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After years of skeptical study, I became persuaded that Jesus was telling the truth when He said that prophesied “last-things” events would be fulfilled in his generation (Luke 21:22, 32; etc.). This is the preterist view of eschatology. Preterism teaches that most, if not all prophetic events happened with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Books by modern authors such as Francis Gumerlock and Kenneth Gentry affirm that this view has been part of the discussion since the earliest days of Christianity. Indeed, preterists argue that the writers of the New Testament were preterists. It is re-emerging in popularity....

Jesus predicted it 37 years before it happened. Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice, who heard Paul's testimony at Caesarea (Acts 26), tried hard to prevent it, as did the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (our main source of first-century information). But the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple in A.D. 70 happened nevertheless, and it was a catastrophe with almost unparalleled consequences for Jews, Christians, and, indeed, all of subsequent history. It compelled a whole new vector for synagogue (not Temple) Judaism, it submerged the Jewish homeland for the next 19 centuries under foreign domination, it...