"This generation will not pass away...": How is this true? Matthew 24:29-35

[PNEUMA]

My basic problem with Matthew 24 is that literally Jesus promises that the end of the world will come, with specific actions, to the generation he’s speaking to, nearly two thousand years ago…

The end of their world came in 70 AD

their world = jews, priesthood, temple, jerusalem, judea

 

[PNEUMA]

I have read this thread’s discussion that AD 70 is the resolution to this puzzle, but I do not see how it resolves the problem I’ve presented (emphasis added):

Additionally, what Jesus says in verse 21 appears inconsistent with the AD 70 explanation: I understand losing the Temple to be the Jewish equivalent of our losing the ministerial priesthood (hence not being able to consecrate the Eucharist – this would end the catholic faith, would it not?), but from the surrounding verses the context is physical suffering, not spiritual: Are you really going to claim that the Romans sacking Jerusalem was worse than the Shoah of World War II? Did the Romans try to kill absolutely everyone, together with the atrocities committed by the Nazis? worse than what they did?

According to Josephus, 1.1 million died in Jerusalem. So a higher percentage was killed by the Romans then by the Nazis

 

[po18guy]

Why not draw back and examine the big picture? You are reading the notes in the NAB/RE and are becoming confused to the point of despair and loss of faith. If the NAB/RE is the only Bible you have, please avoid the footnotes. Some indeed are solid but some lead to confusion and potential loss of faith - this thread stands as evidence of that.

Look at the intro to Matthew:

“The ancient tradition that the author was the disciple and apostle of Jesus named Matthew is untenable because…” and “The unknown author, whom we shall continue to call Matthew for the sake of convenience…”

What is worse is that those “scholars” are of the opinion that Luke essentially copied and pasted Mary’s Magnificat into his narrative and that Mary never uttered those words.

Are you kidding me? Pure modernist revisionism. I have no idea why notes of this nature were ever inserted into the NAB, and why they persist.

 

[ethereality]

You really do need a copy of What Jesus Really Said About the End of the World
**By: ** David B. Currie

Great! Because I’m impoverished to the US Department of Education to the point where I feel unable to support a family, please consider buying the e-book for me.

those “scholars” are of the opinion that Luke essentially copied and pasted Mary’s Magnificat into his narrative and that Mary never uttered those words.

Are you kidding me? Pure modernist revisionism. I have no idea why notes of this nature were ever inserted into the NAB, and why they persist.

This points to an earlier problem I’ve raised, namely, that this is on the United States Council of Catholic Bishops website: Surely this implies that this scholarship has their approval: They are its publisher. If you have no idea why they published it, perhaps you could ask them.

 

[Church_Militant]

Great! Because I’m impoverished to the US Department of Education to the point where I feel unable to support a family, please consider buying the e-book for me.

Let me see what I can do my friend. Do you happen to have a Kindle or Kindle for PC?

 

[fisherman_carl]

My apologies. Thoughts on Matthew 24 from the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible:

"A closer look at Jesus’ words in the context of ancient Judaism reveals a better interpretation. Namely, Jesus was predicting the demise of the Jerusalem Temple–the architectural symbol of the Old Covenant. Jesus’ entire discourse is an extension of his cryptic comment about the Temple: “There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (Mt 24:2)…From this perspective, Jesus stands vindicated since his words did come to pass within the lifetime of his contemporaries.

"…Like many religions in the the Near East, the Israelites regarded their Temple as a miniature replica or microcosm of the world; it was an architectural model of the universe fashioned by God. Conversely, the universe itself was a macrotemple, where God also dwells with His people.

“…the termination of the the Old Covenant world prefigures the destruction of the universe, God’s macrotemple, and the judgment of all nations by Christ. Thus, Jesus’ Olivet Discourse (Mt 24-25) is initially fulfilled in the first century as he said (Mt. 24:34). But imbedded in Christ’s words are spiritual truths that point forward to his Second Coming and the end of the visible world.”

There is much more on this in the Study Bible which provides many scriptural cross-references for this concept.

Hope this helps. :tiphat:

Yes, this is a good answer. Mt 24, Jesus deals with 2 questions. When will be the destruction of the Temple and when will Christ return. There is a lot of symbolism. This is not a literal passage.

Also, in my Bible study recently I learned that during the Exodus from Egypt the Jews were instructed by God to build a portable tabernacle that housed the ark with the mercy seat where God promises to meet them. This was a place where God, the Creator of everything, was to meet man. The Jews believed this tabernacle was a tiny cosmos because of this. It was also another garden of Eden because God once again walked with man during the Exodus pilgrimage.

Fast forward to Jesus’ day and you can see why the Temple became all important. The Temple housed the inner sanctuary with the meeting place, the mercy seat, where God and man would meet.

Thus the destruction of the temple was a cataclismic cosmic event using apocalyptic language. This isn’t the first time such language was used. Isaiah 6:1-7 compares the Temple to the cosmos.

Also, Jewish writers in Jesus’ day saw the Temple as a model of the universe. See Josephus, Philo, and others. These considerations help interpret Jesus’ words in their historical context.

There is much more information about this in Ignatius CSB.

 

[fide]

My basic problem with Matthew 24 is that literally Jesus promises that the end of the world will come, with specific actions, to the generation he’s speaking to, nearly two thousand years ago.

The Haydock commentary explains,

The NABRE contains these footnotes; the USCCB explicitly rejects the explanations of Tirinus and Vence:

I am tempted to despair and give up reading the Bible, because it appears that either I cannot understand it, or else it is clearly self-contradictory and false. A second problem is that the USCCB do not readily provide an explanation for this apparent problem: Being 2000 years old, surely this obvious problem is known, and if there is an answer, surely they would readily provide it alongside, if they are competent pastors. How is the United States Council of Catholic Bishops incompetent in providing explanations of the Bible?

Rephrasing this problem, it appears God delights in giving us reason and then contradicting it. The best explanations above suppose that God is being deliberately confusing, e.g. using the word ‘generation’ to mean ‘believer’ or ‘race’. Why does God force us to reject reason in favor of blind faith? “Even though reason dictates this understanding, I must discard it and instead embrace an ad hoc explanation because someone else told me to.” It is an example of what some critics say, “Science starts with data and derives a conclusion to fit; religion starts with a conclusion and then tries to make the data fit.”

What am I to think? How am I to understand all this?

I believe that the resolution is very simple: There are two generations now alive on this earth - two and only two: the generation of fallen Adam, and the generation of the second Adam, Jesus Christ. The generation of fallen Adam is dead to God, lacking sanctifying grace. The new generation is a new, “born-again” generation in Christ: this generation now continues to bear witness to Christ, and to live His life among those of the generation of Adam, and will do so until “the close of the age” (Mt 28:20)

Thus His words are true, literally.
34 Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

It is necessary to realize what He means by “generation” - then, there was only one (except for Mary!) now, there are only two.

 

[fisherman_carl]

Some more ICSB quotes:

24:29 sun … moon … stars: Images of cosmic catastrophe underscore the magnitude of Jerusalem’s coming doom. ● Depictions of heavenly chaos are used by the OT prophets to predict the downfall of pagan kingdoms (Is 13:9–10; 34:4; Ezek 32:7–8; Joel 2:10, 31; Amos 8:9). Jesus redirects this language toward Jerusalem: the kingdom of Old Covenant Israel will be devastated for corrupting itself like the pagans and rejecting Jesus.

24:34 this generation: The expression in Greek can mean “this race” or “these contemporaries of mine”. The latter meaning best fits this context, not only because Jesus envisions his initial coming within the lifetime of his first disciples (16:28), but also because he often addresses his unbelieving contemporaries with the same term (11:16), either contrasting them with an earlier generation that responded to God’s message (12:41–42) or implicitly comparing them with the faithless generation of Israel that failed to enter the Promised Land (12:39, 45; 16:4; 17:17; cf. Deut 1:35; 32:5).