I think most of the prophetic material in the New Testament has been fulfilled already. What that means, specifically, is that I think Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 refer basically in their entirety to the events of 70 A.D. and its lead-up, when the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. In addition, I think much else in the epistles about the “coming” of Christ refers to this, and much of Revelation refers to this and the subsequent and gradual conversion of the Roman world to the Christian faith. A lot of what for the New Testament writers was future is past for us.
This is not true of all New Testament expectation. There is still the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and creation fully restored (roughly Revelation 20:7-21:8, much of 1 Corinthians 15, etc).
The position sketched out above is called “partial preterism”—full preterism being the view that all prophetic expectation in the New Testament is already fulfilled.
Jim Hamilton of Southern Seminary in Louisville recently put out a Twitter thread where he critiqued the hermeneutics of partial preterism, arguing that it amounts to “doing theology by newspaper headlines,” though in this case it would be ancient headlines.
What he means is this: There is an evangelical demographic who for the past couple of decades has assumed that we are living in the “end times,” and the Left Behind books that you can easily find in every secondhand bookstore in the nation testifies to how popular this perspective has been. World events (especially in the Middle East and Europe) are taken to be signs or markers of things spoken of in Revelation, and every new (Democrat) president is a potential candidate for “the antichrist.” Most recently, many wondered out loud if the Covid vaccine was the “mark of the beast.”
All this is “theology by headlines”—trying to interpret the Bible by what’s in the newspaper. And Hamilton’s point is that partial preterists do the same thing when they argue that the events of 70 A.D. fulfill New Testament prophecy. Hamilton points out that the vast majority of what we know about 70 A.D. does not come from the New Testament itself (which never narrates the event), but from the ancient historian Josephus who lived through it. Hamilton says:
”Let the full force of this sink in: according to Preterists (including the partial ones), if we didn't have Josephus, we wouldn't be able to understand the New Testament's teaching on the end times.”
It’s an important point, and raises questions:
”How does that sit with the sufficiency of Scripture? What happens to the perspicacity (clarity) of Scripture? What does this imply about the canon of Scripture? (if God hadn't preserved Josephus, where would we be?)”
But, the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture as classically defined is simply that “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (Westminster Confession 1.6). It’s the doctrine that we have in the Bible all the words from God that we need for salvation in Christ. The clarity of Scripture is similar in scope (it does not mean that everything in the Bible is clear). It does not exclude the normal framework of understanding that we have as humans (understanding the basics of language, the givens of the world, etc). Learning details of prophetic fulfillment from Josephus doesn’t really impact the sufficiency of Scripture at all. As Hamilton admits, Jesus is pretty explicit about the temple and Jerusalem’s destruction in the gospels, and the significance of it is clear from the larger biblical witness. Even without Josephus, we would have had sufficient biblical revelation about it to understand the point. Besides, is it apart from God’s providence that we do have Josephus? And Josephus gives the most detail, but even without him we would know of the Roman destruction of the temple and Jerusalem from other sources.
Hamilton goes on:
”If the full and partial preterists didn't have Josephus, could they have come to their conclusions? How does this differ from *Interpretation by the Headlines*? Don't embrace a system that requires you to use Josephus as the payoff prooftext for your eschatology.”
But partial preterism does not require this. The fact is that almost all of the prophetic material in the New Testament is drawing on Old Testament language and imagery, and draws its meaning largely from that context. It would be enough for us to know that what Jesus said would happen did happen, and we could still understand its significance to redemptive history from the biblical material alone. Josephus giving us so much up-close and literal detail of the actual events is simply a remarkable gift that has been preserved for us, but interpreting New Testament prophecy in a partial preterist framework doesn’t depend on Josephus.
Now granted, there might be an issue here if we assume that large swaths of the New Testament were written after 70 A.D. and never bothered to mention the temple’s destruction, because that would suggest that the biblical authors didn’t see it as particularly significant. But it’s very debatable whether any of the New Testament comes from post-70.
The charge of interpretation by headlines is clever, but to finish with a simple summary: We understand the meaning and significance of NT prophecy from the text itself and its foundation in the Old Testament. But 70 A.D. did happen, as we know from multiple sources, and hypothetical “what ifs” about not knowing this are, first of all, hypothetical to begin with, and second, would not mean we couldn’t understand what NT prophecy teaches with sufficient clarity anyway.
Very nice. Something tells me Hamilton consults history books when interpreting Daniel 11.
Thank you, Daniel. It's also interesting that (according to RC Sproul) liberal scholar deny the Jesus of fundamental evangelicals because what he prophesied so confidently didn't happen. In fact, it did happen in AD70.