This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Time again for Monday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” and one more thing you can be thankful for come Thursday. (Just remember to be polite and pass the facts when Grandma asks.)

Today’s Lesson: Where’s Jesus?

You tell me.

If you believe the Bible, he should be here by now. In fact, he should have been back in all his glory over 1850 years ago.

Consider:

“Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).

According to Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar’s The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins: 1993), “For Mark, this saying means two things: (1) God’s imperial rule will manifest itself apocalyptically, as the direct intervention of God at the end of the age; (2) this apocalyptic event will take place within the lifetime of some of Mark’s congregation” (p. 80).

This same assertion is repeated in the Gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke:

“Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:28).

“But I [Jesus] tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:27).

According to William Harwood’s Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus (Prometheus Books: 1992):

“All three synoptic gospels put a time limit on Jesus’ second coming. However, by the time Mark was written forty years had passed and still he had not returned. While the Christians could accept their messiah’s tardiness up to that point, they found it impossible to believe that he had revealed his identity to a generation that would never see the restored theocratic monarchy…. Matthew and Luke, who each wrote at a time when it was still believed that the prophecy could be fulfilled, copied it from Mark. John, who wrote after Jesus’ time limit had expired, not surprisingly left it out….

“Jesus’ unfulfillable prophecy proved an embarrassment to Christians almost from the moment his self-imposed time limit expired. In an attempt to make the impossible possible, desperate Christians in medieval times invented the wandering Jew, a man who heard Jesus’ prophecy and reviled him with it as he was dying on the stake. Jesus in consequence cursed the man to remain alive until his second coming. Although widely believed for a long time, and therefore a great comfort to Christians who were thus enabled to believe that the prophecy could be fulfilled, the tale of the wandering Jew was one myth that official Christianity was wise enough not to canonize” (pp. 341-342)

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible (Wings Books/Random House: 1969) basically says the same thing but adds that John 21:20-24 seems to represent an attempt to fudge the issue as the years passed by (pp. 957-959). Whoever wrote those lines took pains to explain that Jesus had never really said that his Beloved Disciple would remain alive until his Second Coming, only that he might remain alive. A point that many early Christians had apparently accepted as true is dismissed by the author of John as a rumor and a misunderstanding. It would seem that that author is either engaging in some early twisting of the truth or the early Christians were confused – in which case one can only wonder what else they may have been confused about.

My Encyclopedia Britannica, for its part, basically confirms both Harwood’s and Asimov’s accounts of the Wandering Jew before dryly adding “As late as 1868 he was reputedly seen in Salt Lake City.”

Unfortunately for Christians who would have us believe that Jesus never promised to come back before everyone in his audience was dead, the three verses quoted above are just the start of their problems.

After giving a vivid picture of his Second Coming and the end of the world, the Bible also quotes Jesus as saying “Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done” (Mark 13:30). Or maybe he said “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matt. 24:34; Luke 21:32). In any event, the Bible gives us three more verses which clearly indicate that Jesus would be back and the End Times would unfold during the lifetime of the people he was speaking to.

In addition, Jesus also allegedly said this: “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved. But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come” (Matt. 10:22-23). As the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible comments, “Jesus tells his disciples that he will return before they can ‘go over the cities of Israel.’ Later (24:14) he says he will not come until the gospel is preached throughout the world. Well, his disciples went over the cities of Israel and then died waiting for the ‘return of the Lord.’ Now, nearly 2000 years later, and long after the gospel had been preached throughout the world, his followers still wait.”

The last book of the Bible – the so-called Revelation of St. John the Divine – dramatically deepens the mistake when it quotes Jesus as repeatedly saying “Behold, I come quickly” (3:11; 22:7; 22:12) and “Surely I come quickly” (22:20). This book’s very first line emphasizes the point when it clearly asserts “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass….” (my italics)

Whoever wrote Revelation was hardly the only early Christian who lied or was drastically mistaken about the return of Jesus.

The Epistle of James – allegedly written by Jesus’s own brother – assures readers “the Lord’s coming is near” (5:8).

1 Peter asserts “the end of all things is at hand” (4:7).

1 John confidently assured its original readers “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (2:18).

Paul also indicated that the End Times were imminent when he said “The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here” (Romans 13:11-12).

David Chidester’s Christianity: A Global History (HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins: 2000) explains how this belief apparently warped many of Paul’s opinions: “To a certain extent, this anticipation of the imminent return, or second coming, of Christ influenced many of Paul’s attitudes toward conditions in the world. For example, he advised Christians to remain slaves if they were enslaved and to obey the political authorities that ruled over them, because events were unfolding that would put an end to all of the old power relations that organized the social order (Rom. 13:1-7). Furthermore, he advised Christians not to seek vengeance against their enemies because the apocalypse would bring sufficient punishment (Rom. 12:14-21). In the end, Paul advised, the power relations of this world would be dissolved by the power of Christ. The end of the world, the ‘close of the age,’ became a persistent element in early Christian reflections on time and human destiny” (pp. 41-42).

James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Houghton Mifflin Company: 2001) corroborates this point of view when it says “Recall that after Jesus died, his friends quickly came to understand him in Jewish apocalyptic terms, expecting him to return soon, ushering in the End Time. That is why, for example, Paul counseled his readers to forgo marriage, not because he was antisex but because so little time remained that procreation, an ultimate investment in the open future, had ceased to have meaning. The assumed imminence of Christ’s return informed the first Christians’ readiness, even eagerness, to offer their lives as martyrs. The cult of martyrdom and apocalyptic longing go hand in hand” (p. 561).

Frederic J. Baumgartner’s Longing For The End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press: 1999) makes these points: “Millennialism pervades the history of Christianity because the religion began as an apocalyptic cult…. Christianity came out of a society that had a powerful apocalyptic vision….Some are especially eager to deny the authenticity of the apocalyptic passages in order to undermine recent violent millennialism. Yet there is no good reason to deny Jesus’ apocalypticism: apocalyptic thinking pervaded Jewish society at the time…. Jesus’ first public words, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Matt. 4:17) are apocalyptic. It is possible to point out dozens of Jesus’ statements with apocalyptic overtones in the synoptic Gospels, but there are few in John…. That these statements [such as Luke 21:32] promising an imminent fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecies were kept in texts that did not reach their final form until at least fifty years later lends authenticity to them. If there had not been a strong tradition that they were Jesus’ words, they would have been changed to reflect the passing of the first and several more generations…. Some converts believed that the Parousia [Second Coming] was so near at hand that they were proclaiming their freedom from traditional sexual mores and the need to work…. Probably no aspect of the first generations of Christians is more obvious than their utter conviction that the Parousia would occur in their lifetimes” (pp. 9-31).

According to Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: 1992), “[T]he apocalyptic vision had been absorbed into early Christianity…. [A]ll scholars concede the centrality of eschatology…. [A]pocalypticism pervades the earliest canonical Christian texts…. The eschatological hopes that sustained the first Christians remained alive in the years that followed, especially in the Eastern church…. As Christianity triumphed, its millennialist strand faded” (pp. 33-34; 46; 48).

Jaroslav Pelikan’s Jesus Through the Centuries (Harper & Row: 1985) hits many familiar bases when it says “Repeatedly in the message of Jesus the call for repentance and the summons to ethical change took as its ground the promise of the Parousia: that the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of glory would soon put an end to human history and would usher in the new order of the kingdom of God. Specifically, the moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, such as the command about turning the other cheek, which have often seemed (except, of course, to Tolstoy) to be an utterly impractical code of ethics for life in the real world, came as an announcement of what his followers were to do in the brief interim between his earthly ministry and the end of history” (p. 24). Pelikan then specifically cites Matt. 10:23 claim that “You will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of man comes” and Matt. 24:34’s, Mark 13:30’s, and Luke 21:32’s claims about “this generation will not pass away till all these things take place” to buttress his case. The balance of the chapter (and the book, for that matter) details how Christians have repeatedly reinterpreted the Bible and redefined Jesus and themselves in the wake of his utter failure to do what he so clearly and repeatedly said he was going to do: reappear soon.

It’s easier to understand both Jesus’s odd admonition to take no thought for the morrow (Matt. 6:34) and the early Christians’s odd failure to immediately write down his story for future generations when one remembers that they seem to have believed that there weren’t going to be any future generations.

Those early Christians were wrong.

The Bible they left us is wrong.

The Jesus it quotes was wrong.

Where’s that Jesus now? Perhaps the Bible itself provides us with a clue:

“A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish” - Proverbs 19:9