Has Revelation already happened?

Question 10187.

Every few months somebody writes to me convinced that the preterist view has settled the whole question, and that the book of Revelation describes events which came and went in the first century. It is not a silly suggestion. Revelation opens by announcing things that must soon take place, and Jesus did tell a generation that certain things would happen before it passed away. If you take those statements seriously, and you should, you owe the reader an account of them.

So let me set out what this reading actually claims, where its strength lies, and why after years of working through the text I cannot hold it. The people who hold it are usually trying to honour Scripture rather than dodge it, and they deserve a fair hearing before they get a disagreement. If you have not yet read what I have written on preterism as a system, that piece and this one belong together.

What the preterist view actually claims

The preterist view takes its name from the Latin praeter, meaning past. Its central claim is that the prophecies of Revelation, and the bulk of the Olivet Discourse alongside them, found their fulfilment in the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in AD 70. On this reading the beast is Nero or the Roman imperial system, Babylon is either Jerusalem or Rome, the great tribulation is the Jewish war of AD 66 to 70, and the coming of the Son of Man in judgement is the Roman siege understood as an act of divine visitation.

Two texts do the heavy lifting. The first is Revelation 1:1, where John says these are things which must soon take place, with Revelation 22:20 closing the book on the same note. The second is Matthew 24:34, where Jesus says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. If soon means within a few years, and if that generation means the people standing in front of Jesus, then the preterist view looks like the only honest option available.

I want to say plainly that this is a real argument and not a lazy one. Anybody who waves it away has not felt the force of the timing language. The question is not whether those verses matter. The question is whether the preterist view is the best account of them once the rest of the evidence is on the table.

Full preterism and partial preterism

There are two versions and the difference between them is enormous. Full preterism, sometimes called consistent preterism, holds that every prophecy including the resurrection of the dead and the second coming was fulfilled by AD 70. On that scheme we are already in the new heavens and new earth, the resurrection was spiritual, and there is nothing left on the prophetic calendar at all.

Partial preterism holds that most of Revelation was fulfilled in the first century while a genuine future return of Jesus, a bodily resurrection and a final judgement remain. Many careful and godly men have held this second position. It keeps the creedal centre of the faith intact even while it empties the prophetic passages of future reference.

I regard full preterism as outside the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy, because it denies a bodily future return and a bodily future resurrection, and 1 Corinthians 15:12 to 19 treats that denial as fatal. Partial preterism is a mistake rather than a heresy. When I speak of the preterist view in the rest of this article I mean the partial version, since that is what most readers who write to me actually hold.

There is a third variant worth naming, sometimes called moderate or orthodox preterism, which reads the Olivet Discourse as fulfilled in AD 70 while leaving Revelation largely future. I have no quarrel with that at all, since it is close to my own reading. The disagreement begins where a preterist view is applied to Revelation as a whole rather than to the discourse Jesus gave about the temple in front of Him.

Why AD 70 cannot carry the weight

Start with the scale of what Revelation describes. A third of mankind dies in Revelation 9:18. Every living thing in the sea dies in Revelation 16:3. Hailstones weighing about a hundred pounds fall on the whole earth, the sun is darkened, and every island and mountain is moved out of place. The Jewish war was appalling, and Josephus records horrors that still turn the stomach, but nothing remotely like this happened to the planet in the first century.

Then take the outcome. Revelation ends with death abolished, tears wiped away, no more mourning or crying or pain, and the nations walking in the light of the Lamb. Whatever you think of AD 70, the years after it produced more persecution, more war and more grief, not the end of them. If Revelation was fulfilled then, the promises it makes went unfulfilled, and that is a worse problem than the one preterism set out to solve.

There is a third difficulty which does not get enough attention. Revelation gives the beast a career of forty two months, a covenant broken in the middle of a seven year span in Daniel 9:27, and a global system of economic control tied to a mark. Nero persecuted Christians savagely, and yet no first century emperor ran a worldwide buying and selling system, and none of the numbers fit his reign without being bent to shape.

There is also the awkward matter of what Revelation itself says will not happen again. The dead in Christ are raised, the beast and false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, Satan is bound and then destroyed, and death itself is abolished. A preterist view has to make every one of those either spiritual or already accomplished, and nobody who has attended a funeral in the last two thousand years finds that persuasive.

Josephus is worth reading on the siege, and I recommend it, because the horror was real and Jesus was right. Yet what he describes is a regional catastrophe of the kind the ancient world produced repeatedly, and Revelation describes the dismantling of the created order. Scale is not a detail here; it is the substance of the argument.

The date of Revelation and the preterist view

The preterist view generally requires that Revelation was written before AD 70, usually in the mid sixties, because a book which predicts the fall of Jerusalem cannot be written after Jerusalem has already fallen. That early date is not impossible, and some respectable scholars argue for it, but it runs against the oldest external evidence we possess.

Irenaeus, who claimed a link back to Polycarp and so to John himself, placed the vision at the end of the reign of Domitian, which means around AD 95. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Victorinus, Eusebius and Jerome all follow the same late date. The internal picture agrees. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 look like second generation congregations with settled histories, cooled love, tolerated error and a reputation to lose, which is hard to square with communities barely a decade old.

So the preterist view has to overturn the earliest and most unified strand of external testimony before it can begin its exegesis. That is not automatically fatal, since the fathers were not infallible, but it does mean the reading starts with a debt it never quite repays.

What Revelation says about itself

John does not present his book as a coded account of current affairs. He calls it an apokalypsis, an unveiling given by Jesus, and he receives a threefold instruction in Revelation 1:19 to write the things he has seen, the things that are, and the things that are to take place after this. That last clause is a promise of genuine futurity, and it governs the structure of everything from chapter four onwards.

The timing word itself repays a closer look. The phrase rendered soon is en tachei, which speaks of the manner of an event rather than its distance. It carries the sense of suddenly, swiftly, without delay once it begins. The same word family sits behind Paul saying God will crush Satan under your feet shortly, and nobody imagines Paul meant that within the month. Scripture also warns us in 2 Peter 3:8 and 9 not to read divine timing on a human wristwatch.

Alongside that stands the doctrine of imminence, which I have written about separately in the piece on imminence. A promise held out as always possible is not the same as a promise dated to a particular decade, and the church has lived in that readiness for two thousand years without being deceived.

John also received his commission with a promise attached in Revelation 22:6, that the Lord sent His angel to show His servants what must soon take place, and he was told in the next breath not to seal up the words of this book. Daniel was told to seal his. The contrast suggests that John was writing for a church that would live in continuing expectation, which is exactly what a preterist view removes.

Israel, the nations and promises still outstanding

This is where the preterist reading and I part company most sharply. God made unconditional promises to Abraham concerning land, seed and blessing, confirmed them to David concerning a throne and a dynasty, and restated them through the prophets after every failure Israel managed to commit. Those promises were made to a particular people and they include specific geography.

If everything terminated in AD 70, then the covenant promises ended in the destruction of the very city where they were to be honoured, and the nation to whom they were given was scattered rather than restored. That is not fulfilment. Paul, writing years after the ministry of Jesus, still asks in Romans 11:1 whether God has rejected His people and answers with a flat no, and he still looks forward to a day when all Israel will be saved.

Zechariah pictures the nation looking on the one they have pierced and mourning as for an only child, and that mourning turns to cleansing. Nothing in the first century answers to it. I take those texts at face value, which is why I hold that God still has a plan for Israel and why the prophetic clock has not been broken up for scrap.

Consider how much of Revelation concerns the nations rather than one city. Kings of the earth, a mark required for buying and selling everywhere, a plague on every living creature in the sea, a multitude out of every tribe and tongue, and finally nations walking in the light of the Lamb. A preterist view compresses a global canvas into one province, and the seams show.

Where the preterist reading is right to press us

Let me give the other side its due, because a fair disagreement is worth more than a cheap win. The preterist view is right that Jesus predicted the fall of Jerusalem, that the prediction came true with terrible accuracy in AD 70, and that a great deal of the Olivet Discourse deals with that event. Anyone who reads Matthew 24 as though the temple stones were not really coming down has missed the plain sense.

It is also right to insist that Revelation meant something to its first readers. The seven churches were real congregations with real pressures under a real empire, and a book which said nothing to them would have been a strange comfort. Prophecy is pastoral before it is predictive, and the preterist view keeps that in front of us.

Where I part company is in the leap from partial reference to total fulfilment. Prophecy often has a near horizon and a far horizon at once, which is the subject of my article on double reference in prophecy. AD 70 can be a genuine foreshadowing of the day of the Lord without being the day itself.

Why the preterist view changes how you read everything else

Doctrines do not sit in isolation. Adopt the preterist view and you have to reinterpret the resurrection, the return, the judgement and the kingdom, because each of those is described in the same passages you have just relocated to the past. That is why full preterism keeps appearing at the end of the road; the logic pulls that way even when the traveller does not want to arrive there.

The method matters as much as the conclusion. A preterist view requires you to read numbers, timescales, plagues and resurrections as figures while reading the surrounding narrative as history, and the decision about which is which rests with the interpreter. Once that door is open it is very hard to shut, and it is the same door through which amillennial readings of Revelation 20 walk.

My own approach is the plainer one. I take the text literally unless the text itself signals otherwise, I let Scripture interpret Scripture, and I allow prophecy to remain unfulfilled if it has not yet been fulfilled. That is not naivety about genre. It is a refusal to make my reading tidier than God has made His revelation, and it is why I read Revelation as still largely ahead of us, as I set out in my article on interpreting Revelation.

So, now what?

If you have been drawn to the preterist view, do not feel got at. Go back to the timing texts and read them with the whole book open rather than in isolation. Ask what en tachei actually means, ask whether the world Revelation leaves behind looks anything like the world of the second century, and ask what happened to the promises made to Israel if the story closed in AD 70.

And then let the unfinished business do its proper work on you. A prophecy still outstanding is a Lord still coming, and a Lord still coming changes how you spend a Tuesday. Who are you praying for who has no time left to waste? What would you stop doing tonight if you knew He might come before morning?

And be careful of the pull towards the full version. Every year I hear from someone who adopted a partial preterist view for good reasons and then found the logic dragging them towards denying a bodily resurrection, because the arguments that emptied Revelation of a future will empty 1 Corinthians 15 just as efficiently. That is a road worth refusing early.

Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.

Revelation 1:19 (ESV)

For Further Study

If you want to weigh this properly, read the other side as well as your own. On the futurist position I would send you to J. Dwight Pentecost in Things to Come, Charles Ryrie in Basic Theology and Dispensationalism, John Walvoord in The Revelation of Jesus Christ, and Lewis Sperry Chafer in his Systematic Theology, with Arnold Fruchtenbaum in The Footsteps of the Messiah for the fullest dispensational treatment of the sequence. Millard Erickson in his Christian Theology gives a careful survey of the competing millennial and preterist options with more even handedness than most. Read them with an open Bible and a sceptical pencil.