Was Jesus a futurist? This may seem like a loaded question if you are a follower and believe that Jesus Christ was omniscience. Christians would say Jesus was prophetic and was exercising his office of prophet when he was making future oriented statements in the Gospels.
Non-Christians, however, may not place the same value in Christ’s omniscience and conclude that Jesus’ ability to accurately foretell any future events was aided by the fact the writers of the Gospels penned the events of Jesus ministry, as well as his words, after the events occurred. For instance, Luke 21 shows Jesus foretelling the destruction of the Jewish temple, coming wars, and the destruction of Jerusalem. Most scholars believe the writing of Luke’s Gospel occurred in A.D. 63 (Robertson & Broadus, 1950), which would have placed it years before the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 and the war continued on until A.D. 73 (Dockery & Broadman, 2010). The idea that Jesus’ foreknowledge was aided by the Gospel writers appears to be unfounded given the historical timeline most scholars adhere to in the writing of the Gospel of Luke.
Assuming the date of authorship is off by a decade or more, would the authors’ knowledge of the events that Jesus was prophesying about effect Christ’s message or believers’ interpretations of his words? The concern is in regards to hindsight bias, which is the attribution of foreknowledge of events given after the events have occurred (Gary, 2008). This is the determination of whether or not Jesus’ foreknowledge of events is because the authors gave him foreknowledge in their writings that were absent in Jesus’ actual words. Placing his omniscient attribute aside, Jesus could have accurately predicted the events in Jerusalem by observing the trends and signs of an imminent clash between the two cultures of Rome and Jerusalem (Gary, 2008). Even if Jesus was not acting in a prophetic role, his observational skill may have provided him with the necessary information.
References
Dockery, D. S. (2010). Holman concise Bible commentary. Nashville, TN: B & H Publishing Group.
Gary, J. E. (2008). The future according to Jesus: A Galilean model of foresight. Futures, 40(7), 630–642. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2007.12.004
Robertson, A. T., & Broadus, J. A. (1950). A harmony of the Gospels for students of the life of Christ: based on the Broadus harmony in the revised version. New York: Harper & Bros.
