Jerusalem's Doom – Signs of its approach

False teachers with false doctrine – this was one of Christ's first signs of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world. Have there ever been so many false teachers as today?

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False teachers with false doctrine – this was one of Christ’s first signs of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world. Have there ever been so many false teachers as today?

Editor’s Notes

Jerusalem’s Doom—Part III

In this part, continuing with Christ’s prophecy, we see that the chastisement of Jerusalem and the Jews is a foreshadowing and a warning of what is to come for the whole world at the end of time.

In this chapter, picking up from Our Lord’s indication of three signs that will precede the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world, Fr Coleridge tells us…

• How the false teachers in the Apostolic age insinuated their errors

• How Christ’s prophecy of Jerusalem’s Doom was fulfilled—as a warning for the future

• How the “Creed of Science” and other modern errors fulfil this final prophecy.

Needless to say, when we are talking about false teaching, rumours of war and the various other signs, there is a lot of applicability to our own time.

For more context on this episode and its place in the liturgical year, see Part I.

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The Doom of Jerusalem

Passiontide—Part I

Chapter XIII
St. Matt. xxiv. 1-28; St. Mark xiii. 1-23; St. Luke xxi. 5-24;
Story of the Gospels, § 144.
(Read on the 24th and Last Sunday after Pentecost)

1. Jerusalem’s Doom – Christ’s prophecy of chastisement

2. What three signs presage the end of the world?

3. Jerusalem’s Doom – Signs of its approach

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Our ignorance of the Apostolic age

In what our Lord has said, He seems generally to be answering both the questions asked Him at once. That is, He sets forth in His answer those signs and warnings which may belong to the period before the destruction of Jerusalem, and also to the times which shall precede His Second Coming, and indeed, in some measure, to the whole history of the Church.

If we examine the clauses of the prophecy in order, we may see how far this holds good.

First, our Lord places the warning against seduction.

‘Take heed that no man seduce you.’

We can hardly doubt that our Lord, when He spoke these words, had in view the Church and the great body of her children, rather than the four disciples to whom He was speaking, or their brethren of the Apostolic band.

One of that band, alas, was already seduced, but not by the false teachers of whom He speaks. Judas was seduced by Satan and his own evil passions. Our Lord was not speaking of him. The warning is addressed to the faithful, who would become aware, in due time, of the substance of the prophecy.

He says that many shall come in His Name pretending to be Christ, and shall seduce many.

‘Many shall come in My name, saying, I am He, and the time is at hand. Go ye not therefore after them.’

False teachers then

When we consider the deep darkness which veils from the eye of history so much of Apostolic times, we cannot be surprised that we know so comparatively little about the impostors of that period.

Yet there is very considerable evidence to show that His prophecy was amply fulfilled even in the years before the destruction of Jerusalem. The early Christian writers mention several, besides the well-known names of Simon Magus and a number of sectarian leaders who sprang from him, Menander, Saturninus, Carpocras, and the whole swarm of Gnostic teachers.

None of these pretended to be our Lord in person, but all more or less claimed His power and seduced people to believe in them. So far, we might follow the opinion of many sound critics in supposing that the warning words of our Lord are meant for the believers of that first age of the life of the Church, which may be said roughly to have been terminated by His coming in the destruction of Jerusalem.

But with the history of the Church for so many centuries before us, it is certainly not necessary to limit the prophecy to a few decades at the immediate beginning of that history.

It may perhaps be that in those early years, when the growth of the Church was as yet incomplete and the conditions of her existence not yet established, it may have been more easy for an impostor like Simon Magus to seduce men to a false belief than it might have been in after ages for Arius or Nestorius and Pelagius, and their followers in modern times, to persuade them that the Church of so many centuries and of the whole world could be in error.

If this was so, this one advantage the heresiarchs and false teachers of the earliest ages may have had, but it was probably counterbalanced by the great authority of the immediate companions and successors of the Apostles, and in other ways.

But we cannot easily think that our Blessed Lord had not in His mind Christians of all ages till the very last, when He warned them in His prophecy against the seduction of the false Christs.

In the Apostolic age they might almost openly call themselves by His name. In later ages they would vary their claims by representing as His their own false doctrines. They spoke in His name and claimed His authority while denying that of His Church.

In this, modern heresiarchs and authors of schism are on a level with the earliest impostors.

With regard to this part of the prophecy, then, we may say that it was fulfilled before the fall of Jerusalem, and continues, even now as centuries roll on, to be fulfilled as the end draws nigh. It is as St. Paul writes to St. Timothy, ‘Evil men and seducers shall grow worse and worse, erring, and driving into error.’¹

Wars and rumours of wars—historically true

The next two clauses in the prophecy are those which speak of wars and rumours of wars, of political commotions leading to war between nations, and again of earthquakes, famines, pestilences, signs from heaven. All these are to precede our Lord’s coming.

There is no doubt historically that the prediction came true in the time before the destruction of Jerusalem. Even in the regions of which Judæa is the centre, there were wars between Herod and Aretas, between the King of Adiabene and the Arabians and Parthians, and Judæa itself had been in a state of immense and continual confusion for some time before the destruction came.

Moreover, there were continually ‘rumours of wars’ which did not break out, the most remarkable of which was the war that Caligula was about to make on the Jewish nation, when he insisted on the erection of his statue in the Temple. This war was prevented by his death.

There were also disturbances in every part of the world where the Jews were settled, rising from the Gentile prejudices which became more and more violent against them. A number of these are mentioned by Josephus and some by Philo.

‘Nation against nation’

The words about ‘nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,’ seem also to have had their fulfilment in the singular commotions of the Roman Empire which followed the death of Nero, and which are spoken of by Tacitus.

That was the first time that the ‘national spirit’ broke loose from the constraint in which it was everywhere held down by the policy and the immense strength of Rome. It made a new epoch in the history of the Empire. A long list, also, of the earthquakes, famines, and pestilences of that time has been made by some commentators.

So there is little doubt that those living at the time of the Jewish war must have had abundant means of verifying the prophetic signs which are here enumerated. These signs, however, are in many respects different in character from the set of signs given by the Evangelists in the latter part of the prophecy, which certainly relates not to the destruction of Jerusalem but to the end of the world.

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Isn’t it clear that these signs pointing to the end of the world are ever-present for us today? Whether that means the end really is nigh or not, it should remind us that our own ends are near.

In the next part, Fr Coleridge considers these signs in light of the modern world.

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The Doom of Jerusalem

1. Jerusalem’s Doom – Christ’s prophecy of chastisement

2. What three signs presage the end of the world?

3. Jerusalem’s Doom – Signs of its approach

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1. 2 Tim. iii. 13