I read (and re-read) Dr. Smith’s piece with more than passing interest, not least because I am invigorated and refreshed by any thoughtful engagement with the questions of biblical scholarship that begins with what Scripture says about itself, namely, that it is, as a first-order reality, the authoritative living Word of the living God for his living Church. The questions I have for Smith proceed from this place of profound appreciation, and in fact endeavor to prod and poke in the direction of even more fidelity to that same “high” view of Scripture.
Defending the truth of Scripture will always be a responsibility for the Church in the context of unbelief hostile to the rightful claims of the Lord of the Word. I share Smith’s zeal for carrying out that defense. But I am confident he would agree with my fundamental concern, namely, that we must take great care to ensure that what we mean by “the truth” is derived from what that Word in fact declares and not from a foreign standard. Some reject what the Bible says because they reject it as divinely inspired and authoritative Scripture. Others, however, believe in the divine character of Scripture and that we must believe whatever God in his Word says, but are not persuaded that a particular reading (such as Smith’s chronology) is what God’s Word says. I do not follow all the links in the chain of reasoning Smith is working with as he locates the question of the dating of Matthew in relation to the Olivet Discourse exclusively (or largely so) in the context of the conflict between faith and unbelief (without denying for a moment that that conflict is real and often materially relevant). Indeed, I fear we may lose more than we gain by claiming, with Smith, not only that a biblical book’s chronology is important, but that it is “vital to … every question of interpretation in the books themselves.” This seems to me to be a consequential example of rhetorical over-reach.
I do not see the chronology of the New Testament writings as a much neglected topic either, since however few dedicated monographs there may be, the topic is routinely addressed, and often at length, in the academic commentaries on each book. But I am sympathetic with Smith’s view on various related questions, including Matthean priority. I hold to a version of this view myself. My view is more akin to B. Ward Powers’ hypothesis (in addition to Wenham) according to which sections of Matthew were written up, copied, and distributed from Jerusalem as needed for missionary purposes, and that these sections therefore circulated prior to the whole of our Gospel of Matthew. Paul’s time spent with the Jerusalem apostles after his Damascus Road conversion would very likely have included not only his instruction in the teachings of Jesus but his exposure to (and perhaps possession of copies of) these materials. Thus, at a small appreciative distance from the reconstruction argued by Smith and Jordan, I regard it helpful to refer to Matthean “material” evidently known, for example, by Paul when writing his quite early first epistle to the Corinthians, without requiring (nor ruling out) that he and others had and knew Matthew’s Gospel as such. This hypothesis fits quite well with the scholarship noted in this series regarding ancient note-taking and Matthew’s possible role as one who took such notes (I am quite intrigued by Dr. Paul’s remarks on this).
Canon as Context and the Ecclesial Purpose of Scripture’s Form
I move, then, to the largely theological nature of my questions. As Smith would undoubtedly agree, our doctrine of Scripture must include a robust embrace of the “to what end” and “how” of Scripture. In this context, a key question I have concerns the role of the canonical collection(s) in our adjudication of the importance of a particular text’s date of composition. I do not suggest that a biblical book’s composition or completion date is unimportant, but I do suggest its importance is subordinate, hermeneutically, to its canonical location or role, and I am interested in how this bears upon our reading of the Discourse in Matthew. Despite what seems still to be a prevailing assumption even among evangelical biblical scholars, the providentially ordered and gifted canon is the Church’s Scriptures, not the books of the Bible as texts in isolation from one another or in their alleged redactional backstory.
This is not a merely “how we got the Bible” question of history; it is a theologically and hermeneutically significant conviction. It is not only textually but theologically relevant to interpretation that the biblical books do not exist for the Church as independent, isolated texts but as books within canonical collections (and ultimately one collection), and that this was the case from long before the final canonical collection was completed (in writing, not only in the collecting). As per Trobisch and others, internal features of Paul’s letters as well as the ancient manuscript traditions suggest that Paul’s “Letter Collection” circulated as such among the churches, evidently as a four-book collection at first and then as the full collection whose order never varies in the extant witnesses. The ancient churches read Paul’s letters as part of that literary unit, which undoubtedly informed their interpretation of any one part of it. Romans, as the consistent first book in the Collection, serves not only as the book it is but as a port of entry into the Collection as a whole. As such Romans provides a somewhat more general theological statement that can ensure a proper sense of proportion in interpreting other, more occasional statements in the Collection (besides providing a missionary support/defense function for the Collection in relation to the Apostle’s controversial ministry). Thus, for instance, the teaching of the less overtly polemical and less occasional Ephesians protects the occasional nature of Paul’s polemical theology in Galatians from distortion, and so on. (Incidentally, despite some scholarship on the question, the role of the Pauline Letter Collection precisely as collection seems to me still largely under-deployed for its importance for interpreting Paul’s letters.) In matters of interpretation, surely our theology of Holy Scripture requires our functioning appreciation, from the outset, of the truth that the Church does not embrace Hosea as Hosea—a text potentially enjoying an independent existence as Scripture—but the Hosea that belongs to the Book of the Twelve (cf. much recent scholarship on the hermeneutical difference this makes) and to the entirety of the canon of Holy Scripture, which canon provides its normative context. How might the priority of canon to individual textual circumstantiality inform our reading of the Matthean Olivet Discourse?
To unpack this a bit more, I would supplement this canonical question with one regarding the purpose of Scripture as it may bear on the assumption at work in Smith’s argument. In the series of affirmations which Smith has suggested (rightly) serve as the “ground” of pre-Enlightenment Christian hermeneutical method, I would hasten to insert—perhaps in between the affirmations of the Trinity and of the reality of God’s verbal revelation of Scripture—an affirmation regarding the nature of Scripture in the Trinitarian economy. God has determined to glorify the Son by way of his Spirit-formed Bridal City. Holy Scripture is located within this ultimate “eschatological” purpose of God, its Author, and serves as an instrument to that end, one which takes into the view the needs of the entirety of the people of God who occupy the time between the resurrections. Forming the people of God in and through history to be the final glory of the Son (something which both John and Paul teach explicitly), the end (final purpose) of canonical Scripture discloses its nature, something which proves hermeneutically critical.
The net yield of my request to attend to matters of canon and trinitarian economy is this: a reading of Matthew’s Olivet Discourse might fit well with a 70 AD fulfillment, but it might work just as well as a rule for how the Church between the resurrections is to interpret many reverberating events of divine judgment in that historical epoch—not because 70 AD fails to serve as fulfillment, but because 70 AD serves as only one of a series of layers of fulfillment that extend until the final assize. Does insisting on a 70 AD fulfillment blunt the work of this text in its divinely purposed formative role for the Church throughout the period in between the resurrections?
It is questions like these that prompt a more basic concern. Dr. Smith’s rousing indictment of post-Enlightenment rejections of Scripture’s self-witness and divine authorship is refreshing, to be sure. Deploying (the often useful) methods and principles of inquiry and evaluation derived from certain sciences, participants in the guild often evade the claims made upon us by the Scriptures themselves which herald from and belong to a wholly other reality, one which is not measured by a foreign standard of truth but determines truth itself. As a result, “biblical interpretation” becomes an exercise in hunting down every fact we might secure regarding the biblical writer’s identity, biography, social-economic-political situation, even psychology, on the assumption that the more we know about the human author and their circumstances, the closer we come to the definitive interpretation of their words. Though this may appear as simply doing justice to the fact that God gave his Word through human persons in history, it often works to sideline the divine as accidental to the centrally determinative human phenomena. But the Church confesses that it is the divine Author which distinguishes such a “Bible” from the Holy Scripture which the Church hears and obeys, and we note that the divine Author clearly did not think it important for hearing and obeying his Word that he provide much information on the human authors and their circumstances. The Church believes the Word, not in her ability to reconstruct the experiences and psychologies behind that Word. The Church further insists (though she sometimes clearly forgets) that it is the divine Author’s “intention” that is in fact the rule of interpretation, not the human author’s. As Smith notes, committed to a particular (modern and unbelieving) notion of what qualifies as “accurate” and “true,” proponents of the modern critical ideology dismiss as false whatever in the Bible does not align with that commitment. God’s Word is thus judged by a standard outside of him. My question: Is it possible that Smith’s strong link of the events of AD 70 with the Discourse is vulnerable to being regarded as a conservative version of the same extrabiblical standard of truth, rather than its opposite?
Struggling with John the Baptist
In Luke 7, John the Baptist sends two of his disciples to Jesus (evidently as the two witnesses required by Torah when determining a matter of truth) to inquire with him if he is the promised One. Without going into detail here as to all the reasons why, I am most persuaded by those scholars of Luke who (1) hear in John’s question at least a mild degree of doubt and uncertainty regarding Jesus’s identity, and who (2) argue that the cause of John’s doubts was likely the incompleteness of Jesus’s ministry to date when measured by Isaiah-rooted messianic expectations. Against the backdrop of John’s Isaiah-focused sermon themes in the wilderness, one can appreciate why. Jesus tells John’s disciples to report back what they see and hear in Jesus’s miracles of healing, restoration, and resurrection, elements which clearly recall the Isaianic profile of the healing and redeeming Messiah that John knows intimately. But Isaiah also prophesied that the Messiah would come in judgment and deliverance, and John had long preached a message of judgment drawing near, of the great leveling now on the doorstep, the imminent arrival of the messianic winnowing fork and consuming fire that destroys fruitless trees (Luke 3). John is perplexed: in what is being reported about Jesus, we have the healing, yes, but we don’t (yet) have the judgment. In the words of an older generation, what gives? John wrestles with the fact that the picture of fulfillment is incomplete when measured by the full tapestry of the Isaianic description. Does this mean Jesus isn’t the One after all? Should John and his disciples look for another?
I suggest that the Church is often caught in John’s question when interpreting the Olivet Discourse, and that we must be very careful indeed not to rule out of bounds legitimate forms of fulfillment through the illicit use of our expectations and criteria for truth. We may be as “biblica” as John who attached himself strongly to the full Isaianic picture, but we may attach to the letter in a way that forecloses on the often mysterious and layered, reverberating ways God has tended to fulfill his promises and warnings in Scripture. Examples abound, not least the “day of the Lord” motif in the Old and New Testaments—a “day” which, like the resurrection motif, both has come and is yet to come in its fulness. (Smith affirms in n. 40 that the “last days” also has a “broader reference in some passages, designating not only the apostolic period but the whole period from the exile through the apostolic period.”) Should we not recognize these examples of broader reference and distributed, layered fulfillment as the divine Author’s work of conditioning us throughout covenant and biblical history to read passages like the Discourse in a similar fashion?
Theologically, it would appear we may be on safer ground to identify the fulfillment of the judging Day as the singular event of the final assize, but also to recognize the fullness of that Day as spilling forth across and within history, and especially between the resurrections, in a range of punctiliar adumbrations who derive from and are drawn into—as by gravitational pull—the central, climactic, final event begun in the resurrection of Christ but yet to be consummated, and to which they belong as of a piece. If so, this changes the character of the question provoking Smith’s argument. I hasten to add that these may be judgments on the visible form of the Church as well as the world, not least because of the Church’s identity in the New Testament as the new temple of God’s dwelling (a temple which, covenant history makes clear, the Lord may tear down in judgment in order to rebuild in a new form(s)). (With Smith, “we must consider the place of God’s sanctuary—the primary subject of the Olivet Discourse.”) If this is so, the Discourse’s characterizations of judgment may pertain to AD 70 while also disclosing the reality back of an extended series of such historical judgments, each of which point to the fact of God’s patience as well as the certainty of its end to come. This would also suggest that the dating of Matthew, while still relevant, would not be decisive of interpretation of the Discourse in its particular referent(s), and the Discourse would function more seamlessly within a canon of Scripture God purposed to be the lamp-light for the whole of the Church in history being formed for that Day (as per Peter).
A further, related nagging question in reading Smith’s piece is the fact that, outside his proposed reading of the Discourse, the New Testament rather consistently points to the passion and resurrection/ascension of Christ as his ushering in of the new world, and not the events of AD 70. Though I appreciate this pulls us into a range of arguments I can’t explore here, I would like to hear more of why Smith connects that new world to AD 70 as he does (p. 12) in comparison with the Apostolic focus on the passion and resurrection/ascension.
All this being said, I hasten to express again my far-reaching appreciation for Smith’s effort and the convictions which give rise to it. My friendly pushback may be summarized this way: before we conclude that a loosening of the tie between the Discourse and the events of AD 70 would justify the scribes and Pharisees in their accusation of false prophecy, and before we regard an appreciation for the layered nature of biblical prophetic fulfillment as “obfuscation” (so n. 47), perhaps other readings of the Discourse proceeding from no less a “high” view of Scripture’s nature, origin, and authority—and arguably more attentive to the form and purpose of Scripture as hermeneutically important—could be given more of an audience.
I read (and re-read) Dr. Smith’s piece with more than passing interest, not least because I am invigorated and refreshed by any thoughtful engagement with the questions of biblical scholarship that begins with what Scripture says about itself, namely, that it is, as a first-order reality, the authoritative living Word of the living God for his living Church. The questions I have for Smith proceed from this place of profound appreciation, and in fact endeavor to prod and poke in the direction of even more fidelity to that same “high” view of Scripture.
Defending the truth of Scripture will always be a responsibility for the Church in the context of unbelief hostile to the rightful claims of the Lord of the Word. I share Smith’s zeal for carrying out that defense. But I am confident he would agree with my fundamental concern, namely, that we must take great care to ensure that what we mean by “the truth” is derived from what that Word in fact declares and not from a foreign standard. Some reject what the Bible says because they reject it as divinely inspired and authoritative Scripture. Others, however, believe in the divine character of Scripture and that we must believe whatever God in his Word says, but are not persuaded that a particular reading (such as Smith’s chronology) is what God’s Word says. I do not follow all the links in the chain of reasoning Smith is working with as he locates the question of the dating of Matthew in relation to the Olivet Discourse exclusively (or largely so) in the context of the conflict between faith and unbelief (without denying for a moment that that conflict is real and often materially relevant). Indeed, I fear we may lose more than we gain by claiming, with Smith, not only that a biblical book’s chronology is important, but that it is “vital to ... every question of interpretation in the books themselves.” This seems to me to be a consequential example of rhetorical over-reach.
I do not see the chronology of the New Testament writings as a much neglected topic either, since however few dedicated monographs there may be, the topic is routinely addressed, and often at length, in the academic commentaries on each book. But I am sympathetic with Smith’s view on various related questions, including Matthean priority. I hold to a version of this view myself. My view is more akin to B. Ward Powers’ hypothesis (in addition to Wenham) according to which sections of Matthew were written up, copied, and distributed from Jerusalem as needed for missionary purposes, and that these sections therefore circulated prior to the whole of our Gospel of Matthew. Paul’s time spent with the Jerusalem apostles after his Damascus Road conversion would very likely have included not only his instruction in the teachings of Jesus but his exposure to (and perhaps possession of copies of) these materials. Thus, at a small appreciative distance from the reconstruction argued by Smith and Jordan, I regard it helpful to refer to Matthean “material” evidently known, for example, by Paul when writing his quite early first epistle to the Corinthians, without requiring (nor ruling out) that he and others had and knew Matthew’s Gospel as such. This hypothesis fits quite well with the scholarship noted in this series regarding ancient note-taking and Matthew’s possible role as one who took such notes (I am quite intrigued by Dr. Paul’s remarks on this).
Canon as Context and the Ecclesial Purpose of Scripture’s Form
I move, then, to the largely theological nature of my questions. As Smith would undoubtedly agree, our doctrine of Scripture must include a robust embrace of the “to what end” and “how” of Scripture. In this context, a key question I have concerns the role of the canonical collection(s) in our adjudication of the importance of a particular text’s date of composition. I do not suggest that a biblical book’s composition or completion date is unimportant, but I do suggest its importance is subordinate, hermeneutically, to its canonical location or role, and I am interested in how this bears upon our reading of the Discourse in Matthew. Despite what seems still to be a prevailing assumption even among evangelical biblical scholars, the providentially ordered and gifted canon is the Church’s Scriptures, not the books of the Bible as texts in isolation from one another or in their alleged redactional backstory.
This is not a merely “how we got the Bible” question of history; it is a theologically and hermeneutically significant conviction. It is not only textually but theologically relevant to interpretation that the biblical books do not exist for the Church as independent, isolated texts but as books within canonical collections (and ultimately one collection), and that this was the case from long before the final canonical collection was completed (in writing, not only in the collecting). As per Trobisch and others, internal features of Paul’s letters as well as the ancient manuscript traditions suggest that Paul’s “Letter Collection” circulated as such among the churches, evidently as a four-book collection at first and then as the full collection whose order never varies in the extant witnesses. The ancient churches read Paul’s letters as part of that literary unit, which undoubtedly informed their interpretation of any one part of it. Romans, as the consistent first book in the Collection, serves not only as the book it is but as a port of entry into the Collection as a whole. As such Romans provides a somewhat more general theological statement that can ensure a proper sense of proportion in interpreting other, more occasional statements in the Collection (besides providing a missionary support/defense function for the Collection in relation to the Apostle’s controversial ministry). Thus, for instance, the teaching of the less overtly polemical and less occasional Ephesians protects the occasional nature of Paul’s polemical theology in Galatians from distortion, and so on. (Incidentally, despite some scholarship on the question, the role of the Pauline Letter Collection precisely as collection seems to me still largely under-deployed for its importance for interpreting Paul’s letters.) In matters of interpretation, surely our theology of Holy Scripture requires our functioning appreciation, from the outset, of the truth that the Church does not embrace Hosea as Hosea—a text potentially enjoying an independent existence as Scripture—but the Hosea that belongs to the Book of the Twelve (cf. much recent scholarship on the hermeneutical difference this makes) and to the entirety of the canon of Holy Scripture, which canon provides its normative context. How might the priority of canon to individual textual circumstantiality inform our reading of the Matthean Olivet Discourse?
To unpack this a bit more, I would supplement this canonical question with one regarding the purpose of Scripture as it may bear on the assumption at work in Smith’s argument. In the series of affirmations which Smith has suggested (rightly) serve as the “ground” of pre-Enlightenment Christian hermeneutical method, I would hasten to insert—perhaps in between the affirmations of the Trinity and of the reality of God’s verbal revelation of Scripture—an affirmation regarding the nature of Scripture in the Trinitarian economy. God has determined to glorify the Son by way of his Spirit-formed Bridal City. Holy Scripture is located within this ultimate “eschatological” purpose of God, its Author, and serves as an instrument to that end, one which takes into the view the needs of the entirety of the people of God who occupy the time between the resurrections. Forming the people of God in and through history to be the final glory of the Son (something which both John and Paul teach explicitly), the end (final purpose) of canonical Scripture discloses its nature, something which proves hermeneutically critical.
The net yield of my request to attend to matters of canon and trinitarian economy is this: a reading of Matthew’s Olivet Discourse might fit well with a 70 AD fulfillment, but it might work just as well as a rule for how the Church between the resurrections is to interpret many reverberating events of divine judgment in that historical epoch—not because 70 AD fails to serve as fulfillment, but because 70 AD serves as only one of a series of layers of fulfillment that extend until the final assize. Does insisting on a 70 AD fulfillment blunt the work of this text in its divinely purposed formative role for the Church throughout the period in between the resurrections?
It is questions like these that prompt a more basic concern. Dr. Smith’s rousing indictment of post-Enlightenment rejections of Scripture’s self-witness and divine authorship is refreshing, to be sure. Deploying (the often useful) methods and principles of inquiry and evaluation derived from certain sciences, participants in the guild often evade the claims made upon us by the Scriptures themselves which herald from and belong to a wholly other reality, one which is not measured by a foreign standard of truth but determines truth itself. As a result, “biblical interpretation” becomes an exercise in hunting down every fact we might secure regarding the biblical writer’s identity, biography, social-economic-political situation, even psychology, on the assumption that the more we know about the human author and their circumstances, the closer we come to the definitive interpretation of their words. Though this may appear as simply doing justice to the fact that God gave his Word through human persons in history, it often works to sideline the divine as accidental to the centrally determinative human phenomena. But the Church confesses that it is the divine Author which distinguishes such a “Bible” from the Holy Scripture which the Church hears and obeys, and we note that the divine Author clearly did not think it important for hearing and obeying his Word that he provide much information on the human authors and their circumstances. The Church believes the Word, not in her ability to reconstruct the experiences and psychologies behind that Word. The Church further insists (though she sometimes clearly forgets) that it is the divine Author’s “intention” that is in fact the rule of interpretation, not the human author’s. As Smith notes, committed to a particular (modern and unbelieving) notion of what qualifies as “accurate” and “true,” proponents of the modern critical ideology dismiss as false whatever in the Bible does not align with that commitment. God’s Word is thus judged by a standard outside of him. My question: Is it possible that Smith’s strong link of the events of AD 70 with the Discourse is vulnerable to being regarded as a conservative version of the same extrabiblical standard of truth, rather than its opposite?
Struggling with John the Baptist
In Luke 7, John the Baptist sends two of his disciples to Jesus (evidently as the two witnesses required by Torah when determining a matter of truth) to inquire with him if he is the promised One. Without going into detail here as to all the reasons why, I am most persuaded by those scholars of Luke who (1) hear in John’s question at least a mild degree of doubt and uncertainty regarding Jesus’s identity, and who (2) argue that the cause of John’s doubts was likely the incompleteness of Jesus’s ministry to date when measured by Isaiah-rooted messianic expectations. Against the backdrop of John’s Isaiah-focused sermon themes in the wilderness, one can appreciate why. Jesus tells John’s disciples to report back what they see and hear in Jesus’s miracles of healing, restoration, and resurrection, elements which clearly recall the Isaianic profile of the healing and redeeming Messiah that John knows intimately. But Isaiah also prophesied that the Messiah would come in judgment and deliverance, and John had long preached a message of judgment drawing near, of the great leveling now on the doorstep, the imminent arrival of the messianic winnowing fork and consuming fire that destroys fruitless trees (Luke 3). John is perplexed: in what is being reported about Jesus, we have the healing, yes, but we don’t (yet) have the judgment. In the words of an older generation, what gives? John wrestles with the fact that the picture of fulfillment is incomplete when measured by the full tapestry of the Isaianic description. Does this mean Jesus isn’t the One after all? Should John and his disciples look for another?
I suggest that the Church is often caught in John’s question when interpreting the Olivet Discourse, and that we must be very careful indeed not to rule out of bounds legitimate forms of fulfillment through the illicit use of our expectations and criteria for truth. We may be as “biblica” as John who attached himself strongly to the full Isaianic picture, but we may attach to the letter in a way that forecloses on the often mysterious and layered, reverberating ways God has tended to fulfill his promises and warnings in Scripture. Examples abound, not least the “day of the Lord” motif in the Old and New Testaments—a “day” which, like the resurrection motif, both has come and is yet to come in its fulness. (Smith affirms in n. 40 that the “last days” also has a “broader reference in some passages, designating not only the apostolic period but the whole period from the exile through the apostolic period.”) Should we not recognize these examples of broader reference and distributed, layered fulfillment as the divine Author’s work of conditioning us throughout covenant and biblical history to read passages like the Discourse in a similar fashion?
Theologically, it would appear we may be on safer ground to identify the fulfillment of the judging Day as the singular event of the final assize, but also to recognize the fullness of that Day as spilling forth across and within history, and especially between the resurrections, in a range of punctiliar adumbrations who derive from and are drawn into—as by gravitational pull—the central, climactic, final event begun in the resurrection of Christ but yet to be consummated, and to which they belong as of a piece. If so, this changes the character of the question provoking Smith’s argument. I hasten to add that these may be judgments on the visible form of the Church as well as the world, not least because of the Church’s identity in the New Testament as the new temple of God’s dwelling (a temple which, covenant history makes clear, the Lord may tear down in judgment in order to rebuild in a new form(s)). (With Smith, “we must consider the place of God’s sanctuary—the primary subject of the Olivet Discourse.”) If this is so, the Discourse’s characterizations of judgment may pertain to AD 70 while also disclosing the reality back of an extended series of such historical judgments, each of which point to the fact of God’s patience as well as the certainty of its end to come. This would also suggest that the dating of Matthew, while still relevant, would not be decisive of interpretation of the Discourse in its particular referent(s), and the Discourse would function more seamlessly within a canon of Scripture God purposed to be the lamp-light for the whole of the Church in history being formed for that Day (as per Peter).
A further, related nagging question in reading Smith’s piece is the fact that, outside his proposed reading of the Discourse, the New Testament rather consistently points to the passion and resurrection/ascension of Christ as his ushering in of the new world, and not the events of AD 70. Though I appreciate this pulls us into a range of arguments I can’t explore here, I would like to hear more of why Smith connects that new world to AD 70 as he does (p. 12) in comparison with the Apostolic focus on the passion and resurrection/ascension.
All this being said, I hasten to express again my far-reaching appreciation for Smith’s effort and the convictions which give rise to it. My friendly pushback may be summarized this way: before we conclude that a loosening of the tie between the Discourse and the events of AD 70 would justify the scribes and Pharisees in their accusation of false prophecy, and before we regard an appreciation for the layered nature of biblical prophetic fulfillment as “obfuscation” (so n. 47), perhaps other readings of the Discourse proceeding from no less a “high” view of Scripture’s nature, origin, and authority—and arguably more attentive to the form and purpose of Scripture as hermeneutically important—could be given more of an audience.
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