Jerusalem in 70 can be compared to the agony of Christ on the cross. From that viewpoint, both Christ and the Jews are victims of Roman “big government” and “Soviet-style” tyranny. Additionally, if the Book of Revelation was written after 70, then it must be about events in the far future — events that are “just around the corner” for the modern reader.

You can buy Leo Yankevich’s poetry volume The Hypocrisies of Heaven here.

Full Preterists lean towards the early dating school. The argument for early dating holds that this is the case given that the Book of Acts doesn’t describe the death of James, the “brother” of Jesus, in 61 AD, or Paul around 64 AD and Peter shortly thereafter. Additionally, Luke writes in Acts about a Christian prophet named Agabus who correctly predicted a famine during Claudius’ reign. If Acts was written after the destruction of the Temple, the fact that the prophecies in the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled would certainly have strengthened Luke’s case.

Acts must therefore have been written before 61 AD. Luke’s gospel was written before Acts, and after Matthew and Mark. Paul is also aware of the story of Jesus Christ, and he quotes Luke nearly word for word in 1 Timothy 5: 17-18, as well as in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. Admittedly, there are those who claim that Paul didn’t write the letters to Timothy or the Corinthians, but the case that he did write them is better than the opposite view. Additionally, if the Synoptic Gospels were written after 70, then there are several curious anachronisms, the most prominent being Jesus paying the Temple tax in Matthew 17:24-27. Why write about the Temple tax if there is no Temple?

The prophecies in the Olivet Discourse were also utilized by the Christians during the Roman-Jewish War. In Matthew, Jesus says:

So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel — let the reader understand –then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equaled again. (Matthew 24:15-21 NIV)

When the Christians in Jerusalem saw the Roman army headed toward Jerusalem, they followed the advice of Christ and left towards Pella, a Greek-speaking city in the Decapolis. There were no Judeo-Christian soldiers on the ramparts of Jerusalem.

An early date for Revelation

Late date advocates argue that Revelation was written in 95, during the reign of Domitian. This later date is critical to the futurist case, since the Roman-Jewish War would have been in the past at the time of the book’s writing. But this view also makes Revelation very difficult to understand, and also an unnecessary part of the Christian message. This idea is not new, however. Martin Luther, for example, put the book in an annex in his translation of the Bible. John Calvin didn’t write a commentary on Revelation at all.

When one recognizes that Revelation could have been written in 65 AD, when Nero’s anti-Christian persecution was in full swing, revolts were breaking out across the Empire, and the Jews of Judea were moving toward a violent rebellion, the book’s message becomes clearer.

Full Preterists also believe that John the Apostle is the writer of Revelation rather than John the Evangelist or John the Presbyter (who might have been the same John, anyway). By this reckoning, John the Apostle was sent to Patmos after being tortured but not dying during Nero’s persecutions. While in Patmos John had a vision, and he shared that vision in a letter which was written in the Septuagint Greek literary style, no doubt inspired by the Septuagint version of Daniel. There are also many Hebrew idioms translated into Greek. John didn’t have an editor; this explains why the clear Greek voice in the Gospel of John is different from that in Revelation.

John’s Revelation was sent to the seven churches in Asia. These churches were on an established Roman mail route.

John’s Revelation is addressed to seven churches in Asia. The limited number of churches gives weight to the early-writing view, since there would have been more churches in 95. There are other clues, too. John’s imitation of the Septuagint hint that he was not as fluent in Greek as he was later. The Judaizers in Christianity were still active then, and the Temple is said to still be standing (Revelation 11).

There are also two major clues that Nero was the Emperor at the time of its writing. The first is in Revelation 17:10, where John writes, “And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space” (KJV). There were five “kings” of Rome after the end of the Republic. Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius had come and gone by 65, and Nero was then the current “King.” Nero died in 68 and was replaced by Galba, who ruled “a short space” during the year of the Four Emperors.

Then there is the cryptic Number of the Beast, which is 666, or 616 in some manuscripts. The Number of the Beast is the most difficult puzzle in the Bible. The Stamp Act, vaccines, credit cards, and social security numbers have all stood in for the Number of the Beast at various times. But looking at this puzzle in the light of first-century language causes the meaning of Number of the Beast to become clear.

In the first century there was no separate system of numbers, so letters were used in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. People could therefore write names as cryptograms. These codes are called gematria. An example of this was found in the ruins of Pompeii. Archeologists discovered graffiti in Greek which can be translated as, “I love her whose number is 545.”

In the case of the graffiti in Pompeii, 545 is ϕμε. Therefore ϕ = 500 + μ = 40 + ε = 5. In the case of the Number of the Beast, we know that John says, “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six” (Revelation 13:18 KJV).

In ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, the gematria for Nero Caeser was “Nrwn Qsr,” which is enumerated in the following way:

The text which calculates the gematria as 616 is the Hebrew transliteration of the Latin form of Nero Caesar. Once one understands that the gematria 666 is a code for Nero, the imagery of the “Beast” in Revelation is clearly Nero, who persecuted Christians for 42 months, half of the seven years of tribulation. Nero was also worshiped as a “god” in his lifetime. The wounded-head imagery also refers to events which transpired shortly after Nero died. He remained popular in the provinces, and many there claimed that he hadn’t died and would return.

The Beast in Revelation was an allusion to Emperor Nero.

The Whore of Babylon, for its part, is a representation of the organized Jewish community in Jerusalem. For decades they had persecuted Christians while colluding with Rome in various ways. John writes in Revelation, Chapter 17:

I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. (KJV)

In the next chapter, John writes:

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. (Revelation 18:8 KJV)

The Whore of Babylon represents the organized Jewish community in Jerusalem. They had become wealthy by colluding with Nero. They had persecuted the Christians and very likely used their influence in Rome to cause persecution of Christians outside Judea. Then they revolted against Rome — and a new Roman administration destroyed Jerusalem.

In Revelation 9, John describes a plague of locusts that are arrayed for battle wearing breastplates, but that cannot make progress for five months. Preterists believe that this is a description of the Siege of Jerusalem.

John’s Revelation can easily be explained from a secular point of view. Spiritual geniuses can determine the direction in which society is headed before others can. John’s tribulation lasts seven years, with the first half being the persecution of the Christians by Nero and the second half being the Roman campaign in Judea. While the early Christians were not on the Jewish side, they would have been forced to flee and deal with the problems of famine, plague, and disorder that come with all wars.

In more recent times, poor American presidents have tended to have tribulations which last roughly three and a half years. Lyndon Johnson, for example, was inaugurated at the end of January 1965; within six months the race riots started, and the Vietnam War became too large to ignore. When Nixon was elected three and a half years later, the Vietnam War remained, but the tribulation of constant race riots had ended. More recently, Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2020, and by May his first crisis — the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack — occurred nearly six months into his four-year term. Genocide Joe was unable to untangle the mess without allowing the Nordstream pipeline to be built. This altered the balance of power in Europe, and disaster upon disaster has followed. These disasters may end after three and a half years should a new administration take power, however.

Peter meets with a Centurion. The early Christians could easily have talked to them about hypothetical military campaigns in Judea.

The Apostles also knew Roman military officers and could have sought their advice. The Apostles undoubtedly recognized that the behavior of the Jews was out of control and would eventually put them in conflict with Rome. Given that the Roman army was unbeatable, the timelines for a three-and-a-half-year campaign in Judea as well as a five-month siege at Jerusalem could have been predicted by asking a Roman military man about deployment schedules, march times, possible political unrest in Rome, and food stocks in Jerusalem.

There are supernatural interpretations related to Christ’s “binding of Satan” while in the Wilderness and the spread of his message to all parts of the Roman Empire in Revelation 20, as well as interpretations regarding the soul and the resurrection of the dead, but they fall beyond the scope of this essay.

New Jerusalem

John writes, “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” (Revelation 21:10 KJV)

John writes a passage in Revelation 21 about New Jerusalem, a golden cube — or pyramid, according to some — the dimensions of which were 1,400 stadia in height, width, and length which descends upon the Earth. New Jerusalem is likewise decorated with precious stones, and contains gates and other marvels.

This cube should not be interpreted as a literal thing. Multiply New Jerusalem’s width by the length, and one will arrive at a figure that is equal to the area of the Roman Empire at the time. The arrival of New Jerusalem means, according to full Preterists, that in the wake of the destruction of the Temple and the Holy of Holies therein, God is everywhere rather than contained in a box in a Temple that is staffed by Jewish priests surrounded by money-changers.

New Jerusalem represents the area of the Roman Empire at the time.

The censoring of full Preterism

Full Preterism was not uncommon prior to the rise of John Nelson Darby’s Dispensationalist theology, which became dominant in the late nineteenth century. This raises the question: Why has Preterism been eclipsed?

You can buy Tito Perdue’s Though We Be Dead Yet Our Day Will Come here.

The first reason relates to the warlord culture of Anglo-Protestantism. It is a tough for an aspiring minister to acquire a following. One way to find a shortcut to the top is to find a gimmick, to put it crudely. By all accounts, Darby’s sermons were entertaining. His ideas also became part of the debate between modernists and fundamentalists. The Preterists, who were often modernists, couldn’t match the gimmicks or the fever of the fundamentalists.

If Jesus Christ actually did return in 70 AD, then Christians must live and work every day in the existing Kingdom of Christ. But work is hard. Futurist interpretations of eschatology are an easy way out. All a Christian is required to do under the futurist interpretation is the minimum initiation ritual (as required by whatever denomination he belongs to), and then wait for Jesus to return. Why polish the brass on a sinking ship? There is no reason to do anything if the end is near.

Christians once built hospitals and universities, but that is fraught with risk. Consider the career of Oral Roberts. He was a great minister who founded a university in Oklahoma that bears his name. He then added a medical school to it. The medical school lost money, so in 1987 Roberts made an embarrassingly stupid appeal for money in order to turn things around. He then shut himself up in a UFO-shaped penthouse and claimed that God would kill him if he didn’t get several million dollars. Roberts thus became the object of derision and scorn. With that in mind, it is easy to see why so many Christians give up on building a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and passively wait for the end.

It is likewise tough to succeed financially as a minister, especially a Protestant minister. I know two ministers whose careers fizzled due to financial issues. The first joined the spiritual revolution of the late 1960s, but came too late, was too young, and was not charismatic enough to get a massive following. He had to constantly hit his relatives up for money, and he eventually got a steady job when he realized that he needed to put his kids through college. The second was a high school classmate. She took on debt to get through seminary, and upon graduation was told she needed to get a base of financial supporters of her own. I sent her money for a time, but then she dropped out and became a married mother.

Churches must therefore always be looking for donations, and that leaves them vulnerable to corruption. But there is also another — darker –aspect to this. Futurists and Dispensationalists hold that Jews are on a separate, special track in relation to the divine plan. This puts modern Israel at the center of world affairs. Jews are a financially secure group of people with a functioning government and military, and they receive funding from every Western government. They can easily fund a Christian ministry and thus shape its theology to suit their aims.

Consider one Premillennial Dispensationalist, Edgar C. Whisenant. He argued that the Second Coming would occur in 1988. His books were distributed by the thousands to ministers across the United States, and his message was broadcast in the mainstream media. One must wonder who paid for that. Incredibly, Whisenant favorably quotes Rabbi Meir Kahane throughout his book. Kahane was an extremist ethnonationalist Jew who wanted to commit genocide against the Palestinians — approximately 20% of whom are Christians descended from the earliest members of that faith.

Kahane was killed by an Egyptian assassin in 1990, but his vision lives on. The success of Kahane’s ideas correlate with what Kevin B. Macdonald has written: “At all the turning points [in Jewish history], it is the more ethnocentric elements — one might term them the radicals — who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day.” Kahane’s views were on the Israeli fringe in 1988, but today they are Israeli state policy. Christian futurists and Dispensationalists who support Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians have been influenced by Whisenant’s ideas and support Kahane’s evil ideas. The failures of the futurists’ prophecies likewise discredit Christianity and cause Christians to lose faith — which is also a Jewish aim.

The Roman-Jewish War was not a conflict where there were Judeo-Christians on one side and Romans on the other. The Christians left Jerusalem during the war and settled in Pella, which is to the east of the Jordan River — part of the Greek Decapolis. The first Christians were also highly counter-Semitic. Preterist theological interpretations are utterly hostile to the organized Jewish community, and the logic of Preterism leads to the conclusion that Christians cannot support modern Israel. Preterism’s implications likewise charge Christians with moving forward with their aims in the real world. They are to build institutions and seek political power. White advocates should do the same, even at the risk of setbacks, scorn, and persecution.

Bibliography

Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation (Fountain Inn, S. C.: Victorious Hope Publishing, 2010)

George Holford, The Destruction of Jerusalem, an Absolute and Irresistible Proof of the Divine Origin of Christianity (Frankford, Penn.: Josephy Sharpless T & G. Palmer, Printers, 1812)