Luke 21:20

But when ye see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that her desolation is at hand.

THE SIGN AND WHAT SHALL FOLLOW IT

The sign was to be the encirclement of Jerusalem with hostile armies. This was a sign no one could miss; and when it came, they were to expect utter desolation of the city.

There is absolutely no evidence here that Luke was writing long after the facts, or that he retrospectively included these words in Jesus' prophecy. Such a conceit exists in the critical schools, but it is unfounded in any evidence whatever, and must be written off as totally unacceptable. Note this:

There is nothing in this passage that is not also in Matthew, who mentioned the "armies" that would burn the city (Matthew 22:7), and the "desolation" that would follow (Matthew 24:15); and it is certain that Matthew thus quoted Jesus' words which were spoken forty years prior to their fulfillment. The only word in this verse that is not in Matthew is "encompassed," and such an encompassing is inherent, absolutely, in the fact of the king's "armies" destroying those murderers and burning "their city."

One cannot help being wearied by the type of criticism reviewed here; because, more and more, the inherent dishonesty of such criticisms is apparent. The people who make them cannot be so stupid as to be ignorant of the refutation of their theories. As an editorial from "Christianity Today" expressed it:

When scholarly objections to particular texts are raised, it is proper to meet them with scholarly evidence on the other side. If we then discover, however as frequently happens - that even when we have shown their criticism of a passage to be unfounded, certain critics continue to reject its reliability, we recognize that their objections are based on anti-Biblical presuppositions and must be seen as a kind of faith or (anti-faith) rather than as scholarship and science.

The road that one takes at the beginning of a journey determines the goal he will reach. Starting with the conviction that the Bible is unreliable leads us not merely to mistrust it but to misunderstand it. The prolonged misreading of the evidence ultimately leads to views that are as unreal, abstract, and incommunicable as those of Bultmann and other "modern" theologians. The first need of Christians and the Church today is to start at the beginning, to reaffirm the historic Christian assertion that the Bible is true and trustworthy in the whole and in all its parts.

(January 17,1975)

A case in point is this verse. The allegation of a late date (after the destruction of Jerusalem) for Luke, and the insistence that he here put words in Jesus' mouth which Jesus never spoke is not serious scholarship at all, but prejudice. There is a whole volume of evidence which refutes such prejudice; but the simple affirmation of the sacred author, Luke, that he gave us an account "of all things accurately" (Luke 1:3) is far more than sufficient refutation of it.

Matthew and Mark in the parallels used the words "the abomination of desolation," both of them being Jews; but Luke the Gentile, while using "desolation," selected another word that Jesus used in the discourse, which was "armies." That Jesus did indeed use that word is seen in the fact that when the armies of Rome surrounded the city, all the Christians fled to Pella (see under Luke 21:21).

All of the language Luke used in this verse may be found in the Old Testament, and there is no word or phrase in this whole paragraph which requires one to believe Luke was writing history as a prophecy, an act of dishonesty in itself. Scholars who have spent years of study on the questions raised here affirm that "There is no single trait of the forecast which cannot be documented directly out of the Old Testament.[20] C. H. Dodd was certain that "Luke's reference to Jerusalem being encompassed by armies stands on its own feet, and is not coloured by the event of A.D. 66-70."[21]

We repeat, the critical allegations based on this verse are not scholarship at all, but prejudice, grounded in the a priori bias that there is no such thing as prophecy.

[20] Norval Geldenhuys, op. cit., p. 533.

[21] C. H. Dodd, "The Fall of Jerusalem and the `Abomination of Desolation'," Journal of Roman Studies, 37 (1947), pp. 47-54.