The end-time prophecies of Jesus – in the passages (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21) referred to as the Olivet Discourse – are very controversial.
Even noted Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis have felt constrained to admit that Jesus must have made an error when he promised his disciples that he was going to return in judgment before “this generation” had passed away.
Preterists get around the problem by arguing that much of the Olivet Discourse was actually fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem some 40 years after Jesus’ death.
Full Preterists believe that everything Jesus predicted has already happened, but they are heretical.
I subscribe to a version of partial Preterism (which is orthodox), but an article I came across recently obviates even the need for Preterism to defend Jesus’ words.
It analyzes Jesus’ language in the Olivet Discourse and concludes that the phrase “this generation,” as it is written in the original Greek, does not necessarily have to mean the life-spans of the people He was addressing – his disciples.
It can also mean “variety” or “type” or “species” or “off-spring.”
All those interpretations would leave a much broader time-span for the fulfillment of Jesus’ words, for “this generation” can now refer to the off-spring of the believers or even to the species of humanity, the Jews, that will not pass away until Christ returns.
“Genea hautey can mean “this offspring,” “this generation I just mentioned,” “this generation I am talking to,” or “this contemporaneous generation,” depending on the context. It is not other contexts, but the context of Matthew 24:34 that should be the determining factor as to what Jesus meant by the word genea. The context of the Olivet Discourse leads us to believe that Jesus was speaking either of the offspring of Jacob (the Jews), the generation of God’s children, or of a future generation among us he had just addressed.
[Lila: It could also straight-forwardly refer to “the generation which sees the “abomination of desolation.” And that, just there, proves that the Muslim “Dome of the Rock” cannot be the “abomination of desolation,” as Zionists like to claim. First, it is not built on the ruins of the Temple of Herod (the Second Temple), but on the ruins of the Roman Fort Antonia, so there is no abomination involved; second, the generation that saw its building (in the 7th century) has long passed away and will not be around to see the Second Coming, however you conceptualize it.]
Alternatively, genetai may be translated “begin to happen” in Matthew 24 34.
Therefore, we are not forced into difficult aspects of the Partial Preterist view, which allegorize and spiritualize important portions of the Olivet Discourse. Nor must we resort, as Full Preterists do, to asserting that the Second Coming and the Resurrection must have happened invisibly in 70 AD, when it is plain to everyone that church history records none of these events, and the bodies of all men who have died, except that of our Lord Jesus (and possibly those mentioned in Mt 27:53), remain within the earth. Nor need we despair at finding a solution, as CS Lewis did. Despite his remarkable intellect and his usual able defenses of the Christian faith, he was quite wrong in thinking that the facts force us to admit Jesus made an embarrassing error.
Instead, we find not just one, but four reasonable, scriptural, and orthodox alternatives to the assertion of critics of the Christian faith that Jesus was referring to the contemporaneous generation in Matthew 24:34. All four permit us to confidently accept the full import of the other words of Jesus in the Olivet Discourse!”