REFUTING THE A.D. 70 THEORY - 3
REFUTING TH E A.D. 70 THEORY - 3
Yeow Chin Kiong
What happened in Jerusalem in A.D.70 that marked the year as especially important to a segment of Bible-believers today that they actually do not mind if they are identified as "A.D.70 theorists"? Why do they insist that that year (in Gregorian calendar reckoning) was of paramount importance in God's plan of salvation, no less? Why is that year as important to them as the year of the beginning of the Christian Dispensation as other Bible-believers consider the year of Jesus' death by crucifixion, burial and resurrection to be that beginning?
The answer lies in what happened in A.D. 70 in the political history of Jerusalem, particularly on how that cataclysmic event is connected to Jesus' prophecies during His Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24 and 25. In early September of that year, after months of siege, the walled city of Jerusalem,- then the seat of Judaism's worship according to the Old Testament's Law of Moses,- fell to the Roman forces of Titus, accompanied by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt some four centuries before by Jewish returnees from Babylonian exile.
The region of Judea inhabited by Jews had been a province of the Roman empire since 6 B.C. The encroachment of Roman religion (including emperor worship), law and culture into Jewish society was considerable even during the days of Jesus and His disciples of the first century A.D., as the record of the New Testament's four gospels, Acts of the Apostles and epistles testify.
In fact, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus is identified as "Simon the Zealot" (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), called "Simon the Canaanite or Cananaean" in Matthew 10:4 and Mark 3:18. The Zealots were members of a Jewish political party who were provoked by the religious and cultural insensitivity of Roman provincial administrators to assassination and other violent acts against their Roman colonizers, eventually leading to the A.D.70 Roman siege of Jerusalem.
The horrifying build-up leading to the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem caused the loss of about a million Jewish lives and a breakdown of Jewish worship according to tbe Law of Moses. Before the Holocaust of the early 1940s engineered by Nazi Germany, the A.D.70 cataclysm was the worst tragedy to befall the Jewish people. When seen as an act of God to remove the Law of Moses to replace it with the Christian dispensation, "A.D.70" came to represent the heralding of a cosmic end, followed by a totally new order of things,- a new heaven and a new earth!