Does the New Testament Gospel Apply Only to the First Century?

Thoughts on the Full Preterist and Israel Only Perspectives

My last post addressed what is probably the most frequent question posed to me in recent years by those who have read some of my published work, namely how “the house of Israel” language in Matthew should be understood given my work on Israel in Early Judaism.

In this post, I’ll address the second most frequent set of questions, which all hang together and are generally asked together in some combination:

If Paul’s gospel was really about restoring the northern kingdom, couldn’t the “Israel Only” people have a point that it applies only to those within the bloodline of Jacob/ancient Israel? What if the Holy Spirit by grace was only leading those of Jacob's heritage to Christ, while gentiles not from the bloodline of Israel, were non-elect?

What is your view on the preterists’ claims that these books were only relevant to their initial first century audience and that the gospels and Paul's letters are only relevant until the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and have no relevance after that?

What is your opinion on Jesus and Paul having a first century fulfillment of prophecy and that the gospel was not supposed to extend to today as preterists claim?

How did Peter and the others see those in the nations coming back anyway? Those from the 10 tribes? Did he only imagine it would be law abiding, circumcised individuals coming home? Surely that was not lost and dead Ephraim.

And what is your view on salvation, are gentile Christians supposed to follow the Torah? the Hebrew roots movement claim that all Christians are supposed to keep the feasts, sabbath etc.

These are questions at the heart of debates among a few small but surprisingly loud groups of people who hold to “Full Preterism” or “Israel Only” (IO) theology. This is a theological framework that argues that the biblical story of redemption only applies to the twelve tribes of Israel and comes to its culmination with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (or the end of the Jewish War in 73 CE), having no relevance to anything after that.

I was unfamiliar with these groups until about 2020, when I started getting emails that were obviously spilling over from online debates in which many participants were using my 2011 JBL article, “What Do the Gentiles Have to Do with ‘All Israel?’” to defend one position or another.

One of the first to contact me was Derek Lambert, whose now popular MythVision video channel and podcast seems to have been enmeshed in these debates at the time; he first contacted me in 2020 wanting to discuss exactly these questions. I demurred at the time since The Idea of Israel was not yet out, but once that book came out, I went on the show to discuss it, though focusing more on the content of that book than these debates, about which I was still pretty unfamilar. (Lambert seemed to have largely moved on by then also.)

My more recent interview on that show did briefly touch on these debates, albeit indirectly (the video below starts in the most relevant portion of the discussion).

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth a bit more thorough discussion here, if only to prevent my having to address it over and over again. From now on, I should just be able to tap the sign.

The Audience and Rhetoric of the NT Authors

I’ll take the second part of this series of questions first:

What is your view on the preterists’ claims that these books were only relevant to their initial first century audience and that the gospels and Paul's letters are only relevant until the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and have no relevance after that?

First of all, it’s true that the books of the New Testament were not written to us but rather to an ancient audience far removed from the twenty-first century. This is, of course, one of the primary reasons these texts are so difficult for modern readers to understand. Even a well educated reader still depends on an army of experts and a long history of tradition to help translate and facilitate good interpretation of these texts.

Nobody is capable of simply reading these texts and interpreting them on their own terms; at a minimum, we need others to teach us the languages, history, and cultural encyclopedia of the world in which these texts were written. That much is true. It’s also true that the IO/Full Preterist folks I’ve observed tend to ignore the scholarly work done before them, insisting that their radically revisionist readings (of translations!) are uncovering the truth after thousands of years of error.

But this does not mean that these texts are not relevant to later audiences or even that they weren’t written with the possibility of later audiences in mind. The New Testament authors themselves interpreted and based their works on ancient (to them) texts like Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms. They surely recognized that their own works may take on similar significance.

In fact, if we pay close attention to at the formal features of the New Testament gospels, it’s evident that at least Luke-Acts was written to serve as a continuation and culmination of the biblical historical books, going so far as to imitate the distinctive grammatical and rhetorical features of the Greek translations of these historical books in the first chapters of Luke, using style and language to affectively link Luke-Acts to those older books. Put more plainly: the author of Luke-Acts was deliberately aiming to write scripture.

Mark and Matthew arguably do the same thing, with their distinctive anonymous theologically-oriented accounts imitating their earlier scriptural exemplars.

Indeed, one of the foundational flaws of the IO/Full Preterist view is that it depends on reading texts written after 70 CE as though they only pertain to the time before 70 CE. Matthew, Luke, and John were likely written a good bit after the destruction of Jerusalem and subtly point to that destruction as evidence of Jesus’ authority and continuing heavenly rule.

In other words, the Gospels are not a set of transcripts of Jesus’ words from the late 20s and early 30s CE but are instead theologically refined compositions from after 70 CE making specific arguments about the continuing authority of Jesus in the wake of those events.

For example, an IO/Full Preterist reading requires reading against the grain of the rhetoric at the end of Matthew or Acts, each of which concludes by rhetorically putting the audience in the position of continuing the mission of the disciples (in Matthew) and Paul (in Acts).

This is a similar rhetorical move as that found at the end of 2 Chronicles, which concludes with Cyrus’ open-ended decree, “Whoever is among you of all his people, may YHWH his God be with him, and let him go up!” (2 Chr 36:23).

Just as the reader of 2 Chronicles is invited to participate in the promised restoration of Israel, the reader of Luke-Acts is invited to hear Paul’s proclamation that “this salvation of God has been sent to the nations; they also will listen” (Acts 28:28), and the reader of Matthew is rhetorically situated in the position of continuing the Great Commission as heirs of the original disciples.

A large percentage of the New Testament was written after the events of the Jewish War; it beggars belief to suggest that these books were written only as a memoir of a gospel message that only applied in the time period before they were written. Instead, these books—the Gospels and Acts in particular—were all written with an eye toward the future, since such books are written to be read by those alive after they were written.

Bloodlines, Election, and the Gentiles

That then leads to the more central question:

If Paul’s gospel was really about restoring the northern kingdom, couldn’t the “Israel Only” people have a point that it applies only to those within the bloodline of Jacob/ancient Israel? What if the Holy Spirit by grace was only leading those of Jacob's heritage to Christ, while gentiles not from the bloodline of Israel, were non-elect?

This has been an important point of clarification I’ve had to make ever since folks started to take notice of my 2011 article: Paul’s gospel is indeed concerned with the restoration of the non-Jewish Israelites from northern stock, but he explicitly argues against a fundamentally genealogical/biological foundation for salvation. In Paul and the Resurrection of Israel (affiliate link), I put it this way:

Paul does not suggest that there are “disguised” Israelites among the nations who have simply forgotten their true ethnic heritage and are now being restored through recognition of their Israelite lineage. The nations/gentiles are not unknown Israelites. On the contrary … the point is that the bulk of northern Israel has actually become “not my people” (=gentiles). … Israel’s redemption is therefore not a matter of finding and identifying unknown Israelites among the nations … but rather involves recreating Israel from the gentiles through the transformative work of the spirit.¹

Paul’s gospel is not a matter of collecting those among the nations who don’t realize that they’re actually Israelites. Instead, he is proclaiming something much bigger: YHWH’s people Israel was swallowed up by the nations, so now the God of Israel has laid claim to all the nations.

That is, Paul doesn’t argue that there are enclaves of Israelites who have just forgotten who they are; instead, the bulk of Israel had been so thoroughly assimilated among the nations through centuries of intermarriage that they had effectively died in an ethnic sense—the people had ceased to be a separate ethnic entity. In the modern world, we have a word for this: genocide.

To use a more modern hypothetical example, if a man from Mexico immigrates the the United States and then marries another immigrant from, say, Croatia, what is the ethnicity of their children? And if their firstborn daughter then marries someone whose grandparents came to the USA from Italy, Ireland, Morocco, and China, what will our Mexican man’s grandchildren be, ethnically speaking?

The answer is that they won’t be Mexican, Croatian, or Chinese. They’ll be Americans, a new ethnicity altogether, the product of cultural fusion in the “melting pot.” This is how ethnicities always work—they may seem fixed and stable in the present, but they are always being reshaped in each generation as human populations and cultures migrate, shift, and change.

This modern hypothetical only extends two generations, perhaps fifty or sixty years. Now consider that Israel had been scattered by the Assyrians for over 750 years by the time Paul was writing—roughly 25 times longer than our hypothetical example. After three quarters of a millennium, we’re not talking about “Israelite-Greeks” or “Israelite-Assyrian-Persians.” We’re talking about wholly different people groups forged from the mixture of much older groups.

This is why in the Mishnah, a tradition ascribed to Rabbi Joshua explains, “Are there Ammonites and Moabites in this place? Sennacherib, king of Assyria, already came up and mixed up all the nations” (m. Yad. 4:4).

Once mixed up in this fashion, those nations had long since ceased to be those nations. After ten or twenty generations of intermarriage, the fact that someone may have had an Ammonite descendant half a millennium earlier had long ceased to matter or be remembered.

Paul’s Gospel: Life from the Dead

But Paul’s gospel is ultimately much bigger than a few people recovering their ethnic identity; as he himself emphasizes, he is proclaiming life from the dead—not only on an individual level but the level of the people of Israel.

This is therefore not a case in which, if one simply spent enough time combing through “endless genealogies,” (1 Tim 1:4), one might uncover some previously unknown Israelite blood that explains why one was chosen for salvation. Instead, Paul emphasizes that genealogy/blood and even possession of the Torah is neither sufficient nor necessary for salvation (e.g., Rom 2, Rom 9:1–13). Salvation rests on pneuma (spirit), not biology.

Moreover, Paul is working from an understanding of Israel’s history in which Israel’s disobedience had resulted in their being cut off from the covenant. Whereas these northerners were once “my people” (covenantal partners of YHWH), they were divorced and became “not my people” (Hos 1:9, etc.). As such, these Israelites go from being ethnically distinct from the other nations to becoming gentiles—a thorough ethnic transformation.

Some may protest that ethnicity doesn’t work this way and that ethnicity or race is immutable and cannot be transferred or transformed. But this was not the view of ethnicity held in antiquity, nor does it stand up to scrutiny; instead, it is a view popularized around the Enlightenment, when many Europeans began to think humans were different “races” (another term for “species” at the time) rather than a single species. This view has since been debunked biologically, but the terminology and many of the presumptions have unfortunately stuck. Moreover, ethnic transformation is surely less implausible than resurrection from the dead!

This is the context in which Paul proclaims that God is restoring Israel through a process he likens to “resurrection from the dead” (Rom 11:15), a clear allusion to Ezekiel 37’s vision in the valley of dry bones, in which Israel is portrayed as long dead and desiccated but eventually to be restored and renewed by the spirit of God.

Again, this is not rediscovery of ethnicity but re-creation—or, to use more precise Pauline language, “new creation” (Gal 6:15, 2 Cor 5:17).

Finally, it should be emphasized that the “salvation” Paul is proclaiming is ultimately victory over death itself; the fundamental problem is mortality and death. This problem is solved by receiving the spirit, which makes those who receive it immortal.

Whereas the “Israel Only” folks insist that only Israelites were subject to the condemnation Paul and other NT authors discuss, the problem of death is one shared by all humanity, and it is salvation/rescue from death itself that the NT authors proclaim. That is not a time-bound message.

YHWH’s Claim on the Nations

The biological background and theoretical tie to an imagined Israelite ancestor of each individual is therefore not in view in Paul’s gospel. That said, the fact that the nations assimilated Israel and were alloyed together with Israelites is what gives YHWH a claim to rule over those nations.

This rule over the nations is closely tied together with Israel’s restoration throughout the Psalms and Prophets, and Paul definitely builds on that in the way he puts forward his gospel proclamation. I’ve got more on this in the last chapter of Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, so I won’t get into that part in detail here. What matters is that YHWH’s claims are not limited to the parts of the nations that have distinct Israelite heritage but rather extends to the whole of every nation—likewise in Matthew 28, “all authority … all nations.”

Fulfilled in the First Century?

All that said, the next question is still relevant, as one could (and some do) argue that everything Jesus and Paul ever said was fulfilled in the first century and was never supposed to extend beyond “the end of the age” represented by the Jewish War and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

What is your opinion on Jesus and Paul having a first century fulfillment of prophecy and that the gospel was not supposed to extend to today as preterists claim?

First of all, I think it’s important to acknowledge that Jesus and Paul both primarily addressed the issues of their own day. Jesus prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple; Paul’s letters are addressed to first-century churches and deal with specific problems and questions pertinent to those specific churches and people.

It’s also entirely plausible (and many scholars believe most likely) that both Jesus and Paul expected the cataclysmic destruction of the world and the direct, literal reign of God on the earth to happen in the first century.

I’m among those who are less certain about this. I think some of Paul’s statements have been either pressed beyond their natural meaning in context (as highlighted by Andrew Doole) or outright misinterpreted (as observed in Sydney Tooth’s excellent dissertation), and Jewish eschatological timetables afforded many potential options, such as a two-thousand-year Messianic Age followed by the “Day of the Lord” as witnessed in the Epistle of Barnabas 15:4 and the Babylonian Talmud (b. Sanh. 97a–97b) and probably hinted at in 2 Peter 3:8.

1 Thessalonians does suggest Paul is working with some idea of a timetable (as does 2 Thess, which many scholars think was not by Paul), but he’s not clear about the timeframe. Instead, the emphasis in 1 Thessalonians is that the timeframe is irrelevant due to the resurrection—since “the dead in Christ will rise first,” it doesn’t matter when, Paul explains, what matters is that it’s going to happen.

In any case, Paul’s expectations of what would happen as a result of his gospel were certainly not fulfilled in the first century. As far as I can tell, there has been no general resurrection, for one thing.

As for Jesus’ expectations, we have to go from the Gospels on that, and (as discussed above) the Gospels themselves are clearly working from the presumption that Jesus’ message was applicable after the Jewish War.

My impression from my brief interactions with the Israel Only/Full Preterist folks who have contacted me is that this particular point is more of a matter of faith for them—it is theologically important to them that the gospel no longer apply today, and a fair bit of Procrustean surgery winds up being done to ensure they come to the desired interpretive outcome.

The Means of Restoration

Finally, we can look at the question of how exactly the NT authors thought all this would take place.

How did Peter and the others see those in the nations coming back anyway? Those from the 10 tribes? Did he only imagine it would be law abiding, circumcised individuals coming home? Surely that was not lost and dead Ephraim.

And what is your view on salvation, are gentile Christians supposed to follow the Torah? the Hebrew roots movement claim that all Christians are supposed to keep the feasts, sabbath etc.

First of all, we mustn’t assume that the NT authors (much less the apostles) were all uniform in how they understood things. Nevertheless, for Paul and his allies and then those after them, it’s clear that they did not expect those being “saved” from the nations would be physically circumcised, Torah-keeping individuals returning to their Israelite status.

Indeed, they argue the opposite; Paul argues that the pneumatic (spiritual) circumcision of the heart is what matters, making those who receive it into children of Abraham and heirs of his covenant. I’ve of course argued that Paul also points to this as the means by which the lost and dead portions of Israel were also being restored to life.

As for salvation and requirements for gentile Christians, most of this is discussed in my book, but I’ll have a more lay-level book that addresses this question more directly out in a couple years.

In brief, I don’t think Paul expects his (former) gentile converts to keep the feasts in the traditional manner, keep kosher laws, etc. When he says the whole Torah is fulfilled in the command “love your neighbor as yourself,” he means exactly that (he thinks the “love God” command is automatically fulfilled by those who have the spirit).

Now, the spirit is in the details, and as for what “love your neighbor” actually entails, I think he and the other early leaders agree on guidelines based on the laws for the sojourner in Leviticus 17–18, which are reflected in the agreement in Acts 15 (consumption of blood, meat from strangled animals, sexual regulations).

In any case, Paul and those after him came to believe that those who received the spirit thereby became full members of the renewed Israel, and that transformation of the heart was the means of salvation for gentiles, Samaritans, and Jews, a salvation that was not limited to the first century but extended to anyone otherwise subject to death.

1. Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, 286.