The Abomination of Desolation in Jesus’ Prophecy – More Scholars Who Support Its Surprising Identity

I’ve come across more items of a more general interest in the course of my formal studies these last few days: a very old and a very publication favourably arguing that the “abomination of desolation” can only refer to a statue set up in the Jerusalem temple by Hadrian in the 130s CE.

Some readers here will be aware of Hermann Detering’s proposal that the “abomination of desolation” that was to be “standing where it ought not” referred to the time of the Bar Kochba War, 132-135 CE, and the Roman emperor Hadrian’s supposedly setting up of a statue of Jupiter/Zeus in the Jewish Temple. See Little Apocalypse and the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Well, Hermann Detering’s name and the article I discussed in the above link appeared recently (2024) in a footnote of a book chapter by Étienne Nodet, “Destructions du Temple de Jérusalem”. But what was most interesting was that Nodet was pointing out that the same view (that the prophecy in Mark 13 and Matthew 24 refers to Hadrian erecting a pagan statue in the Jerusalem temple) was made as early as 1845 by none other than the great, pioneering New Testament scholar, Ferdinand Christian Baur! New Testament scholars have followed a good many of Baur’s leads but this particular one fell between the cracks.

Nodet introduces an alternative possibility that the statue erected in the temple was actually a statue of Hadrian himself. In the light of Thomas Witulski’s research there is probably no major difference between Jupiter and Hadrian: see the post, Hadrian the God.

I have translated Nodet:

Finally, one must mention a collection of ancient traditions entitled Chronicon Paschale, which indicates that Hadrian destroyed the Temple, which had been rebuilt⁴². Taken in isolation, such information would carry little weight, but it combines with a statement by Jerome: he affirms that an equestrian statue of Hadrian was erected at the site of the Holy of Holies and that it is none other than the “Abomination of Desolation” prophesied by Jesus (In Matth. 24:15); this must evidently be connected with the statue erected by Apostomos⁴³.

. . .

In Luke’s version, without profanation, the prophecy may refer to the war of 70, but in Matthew–Mark, the “Abomination of Desolation” of Daniel signifies a formal profanation of the Temple, alluding to the idol erected by Antiochus IV mentioned above. To situate the prediction of Jesus, one must eliminate the attempt of Caligula to have his statue placed in the Temple, since his death at the beginning of 41 interrupted this project⁴⁶, as well as the assault of Titus and the fire of 70, since that was not strictly speaking a profanation. One must therefore return to Jerome’s interpretation of a prophecy of Jesus, which had already been proposed by F. Baur in 1845, but, like modern scholars, he rightly considered that it had been composed after the fact⁴⁷. The consequences for the dating of the Gospels are obvious, but little used.

42 Cf. L. Dindorf, Historici graeci minores, Leipzig 1870, vol. I, p. 474. The sources on the causes of the Bar Kokhba revolt are sparse, but there was certainly a profanation of the Holy of Holies, cf. E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, vol. I, pp. 535–542, hence an analogy with the Maccabean revolt.

43 There are good reasons to think that shortly after the foundation of Aelia Capitolina an equestrian statue of Hadrian was erected in the Holy of Holies or in its place; see D.-M. Cabaret, La topographie de la Jérusalem antique: essais sur l’urbanisme fossile, défenses et portes, du 2e s. av. au 2e s. ap. J.-C., Louvain 2020, pp. 260–288. [my note: Apostomos was the name given in rabbinic records to Hadrian]

. . . .

46. The affair, recounted by Philo and Josephus, is presented in detail by E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, vol. I, pp. 394–397.

47. See F. C. Baur, Kritische Untersuchungen über die kanonischen Evangelien, ihr Verhältniss zueinander, ihren Charakter und Ursprung, Tübingen 1851, p. 122; he was little followed, no doubt because of his personal discredit, but one should note the detailed study by H. Detering, “The Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 par.): A Document from the Time of Bar Kokhba,” Journal of Higher Criticism 7 (2000), pp. 161–210.

Here is Baur’s discussion, again translated. For Baur, Matthew was living at the time of the Bar Kochba war and wrote of what he understood to be the culmination of the tribulations before the end, while Luke wrote of the first war, 66-70, and the beginning of sorrows.

If Jesus cannot have spoken as the evangelist has him speak in chapter 24, then the question deserves all the more to be considered whether the event which is here presented as the sign of the Parousia is in fact the destruction of Jerusalem at all.

According to the presentation, the discourse of Jesus is connected with the destruction of Jerusalem, which is yet to occur; but the discourse itself does not intend to give a description of that destruction, but rather to set forth only the signs of the Parousia, which takes place only after the destruction of Jerusalem and presupposes it.

If one now asks whether the phenomena indicated in relation to the sign of the Parousia fit the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, one must almost throughout give a negative answer. The commentators unanimously observe that before the destruction of Jerusalem neither false messiahs nor significant wars among nations, such as are meant in vv. 6 and 7, can be demonstrated. Nor is anything more precise known about persecutions of Christians through which many Christians might have been led into apostasy.

How perfectly, on the other hand, does all this fit the Jewish war under Hadrian! At that time it was that Bar Kokhba was generally regarded by the people, who flocked to him in crowds, as the Messiah who was to free them from the yoke of Roman rule, and rabbis such as Akiba gave every support to belief in him. Not only in Palestine did a general uprising of the Jews occur—which the Romans were able to suppress only with the greatest exertion in a war that seems to have lasted several years, in which Jerusalem had first to be reconquered (around the year 134)—but the spirit of unrest spread everywhere where Jews were in the Roman Empire and broke out in secret or open attacks on the Romans; and the support which Bar Kokhba received alone must prove how deeply the nation was involved in his undertaking. “Almost the whole world,” says Cassius Dio (LXIX, 14), “was set in motion by the uprising of the Jews.” Münter, Der jüdische Krieg unter den Kaisern Trajan und Hadrian (1821), p. 66.

What the discourse of Jesus contains about persecutions of Christians also receives thereby a new light. Bar Kokhba treated the Christians, who did not wish to take part in the uprising against the Romans, with the greatest cruelty, as is reported by Justin Martyr (Apol. I, 31), Eusebius of Caesarea (H.E. 4.6), and others; and according to the assertion of the Talmudists, many at that time are said to have denied the Christian faith. Münter, ibid., p. 55.

Still more remarkable, however, is how in this connection even the βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως (“abomination of desolation”) first seems to receive its proper meaning. The interpreters who think only of the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus have not yet succeeded in taking the expression in a sense corresponding to its precise wording.

Baur then addresses the arguments of those who attempted to place the prophecy in the time of the first destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE):

If, according to Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer, the phrase refers generally to the abominable devastation on the temple site which historically occurred through the Romans at and after the conquest of the temple, then one may rightly say with Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette that the term does not fit this at all. But if, with de Wette following Hugo Grotius, one thinks of the Roman army with its standards, which were an abomination to the Jews, then Meyer can object that the words contain nothing pointing to this. Nor is it clear why precisely the standards should be singled out as something so especially abominable, and even in this way the expression is not exhausted, since one cannot assume that the Roman standards remained planted on the temple site after its destruction.

But only the events of Hadrian’s time can make sense of the prophecy, Baur continues….

The expression receives its adequate meaning only through the report that Hadrian, precisely at that time, during the aforementioned Jewish war, either before or after it, set up the statue of Capitoline Jupiter on the place where formerly the temple of Solomon had stood (εἰς τὸν τῷ θεῷ τόπον ναὸν τῷ Διΐ ἔθηκεν, Cassius Dio LXIX.12; Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 1.2: ubi quondam erat templum et religio Dei, ibi Hadriani statua et Jovis idolum collocatum est), from which Jerusalem also received the pagan name Aelia Capitolina.

How striking, then, is the expression used by the evangelist if the statue of the pagan god stood as a permanent monument on the very site where formerly the true God was worshipped! This was the truly abominable aspect of the devastation already accomplished, with which for the Jew and Jewish Christian everything was connected that made paganism as such abhorrent. This extreme, the worst that could happen, is therefore highlighted by the evangelist as the most evident signal of the catastrophe now fully unfolding.

To grasp the discourse at its central point, one must place oneself entirely on the standpoint of the event as presented by the evangelist. The form of prophecy brings it about that everything spoken of here is presented as something still future. Yet it cannot have been purely future, since what had already happened determined him to direct his gaze into the future and to perceive in the present the future developing within it.

But where, one must ask, in his presentation does what has already happened separate itself from what is yet to happen? Since he places the Parousia, which comes at the end of all things, in such an immediate relation to the θλῖψις (tribulation)—as v. 29 proves—and since he expressly says (v. 22) that for the sake of the elect the days of this tribulation were shortened, then at the time of composing this discourse the μεγάλη θλῖψις (“great tribulation”) cannot yet have run a long course; accordingly, that βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως can scarcely yet have been set up in the holy place.

But even this assumption is not necessary. According to Cassius Dio (ibid.), the great uprising of the Jews broke out precisely because Hadrian had already begun to carry out his plan to rebuild the destroyed city as a Roman colony and to erect the image of Jupiter in place of its temple. The uprising intervened, but it was foreseeable that after its suppression what had already been decided would be carried out all the more decisively—as indeed, according to Eusebius (H.E. 4.6), the founding of Aelia followed immediately after the end of the war.

What if, then, we assume that the author wrote in the midst of the uprising? Only thus do we fully understand how he could point with such emphasis to the βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως as the decisive turning point of the catastrophe now unfolding. As certainly as he, as a Christian, could regard Bar Kokhba only as a false prophet, so certainly could he not doubt the victory of the Romans; but as a Jewish Christian he could see in the profanation of the holy place by a pagan idol only the worst that could yet happen. If it comes to that, then there can no longer be any doubt that now the μεγάλη θλῖψις begins, upon which the Parousia immediately follows.

It is clear to see how, from this point, his entire conception of this great catastrophe is shaped. It divides for him, through the erection of the βδέλυγμα, into two periods: the one being the ὠδῖνες (“birth pangs,” v. 8), the other the θλῖψις μεγάλη itself. As he proceeds from definite phenomena given in reality, so in the second period the same fundamental conception appears again, only in its highest intensification. The general flight, in which each thinks only of saving himself, can only be a time of unrest and wars like the first period; and just as that period has its driving principle in belief in a false Messiah, so in the second period the most characteristic feature is that ψευδόχριστοι and ψευδοπροφῆται (“false Christs and false prophets”) seek to lead all into error and delusion.

This feature stands out so clearly in the description of the two periods that, if one must choose between the time of the first destruction of Jerusalem and the time of Bar Kokhba, one can only decide for the latter.

Admittedly, Luke in the parallel passage (chapter 21) can only have meant the first destruction of Jerusalem. But what does that prove for the explanation of Matthew? At this point we perceive only the different standpoint of the two evangelists, partly in relation to belief in the Parousia, partly in relation to the events then occurring in Palestine. For the non-Palestinian writer these events could not have had the same interest in themselves; moreover, he saw the expectation of the Parousia fulfilled only in the still-future βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ. And just as for him the increasingly universal inclusion of the Gentiles belonged essentially to this kingdom, so for him the first destruction of Jerusalem had all the more the significance of a divine judgment (21:23), which, in the same measure that it testified to the rejection of messianic salvation by the Jews, guaranteed the inclusion of the Gentiles in the kingdom.

While Luke thus had the interest of fixing the beginning point of the great catastrophe—whose course extended from the destruction of Jerusalem to the Parousia—for the author of the Gospel of Matthew everything in his conception was concentrated at the point where the tribulation, whose pressure he felt keenly in the immediate present, could end in its highest intensity only with the Parousia of Christ.

If the interpretation of Matthew 24 attempted here is correct—as I do not doubt—then we would thereby have a very definite date for the composition of our canonical Gospel of Matthew: it would fall in the years 130–134, and I would not know what could be objected against this assumption.

If, according to this assumption, even the oldest of our canonical gospels—which the others already presuppose—cannot be placed any earlier, then it also provides a standard for the age of the others, and one can all the less be surprised that the data for determining the time of their origin do not reach further back.

Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Kritische untersuchungen über die kanonischen evangelien, ihr verhältniss zu einander, ihren charakter und ursprung. With Internet Archive. Tübingen, L.F. Fues, 1847. http://archive.org/details/kritischeuntersu0000baur. — pp 605-609

Nodet, Étienne. “Destructions du Temple de Jérusalem.” In Aux Origines Judéennes Du Christianisme Études En L’honneur De Simon Claude Mimouni Pour Son Soixante-Quinzième Anniversaire, edited by José Costa, David Hamidović, and Pierluigi Piovanelli. Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Religieuses. Brepols Publishers, 2024. — pp 467-486

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