Most liberal Protestants and post-Vatican II Catholics hew to the philo-Semitic party line, denouncing “the doctrine of supersession” for teaching (falsely they say) that Jews have been rightly punished for the sin of rejecting their Messiah. Theology texts routinely decry the examples of “this teaching and its terrible consequences” that “can be found in all periods of church history.”59 Most Christians, therefore, prudently prefer to shut their eyes to the theological meaning of the terrible events of AD 70.
It is a strange irony that Christian historians and theologians now generally deny or downplay the apocalyptic significance of what could be called the First Holocaust. More curiously still, the theologians most concerned to emphasize Christians’ responsibility for the fate of Jews in Hitler’s Germany are the least likely to wonder whether the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was the work of the God of Israel. Progressive theologians, generally, dare not acknowledge that the destruction of the Temple was a decisive turning point in the history of the early church — the historical moment when the Old Covenant with carnal Israel was superseded by the New Covenant creation of Christ’s spiritual kingdom. Instead, averting their eyes from the fiery holocaust which consumed the Temple, mainline Protestant intellectuals piously affirm the allegedly “deep and inseparable relationship of Israel and the church.”60
But the ruling liberal consensus which successfully relegated the events of AD 70 to the status of a historical footnote is open to challenge from two directions. Certainly, the early church fathers generally viewed the destruction of Jerusalem as the work of divine providence. Moreover, in recent decades, a popular theology known as “preterism” (from the Latin, præter meaning “past”) has presented a serious challenge to academic orthodoxy.
Preterism versus Futurism
For preterists, the cataclysmic collapse of ancient Judaism in AD 70 was the preordained fulfilment of biblical prophecies promising the creation of a new heaven and new earth. They interpret the Book of Revelation as a prediction of the disaster that was to befall the Old Jerusalem in the then very near future. In their view, Revelation brings to a close the biblical story of the old heaven and the old earth which began with the creation of the cosmic temple in the Book of Genesis.61 AD 70 marks the end of the transition from the Old to the New Covenant, the moment when the Kingdom of Christ overturns, once and for all, the racially exclusive law of Moses and opened its doors not just to Jews but to men and women of all nations.62
Because preterists have consigned Old Covenant Israel to the dustbin of history, their “fulfilled eschatology” has been denounced as heretical, especially by evangelical Protestants and Christian Zionists who cling to one version or another of a futurist vision of the end times. Pre-millenial dispensationalists interpret the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 as a sign that the Christian age will end with the imminent return of Jesus to rule from a physical throne in a rebuilt Temple in Old Jerusalem. Preterists, on the other hand, flatly deny that the Jews are still God’s chosen people. Not only does modern Israel not possess a divinely-ordained title to Palestine63 but the Kingdom of God established in AD 70 has no end.
The Bible, therefore, is the story of how the Kingdom was born into a world without end as well as a warrant authorizing the church to extend its spiritual dominion over all the nations of the earth. But the world will not end tomorrow or even in the next century. In fact, it is likely to endure for millions more years; there is, therefore, no urgent need to establish the universal dominion of the Kingdom any time soon. Indeed, that goal is now utterly beyond reach, given the weakened condition of modern Christianity. The spiritual enfeeblement of Christendom is in large part the consequence of the futurist eschatology that most Christians now profess. Western Christians look to the church for an assurance of personal salvation in the world to come and to the Divine Economy for the hope of health, wealth, and personal power in this life.64
Churches have become private, voluntary associations; the Old Faith has been pushed out of the public square and religious experience is confined to the private, inner life of individuals. The Bible, accordingly, has ceased to be the sacred charter of an ecclesiastical authority presiding over a way of life, a communion, and faith practiced in public and in private by all manner of men and women. For mainline Protestants, the Bible is merely the man-made medium through which we hear human witnesses to the Word of God, the otherwise inaccessible divine Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ. Liberal theology no longer views the Bible as a warrant to baptize all the nations so as to expand the spiritual dominion of Christendom to the ends of the earth. Those who look forward to Christ’s Second Coming sometime in our future are unable to make coherent sense out of either Genesis or the Book of Revelation which deal, respectively, with the beginning and the end of Old Israel. Nor can they account for the time-texts elsewhere in the New Testament suggesting that Christ would return on a cloud of glory before the present generation of those listening to him had passed away.
In recent decades, the preterist tradition has helped Christians to rediscover the full meaning of the Word of God. Clearly, if the eschatological prophecies concerning the last days of Israel and the coming of the Kingdom were fulfilled with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, Christians must think more deeply about the future. For preterists, the Kingdom of God is a presently existing reality in a world without end. Within the preterist tradition, therefore, the Bible is recovering its former status as the foundation charter of the new covenant creation, not as a fossilized text, but as the seedbed for the renewed spiritual dominion of Christendom.
The dominion theology implicit in preterism not only provides a warrant for the eventual conversion of the Jews; it mandates “nothing less than the complete conversion of our planet through the gospel of Jesus Christ”.65 The restoration of Christendom cannot be limited to the quest for mere personal salvation or a quick religious “fix” for depressed and downtrodden individuals. It offers healing to the nations. For almost two thousand years, those who call themselves Jews have resisted and denied the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Of all peoples, therefore, Jews have the greatest need for the healing power of his saving grace.
Needless to say, contemporary Jews condemn campaigns to convert them as an intolerable recrudescence of Christian anti-Semitism. In an effort to ward off such accusations from Jews and the inevitable charges of heresy coming from their fellow Christians, some preterist writers seek support for their interpretations of the events of AD 70, not just in the Bible, but in the writings of the early church fathers.66 The remainder of this essay assesses whether patristic writings do lend weight to the preterist tradition. We will seek answers to four questions that arise out of preterist interpretations of the fall of Jerusalem:
1. Was the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple an act of divine vengeance?
In the words of historian GWH Lampe, the belief “that the fall of Jerusalem avenged Christ’s death became a commonplace of later Christian apologetics”.67 Most famously, St Augustine (354–430 AD) declared that “the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him…were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom” to be “dispersed through the lands” as “a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.” Augustine specifically rejects the notion that an “inseparable relationship” exists between Old Israel and the Christian church: “those Israelites who persist in being His enemies…shall forever remain in the separation which is here foretold.”68
Similarly, the church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, (263–339 AD) thought it fitting that three million Jews thronged into Jersusalem, “as if to a prison” to “receive the destruction meted out by divine justice”. He related some of the horrors of that tragedy “so that readers may learn how quickly God’s punishment followed their crime against Christ.” Moreover, Eusebius, attributed to Josephus the belief that these “things happened to the Jews as retribution for James the Just, wh
o was a brother of Jesus who was called Christ, for the Jews killed him despite his great righteousness”.69 Justin Martyr agreed that it was right and just that Jerusalem was destroyed for the Jews “killed the Righteous One and his prophets before him.” Origen and Tertullian also shared that view.70 Melito of Sardis (died ca 180 AD) gave the most compelling poetic expression to the view that the Jews had received their just deserts when “the Lord thundered out of heaven, and the Highest gave voice” to his vengeful wrath against Old Israel by dashing the Temple to the ground.71
Perhaps out of concern “that the sentiments” he reports might “be taken as they stand as a record of a present-day Christian’s views,” Lampe downplays the impact of the Temple’s destruction upon early Christian communities. He notes that “the literature of the Christian movement contains relatively few allusions to the fall of Jerusalem.”72 At the same time, however, Lampe implies that such retrospective uninterest followed from the fact that well before AD 70 Christians had come to expect the destruction of the Temple “as a foregone conclusion.”73 For Christians in the Gentile world, “as indeed for Jewish Christians as well, the decisive event which vindicated Jesus as the Christ…was not the destruction of his enemies but his resurrection from the dead and his exaltation to God’s right hand.” Paul’s teaching had already established the congregation of the Christian people as the holy temple of God. The Jerusalem Temple was replaced “by a spiritual or heavenly temple ‘not made with hands.’” After the turn of the first century, the events of the year 70 were soon viewed “as a prelude to the even more final and crushing judgement of God executed in 135 AD against the revolutionaries who waged a Second Jewish War against Rome”. After the dust settled following that tumultuous series of events, the emphasis of the early church turned to the more pressing problems associated with the social construction of the New Jerusalem in the everyday life of Christian communities.74
2. Did the destruction of the Temple inaugurate a New Covenant Creation?
On the highly dubious assumption that the gospels were written after AD 70,75 Lampe believes that New Testament prophecies of the doom of the Temple were most likely vaticinia post eventum. But he does concede that within three or four decades after AD 70 “the separation of the Jewish Christians from Judaism became complete.”76 Indeed, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas (ca 100 AD) casts doubt on the idea that God ever made a binding covenant with Old Israel. According to this document, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ annulled the Law of Moses “that the new law…being free from the yoke of constraint, might have its oblation not made by human hands.” God had offered a covenant to the people of Old Israel “but they themselves were not found worthy to receive it by reason of their sins.” The new “spiritual temple built up to the Lord” required a new people. “Before we believed on God,” the old temple “built by hands…was full of idolatry and was a house of demons.” Because the people of Israel were terminally corrupt and weak their worldly Temple “was pulled down by their enemies.”77 Tertullian was another patristic writer holding that the destruction of the Temple was the fulfilment of biblical prophesies of a new spiritual Israel.78 But Eusebius of Caesarea provided the most comprehensive account of how the fall of Jerusalem signalled the supersession of the Old Covenant by Christ’s New Covenant creation.
In his Proof of the Gospel Eusebius demonstrated that the Mosaic covenant was destined from its inception to be superseded by a new covenant that “could be applicable to all nations and to men in the uttermost parts of the earth”. Because the Mosaic law prescribed a particular place inaccessible to anyone living far away from Judea as the venue for the ritual worship of God, it can only be “applicable to the Jews, but not to all of them, and certainly not to the dispersed (among the Gentiles), only in fact to the inhabitants of Palestine”. The “ideal of the new covenant” was intended to “be helpful to the life of all nations”. Eusebius contends that Moses expected the Jews “to receive the new covenant announced by Christ”. Those who refused fell under Moses’ curse. In “due course Christ sojourned in this life, and the teaching of the new covenant was borne to all nations, and at once the Romans besieged Jerusalem, and destroyed it and the Temple there”. At that moment, according to Eusebius, “the whole of the Mosaic law was abolished, with all that remained of the old covenant, and the curse passed over to the lawbreakers, because they obeyed Moses’ law when its time had gone by”.79
It was clear to Eusebius that “the Advent of Christ and the call of the Gentiles would be accompanied by the total collapse and ruin of the whole Jewish race”. Gentiles to the farthest end of the earth would become a new people living under a new covenant.80 But yet another issue arises out of the biblical prophecies discussed by Eusebius:
3. Did Christ come on ‘clouds of heaven’ — the Parousia — to oversee the destruction of the Temple?
In his Church History, Eusebius tells the story of how James, the brother of Jesus, died at the hands of the scribes and Pharisees. He quotes from an account of James’ interrogation written by Hegessipus in which James is reported to have said that the Son of Man “is sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Great Power, and he will come on the clouds of heaven”.81 Such language immediately calls to mind repeated New Testament assurances (e.g. Rev 22:7) that the time of Christ’s Second Coming was near. In his Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius suggests that the coming of Christ had occurred before his own time at the fall of the Temple. Note, however, that Eusebius treats the entire period from the advent of Christ to the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 as a single unified episode identified as the “coming”.
Indeed, Eusebius links the coming of Christ with a much wider process of world-historical “synchronization” in which the entire world of classical antiquity was unified under Roman rule. The creation of a Roman empire extending to the ends of the earth was the essential biocultural precondition for the call to all the Gentile nations of the oikumene. It was not by “human accident that the greater part of the nations of the world” were gathered together in one empire just as God arranged “the beginning of teaching about our Saviour”. The rulers of the Jewish people were destined “to be shaken by the Descent of the Lord from heaven”. The “Descent of the Word” is related to “the impiety of the Jews and the destruction falling upon them”. Whether Eusebius believed in another as yet future Second Coming is unclear since he makes reference to such an event in another context not obviously related to the fall of Jerusalem. But he certainly associates the sufferings of the Jews during the siege with “the days of the Lord”. He cites a prophecy that the Lord will stand in that day on the Mount of Olives which he takes to be a reference to the church “established by God after the fall of Jerusalem”. After “the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ” the city of the Jews, “Jerusalem itself and the whole system and institutions of the Mosaic worship were destroyed”.82
It seems clear, therefore, that Eusebius connects “fire and chariots with His coming, through the siege that attacked Jerusalem”.83 There remains another question, however; namely:
4. Did some or all of the patristic writers embrace the full preterist belief in fulfilled eschatology?
There was no consensus among the patristic writers on eschatological issues. Very early on, Barnabas advanced a putatively precise, futurist vision of the millennium, declaring “that in six thousand years [beginning with the Genesis creation story] the Lord shall bring all things to an end”.84 Other prominent patristic writers also declined to associate the fall of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ. Irenaeus and Justin Martyr were among those who favoured a futurist eschatology. On the other hand, Eusebius gives his readers the strong impression that the biblical hope of Israel was fulfilled completely in the forty years from the passion of Christ to the final doom of the Jerusalem Temple. It was only after “the period of the Romans, in whose time the Jewish Temple was burnt for the second time” that the Lord became “King of all the earth;” it was then that �
��His Name encircle[d] the whole earth and the wilderness”. We must agree, Eusebius concluded, “that the King who was prophesied, the Christ of God, has come, since the signs of His coming have been…clearly fulfilled”.85
Conclusion
Using the patristic writers as a benchmark of Christian orthodoxy, it is difficult to sustain the charge that contemporary preterism is heretical. The patristic writers lend powerful support to the supersessionist implications of modern preterism. In sharp contrast, those who deny the complete theological separation between Christians and the revolutionary Jews who have rejected Christ for the past two thousand years appear to have departed from the Christian orthodoxy which reigned during that period. Remarkably enough, no shame attaches to this contemporary brand of heresy. On the contrary, anti-supersessionists such as R Kendall Soulen freely acknowledge that “the standard canonical narrative” established by patristic writers such as Justin and Irenaeus “makes it appear self-evident that the true Israel of God is a spiritual rather than a carnal community”.86
Soulen argues that, precisely because “supersessionism has shaped the narrative and doctrinal structure of classical Christian theology in fundamental and systematic ways,” it has become necessary to re-evaluate “the whole body of classical Christian divinity”.87 Significantly, however, Soulen simply ignores the events of AD 70. Only by scrubbing the historical record clean of the burning of the Temple and its utter desolation can contemporary Christians be persuaded to embrace “the synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2:9) as the eternally blameless victim of tyranny and oppression at the hands of the Church down through the ages. For far too long now, Anglo-Saxon Protestants have dismissed the teachings of the patristic writers on the Jewish Question as an expression of unthinking prejudice. It is now well past time to rethink the meaning of the First Holocaust. Neither the apocalyptic fall of Old Jerusalem nor the Second Holocaust of the Second World War should be closed off any longer to historical investigation and theological reflection simply “for fear of the Jews” (John 7:13).
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