“Paul, in his epistles to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians, had more than once spoken as if the coming of our Lord Jesus was very near”
Yes, it WAS near, in 70 AD. Jesus promised that the generation listening to Him in 30 AD would see Him in glory.
We know from Josephus that the people in besieged Jerusalem saw the signs of a heavenly host and we know that the temple was utterly destroyed, not one stone resting upon another.
We also know that the Jesus movement Jews ie the Christians saw the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD as a fulfilment of Daniel, of the Olivet discourse and of the Revelation of John and that us why Christianity spread further after that.
The reason all the stones were overturned was because the fire in the temple was so intense, the gold melted into the joints between the stones and the Roman soldiers were digging them up to get to them.
Of course we all know all that to be discredited in our day. Preterism is a wrongful interpretation of scripture.