Is the Second Coming of Jesus true?

According to the Gospel, Jesus had once revealed His Second Coming to the disciples:

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In the Book of Mark 13, Jesus said to his disciple, "But in those days, following that distress, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory …… I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened."

Apostle Paul interpreted Jesus' saying of His Second Coming as imminent and would take place before he died:

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In the Book of 1 Thessalonians 4, it says, 'We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him ...... After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.'

However, it is obvious that the Second Coming of Jesus as understood by the disciples did not happened in their generation and their hope disappointed:

In 2 Peter 3, it says, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation …… But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
According to Marcus Borg's The Meaning of Jesus, there are two possibilities. Either, the apocalyptic eschatology goes back to Jesus Himself but the meaning was misunderstood by his immediate successors including Apostle Paul. Or, the expectation of the Second Coming of Jesus was a product made up by Early Christians movement after Jesus death. Let us examine the authenticity of the Gospel's record of Jesus' saying by the following criteria:

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Criterion of Embarrasement

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The recorded saying was considered by the early post-Easter Christian as awkward, contrary to the editorial tendency and as in need of qualification or even deletion, but the material was preserved despite the awkwardness and potential embarrassment. Under this criterion, the recorded saying may be considered authentic.

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Criterion of Multiple Attestation

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The recorded saying of Second Coming was mentioned in two or more independent sources like the Book of John, the Book of Revelation, and the letters of Apostle Paul including the First Book of Thessalonians and Corinthians which are commonly considered to be written at a much earlier time than the Books of Gospel. However, under this criterion, it can only be regarded as primitive rather than authentic.

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Criterion of 'Aftermath'

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As recorded in the Book of Acts 2:42-47, the early post-Easter Christians had everything in common and sold their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. It seems that the early post-Easter Christian strongly believed that the coming of Christ was near. Under this criterion, the recorded saying may be considered authentic.

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Criterion of Historical Plausibility

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Jesus could only say what a first century Jewish charismatic or prophet could have said. This was possible according to the prophesies of the Old Testament. Under this criterion, the recorded saying may be considered authentic.

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Criterion of Discontinuity

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The recorded saying was not dissimilar to both contemporary Judaism and the early post-Easter Christian. Resurrection was seen as an 'end-time' event in Judaism. The conviction that Jesus had been resurrected led to the inference that the end is near. Moreover, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 also led to the sense that the end is at hand and the early post-Easter Christian thought so.

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A Challenging Question

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If Marcus' hypothesis, i.e. the early post-Easter Christians misunderstood the Second Coming, or the record of Jesus' saying was just a product of the early post-Easter Christians for the purpose of thelogical representation, are false, the only option left may be that our conception of Jesus' Second Coming is false.

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Some minor 'Christian' sects, like Jesus Seminar which Marcus Borg belongs to, believes that the Second Coming of Jesus has already taken place. The Kingdom of God is just 'here and now', and they have no concern on any futuristic kind of eschatology. Will you maintain your Chrisitan life and be faithful to God if the Kingdom of God is just 'here and now'? If they can sustain their 'Christian' life just by the belief of the 'here and now' Kingdom of God, can we say that they have greater love than us?

The Physics and Theology of the Resurrected World

Different from what Judaism considers essentially as a metaphor for the national restoration, Christian resurrection, in present and pre-mortem terms, is commonly used to refer to the idea of transformation of the old self to a new spiritual life through the salvation of Christ; and in futuristic and post-mortem terms, it is the idea of reformation of the dead and the incorruptible unification of the spirit with this new physical body. It is different from resuscitation, which is merely the return of life after clinical death without transformation in form and substance.

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The resurrected body was a real spiritual physical body, instead of a soulish flesh. He is neither ghost nor halluciation. In the third day after Jesus death, the women went to the tomb and did not find His body. Later in one occasion, Jesus said to the disciples, "Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." The process of Jesus resurrection was not furnished in the bible (definitely there was no video camera installed inside the tomb) but the empty tomb seems to imply that the resurrected body was a continuation of the dead body and yet it was at the same time a discontinuation of the dead body in the sense that he was completely transformed into a new physical entity.

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According to the information available, the resurrected body conformed to a different set of physical laws which is not within our epistemological regime and normally not applied in the ‘natural’ world in which we are living. For example, the disciples were kept from recognizing Jesus while He came to them. When their eyes were opened and they recognized him, he disappeared from their sight. Perhaps it the our false perception from uncritical literal reading, it seems that post-Easter Jesus was able to alter his apperance and 'shuttle' to anywhere with no time lag. Then, whilst his disciples including Thomas were inside a room with all doors locked, Jesus came in and stood in their midst and said, "May you have peace." It appears that the resurrected body of Jesus was able to pass through everything solid.
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Questions arise.
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Unlike Jesus, whose postmortem body as implied from the Bible was a continuation from His pre-mortem, our bodies should probably be decayed or burnt to ashes first before the time of resurrection. Will our future body be a continuation from our present form?
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The resurrected body is a real physical body, yet it does not conform to the existing set of physical laws. Is it what the physicists say about the collapse of physical laws at the point of infinite density after the contraction of universe?
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By mathematics, infinity is just an imaginary number and does not exist in material world. How can the new physical world be incorruptible and the resurrected body eternal? Is 'physical' and 'material' not the same? Can we explain it by saying that temporal idea of 'foreever existence of God' is different from that of 'spiritual eternity', in the sense that God has no beginning and no end while our spiritual life, still as a creation of God, has to have a start?
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The Book of Revelation says, "There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." By inference we commonly believe that there will be neither sin nor fault in the new physical world, but how about 'Free Will'? 'Free Will' is meaningless in the sense that there is no possibility for sin and fault. So is love. Is it necessary for us to linger on the concept of love when we are dwelling in the new physical world?
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It must be a completely new world that we may not be able to fathom until we go into it!

Biblical reference: Eze 37, Lk 24, 1Co15, Jn21; 1Pe3; Rev 21; Other reference: The Meaning of Jesus by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright

The Conflict between History & Faith is Necessary

The conflict between history and faith, or the separation of Christianity from history has been a great concern of modern theology. Based on source hypothesis and literal criticism, modern liberalists are trying to eliminate the suspected mythical elaboration in the gospels and reconstruct the historical Jesus. The problem is that it implies Christianity is to a certain extent a theological invention by early church, though some modernist like Marcus Borg thought that it makes no difference to his Christian faith.

Philosophical theism or theological exhortation has never influenced the world so powerfully as Christianity has. Gospel means "good news", i.e. information about something that has happened. Historical reconstruction of Jesus fails in trying to separate the divinity and humanity of Jesus; such separation is impossible because divinity and humanity are too closely interwoven to be differentiated in a clear-cut manner.

The historical evidences amounted only to probability or plausibility, which is the best that history can do, but probability or plausibility is at least sufficient for putting our experience into trial. Christian faith cannot do without history, otherwise our faith will have no reference for being put into test. Instead, our spiritual experience adds to history that directness and intimacy of faith which deliver us from fear. This is why phenomenal conflict or tension between history and faith is necessary for maintaining the dialogue between faith and reality.

Reference: The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 13

A Retrospection on Jesus' Capability of Errors

It is worth to consider that Jesus has had to make errors in learning anything new if we consider Him a full human being. To be honest, it it may be more difficult to argue for the opposite. The problem is whether error or fault is counted as sin, as fault and sin are closely related as I perceived before.

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In literal sense, it is true that the original Greek word for sin ‘Hamartia’ means ‘to miss the mark’, and thus by definition it can include even a minor fault. But from non-literal and expository point of view, i.e. to consider the biblical teaching as a gestalt, it appears that inadvertent fault 'Paraptoma' is different and may be excluded from the deliberate sin agaisnt God. (See Galatians 6:1) Therefore, our belief on the sinlessness of Jesus can still be maintained even if He had fault.

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Based on the above hypothesis and inference, regardless of the idea of sanctification as a life process, it may be possible to say: we can identify ourselves with Jesus in terms of His human nature, in the sense that Christians are still capable of faults but will no longer sin agaisnt God. (See my point of view expressed in the article titled ‘The Revelation of Sinning Believer – The Satan’s Lie Decoded’), except that Christians had already sinned in their old days but Jesus had never. In other words, if Jesus was incapable of errors, we may risk lossing our identity with Jesus as a full human being.

Does our faith have a verifiable foundation?

For us, being physically restricted in a spatiotemporal world, nothing is verifiable in the strictest sense. For instance, if we say only human beings worship God(s), the statement is unverifiable because we cannot say we will never discover the otherwise in the future. Instead, things in this world can only be disambiguated within our epistemological regime.

This is what we call objectivity, which itself is built up on unverifiable ground. Therefore, there is no absolute objectivity. Objectivity is relative. We as Christians may employ this logic to defend us against modernist's attack on our faith. However, it seems that such apologetic claim is at the same time self-defeating because it implies the foundation of faith is either unverifiable.

From my point of view, it is true that we can never verify our faith or the foundation of our faith. It is not only because the foundation of faith is unverifiable, but also faith is something outside the epistemological regime. The only thing that we can do is to verify the coherence between faith and personal spiritual experience which we are certain of. Hebrew 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." The dialogue between faith and experience is a dialogue between objectivity and subjectivity; between the future and the immediate presence of the kingdom of God. As mentioned by Wright: it is natural to say "I believe it's raining" when indoors with the curtains shut, but it would be odd to say it standing on a hillside in a downpour,* as it is what we are certain of.

* Reference:
The Meaning of Jesus - Two Vision, by Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright - Part I, Chapter 2, p.25

Problems on 'Synoptic Problem'

I recently read an article at the web page titled The Synoptic Gospels, recommended by my Sunday School teacher and probably written by a secular scholar named Diogenes the Cynic, indubitably not the philosopher of 412 BC, which highlights some of the errors and discrepancies found in and amongst the four canonical gospels. As a layman to history, I am not able to comment and rebuke all of them but by common sense I opine that the ground for his assertion is rather weak. I use two examples to illustrate my point of view.

According to Mr. Diogenes, Matthew claims that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great (4-5BC) while Luke claims that Jesus was born during the Censes of Quirinius (AD6-7 according to the account of Josephus), which is nearly 10 years after Herod the Great died in 4BC. And, Judea did not become a Roman province until AD6 and hence was not subject to a census in 4BC. Moreover, the census was only applied to Roman citizens, not to the peasants residing in client kingdoms. The problem is that his assertion seems merely to serve his predetermined surmise, as we Christians always do. Although Judea was not officially announced as a Roman province during the time of Jesus birth, the area had already been under the reign of Roman Empire for half a century then and an earlier census under a prior governorship of Quirinius was not implausible. Lastly, the purpose of the census includes creation of ranks and collection of tax, and those who voluntarily absent themselves from census, i.e. incensus, are subject to severe punishment. Therefore, it is dubious that peasants are not included in the census. Even peasants were not inlcuded, the Bible has never mentioned that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem because of registration.

Another irreconcilable discrepancy claimed by Mr. Diogenes, found between Matthew and Luke is the anecdotes of Jesus immediately after His birth. Matthew says that Jesus' family fled to Egypt after Jesus was born and then moved to Nazarath 'only' after they had returned from Egypt and an angel told them to move to Galilee. On the other hand, Luke explicitly states that Jesus went to Jerusalem to be circumcised eight days after he was born and then immediately returned to Nazareth. No reporter in the world, even today, is able to know the whole picture of an event but he can only look at it from a particular angle. Either, whether the two different narratives are irreconcilable is questionable. Matthew had never implied that Jesus was moved to Nazareth 'only' after they had returned from Egypt and he just said that 'they returned to their country by another route' after the birth of Jesus. (Mt 2:12). It is not an anachronic problem and it is not uncommon for two consecutively written historical events recorded in Bible happened with a time gap in between, and many other events happened during this time gap could be omitted by the author. It is plausible that the circumcision could take place between the birth of Jesus and his family exile to Egypt.

Last but not least, I am not going to use the above examples to defend for the sake of apologetics for biblical inerrancy. The main point is that different standpoints come up with different point of view and even the commonly employed criteria used by secular and non-secular scholars, such as discontinuity, multiple attestation, embarrassment, etc, are unverifiable even by the most rational method, and can just provide hints on historical plausibility only. I guess any argument will just be at large or in vain.