A Look at (The Manner of) the Fulfillment of the Prophecies Concerning the Fate of Jerusalem, With Notes on (The Manner of) Interpreting the Prophecies Concerning the Last Days of the World

My God, what a dread and instructive spectacle! What an extraordinary agreement of events with the predictions! What an unforeseeable chance, and yet what precision in the fulfillment! Terrible earthquakes that destroyed whole cities in Bithynia and Campania169; a fearful famine in Rome (in the years 43 and 54), in Greece (in 50), and in Palestine170; a savage plague in Babylonia (in 40) and in Italy171; bloody civil strife in Judea and the regions bordering it172, and then throughout the whole empire after the death of Nero—in a word, all those calamities of which Jesus Christ spoke seem to portend173 something extraordinary for the whole world, and make one look for the fulfillment of one of the great judgments of God. But now the clouds of calamity, which until then had drifted over various places, suddenly rush toward Palestine and gather over Jerusalem—outwardly, it would seem, on account of rebellion against the Caesars, but in truth on account of the Jews’ resistance to the God of their fathers, on account of their rejection of the Messiah. In vain does heaven give a sign to admonish the thoughtless174; in vain do wonders occur in the temple175; in vain do the prophets warn176, kings counsel177, and the sages, and the high priests entreat178; the Jewish people blinded their own eyes so as not to see, hardened their own hearts so as not to understand the heavenly revelations proclaiming the coming of God’s dread judgment179. There began a sorrow which, in the exact words of the eyewitness Josephus, had no equal, and never will. Tens of thousands of Jews, like dumb beasts, were slaughtered even before the war began; the cities of Judea fell one after another into ruin; the land that once flowed with milk and honey became a wilderness. Jerusalem alone still stood. But, my God, what a Jerusalem! Surrounded without by Roman legions, whose fluttering standards, bearing the idolatrous images of the Roman demigods, seemed to salute its destruction; filled within by robber bands of Zealots, Idumeans, and Sicarii, who, calling themselves defenders of the sanctuary, defiled it with crimes unheard-of even in houses of debauchery, put to death without mercy the best of the citizens, cut one another down, and mocked the prophets of the Messiah—and Jehovah Himself!.. Could the abomination of desolation seen by Daniel have been greater than this abomination?.. Thousands of unburied corpses covered the marketplace, the streets, the very Temple… Things which decency forbids naming were eaten, sold for their weight in gold… A mother slaughtered her own infant for food!.. The Roman general himself was seized with horror at the calamities that had befallen the besieged, and swore by his gods that he was innocent of them, having offered peace so many times. At last Jerusalem fell; one of the Roman soldiers, against the strict order of his commander, moved, in the Jewish historian’s own words, by some unseen power, set fire to the Temple… In vain did the conqueror do everything to save this ornament of the East, which in his mind he had marked out to be a monument of his victory: the fire, kindled by heaven, would not go out!.. On the site of a building unmatched in size, wealth, and strength, there remained only heaps of stone and mounds of ash. Of all Jerusalem only three towers remained, as a memorial of its former greatness. A hundred thousand Jews, who had outlived their fatherland, were led into captivity and sold like despised slaves in the marketplaces of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Astonished at the ruinous consequences of his victory, the pagan conqueror, lifting his hands to heaven, humbly confessed himself an instrument of heaven’s wrath, and refused the title «Judaicus»180.

So came the blood of the righteous upon a people who had forsaken God! It came at a time when many of the Jews who had been contemporaries of Jesus Christ had not yet been gathered to their fathers; it came in such a way that not the Jews only, but the pagans themselves saw and confessed the punishing finger of God!

Who could, by natural means, have foreseen and foretold all this as Jesus Christ foresaw and foretold it? No human foresight, no human wisdom, could have said with certainty that the Jews, in less than half a century, would come to such ignorance of their own national weakness as to rise in open war against the Romans, whose very name subdued and held in obedience peoples far more powerful than the Jews! One need only read the speeches of the high priest Ananus and King Agrippa to the Jews to see what utter madness the Jewish revolt against Rome appeared, to anyone possessed of reason and a correct sense of the times. Who, I repeat, could have declared with certainty that an entire nation would venture upon so thoroughly mad, hopeless, and ruinous an undertaking? It is true that Judea had long harbored many minds inflamed with dreams of national independence and a passion for civil strife: such were the followers of Judas the Galilean, the Zealots, the Sicarii, and others; but no one could have imagined that these small, disorderly bands would gain the upper hand over the moderate and peaceable part of the Jews, seize supreme power into their own hands, and become the arbiters of war and peace, of the life and property of their fellow citizens. For war with the Romans to begin, it was necessary that Claudius and Nero should reign in Rome, capable of sending such procurators as Cumanus, Festus, Albinus, and Florus; it was necessary that these monsters, and Florus above all, should by their injustice, plunder, cruelty, and folly drive the Jews utterly past endurance, and force even the most moderate and prudent among them to venture upon anything rather than suffer endlessly. Had there been no Florus, there might, perhaps, have been no war—so Josephus himself thought. How many other causes might have halted this war at its very outset, interrupted it partway through, or kept it from the dreadful outcome in which it ended! Touching on these causes, the Jewish historian more than once marvels at their ineffectiveness, and explains it by the predetermination of heaven. Who, then, could have known this predetermination more than half a century beforehand, and pronounced it aloud so decisively and in such detail, as Jesus Christ did? Not only the time of the event, the manner of the calamities, and the circumstances preceding and following are set out, but even particular details—for instance, that Jerusalem would be surrounded on every side by a rampart, a thing very rarely seen in the sieges of great cities. No: whatever the enemies of Holy Scripture may say about the obscurity of certain prophecies, here they must lay a finger on their lips. Josephus, a witness and participant in the events, in recording the history of the Jewish war, certainly had no intention of distorting the truth in favor of the Christian religion; and yet many pages of his history seem written for the very purpose of testifying to posterity how faithfully Jesus Christ’s prediction was fulfilled among the Jewish people.

Let us look in another direction, let us turn to the apostles and their disciples: what became of them? Once again, exactly what their Teacher had foretold. In the time that passed before the destruction of Jerusalem, they had already come to see over themselves, on the one hand, every kind of persecution, and on the other, every kind of help from on high that had been promised them. Despite their innocence, and the beneficence of their teaching and their deeds, they are persecuted everywhere, tormented as though they were criminals. Paul alone passes through countless tribunals, answers before the Sanhedrin, the Areopagus, Caesar, and marks his own blood as a trail from Arabia to Illyricum, from Antioch to the Pillars of Hercules. Most of the disciples of Jesus Christ have already laid down their lives for their Beloved. Thousands of their followers are preparing to enter upon the dreadful course of persecution now being secretly readied in every part of the Roman Empire. The name of Christian has become a crime among nearly every nation. Betrayal has been tasted even from their own: many have appeared who preach the name of Christ impurely, seeking their own advantage and not what Christ requires (Phil 2:21); false brethren have come to light, corrupting those untried in the faith, minding only earthly things, enemies of the cross of Christ, whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame (Phil 3:19); there have already crept in such wicked men as turned the very grace of God and His mercy toward sinners into an occasion and a pretext for an unclean life, spurning meanwhile all authority, and denying Jesus Christ Himself; through lawlessness the love of many, many has already grown cold (the Epistle of Jude)!

But at that very same time, the other, joyful side of Jesus’s prophecies was being fulfilled among His disciples. The little flock, left in the wilderness among wolves, but kept by Providence, grows, and by its own excellence proves to pagans and Jews alike that a spiritual kingdom over the whole world has been bequeathed to it. Christian communities form with unbelievable speed even among the most unenlightened and savage peoples; the apostles’ preaching visibly reaches every corner of the universe; the victory of the Gospel has already extended even to Caesar’s own household (Phil 4:22). No one can withstand the wisdom that appears again and again on the lips of the Gospel’s preachers whenever they bear witness before judges for the name of Jesus. Having heard Paul, the Roman procurator very nearly becomes a Christian; the Pharisees themselves, carried away by his words, turn from accusers into defenders; an entire Sanhedrin has no answer to give the fishermen who charge it with the murder of the Messiah! Judaism, inclining toward its sunset, aids the advance of Christianity by its own fall. Faithful to their Teacher’s warning, the Christians keep themselves untouched by the civil unrest and wars, leaving in good time a land forsaken by God; the rest save themselves by flight to the hills of Pella.

So faithfully, on this side too, was the prophecy of the God-man fulfilled! Who, forty years before, could have vouched for such a fulfillment? Who could have expected that, in so short a span of time, a handful of the poorest, most obscure Hebrews, untaught in earthly wisdom, would bring about such a revolution throughout the whole world: spread a new faith utterly contrary to men’s prejudices and passions, compel the wise Greek and the Roman to render divine worship to the Crucified One, overthrow idols and set up the cross in their place? The mere thought of such an event in the future would, in the time of Jesus Christ, have seemed something wholly strange and impossible… And yet this impossible thing was foretold, and was fulfilled in actual fact with perfect precision…

But let us turn our gaze further, and see what has come to pass over the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem, which from this time forward become an eternal monument of heaven’s wrath.

Unwarned by the destruction of Jerusalem and their own dispersion throughout the world, the Jews go on dreaming of restoring the walls of their ancestral city. To the general expectation there appear, one after another, according to the prediction of Jesus Christ, false christs and false prophets181, who give signs and promise wonders; the deceived people rise once more against the Romans, straining their last strength; rivers of Jewish blood flow anew, hundreds of thousands more are cast into slavery, but Jerusalem does not rise from its ruins; instead of liberation, it loses even its very name182. A descendant of Abraham, having bought from the pagans permission to shed tears at the graves of his forefathers183, comes to the holy city and sees with horror, in its place, Aelia Capitolina, on whose gates is carved the animal so hateful to the Jews…

But now the very truth of Jesus’s prophecy is, as it were, put to the test. Upon the throne of the Roman Caesars there arises Julian, enemy of Christianity, friend of the Jews, who has sworn, to the shaming of the Christians and their faith, to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem in defiance of Jesus Christ’s prophecy. At the despot’s word, thousands of Jews stream into Palestine from every corner of the world; they begin to dig up the Temple’s foundation, the wealthiest women dig the sacred earth with their own hands, their zeal rises to a pitch of frenzy: all in vain! Out of the ground there suddenly burst a multitude of fiery balls, which drive the workers away184. The same phenomenon, dreadful and unbearable, repeats itself every time the interrupted work resumes, and the builders of the Temple, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, are scattered, bearing witness by their own experience that the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem lie at the disposal not of earthly Caesars, but of the King of Heaven, who has appointed them to bear witness to the glory of His Son…

At last, it would seem, the times of the Gentiles are drawing to an end… Jerusalem becomes the possession of Christian emperors. Now their aim is to renew, to adorn the places hallowed by the earthly life of the God-man. And so they are renewed, adorned: but for how long? Flowers are unfitting to grow on Golgotha; a field of blood ought not to be the dwelling-place of gaiety and quiet: and so, moved by some unknown power, Chosroes185 and Omar come to disturb the ruins of Jerusalem afresh and scatter the stones that had managed to gather together! On the site of the Holy of Holies there appears a new abomination of desolation—the mosque of Muhammad!

Yet another series of astonishing events! Unable to fathom the ways of Providence, the whole Christian West rises up against the Muslim East, fights under the cross for the liberation of Christ’s tomb, seeks to turn into the capital of a new kingdom a city destined to be the place of the world’s mourning. The vanquished crescent withdraws, vanishes; but scarcely half a century passes, and it appears again in its full strength on the site of Solomon’s Temple; the kings and leaders who took upon themselves the guarding of Christ’s tomb flee, never to return; Jerusalem remains liberated only in the song of Tasso!..

New workings of the judgments of Providence in the history of Jerusalem! What could not before be achieved by the combined, extraordinary effort of the Christian powers has, it would seem, become possible and easy for some even singly. And yet? Not one power now so much as thinks of liberating the holy city! Most would be astonished if such a thought were attributed to them! So far, it would seem, have Christians forgotten the cradle of their own religion, even as they have begun to note and honor the birthplaces of philosophers, poets, and actors… One word in some victorious treaty, and the Christian traveler, having crossed the seas, overcome a thousand hardships, entering Jerusalem, would not be forced to wage a fresh struggle with the greed of the Turkish authorities, would not have to buy from Muhammad the right to venerate the tomb of Jesus: and yet no one thinks it, one might say, no one dares even utter the word… Why? Because it is not pleasing to Providence that a land of unbelief, stained with the blood of the Son of God, should enjoy the peace of faith in Him; and so the cross of Jesus, shining everywhere in glory, is on Golgotha silent still; its radiance would be incompatible with the sorrow and desolation that must reign there.

Ages, perhaps millennia, will yet pass over Jerusalem, but the words of Jesus, which doomed the Temple of Jerusalem to desolation, will not pass by unfulfilled. The daughter of Zion will not recover her former beauty until she goes out to meet the Messiah she once rejected, and says: «Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord» (Jn 12:13).

One is seized with dread at the mere thought of how many conditions had to be met for Jesus Christ’s prophecy to be fulfilled over the Jewish people exactly as it has been fulfilled for the past nineteen centuries!..

After this, can one still doubt the fulfillment of the other part of Jesus’s prophecy, concerning the end of the visible world, His glorious coming, and the judgment of the human race? The past stands surety for the future. To turn the beneficial uncertainty of the future into dead calculation, to subject to numerical precision the times and seasons which the Heavenly Father—and most wisely—has kept within His own authority (Acts 1:7), would be to set oneself against the mysteries of Providence, before which even angels stand in awe. Instead of a useless and dangerous inquiry into the time of Jesus’s future second coming, let us rather offer a few observations that may help to remove errors in the understanding of Jesus Christ’s words.

Observing that the Lord’s prophecy of His own future coming is not precisely separated from the prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction, and even seems, as it were, enclosed within it; observing besides that the expressions used to denote the future end of the world (such as the darkening of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, and the rest) sometimes carry, in the ancient prophets, a metaphorical sense (denoting the fall of kingdoms, the destruction of cities)186—some have come to wonder whether this entire prophecy of Christ’s might refer to one and the same subject, the destruction of Jerusalem, and whether what is commonly taken for the second coming of Jesus Christ ought not rather to be regarded as a prophetic, idealized picture of the events accompanying that destruction—that is, the extreme calamities of the besieged, the humiliation and dispersal of the Jewish people, the triumph of Christianity, and so on. To dispel this plausible but in fact false notion, one must remember: (a) that the language of ancient prophetic inspiration is one thing, and Jesus Christ’s present discourse is another. A double-meaning, allegorical manner of speech would have suited Him least of all at this moment, when it was necessary to warn the disciples against errors and misunderstandings concerning future events. Moreover, when one reads the above-mentioned expressions in the ancient prophet, one sees at the same time that he is speaking figuratively; hearing the words of Jesus Christ, one feels quite the opposite; (b) in every other case where Jesus Christ speaks of His coming, that coming is understood as an actual event; it would be strange if only in the present instance, where the historical reality of His expressions is most evident, one were to turn it into a metaphor. In that case one would already have to force the most unnatural sense onto all the parables that follow; and above all, the picture of the universal judgment with which Jesus closed His discourse fits the allegory of Jerusalem’s destruction least of all. Nor, finally, should one forget that in the epistles of the apostles the future end of the world and the Lord’s glorious coming are set forth incontestably, in the literal sense (1 Pet 4:5; 2 Pet 3:10; 1 Thess 4:15–17); why, then, should one turn away, so to speak, without cause from this prophecy in the Gospel, when one will certainly have to meet it again in the apostles?187

A second danger! Reading in St. Matthew that the end of the world and the Lord’s coming must follow at once after the tribulation of those days—that is (as is clear from what precedes), after the calamities that accompanied the fall of Jerusalem—some have again supposed that the God-man here promises His coming, as it were, sooner than it was actually to be, and that there is therefore a certain inexactness and obscurity in His prediction.

But this tempting thought collapses beyond recovery before the force of a few words found in St. Luke. In his Gospel, between the destruction of Jerusalem and the Lord’s coming, there stand whole «times of the Gentiles» (Lk 21:24), during which Jerusalem must remain trodden down by the uncircumcised, and the Jews must remain in bondage to all the nations. That the times of the Gentiles are not brief is clear from the very expression «times», and from the events that must take place within their course. The length of these times is felt still more plainly in the Apostle Paul, who discusses this very subject in his Epistle to the Romans. The blinding of Israel, and consequently its dispersion, must, by the apostle’s teaching, continue until the full number of the Gentiles has come in (Rom 11:25). And such a condition can plainly come to pass only after the passing of many ages. This means that Jesus Christ neither pictured to Himself, nor gave His disciples occasion to picture, the fulfillment of future events sooner than was fitting.

What, then, are we to make of the word «immediately», found in the Gospel of St. Matthew? This is the prophetic «immediately» beneath which whole centuries are often concealed. It may be guessed, moreover, as a comparison of the evangelists with one another shows, that we do not have Jesus Christ’s discourse in the full completeness, word for word, in which it was spoken. It cannot be that so long a conversation was not interrupted, as usual, by questions, remarks, and movements of the disciples188. In the discourse itself there are traces that the course of the speech followed the thread of these questions. At the time, everything was understood, definite, and precise for those who heard it. Now, when that thread has been let go, when the conversation has been turned into a continuous speech, many of the intervals have of necessity vanished, unrelated subjects have been drawn together, and the future has been presented, as though in a single picture, in a contemporary guise. Despite this, even now, whoever knows how to find the true point of view will see the picture resolve into perspective, showing its subjects distinctly and clearly.

A third danger, threatening idle curiosity in the understanding of the Savior’s words, is the perplexity: «How could He, being the Son of God, not know something? How could the Judge of the world not know the time of His own future coming?» (Mk 13:32). Against this stumbling-stone the Arians were broken, and against it the agnostics189 have shattered themselves. But for faith it does not exist!.. For Him who humbled Himself so far as to take on the form of a servant, even to enduring the most shameful of executions, was it hard to humble Himself so far as to be, according to His humanity, without knowledge of the loftiest mystery of Providence, unknown even to angels? The knowledge of this mystery, by its very nature, belonged not to the state of Jesus’s humiliation, but to the state of His glory190. And so, after the Resurrection, when the disciples ask Him about the time of His coming, He does not say: «I do not know it Myself» (for He had already broken the seven seals that sealed the book of destinies (Rev 5:5), and had received from the Father the revelation of all future events (Rev 1:1))—but answers only: «It is not for you to know the times and seasons» (Acts 1:7).

On the contrary, hearing from Jesus Christ’s own lips of His not knowing the mystery of Providence, immediately after those majestic words «heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away» (Mt 24:35), one cannot help but be struck with a holy astonishment at the purity and holiness of Jesus’s soul, which continually shows itself for exactly what it is: it discloses the great and divine, and does not conceal the small and human; it speaks the truth without the least concern for whether its words might produce some unfavorable impression of itself. To say, immediately after «I can do all things», «I do not know this»—for that, a greatness of spirit beyond the human is required.

Yet it is hard to see what is lacking here even for those who love to see in the person of Jesus a majesty more external and, so to speak, sensory, rather than moral and spiritual. The King of heaven and earth, commanding all nature, the Judge of the living and the dead, coming on the clouds accompanied by all the angels, whose words are unchanging, whose rewards are eternal, whose punishments are unending… Can there be a picture more majestic, a glory loftier, a power greater and more striking?

And so did He depict Himself who knew perfectly well that in two days He must die upon the cross!..

Almost at the very time that the Lord was discoursing on the Mount of Olives with His disciples about the end of the world, in Jerusalem, in the courtyard of Caiaphas, an extraordinary, secret gathering of the Sanhedrin was taking place to deliberate on the last days of His own life (Mt 26:3). Since the raising of Lazarus, matters had reached the point that the leaders of the Jewish people had only one of two courses left to choose: to acknowledge, with reverence, the Prophet of Galilee as the Messiah—to which the greater part of the people, and even some members of the Sanhedrin, already inclined—or, setting themselves against Him and His ministry, to take decisive measures to put a stop to the further success of His preaching and His wonders. Caiaphas and his accomplices were now even less capable of choosing the first course than at their first council, on the occasion of Lazarus’s resurrection. After the events of the preceding days—the solemn entry into Jerusalem, the disgrace of all the Jewish sects and even of the members sent by the Sanhedrin itself, and above all after the last, terrible, denunciatory sermon in the Temple, which fell with its whole weight upon the heads of the people’s leaders—the Prophet from Galilee seemed to the chief priests the most dangerous, personal adversary, against whom it was permissible to use every means: law and civil measures, cunning and force. It was in just such a spirit that the secret council of the wicked assembly proceeded. The very place of its meeting showed that everything happening there lay under Caiaphas’s secret direction. Yet had any disciple of Jesus overheard how the deliberations of the leaders of the Jewish people ended just then, he might have thought that they, having somehow learned of the secret discourse of Jesus Christ with His disciples on the Mount of Olives which we have just heard, had resolved to hinder the fulfillment of His prophecy concerning the time of His own death. It was firmly resolved to take His life, and for that purpose to seize Him—but not in two days, as He had told His disciples, but only after the whole eight-day festival had passed (Mt 26:5). To venture on this in the very time of the Passover seemed an extremely dangerous, and therefore reckless, thing to do. It seemed evident that the great multitude of people, gathered from every corner of the world for the feast, would not be silent onlookers at an act of violence against the Raiser of Lazarus, and would not quietly hand Him over to the small guard the Sanhedrin could muster. And to give, at so dangerous a time as the Passover, an occasion for popular unrest—always attended by great danger to the existing authorities, and for which, moreover, they would afterward have to answer strictly to the Roman government—this was an extremity to which Caiaphas could not bring himself, out of sheer hatred for Jesus though he was… The timidity of the Pharisees’ calculations went so far, in this case, that it was judged best not to use open force against Him even after the feast (for in Jerusalem itself there could always be found a good many people ready to repel by force any attempt against so great a Prophet), but to seize Him by cunning, in some secret place, without the people present, at night—though with the intention, still, of trying Him and condemning Him to death by law—whether their own ancestral law, or Roman law, but by law.