On the contrary it is to His disciples that we must attribute the attempt to fix dates. The age was inclined to apocalyptic speculation, and the disciples, influenced by its curious anticipations, were especially interested in the “when,” that is to say, in the external and chronological aspect of our Lord’s eschatology. And so, when they heard Jesus talking of the Last Day, they were disposed to conceive the main elements of His announcement, not according to the inner and essential connection in which He regarded them, but from a purely chronological standpoint, and so to weaken the whole force of His prophecy. And the evangelists manifest the simple fidelity of their record in nothing more plainly than in this, that in their manner of correlating our Lord’s eschatological pronouncements with one another and with His other discourses, they represent the special interpretation, influenced as it was by traditional conceptions, which many of His disciples originally gave to the teaching of Jesus. Our Lord Himself expressly and finally refused to make any pronouncement regarding the day and hour of the Last Day. When the disciples asked Him when the sign of His coming and of the end of the world would appear (Mk. xiii, 4), Jesus declared without qualification: “Of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Mk. xiii, 32). This is one of the most certain of all the sayings of our Lord and can come only from Him. For after His resurrection, when the glory of God had been manifested in His countenance, His disciples would scarcely have originated a statement so liable to misconstruction, as that even the Son did not know the day of the Judgment. We should therefore interpret all other sayings of Jesus in the light of this certain utterance. Jesus does not, as He might have done, answer His disciples with a pure distinction. He does not say that the Son of Man will assuredly come soon, but that the exact hour of His coming depends on the Father. His answer is rather an unqualified and plain “I know not.” And therefore that statement of His which immediately precedes these words, that “this generation shall not pass until all these things be done,” cannot refer to the definite day and hour of the General Judgment, but only to the events mentioned in His discourse, to those events introductory to the Judgment which were to occur in His own generation, and especially to the destruction of Jerusalem. Had Jesus contemplated an immediate coming of the Last Judgment, He would not have mentioned in the same discourse another series of signs which could not possibly be fulfilled in His own generation, such as fierce international wars, famines, earthquakes, universal hostility to Christians, the appearance of many false prophets, the preaching of the Gospel in the whole world (Mt. xxiv, 5 ff.). A very short time before His death, when the sinner of Bethania anointed Him, He returned to the last of these prophecies: “Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done shall be told for a memory of her” (Mt. xxvi, 13). So Jesus contemplates a universal crisis which will last a very long time and include a very large number of events. As to when these shall reach their end, that is a matter which depends upon the Father alone.