Were the Events of A.D. 70 Significant Enough to Confirm the Fulfillment of the Second Coming?
Were the Events of A.D. 70 Significant Enough to Confirm the Fulfillment of the Second Coming? Below is the 42nd of multiple excerpts from The Parousia , the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell. [In previous excerpts, posted at the Parousia blog (see link above), Russell has painstakingly shown that an imminent, 1st-century Second Coming was a belief central to Christ's own prophecies and to the teachings of the apostles in the New Testament's epistles and the Book of Revelation. [Russell deals with three key questions in this excerpt: (1) Were Christ and the apostles deluded about the timing of the Second Coming and did God permit this to keep Christians in a state of constant vigilance? (2) Was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in A.D. 70 merely a preliminary "type" of coming of Christ, one that awaits an ultimate fulfillment at the end of history, resulting in a cosmic cataclysm? (3) Was the prophesied judgm