“Truly I tell you, this generation shall certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” we’re told the Lord said, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first,” then those “who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,” and thence the saved “will be with the Lord forever.” Paul said he expected it in his lifetime, and by a word of the Lord. The Evangelists said it would be within the lifetime of at least someone of his generation. Revelation implied it would happen during the reign of Emperor Domitian. Yet it never happened. Not in thousands of years.

As I announced last week, after a delay caused by a hurricane, Don Preston and I finally debated his view of Christian history on MythVision this weekend, with Derek Lambert hosting. Today I’ll publish my post-game analysis not of the debate per-se (you can watch that and judge for yourselves; there are also useful comments under my blog announcement for it), nor of any of Preston’s many promised videos discussing our debate (like this or this, since I’m sure those will just endlessly extend the apologetics), but of Preston’s theory. The debate simply gave Don the opportunity to answer my expert questions and challenges, so we could see what he had to say for his position. Otherwise, we can just analyze his case in print—which is more expansive than he had clocktime to present in the debate, yet doesn’t differ in any relevant way.

What in Heaven and Earth Is Full Preterism?

I will analyze the case Preston makes in the book he sent me (which he adjudged the best version of his case): Like Father, Like Son, On Clouds of Glory: A Study of the Nature of the Second Coming of Christ (CreateSpace 2016). He also sent me a book devoted entirely to 2 Peter, and he has a book dedicated entirely to 1 Thessalonians, and many more. But as far as I can tell, these are sufficiently summarized in Father, Son, insofar as any objective historical analysis is required. Because all they add are a mountain of minutiae for the apologetic, essentially padding an argument that already fell apart at its first premise, abrogating any need to read the minutiae.

Preston is a Full Preterist, which is an obscure and controversial Christian sectarian view. You can catch up on the strange world of preterism, and in particular “full preterism,” at Wikipedia. But in brief, Preston holds that the earliest documents say Jesus not only did predict he would return and complete the end times in the first century (like all mainstream historians conclude) but that everything he said that would entail (even “the resurrection of the dead”) was only a metaphor and not literal—and therefore it all in fact did happen (a position held by no mainstream historian). This means that, according to Preston, there is no second coming left for Christians to wait for. Usually Christians solve the problem of this failed prophecy by insisting Jesus didn’t mean what he said in respect to the time of the second coming; Preston solves the problem by insisting Jesus didn’t mean what he said in respect to what would happen.

Of course, as a historian, I don’t believe either is the case, and that the historical facts support neither of these views. They are both mere apologetics, not legitimate historical conclusions. So the only point in debating this is as a historical theory of early Christianity: in that context, Preston is simply proposing a different literary intention behind the earliest Christian authors, that they didn’t mean what the mainstream consensus of experts claim, but something else—something that it is not even possible to verify or falsify, because it only involved invisible spiritual events, and thus no historical record will exist that they happened, or didn’t happen, apart from the fact that the Jewish temple was indeed destroyed and the city of Jerusalem was left an unpopulated ruin, and thus in some obscure sense the Jews who killed Jesus and persecuted the Christians “got theirs.” Judgment was pronounced and carried out, with none more to come. Otherwise the saved just “felt in their hearts” that they were thus “glorified,” and that was it.

You might already be thinking, “Um. That makes no sense as either history or theology.” And you’d be right. But I’ll leave theology for the theologians (because I think it’s ridiculous). I tried in cross, but Preston would never answer questions about that anyway (and I hear by report he never does). So I cannot tell you what Preston actually thinks Christians or the damned “get” now. Since the end and the resurrection already concluded two thousand years ago, why still “be” a Christian? Preston talks on about feeling glorified and a change in spiritual status, but he never gets specific as to what, physically, this means. He clearly does not believe the dead will be raised in any literal sense. So do people who die today teleport to heaven or hell and live forever in paradise or torment? And do they do this as immaterial ghosts or in new material bodies? Or does no one live forever, they just get some abstract vindication, a “blue check” in some Celestial Twitter, but live no more on? And how does either outcome jive with anything we hear Jesus or early Christians said they believed and hoped for? I don’t know.

So all I can speak on is Preston’s theory of what Christians meant or imagined Jesus predicted, setting aside soteriological metaphysics and just looking at history.

Preterism Is False as Objective History

In our debate I defended the consensus of mainstream historians: that Jesus was believed to have said he would return from heaven within the lives of his peers, and that he would then bring about the promised end of the world, destroying all secular rule, ending all death and suffering, and raising the world’s dead once and for all. Because that’s what everyone claimed he said (and he left us no writing of his own, so we only have their word to go by). I noted that not all early Christians agreed on what would happen to the Earth in all this (whether it would be burned up, as in Revelation 20–22 or 2 Peter 3, or magically returned to a state of paradise, like in Jubilees or the Aramaic Apocalypse). And not all agreed on what exactly would happen to the unsaved (whether they would simply stay forever dead—as I think a close reading of 1 Corinthians 15 entails—or be raised to eternal torment—as promised in Daniel 12). But what they did all agree on was that all the chosen among the world’s dead would be brought back to life, just like Jesus, and this would mark the end of all suffering and death, forever…and that this was due to happen within their lifetimes.

This, of course, didn’t happen. The prophecy was false. As I noted already, Christians can only rescue it in either of two ways: to change when Jesus meant it would happen (so that it agrees with it having been thousands of years yet and not just one generation); or change what Jesus meant would happen (so that it agrees with the remaining historical data). Preterists take the latter approach. But that doesn’t work as history. Any sound critical analysis will show that the earliest Christians all thought (and even had Jesus say) that the entire world would materially (and thus visibly) change, once and for all, and that Jesus would materially, visibly return to destroy all enemies, and rule for ever and ever over an immortal brood of followers.

First Principles

So preterists have to violate all the pertinent principles of historical and literary reasoning. I’ll illustrate that shortly. But as I noted in the debate, we also need to make clear that Preston and I are building on very different starting points:

1. This is an empirical question of history. I am approaching this question as a historian, not a theologian. I am applying the peer-review standards of history and literature as professional academic fields. Preston is largely eschewing those standards and inventing his own, based more on how he “feels” (as indeed he outright said a few times in our debate if you paid close attention), and less on any proper logical relationship between evidence and conclusion. And when I queried him on both, he consistently flailed. Even when asked he could not identify anything as “evidence” (as opposed to an irrelevant fact) and could not explain by what logic his conclusion follows even from what he proposed to be evidence. He likewise ditched all accepted principles of literary studies (even more so in his book; I’ll give examples below), ignoring rules of genre, context, or cueing—abandoning even a basic understanding of how similes and metaphors work.
2. There is nothing supernatural. I am, like most mainstream intellectuals, an atheist. There are no gods or other beings watching over us. There are no special powers to predict the future. Any historical Jesus would have been an ordinary, fallible, limited human being no different than any other revered religious founder in history. Which means prophecy doesn’t exist as a thing. Don operates from the assumption that an invincible space alien inspired all the Old and New Testaments and thus ensured their complete congruence and accuracy, even with respect to their meaning, but also in respect to the future course of events God had planned (which of course God then arranged; because, in case you forgot, Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory). But really all Don and I were debating was what Christians meant, and not whether they were psychics or had supernatural alien informants puppeteering human history. If Jesus did mean only the destruction of Jerusalem, he was just making a smart guess. This would be ordinary political forecasting, not “prophecy.”
3. Context determines meaning. In literary studies, determining what an author meant requires consulting the internal context (which means the literary cues they provide as to what kind of communication they are engaging in) and the external context (which means asking what were the governing assumptions and understandings of the author and their audience in their historical time). As you’ll soon notice, Preston’s entire argument hinges on the singular premise that the intentions and understandings of authors hundreds of years before (like the Prophets or Psalmists), in a completely different ideological and cultural environment, are the only “context” within which New Testament authors are to be understood. But this isn’t even a context. It’s the opposite. It’s an anachronism. The only actual context for interpreting an author is their own time and their own pattern of composition. Not completely different eras and completely different compositional patterns. You can’t say “Star Wars says the Force is a Jedi power, therefore when my physics textbook talks about forces, it’s talking about Jedi powers.” Nor can you say “Jesus said to give all your wealth to the poor, therefore the Gospel of Supply Side Jesus is defending Marxism.” You have to read these different texts, in different genres, by different people, at different times, in respect to their own context and cues. You can’t ever successfully understand an author following Preston’s method instead.
4. Context changes with time. The Bible is a book written by dozens of different authors spanning many hundreds of years, most of whom never met each other. And they wrote in different genres and with different perspectives and circumstances, and often with different objectives. I made clear that I pretty much follow the standard mainstream consensus of professionals on this, which includes the current empirical understanding that many of the books of the Bible are forgeries written much later than they purport to be (most particularly for our debate, Daniel, half the Epistles of Paul, and 2 Peter), and that all the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation (and all the forged Epistles), were written after (not before) the Jewish War concluded in 70 A.D. This did not much impact the debate, but you should be aware that Preston is not an empiricist, but a radicalist, placing most of the New Testament before the war, and rejecting all conclusions of forgery. But the broader point, that context changes with time, did affect the debate: Preston completely ignored this fact, and avoided addressing it every time I brought it up. Which matters, because…
5. Judaism’s context changed radically. Most of the Old Testament was written before the Persian conquest of the Middle East. It evinces a religion that did not have any conception of the end of the world or resurrection of the dead or even much in the way of an afterlife. Persian religion had all of those things. After a few centuries of contact with Persia, Judaism acquired all of those beliefs, and reinterpreted all its prior writings as having anticipated and thus “agreed” with these new beliefs (for evidence and scholarship on this point, see No, the Original Christians Did Not Loot Egypt).

External Context

And that caused two major developments:

1. The Rise of Pesher. This was a new way of interpreting scripture widely adopted by apocalyptic Jews, and routinely on display in the Dead Sea Scrolls—and in Paul and the Gospels, so Christians were adhering to it as well. A pesher is a type of exegesis whereby an inspired author believes they have found secret meanings in scripture, meanings hidden by God, that are different from the original or plain meaning of the text. This allowed all sorts of strange new ways of “understanding” what the scriptures said. In result, the original meaning of the prophets became irrelevant. Christians were reading the prophets as saying coded secret things confirming their new beliefs. This means we cannot understand Christian authors by referring to what Old Testament authors originally meant. And yet Preston’s entire case depends on rejecting this fact of history.
2. The Rise of Apocalyptic. Pesher in turn gave rise to a new genre of Jewish literature, called Apocalyptic (or “New Apocalyptic” if you include in “apocalyptic” even the kinds of things Preston counted, such as predicting merely the transient fall of a local kingdom and not the end of the known world). In this new genre of literature, literal details of the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead, and how they would be brought about by a final anointed savior-figure, a Messiah, were all “found” secretly hidden in the Old Testament books—and in other books, since the canon of the Old Testament was not then decided, and Christians regarded many more books as inspired scripture than are now there (for evidence and examples, see Element 9 in Ch. 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus). In result, the standard Jewish view had changed from what it was when most of the Old Testament was written.

Both of these new developments—pesher and cosmic apocalypticism—changed everything Preston depends on for his argument. When Christianity arose there were diverse sects of Jews, including Sadducees who rejected the supernatural and interpreted these prophecies as being of a merely military and secular restoration of Israel (imagined more like a future political utopia). But Christians were not materialists; they were supernaturalists. They therefore held to the view of the majority of Jews we know of, who fervently believed (and declared heretical anyone who denied) a literal end of the world, a literal resurrection of all the righteous dead, a permanent end to all the unrighteous, and an immortal existence in an ensuing paradise.

Preston was also prone to black-or-white or straw man fallacies in our debate. For example, he almost accused me of claiming New Testament authors were always writing literally, so any example he could find of nonliteralism would then “refute” me and prove they were writing metaphorically always just when Preston needed them to be. But I dispelled that at once: I corrected him, noting that authors used all modes, and so whether in a particular passage an author is being literal or not has to be determined case-by-case (for example, see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians), so he cannot simply “assume” they were being metaphorical whenever he needed—we need contextual evidence that they were.

And when I asked Preston for that evidence, he evaded and never presented any. He always would just return to his circular argument that any quotation of scripture meant the author understood it to mean the same thing its original author intended—which we know for a fact was not the case. One example I gave was the way prophecies of a virgin birth are extracted by Matthew from texts that never meant any such thing and in some cases weren’t even talking about future events at all; and Preston must say Matthew wasn’t being metaphorical about it, as then even the existence of a divine Jesus becomes a mere metaphor.

In another instance of this, Preston incorrectly said my definition of Jewish apocalypticism meant an “end to the time-space continuum” (a slip I found in his book as well, so it seems to be an error fundamental to his position). But that simply is not the case. The physics of the world would change, so the world as we know it would end, not “all existence would end.” As I noted before, this was imagined in some cases as melting the Earth and replacing it with a better place; and in other cases as simply returning Earth to its prior state of paradise. But in either case, apocalypticists most definitely understood this in a literal, cosmic way, and not as a metaphor for some invisible inner experience or merely spiritual change in status. But Preston’s straw man here made it easier for him to argue by false lemma, saying that this or that author clearly cannot have meant an “end to the time-space continuum,” and therefore they meant something nonliteral and merely metaphorical. This violates the Law of Excluded Middle by forgetting that actual apocalypticists of that time held to neither view, but to the one Preston kept ignoring.

I surveyed examples of this literary context in my opening, a point Preston completely dropped in the debate and simply evaded at every turn, even when I kept re-noting it. He did not seem in any way interested in the actual historical and literary context of Christian authors. Yet only that can determine what they meant in any given case. Here is just a sample:

1. Daniel. Only one apocalyptic book of this kind was inducted into the canon: the book of Daniel, which all mainstream scholars agree was written in the 2nd century B.C., not in the 6th century as it claims (see How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery). It thus shows all the influence of Persian ideas on Jewish expectations. Like in Daniel 12, which says, “At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time,” the angel Gabriel says to Daniel, “your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” And Daniel is promised he will be among them: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Which was predicted to happen in the coded seventy sevens chronology of Daniel 9, which is itself a pesher explicitly reinterpreting a passage in Jeremiah to have predicted this literal end of the world soon after the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century B.C. (a concept in no way ever meant by the actual author of Jeremiah). But when that didn’t happen, Jewish sages started reinterpreting the seventy sevens prophecy to match some yet other future event.
2. The Dead Sea Scrolls. One result of that effort was Christianity itself (see Elements 3 through 7 in Ch. 4 of OHJ). But we see earlier examples (transitional fossils, as it were) in the Dead Sea Scrolls—like the Melchizedek Scroll and the Aramaic Apocalypse, which interpret the Prophets of having promised a literal supernatural messianic war, a literal end of the world, a literal resurrection, and a literal end to death and disease. Which of course didn’t happen. So the can kept getting kicked down the road (see my talk on “How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Caused Christianity Instead,” and its accompanying slides).
3. Enoch. The Book of Enoch is another example of this trend, and modern scholars agree it was very influential on early Christian thought. It is even cited as scripture in Jude 1:14–15: “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: ‘See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him’.” The full context of that quote in the book of Enoch makes clear that this is a reference to a literal end-times event and resurrection of the dead. It is not a metaphor for some invisible change of status.
4. Life of Adam and Eve. Another example is the Apocalypse of Moses, also known as the Life of Adam and Eve, which is alluded to by Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, when he refers to the location of the original Garden of Eden as being in the third heaven, which is explained in this Apocalypse. It also explains the death penalty pronounced by God in Genesis (which is relevant to Preston’s case, even though he never touched on it in our debate; I’ll revisit it below), and, more importantly, God’s promise to resurrect Adam and all people in the end time and allow them to return to Paradise in the third heaven: “For it will not be yours now, but at the end of time,” meaning the time of mortals, “Then will all flesh be raised from Adam till that great day” and “the delights of paradise will be given to them and God will be among them,” and “they will no longer sin before his face, for the evil heart will be taken from them and there will be given to them a heart of understanding” and “when again the Resurrection has come to pass, I will raise you up and then there will be given to you the Tree of Life” again, ensuring Adam and everyone else can live forever.
5. Jubilees. Another example is Jubilees 23, which was also an influential text on early Christianity. It, too, describes the end of the world, the resurrection, and all the world being free of war and disease (as are also promised in the Aramaic Apocalypse, which appears to be a commentary on Jubilees):
   • “And there shall be no old man. Nor one who is dissatisfied with his days. For all shall be children and youths. And all their days they shall complete and live in peace and in joy, for there shall be no Satan nor any evil destroyer. For all their days shall be days of blessing and healing. And at that time the Lord will heal His servants, and they shall rise up and see great peace, and drive out their adversaries. And the righteous shall see and be thankful, and rejoice with joy for ever and ever. For they shall see all their judgments and all their curses befall their enemies.”
6. The Talmud. Though it’s a later compilation of teachings spanning prior centuries, we also find discussion across the Talmud of how Jews interpreted the Old Testament books to confirm all these beliefs, including an end of the world and a world resurrection. The Talmud even condemns as a heretic anyone who denies this (discussion, discussion, discussion).

Another important piece of context, which didn’t become important in the debate but is important to anyone reading Preston’s books, is that of Proselytes and God Fearers. Because you can’t understand early Christianity without understanding the context of the religious marketplace it arose in. In the early first century, Judaism was popular among certain Gentiles who admired its apocalyptic promises and its sense of family and camaraderie, but did not want to adhere to its strict rules and flesh mutilation. These were called God Fearers and (if converted) Proselytes. Paul found a way to poach from this ready market by doing away with the hardships, and letting God Fearers convert without them. The Gentile audiences he is writing to are thus already well versed in Judaism and its current expectations of the end times, even if they formerly had been pagan. This is why Paul can readily rely on Greek translations of the Scriptures with them.

When we put all this together, we have to read Paul and the Gospels, and Revelation (and even the forgeries), in this context: these were Persian-influenced apocalyptic Jews (or avid fans thereof), and so were their audience. So they would have shared the popular belief in a literal end with a literal resurrection of all the world’s dead, and an end to all death and disease, and living forever in a resulting paradise. Which means they were all non-preterists. If they had held to anything so radically contrary to the overwhelming Jewish zeitgeist of their time as Preston’s “metaphorical apocalypticism,” they would have had to remark on it, lest everything they say be misunderstood. Which has an important consequence to how we evaluate this debate with the method of Empirical Hypothesis Testing.

If any of these authors were Preston-style preterists, they would be extremely unusual in their time and place. And that means they would have to explain that they didn’t mean what they said in the way everyone else then understood (otherwise, that’s exactly how everyone would understand them). So we should have examples of them explicitly outlining their preterist reimagining of the apocalypse. But they don’t. If they had been preterists, we would not need convoluted reinterpretations of their words from Don Preston. Paul would already be explaining it to us, explicitly. The Gospels would already have Jesus explaining it to us, explicitly. They would already differentiate their unusual preterism from the popular non-preterism all around them. In fact they would have to be engaging in argument with that popular non-preterist apocalypticism, endeavoring to refute it in favor of their unusual alternative. But they don’t.

Ironically, Preston remained oblivious to this point in our debate even when he tried to argue that we know Jesus deviated from popular Judaism in some aspects of his apocalypticism, “therefore” we can conclude he also deviated from it in every way Preston insists as well. But this is exactly backwards. The early Christians did deviate from the mainstream, and had Jesus say so a lot, such as rejecting the idea of a secular military king and replacing it with an eternal cosmic space ruler, rejecting popular notions of a military conquest with a bold anti-militarism, replacing their dreams of an earthly kingdom with its actual destruction and replacement with a supernatural paradise, and so on. But here’s the thing: we know this because they say it. That’s how empirical hypothesis testing works: if they deviated from the norm, they would say so. Because they would have to. And lo, they do. But notice what they don’t say: everything Preston wants them to have said. This kills his theory. His own evidence proves they would have also said what he wants. But they don’t; so his own evidence refutes his own theory.

This means the evidence plainly establishes that these authors were standard apocalypticists of their time, in respect to all its cosmic and supernatural aspects. When they speak of the same things and in the same way as every other intertestamental apocalypticist, they were doing that because they were saying what every other intertestamental apocalypticist was. They were unaware of any confusion or argument to confront over that, because they didn’t have any. When they differed, they said so. So when they didn’t say so, they didn’t differ.

The external context thus plainly establishes that Preston’s theory of what they meant is false.

The Internal Context

Which leaves one premise left to establish: evidence that Paul and the Evangelists were typical apocalyptic Jews of their era, using pesher to reinterpret Scriptures as predicting a literal end of the secular world and its replacement with an eternal paradise in which all the righteous dead would rise and live forever, and that right soon. Preston has convoluted arguments that they are always speaking metaphorically about this, but he never presents evidence of this—as in facts that make it probable that that is what they are doing in those passages. To the contrary, like all apologists, he can only get to his conclusion by ignoring all the evidence against it—by basically ignoring the context of every passage, it’s every cue, even its genre.

Obviously there is a lot of figurative and metaphorical discourse in early Christian texts (see, for example, Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords? and Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders). But not every single passage is that, nor does every figure or metaphor support Preston’s specific “take” on what a passage is “supposed” to mean. Literary analysis has to be disciplined and rational (see, for example, Reading Josephus on James: On Valliant Flunking Literary Theory and “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability). You can’t just say “Isaiah meant x, therefore any Christian quoting or riffing on Isaiah meant x.” They usually wouldn’t have—pesher almost never adopts the prophet’s original meaning. So you need specific evidence of any such strange deviation from the methods of the pesharim.

For example, Paul often tells you when he is being figurative, allegorical, or metaphorical. Or even the structure and context of his discourse makes this clear. None of this evidence exists for any of the passages Preston considers, nor even for any figurative component of them supporting what he avers. To the contrary, they are presented in exegetical, not metaphorical, mode; they are discursive in the classic sense of Hellenistic rhetoric, which is the mode Paul is using—as he is writing in educated Greek and thus knows the difference between discursive and allegorical modes of communication taught in the Greek schools he would have attended. Which is why he has to use known techniques for signaling when he is using figure or metaphor, because that was required by the genre. In other words, Paul is composing Epistles that are describing and responding to arguments; he is not composing Psalms or Prophecy (much less Myth or Fable or even History), so he is not employing their routine of metaphorical discourse. He is presenting rational arguments to a conclusion, in the format of ancient Greek rhetoric, which required the core of what he says to be literal and plain—to be, in other words, explained. Hence if Paul were ever advocating Prestonian Preterism, he would be explaining it to us. We would not have to secretly interpret it out of what he said.

The Gospels (and Acts), meanwhile, are composed in the genres of myth and fable (and propagandistic history), so we know they will employ allegorical discourse rather routinely; and we can prove this empirically with abundant examples (see Chapter 10 of OHJ). And of course Revelation is even more metaphorical, as “coded prophecy” is its entire genre. But the Gospels are narratives and thus mix allegorical with literal construction and intention (and even Revelation switches into this mode at times, just as did the ancient Prophets).

For example, quite consistently across the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is portrayed as a trickster, who speaks in doubletalk and with deliberate obscurity, playing on the ironies of saying something other than a plain hearing would assume, and thus aweing his friends and getting one over on his enemies (very much in the tradition of Aesop, which the Gospels emulate: see Element 46 in Ch. 5 of OHJ). So Preston has at least contextual plausibility on his side in their case. But he still needs evidence—not only that something is a metaphor, but that it is precisely the metaphor Preston is claiming. You can’t just argue, “The Gospels often employ metaphorical discourse; therefore the Gospels say exactly what I claim.” That’s a non sequitur. There is a gap of evidence there. Preston never meets it. He never even tries to. He simply assumes he is right, and that his methodological tool is valid (that anything meant originally by an OT author is understood and meant the same way by an NT author), when it isn’t (it’s just anachronism, ignoring all the changes in the external context I just surveyed).

To see what I mean, let’s go through the most important examples…

The End as Described in Paul

One of the earliest Christian discussions of the apocalypse (a word that then meant an “uncovering” or a “revealing”) is in 1 Corinthians 15. There Paul is specifically dealing with a nascent preterist claiming that, indeed, all is fulfilled, the kingdom has come, and so there is no literal resurrection to look forward to. Notably Paul is here explicitly arguing against preterism, a rather glaring problem for Preston. And even more notablty, Paul’s response to this argument is not Preston’s. Paul does not argue, “Oh, we mean a figurative resurrection, not a literal one,” and then go on explaining what that was. To the contrary, Paul argues, “Oh, yes, we do mean a literal resurrection,” and then goes on explaining what that was. This is fatal to Preston.

To get this you should read the entire text all the way through. Then you will see all the cues as to what mode of discourse Paul is engaging in, what argument he is opposing, what argument he is making against it, and thus what he means to communicate to the Corinthians about all this, including what ideas he means to dispel. Here I can only sample the text for you, with added emphasis calling attention to key points.

For example, Paul outlines his and his opponents’ position like this:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Here we see that Paul clearly believed Jesus literally rose from the dead, and that this means so will we, and that Christianity is false if the dead are not literally to be raised—and soon, because he goes on to say Jesus is “the first fruits” of this general resurrection. His resurrection thus proves the final resurrection of all the world’s dead is close at hand. That is what Paul is arguing (and yes, he argues it again and again, across multiple letters, as you’ll see). There is no possible way to rationally get anything here about Paul meaning resurrection is just figurative for us but literal for Jesus. Paul’s entire argument is that they have to both be literal or else Christianity is false.

Preston is done here. Cooked. His theory is dead on this paragraph alone. But it gets worse.

For Paul then goes on to explain:

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him; then [will come] the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 

Here Paul says Jesus will come again (really, he says he will come—Paul never seems to know anything about it being a “second” time, but we’ll let that slide as moot to the point at hand), and the chosen dead will be literally raised just as Jesus was, and then everything ends: all worldly power ends—because “all” means spiritual and secular; indeed, he says even death will end. This is as literal an apocalypse as you can get. Paul does not mean death will be destroyed figuratively or allegorically or in some weird conceptual sense. He means there will no longer be death. In the end, God rules all, and nothing contrary to his will exists anymore. In case Preston’s handwaving and excuses confuse you about this, just keep reading Paul’s argument. Wait for it. Paul himself will refute everything Preston says.

As Paul goes on, “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?'” And then Paul engages a detailed answer to this argument. If Paul were a preterist, this is where he would explain exactly that position. We would have Preston’s discourse laid out plainly here, with Paul explaining in what way the resurrection will come. Because that is the argument he has to answer: doubters of the resurrection, who complain that it doesn’t make any sense, because of confusion about what their body will then be like. To resolve that confusion and thus answer these deniers, Paul would have to explain the preterist concept of resurrection and why we can be sure it will be fulfilled. But he doesn’t. Paul instead goes on to give a detailed argument about the physics of individual bodies. The resurrected, he explains, will not keep their old crappy flesh. They will have new, superpowered bodies, which are indestructible and immortal, made of the same stuff as the stars (Paul of course knew no real astrophysics—as then he’d be stymied by the fact that our mortal flesh is already made of starstuff, but no matter; we must understand him in his context of scientific understanding, which held to a fundamental divide between terrestrial and celestial matter: see Element 35 in Ch. 5 of OHJ).

Paul reasserts this fact in his next letter to the Corinthians (in 2 Cor. 5):

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

The language here is all commonplace jargon for literal resurrection (bodies as garments, flesh as a tent or a burden, nakedness when disembodied, and the contrast with supernatural celestial bodies), as I survey extensively in my chapter on the resurrection body in The Empty Tomb, and as discussed in the peer reviewed studies of Caroline Bynum and Dale Martin. But the key point here is that Paul believes there will be a final judgment for us all (“we must all appear” for it), including the dead (“whether we are at home in the body or away from it”), and we will end up living in immortal celestial bodies, which will replace our current mortal ones. When Paul says we “live by faith, not by sight” he is plainly referring to our confidence that we will get these new celestial bodies and thus escape death (“what is mortal will be swallowed up by life”), despite the fact that we can’t see them yet, and have to simply trust that we will receive them (a theme echoed as well in Hebrews 11: see my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 236ff.).

There are of course a lot of metaphors here (like “the earthly tent we live in”). But none of them are Preston’s. They are not metaphors for figurative bodies or figurative deaths or figurative lives, but metaphors for literal bodies. Our fleshly and immortal bodies are still real bodies, just as tents and cloaks are real things, too. This is made even clearer when we place this text after 1 Corinthians 15, since it is a continuation of that explanation and argument, and thus can only be understood in that context. Jesus also received a celestial body after his “earthly tent” was destroyed, and so will we; and while there are doubters, we have faith that we will get the same thing. That’s Paul’s argument. If he had meant something else than that, he would have said something else than that. Otherwise what he said can only be understood in the context of what Paul wrote and when.

The internal context is 1 Corinthians 15 and its explanatory argument addressing the doubters of the resurrection. The external context is the first century language of mortal and immortal bodies that Paul draws all his metaphors from. For example, Preston will try to argue that the Judeo-Christian idea of resurrection was “corporate,” and therefore figurative; but that’s a non sequitur: in every extant text it is only corporate in the sense of every individual getting to rise from the dead in a new or improved body. It is not figuratively corporate. It is literally corporate. Sharing in the body of Christ, as the Church infused with his Spirit, is for Paul a material metaphysical fact, which is what ensures we will each, as members of that corporation, escape death through resurrection into better body-suits than we wear now.

Lest you still not be convinced, Paul gets even plainer than this. In 1 Cor. 15 Paul concludes, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed,” all until, as Paul says, “Death has been swallowed up in victory,” here quoting Isaiah 25:8, but clearly in no way meant by Isaiah. Notice the parallel text in 2 Cor. 5, of our mortality being swallowed by life, ending death once and for all (as also declared in 1 Cor. 15:26, where death is the last enemy to be defeated), in the context of losing our mortal bodies and gaining in their place superior, celestial bodies. And Paul says the same thing happens to the dead as the living. So they don’t have different fates. He is also explicit that this will happen at once to all the dead and the living, in a mere instant of time.

Paul may be drawing language, like of trumpets sounding, from scripture, but he is using it literally here. He says that he imagines “we will hear” this “last trumpet” (not that we will imagine it or experience it symbolically in something else) and that is when our bodies will be changed into immortal and invincible ones, ending all death, everywhere. If Paul did not mean these things literally, he would have to explain so, and what the strange other meaning really was. Otherwise he would be failing to answer the doubters whose arguments he is supposed to be addressing. In the external context, Paul is talking just like every other apocalyptic literalist. In the internal context, Paul is providing an explanation in answer to an argument, not writing songs or poetry or prophecy. Both contexts establish Paul means the end will come in a flash, with a literal trumpet’s blare, and the dead will come back to life in invincible, immortal bodies, and our bodies will be swapped out for those as well.

Paul even expands on this narrative in 1 Thessalonians 4:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 

This repeats everything in 1 and 2 Corinthians: Paul is being discursive (“we do not want you to be uninformed”), he thus has to speak plainly, as anything else in his context will misinform; he is saying the dead will literally come back to life (as otherwise, he argues, we should grieve just as the rest of mankind does), and in exactly the same way Jesus did (“we believe Jesus rose again, and so we believe” the dead in Jesus will rise again, repeating the same argument of 1 Cor. 15; there is no room here for Paul to mean these resurrections are entirely different, one literal and the other metaphorical). And this will happen when “God brings Jesus” back to us at the predicted future time, which Paul goes on to insist will be within his lifetime or at least the lifetime of those among the Thessalonians he is writing to.

Indeed Paul is explicit here, as the context demands (since he has expressly said he needs to be perfectly clear here so no one will misunderstand):

According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

So again, we get the dead being raised to join us, at a trumpet call, when Jesus comes back from heaven. Just as Paul says again in Philippians 3:

Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

That’s exactly what Paul explains in 1 Cor. 15 and 2 Cor. 5: we all get the same new bodies (the dead and the living), and that this will happen when the Savior comes “from” heaven, just as Paul says in 1 Thess. 4. The internal context, and cross-context, of all these passages establishes Paul is speaking literally of these points, not metaphorically.

Pulling Funny Stuff with Language

No sound exegesis can get a different result without ignoring these contexts.

For example, in his books Preston argues things like that the language of Christ “coming” often uses the Greek noun parousia and its cognates, which means “presence” (literally para ousia, “being with or nearby”), and therefore just refers to a general spiritual “presence” and not a literal, visible descent from heaven. But none of these contexts support that reading. This is like saying because the Force means Jedi powers, Newton’s force is a Jedi power. Wrong context. That word simply doesn’t mean the same thing in those different contexts. In fact, the language of parousia is typically used to refer to the arrival of earthly kings and lords, an actual visible travel, and thus in such contexts rarely takes a symbolic or “spiritual” meaning as Preston says. And Paul often uses other words that distinctly mean travel (e.g. in 1 Cor. 11:26 Paul says Jesus shall come, using erchomai, the standard Greek word for going somewhere; in 1 Thess. 4:16 Paul says Jesus will “come down from heaven,” using katabainô, the standard Greek word for downward travel; likewise in Philippians, where we “wait” for Jesus “from” heaven, which is referenced again in Hebrews 9:25-28). And Paul is surrounding all this with literal geophysical markers (come “down,” “from” heaven, “in” the clouds, “to” the air, and even “carried off,” etc.).

Preston needs every single word here to mean pretty much the opposite of what it usually means and what it contextually means as actually used by Paul, and that’s simply an endless array of epicycles, without any evidence for any one much less all of these epicycles—and against the evidence we do have: the external context of what apocalyptic language then was usually employed for and understood as, and the internal context of Paul’s own cues and signals as to what he means and why he is saying what he is, what purposes it serves, and what he wants his audiences to understand.

For example, another argument Preston attempts in his books is to say that the Greek word for “air” (aêr) meant a nonphysical spiritual condition. I am not aware of it ever meaning that—not in the entire thousand year history of the ancient Greek language. Apart from the Homeric era when it meant a nevertheless-still-physical mist (a visible condition of the air), the word always referred to the physical location of the atmosphere, the layer of the sky or heavens between the Earth and the numbered or superior heavens, the region often then referenced as “the firmament,” where birds lived, and precisely the location of clouds, as taught in all Greek schools of the time (as this was among the rudiments of scientific knowledge readily conveyed in school then; see my overall discussion in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire).

So when Paul triples down and says “in the clouds into the air” after Jesus has “come down from heaven,” he is not only being literal, he is being emphatically hyper-specific. There is no evidence otherwise. When cornered, Preston will simply resort to trying to find some similar language in some other text centuries before, and “insist” Paul is using his Greek word the same way as that completely different author, in a completely different time, in a completely different context, writing for a completely different purpose, and in a completely different way. That is simply not valid reasoning. It is, I’m sorry to say, crank. Real, peer-reviewed literary and historical analysis does not work like that.

Another argument you’ll find in Preston’s books is that the Greek word Paul employs for “meeting” Jesus in the air, apantêsis, actually means “escort,” and therefore Paul is talking about Christians only conceptually “escorting” the spiritual presence of Jesus down to Earth, and not actually going up to meet Jesus physically in the air. But this is another stack of epicycles. The word does not always mean escort (it routinely meant simply meet, being simply the nominal form of the verb apantaô); and even when it does, it still means that literally in any geographical context (like “in the clouds in the air”). Its only metaphorical sense was in intellectual argument (to “meet” someone’s argument or challenge), and that was always established by clear contextual markers nowhere present here. Preston admits its most apposite sense was in reference to kings or lords arriving, and emissaries going out to “meet” them, and escort them in (an expected courtesy), which still entails physically going out to meet them (for an example, see Acts 28:15). But Paul does not say whether this meeting was to be followed by any kind of escort, whether of us escorting Jesus back down to Earth, or Jesus escorting us the rest of the way to heaven, so there is no way to know (much less claim) it was one or the other—or either, as the word did not entail any escorting role. But none of these options gets us to “it wasn’t a physical movement.” Paul’s contextual cues indicate that, to his mind, it was. He exhibits no knowledge of Preston’s strange interpretation.

The genre and context of all these statements is not prophecy or songwriting; it is epistolary discourse, a straightforward explanation of facts in answer to a question or to advance an argument. When it uses metaphors, it does so to advance an explanation that is meant to be plain, not obscure, employing language in ways familiar to the audiences of his era and subculture. And it does not challenge what was then the popular understanding but promotes it. Paul thus calls bodies tents because he wants to convey something literal about our physical bodies (that they are fragile and temporary places we live inside), and not because he isn’t talking about individual physical bodies but, say, a purely conceptual change in our spiritual status. He isn’t employing his metaphors that way.

Across all these texts Paul is therefore describing a literal sequence of events: in a flash, a trumpet will sound, Christ will descend from heaven, the dead will rise, and then they and the still-living will be snatched up into the sky to be with the Lord “forever.” Paul means a literal trumpet sound, literal clouds, literal air. And that is why his congregants can be encouraged by his words. It isn’t fake. It isn’t conceptual. It is real. And it will happen very soon.

The End as Described in the Gospels

When this didn’t happen, not even when the Jewish capital and temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., the Gospels came to be written as apologetics to explain why it still had not happened. This is where we get Mark 13 (as repeated and embellished by Matthew and Luke), who makes Jesus say (contrary to what Preston claims) that the Jewish War was just the “birth pangs” and not the actual end (Mark 13:2–8), which will happen some unknown time afterward (Mark 13:32–37), but still within the lifetime of at least someone of the first generation (Mark 13:29-30). Mark also describes it as what people will literally see (Mark 13:26): Jesus descending from heaven in clouds, just as Paul described (a point even more explicitly made in Acts 1:9-11; more on that shortly), and then gathering his elect (Mark 13:27), referencing Paul’s reassuring promise to the Thessalonians (unsurprisingly, as Mark was simply reifying the teachings of Paul into a fable: see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles).

Thus Mark kicked the can down the road a bit. Popular imagination held a maximum human lifespan to be 120 years, and a typical actual maximum was around 85, so at least one person of even 15, somewhere, in the year 30 could be expected to still be around in 100 or even 135 A.D. Paul clearly thought he’d still be around, so he expected the end to come in the middle of the first century at the latest; while Mark moved the goalposts out about fifty years more. Otherwise, Mark was certainly a literalist about the resurrection—he has his Jesus explain that our resurrected bodies will be asexual and immortal, rather than defending the merely conceptual corporate revival (or whatever) that Preston wants.

This idea is also picked up and tweaked a bit more by the author of Revelation, who imagined a great secular cataclysm in the time of Domitian (which didn’t happen, cluing us in that that is when the author wrote, as his “prophecies” were accurate up until just that point, the same mistake that helps us locate the real date of the book of Daniel), followed by a thousand year paradisiacal reign of Jesus on Earth—alongside a select number of martyrs he would resurrect as his immortal seneschals—which would then be followed by a final cosmic war and destruction of Earth and its replacement with a better, in which all death would cease and everyone would live forever.

But even that thousand year reign never happened. Revelation was putting the actual return of Christ and the first resurrection and change to the world in the same window as Mark. For as we find in Rev. 20:4-6:

I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus…who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

After which everything would be destroyed and replaced with a magical space city.

But because Revelation is highly metaphorical and “coded,” I won’t argue its meaning here, as that would be tedious: see instead my article Behold Babylon USA! We have plenty of non-prophetic, non-cyphered texts in the New Testament to judge by instead. Of course nothing Preston argues that Revelation means is valid, either, since he doesn’t employ sound methods of interpretation on even that text. Like all the others, even in all its metaphors and symbolism, he still has to get it to mean the opposite of what it says to get it to mean what he theorizes. As Preston admitted in our debate, his theory is described by no extant Christian text. To the contrary, every extant author from then believes in the resurrection and the apocalypse literally, e.g. from the Epistle of Barnabas and On Resurrection of the Flesh (and Against Marcion 3.24) by Tertullian, to Against Heresies (esp. 5 and 2.33.5) by Irenaeus and On the End of the World by Pseudo-Hippolytus; even the Didache (see §10 and §16). For more see Jonathan Menn’s “Historical Overview of Eschatological Thought.”

But most importantly, by the time we get to the last redaction of the last Gospel, we see Christians abandoning this embarrassing tactic of predicting a time and it passing, by having Jesus extend the clock indefinitely. In John 21:20-23, Jesus is finally made to say that he can keep a member of that generation alive as long as he wants—literally, he says, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”, thus extending the clock to any future time. The author of this contrivance was well aware doubters would mock and say the end will never come then, by dispelling that argument with an editorial comment: “Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that.”

Christians have continued kicking the can down the road every century since, using all these same tactics of punching up vagueness or punching up new interpretations of every failed prediction (see, for example, The Real History of the End of the World and The Pursuit of the Millennium)—rather than simply admitting the original prophecy was simply false all along.

And Everywhere Else

You may recall Jude quoting Enoch describing the end times as Jesus arriving with a horde of angels for a final judgment of all people. There is no indication he didn’t mean this as literally as Enoch did. Likewise in the pre-war texts of Paul’s contemporaries, such as 1 Clement 24–26, where we find an explicit defense of a literal coming resurrection, and Hebrews 1:10–12, where we find this argument:

He also says, “In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe; like a garment they will be changed.
But you remain the same, and your years will never end.”

The author is quoting Psalm 102:25–27, which was originally just a poetic expression (literally a song) about how the world always changes; it was not about any apocalypse. But the author of Hebrews would not be quoting such a trivial point as that here if that’s what he thought the Psalm meant. He clearly thinks it meant something genuinely apocalyptic (as explained in Hebrews 12:25-29 and elsewhere), specifically in connection with the atoning death of Jesus and his role in the final days, leading to an eternal rest from labors for all the saved (as described in Hebrews 4). Preston wants us to ignore this external and internal context (that this author is writing pesher; and that this author would have no logical reason to quote this text here in its original sense), and conclude this is just a mundane proverb about the world ever-changing, or that every word of it is a coded metaphor for a single city being razed.

Nevertheless, in his books Preston will pull astonishing non sequiturs to get that outcome by, such as explaining how the Jewish temple was constructed in imitation of “the earth and heavens,” and therefore all references in the New Testament to “the earth and heavens” just means the temple. But he never presents any evidence that this is, in fact, what any author ever meant. He skips straight from “it’s possible” to “therefore it’s probable,” the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter I’ve been calling out across all apologetics for every delusional idea for years now (see chapter two of my book Proving History). And it’s worse, really, because it isn’t even probable that anyone would ever consider the destruction of a desktop model of the Starship Enterprise as the destruction of the Starship Enterprise. An imitation is not the thing.

Likewise in the 2nd century forgery of 2 Peter 3:

Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be [found dissolved]. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

A quick note about the bracketed [found dissolved] where the manuscripts disagree: the most widespread reading here is simply “found” which makes no logical sense (translators try to handwave some sense into it by rendering it as “laid bare” or “exposed” but that’s a stretch and doesn’t really fit the context). Since the next sentence says “destroyed,” other extant readings make more sense. Manuscripts Augustine trusted read “burned up” here, which is logical but not likely original. A few manuscripts say “not found” (adding the word “not”), but that looks like scribes trying to make sense of a garbled text by coming up with the least change possible to render it sensible again. Whereas the earliest manuscript we have, Papyrus 72 from the 3rd century, says “found dissolved,” and that is almost certainly the original reading (and the word “dissolved” was simply dropped erroneously in transmission after that).

Regardless, Preston wants this entire passage to be some strange metaphor about the elements of Jewish law being done away with. But that contradicts all the internal contextual cues. This author is engaging a discursive argument against “skeptics” of a literal coming of Christ who point out that he hasn’t come and nothing has changed (a natural problem a forger of the 2nd century would be facing, as by then even Mark’s and Revelation’s clocks had run out). If this author were a Prestonian preterist, he would have answered that argument as Preston does: explaining that the change to come will not be a literal, visible destruction or change, but an inner, spiritual one, and will affect only the sinners in Jerusalem for killing Jesus and driving out Christians, and so on. But the author does exactly the opposite. They begin by saying the end to come will be like the previous end, the flood of the Earth that wiped out the then-known world. This author clearly does not think that was a metaphorical event; it’s literal. And he is saying this time the destruction will be by fire. And rather than get metaphorical, he gets hyper-specific: everything on Earth (not just the law; not just Jerusalem) will be destroyed; even the heavens will be, their very atoms will be melted by the heat; and God will create a new heaven and earth for us, and only the righteous will get to live there.

Preston plays word games to try and get this text to say the opposite of what it does. For example, he will try to argue (as in our debate) that because in a different context Paul uses “elements” to mean demonic forces with some relation to religious rituals (and hence “laws”), and 2 Peter says everything Paul said is correct (even though that does not tell us what 2 Peter thinks Paul said or how he should be interpreted), we should conclude 2 Peter is using the word “elements” in the same way here as Paul does there. This is not how language works. Paul was not talking about the end of the world. The context is different. And when context changes, so do the meanings of words, which are decided by context.

2 Peter may have agreed, if we could ask him, that the word “elements” can also be used to refer to elements of geometry, elements of an army, elements of a law (Hebrews 5:12 speaks of “elements of the principal oracles of God”), even elemental spirits; but he would be perplexed that we think he is using it to mean that here. He isn’t talking about any of those things. If this were a discourse about the tactical movement of armies, we should infer “elements” means military units. But it’s not. It’s a discourse about the world visibly remaining unchanged and Jesus not having come, where the response to that argument is that the previous literal destruction of the world by water would be met with a soon-to-come literal destruction of the world by fire (“just you wait!”), where specifically “elements” is contextualized as referring to heavens and earth being destroyed by fire. It therefore means atoms here. Because that’s how words work.

Likewise, Preson will interject his invalid methodological principle that if the ancient prophets meant by “Day of the Lord” just a day of military defeat for God’s enemies, usually a single city, then 2 Peter must also mean that. But this is anachronistic. By the time 2 Peter is writing, the context of everything had changed. With the rise of pesher and apocalyptic, “Day of the Lord” could be transferred to any moment of judgment and destruction, including a final judgment and destruction of all the world. So it is not possible to know which kind of thing an author means by “Day of the Lord” without consulting what they themselves say they mean.

Since 2 Peter says they mean a final destruction of the universe and its replacement with a new one in which no sinners will exist anymore, that is what they mean by it. To take what someone else used the phrase for, in a completely different time and place, and replace what 2 Peter says he means with that, is to violate every principle of communication. It does not avail to complain that 2 Peter builds their ideas out of those ancient texts, because pesher entails he will readily change what those authors meant to be what 2 Peter wants them to have meant instead. So we must still again attend to what 2 Peter tells us he thinks they meant. The original context and intention of those ancient authors was no longer contextually relevant to that. Hence external context (pesher and new apocalyptic reasoning) and internal context (what 2 Peter himself actually says, the argument he says he is responding to, and what he answers it with) both refute Preston’s conjecture. And there just isn’t any rational way for Preston to recover from that.

Things get worse when we get to the other 2nd century forgeries of 2 Thessalonians 2 and 2 Timothy 2, which seem faced with similar arguments as 2 Peter, and respond in very similar ways. But these are worse for Preston because these authors say they are answering some (otherwise unknown) heretical Christians who were claiming “that the Day of the Lord has already come” (2 Thess. 2:2–3) and that “the resurrection has already taken place” (2 Tim. 2:17–18). In other words, these letters were written to refute preterists. Preston asked in our debate how any Christian could think the resurrection had already come, and though there are other easy answers (e.g. they might have been claiming the elect had already been resurrected and there was no more to come), one rather obvious one is: they were claiming exactly what Don Preston is claiming, that it was just a metaphorical restoration of grace after the mundane destruction of Jerusalem.

Either way, if the answer were Preston’s, then that’s the answer these authors would have given to these claimants: yes, it will be invisible and merely conceptual, but it still has to happen (e.g., Jerusalem still needs to be destroyed, or whatever “avengement” the author wanted to kick the can down to). Instead, the author of 2 Timothy references “the last days” as full of sinners (entailing after the final day, there won’t be any), while 2 Thessalonians simply summarizes Revelation’s Domitianic prediction, albeit vaguely enough to attach it to someone else more present (such as Hadrian’s recent promise to erect an imperial temple over the temple ground when he builds a pagan city out of Jerusalem—which indeed he did), and refers to our then being “gathered to” the Lord after the Roman Emperor (the one who “sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God”) is “destroyed.”

Hence this author lays out a standard cosmic apocalypse:

God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you…when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.

There is no reference here to only (or even any of) the Jews of Jerusalem being the targets. Jesus will arrive from heaven with an army of angels, and his targets are all “those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel,” all persecutors (which includes pagans and, obviously, Jewish persecutors in Thessalonika, a thousand miles away from Jerusalem), and they will be eliminated forever (so there won’t be any more of them; things won’t just “go on as it has since the beginning”).

Just where the author should be explaining Preston’s idea of this just being the destruction of Jerusalem, and just a temporary punishment for a select few, and the resurrection and rapture Paul went on about being merely symbolical, the author says none of those things. He simply says what Paul said will happen will yet soon happen (“Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?”). He does not correct any misapprehension of Paul; he does not say those who said it already happened are wrong because they pegged the wrong event but are otherwise right that it will look pretty much the same after that as now.

There is simply no evidence for Preston’s theory here. Even where it is ambiguous or allusive, it can only be filled out by reference to its actual literary context (which means 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 5, Philippians 3, and so on—even 2 Peter 3 and 2 Timothy 2), not an unrelated context from a different era.

And the Stuff That Didn’t Come Up

For whatever reason, a lot of Preston’s favorite arguments never came up in our debate. I repeatedly cued him. But he simply avoided them. He kept returning to the same non sequiturs instead. But as they are illustrative of his entire crackpot approach, I should give some examples.

• Adam’s Death Sentence

For example, Preston tries to argue that no one believed in a literal resurrection, because no one believed the sentence of death God proclaimed upon Adam was a literal death. Of course, this is easily refuted with historical facts demonstrating literal resurrection was the mainstream belief among apocalyptic Jews like Christians. Even Josephus describes this being the case, in his summaries of the teachings of the Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees (see §3 of my chapter on the resurrection body in The Empty Tomb). But, Preston will say, didn’t God tell Adam he would die “the very day” he ate the forbidden fruit? Was he lying as the Serpent claimed he was? How could God be telling the truth if he meant this literally? Mustn’t the text therefore mean a spiritual and not a literal death? And so (if you have been lured this far) can’t we then assume “resurrection” must have been understood as merely a spiritual (and thus non-visible) reversal of this effect?

So the argument goes.

The question has certainly vexed Christians throughout the ages (see the 2018 University of Edinburgh dissertation of Chris Lee, “‘For in the Day that You Eat of It, You Shall Surely Die’: The Early Reception History of the Death Warning in Genesis 2:17”). But it’s easily solved with a proper understanding of grammar and trickster narratives. The Serpent is running game on Adam (through Eve) by tricking him into taking what God said in a different way than it was meant. God was pronouncing a sentence; not promising to immediately kill Adam. And “not understanding this” is precisely the point of the fable.

In the original Hebrew of Genesis 2:17 we get the word “to die” repeated twice, once in the infinitive absolute, which was an intensifier in Hebrew, and then in the simple imperfect, which is translated as future action but can be less specific than that—any future uncompleted action can be described in that form. So when ancient Rabbis translated it into Greek, thus telling us what they thought it meant, they repeat the same word “to die” twice (once as a noun, then as a verb) but this time they give the one in the instrumental dative, hence as the “means by which” an action is carried out, and the other in the future middle indicative—which indicates an outcome the subject of the verb will have brought upon themselves. It translates most directly in either case as “in that very day, by death you will die.” If you take that literally it sounds like God is saying Adam will die that very day. But this is not what the construction means in either Greek or Hebrew—we have to attend to the second appearance of the word death there. If all the author meant were Adam will die that day, he would not add the second “to die.” That signals the meaning as a death sentence. Which we all know need not be carried out immediately.

The notion doesn’t even require that signifier, as context can hold it as well. For example, in Proverbs 19:16 (as also in the Greek), we hear that “whoever keeps the commandments keeps their life, but whoever shows contempt for their ways will die.” Obviously it does not mean they will instantly die, but that their behavior will eventually lead to their death. This is captured by the Greek middle voice, which means in that day “you will bring about your own death,” i.e. cause his death, not simply die. The Hebrew imperfect can carry that same sense, especially paired with the infinitive absolute, as we see in the previous verse where exactly the same pairing is presented for “eat” (“you shall eat by eating” the other fruits), referring to a general ongoing future, and not a specific singular event.

We see the same structure in Genesis 20:7: “return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live; but if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to you will die,” again using the same exact phrase, “shall die by dying,” the verb “to die” repeated twice, once in simple imperfect then in infinitive absolute. Yet here, again, it clearly does not mean that if he did not return his wife, he and his would instantly die; it means they would set in motion events that would result in their death. It is, essentially, a sentence of death, not its execution. Examples abound in ancient Greek, too, like, “If you exile me from this land, you will have killed me” (Euripides, Phoenician Women 1621). This does not mean the exile literally immediately kills him, but that it leads to his eventual death (because he will be unprotected and vulnerable, i.e. subject to death). The context of the story in Genesis implies this is because Adam will be banned from access to the tree of life, whose fruit had been keeping him immortal (a common theme around the food of the gods found in Greek myth as well), per Genesis 3:22-24.

That this is how Christian authors understood it is made clear in several places—not only in literature they revered (the Life of Adam and Eve essentially explains this sentence of death in exactly the way I just did; as does Sirach 14:17, which in its Greek translation even directly quotes Gen. 2:17), but in their own literature (e.g. Romans 5:12–15 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22). We have to listen to what these authors themselves say, and not try to change what they said into something else, especially by some dubious hermeneutical device.

• Luke’s Proclamation in Acts

Another example is when Preston is faced with a direct refutation of his theory in Acts 1:9–11:

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

This pretty much refutes preterism. Luke has gone out of his way to explicitly insist Jesus will visibly descend from heaven in the clouds come the day. So Preston has to make this go away. He does so with a convoluted argument to the effect of “since similes are always partial, this simile is purely metaphorical,” which is a non sequitur. All similes are partially literal; that’s the point of them. Preston will give the example of a saying of Jesus in Matthew 23:37, “how often I have longed to gather [my] children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,” and then explain that in no way is Matthew saying Jesus had wings, therefore in no way is Luke saying Jesus will descend visibly from the clouds. Literature majors might be squinting their eyes at this point.

A simile only works if the comparans and comparand share something in common, and the thing they share is typically made plain in the construction of them. For example, in “gather children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,” the obvious shared element is not the wings but the gathering. In no way does Matthew mean a “mataphorical” gathering. He means a literal gathering (Matthew 25:32, Matthew 25:46, Matthew 13:48–50 and 13:30, Matthew 22:10, Matthew 24:31). In the Venn diagram of the simile, Jesus and the Chosen fill one circle, chickens and their wings fill another circle, and they overlap at function: the role of gathering people up for safety and inclusion. Even in the most figurative sense you could assign to this, whereby gathering is not physical but sociopolitical (the “gathered” come under the “wing” of Jesus’s eternal protection and guidance), the gathering is still functionally literal, in a way that calling this “under a wing” is entirely metaphorical.

So when we look at the simile in Acts 1, what do we get? The one “taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” means “the way you have seen him” is the shared element, and thus takes the role of “gathering” in the hen simile. The rest is not shared. So when Preston goes on about “surely” Luke does not mean that Jesus will be wearing the same clothes or attended by the same entities or do the same things then as now, he’s right—but that is precisely why his conclusion is wrong. Preston has no logical way to get the “way you have seen him” to also become irrelevant. It is literally the one thing here that isn’t. That’s the point of the simile. By Preston’s bonkers logic we’d be entitled to say that Jesus will never literally gather anyone in any sense, because Jesus doesn’t have chicken wings. To the contrary, the gathering is the one literal thing he will do. The wings are metaphor. Likewise, the coming “the way you have seen him go” is the one literal thing he will do. All the rest (what he will look like then, who he will come with, what he will then do) is irrelevant in this. The angels didn’t say “the clothes you saw him wear as he ascended, are the same he will wear when he descends,” nor “while you literally saw him ascend into clouds, he will return figuratively as a mighty army,” or anything that Preston imagines.

And On and On

Example after example is like these. Every time, Preston ignores how literature and language and logic work, and builds epicycle after epicycle to crank everything into saying the opposite of what it says, while presenting no evidence for any of these epicycles. Even what he poses as evidence (what Old Testament authors meant), bears no logical relation to the conclusion (what New Testemant authors meant). Because context (internal and external) has changed all that. In our debate, he never recovered from this. He instead burned clock on repeatedly reasserting his refuted Argument from Anachronism, and then on side-issues that weren’t even relevant.

For example, it does not matter whether the new Jewish apocalypticism the first Christians were swimming in came from Persia, only that it was in Judaism by then. So Preston trying to question the “where” seemed like a dodge, to avoid the evidence I presented that it was in Judaism, with an irrelevant Genetic Fallacy (which I easily dispatched in the debate anyway). Likewise, it does not matter whether Jesus existed. Preston burned a lot of clock on a Poisoning the Well Fallacy accusing me of denying Jesus existed and claiming I should just say Jesus never made these predictions. But the fact is (and as I said in the debate) Paul says he had information like this by revelation, not from the ministry of Jesus (indeed he never mentions the latter as a source), and that authors like Mark were inventing or tweaking the words of Jesus to correct a fumble, whether he existed or not. The issue is simply what did these Christian authors mean Jesus said—it matters not whether it was a historical Jesus who said that, or a Jesus they met in dreams or visions. What any real Jesus really said is essentially inaccessible to us anyway. And the only evidence we have of what he said, is what these later authors claimed he said. So that’s all there is to debate.

Likewise, Preston often argues from historically false premises like that the New Testament Christians were Trinitarians, i.e. they assumed Jesus was identical to God. That’s false. The earliest Christians regarded Jesus as a separate agent of God, assigned powers and missions by God (see Justin Brierley on Jesus). This becomes a problem when he leans on the anachronistic argument that whatever the Old Testament authors said about God can be assumed true of what the New Testament authors said about Jesus. I’ve already hit the overt fallacy in that, but an underlying fallacy lies in this false equivalence. Preston will say things like “God is always invisible, so he can’t literally descend from heaven and appear in the clouds,” but in fact, his angels can. So any argument he presents hinging on that premise also crashes.

Preston similarly would confuse “Kingdom of God” with “Day of the Lord,” i.e. the Apocalypse. But those aren’t the same thing. The Kingdom of God is eternal—it has existed since creation, and was at work in Christians from day one as they saw it. The only distinction is in what way it will manifest and when. The Apocalypse is when the Kingdom would become visible and enact its final triumph; but before that, it was still at work invisibly in the Christian movement, and as well in God’s management of Israel’s history for thousands of past years. This tanks every argument Preston makes that any verse about the “kingdom” of God is about the “apocalypse” of God. For example, Preston snatches a verse from Luke 17 out of context, where Jesus gives a typical trickster answer to the Pharisees who ask him when the kingdom will come and Jesus says “the coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed” because “the kingdom of God is within you.” Because it was, even then. The apocalypse, however, would definitely come in an observable way, complete with the elect being snatched up and vanishing, as Jesus immediately goes on to explain. It will be as literal and visible as the Great Flood or the end of Sodom.

Preston also often conflated earthly kingdoms (human political institutions) with celestial kingdoms (new world orders ruled by space aliens like the Lord Jesus), producing false lemmas like “if Jesus rejected human kingdoms, he rejected apocalyptic kingdoms altogether” and “if it’s not a human kingdom, it’s not a literal, visible kingdom” (alien invasions are quite physical and visible). I also got the impression Preston does not know ancient cosmology was itself literal: the “heavens” all these authors speak of was actually in outer space, visible from Earth (if they had a telescope) and accessible from Earth (if they had wings or a spell of flying). This is why Jesus Is an Extraterrestrial. Heaven wasn’t “another dimension” or an “abstract spiritual realm.” It was a literal astrophysical place. But the kingdom pervades all, heaven and earth, past and future.

Another example came up in the debate (as also often in Preston’s books): that Mark’s and Matthew’s and Luke’s and Paul’s Jesus must mean he will come invisibly in a wave of secular events and not literally descend visibly from the sky, because John’s Jesus says “I will come as my Father came” in past Old Testament events (misquoting John 5:19-21). That’s a double fallacy. First, John has radically re-crafted Jesus to suit his late new messaging; so we cannot attribute what “that” Jesus said to the earlier versions of Jesus found in Mark or Paul (much less any real Jesus). Indeed, our text of John is multiply redacted (as mainstream Johannine experts will explain, and as summarized my MacDonald in The Dionysian Gospel, our John is not the original Gospel, which is lost, but a redacted version of another redacted version we also don’t have). So it actually has three different Jesuses in it; and one would need to ascertain if we can tell which layer this Jesus was constructed in. But never mind that.

More importantly, Jesus is not talking about “how he will arrive” in John 5. He is defending his power to resurrect (and judge) the dead in the last days. Hence he does not say “I will come as my Father came.” He does not mention “coming” at all. The text says the Lord “can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does,” and so “just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.” It’s a reference to the power to raise the dead, which Jesus saw God do in the past (as per Hebrews 11:19 and 11:35), and thus can do in the future. Hence, he goes on to explain, “for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.” So much for Preston’s theory. God also had angels fly up and down between heaven and earth and heroes fly up into heaven on whirlwinds. So there is no way to get Preston’s point here.

This is just a sample. There are so many of these conflation and equivocation fallacies in Preston’s work it would be a chore to even catalog them. Combined with his fallacious Argument from Anachronism, his ignoring of all relevant evidence of the external and internal context of every passage, and his crankish word games, and there is a reason you won’t ever see his theory in a mainstream peer reviewed history journal—and it’s not “because he’s a heretic” (any journal that would reject a theory on that grounds is not mainstream).

Conclusion

I am sympathetic to the suspicion that mainstream scholars are working from false assumptions and might thus might be wrong about something in biblical studies. “The consensus” is not a strong argument by itself. But if you want us to doubt it, you do have to prove it in any given case, and that means with evidence. But irrelevant facts are not evidence. Preston wants us to believe all these texts are using “prophetic language in the same way” as Old Testament authors. But he gives no evidence that it was in the “same” way, rather than in, as I proved, the newly different way going on all around them. So the fact that Isaiah was writing in an old prophetic mode of discourse with an old set of religious assumptions and only referencing local events of his own day in vivid poetry, is not evidence that Paul did. Or anyone else of his time. The evidence is the other way around: Paul indicates he is writing in a then-modern discursive mode, not prophetic, and he lives in a time with a completely different set of religious assumptions. Everything had changed by Paul’s time. So the context and intentions of the original Isaiah are no longer informative.

New Testament authors were all pesherists; they therefore won’t ever be operating from the original meaning of the scriptures they cite. They were operating from what were then “modern” conceptions, of there being new secret coded meanings in the Bible, and of a literal end of mortal time, a real resurrection of the world’s dead, and the final destruction of all evils, after Jesus literally flew down from heaven with a massive force of space invaders. They also weren’t composing the same way. Apart from Revelation, none of them were composing revelatory poetry. Their genres were all modern: discursive epistles and mimetic narratives. Their mode of discourse is inherited from the then-rationalist Greek schools where they were taught. And their audience was all swimming in this same context.

So we have to apply empirical hypothesis testing to any theory like Preston’s:

• What would Paul have written were he a preterist in that context?
• What would Paul have written were he not?
• What are the odds that any Jew of his day was a preterist?

None of these questions empirically answers to the benefit of Preston. They all come down against. What Paul (and the Evangelists and everyone else) wrote is actually quite unexpected and thus quite improbable on Preston’s theory. But it’s exactly what we expect on the standard theory. Which is why that’s now the standard theory. We can’t even establish hardly anyone then was a preterist in Preston’s sense, so he can’t even summon prior probability to his side. It is, again, all against him: odds vastly favor anyone of that era being a literalist with respect to the resurrection and its associated messianic apocalypse. You therefore don’t just need evidence to the contrary—you need very clear and strong evidence.

Yet Preston doesn’t have any evidence. What he proffers “as” evidence, isn’t. That different authors with different ideas in a different era weren’t talking about a literal resurrection and end of the known world has no logical relevance to what New Testament authors were talking about. That pesherists like the early Christians quoted and interpreted everything they believed out of those ancient authors is not evidence that they understood them as saying what they originally meant. Because that’s just as expected if they weren’t. And since the mode of pesher was their zeitgeist, it’s actually unexpected that they were doing what Preston avers. Which is why we need evidence for it—not the circular repetition of the mere fact that they were getting their ideas from those scriptures. You have to establish how and what they were getting, with evidence other than “where” they were getting it from.

When we go looking for actual evidence—as in, facts that are improbable unless a theory is true—we find the opposite of what Preston proposes. If Paul and the Evangelists were Prestonian preterists, they’d have said so, answering challenges, and doubters, and arguments with a presentation of their unusual take on what the otherwise-popular ideas of the end of the world were. They’d be making the arguments Preston is making. Whereas, if these all were just garden variety apocalypticists of their day, they’d be saying everything we find them saying. The external context establishes this. The internal context establishes this. This is starkest in the second century forgeries of 2 Thessalonians 2, 2 Peter 3, and 2 Timothy 2, where precisely when these authors were faced with Preston’s “it already happened” argument, they don’t answer with any point of Preston’s, but by arguing against Preston’s entire explanation—which makes his position, at best, an anti-canonical heresy; and, at worst, nothing anyone ever thought of. And there really is no other rational place left to go from there.

Paul thought the world as we know it would end in his lifetime, when Jesus would literally and visibly visit us, and all the world’s dead would be raised, and death would no longer exist. The Evangelists thought the same thing, only they needed to extend the timeline, because what Paul said Jesus promised didn’t come to pass. Hence Paul’s “in my generation” became Mark’s “when the last member of his generation is still around” which became John’s “whenever Jesus chooses to keep that last guy alive til.” And contrary to any of these authors seeing the fall of Jerusalem as the end, the ones who knew of it all tried to rationalize it as only one of the signs the end is coming. Because they knew it didn’t fulfill Paul’s prediction of the end of the world. That was precisely the problem with it that the Gospels (and Revelation) were written to fix.