For most evangelicals and many other Christians, especially
Rapturists, one of the favorite gospel passages is that known as the Olivet
Discourse. The passage is so named
because in its occurrence in the Gospel
of Matthew (Chapter 24) and in the Gospel
of Mark (Chapter 13) takes place on the Mount of Olives outside
Jerusalem. Unfortunately for those using
it as a horoscope of Earth’s future, it has already been fulfilled, at least
the core prediction of its original form, found in the Lucan version.
The nearly identical, but less altered and closer to the
original, exchange and discourse in the Gospel
of Luke (Chapter 21:5-37) happens within the temple compound. Its central prediction (in verses 20-24) is
the siege of the city of Jerusalem ending in its complete destruction and
subsequent deportation of its entire population. That is exactly what happened in 70 CE, at
the end of the Great Jewish Revolt that began in 66 CE.
The Great Jewish Revolt was not the first uprising of the
population of Palestine against the empire of Rome, of which it had been a part
since Pompey’s conquest of the Levant in 63 BCE, after which the Hasmoneans
continued as client-kings.
Earlier rebellions against Rome
Less than two decades after the conquest, Hezekiah ben Garon
declared himself king of the Jews upon beginning a rising in Galilee in 47
BCE. This rebellion was put down by
Galilee’s governor, Herod the Idumean, later known as Herod the Great. Herod overthrew the last Hasmonean in 37 BCE,
to the great relief of everyone, and was recognized as king of the Jews by the
Empire.
Hezekiah son Hananiah was a venerated sage contemporary with
Hillel and Shammai.
Upon Herod’s death in 4 BCE, four risings broke out across
his former kingdom in Idumea, Judea (with which Samaria had been merged since
110 BCE), Perea, and Galilee. The legate
of Syria, Publius Quinctilius Varus,
crushed the revolt rather easily, crucifying over two thousand of its leading
members.
After the revolt was
settled, Herod’s son Archaelaus inherited Judea (which indluded Samaria and
Idumea); Herod’s son Antipater (aka Antipas) inherited Galilee, Perea, and the Decapolis;
Herod’s son Philip inherited Iturea, Trachonitis, Batanea, Gaulanitis, and
Panaeas; and Herod’s daughter Salome inherited Philistia. This settlement makes rather inconvenient the
assertion in Chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew that after returning from Egypt
Jesus’ parents, originally from Bethlehem, relocated to Galilee since Judea was
ruled by “Herod’s son”; so was Galilee.
The census for tax
purposes mentioned in the Gospel of Luke took place in 6 CE after Rome had
removed Archaelaus and made Judea a province under direct Roman rule as a
subprovince of the province of Syria.
Quirinius, legate of Syria at the time, ordered the census for the new
acquisition, which was the only area covered by the census, not the “whole
world”. Judas the Galilean took
advantage of the resentment to start another rising from his home base. After this was put down, the Romans moved the
capital of the subprovince to Caesarea Palestinae.
In 36 CE, the
Samaritan Prophet and his followers occupied the summit of Mt. Gerizim, upon
which Herod the Great had rebuilt their temple destroyed by the Hasmonean ruler
of Judea, John Hyrcanus, in 110 BCE. Though their only goal was a separate
subprovince under Roman rule, the local prefect, Pontius Pilatus, crushed their
benign demonstration with such brutality that Rome recalled him.
From 41 through 44
CE, Herod’s grandson Agrippa managed to cobble his grandfather’s kingdom back
together with himself recognized as king of the Jews. Upon his death, the entirety reverted to
direct Roman rule, but under a Jewish procurator from Alexandria named Tiberius
Julius Alexander.
Around 45 CE, Theudas
the prophet, probably of Judea, led his followers to the wilderness around the
Jordan River, claiming to be the Messiah.
The minor revolt was easily dispatched.
The sons of Judas
the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, rose up against Roman rule in 46 CE, and carried
out a guerrilla war for two years. At
the end in 48 CE, they were both crucified.
The year after those
crucifixions, 49 CE, rumors of impending destruction of the temple by Ventidius
Cumanus, procurator of Judea, led to riots which caused the trampling deaths of
thousands in the city for Passover.
In 52 CE, Galilean anti-Samaritan extremists led by brothers Alexander and Eleazar ben Dinaeus
invaded Samaria, causing destruction, mayhem, murder, rape, and robbery. Basically, they were bandits mouthing
political slogans.
A charismatic
individual known to history only as the Egyptian Prophet led an uprising in 58
CE that ended in a climactic battle on the Mount of Olives.
Jesus ben Ananias
According to the renowned Jewish historian Titus Flavius
Josephus, a commoner and farmer named Jesus ben Ananias appeared in Jerusalem
during Sukkot, or the Feast of Booths, in 62 CE preaching the coming
destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple.
Not content with disturbing temple-goers, he then paraded around all the
streets of the city, preaching his message.
Though Josephus does not mention it, I can say without a
doubt that people were waving palm branches and shouting Hosannas. How do I know this to state it so
unequivocally? Because palm branches and
Hosannas were always part of Sukkot, as they still are today. They are not part of Pesach, or Passover, and
never have been. Palm branches and
Hosannas for Passover are like Christmas trees and carols for Easter.
Well, the temple priests and elders of the Sanhedrin, along
with the business leaders present, who were trying to conduct ceremonies and
collect wagonloads of money from tourists, took exception to the gloom Jesus
ben Ananias was spreading, arrested him and took him into the basilica at the
south end of the temple compound, its meeting place at the time, where they
interrogated and beat him, trying to goad him into either silence or an
actionable outburst.
Failing, they sent him to the Roman procurator, Lucceius
Albinus, accusing him of sedition and suspicion of rebellion. Hearing their case and hearing from the
defendant nothing but more of the same, the procurator had him flogged. Jesus ben Ananias never cried out except to
say “Woe to Jerusalem!” repeatedly.
Albinus decided he was just crazy, and let him go.
Jesus ben Ananias continued preaching about the impending
destruction of Jerusalem until his death during the Siege from a rock thrown by
a Roman catapault.
The festival at which Jesus ben Ananias chose to appear, by
the way, is the one at which Jews look forward to the coming of the Messiah. The name Ananias is a
Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Hanina, and it is not beyond possibility
that this Jesus, or Yeshua, was the son of the earlier sage Hanina ben Hezekiah
ben Garon.
The Great Jewish Revolt
Despite unrest in the past decade, the Romans were
unprepared for the violence of the uprising that began in 66 CE, at first
centered in Judea, but then spreading to Galilee, Idumea, and even Samaria. The legions retook Samaria first, destroying
its capital of Sebaste and burning the temple atop Mt. Gerizim (rebuilt by
Herod in 19 BCE). Galilee fell in 69 CE,
which left Judea and Idumea.
While the Romans had been reconquering their perimeter, six
factions of rebels fought for supremacy among themselves, only uniting as the
Romans closed their siege lines. These
factions included the traditional Temple Guard and priests, the Galilean
Zealots, Judean peasants, the Judean Zealots, the Sikarii, and the
Idumeans. The members of the fledging
cult then known as The Way or the Nazarenes fled the city to the Nabatean
capital of Petra.
The siege lasted six months, with tens of thousands dying of
starvation and disease, plus those caught when trying to escape whom the Romans
crucified within sight of the walls, thousands of them. At the height of the Siege, the entire city
was surrounded with crucified people.
Until the accessible countryside ran out of wood, that is.
Aftermath
After the capitulation, captive rebels were forced to tear
the city down to ground level, leaving only the western wall of the city and three towers,
according to Josephus, who was there on site.
The Romans crucified only a few of the survivors; one of the captive
leaders, in fact, made it to Rome (John of Giscala). Many of the survivors of the siege and some
captives from elsewhere in Palestine were deported to imperial territories in
North Africa west of Egypt, where they became ancestors to the Jewish ethnic division
known as the Maghrebim.
Note that above I stress “of the city” when referring to the
western wall left standing. It was the
western wall of the entire city, not the western wall of the temple mount,
which was on the east side of the city. The
mount and compound of the temple, which occupied the eastern extremity of the
city, were dismantled even more completely than the rest of the city. During the siege, the Temple had caught fire and
was utterly destroyed, with the fire burning hot enough to liquefy all the gold
in its treasury. To get it all, the
legionnaires forced the captives to reduce it thoroughly to ground level and
sift through all the detritus.
In the second year of the Great Jewish Revolt, the
Samaritans, previously quiet, joined the revolt, but their rebellion was swiftly
ended by Sextus Vettulenus Cerealis, legate of Syria, who destroyed
their temple atop Mount Gerizim near Neapolis (Nablus).
The Sikarii, many of them escapees from the Siege of
Jerusalem, held out for three years in Herod's fortress at Masada. When the
Roman finally breached the walls with laboriously constructed siege engines,
they found all inhabitants dead by their own hands.
At the time of the revolt, there was not only the temple in
Jerusalem and that atop Mount Gerizim, but another in Egypt, at Leontoplis in
the "Land of Onias". After the capture of Masada, the prefect
of Egypt, the same Tiberius Julius Alexander who had previously been procurator
of Judea, destroyed the temple of Onias to prevent it becoming a staging ground
for rebellion.
Of the eschatological discourse on the Mount of Olives
In the discourse, Jesus talks of other signs for the coming
of the Son of Man, although he stresses after naming several that seeing them
does not necessarily that the end is imminent.
Then he tells the Parable of the Blossoming Fig Tree, which some quite
mistakenly and on little basis say is a prophecy of the revival of a Jewish
nation-state. In reality, when he talks
of the fig tree blooming and knowing therefore that “spring is nigh”, it is the
same as saying, “When you see the dogwoods blooming, you know you’re about to
get a cold snap”, nothing more.
The version of the discourse in Matthew and Mark replaces
the prophecy in Luke about Jerusalem
being surrounded by armies with absurd anachronism about a future “abomination
of desolation”. For Jesus of Nazareth to
have issued such a prediction in the fourth decade of the Common Era (c. 33 CE)
would have been as ridiculous as me predicting in the year 2015 that there will
be a civil war in the United States when the southern states attempt to secede
from the Union in order to preserve slavery.
The purported “abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel
the prophet” took place even longer before Jesus’ day than the Civil War is
from now. It would be more like me
predicting the War of 1812.
Alexander the Great conquered Syria, Samerina (Samaria),
Yehud (Judea), Phoenicia, Philistia, and Egypt from the Achaemenid Empire of
Iran in 332 BCE. After he died in 323
BCE, war broke out among his generals over the spoils.
At the end of the Wars of the Diadochi (the successors) in
301 BCE, the province of Samareia with its sub-province of Judeia lay in the
hands of the Ptolemys of Egypt. Their
Seleucid rivals of Antioch in Syria took Samareia in 219 BCE and Judeia in 198
BCE.
Thirty years later (168 BCE), the Selucid king in Antioch,
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, invaded Ptolemaic Egypt to take that dynasty’s last bit
of territory, but was forced out by the latter’s allies from the Roman
Republic. On his return to his capital
at Antioch, his army stopped in the vicinity of Jerusalem, seat of Judeia, then
a sub-province of Samareia. This is when
the “abomination of desolation” is supposed to have taken place.
The story in the Apocrypha book of 1 Maccabees (written by a pro-Hasmonean propagandist) is that
Antiochus stormed the temple mount, breeched compound, invaded the inner
sanctum, and erected a statue to Zeus in the Holy of Holies. Josephus’ account is mch more prosaic;
according to him, Antiochus helped restore the high priest, Menelaus son of
Simon of the Oniad dynasty, who had been deposed by the previous high priest, his
brother Jason, while the Seleucid army was in Egypt. To pay off his benefactor, Menelaus plundered
the temple treasury.
The story about an “abomination of desolation” made a better
story for propagandists of the Hasmonean dynasty. The accuracy of this “prophecy” in the book
of Daniel was greatly enhanced by the
fact that it was probably written by the same author as the one who recorded
its fulfillment in 1 Maccabees (among
other commonalities, they make the same historical errors).
Whatever their actual nature, the events occurred a decade
before that actual outbreak of the Second Judean Civil War, sometimes called
the Maccabean Revolt, which happened over the question of succession after the
death of high priest Alcimus in 159 BCE.
Rising in noble answer to such an egregious offence sounds much better
than the ignoble quest of greed and ambition that it actually was.
Conclusion
So, the prophecies of the Olivet Discourse? For the most part already fulfilled, and the
remainder vague at best. Even James
Ussher, to whose chronology of history so many are committed, knowingly or
otherwise (he was the one who originated the date of 4004 BCE for Creation), explicitly
stated this to be the case. He felt it
so strongly that he ended his chronology with the events that led up to the
temple’s destruction.
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