Was Jesus a false prophet?

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charleychacko

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The view of one Bible scholar:"The second of the problems mentioned above -- if Jesus expected God to change the world, he was wrong -- is by no means novel. It arose very early in Christianity. This is the most substantial issue in the earliest surviving Christian document, Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. There, we learn, Paul's converts were shaken by the fact that some members of the congregation had died; they expected the Lord to return while they were all still alive. Paul assured them that the (few) dead Christians would be raised so that they could participate in the coming kingdom along with those who were still alive when the Lord returned. The question of just how soon the great event would occur appears in other books of the New Testament. A saying in the synoptics (discussed more fully below) promises that 'some standing here' will still be alive when the Son of Man comes. In the appendix to the Gospel of John (ch. 21), however, Jesus is depicted as discussing an anonymous disciple, called 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', with Peter: 'If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?' The author then explains, 'So, the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?"' (John 21.21-3). The history of these adjustments to the view that God would do something dramatic while Jesus' contemporaries were still alive is fairly easy to reconstruct. Jesus originally said that the Son of Man would come in the immediate future, while his hearers were alive... Then, when people started dying, they [the followers of Jesus] said that some would still be alive. When almost the entire first generation was dead, they maintained that one disciple would still be alive. Then he died, and it became necessary to claim that Jesus had not actually promised even this one disciple that he would live to see the great day. By the time we reach one of the latest books of the New Testament, 2 Peter, the return of the Lord has been postponed even further: some people scoff and say, 'Where is the promise of his coming?' But remember, 'with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3.3-8). The Lord is not really slow, but rather keeps time by a different calendar. In the decades after Jesus' death, then, the Christians had to revise their first expectations again and again. This makes it very probable that the expectation originated with Jesus. We make sense of these pieces of evidence if we think that Jesus himself told his followers that the Son of Man would come while they still lived. The fact that this expectation was difficult for Christians in the first century helps prove that Jesus held it himself. We also note that Christianity survived this early discovery that Jesus had made a mistake very well." E.P. Sanders (1993) The Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin.So did Jesus predict that his "second coming" would happen in the first century?
 

HammerStone

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The author of this piece misses one important clue about the final days that Jesus gave us. He gave us the parable of the fig tree which is arguably one of the most important things about the latter days that he ever told us.Matthew 24:32-34Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.The generation of the fig tree is "this generation" that "shall not pass" that Christ speaks about in this passage. You have to look at the context of the verses and so many of these higher critics simply cannot do that because they're blind to the true meaning. Jesus didn't give it a timeframe, in fact this person here is ignorning the statement:Mark 13:32But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.So, if Jesus was trying to predict the time by his statements in Matthew 24, then he's in direct conflict with his own words. Some people want to expose Jesus as a fraud, but I think even the worst of frauds would not be so foolish as to make two contradicting statements like this.
 
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