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Aha, good find! Have you read it? This is exactly the sort of digging into the context that I am unfamiliar with that I was hoping someone would bring out, and I'm genuinely very grateful to you for flagging this for me. (Stuff like this is what makes The Motte so great!)
And also in late(r) ones! My understanding is that Revelation was believed to have been written around the time of John. And it's been a recurring theme ever since.
Yes! But He also gives a large number of parables where He cautions that He will be gone long enough to tempt some people to believing He will never come, including in this passage, and as I believe you mentioned, 2 Peter 3 talks about this explicitly – there's apparently not much consensus as to when it was written but it seems like it could have been written earlier than Matthew. Peter certainly seems to be counseling believers to be prepared to extend ~infinite patience while still living as if Christ would return tomorrow. (And of course I'd say this is also what Christ Himself is pointing towards in the very next chapter, 25).
Finally, in the plot of Matthew itself, Christ is giving the disciples this advice at a time before they realize He is going to be crucified. Afterwards, in Matthew 28, He gives them the Great Commission, which is still ongoing (but see also of course Matthew 24:14).
Wasn't Christ in this very passage already "problematizing" prima facie readings? He references the defilement of the temple (in Daniel) as a future event, which Jews at the time would have recognized as a past event, wasn't He? So it seems to me that a prima facie reading of this passage is that Christ is being deliberately cryptic at least at points.
Now as I already pointed out to Quantum, Christ Himself satisfies Quantum's prima facie requirement – Christ is still alive! But of course I think that's really the sticking point – either Christ rose from the dead (and there's some good reasons to believe this! – I think fair-minded people can acknowledge this even if they are not personally a Christian) in which case I don't think this passage should stand in the way of being a Christian. Or – He didn't, in which case this passage could be very explicable and it would not move the needle much.
I know that in real life things are a bit less reductive than that – people are swayed by something like the weight of evidence as a whole – but I think you can see why people who aren't completely satisfied by explanations of passages like this do believe. Most Christians can't explain every possible objection to Scripture, any more than a scientist of any given discipline can explain every scientific anomaly. But just as the inability of science to close the case on outstanding questions does not make the framework it has established useless, the fact that Christians still wrestle with the text centuries after it was written does not make the moral and historical framework it has established obsolete. (I'd actually argue this is a feature, not a bug!)
I skimmed it but I'm a dilettante. It really is quite a fascinating field.
I agree that if you're willing to approach it with faith, then a lot of it is unclear enough for faith to hold up.
One of the things that I think is true of life in general is that your faith will be tested. And sometimes logic, no matter how prettily written down, is not what comforts the heart. Sometimes no amount of clear reasoning and pat answers can prepare you for the devastation life has to offer or teach you how to respond to life's frustrations.
I think it's interesting that we can have these sorts of conversations where, if we are willing to wrestle with the text in faith, we are rewarded - not always with clear answers, but with a reason to be encouraged and to continue engaging. (As I certainly have been here, thanks to you and other Mottizens!) I don't think a book that only has crystal-clear answers can do that - only a text with problems, or one that is often unclear or mysterious or even seemingly paradoxical can do that.
And when the times come in our lives where syllogistic arguments fail, that process of being rewarded for being willing to engage in faith even if the results are unclear might be the thing that shows you how to hold fast to what you believe in. The process of wrestling might be the thing that unbeknownst to us was teaching us how to hold on. I wouldn't say this process is limited to religious texts, either! Perhaps looking for perfect clarity in a book that aims to build character is like looking for a textbook without unsolved problems.
Food for thought (for me as much as anyone!)
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