The following passages are often treated quite separately, but it seems to me that they deserve to be assessed together, since they appear to be versions of the same basic concept:
Matthew 16.28: 28 "Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom."
Mark 9.1: 1 And Jesus was saying to them, "Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power."
Luke 9.27: 27 "But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God."
Version 2.
Matthew 24.34-35: 34 "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.
Mark 13.30-31: 30 "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away."
Luke 21.32-33: 32 "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all things take place. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away."
Version 3.
John 21.21-23: 21 So Peter seeing him said to Jesus, "Lord, and what about this man?" 22 Jesus said to him, "If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow Me!" 23 Therefore this saying went out among the brethren that that disciple would not die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but only, "If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?"
Version 4.
1 Corinthians 15.51-52: 51 Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
1 Thessalonians 4.16-17: 16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. 17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord.
The meaning of all four versions seems to be clear: certain apocalyptic events are going to happen, and they will happen at a time at which some of the people alive right now are going to still be alive, while others will have died. The generation in view ("this generation") in all four versions is that of the apostles (Peter and company, the beloved disciple, and Paul, at the very least).
Version 1 specifically relates to the coming of the Son of Man, who will be ashamed then of those who are ashamed of him now (Matthew 16.27; Mark 8.38; Luke 9.26). Version 2 specifically relates to the coming of the Son of Man and the regathering of the elect (Matthew 24.29-31; Mark 13.24-27; Luke 21.25-28). Versions 3 and 4 specifically relate to the resurrection from the dead and the simultaneous transformation of the living ("that disciple would not die," "we shall not all sleep"). Arguably, none of the four versions has yet fully come true even today.
What can we say about the origins of this body of material? Does it not seem evident that it had to have arisen during the lifetimes of the apostles? What would bring someone of a later date, well after the death of the last apostle, to even suggest that at least some of the apostles would still be alive to witness these events which even today have not yet transpired? If someone has solid ideas along these lines — ideas, I might add, which would not make me sound like a Christian apologist were I to adopt them — then I am most interested in hearing them.
The more so since it appears to me that there has been damage control and back pedaling with respect to these very predictions.
Version 1 is mitigated by being placed six or eight days before the Transfiguration, leading a lot of modern Christians to think that the Transfiguration is, in fact, the intended fulfillment of the prediction. The awkwardness of Jesus thus being made to predict that "some" of his disciples would still be alive in a week's time, not to mention the conspicuous absence of a true coming of the Son of Man, in whatever sense, seems to escape such exegetes. But modern Christians still sometimes follow this interpretation, so perhaps somebody in antiquity actually planned for it by locating the Transfiguration in that spot.
Version 2 is mitigated in Luke by a rather complex strategy of rewriting the material we find in Matthew and Mark. I am not going to go into it here and now, but suffice it to say that Luke seems to make room for an indefinite period called "the times of the gentiles" in 21.24. Version 2 appears to be mitigated in Matthew, Mark, and Acts (nominally the sequel to Luke) by the following passages:
Mark 13.32: 32 "But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."
Didache 16.1: 1 Watch concerning your life; let not your lamps be quenched or your loins be loosed, but be ready, for you do not know the hour at which our Lord is coming.
Acts 1.6-8: 6 So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?" 7 He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or seasons [χρόνους ἢ καιροὺς] which the Father has fixed by His own authority; 8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."
Did the same mind which promised certain events within the lifespan of a generation also state that nobody could know when they would happen? Modern Christians sometimes get around this conundrum by positing that Jesus knew which generation the events would take place in, but not the exact day or hour within that generation; depending upon their eschatological outlook, then, they go on to posit either that "this generation" was the apostolic one, and the events described (such as the gathering of the elect) happened in a spiritual manner, behind the scenes in heaven somehow, or that "this generation" refers to the future generation which would witness the events in question, thus interpreting this version of the prediction quite apart from the other three versions. These apologetic interpretations are made possible by the insertion of the mitigating statement that nobody knows the day or the hour.
Furthermore, Acts 1.7 draws out the end into the realm of "times" and "seasons" — these καιροὶ καὶ χρόνοι are the long stretches, the epochs or eras, the ebb and flow of history, the coming and going of kingdoms and empires upon the earth:
Wisdom of Solomon 7.17-21: 17 For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; 18 the beginning and end and middle of times [χρόνων], the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons [καιρῶν], 19 the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, 20 the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots; 21 I learned both what is secret and what is manifest.
Wisdom of Solomon 8.8: 8 And if any one longs for wide experience, she knows the things of old, and infers the things to come; she understands turns of speech and the solutions of riddles; she has foreknowledge of signs and wonders and of the outcome of seasons and times [καιρῶν καὶ χρόνων].
Daniel 2.21: 21 "And it is He who changes seasons and times [καιροὺς καὶ χρόνους]; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to men of understanding."
The mitigation of version 2 can also apply to version 1, incidentally, should the timing of the Transfiguration trick not seem up to the task.
Version 3 is mitigated within the Johannine passage itself; the whole purpose of the passage is to "correctly" interpret the rumor about the beloved disciple, so the rumor is both mentioned and then reinterpreted ("he said 'if,' nimrods") in the same breath.
Version 4 is not really mitigated in 1 Corinthians; I think the fact that one might take the first person plural "we" to mean believers in general may have allowed this passage to pass without later remark. Indeed, on its own, that would probably not be the worst interpretation in the world: Paul is presumably still living as he writes, after all, and if he does not know the day or the hour he cannot very well guarantee that he will be dead when the time comes, so he is practically forced to group himself with the living. It is the juxtaposition of his expectation with the other versions of the prediction that make me question this logic.
The prediction in 1 Thessalonians, however, is mitigated by what I take to be an interpolation in 5.1-11. The relevant portion is:
We are back to the broad stretches of history ("the times and the seasons") again; we are back to the unknown day and hour (the "thief in the night"). It appears to me that the same strategy used in Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, and Acts 1 has been used here, as well: the generational prediction has been blunted with the sober knowledge that nobody knows the times and seasons, much less the exact day and hour.
Once these initial tactics had been employed against the generational prophecy (which C. S. Lewis once called "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible"), the way was clear for more thoroughgoing approaches:
Epistle of the Apostles 16-17a: 16 Then said we to him, "Lord, that which thou hast revealed unto us is great. Wilt thou come in the power of any creature or in an appearance of any kind?" He answered and said unto us, "Verily I say unto you, I shall come like the sun when it is risen, and my brightness will be seven times the brightness thereof! The wings of the clouds shall bear me in brightness, and the sign of the cross shall go before me, and I shall come upon earth to judge the quick and the dead." 17a We said unto him, "Lord, after how many years shall this come to pass?" He said unto us, "When the hundredth part and the twentieth part is fulfilled, between the Pentecost and the feast of unleavened bread, then shall the coming of my Father be" [thus reads the Coptic, but the Ethiopic has, "When a hundred and fifty years are past, in the days of the feast of Passover and Pentecost"].
It seems that the Epistle of the Apostles originally predicted that the resurrection would happen 120 years after Christ's ministry, a figure which was eventually adjusted upward by 30 years when no amount of calendrical twisting could make the 120 years work any longer.
None of the earliest mitigating strategies is entirely effective, but all of them are still used by various Christians to this day. Taking both the original prediction and its unsuccessful mitigation seriously, I find myself led to believe (A) that the prediction, originating during the apostolic period, was so widespread and entrenched that it could not be ignored, even when it did not come to pass, and (B) that Christians constructed modifications to the prediction which were "good enough" — ad hoc and patchy, to be sure, but "good enough" to allow intelligent exegetes to wriggle out of the obvious implications.
But I am willing to be persuaded otherwise: how could these predictions feasibly have arisen after the apostles were all dead and gone?
Ben.