gmx wrote: ↑Mon Feb 12, 2018 1:10 am
Can someone explain to me what the reader is supposed to do with their understanding in Mark 13:14-17? If it refers to the first Jewish war, then isn't it too late to be issuing warnings to flee?
Maybe not:
Brian J. Incigneri, The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark's Gospel, pages 123-124: Josephus frequently reports that people managed to leave the city after the Romans arrived in April 70. Indeed, immediately after the Roman encampment, many people fled the city: "Titus dismissed the majority into the country, whithersoever they could" (JW 5.422). Only in June did the Romans debate whether to blockade the city, and a siege wall 4.5 miles long was finally built in mid-June, supposedly in three days (JW 5.499–508).27 Titus admitted that he did not have enough troops: "To encompass the city with troops would, owing to its extent and the obstacles presented by the ground, be no easy matter" (JW 5.496). Later, Josephus reports that many priests who escaped after the fall of the second wall, were spared and sent to Gophna (JW 6.113–16).
It sounds like the author knows what happened.
Does it? To me it sounds like the author knows what happened in Mark 13.1-2: the temple fell, and its entire complex was totally destroyed.
But the passage of Mark 13.14-20 sounds to me like the words of a person who did not necessarily know that the temple either fell or was going to fall. To warn against something that can be called "the abomination of desolation" is to hearken back to Daniel (Peter gave the references above) and to 1 Maccabees:
1 Maccabees 1.54: 54 Now on the fifteenth day of Chislev, in the one hundred and forty-fifth year, they erected an abomination of desolation [βδέλυγμα ἐρημώσεως] upon the altar [ἐπὶ τὸ θυσιαστήριον]. They also built altars [βωμούς] in the surrounding cities of Judah, 55 and burned incense at the doors of the houses and in the streets.
1 Maccabees 6.5-7: 5 Then some one came to him in Persia and reported that the armies which had gone into the land of Judah had been routed; 6 that Lysias had gone first with a strong force, but had turned and fled before the Jews; that the Jews had grown strong from the arms, supplies, and abundant spoils which they had taken from the armies they had cut down; 7 that they had torn down the abomination [τὸ βδέλυγμα] which he had erected upon the altar [ἐπὶ τὸ θυσιαστήριον] in Jerusalem; and that they had surrounded the sanctuary with high walls as before, and also Bethzur, his city.
Both Daniel and 1 Maccabees originally were referring to the same crisis: the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes to turn the Temple into a shrine for Jupiter. The abomination of desolation is not the destruction
of the temple, but rather the setting up of something blasphemous or idolatrous
in the temple. Daniel's prophecy, of course, came to be applied to events long postdating Epiphanes, as well, as can be seen in Mark 13.
The command to flee the city seems to reflect this Maccabean situation, as well:
1 Maccabees 2.27-38: 27 And Mattathias cried throughout the city with a loud voice, saying, "Whosoever is zealous of the law, and maintains the covenant, let him follow me." 28 So he and his sons fled unto the mountains [ἔφυγεν αὐτὸς καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ αὐτοῦ εἰς τὰ ὄρη], and left all that ever they had in the city [καὶ ἐγκατέλιπον ὅσα εἶχον ἐν τῇ πόλει].
Compare Mattathias' actions to those in Mark 13.14, "let those who are in Judea flee unto the mountains" (οἱ ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ φευγέτωσαν εἰς τὰ ὄρη). Also compare the leaving behind of possessions to Mark 13.15-16 (instructions not to take anything along).
To me this part of Mark 13 looks like a text which originally predicted that something or someone blasphemous or idolatrous would be set up in the Temple (compare 2 Thessalonians 2.1-17) but was later contextualized as a prediction of the fall of Jerusalem (by means of providing such a context in Mark 13.1-2).