Thursday, August 1, 2013

Matthew 24:3

In the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples about future events. What provokes the discourse are three questions:
When Jesus sat down upon the Mount of Olives, his disciples came to him privately saying: Tell us:
  •  When shall these things [the destruction of the Jerusalem temple] be?
  •  And what is the sign of thy appearance?
  •  And of the end of the world?
The chapter reads very differently depending on whether one takes the questions as three separate questions (as I have here) or combines them some way (such as considering the appearance of Christ as the end of the world). What signs one looks for depends on how one reads the question or questions.