Was the birth and death of Jesus Christ an abomination?
I first came upon this line of thinking in Matthew Henry’s commentaries (very excellent). The argument goes that the abomination of desolation would have been the Roman armies, with their pagan symbols, surrounding the Holy City. Check out Josephus’s War Of the Jews. There were signs and wonders which preceded the destruction of Jerusalem that were quite incredible, so to a certain degree it is reasonable to conclude that scripture either had a double meaning or was referring to that destruction.
Of course, I have not studied any of this for a couple of years.
All of this was fulfilled in about 70 AD when the Romans installed a stature of Caeser in the Temple and utterly destroyed Jerusalem.
I'm a Catholic. I never understood why anybody would think that this is going to happen in the future when it was already fulfilled in antiquity. It also goes with Christ's own prediction of the same events. Daniel and Jesus predict the same event that happened in about 70 AD. That's amazing, and it's a cause for great wonder. Why in the world do we need to project that into some imaginary future when we have the glory of the historical proof of prophecy?
The author of this article is correct - dispensationalism is a come-lately reading of the Bible. Nobody read the Bible like that before. It's utterly foreign to Holy Tradition. To read it in such a way would require one to reject Tradition utterly and to assume that the Spirit was not with the Church for preceding 1800 or so years which would directly contradict the promise that Christ will always be with us and that the Spirit will lead us to all truth.
It's a terrible distraction, and frankly it's embarrassing for us more traditional Christians. I mean, Hal Lindsay says that the metal insects in Revelation are Soviet Helicopters. How much more "out there" can one really get? I wish they'd stop.