Why did Jesus say some people wouldn't die before he came back?
This
question had a dramatic influence on Albert Schweitzer when he was
studying New Testament theology. Jesus said, "This generation will not
pass away until all of these things come to pass . . . You will not go
over all the cities of Israel until all of these things come to
pass . . . Some of you will not taste death until all of these things
come to pass."
Schweitzer looked at those passages, and he thought
of them as obvious cases where Jesus blew it, where Jesus expected his
return in the first century. Schweitzer saw this expectation of the
early return of Jesus in early writings of Paul. Then there was an
adjustment in the later writings of the Bible to account for the great
disappointment that Jesus didn't show up in that first generation.
That's been a matter of great consternation for many people.
Jesus
didn't say, "Some of you aren't going to die until I come back." He
said, "Some of you will not taste death until all of these things come
to pass." The difficulty lies in the structure of the language. The
disciples are asking Jesus about the establishment of the kingdom. Jesus
talks about two distinct issues. He talks about what obviously involved
the destruction of Jerusalem when he said that the temple would be
destroyed. Then at the end of the Olivet discourse, he talks about his
return on clouds of glory.
Some of the best New Testament
scholarship that I've seen is on the meaning of the Greek words
translated "all of these things." An excellent case can be made that
when Jesus used that phrase, "these things" of which he was speaking
pertained to the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem. It's
amazing that Jesus of Nazareth clearly and undeniably predicted one of
the most important historical events in Jewish history before it took
place.
This wasn't just a vague Nostradamus or Oracle of Delphi type of
future prediction; Jesus vividly predicted the fall of Jerusalem and the
destruction of the temple, which indeed took place in A.D. 70, while
many of his disciples were still alive. It was also before the
missionary outreach had reached all of the cities of Israel and before
that generation had, in fact, passed away. Those cataclysmic events that
Jesus had predicted on the Mount of Olives did, indeed, take place in
the first century.