First, there is the radically sceptical answer of the so-called Jesus Seminar, who were very much in vogue twenty years ago. Their answer, articulated by people like Robert Funk, Burton Mack and Dominic Crossan, was that Jesus never said any such things. Jesus, the historical Jewish preacher, broke away from the apocalyptic movement of John the Baptist, and heralded in its place a non-apocalyptic kingdom that was more to do with ethical living and community in the here and now than any imminent cosmic collapse. Leaders in the early church, in particular Mark, retold the Jesus story in highly apocalyptic terms, and crushed the historical (and non-apocalyptic) Jesus original under the weight of their ecclesiastical authority, soon enshrined permanently in the canon of Scripture. True Christianity involves the rediscovery, and reenactment, of Jesus’ original vision, and the marginalization of texts like Mark 13, with their hopeless predictions of an end of the world that never happened.
 
Second, there is the exact opposite position. Instead of a Jesus who said nothing about the parousia (literally “presence”) which never happened anyway, some scholars have argued for a Jesus who did speak about the imminent coming of the Son of Man, and who turned out to be right. This interpretation, as presented variously by George Caird, Dick France and most notably Tom Wright, involves reading the key phrases in the Olivet discourse (Mark 13 and parallels) as standard Jewish symbolic language, by which the writer or speaker invests real-world events with their full significance. So the sun turning to darkness and the stars falling do not refer to the end of the world, but to dramatic (an English equivalent might be “earth-shattering”) events, like the destruction of Jerusalem; the “Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” is not literal, but a symbolic way of denoting his vindication and enthronement with God (as in Daniel 7:13-14); and so on. Read this way, Mark 13 and parallels are about the destruction of Jerusalem and vindication of Jesus, rather than about the second coming, the end of the world, or anything like that.
 
Thirdly, there is the more common evangelical Christian response, as expressed by more conservative commentators like DA Carson and Leon Morris: Jesus was talking about the second coming, but he didn’t say this would happen within a generation. Wright’s view, many argue, is ingenious, but it doesn’t seem to work with the Matthew version in particular, in which the parables of the virgins, talents and sheep and goats follow, and in which the coming of the kingdom is associated with the judgment of everybody. Some scholars also argue that it misreads the evidence surrounding both “the coming of the Son of Man” and symbols of cosmological catastrophe in Judaism (as my doctoral supervisor, Eddie Adams, argues coherently here). Much better, then, many Christians argue, to understand the time references more loosely - “this generation will not pass away before all these things take place”, for example, could mean “this race will not pass away” - and preserve the traditional focus of the discourse, which is on the return of Christ to the earth.
 
Cobblers, say the fourth group. The word “generation” in the Synoptics always means what it sounds like it means: the group of people alive at the moment. Not only that, but there are other places where Jesus talks of all this happening before some of his listeners die (for instance Matt 16:28). And the cosmological and “coming” language means what it sounds like it means, too: the return of Jesus and the end of the world are in view. Nor can we weasel out of it by saying that Jesus never said such things, and it was all invented by the early church; apocalyptic language is far too embedded in the Jesus tradition to get away with that one. Let’s face facts, said Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer a century ago, and say Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison now. Jesus thought the world was about to end, and he was wrong. Get over it.

So, to recap: either Jesus didn’t think the coming of the Son of Man would happen within a generation, and it didn’t (view 1); or he did, and it did (view 2); or he didn’t, and it didn’t, but it will one day (view 3); or he did, and it didn’t, and he was wrong (view 4). So far, so good.
 
I’m writing this on the train on the way back from a seminar in London, and until this afternoon, I thought those were the only four options available. But two researchers at Oxford, Casey Strine and Chris Hays, have just persuaded me otherwise. There’s a fifth way of looking at the “coming of the Son of Man”, one that (they argue) is truer to the way the Old Testament often presents predictive prophecy.
 
I’ll try and do it justice tomorrow. In the meantime, would anyone care to guess?