Note 103 — Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

Another question is, whether the principal feature in the picture before us, the destruction of the temple and the devastation of Jerusalem, as introductory to the coming of the Messiah, may also be shown to have made part of the popular conception in the time of Jesus. In Jewish writings we find the notion, that the birth of the Messiah would coincide with the destruction of the sanctuary:103 but this idea was obviously first formed after the fall of the temple, in order that a fountain of consolation might spring out of the lowest depth of misery. Josephus finds in Daniel, together with what relates to Antiochus, a prophecy of the annihilation of the Jewish state by the Romans:104 but as this is not the primary object in any of the visions in Daniel, Josephus might first make this interpretation after the issue, in which case it would prove nothing as to the time of Jesus. Nevertheless, it is conceivable, that already in the time of Jesus, the Jews might attribute to the prophecies of Daniel a reference to events yet future, although these prophecies in fact related to a far earlier period; and they might do so on the same grounds as those on which the Christians of the present age still look forward to the full realization of Matt. xxiv. and xxv. As immediately after the fall of the kingdom made of iron mixed with clay, and of the horn that speaks blasphemies and makes war against the saints, the coming of the Son of man in the clouds, and the commencement of the everlasting kingdom of the saints, is prophesied, while this result had not by any means succeeded the defeat of Antiochus: there was an inducement still to look to the future, not only for the heavenly kingdom, but also, since they were made immediately to precede it, for the calamities caused by the kingdom of iron and clay; among which calamities, by analogy with what was predicted of the horn, the desecration of the temple was conspicuous. But while the prophecy in Daniel includes only the desecration of the temple and the interruption of the worship, together with (the partial105) destruction of the city: in the discourse before us complete destruction is predicted to the temple—and likewise to the city, not merely in Luke, where the expressions are very marked, but undoubtedly in the two other Evangelists also, as appears to be indicated by the exhortation to hasty flight from the city;—which prediction of total destruction, as it is not contained in the type, can apparently have been gathered only from the result. But in the first place, the description in Daniel with the expressions ‏שָׁמֵם‎ and ‏הִשְׁחִית‎ (ix. 26 f., xii. 11), which the LXX. translates by ἐρήμωσις, desolation, and διαφθείρω, I destroy, may easily be also understood of a total destruction; and secondly, if once, in connexion with the sins of the nation, the temple and city had been destroyed and the people carried away captive, every enthusiastic Israelite, to whom the religious and moral condition of his fellow-countrymen appeared corrupt and irremediable, might thenceforth expect and predict a repetition of that former judgment. According to this, even those particulars in which, as we have seen in the foregoing section, Luke surpasses his fellow-narrators in definiteness, are not of a kind to oblige us to suppose, either a supernatural foreknowledge, or a vaticinium post eventum: on the contrary, all may be explained by a close consideration of what is narrated concerning the first destruction of Jerusalem in 2 Kings xxv.; 2 Chron. xxxvi.; and Jer. xxxix. 52.