Richard Carrier notes in On the Historicity of Jesus (p560) how Paul never speaks of a ‘second coming’, prompting me to look at all the predictions of Christ’s future arrival in the New Testament. Here’s a selection of verses, some of them supposedly the words of Jesus himself, where this coming is ‘prophesied’:
And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory (Mark 13.26).
You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven (Mark 14.62).
For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24.27).
For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man… they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24. 37, 39)
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all his angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of glory. (Matthew 25.31).
You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect (Luke 12.40).
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God (1 Thessalonians 4.16).
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5.23).
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11.26).
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord… Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand (James 5.7-8).
Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Titus 2.13).
Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him (Revelation 1.7).
Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done (Revelation 22.12).
Isn’t this strange? None of them refer to Christ’s arrival as a ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. You’d be hard pushed to find any such ‘prophecy’ in the New Testament*. His appearance here on Earth is described as the coming of a celestial being. Even Jesus is made to talk about the manifestation of such a figure, taken by Christians to mean his own future self, as if he’s talking about someone else: the Son of Man, who hasn’t yet appeared but will do so in the near future. It’s as if the gospels’ fictional Jesus is being made to predict the arrival of the ‘real’, celestial Jesus.
More importantly, the Son of Man and Paul’s version of the same figure, the Christ, are spoken of as ‘coming’ or ‘descending’, not ‘returning’ or coming again. It’s as if Paul, the writers of the synoptic gospels, John of Patmos and other first-century Christians* didn’t believe that the Christ had already visited the Earth. They talk instead as if he’s about to arrive for the very first time. When he does, they believed, he would be coming as an avenging angel, rescuing those who believe in him – as a celestial being who carried out his salvific work in the heavenly realms (1 Corinthians 15, Galatians 1.11-12 etc) – and slaughtering those who don’t. This is the apocalypse – the revealing or uncovering of the heavenly Christ for the very first time.
That Jesus will ‘return’ or make a second coming is an assumption made by later believers on the basis of verses like those above. In fact, they say no such thing. The earliest Christians wrote as if they didn’t believe their envisaged hero had ever been on Earth. For them, his one and only arrival was still to come.
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* An exception appears to be Hebrews 9.28 which says, ‘so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him’. Hebrews, however, regards the Christ only as a supernatural high priest, operating in the heavenly realms. This second appearance then can only refer to this character, who is not conceived as having had any existence here on Earth.
rejectingjesus, 
Lets just take one of the passages you’ve collected:
You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect (Luke 12.40).
This is Jesus speaking. He regularly used the title Son of Man and in the third person when speaking about himself. The context, however, always indicates that he was speaking about himself. See earlier in Luke 12.
The Luke 12:40 passage is an allusion to Daniel 7:13,14 where the Son of Man is said to receive an eternal kingdom.
In Luke Jesus is identifying himself with the Son of man in Daniel. He is speaking in this parable in Luke of the coming of the master to his servants (the Son of Man) after a wedding banquet and expecting that his servants would be ready for his return.
In a passage you did not quote, John 14:1-4 Jesus speaks about this return for his servants.
These speak about the same thing though one is a parable other simple direct speech.
What you have done in your selection of passages to quote is to bias your quotes toward those that speak of the glorified resurrected Jesus and ignore the earthly Jesus. To be fair, you need to consider both.
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The Jesus character in Mark’s gospel refers to the Son of Man in the third person because this figure is a third person. It is not Jesus referring obliquely to himself (why would it be?)
Gospel Jesus is to a significant extent, perhaps entirely, a fictional character. He is the construct created to embody, literally, the celestial being ‘seen’ by early visionaries like Cephas and Paul, in their hallucinations and ‘revelations’. These illusions came first; the constructed ‘earthly’ Jesus is then made to predict the arrival on Earth of this celestial being, referred to as the Son of Man. This is why no-one in the pre-gospel epistles refers to the celestial being’s arrival on Earth as a ‘second’ coming or return. His descent from the heavens to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth was to be his first visit here.
As we know, none of this happened. Visions and ‘revelations’ have a habit of not materialising in reality.
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I think you are under the spell of Richard Carrier. He makes all these claims, as you have here, and without the least evidence.
Neil: This is why no-one in the pre-gospel epistles refers to the celestial being’s arrival on Earth as a ‘second’ coming or return.
There are really no pre-gospel epistles. The gospel in oral form predated the written Gospels and the epistles. That is why Paul could on an early visit with the Apostles (Gal. 2:1,2) compare the gospel he had been preaching with the gospel the Apostles had been preaching. He did not want to be mistaken. He found that they approved because their gospels were the same.
That oral gospel was the same as the later written Gospels. How do we know? Because there was no correction from the Apostles. It was the gospel they had been preaching after all.
But as for the “second coming.” That was a bit confusing for the disciples early on as well. They, like everyone else, expected the Messiah to appear and establish the Messianic kingdom at his coming. When that did not seem to have happened, many were disillusioned.
The disciples, however, could not get away from the fact that Jesus by every other measure was the Messiah. One of the sub-plots, so to speak, in all four Gospels is their coming to that conviction and their wrestling with the fact that Jesus did not satisfy that final expectation of establishing the kingdom. They ask about that in Matthew 24 after Jesus has told them that the temple is going to be destroyed.
Jesus’ answer was not now but later. Why? Because the first step in establishing the kingdom is to gather the subjects of the kingdom. That is why Jesus told them that he would not return until the good news of the kingdom had been preached in all the world.
That btw was what Paul understood to be his mission.
So, what the disciples and everyone else who waited for the Messiah expected was modified by Jesus to be an extended time of presenting the good news and inviting people of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation to receive the news and choose to follow the Messiah. At that point Jesus would return to be their king.
The preaching of the good news has been proceeding apace. There are now more than 2 billion people from around the world who are followers of the Messiah. They appear to include people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And that is why, among other reasons,I believe the arrival of the king is not far off.
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You have evidence of an oral tradition, Don? It’s only a conjecture and even if such a tradition existed, there would undoubtedly have been numerous versions of the story, not one accurate report passed round by word of many mouths. I know you also believe in the Q document. It is equally hypothetical. Such a precious document would have been referenced by NT writers and would surely have survived in some form. Yet not a scrap of it remains.
But still you claim that Richard Carrier provides no evidence for his thesis that Jesus is unlikely to have existed. I take it you haven’t read any of his books then, in which he presents such evidence, almost 700 pages of evidence and argument in On The Historicity alone. I’m not in thrall to him; I reached my own conclusion and then read him. The books of the New Testament itself, if read in the order they were written clearly reveal how your cult started and how, eventually the earthly Jesus was constructed.
I’m not going to respond in any detail to your flights of fancy about this same fictional character parachuting down from heaven in the near future. You Christians have been claiming this for 2000 years now.
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@Don.
Oral tradition?
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“This same Jesus…”
Acts 1:6-11 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying,
“Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Jesus Ascends to Heaven
(Mark 16:19, 20; Luke 24:50–53)
Now when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.
And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said,
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven?
This same Jesus,
who was taken up from you into heaven,
will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.”
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Well done, you found a passage that says Jesus will ‘come in like manner’ from heaven. This suggestion is made by two angels after an imaginary Jesus has been sucked up into outer space. You jump to the conclusion that it refers to a second coming (and not, say, the descent of the Holy Spirit that happens a bit later on in this fantasy story).
Angels and a man beaming up beyond the clouds. Yeah, makes perfect sense.
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Anonymous commenter. You don’t seem to have understood the assignment. The comment you are responding to clearly says:
Neil: “This is why no-one in the pre-gospel epistles refers to the celestial being’s arrival on Earth as a ‘second’ coming or return.”
And you respond with stuff from the gospels and Acts. Neither the gospels nor Acts are “pre-gospel” as stipulated by Neil.
To sum up the article: Pre-gospel New Testament writings seem unaware of an historical Jesus and speak only of his imminent “coming,” never of a “second coming.” The gospel come along and give us an historical Jesus. And the gospels and subsequent writings speak of an imminent “second coming.” As if an historical Jesus wasn’t considered until the gospels invented him.
Your comment only shows Neil correct. But thanks for playing.
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1 Thess. 414 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also we believe that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep as Christians. 15 For we tell you this by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep.
That’s as early as you can get in NT writings. (Except maybe James.)
The word coming is τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ κυρίου and is used for the coming of a king.
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Paul makes no reference to a return or second coming here though, does he.
Paul’s Christ is a celestial being in the same way that other dying and rising gods – Osiris, Adonis, Attis and Dionysus – were. None of these was real but were said to live in a heavenly realm where they died and rose again. Likewise Paul’s Jesus, whom Paul (and his predecessors) knew only through visions and ‘revelations’ (Galatians 1:11-12 etc).
Paul knows nothing of an earthly Jesus; the gospels, giving the cosmic Superman a life on Earth, had yet to create him. So when Paul talks of the coming of the Lord, that’s exactly what he means: the arrival of the celestial Christ on the Earth.
He does not mean nor does he say that he expected the return or second coming of a character who had supposedly wandered around Galilee a few years earlier. He meant his cosmic Lord was about to make his grand entrance on the Earth. Read his writing without imposing the idea of a ‘second coming’ on it – a term Paul never uses – and you’ll see.
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Anonymous: … the coming of the Lord… The word coming is τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ κυρίου and is used for the coming of a king.
Wow. Just wow.
You remind me of another commenter here from a while ago. He too lacked basic comprehension skills while pretending to great insights. Maybe skip the greek until you can comprehend basic English. Specifically what Neil has been saying and that the text clearly agrees with him.
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Also, Anonymous the Incomprehensive, there are times when looking at the original languages can help understand what’s being said. This is not one of them.
You quote the English which clearly states “coming” then quote the Greek which says the same. Repeating it in Greek adds nothing. It only serves to stroke your pretentious ass er… ego. Save it for your blog.
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It actually is not insignificant. Parousia is a different word from coming. It means arrival or coming as a king. The first “coming” of Jesus was as savior. ἦλθεν γὰρ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ζητῆσαι καὶ σῶσαι τὸ ἀπολωλός.
“For the son of man came to seek and save the lost.”
You can see the difference: one is to coma as savior the other as king. Two roles. Two comings.
I’ll try to explain the significance from now on for those who don’t know. But in any case, Neil wanted a pregospel reference to the Lord’s return. I provided that. Neil can now correct his statement.
Luke 19:10
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You obviously didn’t read my reply to your previous comment. Shame on you.
I will, however, correct my statement:
Not only is there no mention of a return or second coming in the pre-gospel books of the NT but there don’t appear to be any in the post-gospel/Acts books either.
How’s that?
I’m looking at the NT in chronological order for the next few posts and have reached Jude. No ‘second coming’ or ‘return’ in any of them that I can find. Nor indeed any reference to or quotation from an earthly Jesus.
Feel free to correct me again, but be sure you don’t mistake ‘the Lord’s coming’ for ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. They’re not the same.
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Luke 19:10
See how you have to switch to a gospel for that?!?!
Every post you make confirms what Neil has been saying.
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trash
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Thank you for your insightful and profound comment, Mr Anonymous. Now, if you’d like to tell me why you think my post is trash – by showing me where, for example, the New Testament refers to a second coming or Jesus’ return – then maybe I’ll take you seriously. Until then, I fail to see why I or anyone else should listen to a word you say.
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Jesus is 100% Real and 100% coming back soon. The bible literally said as it was in the days of Noah, (unbelief, and doubt) so will it be at the second coming of Jesus Christ. Noah preach for HUNDREDS OF YEARS that it would one day be a flood. It had never rained EVER. They didn’t believe him and when the flood came they ALL perished. You sound just like them. When Jesus comes back it will be too late to ask for forgiveness after denying his return and existence. Lord help you.
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Jesus, if he ever was real, is 100% dead and gone. He 100% did not come down from heaven when he said he would. The Noah myth was 100% lifted from an older myth and 100% doesn’t say what you claim it says.
So, how likely do you think it is that your final threat will turn out to be 100% correct? I’d say 0%.
You, on the other hand, are 100% deluded.
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Anonymous: trash
Brilliant! Insightful! Compelling!
That’s it, everybody! The internet is over. Jesus wins!
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@Don.
You criticize Carrier on the grounds of apparent lack of evidence yet I would be truly amazed if you were able to provide a single piece of evidence for just one of the primary foundational tenets of your faith based religion.
Be my guest…
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