What Is Preterism? Did the End Times Already Happen?

Preterism is the view that most of what people call end-times prophecy is not about the future at all. It says the great tribulation, the abomination of desolation, the beast and the fall of Babylon were fulfilled in the first century, and above all in one event: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70.

The name comes from the Latin praeter, meaning past or beyond. And the short answer to the question in the title is: it depends entirely which preterism you mean. One version of it is held by respected Reformed and Anglican teachers and affirms every line of the creeds. Another version says the resurrection and the second coming already happened, and nearly every Christian body, including the first group, treats that as outside orthodoxy. Those two are constantly confused, usually to somebody's disadvantage.

The verses that drive it

Preterism does not begin with a theory. It begins with a set of sentences about timing that are awkward on any reading.

Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Matthew 24:34

That comes at the end of the Olivet Discourse, after Jesus has described wars, famines, a desolating sacrilege and the darkening of the sun. A biblical generation is commonly reckoned at about forty years. Jesus spoke those words around AD 30. Jerusalem fell in AD 70. The arithmetic is the whole preterist case in miniature, and it is unpacked at length in this generation shall not pass.

Three more sentences do similar work.

• Matthew 16:28. "There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
• Revelation 1:1. The things shown "must shortly come to pass."
• Revelation 22:10. "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand." Daniel, by contrast, is told at Daniel 12:4 to shut up the words and seal the book, because his fulfilment was distant.

Preterists argue that a reading which makes "shortly" mean two thousand years and counting has drained the words of ordinary meaning. Their critics reply that Scripture also says a thousand years are as a day with the Lord, and that "this generation" may mean a kind of people rather than a span of years. Neither answer is silly, which is why the argument has lasted.

What actually happened in AD 70

The revolt began in AD 66 with a tax dispute and a massacre in Caesarea. Nero sent Vespasian, an experienced general, who worked through Galilee methodically. In AD 69 Nero was dead and Vespasian became emperor, leaving his son Titus to finish the war.

Titus surrounded Jerusalem around Passover of AD 70, when the city was swollen with pilgrims. The siege ran about five months. The Romans built a wall of circumvallation to stop anyone leaving, famine set in, and rival factions fought each other inside the walls. In August the temple burned. The city was levelled. The daily sacrifice has never resumed to this day.

The main source for all of it is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish commander who surrendered at Jotapata, went over to the Romans, and wrote The Jewish War under Flavian patronage. He reports at War 6.9.3 that eleven hundred thousand perished and ninety-seven thousand were taken captive. Those are his figures, written by a man with reasons to magnify both Roman power and Jewish suffering, and ancient historians routinely inflated numbers. Tacitus gives 600,000. Modern historians treat all such totals as unreliable. What is not in doubt is that the destruction was near total and that it ended the temple system permanently.

If you are looking for an event large enough to justify the language of Matthew 24, preterists say, that is it, and it happened inside the window Jesus named.

Cosmic language for political collapse

The second pillar of preterism is a claim about idiom. When the Hebrew prophets announce the fall of a nation, they routinely describe the sky going dark. The sun, moon and stars stand for rulers and powers, and their extinguishing is the end of an order, not the end of the planet.

For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. Isaiah 13:10

That is Isaiah's oracle against Babylon, a city that fell to Cyrus in 539 BC while the sun kept rising. Isaiah 19:1 has the Lord riding on a swift cloud into Egypt, a coming that no one records as a visible descent. Ezekiel 32:7 uses the same darkened sun and covered heaven for the fall of Pharaoh.

So when Jesus uses that vocabulary in Matthew 24:29, preterists argue, he is speaking the language his hearers already knew, and he is announcing the end of the temple age rather than the end of the world. Futurist readers answer that Matthew 24:30 adds the visible appearance of the Son of man and the gathering of the elect, which goes beyond anything in Isaiah, and that a genuine idiom in one place does not settle its use in another.

The dating problem

Preterism needs Revelation written before the events it describes. If the book was composed around AD 95, it cannot be a prophecy of a city that fell twenty-five years earlier.

The usual external evidence for the later date is one sentence in Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.3, written about AD 180, which says the vision was seen "no very long time since, but almost in our own day, towards the end of Domitian's reign". Domitian ruled AD 81 to 96. That sentence is why most reference works give AD 95.

Preterists press two points. The Greek is grammatically ambiguous about whether "it was seen" refers to the vision or to John himself, so the sentence may only mean that John was still alive under Domitian. And internal evidence, they argue, points earlier: the temple is still standing to be measured in Revelation 11:1, and the beast's number matches Nero's name.

Most scholars still hold the later date. It is a real dispute rather than a settled one, and it is one of the four decisions that generate the whole end-times map.

The distinction that matters most

Here is where careless writing does damage. Two things travel under the same name.

Partial preterism holds that AD 70 was a real coming of Christ in judgement, in the prophetic sense of Isaiah 19:1, while the personal, bodily, visible return remains ahead, along with the general resurrection and the last judgement. Every clause of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds stands.

Full preterism, sometimes called hyper-preterism or consistent preterism, extends the logic to everything. The second coming, the resurrection and the judgement all occurred in AD 70, and the new heavens and new earth are the present order. There is no future event left.

It should be said plainly. The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead" and affirm "the resurrection of the body", and full preterism denies both as future realities. No major denomination teaches it. It has been formally rejected by Reformed bodies, and the partial preterists themselves are among its sharpest critics: R. C. Sproul, who argued the partial case in The Last Days According to Jesus in 1998, and Kenneth Gentry, who devotes an appendix of He Shall Have Dominion to refuting it, both reject it, as does Gary DeMar. The most striking case is David Chilton, a leading partial preterist author who moved to the full position in the mid 1990s and died in 1997 at forty-five, which is why his earlier books and his final views are cited on opposite sides of the argument.

Who holds partial preterism

It is a minority view with serious names attached. Sproul and Gentry are the best known American advocates. N. T. Wright, the New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham, reads the Olivet Discourse in substantially preterist terms without adopting the label. Historically, the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Alcasar produced the first systematic preterist reading of Revelation in Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi, published in 1614, the year after his death, and the American scholar Moses Stuart advanced the approach in his commentary of 1845. It has strong representation in Reformed and postmillennial circles and almost none in popular prophecy publishing, which is futurist nearly to a page.

Where it sits on the larger map

Preterism is one answer to one question. It tells you when prophecy is fulfilled. It does not by itself tell you what happens to the millennium, to Israel, or to the church, because those are answered on a different axis.

Cross the four timing perspectives with the three millennial positions and you get twelve identifiable views, each with churches and scholars in it. A partial preterist can be postmillennial, as Gentry is, or amillennial, as many Reformed readers are. Knowing that a person is a preterist tells you one coordinate of two, which is exactly why so many end-times conversations run past each other.