N.T. Wright on The Second Coming of Jesus

As regular readers know, I've written here before about preterism, the view that all biblical prophesies concerning "the second coming" of Jesus are references to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Preterism has been a stream of thought within my faith tradition, the Churches of Christ, but has mostly been dismissed as crackpot.

And yet, my interest in preterism stems from the fact that the view is increasingly getting support from biblical scholarship. N.T. Wright is a case in point.

For example, in a recent article "Hope deferred? Against the dogma of delay" (published in Early Christianity, 2018, Vol. 9, p. 37-82) Wright, among other things in the article, looks at two of the key "second coming" texts from the gospel of Mark:

Mark 9.1
And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Mark 14. 61-62
But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus said, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’”

In both passages, Jesus proclaims that the present generation--his audience in Mark 9 and the High Priest in Mark 14--will witness in their lifetime the kingdom of God coming "with power" and the Son of Man coming in the clouds

What could this possibly mean?

Wright argues that the answer is found in Mark 13. In Mark 13 Jesus again speaks of this "second coming":

Mark 13.24-27
“But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

This passage in Mark, along with its parallels in Matthew and Luke, are generally read as predictions about some future event related to Judgment Day and the end of the world. And yet, as Wright points out, the events in Mark 13 are clearly about the destruction of the Temple. Jesus' discourse in Mark 13 kicks off this way:

Mark 13.1-4
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” 

For Wright, and myself, Mark 13 provides the key to understanding Mark 9 and 14: The second coming of Jesus that would happen within a generation was the calamity of AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed. As Wright comments:

What about Mark himself? Did he think, in writing the passages in Mark 9:1 and 14:62, two of the regularly-cited key texts, that Jesus had been predicting a cosmic catastrophe? The main answer to this is found in Mark 13...this so-called "apocalyptic discourse" is primarily about the fall of the temple...This, indeed, is the event which will happen within a generation...And everything we have seen so far from Paul, from Matthew and from Luke insists that we should read this language [about Jesus's "second coming"] in terms of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus on the one hand and the fall of the Temple (the heaven-and-earth place) on the other.