Turkel:

Matthew 26:64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62).

Luke 22:69 Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the power of God.

Jesus’s retort to Caiaphas, in light of the primary charge that Jesus threatened the Temple, is of great significance in this context. "As a prophet, Jesus staked his reputation on his prediction of the Temple’s fall within a generation; if and when it fell, he would thereby be vindicated."

Till:
I noted in Part Seven that Turkel always argues from the assumption that the Bible is inerrant, and he is doing it again here. The so-called gospels were written after the fact of both the life of Jesus (if indeed he existed) and the destruction of Jerusalem, so how does Turkel know that Jesus actually predicted the destruction of the temple? He apparently discounts entirely the possibility that the "Olivet discourse" was put into the mouth of Jesus by writers who knew that the temple had been destroyed and wanted their readers to believe that Jesus had accurately prophesied its destruction. Turkel probably believes that every word in the speeches attributed to Jesus in the gospels were actually spoken by him exactly as they were recorded decades after the fact. What contemporary records did the synoptic writers consult to determine that Jesus had actually predicted the fall of the temple? When he can present reasonable evidence that Jesus really made such a prediction, Turkel can then come back and talk about how Jesus was "vindicated" by the destruction of the temple. Until he can produce such evidence, he is doing nothing but engaging in question begging and special pleading in that he is basing his position on an unstated assumption that the Bible is inspired of God and must therefore be true in what it says.

Turkel:
Jesus also promoted himself as the new Temple which would replace the old one, with his predictions that he would raise a new one--his body--in three days.

Till:
My comments above apply to this too. How does Turkel know that Jesus made any such prediction as this? Why, the Bible tells him so; hence, we are seeing more argumentation by question begging and special pleading. When Turkel can present reasonable evidence that the Bible is the "inspired, inerrant word of God," we can then talk about predictions that Jesus allegedly made about the destruction of the temple and his resurrection, for which Turkel has no supporting evidence at all except that biased Christian documents said so. Until then, Turkel’s assertion will carry no more weight than the word of a Mormon who would say that he knows that God has a human body because the Book of Mormon tells him so.

Turkel:
If the Temple did not fall he would be proven a charlatan. But if the Temple did indeed fall, he would be vindicated--

Till:
Turkel is still engaging in question begging and special pleading. What would he do without these logical fallacies to fall back on? Besides that problem is the fact that Turkel’s statement is decidedly not true. Since when did false predictions convince religious followers that the ones who erred in their prophecies were charlatans? History is filled with examples of false prophecies that should have killed the religions in which they were made, but cognitive dissonance has had the power to enable the faithful to rationalize the prophetic failures. In Part Six I cited the example of the Millerite/Russellite predictions that Jesus would return to earth in 1844, but when that prediction failed, the date was pushed forward to 1874 and then to 1875 after that prophecy failed too. Finally, the faithful rationalized the failure by saying that Jesus had actually returned in 1874 but had done so invisibly.

Jesus has been coming soon all of my life, and I was born in 1933. Before the Millerite/Russellite prophecies, there had been predictions that Jesus would return "soon," sometimes on fixed dates. Those prophecies all failed, yet Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists are still with us to this day. Turkel likes to blast Mormons, but they still exist today despite the flagrant failure of a prophecy in September 1832 that Independence, Missouri, would become the New Jerusalem and that the temple would be built there in that generation (Doctrines and Covenants 85:3-5, 31). The failure of the prediction didn’t even come close to convincing the faithful that Smith was a charlatan.

In Turkel’s crusade to peddle preterism, we see the same cognitive dissonance at work. Jesus and New Testament writers predicted that Jesus would return "soon" or "shortly," within the lifetime of the people of his generation. Besides the prediction in the "Olivet discourse" that we have referred to several times, predictions of an imminent return of Jesus were made in several other scriptures.

Matthew 16:27 "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Matthew 10:23 When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

James 5:8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.

1 Peter 4:7 The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers.

1 John 2:18 Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour.

Revelation 3:11 I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown.

Revelation 22:7 "See, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book."

Revelation 22:12 "See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone's work.

Besides texts like these, which spoke of an imminent return of Jesus, there are others that taught that he would return within the lifetime of those to whom New Testament epistles were addressed. The apostle Paul, for example, told the Thessalonians that they had "turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead (1 Thess. 1:9-10), but if Paul had known that Jesus would not return within the lifetimes of those Thessalonians, why would he have taught them to wait for Jesus from heaven? If Paul didn't know that Jesus would not return in the lifetime of his readers, that doesn't speak too well for the gospel that he had received by revelation from Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12).

Later, Paul told these same Thessalonians that some of them would be alive when Jesus returned.

1 Thessalonians 4:13 But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. 16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

Notice the parts of this passage emphasized in bold print. First of all, Paul spoke of "we who are alive" at the coming of Jesus, an expression that would include himself, or is it no longer true that the first person plural pronoun includes the speaker? Diehard dispensationalists try to make soon and near to mean soon and near in the sense in which God reckons one day to be a thousand years and a thousand years one day (2 Peter 3:8), and they try to make the "we" in the passage just quoted to mean something like the "we who are alive whenever Jesus may happen to return," and that wouldn’t necessarily have been Paul and the people of his time. In other words, dispensationalists quibble that soon didn’t mean soon, shortly didn’t mean shortly, near didn’t mean near, and we didn’t mean we. (Ben Witherington, a dispensationalist whom Turkel often cites, has tried to circumvent the problem by saying that Paul didn't necessarily know that Jesus would return in his lifetime but only understood that it was possible that he could return that soon [Jesus, Paul and the End of the World, p. 24], but, again, if Paul didn't know that Jesus would not return during his lifetime, that doesn't say much for the gospel that Paul had received by revelation from Jesus Christ.) Preterists, on the other hand, admit that soon and near meant what they generally mean except that they were all figurative in meaning. Jesus did come soon, but it was a figurative coming. Every eye, including those who pierced him (Matt. 24:30; Rev. 1:7), did "see" him, but he was seen only figuratively. Shades of Millerite/Russellite ducking and dodging! Detailed refutations of these quibbles can be found in Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

Both groups (the dispensationalist and the preterist) have to stretch imagination to the limits to present their "explanations" of the second-coming prophecy failures, but the text in 1 Thessalonians puts an insurmountable obstacle in their way. Paul was trying to comfort those who were grieving over friends and relatives who had died, so he told them not to worry, because when Jesus returned, he was going to bring with him those friends and relatives who had died (vs:13-14). He was telling them that comfort from their sorrow and grief was coming soon, but how much consolation would these people have derived from being told that their friends were dead and would remain dead until some distant time in the future when they too would be dead? Such an interpretation is both strained and nonsensical. Equally nonsensical is the preterist figurative spin, which makes the coming of Jesus in AD 70 a purely unseen regional event symbolized by the destruction of the temple, which the Thessalonians living 500 miles away, as the crow would fly over the sea, would have been unaware of. (A detailed explication of this problem can be found in Part Two and Part Four). The preterist spin, in other words, would have Paul telling the Thessalonians that they had turned from idols to the living true God and to wait for the coming of his son from heaven, which coming they would be unaware of when it happened because they were living too far away to see the regional events of AD 70 that would figuratively represent the coming of Jesus.

These nonsensical interpretations are also inconsistent with another passage where Paul was offering assurances to those who had doubts about the resurrection.

1 Corinthians 15:51 Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

There is that pesky "we" again. It’s strange how Paul spoke of what "we" would experience when as an inspired apostle who had received his gospel by revelation from Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12), he should have known that "we" would not be alive at the coming of Jesus, and so "we" would not be "changed" in the twinkling of an eye and caught up in the air to meet Jesus and forever be with him.

Turkel:
[But if the Temple did indeed fall, he would be vindicated--] just like Daniel's "Son of Man" which [sic] he claimed to be.

Till:
Jesus claimed to be Daniel’s son of man? Just where did he claim that? According to the "gospels," Jesus appropriated the Semitic expression "son of man" and applied it to himself, but, as I showed in Part Seven, this was just an expression that meant "human being," and it was so used many times in the Old Testament, but I know of no place where Jesus had ever said that he was Daniel’s son of man. Visitors to his website must read Turkel’s articles with a wary eye, because he is not above distorting, misrepresenting, and outright falsifying what the Bible says to suit his purposes.

Turkel:
In saying he will ride the clouds, Jesus is not saying, as Wright wryly notes, that Caiaphas would one say [sic] walk by a window, look outside, and see Jesus popping a wheelie on a cumulus. Rather Jesus is saying, "You will see me vindicated; you will see my predictions come true."

Till:
Oh, really? Jesus wanted Caiaphas to know that he would be vindicated when the temple was destroyed, but instead of just saying, "When the temple is destroyed, I will be vindicated," he said, "You will see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven," and expected his audience to understand that the coming in the clouds meant the destruction of the temple. Folks, this is the kind of nonsense that preterists have to resort to in order to find their invisible coming of Jesus in AD 70, and their invisible coming is just as unlikely as the Millerite/Russellite invisible comings of the 19th century.

Turkel:
The "coming"--as noted, using the word erchomai, which specifies neither destination nor direction--

Till:
I demolished Turkel’s erchomai quibble in Part Four, so there is no need for me to rehash my rebuttal here. Those who click this link will see that erchomai and parousia were used interchangeable by Matthew and other New Testament writers; hence, Turkel's attempt to assign some special meaning to the word erchomai in the "Olivet discourse" is without merit. The link immediately above will show that even "Matthew" used the word interchangeably in the very chapter (24) on which Turkel is trying to base his preterist beliefs.

Turkel:
[The "coming"--as noted, using the word erchomai, which specifies neither destination nor direction--] alludes to the "going" of the Daniel 7 Son of Man from earth to heaven to be enthroned.

Till:
In Part Seven I showed that the "son of man" in Daniel 7:13 was the nation of Israel and not "Christ" as Turkel has asserted without even trying to prove, and then later in the same article, I showed compelling reasons why the coming in the clouds should be interpreted to mean that after the "Ancient of Days" had judged on earth and destroyed the fourth beast, the nation of Israel would appear before the "Ancient of Days" to receive dominion, glory, and a kingdom. Until Turkel can show--show, not just assert--that my exegesis of the "son of man" vision is incorrect, his assertions about the son of man’s being "Christ" will stand seriously impeached.

Turkel:
Caipahas (or more likely, the collective assembled for the trial; as well as the "tribes of the earth"--Matthew uses "tribes" elsewhere only of Israel [19:18],

Till:
Actually, the word tribes was used in Matthew 19:28 rather than 19:18, but this is a rather minor point compared to Turkel’s duplicity in saying that the word tribes was used here in reference to only the tribes of Israel. Turkel cited the usage rather than quoting it, because even he knew that if he quoted it, his readers would have seen just how deceptive his citations can be. Let's take a look at the complete verse.

Matthew 19:28 Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

It’s hard to believe that even Turkel could be so duplicitous, but here is the evidence right in front of us. To argue that "all of the tribes of the earth," who would mourn over Jesus at his coming, meant only the tribes of Israel, Turkel cited the text just quoted as an example of where tribes was used in the New Testament to mean just the tribes of Israel, but he didn’t bother to tell his readers that they can know that the word had this limited meaning because it was qualified with the prepositional phrase "of Israel." Such a comment of his would be as idiotic as saying that we can know that the word people in a statement about "the people of France" meant only the people of France and not all people everywhere.

I will say again that visitors to Turkel’s website should read his articles with a wary eye, because he will distort and misrepresent his sources in order to make them friendly to his doctrinal position.

Turkel:
[Caipahas (or more likely, the collective assembled for the trial; as well as the "tribes of the earth"--Matthew uses "tribes" elsewhere only of Israel (19:18),] and the word is used in the Septuagint to refer to them;

Till:
Yes, the Septuagint used the Greek word phule in reference to the tribes of Israel, and it used the same word to refer to "tribes" that were not the tribes of Israel. The meaning of the word was determined by contexts, as the examples below from Brenton's translation clearly show.

Genesis 12:3 And I will bless those that bless thee [Abraham], and curse those that curse thee, and in thee shall all the tribes of the earth [phulai tes ges] be blessed.

Isaiah 19:13 The princes of Tanis have failed, and the princes of Memphis are lifted up with pride, and they shall cause Egypt to wander by tribes [phulas].

Ezekiel 20:32 And it shall be as ye say, We will be as the nations and as the tribes of the earth [phulai tes ges], to worship stocks and stones.

Notice that there are clear contextual markers here to show how the word tribes was used. The verse in Genesis qualifies the word tribes [phulai] with the prepositional phrase "of the earth" to show the extent of its meaning. The text in Isaiah clearly identified Egypt as the place where its "tribes" [phulas] would wander, so this would not have been the tribes of Israel. The example in Ezekiel used the prepositional phrase "of the earth" to identify what tribes were meant, and since the text was addressing "the house of Israel" (v:20), the "we" would have been Israelites, so if "we" were to become as "the tribes of the earth," those tribes would not have been Israelites. Context, context--the context will always determine the meaning of words, and the contexts of the New Testament passages that Turkel is trying to distort to make "all the tribes of the earth" mean only the tribes of Israel do not support his quibble. In Part Eight of "Humpty Dumpty Takes Another Fall," I examined in much more detail the usage of the word tribes in both the Old and New Testaments to show that Turkel does not have the contextual evidence he needs to limit tribes in Matthew 24:30 to the tribes of Israel. Anyone who reads the section just linked to will clearly see that Turkel is shamelessly ignoring the contexts of the passages he cited in proof of his assertion.

Turkel:
[Caipahas (or more likely, the collective assembled for the trial; as well as the "tribes of the earth"--Matthew uses "tribes" elsewhere only of Israel (19:18 [sic]), and the word is used in the Septuagint to refer to them] and "earth" is ge, or land, can mean a limited area or the entire globe;

Till:
In Part Two of "Humpty Dumpty Takes Another Fall," I replied in detail to Turkel’s unsupported assertion that ge in Matthew 24:30 meant "land," i. e., the land of Israel, and not the whole earth. I didn’t just reply to this assertion, I demolished it by showing that whenever ge meant just a limited region, there were always clear linguistic markers--usually restricting prepositional phrases like "of Israel" or "of Egypt" or "of Judah" or "of Sodom," etc. All I need to do here is recycle the list of such examples that I quoted in my reply linked to above.

Matthew 11:24 But I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for the land [ge] of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.

John 3:22 After these things Jesus and His disciples came into the land of gen] of Judea, [literally "the Judean land"] and there He remained with them and baptized.

Hebrew 8:8-9 Because finding fault with them, He says: "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land [ges] of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the LORD."

Matthew 14:34 When they had crossed over, they came to the land [gen] of Gennesaret.

Acts 13:17-19 The God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land [ge] of Egypt, and with an uplifted arm He brought them out of it. Now for a time of about forty years He put up with their ways in the wilderness. And when He had destroyed seven nations in the land [ge] of Canaan, He distributed their land [ge] to them by allotment.

As I have repeatedly said in my exchanges with Turkel, when New Testament writers used the word ge in its limited sense of "land," that meaning was made clear by contextual markers like those emphasized in the examples above. Likewise, when the word ge was used to mean the entire earth, linguistic markers in the contexts make that meaning very clear, as the examples from the book of Matthew below show.

Matthew 5:18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth [ge] pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.

Matthew 5:34-35 But I say to you, do not swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth [ge], for it is His footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.

Matthew 6:9-10 In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth [ges] as it is in heaven.

Matthew 6:19-20 "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth [ges], where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal."

Matthew 9:4-6 But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, "Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Arise and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth [ges] to forgive sins"--then He said to the paralytic, "Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house."

Matthew 11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth [ges], that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes."

You never know how Turkel will interpret biblical texts when his personal beliefs are in jeopardy, but surely even he will admit that ge and its derivatives in the passages just quoted were intended to mean the earth in general. Since Matthew 24:30 does not say that "all the tribes of the land [ge] of Israel or Judah" will mourn over Jesus at his coming but said that "all the tribes of the earth [ge, unrestricted]" would mourn over him, there is no reason at all except his pet doctrine for Turkel to think that Jesus was saying that only the tribes of the land of Israel would mourn over him. This is a good example of how Turkel can find biblical support for his preterist beliefs only by forcing meanings into his proof texts that the writers never intended.

Turkel:
in context, and in the light of the use of "tribes..." it most likely means Jerusalem or Judaea only) will see the rise of the Christian movement "from now on" or "hereafter" in the KJV), followed by the destruction of Jerusalem just as Jesus predicted-

Till:
Well, by quoting from my previous replies to this assertion, I showed that there was nothing in the usage of tribes in Matthew 24:30 to support Turkel’s assertion that it meant only the tribes of Israel. To the contrary, the unrestricted usages of "tribes of the earth" in this verse is a clear indication that it meant exactly what it said, i. e., all the tribes of the entire earth would see Jesus coming and mourn over him. Why don’t we just look at every New Testament passage where tribes was used and let the readers decide for themselves if there is any merit to Turkel’s quibble? I will classify them according to probable meaning, so the first list will contain those where the context clearly indictes that the word was being used in reference to the tribes of Israel.

Matthew 19:28 Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Luke 22:31 (A)nd I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom, 30 so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Acts 26:6 And now I [Paul] stand here on trial on account of my hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors, 7 a promise that our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship day and night.

James 1:1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion:

Revelation 22:12 It [the new Jerusalem] has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites….

Although the quotation from James is probably a figurative usage, the term "twelve tribes of the dispersion" was referring to the twelve tribes of Israel, so in all of these texts, we are able to see that the context, usually containing the restrictive phrase "of Israel" or the numerical modifier "twelve" clearly identified the word tribes as having reference to the tribes of Israel. All other uses of tribes in the New Testament contained no qualifying or restrictive markers, but the contexts show that the word had reference to tribes of the earth in general. Since Matthew 24:30, which has already been quoted or cited several times, is the center of the controversy, I will save it until last and then compare it to the other passages where tribes was used unrestrictively.

Revelation 1:7 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen.

Revelation 7:9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 12:7 When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, 8 and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. 9 For three and a half days members of the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb; 10 and the inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and celebrate and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to the inhabitants of the earth.

Either the unrestricted usage of tribes or contextual emphases like "every nation" or "all tribes and peoples or languages" will show any reasonable person that tribes was used in these passages in its general rather than specific, restricted sense. Turkel and his preterist cohorts, of course, will argue that even though it was unrestricted, tribes in Revelation 1:7 meant just the twelve tribes of Israel, but they have no sensible explanation for why New Testament writers used restrictive or qualifying phrases like "of Israel" when they undeniably meant for the word tribes to refer to only the tribes of Israel, but failed to so qualify the word in passages like Matthew 24:30 and Revelation 1:7, where the meaning of the word would have been so crucial to understanding that Jesus did indeed return during the lifetime of his generation. If the "Holy Spirit" had inspired his chosen writers to restrict tribes in those passages, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

The same problem applies to New Testament usage of the word ge. The word could mean both the entire earth or a limited area of land, but, as I showed above, when it was used in the latter sense, New Testament writers used either restrictive phrases like "of Egypt" or "of Judah" or else clear contextual markers to indicate that the word was being used in the limited sense of "land." Unfortunately for Turkel and his preterist cohorts, no restrictive markers were used with either tribes or earth in the two passages most crucial to their attempts to make them references to AD 70. Here are those two passages just as they appear in the New Testament.

Matthew 24:30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory.

Revelation 1:7 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.

Now here is the way that Turkel and his preterist cohorts wish that these verses read.

Matthew 24: 30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the ge [land] of Israel will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory.

Revelation 1:7 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the ge [land] of Israel will wail.

Any reasonable person can see that preterism forces a strained interpretation on these verses that is so unlikely that nothing more needs to be said about them. Jesus clearly prophesied that when he returned, it would be an event that would be seen worldwide.

Turkel:
([Caipahas (or more likely, the collective assembled for the trial; as well as the "tribes of the earth"--Matthew uses "tribes" elsewhere only of Israel (19:18), and the word is used in the Septuagint to refer to them] and "earth" is ge, or land, can mean a limited area or the entire globe; in context and in the light of the use of "tribes..." it most likely means Jerusalem or Judaea only)[sic] will see the rise of the Christian movement "from now on" or "hereafter" in the KJV), followed by the destruction of Jerusalem just as Jesus predicted] as well as the allusion to Zech 12:10 ["And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him"]... thus proving that he was and is the true Messiah, "the one in and through whom the covenant god is acting to set up his kingdom."

Till:
This is more recycled flapdoodle that I have already dismantled. In Part Three of my Humpty Dumpty series, I replied in detail to Turkel's distortion of Zechariah 12:10, but, of course, that doesn't keep him from recycling it. The link above will take readers to the section that analyzed this text in detail, but I am going to quote here the part where I clearly showed that Zechariah 12:10 offers no help to the preterist position.

As for his allusion to Zechariah 12:10, he [Turkel] made no attempt at all to explain himself, so I guess I will have to step in and explain what he meant. His citation of Zechariah's reference to those who looked upon "me whom they have pierced" is an attempt to make this a reference to the same ones that the writer of Revelation referred to in saying, "Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him" (Rev. 1:7), but anyone who doesn't have a doctrinal axe to grind should be able to read Zechariah and see that he was not referring to first-century events that preterists see as the fulfillment of his prophecies in chapters 12-14.

Zechariah was a postexilic prophet, who began his prophetic rantings toward the end of the sixth century BC. The context of chapter 12 shows that this could not have had reference to any events that happened either at the time that Jesus was "pierced" or at the time the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. To see this, all that one needs to do is read Turkel's favorite verse in its context, which the following analysis will lead up to.

Zechariah 12:1 "Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of drunkenness to all the surrounding peoples, when they lay siege against Judah and Jerusalem."

Here is an early hint that this text cannot be applied to first century AD events. Jerusalem was to be surrounded by peoples, and they would lay siege to Judah and Jerusalem. Turkel and his preterist friends, however, won't let a problem like this bother them. They have a solution. You see, it was all figurative. Any biblical problem can be solved by that one magical word--figurative.

3 "And it shall happen in that day that I will make Jerusalem a very heavy stone for all peoples; all who would heave it away will surely be cut in pieces, though all nations of the earth are gathered against it."

Neither at the time that Jesus was "pierced" nor at the time the Romans destroyed Jerusalem did Yahweh "cut into pieces" all the nations of the earth. Indeed, all nations of the earth were not gathered against it, and the army of the empire [Rome] that was gathered against Jerusalem prevailed and destroyed it. The Roman empire was certainly not "cut in pieces" in AD 70.

But is Turkel worried? Not in the least, because it was all... That's right. It was all figurative.

4 "In that day," says Yahweh, "I will strike every horse with confusion, and its rider with madness; I will open My eyes on the house of Judah, and will strike every horse of the peoples with blindness."

When did this happen? This prophecy was predicting victory for Judah against the nations gathered against it. That didn't happen when Jesus was "pierced," and it didn't happen when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. But, if you can believe it, the prophet was just speaking allegorically. You see, the house of Judah here represented Christianity, so at the time when Jerusalem was destroyed, God opened his eyes on the church.

Why are you nonpreterists so dumb that you can't see something this obvious?

5 "And the governors of Judah shall say in their heart, 'The inhabitants of Jerusalem are my strength in Yahweh of hosts, their God.' 6 In that day I will make the governors of Judah like a firepan in the woodpile, and like a fiery torch in the sheaves; they shall devour all the surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the left, but Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place--Jerusalem."

What governors of Judah? Was this a reference to Pilate? Was it a reference to the procurator over Judah when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem? Can't those who try to make this a prophecy of first-century AD events see that this was a prophecy of victory, when Judah would "devour" all the peoples who came against it? Nothing like this happened when Jesus was "pierced," and nothing like it happened when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. I'll give Turkel a hint here. The Romans won; the Jews lost. If this was a prophecy of first-century AD events, then it obviously failed.

But no sweat! It was all allegorical. How do I know? Well, Turkel and his preterist allies say that it is. What else do you want? When Humpty Dumpty says that a text means thus and so, that settles it.

7 "Yahweh will save the tents of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah. 8 In that day Yahweh will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of Yahweh before them. 9 It shall be in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem."

Uh, when did this happen? Did Yahweh save the tents of Judah when Jesus was "pierced"? Did Yahweh defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem when the Romans destroyed it? Did Yahweh destroy all the nations that came against Jerusalem? Here I was, thinking all along that Jerusalem lost the battle.

Silly me!

But, of course, I'm too dumb to see that it was all allegorical. The tents of Judah were the church, which God "saved" when Jerusalem was being destroyed. God defended it and ensured its survival. You people who can't read this text and see this should be ashamed of yourselves.

10 "And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication;"

Was the "piercing" of Jesus "the Spirit of grace and supplication" that Yahweh poured on the house of David? Was the destruction of Jerusalem a pouring out of "the Spirit of grace and supplication"?

Yes, it was, because... that's right. It was all allegorical.

"then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn."

Here is a fragment of a verse that prophecy-fulfillment buffs lift out of context and try to make it applicable to Jesus, but my analysis of the context above shows that this "prophecy" could not have been referring to the destruction of Jerusalem, unless one wants to take complete leave of his senses and make the prophecy allegorical in order to preserve an emotionally important belief.

Oh, yes, by the way, Turkel's quotation from his original article, which I am now replying to in this section, brought up the Septuagint. I wonder if he is aware that the Septuagint version of Zechariah 12:10 says, "(A)nd they shall look upon me, because they have mocked me, and they shall make lamentation for him, as for a beloved friend, and they shall grieve intensely, as for a first-born son."

The unitalicized words [friend and son] were not in the Septuagint text but were supplied by Brenton in the same way that the KJV put nontextual words in italics. The Septuagint predates the earliest Masoretic copy of Zechariah by several centuries, so it is entirely possible, or even likely, that the Hebrew text that the Septuagint translators had before them did not even refer to someone who had been "pierced" but instead to someone who had been mocked. Hence, it is likely that Turkel--er, DeMar--has built his argument on a corruption of an earlier reading of Zechariah 12:10.

As I proceed to pick Turkel's arguments apart, point by point, we will see that his argument about the meaning of ge [earth] and phule[tribe] falls apart. We will get to that part rather quickly now.

I have already linked readers to and quoted sections of Part Three that rebutted Turkel's spin on the usage of earth and tribe in the Bible, so there is no need to rehash any more of my rebuttals of Turkel's misapplications of these words.

Turkel:
Jesus also speaks, in all three versions, of being at the right hand of power-alluding all through again to Daniel 7 and the enthronement of the Son of Man.

Till:
I in this section of Part Seven I showed that Daniel 7:13 was referring to the triumph of the nation of Israel over its enemies and not to Jesus; hence, Turkel is still arguing from his false, unsupported assertion that Jesus was Daniel’s "son of man." There is no need for me to smash this assertion again with a sledgehammer.

Turkel:
Hearken now back to the disciples’ original question. They want to know, in essence, when Jesus will assume the kingship.

Till:
No, they actually asked Jesus two questions: (1) When will the temple be destroyed? (2) What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the world.?

Matthew 24:3 3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, (1) when shall these things be [not one stone of the temple being left upon another]? (2) and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

The second, compound question indicates that the disciples understood that the coming of Jesus would also be the end of the world. I used the KJV immediately above, because this is the version Turkel has been hyping throughout his article. He will now argue that world is an incorrect translation, because the disciples were actually asking what would be the end of the "age," i. e., the Jewish age, but I have already shown that aion was often used in Greek to mean world.

As for Turkel’s claim that the disciples were "in essence" asking when Jesus would "assume the kingship," that dog won’t hunt either, because the New Testament clearly teaches that Jesus assumed the kingship upon his ascension into heaven (Acts 1:9-10), and New Testament writers made this belief too clear to misunderstood. In Part Eight of my Humpty Dumpty series, I quoted several New Testament passages, presumably written long before AD 70, that clearly taught that Jesus was made king of kings and Lord of Lords when he was seated at the right hand of God after his ascension. A click of this link will take readers to an overkill of evidence that New Testament writers believed that Jesus had begun his reign long before Turkel claims that it began with the destruction of Jerusalem, so I will quote here just one passage that shoots Turkel's preterist illusions full of more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese has.

Ephesians 5:15 Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16 do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, 18 the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power 20 which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. 22 And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, 23 which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

If this doesn't describe the reign of an absolute monarch, then maybe Turkel could explain to us how "Christ" could have been seated "far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named," not just in this age but also in the ages to come, but was not yet reigning as king. How much more power and authority did "Christ" receive in AD 70 beyond what was described here?

New Testament writers and characters, presumably writing or speaking before AD 70, spoke of Jesus being at the right hand of God.

In his sermon on the day of Pentecost, Peter said that Jesus had been exalted at the right hand of God (Acts 2:33.

As his accusers prepared to stone him to death, Stephen, "full of the spirit," looked up and saw "Jesus standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55-56).

"Paul," who died before AD 70, said that "Christ" was seated "on the right hand of God" (Col. 3:1)

The author of Hebrews said that Jesus had endured shame and had "sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (12:2).

New Testament writers and characters clearly believed that Jesus had begun his reign when he ascended "far above all the heavens so that he might fill all things" (Eph. 4:10). Paul said that Jesus would reign until he had put all things under his feet and destroyed his last enemy, death (1 Cor. 15:25-26). Readers should keep these texts in mind, because we will see later that Turkel had the gall to cite some of them as evidence that Jesus is now reigning, as if he wasn't reigning when they were written before AD 70.

Turkel
His parousia, his enthronement as king, would be "consequent upon the dethronement of the present powers that were occupying the holy city" [346].

Till:
As I just showed, the New Testament teaches that Jesus was "enthroned" after his ascension, which happened [snicker,snicker] long before AD 70.

Turkel:
In the Jewish mindset, the establishment of a Temple was intertwined with kingship. Solomon built the first temple;

Till:
But both Saul and David had reigned as kings almost a century before the temple was built.

Turkel:
Jesus replies by indicating that "the Temple’s destruction would constitute his own vindication’ [Wr.JVG, 342].

Till:
And just where did Jesus "reply" this? The fact that N. T. Wright said this doesn’t prove anything except that Wright was also desperate to find proof of a pet doctrine. If Jesus ever indicated in any way that the destruction of the temple would "constitute his own vindication," let Turkel show us where he said this.

Turkel:
Herod rebuilt the temple as a sign of his kingship;

Till:
Herod had been king for 27 years before he built the temple. His reign was characterized by many building projects. He constructed fortresses and rebuilt or remodeled cities like Samaria, Jerusalem, and Jericho, and he built impressive theaters and stadiums. The latter were offensive to his Jewish subjects, so he reconstructed the temple in Jerusalem apparently in an attempt to win the favor of his subjects. Turkel is swallowing a camel when he tries to associate the recontruction of the temple with Herod's desire to leave a "sign of his kingship."

Turkel:
Bar Kochba showed intentions to rebuild the temple in the 130s AD as part of his pseudo-messianic program.

Till:
As a Jewish leader, why wouldn't he have wanted to rebuild the temple in order to have a unifying symbol to rally his followers around? No matter how dictatorial rulers may be, most want to avoid civil unrest. By the way, readers who want to see evidence that the destruction of Jerusalem during Bar Kokhba's rebellion in the AD 130s would make a better example of preterist fulfillment claims than the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 should begin at this section of Part Two in this final series and read the rest of the article.

Turkel:
In the new era, the temple of God is now the individual believer (1 Cor. 3:16-17, 6:19)

Till:
And individual believers existed before the destruction of the temple in AD 70, didn't they?

Turkel:
and the body of believers (Eph. 2:21).

Till:
Is there a point here? After all, the body of believers also existed before AD 70. Why was the destruction of the temple necessary before the "advent of Christ" could begin? Well, in reality, New Testament writers didn't think this was necessary, because, as I showed above, they taught that Jesus began his "reign" after his ascension to the "right hand of God."

Turkel:
The Spirit indwells in the believer, where the Shekinah once dwelt in the Jewish temple.

Till:
Yeah, right. I would love to see Turkel prove, without resorting to question begging or special pleading, that there is any such entity as this "Spirit," which he says "indwells in the believer." I challenged him above to show us--show us, not just tell us--that it is at all possible for immaterial entities like his "indwelling spirit" even to exist independently of matter. Let's see if he will attempt it.

Turkel:
Christ now sits at the right hand of the father (Heb. 12:22, Eph. 1:20, Acts 2:33, etc.)

Till:
Yes, and as I have pointed out all along, these texts clearly taught that "Christ" was sitting at the right hand of God long before AD 70. His "reign" then, according to New Testament writers, didn't begin with the destruction of the temple in AD 70. It began after he ascended into [snicker, snicker] heaven to sit at the right hand of God. Turkel and his preterist cohorts, however, want us to believe that the advent or reign of Christ depended on the destruction of the temple. We will see soon how Turkel tries to dodge what the passages he just quoted clearly taught about the reign of "Christ."

Turkel:
and rules his kingdom.

Till:
Turkel's own texts cited above show that New Testament writers thought that "Christ" was "rul[ing] his kingdom" well before AD 70, but we will quickly see that Turkel isn't going to let little problems like this get in the way of his believing what he wants to believe.

Turkel:
Paul sees Christ reigning now,

Till:
And Paul wrote his epistles well before AD 70, so Paul saw "Christ" reigning before Turkel and his preterist cohorts say that his "advent" began.

Turkel:
though all is not yet accomplished in that reign (1 Cor. 15:25).

Till:
See the game Turkel plays? When the clear reading of biblical texts get in the way of what he wants to believe, he just waves them aside with the word figurative. Now when he encounters a text that clearly says that "Christ" was reigning well before Turkel's beloved date of AD 70, he says, "Well, yes, he was reigning, but he hadn't yet accomplished everything in his reign."

To show how flimsy Turkel's quibble is here, let's just look at the verse in context.

1 Corinthians 15:19 If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21 For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; 22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24 Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

So Paul, like other New Testament writers and characters, understood that Jesus was reigning well before AD 70, and here Paul was simply stating how long that reign would last: it would last until Jesus had destroyed every ruler, every authority, every power, put all of his enemies under his feet, and destroyed his last enemy, death, as if an omniscient, omnipotent deity would need time to accomplish all of this instead of just doing it all in the blink of an omnipotent eye. At any rate, Paul, writing long before AD 70, said that "Christ" was reigning then and would continue to reign until he had destroyed death.

Turkel tried to wiggle around Paul's obvious belief that "Christ" was reigning when the first epistle to the Corinthians was written by quibbling that "Christ" at that time had not yet accomplished "all" in that reign, but did he accomplish "all" in AD 70? Of course, he didn't, because he did not "destroy every every ruler and every authority and power" and "put all enemies under his feet" at that time, and certainly he didn't destroy death then. Why then should anyone think that the events in AD 70 had brought the "reign of Christ" any closer to "accomplishing all" than it had when Paul was writing to the Corinthians? If the "advent of Christ" couldn't begin until he had accomplished "all," as Turkel certainly indicated above, then that advent still hasn't begun, because Christ hasn't yet accomplished the destruction of death, not even to mention "every ruler and every authority and power." Turkel likes to talk about "bottom lines," so let's give him a bottom line to bang his head against before he calls an ambulance. The bottom line is that when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul said that "Christ" was reigning and would reign until he had brought about the destruction of every ruler, authority, and power, had put all enemies under his feet, and had destroyed death, and nothing happened in AD 70 that brought the accomplishment of these goals any closer, so in Paul's view, the reign of "Christ" wasn't dependent on the accomplishment of all his goals.

Now look at how Turkel tried to wiggle his way around Paul's dating the reign of "Christ" before AD 70.

Turkel:
This is not to say that, as pantelists maintain,

Till:
Well, I must be an apantelist, because I don't believe that any biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, and I have a standing challenge for those who believe in the fantasy of biblical prophecy fulfillment to prove one verifiable example of a prophecy that was fulfilled. Don't expect Turkel to rise to the occasion. I learned early on in my correspondence with him that he shies away from trying to defend biblical prophecies with the possible exception of his obsession with trying to prove that the prophecies of Jesus's "coming" were "figuratively" fulfilled, and we have all seen the miserable job he has done in trying to defend that claim.

Turkel:
[This is not to say that, as pantelists maintain,] the resurrection has occurred already and Christ is through with the world. That can’t be read from the Scriptures.

Till:
Well, I am sure that pantelists who believe that the resurrection has occurred already would have no more trouble "read[ing] that from the scriptures" as Turkel has reading into the Bible what he wants to see in it. Deluded minds who want to believe that the Bible is the "inspired, inerrant word of God" have been reading into the Bible what they want to see it in for as long as the Bible has existed.

Turkel:
But it is clear that with the events of 70, the reign of Christ [was] confirmed in a very unique way.

Till:
That is "clear"? If it is so clear, why aren't all Christians preterists instead of just a minority of them? Does anyone see here how Turkel in any way explained, or even tried to explain, how the events of AD 70 confirmed the reign of Christ in a unique way? He made no attempt at all. He just asserted it and went on his merry way. That is his way of "proving" his doctrinal beliefs. Apparently, he has never heard of the logical fallacy of argumentation by assertion.

Just to bug Turkel, I will point out that if something is "unique," it is unparalleled or without equal, so modifying it with words like very, somewhat, quite, etc. is considered substandard usage, but we see substandardisms in Turkel's articles all of the time, don't we?

Turkel:
This leaves a couple of loose ends to tie up.

Till:
Turkel has more ends hanging loose than he will ever be able to tie together.

Turkel:
Matthew does say as well that a "sign" shall be seen, seemingly in heaven; what of that? DeMar [165] explains that it is not the sign which is in heaven, but the Son of Man; thus what is seen is a sign which is not given any location.

Till:
Oh, well, if DeMar thinks this, then it must be right. After all, he wouldn't allow his preterist beliefs to influence his interpretation of the verse, would he? Nah, we can all be sure that he is as objective as anyone could possibly be.

DeMar says that this sign is just "seemingly in heaven," but not really in heaven, because the sign isn't really a sign but the son of man. The son of man is a sign that was not given any location. DeMar said it, so you can hang your hat on it, but I think I will look at the verse anyway.

Matthew 24:29 "Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. 30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory.

What's that? The "sign of the son of man will appear in heaven? Okay, let's make the son of man the sign. If we do, we, with the exclusion of Turkel, of course, still have to admit that the son of man was to be seen in heaven, and he would be seen coming on the clouds of heaven. If that doesn't locate the sign in heaven, then I'd like to know how it could be made any clearer that the sign would be seen in heaven.

Turkel;
The word here is semeion, used by John often to refer to Jesus’ miracles;

Till:
So now Turkel is playing his you-poor-dopes-if-you-only-knew-the-Greek-you-wouldn't-be-so- stupid game, as if he is has any qualifications at all to speak about nuances in Greek. As for how "often" John used this word in reference to the miracles of Jesus, Turkel is apparently relying on his old faithful KJV, because other versions of John translate semeion as "sign," as in the examples below.

John 2:11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

John 2:23 When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.

John 3:2 He [Nicodemus] came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.

John 6:1 After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.

Turkel said that John "often" used the word semeion to refer to the miracles of Jesus, but he actually used the word in this sense only nine times. If Turkel thinks that this is "often," I won't quibble about it. Neither will I quibble about the KJV translation of the word, because it obviously was referring to the extraordinary deeds or "miracles" that John attributed to Jesus. A semeion, then, could have been a deed or an event, but events must occur somewhere. In other words, they must have locations. They don't happen in vaccuums, so the passages quoted above located the "signs" or "miracles" that Jesus allegedly performed. Changing the water into wine, his first miracle, happened in Cana of Galilee, so that was where the event was located, the "signs" or "miracles" referred to in John 3:2 happened in Jerusalem, so that was their location, and so on. If, therefore, the "sign" in Matthew 24:30 was the "son of man"--I think that the "coming of the son of man on the clouds" would be a more accurate way to identify it--this "sign" or event had to happen somewhere, and "Matthew" said that this sign would be seen in heaven, so the location of the "sign of the son of man" was going to be in heaven, and when preterists like Turkel and DeMar say that this was a "sign" without a location, they are shamelessly quibbling in order to try to force their doctrine into scriptures that were never intended to teach what they are claiming.

Let's compare the "sign of the son of man in heaven" to another sign that the New Testament referred to.

Revelation 15:1 Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and amazing: seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended.

Now just where were these angels located? Where did "John" see them? He said that he saw them in heaven, so why should we not believe that he intended his readers to understand that the angels he saw were located in heaven? So if Jesus said in Matthew 24:30 that the "sign of the son of man" would appear in heaven and that all the tribes [unrestricted] of the earth [unrestricted] would SEE the son of man coming on the clouds, why should we not believe that Jesus meant for his disciples to understand that they would see exactly what he said? So let Turkel tell us exactly what was seen in heaven in AD 70 that fulfilled this prophecy. Maybe he can get Gary DeMar to help him with his answer.

Turkel:
the word itself denotes a token of identification or verification.

Till:
Yes, the people of that prescientific, superstitious time believed that "signs" were tokens of things to come. Even some people in our more enlightened times believe in omens, so there is no surpise to find such superstition reflected in documents written almost 2,000 years ago. What Turkel needs to do is prove that the "signs" mentioned in the Bible were real and not just a superstitious belief.

Turkel:
The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple itself fits this bill.

Till:
I explained at the beginning of this article that the gospels were written after the fact of Jerusalem's destruction. Readers can scroll up to the first Till header and find where I pressed Turkel to explain how we can know that Jesus actually did predict the destruction of the temple rather than that these were just words put into his mouth by the synoptic writers, who, writing after the fact, wanted their readers to think that Jesus had made an amazing prediction. If I were allowed to write a document after the fact of some unusual event that gullible readers would believe was written before the event, I would have no trouble at all making a character in that document look like a prophet who had made an amazingly accurate prediction of that event. Until Turkel can prove that Jesus, before the fact, really did predict the destruction of the temple, all of his talk about "signs" and "vendication" is just senseless babble.

Besides that problem is the obvious fact that even if Jesus did make this prediction before the fact, its "fulfillment" was a sure thing. Solomon's temple had been destroyed, so there would have been no reason to think that Herod's wouldn't also be destroyed. If I predicted that the day will come when not one stone in the Empire State Building will be left standing upon another, "fulfillment" of that prediction will certainly happen someday. What if, for example, someone had said fifteen years ago that not one stone in the World Trade Center would be left standing upon another? Would the person who predicted this have been "vindicated" on September 11, 2001?

Turkel:
Finally, Luke relates this event to "redemption"--this word is used elsewhere in the NT to refer to salvation in a spiritual sense, but it could hardly mean this in any context, whether preterist or dispensational. What does it mean?

Till:
Well, let's take a look a the text in Luke that Turkel, who didn't even cite chapter and verse, was probably referring to. I think everyone will see why Turkel didn't quote the verses.

Luke 21:25 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. 28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

In Part Two of the Humpty Dumpty series, I explicated this text in detail to show that it shoots down Turkel's claim that the "signs" mentioned here would be seen only in the region of Jerusalem or Judea, because Luke made it clear that there would be distress on the "earth" [unrestricted] among "nations" [unrestricted], so this parallel account does irreparable damage to Turkel's quibble that "the tribes of the earth" would be only the tribes of Israel in the land [ge] of Israel, because the word nations [the plural of ethnos] was the same word used in the texts below, which obviously was referring to nations of the world in general.

Matthew 24:9 "Then they will hand you [the disciples] over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name."

Matthew 24:14 "And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come."

Matthew 25:22 "All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats...."

Matthew 28:19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...."

Luke 24:45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem."

Acts 17:26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live....

I could quote many more, but these are sufficient to show that Luke's parallel account of the so-called "Olivet discourse" is very clear in saying that the "signs" in heaven and the distress they cause will be experienced and seen by nations in general and not just the tribes in Israel, so there is no wonder that Turkel simply referred to Luke's account without even citing it, much less quoting it.

We will see below that Turkel tried to talk his way around the obvious meaning of redemption in Luke's account of the end signs, but if this text and its parallels in Matthew and Mark are accepted at their face value, there is no mystery to what Luke meant. The people of all nations would be experiencing distress on the earth and seeing signs in heaven, at which time they should stand up and raise their heads to see their redemption [Jesus] coming in the clouds with "power and great glory." Preterists, however, cannot accept the obviously intended meaning of this text, because it destroys beliefs to which they are emotionally attached.

The New Testament predicted that Jesus would return shortly, within the lifetimes of some in his generation, but it didn't happen, so those who want to cling to the ridiculous belief that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God, both dispensationalists and preterists, have to put ridiculous, unlikely spins on the texts that predicted an imminent return of Jesus.

Turkel:
Stein (commentary on Luke, 525) sees in the term an idea of consummation of hopes; one might relate this, then, to the tanglible [sic] evidence of the enthronement of Christ that the destruction of Jerusalem and the "old order" provided.

Till:
I suppose Turkel expects us to swoon because Stein "sees" this, but I trust he will excuse me for seeing exactly what the text says in my explication above. "Luke" was a part of the generation that had expected an imminent return of Jesus, and so writing after the destruction of the temple, he had seen that event as a posttribulation sign, and so he was telling his readers to expect Jesus to return soon, at which time they could lift their heads and actually see their "redemption" coming in a cloud.

Turkel:
(I have been asked how the destruction of Jerusalem, considering that it resulted in increased tensions between the Jews and Christians [who were then expelled from the synagogue and lost any claim to the Romans that they fell under the protected umbrella of Judaism] would have been understood by Christians as their "redemption". [sic]

Till:
Well, gee, it seems that if this is all true and the Christians of that time were so delighted by the "redemptive sign" presented by the events of AD 70, Christian literature of that time would have been filled with references to it. Reputable scholarship recognizes that Matthew was written well after AD 70 and Luke was written after Matthew, so we have to wonder why these two gospels didn't reverberate with the preterist themes that Turkel is trying to peddle. If this was just an oversight on their part, perhaps Turkel can refer us to other early Christian writings, such as the Epistles of Barnabas and Clement and the large body of aprocryphal writings that didn't make the New Testament cut, where the writers recognized that their "redemption" was vindicated in AD 70. We will anxiously wait for Turkel to give us this information. If he fails to do so, we will assume that even he knows that his preterist jargon is just more buncombe that diehard biblicists have dreamed up to keep from admitting that second-coming prophecies had failed.

Turkel:
The answer lies in the difference of ancient personality. Such tensions upon individuals would have been placed, in the ancient mindset, secondarily to that which was better for the group and its efforts as a whole. Believe it or not, they would have taken the expulsion and persecution,

Till:
As I pointed out in Part Seven, Turkel likes to talk about "ancient Near Eastern customs" and idioms whenever it is to his advantage, but the spin that he was putting on the "son of man" idiom in Daniel 7:13 completely ignored the meaning of this Semitic idiom, so he evidently doesn't consider ancient Near Eastern customs and mindsets to be important when he is trying to sell a doctrinal belief that is clearly contrary to the proof texts he is using, but now that he is a bind trying to make his preterist spins sound even halfway sensible, he turns to talking about "ancient mindsets," which, in typical fashion, he just threw out without making any attempt at all to show that the "ancient minset" would have considered individual concerns secondary to that which was "better for the group and its efforts as a whole." How does Turkel know this? Where did he get it? Well, as we will soon see, he read it in a book.

Turkel:
Not happily of course, but would have considered the redemptive sign worth the price. For more on this see my review of this book.)

Till:
Since Turkel shows little objectivity and impartiality in his articles, I was going to pass on this review, but I decided to give it a try. It was wasted time, because I found nothing but more unsupported assertions that ancient Near Eastern cultures place more value on "collectivism" than individuality. Here is an example of the unsupported assertions with which Turkel peppered his review.

What was done for the group was paramount; what was done for the individual was a matter of the least importance; individualism was deviance, because it impaired the group's ability to survive. (This is why a single death of one of our soldiers seems so meaningful to us, yet other cultures can seemingly "throw away" lives by the score without experiencing dissonance. It is also why something like the destruction of the Canaanites could be done without guilt.) Control over behavior was exerted by the group, not by individualized norms.

I'm tempted to remind Turkel that he is on record arguing in our Abiathar exchanges that people in biblical times never experienced feelings of guilt, but I am going to pass on it to make a more important point. Those of you who have wondered why an omnibenevolent deity could order that no one be left alive to breathe during Joshua's sweep through Canaan (Deut. 20:18; Josh. 10:40; Josh. 11:10-11) and why this same omnibenevolent deity ordered the "utter" destruction of the Amalekites, including even children and babies (1 Samuel 15:1-3) now know why this deity in his unlimited love and mercy could order massacres like these and the Israelites could execute the perceived commands without any feelings of "guilt." The lives of 21 million Canaanites were just being "thrown away" for the collective good of the three millions Israelites. Why didn't I realize that before?

Why did I say that 21 million Canaanites were thrown away? Well, Deuteronomy 7:1 claimed that the seven nations in Canaan were "greater and mightier" than the Israelites, and the census figures in the book of Numbers clearly indicate that the Israelites who left Egypt in the exodus numbered at least 2.5 to 3 million, so if the seven nations in Canaan were greater and mightier than the Israelites, we have to assume that there were anywhere from 17.5 to 21 million Canaanites packed into Canaan like sardines or else conclude that the Bible [gasp!] is not inerrant. Of course, it apparently has not occurred to Turkel that the total destruction of the Midianites (Num. 31:18), the Canaanites, and the Amalekites was far from being "collectively" beneficial to the nations that were being wiped out, and his failure to recognize the barbarism of such atrocities is no doubt due to his assumption that the Bible was inerrantly right in saying that the Israelites were the chosen people of Yahweh (Deut. 7:6), so the extermination of thousands or millions of people who, through no fault of their own, were not in that select group is nothing to be concerned about.

I can think of various biblical examples that clearly dispute Turkel's premise that "collectivism" in ancient Near Eastern cultures was considered more important than individual concerns. If Turkel doubts this, I will be glad to take him on. Meanwhile, we will pass off his comments about an "ancient mindset" that put the destruction of Jerusalem above individual Christian concerns as just more unsupported nonsense that he had to resort to in order to give a semblance of respectability to his preterist beliefs. He has repeatedly shown that when he has no real evidence to support his assertions, he will wag out claims about ancient Near Eastern customs, idioms, and mindsets.

Now let's look at more of his recycled spins on biblical texts that were never intended to mean what he and his preterist cohorts claim.

Turkel:

Matthew 24:31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (Mark 13:27)

Dispensational _ have taught us that in this passage we have a picture of a "rapture" of believers, of divine beings picking us up by the ears and taking us home.

Till:
As I have repeatedly noted in my replies to Turkel, "dispensational paradigms" are just as erroneous as the preterist ones, because the Bible teaches neither scenario. As I showed in Part Eight and Part Nine of the Humpty Dumpty series and Part Two, Part Four, and Part Five of this series, New Testament writers obviously intended their readers to understand that the return of Jesus was imminent and would be universally visible, at which time a final judgment would be rendered. Turkel and his preterist cohorts try to circumvent these predictions of an imminent return by yelling, "Figurative--it was all figurative!" Only those who are hopelessly credulous will buy the unlikely claim that all New Testament writers veiled their predictions of the second-coming in figurative language that was misunderstood until preterists finally came along and set everyone straight.

Turkel:
But we should take some caution before jumping into this interpretation. All agree that "four winds" and "one end of heaven to the other" indicates a worldwide gathering, and the "elect" are believers, but the rest is open to examination.

Till:
And as we will immediately see, Turkel's "examinations" of second-coming predictions make them all figurative.

Turkel
First: "Angels" is aggelos, and while it is used of supernatural beings (Matt. 1:20, 13:40, 16:27, 28:2, Luke 1) it is also used of humans like John the Baptist (Matt. 12:10, Mark 1:2, Luke 7:27) and Jesus’ disciples (Luke 9:52) in the NT and in the Septuagint [DeM .LDM, 175]. The word does not denote a divine being per se, but a function, that of a messenger.

Till:
Well, first of all, I should point out that Matthew 12:10 makes no mention of John the Baptist. Turkel probably meant Matthew 11:10, which quoted Malachi 3:1 and applied it to John the Baptist. The texts in Mark (1:2) and Luke (7:27) are simply parallels of Matthew 11:10 in that they too quoted Malachi 3:1 and applied it to John the Baptism, so this raises an interesting question: did Malachi intend for the "messenger" to be a human or a "supernatural being"? We can't assume that Malachi was speaking of a human messenger simply because New Testament writers claimed that he was prophesying the coming of John the Baptist, because we have already seen in Part Six that New Testament writers would often distort the meaning of Old Testament scriptures to force them into prophetic situations that were never intended by the original writers. In the synoptic writers' application of Malachi 3:1, we have another example of such distortion, as an analysis of the context of this verse will show.

Malachie 3:1 See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says Yahweh of hosts.

"Malachi," whose author was never named in this book, means "my messenger," and largely on the basis of the verse just quoted, which New Testament writers applied to John the Baptist, the book was given its name, but an examination of this verse in the context of the book's short four chapters will show that this "messenger" was to be someone who would come at that time to reform the religious corruption that had developed in Jerusalem after the return of the exiles from Babylon. The writer deplored this corruption, which was represented by such outrages as the offering of polluted and blemished sacrifices (1:7-8), apostate priests (2:1-3), and divorcing Jewish wives in order to marry foreigners (2:11-16), Whenever such religious outrages developed in ancient Israel, some prophet would invariably arise on the scene to prophesy the coming of an agent of Yahweh, who would come and make things right. Micah made a prediction in (5:2-15) that "seven shepherds" and "eight principal men" would come to deliver Yahweh's people from the Assyrians. Jeremiah predicted that Yahweh would cause a "branch of righteousness to grow from Jesse" to save Judah (33:15-16), and so on. There was always going to be some agent of Yahweh who would come and deliver the Israelites from their plights of captivity or religious apostasy, and so it was with Malachi. He was predicting the coming of a "messenger" who would reverse the corruption of that time. That this "messenger" was not to be John the Baptist can easily be determined by reading the verse in context.

Malachi 3:1 See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says Yahweh of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap; 3 he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to Yahweh in righteousness. 4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to Yahweh as in the days of old and as in former years. 5 Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be swift to bear witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me, says Yahweh of hosts.

The New Testament gives no indication at all that such wonder and awe was created among the people by the coming of John the Baptist. In fact, he was so unable to stand before the authority figures of his time that he died by beheading. Neither did he cause such religious reforms as those predicted in the passage quoted above. He certainly didn't "purify the descendants of Levi," because the priests were the ones responsible for bringing Jesus to trial. The offerings of Judah and Jerusalem were not made pleasing to Yahweh as in the days of old, because Jesus had to purge the temple of corrupt money changers. The epistle of James deplored the exploitation of laborers, whose wages were being held back by their employers (5:3), so hired workers were still being oppressed after the coming of John the Baptist. If, then, this was a prophecy of John the Baptist, the prophecy obviously failed, so Malachi 3:1 is just another example of how New Testament writers would lift Old Testament statements entirely out of context and claim that they were prophecies of events and persons in the time of Jesus.

In closing his book, Malachi indicated that this messenger would be Elijah.

Malachi 4:5 Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

That "Malachi" meant for his readers to understand that the messenger being sent from Yahweh was John the Baptist was claimed by New Testament writers, who applied both 3:1 and 4:5 to John the Baptist (Matt. 11:11-14; Mark 9:11-13), but we have just seen good reasons to suspect that this "prophecy" was distorted and misapplied. If the "messenger" in Malachi 3:1 was to be Elijah, there is no reason at all not to believe that a mystic prophet living in superstitious times would have thought that Elijah would literally return to restore religious purity in Jerusalem. If this was what he meant, then the "messenger" would have been a supernatural, spiritual being, and not an ordinary human being, so most of Turkel's proof texts just went down the drain.

It is, of course, true that the word angel in the Bible was sometimes used in reference to human messengers, but anyone who will take the time to consult a concordance will see that the vast majority of the time, this word was used to denote heavenly beings, so just sheer odds alone favor that the angels coming with Jesus, whom he sent forth to gather "the elect," were supernatural beings, but we don't have to depend on guesswork. Context--there is that word again--will almost always determine what kind of angel was meant. When the New Testament, for example, speaks of angels in heaven (Matt. 18:10; 22:30; 24:36; Mark 12:25) or of angels "descending" (John 1:51; Matt. 28:2), we can be reasonably certain that the supernatural kind of angels were meant. Likewise, when the New Testament spoke of Jesus coming with his angels, only someone with a doctrinal commitment to defend would try to make these angels a host of human messengers coming on the clouds with Jesus. In Part 8 of the Humpty Dumpty series, I analyzed the various texts that referred to angels accompanying the return of Jesus, so there is no need for me to rehash those analyses here. In this section of Part 9, I analyzed aprocryphal works like the Apocalypse of Peter to show that the early Christian understanding was that Jesus would return with angels or a "great host" to render judgment by fire on the world. In Part 2 of this series, I did a further analysis of the usage of angel in second-coming texts. Only a diehard preterist could examine this information and still insist that the angels in Matthew 24:31 were just human messengers, who would go forth and evangelize the world after AD 70

Turkel:
Second: the "trumpet" sounding admits to several options. Keener [587] notes that the trumpet was usually in the OT a call to war, and that this is found in pagan contexts as well, but this obviously won't bear on this context. A trumpet is also used at the resurrection of the righteous (1 Cor. 15:52),

Till:
Turkel is assuming that this text was referring to a different "coming" than the one prophesied in Matthew 24:30-31, but I have shown here, here, and at the beginning of this article that both 1 Corinthians 15:52 and 1 Thessalonians 4:16 spoke in expectation of a trumpet that would sound the return of "Christ" and the resurrection of the dead within the lifetime of the apostle Paul and those to whom he addressed those expistles. The New Testament simply does not teach two"comings." It teaches that there will be just one, at which time the dead will be resurrected, those living will be "caught up" in the air to be with Jesus forever, and the unrighteous will be judged. Turkel and his preterist cohorts are denying the obvious meaning of these texts in order to cling to the discredited biblical inerrancy doctrine.

Turkel;
[A trumpet is also used at the resurrection of the righteous (1 Cor. 15:52),] that which has often been cited in favor of a "rapture" interpretation.

Till:
Turkel and I are in agreement here. The so-called rapture is a belief that was not taught in the New Testament. It is just as ridiculous as Turkel's preterist belief.

Turkel:
But there are other uses as well. A trumpet was used for various proclamations, for kingship, a celebration of triumph, for a call to worship, and for the assembly of God’s people.

Till:
And this does what to prove that the trumpet in Matthew 24:30, 1 Corinthians 15:52, and 1 Thessalonians 4:16 was not intended to mean a heralding of the return of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead?

Turkel:
Third: to "gather" means to collect in one place. This word (episunago) is used sparingly in the NT, and seems often to refer to a physical gathering, but not always: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" Jesus’ intent here was not to physically gather together all the Israelites;

Till:
Well, this text didn't even address "all the Israelites." It addressed "Jerusalem," which would have been all the people living in Jerusalem. If not, why not? There is no reason at all to believe that Jesus was not speaking here of what Turkel calls a "physical gathering." This, of course, is something that he read in preterist literature and passed along without thinking about it.

Turkel:
the protective umbrella was the Messianic kingdom.

Till:
Which, according to New Testament texts written before AD 70, existed well before the destruction of Jerusalem. In Acts 14:22, the apostle Paul, who died before AD 70, exhorted the people in Lystra, Antioch, and Iconium to enter into the kingdom of God, through many tributions, so was he exhorting them to enter into something that didn't even exist at that time? He told the Colossians (1:13) that "the Father" had delivered them out of the power of darkness and translated them into "the kingdom of the son of his love," but how could he have translated them into a kingdom that didn't even exist at that time? He told the Thessalonians (2:12) that God had called them into "his own kingdom and glory." The New Testament clearly taught the establishment of the kingdom long before AD 70, so there is no need to waste more time quoting texts that a bullheaded preterist is just going to ignore anyway.

Turkel:
The Greek word is also related to the word "synagogue" (sunagoge).

Till:
Which does what to prove that ge [earth] and phule [tribe] were used in their limited senses in Matthew 24:30-31 and that the "angels" referred to here were just human messengers? It did nothing to prove Turkel's major premises, but it did give him an opportunity to deceive his readers into thinking that he is linguistically competent to speak with authority about New Testament Greek.

Turkel:
To tie it all together:

Till:
Please do.

Turkel:
We noted earlier that it is predicted that the end will come when the gospel is preached to the Roman Empire.

Till:
That is what Turkel asserted, but he failed to mention here that I showed in my initial reply to him that this assertion is another dog that won't hunt. It was, in fact, the first of his "points" that I addressed. Here are my opening paragraphs in "The Humpty Dumpty of Biblical Apologetics."

A character named Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass said to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." The more I read the articles of Robert Turkel, the more I think that he must be the Humpty Dumpty of biblical apologetics, because he continually asserts that this or that word or expression means thus and so instead of the usual meanings that are attached to them. In reading through his article above, one learns that clouds didn't mean clouds, that stars didn't mean stars, that tribes didn't mean tribes, etc. It seems that in the text of his "Olivet Discourse" words like those just mentioned always had "symbolic" meanings, and these symbolic meanings, of course, always fit conveniently into the preterist scenario that Turkel espouses. He is at his best in assigning arbitrary meanings when he declares that certain Greek words didn't mean what biblical translators said that they meant. When Jesus said that the "the gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world" before the end came (Matt. 24:14), Turkel said that the word for world here was oikoumene,which didn't mean world but "only the Roman empire." Never mind that lexicographers like Arndt and Gingrich assigned "the inhabited earth, the world" as the primary meaning of this word (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 1960, pp. 563-564), and never mind that it was obviously so used in many places in the New Testament, world in this particular passage is a meaning inconvenient to Turkel's pet theory, and so he declares that the word didn't mean world but only "the Roman empire.

Here are some passages that used oikoumene with the obvious intention of conveying its primary meaning, i.e., world.

Luke 4:5 Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world [oikoumenes] in a moment of time.

This, of course, is a verse from the story of Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, which occurred after his baptism in the Jordan River. Most of the Roman empire lay to the west of this region, so if Jesus was able to see all the kingdoms of the world, how likely is it that Luke meant that the devil had shown to Jesus only the kingdoms that lay to the west of this mountain but not those that were east of it? Besides this, literal translations, such as Concordant Literal New Testament and Hendrickson's Interlinear both translated oikoumenes in this verse as "the inhabited earth" and "the habitable world" respectively.

There is much more on this point in my article linked to above. Those who take the time to click the link and read the rest of the article will see that I quoted many other passages, such as Hebrews 1:1-6, Revelation 3:10, and Romans 10:18, where oikoumenes was used in the obvious sense of the entire world and not just the Roman Empire. Readers will also want to read this section of Part Two of the Humpty Dumpty series, where I showed that a previous comment by Turkel had come back to haunt him, because he had said that the Greek word kosmos meant the whole world, so I quoted Matthew 4:8, which was a parallel version of Luke 4:5, where the devil took Jesus to a high mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the "world." Whereas Luke used the word oikoumenes, which Turkel said meant only the Roman Empire, Matthew used kosmos, which Turkel said always meant the entire world. Hence, it is obvious that oikoumenes was used interchangeably with kosmos, so Turkel, in typical fashion, is arguing by assertion when he says that Jesus "predicted that the end will come when the gospel is preached to the Roman Empire," because Jesus used the word oikoumenes in Matthew 24:14, when he said that the gospel would be preached to the whole world [oikoumenes] before the end would come. Hence, Turkel is following his usual habit of asserting without support while hoping that his readers won't take the time to examine the assertion to see if it can withstand scrutiny. I have just shown that his position on the meaning of oikoumenes is obviously wrong.

Turkel:
Now Jesus tells us that following the destruction of Jerusalem, the messengers or "angels" or [sic] the gospel will take that gospel worldwide, to gather his elect, the body of Christ, the "people of God" (1 Peter 2:9-10).

Till:
I showed above that the contexts of second-coming passages that refer to angels do not support Turkel's view that the "angels" here were just human beings, who would go forth after AD 70 and preach the gospel worldwide, so there is no need to rehash it here. When Turkel says that these "angels of the gospel" would take it worldwide, he is reading into the text something that just isn't there, and to see that, all we have to do is quote the passage.

Matthew 24:31 31 And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Notice that this text speaks only of "angels" and says nothing at all about "angels of the gospel." When Turkel says that these are "angels [messengers] of the gospel," he is reading into the text something that isn't there. Since other second-coming texts speak of angels coming with the son of man (Matt. 16:27; Mark 8:38, 1 Thess. 1:7), there is no reason at all to think that the angels in Matthew 24:31 were just human messengers. That is something that Turkel is reading into the text in order to accommodate a doctrine that is emotionally important to him.

Turkel:

Matthew 24:32-39 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be (Mark 13:28-32; Luke 21:29-33).

Of course we now come to the central point of contention that got this started. Jesus speaks of these things happening within "this generation." The dispensational paradigm is required to understand "this generation" in other ways (i.e., the race of Jews, for example) but we have seen that these [sic] is no need for this. The generation Jesus spoke to saw these things fulfilled.

Till:
I certainly agree that the spin that the dispensationists put on the meaning of "this generation" is incorrect. In fact, I will come right out and say that I think that it is downright ridiculous, but Turkel has no room to talk about the dispensationalist view of this verse, because his spin is just as ridiculous. He just said that "(t)he generation that Jesus spoke to saw these things fulfilled, so perhaps he will tell us when that generation (1) saw the sun darkened, (2) the moon not give its light, (3) the stars fall from heaven, (4) the son of man coming on the clouds, and (5) the angels going forth with the sound of a trumpet to gather the elect. Turkel cannot argue that this was all figurative, because I have repeatedly shown otherwise, especially in the entirety of Part Six of this series. Before Turkel tries his figurative duckling and dodging, he should have the intergrity to address all of my counterarguments in that article. If he fails to do so, we can assume that he knows that all of his talk about figurative language is without merit.

Turkel:
At this point the discourses diverge substantially. Mark 13 continues the discourse to verse 37 with admonitions to be watchful. Luke 21:34-6 does the same; Luke however, does place the "Noah" warning at 17:25 and adds a comparison to Sodom and Gomorrah. The warnings are good to go under any paradigm, and with that we leave Mark's version of the discourse behind. We pick up with Matt. 24:40 and parallel:

Matthew 24:40-41 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

Luke 18[sic]:35-6 Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

Another "rapture" passage?

Till:
No, it isn't, because "the rapture" is not taught in the Bible. It is a belief just as fanciful as preterism.

Turkel:
"Taken" into the air, perhaps? Maybe not,

Till:
Definitely so. Has Turkel never read 1 Thessalonians 4:17, which clearly says that the Lord from heaven will descend with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God and that "we" (which would include Paul) who are alive will be... what? "We who are alive, who are left [meaning not dead yet], will together with them [the dead in Christ who had just been resurrected] be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." Perhaps, then, Turkel will tell us why the gathering of the elect by the angels in Matthew 24:31 did not mean that they would be gathered into the air to meet Jesus.

Hey, wait, some might say; I thought you didn't believe that the New Testament teaches a "rapture." It doesn't, and the text just quoted from 1 Thessalonians 4 can't be pressed to mean that, because it says that "we" who are alive at that time will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and will forever be with the Lord. So the New Testament teaches that when Jesus comes in the clouds, those living at the time will be caught up to meet him in the air and will forever be with him. Rapturists teach that some will be caught up at that time but others will be "left behind" until some imaginary rapture period has been completed. The New Testament doesn't teach anything about being left behind or a rapture period. It teaches that when Jesus returns, that will be it; the end will have caught the unrighteous unsuspectingly, just as the flood had caught those who were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage when the flood came upon them in the days of Noah. I am glad that Turkel quoted that part of the passage. I will have more to say about it later.

Turkel:
and maybe the "taken" one is not the good guy at all:

Jeremiah 6:11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.

Till
That wasn't even a halfway decent try, because Turkel is trying to compare a text that clearly spoke of those who would be taken in the context of the gathering together of "the elect" by the angels that Jesus would send forth with a text that was obviously speaking of fury that Yahweh would execute against the unrighteous in Jerusalem. Does Turkel know what the fallacy of the false analogy is?

Turkel:
Furthermore, note the parallel in the previous passage in which the wicked are the ones "taken" by the Flood [Keener, 592; Gundry, commentary on Matthew, 494].

Till:
Yes, but those "taken" in the flood were not the elect, were they? They were the ones that the flood was intended to destroy. I hope that Turkel will try to read this very carefully. The "elect" would be those who have been "saved," so when they were sent forth to gather them, the angels were gathering the righteous not the wicked. Of the two men in the field, the angels would take one and leave the other, and the same for the women grinding in the mill, so I will ask again if Turkel knows what the fallacy of false analogy is.

Turkel:
Those taken, are taken in judgment by the impending judgment on Jerusalem and Judaea, which would be no respecter of persons. That this is not a "rapture" verse is clear in that this is where Luke places the Matthew 24:28 remark about carcasses.

Till:
No, this isn't a "rapture" verse, because the New Testament doesn't teach the rapture doctrine. As for where Luke placed the comment about the carcasses, the passage that Turkel quoted here is not a part of Luke's parallel of the "Olivet discourse." Luke's parallel account of the "Olivet discourse" was in chapter 21, not chapter 17 . Although Luke 17 (not 18) contains similar language to Matthew's account of the "Olivet discourse," the speech that Luke 17 attributed to Jesus happened when Jesus and his disciples were "passing along the borders of Samaria and Galilee" (v:11), so Turkel is trying to support his spin on what Jesus said in the "Olivet discourse" by referring to something that Luke attributed to him in another discourse. If we assume biblical inerrancy, which Turkel does, of course, then Jesus made two speeches in which he referred to "eagles" or "vultures" being where the carcass is, so Turkel cannot argue the meaning of a verse in Matthew 24 on the grounds of where Luke put a similar comment about a carcass in an entirely different speech.

If any importance is to be attached to the remark about the carcass, it must be considered in the context where Jesus put it in his "Olivet discourse," so let's look at the larger context of the comment.

24:4 Jesus answered them, "Beware that no one leads you astray. 5 For many will come in my name, saying, 'I am the Messiah!' and they will lead many astray. 6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: 8 all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. 9 "Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. 10 Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. 11 And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. 12 And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. 13 But the one who endures to the end will be saved. 14 And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come. 15 "So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), 16 then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; 17 the one on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; 18 the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. 19 Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! 20 Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. 21 For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. 22 And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. 23 Then if anyone says to you, 'Look! Here is the Messiah!' or 'There he is!'--do not believe it. 24 For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. 25 Take note, I have told you beforehand. 26 So, if they say to you, 'Look! He is in the wilderness,' do not go out. If they say, 'Look! He is in the inner rooms,' do not believe it. 27 For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 28 Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.

As previously noted, the disciples had asked Jesus (1) when the temple would be destroyed and (2) what would be the signs of his coming and the end of the world. In the passage quoted above, Jesus was answering the first question by telling his disciples what "signs" to expect, such as wars, rumors of war, nation rising against nation, earthquakes, famines, etc., but that they should not be misled by these signs, which were not signs of the end. He had actually begun answering the disciples' questions by warning them not to be misled by false prophets and christs. Writing after the fact of the destruction of Jerusalem, "Matthew" knew that there had been considerable tribulation and suffering there, which in those times would always bring out false prophets and saviors, because "where the corpse is that is where the vultures will gather." In other words, Matthew was trying to make his readers think that the speech of Jesus had preceded the sacking of Jerusalem, so he had Jesus telling his disciples not to let false prophets deceive them when the vultures (false prophets and christs) arose during those days of tribulation. The gathering of the vultures, then, had reference to opportunists who would arise during the turmoil that would come with the siege of Jerusalem. The signs of the coming of the son of man, however, would come later, "immediately after the tribulation of those days," as the continuation of the text clearly shows.

29 "Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. 30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory.

That Luke may have put the reference to vultures gathering over the carcass in a different place in another, but similar, speech that he attributed to Jesus can in no way determine the meaning of that same comment in Matthew's version of the "Olivet discourse." Turkel's flagrant distortion of the intended meaning of this comment in Matthew 24 will become more obvious as we continue through his attempts to twist Jesus's speech into saying something that it was never intended to mean.

Turkel:
We now leave also Luke’s unique material. Matthew 24:42-51 continues with more warnings of watchfulness that work under any paradigm. We now close out with some items unique to Matthew, in chapter 25.

Matthew 25:1-2 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

The parable of the wise and foolish virgins (25:1-13), followed by the parable of the talents (25:14-30), are both parables of general warning that fit under any paradigm.

Till:
From Matthew 24:36 where Jesus began emphasizing that no one, not even the "angels of heaven" (who were no doubt "human angels of the gospel"), knew when he would come, Jesus began a series of warnings. He compared the unexpectedness of his coming with the days of Noah (vs:38-39), when the flood came suddenly and carried away the wicked. Then he used the parable of the master of the house (vs:43-50, who was unprepared for the unexpected return of his lord and was caught beating his fellow servants and eating and drinking. Those who were so caught would be "cut in pieces and put with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (v:51), which is a pretty obvious depiction of the final judgment described in similar terms elsewhere in the New Testament.

Matthew 8:11 I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, 12 while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

I see no reason at all to think that Jesus was here referring to torment [weeping and gnashing of teeth] that these people would experience at the time of Jerusalem's destruction. As we continue through Turkel's maze of assertions below, we will see that Jesus in these parables was obviously referring to a judgment that would follow his second coming. Unfortunately for Turkel, Jesus said something in his last parable quoted above that kicks the props right out from under his preterist theory.

Matthew 24:45 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.

Jesus then advised his audience to be "be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour." Turkel wants to make this "coming of the son of man" just a figurative way of saying that the temple would be destroyed in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, but this "paradigm" cannot be forced into the parabolic warnings that Jesus issued here and in the next chapter, because the coming destruction of Jerusalem was something that the people could have been aware of because of the events happening in preparation of the Roman siege and eventual conquest. Luke, who also wrote his version of the "Olivet discourse" after the fact of the destruction of Jerusalem, made it very clear that the people would be able to see what was coming and take action to save themselves.

20 "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. 21 Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it; 22 for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written."

When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near!" But the desolation of Jerusalem, according to Turkel and his preterist cohorts, was the "coming," which Jesus clearly said in the parables Turkel has cited would happen unexpectedly to catch the unprepared unaware. Turkel's scenario would nullify everything Luke said here, because people would be able to see the Roman army gathering to lay siege and would be able to make preparations for the "coming," unlike the master of the house, whose Lord returned and caught him beating his fellow servants.

When confronted with this problem, preteriest will crow about the last statement quoted above, where Luke said that these would be days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written, but surely none of them would argue that the destruction of Jerusalem would be a fulfillment of all--every prophetic utterance--that had been written, because even they will admit, as Turkel did in his earlier reference, to pantelists, that there are still prophecies to be fulfilled.

So what did Luke mean here? To answer that, we have only to read on.

Luke 21:25 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. 28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

So Luke was saying that the "days of vengeance" against Jerusalem would be followed-- immediately, according to Matthew's version ((Matt. 24:29)--by the signs of the son of man coming in the clouds with his angels, and that would be the end of the world and the final judgment. This will become even more obvious as we wade through Turkel's circumlocutory comments on Jesus' parables that described the final judgment. In one case, we will even see a flagrant example of deceptive quotation.

Turkel:
From [sic] the References to the bridegroom "tarrying" (25:5) do not necessairly [sic] comport with a substantial wait--as DeMar rightly notes, the bridegroom and the master return to the same people the story starts with.

Till:
DeMar, of course, is an outspoken preterist, who will look for any way to spin a verse to make it not mean what it obviously says if that verse conflicts with his preterist beliefs. The fact that the bridegroom returned to the same people the story started with does nothing at all to support preterism, since the bridegroom obviously symbolized Jesus and the virgins symbolized the people who would be here on the earth when the bridegroom {Jesus} came. The meaning of the parable, then is that when Jesus returns some will be prepared for him and some will not. The message of the parable was simply to warn everyone to watch because they could not know when the day of the coming would happen (v:13), but as I showed above if that "coming" was just a figurative reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, the people could easily know, as Luke said, when the "coming" was at hand, because they could see the siege and other military preparations taking place around the city.

Turkel:
A "tarrying" within the generational period is more than sufficient to account for this,

Till:
Well, there is not doubt that the synoptic writers meant for readers to understand that there would be just a generational tarrying, because as I just pointed out above Luke and Matthew thought that the tribulation and suffering associated with the destruction of Jerusalem would immediately precede the signs of the son of man coming in the clouds with his angels. The "Olivet discourse" is just one of several New Testament passages that taught an imminent return of Jesus, within the lifetime of those who wrote the New Testament books, but their predictions obviously failed, so inerrantists have leaned over backwards to try to explain away the failure.

Turkel:
and if 2 Peter is to be reckoned, the doctrine of generation return was known to mockers and was being jeered at as early as the 50s and 60s, as we would expect.

Till:
Turkel is here repeating his claim that the second epistle of Peter was written in the 50s or 60s of the first century, but I thoroughly demolished this in earlier replies to Turkel. In this section of Part Seven in the Humpty Dumpty series, for example, I showed that such notable scholars as Bruce Metzger think that 2 Peter was written in the second-century AD, which would have been well after Turkel's date, which he has postulated for no other reason than to escape from a text that is devasting to his preterist beliefs. The link above will take readers to a longer discussion of the dating of 2 Peter, but here is a part of a quotation from Metzger's commentary.

In The New Testament, Its Background, Growth, and Content, Metzger gave the following opinion of the authorship and date of 2 Peter.

Although the author of this letter calls himself 'Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ' (1:1), and makes reference to his being present at the transfiguration of Jesus Christ (1:18), several features of its style and contents have led nearly all modern scholars to regard it as the work of an unknown author of the early second century who wrote in Peter's name (p. 258).

So in claiming that 2 Peter was written in the AD 50s or 60s, Turkel is pitting himself against "nearly all modern scholars." I urge everyone to take the time to click the link above to see the scholarly evidence against Turkel's dating of 2 Peter and then to go to Part Nine in the same series and read the entire article, where I anlyzed 2 Peter 3 to show that a text written well after AD 70 clearly said that the coming of Jesus was yet in the future. This article also analyzed passages in The Apocalpse of Peter, Sibylline Oracles, and Prophetical Extracts of Clement of Alexandria, all written in the second century AD, which made references to the coming of Jesus and destruction of the world by fire and thereby show that these works that were respected in the Christian community at the time obviously didn't think that the "coming" had already happened decades ago.

Turkel:
But what of the apparent pictures of final judgment? They are, as Wright observes, actually threats to the "present nation of Israel" [JVG, 185] warning them to repent.

Till:
Yes, they were warnings to repent so that the people would be prepared for the imminent coming of Jesus and the judgment of the world, because they had no way of knowing when these events would come upon them. The fact that works written by post AD 70 Christians made no mention of a "coming" when Jerusalem was destroyed is certainly detrimental to Turkel's preterist position. It seems strange that he can know with such certitude things that were obviously unknown to Christian writers just a few years after Ad 70.

Turkel:
"In the sad, noble, and utterly Jewish tradition of Elijah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist, Jesus announced the coming judgment of Israel's covenant god on his people, a judgment consisting of a great national, social and cultural disaster, ultimately comprehensible only in theological terms." Like other signs in the Discourse, these are eschatological word-pictures-to be taken seriously enough as they stand.

Till:
Old Testament prophets had repeatedly predicted that Yahweh would establish on earth an everlasting kingdom of Israel with a descendant of David ruling over it, so Wright's preterist take on Matthew 24 makes false prophets of them all. These prophecies are too numerous to look at all of them, so I will quote just one and then reference some of the others.

Jeremiah 33:14 The days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "Yahweh is our righteousness." 17 For thus says Yahweh: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, 18 and the levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to make grain offerings, and to make sacrifices for all time. 19 The word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah: 20 Thus says Yahweh: If any of you could break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night would not come at their appointed time, 21 only then could my covenant with my servant David be broken, so that he would not have a son to reign on his throne, and my covenant with my ministers the Levites. 22 Just as the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will increase the offspring of my servant David, and the Levites who minister to me.

Neither the preterists nor the dispensationalists can talk their way around this prophecy by saying that it was referring to the kingdom of Jesus, because verse 18 clearly said that the Levitical sacrificial system would last forever. It didn't, and so the prophecy failed. When Wright or Turkel or DeMar try to say that Jesus was just "announc[ing] the coming judgment of Israel's covenant god on his people, a judgment consisting of a great national, social and cultural disaster" that brought an end to the Jewish system, they are, in effect, accusing the Old Testament prophets of making false predictions about an everlasting Jewish kingdom.

Some other Old Testament prophecies of an everlasting Davidic kingdom on earth can be found in Jeremiah 23:5-8, 2 Samuel 7:12-16, and 1 Chronicles 17:11-14, and 1 Chronicles 22:8-10. If Turkel wants to defend the claim that these prophecies of an everlasting Davidic kingdom were figuratively fulfilled in the "reign of Christ," all he has to do is let me know.

Turkel:
This leaves the enormous account of Matthew 25:31-46, the sheep and the goats. We'll offer enough to make the point clear:

Till:
Turkel said that he was offering "enough to make the point clear," but we will see that what he actually did was leave out the parts that are fatal to his preterist position. As you read the "enough" that he quoted, please notice the ellipses, which indicate the parts of the passage that he omitted. We will first look at the text as Turkel quoted it, and then I will quote it with the omissions reinserted in place of the ellipses.

Turkel:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world... Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels... And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Till:
Now here is the entire text. I will emphasize in bold print the parts that Turkel previously omitted. What the addition of the omitted verses does to the meaning of the text should be immediately obvious. I will quote from the archaic KJV, which Turkel uses (except when it conflicts with whatever position he is trying to defend).

Matthew 25:31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. 34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? 38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? 39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? 40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. 41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: 42 For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: 43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. 44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? 45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Turkel:
But surely this has not happened? Actually it has, and still does.

Till:
Now we can see why Turkel omitted the verses that I reinserted above in bold print. Without them, it is easier for those who trust him to think that the "judgment" described here happened figuratively in AD 70, but it isn't so easy to make even the gullible ones to think that the destruction of Jerusalem and "the Jewish system" was somehow a figurative way of Jesus telling the "blessed of [his] father" that they had fed him when he was hungry and gave him water when he was thirsty. Exactly what happened while Jerusalem was being destroyed that would have been Jesus figuratively telling the "blessed of [his] father" these things, and exactly what happened that would have constituted these "blessed" asking him when they had done these things? Likewise, what happened that would have constituted a figurative telling of those on the left of Jesus that they had not fed him when he was hungry and given him water when he was thirsty, and just how did those on the left figuratively ask Jesus when they had failed to do these things for him? Anyone who thinks seriously for just a moment should be able to see the absurdity of the spin that Turkel and his preterist cohorts are putting on this passage.

Notice too that Jesus told those on his left to depart from him and go into everlasting fire that had been prepared "for the devil and his angels." Does Turkel seriously expect us to think that this is just something that figuratively happened when Jerusalem was destroyed? This is clearly a scene of rewards and punishment, which is what the New Testament says will occur when all will stand before the judgment seat of Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.

Romans 14:10 But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. 11 For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God. 12 So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.

Anyone who doesn't have a pet doctrine to defend should have no difficulty at all seeing that the parable of the sheep and the goats quoted above was describing the final judgment scene when all will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give accounts of their deeds. Those who have done that which is wrong will be told to depart into the eternal fire [hell] that has been prepared for the devil and his angels (v:41), and those who have done that which is good will "inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world" (v:34).

Turkel, of course, isn't going to accept this, so it is time for the coup de grace. I just quoted where Jesus told those on his right to "inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world." Now Turkel says that this is just a figurative judgment, but in telling those on the right that they are to inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world, Jesus was indicating that these are people who are not still living an earthly existence. That creates a problem for Turkel, because the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:50 that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." How then could Jesus have been telling the people on his right to "inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world" if they were still living, flesh-and-blood human beings?

Turkel:
All agree that the Bible teaches that judgment is entered upon death (Heb. 9:27).

Till:
No, "all" don't agree to this, because the text doesn't say what Turkel claimed.

Hebrews 9:27 And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

So this verse does not say that one is judged upon death; it says that one is judged after death, but how long after death does this judgment come? The New Testament actually teaches that people die and then will be resurrected at the return of Jesus, at which time a judgment will occur to "render to each man according to his works (Rev. 22:12; Matt. 16:27). These texts describe that final judgment.

John 5:26 For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; 27 and he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. 28 Do not be astonished at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29 and will come out--those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.

Revelation 20:11 Then I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it; the earth and the heaven fled from his presence, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. 13 And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; 15 and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

The New Testament clearly speaks of a final judgment when everyone will be resurrected and judged at the same time according to their works. Turkel likes to talk about the book of Daniel, so he should be familiar with the earliest description of a general resurrection, at which time all will be judged according to the way they had lived on earth.

Daniel 12:1 "At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. 2 Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. 4 But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end."

Turkel has talked a lot about how the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple "fits the bill," but nothing could "fit the bill [of final judgment]" any clearer than the parable in Matthew 25:31ff of the son of man, who comes in glory with his angels and sits on his throne with all nations gathered before him for judgment. The dialogue recorded between Jesus and both those on his right and those on his left shows to any reasonable person that this is a final judgment scene like those recorded in the texts just quoted above. Turkel strains at a gnat and swallows a camel to make this an ongoing scene that is "figuratively" happening now. When a Bible believer has a pet theory to defend, there seems to be no limit to how far he will bend over backwards to find scriptures that teach it, and that is what Turkel is now doing with the parable of the sheep and goats.

Turkel:
We cannot assume that what we are being offered here is a literal picture of events--no more so than people are actually sheep or goats,

Till:
No, it isn't a literal picture. Parables are never literal. However, the meaning of similes, which is what the sheep and the goats are, is always easy to understand. If I said, "John runs as fast as a deer," Turkel wouldn't think that I was saying that John is literally a deer, but he would understand the obvious meaning of my simile, which is that John can run fast. In the parable under consideration, the people of all nations are compared to sheep and goats in a simile: (B)efore him [the son of man sitting on the throne of his glory], will be gathered all nations, who will be separated as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (v:32), so the people are indeed literal people from "all nations"; it is the separation that is figurative. As I noted above, the dialogue between the son of man and the separated people clearly depicts a final judgment scene, except, of course, to those like Turkel, who have emotionally important beliefs that keep them from acknowledging the obvious.

Turkel:
or that the millions of blessed and wicked will respond with exactly the same words at once as though they were some sort of Greek tragedy chorus.

Till:
I addressed this speaking-in-unison quibble in this section of Part 8 in the Humpty Dumpty series. I quoted 11 different passages in which characters spoks in unison in scenes that were obviously intended in literal senses, so I will quote just a couple of examples here.

Matthew 9:14 Then the disciples of John came to Him [Jesus], saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?"

Matthew 26:17 Now on the first day of the Feast of the Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying to Him, "Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?"

Are we to assume that because these scenes were depicted with the disciples of John and Jesus speaking in unison that both events had some kind of figurative meanings? I could fill several pages with examples like these, because such scenes were simply an idiomatic way of presenting pluralities of people with common ideas and purposes that were vocalized by just one of the group. Even in the "Olivet discourse," which Turkel has tried to make figurative almost from beginning to end, we find this same idiom used in reference to the questions that the disciples of Jesus asked him.

Matthew 24:3 Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?"

This texts says that the disciples [plural] asked this question, so are we to assume that because the disciples were presented as saying "exactly the same words at once as though they were some sort of Greek tragedy chorus," this scene never really happened but instead had some figurative meaning? As I said in my previous reply to this quibble, linked to above, "(i)f one was reading a history of World War II in which the author said, 'Patton's men said to him, "We don't want to retreat anymore,"' no one would think that the writer was actually suggesting that an entire division of soldiers spoke up and said at the same time, 'We don't want to retreat anymore.'" The readers would understand, however, that this division of soldiers somehow communicated to their commander, probably through a representative, that they didn't want to retreat anymore. Turkel is always talking about ancient Near Eastern and Semitic idioms, so if he didn't have a pet doctrine to defend, I doubt that he would say that the speaking in unison in the parable of the sheep and goats made the entire scene figurative. By the way in Part 8 of the Humpty Dumpty series, which I linked readers to above, I showed that the presence of some figurative expressions, like similes, in a text does not make the whole passage figurative. It is short enough that I can quote it here.

Turkel tried to justify his spin on the judgment scene described in Matthew 25:31ff by quibbling that the reference to the sheep and goats in the passage shows that it was all figurative. The text, however, says that the people of all nations will be gathered before "the son of Man" after he comes in all of his glory, at which time a separation will take place. The text makes use of the simile of a shepherd dividing sheep and goats to put the sheep in one place and the goats in another. In the same way, the text is saying, the "son of Man" will divide the people of all nations who are gathered before him. Some will be put on his left and some on his right. No reasonable person can claim that the entire text must be interpreted figuratively just because one simile was used. Let's suppose we had the following text.

After the battle, the prisoners were taken into the courtyard of the village and lined against a wall. They were then shot like pigs in a slaughterhouse.

What person reading this would think that the use of the simile "like pigs in a slaughterhouse" made the entire text figurative and that no actual massacre of soldiers actually occurred? Turkel seems to have a hard time understanding that the use of some figurative language in a text doesn't necessarily make all language in the text figurative. The scene in Matthew 25:31ff was obviously describing a final judgment scene that will take place on the "day" that the "son of Man" comes in his glory with his angels. At that time, judgment will take place, and those on the left will go away "into everlasting punishment," which was earlier described in the text as "everlasting fire" (v:41), and those on the right will go away "into eternal life." The view of a final judgment day in which both the "wicked" and the righteous will be judged "according to their works," whether they be good or bad (2 Cor. 5:10) is explicitly taught in the New Testament. This explication of Matthew 25:31 is consistent with all New Testament passages that describe this "day of judgment," but Turkel's interpretation can be made consistent with the others only by stretching imagination like a rubber band to make all of the text figurative because of the use of a simile.

This quotation also shows that I rebutted long ago quibbles that Turkel keeps recycling as if they have not yet been answered.

Turkel:
As DeMar rightly says, this depicts a "judgment over time" [DeM.LDM, 200]. Jesus is now exalted to his throne and is passing this sort of judgment as more and more pass on. His remarks to the sheep and goats, and their responses, are typified and stereotyped; this should also be obvious since they cannot be a complete catalog of virtuous and wicked acts. Matthew 25:31-46 is taking place even now-it is not a future judgment (exclusively), but it is a final one.

Till:
To save time, I will just cut and paste here my previous reply to this, which can also be found in Part 8 of the Humpty Dumpty series linked to above.

To maintain continuity without requiring readers to scroll up to review the statement quoted from Turkel, I'll requote the last half of the paragraph here.

As DeMar rightly says, this depicts a "judgment over time" [DeM.LDM, 200]. Jesus is now exalted to his throne and is passing this sort of judgment as more and more pass on. His remarks to the sheep and goats, and their responses, are typified and stereotyped; this should also be obvious since they cannot be a complete catalog of virtuous and wicked acts. Matthew 25:31-46 is taking place even now--it is not a future judgment (exclusively), but it is a final one.

So DeMar "rightly said" this, did he? I assume everyone noticed that Turkel gave none of DeMar's reasons for saying this; hence, it amounts to nothing but an unsupported assertion. If I can quote a scholar who "rightly" says that this scene depicts a final judgment that will take place after the end of the world, will I tie Turkel? If I quote two or more, will I win? The passages I have quoted and explicated above show that the New Testament depicts a final cataclysmic day in which Jesus will return, the world will be destroyed by fire, and all people will stand before the judgment seat of God to give an account of the deeds they have done. The scene above is consistent with all of those passages. Turkel's strained figurative interpretation isn't.

Of course, no one would think that Matthew 25:33-45 was intended as a complete catalog of every possible righteous and unrighteous act. I'm sure that the apostle Paul didn't intend for his "works of the flesh" in Galatians 5:19-21 to be a complete catalog of sins that would keep people out of the kingdom of God, but they served to remind his readers of the need to do virtuous acts. In the same way, the judgment scene depicted in Matthew 25:31ff served to communicate the idea that righteous acts would be rewarded with eternal life, and unrighteous ones would be rewarded with eternal damnation.

Finally, Turkel argued above--er, excuse me--Turkel asserted above that Jesus is now sitting on his throne passing this judgment "as more and more pass on," but the scene obviously was not depicting a continuous, day-by-day judgment but one that would happen at a specific time when the "son of Man" came in his glory with his angels, which according to other texts would be a time when he would render punishment to all people according to their works. The text is consistent with that New Testament theme, because it depicts Jesus rewarding the righteous collectively and the wicked collectively. "And these [the unrighteous] will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." This is not a depiction of the piecemeal judgment that Turkel asserts but doesn't support with any kind of explication of the text.

Furthermore, to say that Jesus is now on his throne passing judgment as "more and more pass on" runs contrary to the scene in the parable of the tares [also quoted above] where the servants of the owner of the field ask if they should go pull up the tares and burn them. The owner's answer was, "'No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them" (Matt. 13:29). The owner then told them to let both [the tares and the wheat] grow together until the harvest and at the time of harvest he would tell the reapers to pluck up the tares and burn them. Again, this scene is very consistent with the other New Testament passages that teach a final judgment at the end of the world, at which time the world and the wicked will be destroyed with fire. It is not consistent with Turkel's claim that Jesus is now passing out judgment on a day-to-day basis. Turkel's view would have the tares being plucked up on a day-to-day basis, but the parable said that the tares should be left to grow with the wheat until the harvest, which would be a specific time compatible with the idea of a "day of judgment."

There are more end-of-time [age] passages to be analyzed, but I will get to them as I continue dismantling Turkel's preterist position. Then after I have rebutted all of his figurative quibbles, I will explicate 2 Peter 3:1ff.

Those who want to see a complete, thorough rebuttal of Turkel's quibbles should take the time to read all of Part 8 in the Humpty dumpty series, and then read Part 9 to see a detailed explication of 2 Peter 3, which, against all principles of literary interpretation, Turkel has tried to make entirely figurative.

Turkel:
In conclusion: The impetus for this analysis, as noted at the beginning, was skeptical claims that the Bible wrongly taught a "soon" coming of Jesus. Dispensatialists [sic] try to solve this problem by redefining "soon". Our solution is that all along they and others have mis-defined [sic] "coming".

Till:
Well, those who have read all of my replies to Turkel know that I have shown that the New Testament very clearly taught that Jesus would come again soon. Dispensationalists do indeed try to explain the prophecy failures by saying that soon didn't mean soon, at hand didn't mean at hand, and shortly didn't mean shortly, but as I have said repeatedly in my replies, preterists try to circumvent the texts that predicted an imminent return or "coming" by claiming that everything in these texts was figurative. Both interpretations are erroneous. I have rebutted the preterist dodge so thoroughly and often in my replies that I don't have to rehash them here.

Turkel:
I have expected, and still expect, certain reactions to this argument.

Till:
Only an idiot would present such far-fetched, unlikely "explanations" as Turkel has and not expect "certain reactions" to his arguments, which weren't really arguments but just unsupported assertions. Turkel still doesn't understand that he proves nothing when he says that Wright thinks thus and so, DeMar said this and that, and Goldingay believes whatever. All he is doing when he recycles what they said or thought or "saw" is committing the fallacy of appealing to authorities, as if what preterists think or say would carry any real weight in a debate over preterism.

Turkel:
Skeptics I believe will continue to do as our one critic has, merely giving a brief description as though the arguments are refuted by exposure.

Till:
I suspect that I am the "one critic," but when Turkel says that I merely give "a brief description," he is either flagrantly lying or else hasn't really read my rebuttals, which anyone who reads them can see are very specific and detailed. They have pounded Turkel's-- er, DeMar's--preterist assertions flatter than a cow patty.

Turkel:
Fellow believers may react "violently" (as one letter writer has, though providing no more refutation than the skeptic has),

Till:
I don't doubt that "fellow believers" will so react, because even Bible believers can generally see the absurdity of preterist spins on second-coming prophecies. I don't know who the letter writer was, but I certainly can believe that he provided no clear refutations, because Bible believers in general do nothing but recycle worn-out, discredited explanations of biblical discrepancies when they are trying to defend biblical doctrines. I, on the other hand, have replied to Turkel with detailed and specific refutations. They have nailed Turkel's hide to the wall on this issue, and he never will take the time to answer my refutations as thoroughly as I have presented them, because that would take too much time. He prefers to crank out shallowly discussed hackwork.

Turkel:
but I hope will explore this view, and allow scholarship rather than popular fiction and literature to govern their eschatology.

Till:
Scholarship? What scholarship? Since when are avowed preterists, like Gary DeMar, writing in defense of a pet doctrine, showing anything remotely related to scholarship? They have about as much objectivity as a Catholic Cardinal writing in defense of the doctrine of papal infallibility. As for scholarship, is Turkel going to accept scholarship, like that of Bruce Metzger cited above, who said that the epistle of 2 Peter was a second-century work, a fact that reduces the preterist attempt to make 3:1-13 all figurative just more hogwash? I predict he won't.

Turkel:
John MacArthur is right at least in saying that eschatology is a central doctrine, inseperable [sic] from others and particularly the authority and divinity of Christ. We cannot afford to be satisfied with easy solutions.

Till:
Nothing that MacArthur or Turkel or anyone else says about "eschatology" can make biblical beliefs about eschatology real. We have no more reason to think that what biblical writers said about eschatology is any more factual than any of the other superstitious rantings that fill the Bible. Credible science has shown that the earth will not end soon but should last another five billion years until the sun exhausts its fuel. I put more credence in that than what some ancient mystics said about "end times." As for the "authority and divinity of Christ," neither Turkel nor any other Bible believer can prove that, if he even existed, "Christ" was divine or that he had any more "authority" than anyone else at that time.

Satisfied with easy solutions? Preterism is one of the most simplistic attempts to explain the failure of eschatological prophecies. It just says that everything was figurative and expects others to buy it.

This completes my replies to Turkel's articles on "Olivet discourse" nonsense. Anyone who reads them in their entirety can see that I replied to him in detail, but anyone who waits to see if he will reply to my rebuttals with equal thoroughness should not hold his/her breath. It just isn't Turkel's style to answer anything in detail. He finds it much easier just to say that DeMar thinks, or Wright believes, or Witherington sees, etc.

Turkel's Primary Sources:

Dem. LDM DeMar, Gary. Last Days Madness. American Vision, 1999.
Mac. SC MacArthur, John. The Second Coming. Crossway Books, 1999.
With. JPEW Witherington, Ben. Jesus, Paul and the End of the World. IVP, 1992.
Wr. JVG Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Fortress, 1996.

Till:
Two of Turkel's "primary sources" are notoriously preterist in their views of "eschatology," and the other two are dyed-in-the-wool Bible believers, whose first inclinations in the discussion of any biblical text is to assume that it is "the inspired word of God." What they have to say on any biblical subject is about as convincing to nonbelievers as an essay on atheism would be to believers if it did nothing but quote what Dan Barker and other avowed atheists have said about the subject. Turkel has a lot to learn about how to use credible sources in his articles. There are reputable biblical scholars, like those that I quoted in my discussions of texts in Daniel, who do not let their views of the Bible get in the way of their scholarship, but Turkel seems to have little regard for them.

As I said earlier, Turkel likes to talk about "bottom lines," so I will appropriate the phrase here to say that the bottom line in Turkel's articles on preterism is that he resorts to "figurative scenarios" to explain away the prophecies that Jesus would return in the lifetime of some in his generation, and those scenarios are just as ridiculous as the spins that the dispensationalists put on them to make soon not mean soon, at hand not mean at hand, and shortly not mean shortly. Another bottom line is that "Peter" said that the "end of all things is at hand" (1 Peter 4:7) in just one of the many New Testament passages that spoke of an imminent return of Jesus, which would signal the end of the world. Turkel and his preterist cohorts have to play the same game as the dispensationalists and say that "the end of all things" here didn't really mean the end of "all things," but just the end of the "old order," but that "Peter" was referring here to the end of the world at the coming of Jesus is evident from what he went on to say.

1 Peter 4:12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.

Yes, the people of that time thought that Jesus would return soon, but when it didn't happen, some second-century writer forged a second epistle from "Peter" and made the excuses for his delay that we have already seen in my analyses of 2 Peter 3 in Part Eight and Part Nine of the Humpty Dumpty series. Both dispensationalists and preterists today are leaning over backwards to find ways to explain why the second-coming prophecies failed.