A lot of this starts with Daniel. Put simply, the final days, after Antiochus iv has died after attacking ‘the temple’ in ‘the holy land’ are events easily attributable to Antiochus iv, and once adjusted to their proper place simultaneously change the map of where Antiochus iv was when he attacked ‘the temple’ in ‘the holy land’ in Susa just like Polybius and every other source puts Antiochus’s attack on a temple resulting in his fatal injury – in (Susa), Elam!
Thus it is all past tense, no prediction ever attempted by the author, and the rising of the saints in chapter 12 is past tense.
As in Matthew, though not one else ever records these resurrections.
As in Revelations as well. All this dramatic and magical language of dragons and gaping earth and beasts mark an apocalypse – a revelation – about how the readers and the writer got to there present position in the new earthly kingdom they now live in. We should not expect the dragons to be imaginative and the saints arising to be real.
Love your work, you can delete my comment, but I had to get it off my chest. Read John Granger’s work on the fall of the Seleucid Empire, and his work on the Maccabean rebellion. I had just read it and was trying to tell someone Daniel should be dated to near 163 at the latest. I looked at Daniel 11 and could not justify it. Those last verses are obviously about Antiouchus iv, at least as far as having just read Granger’s detailed reconstruction. Putting those couple of verses in their proper context rearranges Antiochus’s location… just repeating myself now. Rant over. Modern understanding of apocalyptic literature seems at odds with the literature itself. God bless, remember Jesus is a myth!

Please read the article you are commenting on.

Your point is addressed in the paragraph beginning “Preston similarly would confuse “Kingdom of God” with “Day of the Lord,” i.e. the Apocalypse.”

especially bristling at the accusation of universalism while not clarifying why

There were a few things like that, which struck me the same way.

Having studied his works and interviews and debates, I think this may have to do with his cornered position: he gets vehemently accused of being a dangerous heretic by the people he is most keen to convince (fellow Christians)—and I am not kidding; some of the pastoral rhetoric against him is (ironically or not) literally apocalyptic.

Someone in that position will be hyper-sensitive to any hook or soundbite that might be used against them to push that hostile narrative. So “this enables universalism” (an oft-vilified and panic-inducing heresy) is a trigger position for him; a third rail he has to visibly jump away from (and explanations aren’t relevant).

As to his evaded soteriology, I mentioned the blue-check option because I am starting to suspect I’m getting close there—though I can’t prove it and am not confident in it, I think he might not believe in salvation at all, in any literal sense. That’s why he keeps talking about vindication, and not immortality; and corporate salvation, not individual. The Church lives forever. Its congregants don’t. They just get gold stars, or a name carved on a wall in some celestial Langley Monument.

If so, I’m sure he is confident this is all good and just and biblical and the best thing God could ever have arranged, but knows full well it will turn literally all his peers against him and cause them never to hear him out on the preterism thing.

Note that everyone has permission to do that with my blog articles without even having to ask as long as three conditions are met:

(1) You don’t change anything without explicitly indicating you did.
(2) You give full credit (my name as author, and where you found the article).
(3) You don’t sell it but distribute it for free (if you’re going to charge, that’s business, and then we need to negotiate a contract).

He isn’t quite doing that.

First, with respect to the OT, he’s doing the opposite. A lot of his analysis either is, or tries to be, getting at the original, contextual meaning of OT authors.

Second, with respect to the NT, he’s doing only half of it. He is certainly “changing” the original meaning by a strange hermeneutical device. But that’s as far as the similarity goes. He isn’t doing pesher strictly speaking, because (a) he isn’t claiming God told him this was the secret meaning hidden in the text (he is claiming mundane literary analysis can show it is the plain meaning and not hidden at all, and thus no Holy Spirit is needed to find it) and (b) he isn’t creating new meanings by stringing together disparate texts and assuming they are all talking about the same thing.

For example, he isn’t “making up” the fact that all the passages he discusses are about the apocalypse (in whatever sense); they really are all about that, plainly (he’s just changing what they say). By contrast, pesher takes verses that aren’t even about the same thing, string them together, and extract a completely new meaning. You can see this happening in Daniel 9, to a section of Jeremiah (by riffing on unrelated material in Isaiah and Wisdom of Solomon as if they were secret keys to the hidden hypertext in Jeremiah). But you can see it a lot when, for example, random Psalms are used to say secret things about Jesus that in their original context obviously had no such sense, and when Paul mashes disparate texts together to make a single point. And so on.

I suspect, rather, what is happening is not blindness to his in-group’s own methods, but blindness to the laxity and arbitrariness of those methods. This is a point well made by Hector Avalos in The End of Biblical Studies, particularly (but not only) with regard to liberal theologians reinterpreting the Bible: their standards for how to extract the “true” meaning from the text are so random and bullshitty that it essentially gives license to someone like Preston to invent any similarly random and bullshitty method—because the result looks just like what everyone else in his field is doing. Here “his field” means theology and exegetics, not history. Conflating those things is yet another “everybody does it” blindspot.

Of course, for our purposes the big problem is that this indicates decisively that Don’s position is bankrupt. He can’t explain the most basic thing: What he thinks the marketing for his product was. Okay, Jesus Brand doesn’t get you sparkling white sheets, Don, despite them insisting on how white your whites will be. What does it actually get you ? And where do they say that?

I also find the failure to understand pesher so interesting and so telling. Every Christian alive, no matter how dogmatic and no matter how tolerant of other people’s unorthodoxy from their perspective, knows that people use specious syntheses of texts to arrive at weird conclusions. Bible codes are obvious.

I suspect that having to admit that they were using that method also entails admitting that they were using an unreliable method.

And, yeah, Don’s “gotcha” on Jesus existing and having said what is claimed to have been said was so silly.

I would love to see this put out as a booklet or a PDF document that I could share with others. Great job!

Is there a particular fallacy or phenomenon in that: blindness to the methods of one’s own in-group? Christians/Muslims can see the problems in other religions, but can’t recognize the exact same things in their own religion. To a lesser extent, fans of a sports team will always see the best in their own players, and become blind to their faults (often that these same fans point out in other teams’ players). Because Preston still see’s the New Testament authors and Jewish prophets as part of his in-group, he can’t seem to comprehend how they are actually doing pesher.