"Whoso readeth, let him understand"

[GhostontheNet]

I write this topic on these passages in Matthew 24 and Mark 13: (whoso readeth, let him understand:)[/I] Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:"]Matthew 24: 15-16 KJV
(let him that readeth understand,)[/I] then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains:"]Mark 13:14 KJV It may seem like a minor issue, but I find this passage about the reader understanding curious. From commentaries I've read, mostly what I found at local libraries, the interpretations are highly divergent. One view holds that this passage was written by the evangelists themselves either during or after the retreat of Cestius (66 A.D.) or the withdrawl of Vespasian pending a new Imperial directive after Nero's death (68 A.D.). This would mean the gospels or at least this passage was written in 66 or after and would serve as either a warning to flee Jerusalem now or to note the event's past occurance. Another take on the issue is somewhat similar, save that it holds that this was a scribal insertion into the text for the same reasons, doing nothing to the date of Matthew and Mark. A third possibility is this was done by the pen of the evangelists to draw attention to the cryptic nature of Daniel's prophecy. I suspect other interpretations of this are existent, anyone have some input?

[John Reece]

I write this topic on these passages in Matthew 24 and Mark 13: (whoso readeth, let him understand:)[/I] Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:"]Matthew 24: 15-16 KJV
(let him that readeth understand,)[/I] then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains:"]Mark 13:14 KJV It may seem like a minor issue, but I find this passage about the reader understanding curious. From commentaries I've read, mostly what I found at local libraries, the interpretations are highly divergent. One view holds that this passage was written by the evangelists themselves either during or after the retreat of Cestius (66 A.D.) or the withdrawl of Vespasian pending a new Imperial directive after Nero's death (68 A.D.). This would mean the gospels or at least this passage was written in 66 or after and would serve as either a warning to flee Jerusalem now or to note the event's past occurance. Another take on the issue is somewhat similar, save that it holds that this was a scribal insertion into the text for the same reasons, doing nothing to the date of Matthew and Mark. A third possibility is this was done by the pen of the evangelists to draw attention to the cryptic nature of Daniel's prophecy. I suspect other interpretations of this are existent, anyone have some input?

From the New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Mark (pages 523-524), by R. T. France [the words within brackets are my insertions -JR]:

Matthew refers explicitly to Daniel's prophecy, so that in his version of the discourse the aside o anaginwskwn noetw [let the reader understand] could be understood as part of the reported speech, calling on the reader of Daniel to take note. Mark has not left us that option, since he refers to no written text. The clause must therefore be an aside by the author (for similar asides see 2:10; 3:30; 7:3-4, 19), calling on the reader of his discourse to take note of the preceding clause. That is all that noew [understand] need imply: the aside is an N.B. [Nota Bene - used to direct attention to something particularly important].66 But in view of the cryptic nature of the reference to a bdelugma [abomination] standing where he should not is probably also a warning that the meaning is not on the surface and will need to be thought out if the reader is to be in a position to take appropriate note of this 'sign' (cf. Rev. 13:18; 17:9 for the need for nouV [understanding] in order to be in a position to profit from cryptic symbolism). To perceive the relation of coming events to the desecration of the temple by Antiochus may need some lateral thinking.

66. Gundry, 742-743, rightly notes that the 'reader' would normally have been the one reading the text aloud to an audience. In that case, is it possible that Mark is instructing him not only to grasp the meaning for himself, but also to explain it to those listening?

Regarding the date, from the commentary by R. T. France cited above (pages 38-41):

The tradition of the early church then affirms consistently that this gospel was written by Mark in Rome as a record of Peter's teaching, most probably while Peter was still alive and therefore not later than the early sixties of the first century.

Modern scholarship has had a remarkable propensity to regard early church traditions of this nature as automatically suspect. Actual arguments against taking the traditions seriously are not so common. Rather, an alternative structure is created around a presumed later dating for the writing of the gospels as a group, based partly on conjectural reconstructions of the relation of each gospel to first-century developments, in particular the fall of Jerusalem and the presumed phases of the development of the church’s internal concerns and external relations especially with Judaism. Such reconstructions tend to place gospel writing as an enterprise subsequent to the time of Peter, with Mark’s gospel dating from A.D. 65 at the earliest and more likely A.D. 70 or later, and so the Petrine connection for this gospel is generally discarded as historically unviable.

A significant factor in this general suspicion of early church beliefs on the writing of the gospels is no doubt the almost unanimous patristic belief that Matthew’s was the first gospel to be written. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this belief has been replaced by the priority of Mark. Only in recent years has the priority of Matthew been reasserted by a significant minority of NT scholars, and it remains true that the priority of Mark is the assumed starting point for most gospel studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If, then, patristic views were in error on this point, why should they be credited on other related issues? Their understanding of the origin of Mark is thus found guilty by association with their mistaken view of priority.

In contrast to this general skepticism, Martin Hengel's Studies in the Gospel of Mark offers a robust argument for taking the patristic accounts of Mark seriously. Hengel is particularly scornful of the repeated assertion that the gospels are ‘anonymous’ documents, to which the names of ‘authors’ were conjecturally attached sometime in the second century. His study on ‘The Titles of the Gospels’ argues that as soon as more than one written version of the euaggelion [gospel] was in circulation some label would be necessary in order to distinguish them, and the only such labels we know are the traditional terms kata Maqqaion, kata Markon [according to Matthew, according to Mark], etc., which are found with remarkable unanimity from as early as we can trace the titles of these books. Hengel points out how improbable it is that a late conjectural attribution could have produced such unanimity and left no trace of alternative attributions. . . .

I have concentrated on Hengel’s arguments not because they are unanswerably right (though I think they have the better of it in terms of historical method) but because they illustrate how questionable modern critical reconstructions of gospel origins, with their almost axiomatic dismissal of early church tradition as not worthy of serious consideration, may prove to be when examined in the light of historical realism. I do not wish to argue that any one view of the gospel’s origins, even that of the early church fathers where they agree, is necessarily right, but rather to suggest that any exegesis which bases itself firmly on one particular theory of gospel origins is likely to be founded on shifting sand.

[NathanDavid]

This is an easy one. It refers to false prophets and false teachers running the backslid churches. The desolation is the false teacher in the pulpit who is teaching the pre-trib rapture lie, hence an additional incidence of "abomination of desolation" that is "where it ought not be," in that so many have been taught wrong! Can't monkey around with the Revelation!