Matthew 24 - Introduction

CHAPTER 24.

THE APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE.

This chapter and its synoptical parallels (Mark 13; Luke 21) present, in many respects, the most difficult problem in the evangelic records. Many questions may be, have been, asked concerning this discourse on things to come. Which of the three versions comes nearest to what Jesus said? Did He say all that is here reported on this occasion, or have we in all the versions, more or less, a combination of words spoken at different times? Were the words here collected, all of them, or even the greater number of them, ever spoken by Jesus at any time; have the evangelists not worked up into the discourse a Jewish, or Jewish-Christian, apocalypse, or given us a composition of their own, consisting of certain logia of the Master, as the nucleus, with additions, modifications, and comments in the light of subsequent events? Finally, what is the didactic significance of the discourse, what did Jesus mean to teach His disciples respecting the themes treated: the Ruin of the Holy City, the Coming of the Son of Man, and the End of the Age, and the connection between these things? A history of opinion on these topics cannot here be given; a confident attempt at answering the questions propounded I am not prepared to make; perhaps a final satisfactory solution of the problem is not attainable. I offer only a few general considerations which may, at least, help readers to assume a right attitude towards the problem, and to bring to the study of the discourse a sympathetic spirit.

1. The time was suitable for some such utterance. The situation was this: Jesus expecting death in a few days; convinced that the moral and religious condition of the Jewish people is hopelessly bad, and that it must ere long end in disaster and ruin; surrounded by friends who are to be, after the decease of their Master, the missionaries of a new faith in a troublous time, when an old world is going down and a new world is coming into being. Here surely is an occasion to provoke the prophetic mood! At such supreme crises prophetic utterances, apocalyptic forecasts, are inevitable. Here they are, whomsoever we have to thank for them. From whom are they more likely to have proceeded than from Him who had such clear insight into the moral forces at work, and into the spiritual phenomenology of the time?

2. The aim of any prophetic discourse Jesus might deliver at this crisis, like that of all true prophecy, would be ethical; not to foretell, like a soothsayer, but to forewarn and forearm the representatives of a new faith, so that they might not lose their heads or their hearts in an evil perplexing time not to gratify curiosity but to fortify against coming trial.

3. Prophetic utterance with such an aim would not need to be exact in statements as to dates and details, but only to be true as to the sequence and general character of events. From all we know of Hebrew prophecy it was to be expected that the prophesying of Jesus would possess only this latter kind of truth, instead of being like a “history of events before they come to pass”. The version of the evangelic apocalypse that least resembles the description of prophecy now quoted from Butler's Analogy (part ii., chap. vii.) will come nearest to the original utterance. This consideration tells in favour of Mt. and Mk.

4. All prophetic or apocalyptic utterances have much in common; phraseology and imagery tending to become stereotyped. The prophetic literature of the O. T. had indeed provided a vocabulary, which by the Christian era had become normative for all speech concerning the future. Hence Jewish, Jewish-Christian, and Pauline utterances of this kind would in many particulars resemble one another, and it might be difficult to decide by mere internal evidence from what circle any particular utterance emanated. But it is not probable that the evangelists would introduce into a professed report of a discourse by Jesus a current apocalypse of known Jewish origin unless they had reason to believe that Jesus had adopted it, or endorsed its forecast of the future (vide Weizsäcker, Untersuchungen über die Evang. Gesch., pp. 126, 551).

5. As we have seen reason to believe that in previous reports of our Lord's Discourses (e.g., of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Mission Discourse, chap. 10) grouping of kindred material irrespective of historical occasion has taken place, so we cannot be surprised if traces of a similar procedure present themselves here. The remark applies especially to the latter part of the chapter, Matthew 24:37-51, which contain logia given by Lk. in other connections (chaps. 12 and 17).