The Gospel Preached to the Oikoumene Before the End

A few months ago, our congregation sang Psalm 96. When we reached verse 13, something grabbed my attention:

Before the Lord; because he comes,
to judge the earth comes he:
He’ll judge the world with righteousness,
the people faithfully.¹

That sounds like Acts 17. Paul on Mars Hill, telling the Athenians that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.” The second coming of Christ, the man appointed to judge the world in righteousness, is the climax of both the psalm and Paul’s sermon. Singing Psalm 96 that afternoon linked the psalm in my mind with the end, with the return of Christ to judge the oikoumene.

But when I got home from church and started reading through the whole psalm again, something else emerged. The psalm doesn’t just end with judgment. It begins with a command to proclaim good news among the nations and declares that the Lord reigns over the inhabited world. Proclamation to the nations, the kingdom, the oikoumene, and then the end. I knew what that sounded like. That sounds like Matthew 24:14.²

Most readers of Matthew 24:14 instinctively hear Isaiah in the background. And rightly so. The “gospel” language of the New Testament is deeply rooted in Isaiah 52:7 and 61:1, where the herald proclaims good news and announces that God reigns. But Isaiah may not be the only voice in the room. And once you hear the other one, it’s hard to unhear it.

The Verse in Question

Matthew 24:14 reads:

καὶ κηρυχθήσεται τοῦτο τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ οἰκουμένῃ εἰς μαρτύριον πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, καὶ τότε ἥξει τὸ τέλος.

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

Five concepts are bundled into a single sentence: gospel, kingdom, inhabited world (οἰκουμένη), nations, and the end. With the Acts 17 connection in mind, a question came to me: is there an Old Testament passage, particularly in the Septuagint, that holds all five of these concepts together in the same way Matthew does?

There is. And it is Psalm 96.

Psalm 96 belongs to the cluster of “Yahweh Reigns” enthronement psalms (Psalms 93-99), which were read eschatologically in Second Temple Judaism. In the Septuagint (LXX 95), its vocabulary is strikingly Matthean. Walk through the psalm and watch the elements stack up.

Verse 2: Proclaim the Good News

ᾄσατε τῷ κυρίῳ, εὐλογήσατε τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ, εὐαγγελίζεσθε ἡμέραν ἐξ ἡμέρας τὸ σωτήριοναὐτοῦ.

“Sing to the Lord, bless his name: proclaim his salvation from day to day.” (Brenton)

Brenton renders εὐαγγελίζεσθε simply as “proclaim,” but the Greek verb is more specific than that. It is the LXX rendering of Hebrew בַּשְּׂרוּ (basseru), the same root behind Isaiah 52:7’s famous herald and Isaiah 61:1’s anointed preacher. It is the verb from which the noun εὐαγγέλιον (”gospel”) derives. To εὐαγγελίζεσθε is not merely to announce something; it is to evangelize, to proclaim good news. Here, at the very start of the psalm, the people of God are commanded to proclaim good news about his salvation.

Verse 3: To the Nations

ἀναγγείλατε ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς λαοῖς τὰ θαυμάσια αὐτοῦ.

“Publish his glory among the Gentiles, his wonderful works among all people.” (Brenton)

The audience of this proclamation is τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, the same Greek word Matthew uses in πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν (”all the nations”). Brenton translates it “Gentiles” here; the word is the same either way. The good news is not for Israel alone. It fans outward.

Verse 10: The Lord Reigns Over the Oikoumene

εἴπατε ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσεν. καὶ γὰρ κατώρθωσεν τὴν οἰκουμένην, ἥτις οὐ σαλευθήσεται· κρινεῖ λαοὺς ἐν εὐθύτητι.

“Say among the heathen, The Lord reigns: for he has established the world so that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people in righteousness.” (Brenton)

This may be the single most loaded verse in the entire comparison. The enthronement cry ἐβασίλευσεν (”he reigns,” “he has become king”) shares the same Greek root (βασιλ-) as βασιλεία (”kingdom”). “Say among the nations that the Lord reigns” is, in effect, “proclaim the kingdom among the nations.” And the word Brenton translates as “the world” is οἰκουμένη, the same word Matthew uses for the scope of gospel proclamation in Matthew 24:14. The Lord’s reign is set explicitly over the οἰκουμένη.

Worth noting: the Aramaic Targum of Isaiah 52:7 renders “your God reigns” (malak elohayik) as “the kingdom of your God is revealed.”³ The enthronement formula and the “kingdom” concept were already linked in Jewish exegetical tradition. Psalm 96:10 is doing the same thing.

Verse 13: He Comes to Judge the Oikoumene

πρὸ προσώπου κυρίου, ὅτι ἔρχεται, ὅτι ἔρχεται κρῖναι τὴν γῆν· κρινεῖ τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ λαοὺς ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ αὐτοῦ.

“for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth; he shall judge the world in righteousness, and the people with his truth.” (Brenton)

Here is the “end.” The psalm does not use the word τέλος, but the concept is identical: the Lord arrives to render final judgment on the οἰκουμένη. Again, Brenton translates οἰκουμένη as “the world,” but the Greek word is the same one found in Matthew 24:14. And crucially, this judgment comes after the proclamation. The psalm’s narrative arc is: proclaim the good news (v. 2) --> to the nations (v. 3) --> the Lord reigns over the oikoumene (v. 10) --> then he comes to judge the oikoumene (v. 13).

That is the narrative arc of Matthew 24:14.

A Note on the Scope of Oikoumene

If this allusion holds, it has implications for how we read οἰκουμένη in Matthew 24:14. A popular interpretation, especially in orthodox and unorthodox preterist readings, limits the word to the Roman Empire, following its political usage in passages like Luke 2:1 (“a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered”). On that reading, the verse was fulfilled in the apostolic age: the gospel reached the bounds of the Roman world, and then the “end” (the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70) came.

But if Matthew’s language is echoing LXX Psalm 95, the word arrives already loaded with a very different meaning. In the psalm, οἰκουμένη is not a political territory administered by Caesar. It is the world that God Himself established (v. 10: κατώρθωσεν τὴν οἰκουμένην), the world He comes to judge in righteousness (v. 13: κρινεῖ τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ). It is set in parallel with “the earth” (τὴν γῆν) and “all the peoples” (πᾶσι τοῖς λαοῖς): universal, not provincial. The scope is creational and cosmic: the God who made the world is coming to judge the world.

If Matthew is drawing on this psalm, then his οἰκουμένη inherits that cosmic scope. The gospel of the kingdom is to be preached not merely across the administrative footprint of Rome, but throughout the whole created order of human habitation, because the one who established the οἰκουμένη is the one who is coming to judge it. Limiting the term to the Roman Empire would flatten the very allusion that gives the verse its theological depth.

“Inhabited World” Does Not Mean “Roman Empire”

It is worth pausing to name the specific logical move that gets the preterist from the lexicon to the Roman Empire, because it is not as clean as it first appears.

The argument typically runs in three steps:

1. οἰκουμένη means “the inhabited world” (correct, and every lexicon agrees).

2. The “inhabited world” as known to first-century people was, roughly, the Roman Empire.

3. Therefore οἰκουμένη means “the Roman Empire.”

But step 3 does not follow from steps 1 and 2. “Inhabited world” is the meaning of the word. “The Roman Empire” is a historical referent that the word happened to overlap with in certain first-century political contexts. Those are two very different things. The meaning of a word and the thing it points to in one specific usage are not the same.

Consider an analogy. If someone in 1950 said “a message broadcast to the whole world,” the practical referent might be limited to countries with radio infrastructure. But the meaning of “the whole world” has not shrunk to fit the technology. If you dug up that sentence 2,000 years later, it would be a mistake to conclude that “the whole world” was a technical term for “countries with radio towers.” The speaker meant the whole world. The signal just hadn’t gotten everywhere yet.

That is precisely what some do with οἰκουμένη. They notice that in Luke 2:1, the practical referent of “the whole inhabited world” is the Roman Empire (because Caesar’s census only reached Roman territory), and then they retroject that referent back into the word as though it were the definition. But even in Luke 2:1, the word does not mean “the Roman Empire.” It means “the inhabited world.” Luke is simply noting, with some hyperbole, that Caesar claimed authority over the whole inhabited world. The word’s semantic content is universal; it is the political reality that was limited.

Calvin and Gill, commenting on this very verse, both recognized as much. Calvin calls the usage a “figure of speech (by which the whole is taken for a part, or a part for the whole)” and notes that this synecdoche “was in constant use among the Roman authors, and ought not to be reckoned harsh.”⁴ He does not say the word means the Roman Empire. He says the whole world is a rhetorical figure that the Romans habitually applied to their own domain. The word means the whole world; the figure narrows it. Gill arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle, observing that the Roman Empire was called “the world” because it was vast and because of “the boasting language of the Romans,” comparing it to Ptolemy Evergetes calling his own kingdom κόσμος, “the world.”⁵ For Gill, “oikoumene = Roman Empire” is not a lexical definition but a piece of imperial propaganda: Rome called itself the world the way every empire flatters itself with universal pretensions.

Both commentators, in explaining why οἰκουμένη refers to the Roman Empire in Luke 2:1, inadvertently confirm that the word does not mean “the Roman Empire.” It means the whole inhabited world, and the narrowing in Luke 2:1 is a product of Roman rhetorical convention (Calvin) or Roman imperial boasting (Gill). Neither would recognize the preterist move of taking that one figurative usage and importing it into Matthew 24:14 as the word’s baseline definition. If anything, their comments prove the opposite: that when a biblical author uses οἰκουμένη to mean the Roman Empire, it is the exception, a recognized literary device, not the rule.

And this is where the Psalm 96 background is so devastating to the move. In the psalm, there is no Roman Empire. There is no Caesar. The οἰκουμένη is the world God established (κατώρθωσεν, v. 10) and the world God will judge (κρινεῖ, v. 13). Its scope is determined not by any empire’s borders but by the reach of God’s creative act. If God established it, He will judge it. All of it.

So when Matthew picks up the word from that psalmic tradition, it arrives carrying a theological definition, not a political one. The “inhabited world” is the world God made. The preterist interpretation has to actively strip that meaning away and replace it with a Roman administrative category that the source text knows nothing about.

In short, the equivocation works like this: the preterist uses the lexicon to get from “world” to “inhabited world” (which sounds narrower and more technical), and then uses Luke 2:1 to get from “inhabited world” to “Roman Empire.” But neither step licenses the conclusion. The lexicon confirms the word means “inhabited world,” not “Roman Empire.” Calvin confirms the Luke 2:1 usage is a figure of speech. Gill confirms it is imperial boasting. And the psalm from which Matthew’s language appears to derive knows nothing of Rome at all. The word means what it has always meant: the whole inhabited world that God created, and the whole inhabited world over which he reigns.

What the Lexicons Say

The claim that οἰκουμένη in Matthew 24:14 means “the Roman Empire” is not merely weakened by the Psalm 96 allusion. It is contradicted by the reference works that some preterists claim to be relying on.

Thayer’s Greek Lexicon divides the NT uses of οἰκουμένη into three categories:

1b. The Roman Empire. Thayer assigns exactly one New Testament verse to this category: Luke 2:1, where Caesar Augustus decrees a census of the whole οἰκουμένη. This is the verse Gary DeMar, for example, treats as the controlling parallel for Matthew 24:14. But Thayer disagrees.

1c. The whole inhabited earth, the world. This is where Thayer places Matthew 24:14, alongside Luke 4:5, Luke 21:26, Acts 17:6, Acts 17:31, Acts 19:27, Acts 24:5, Romans 10:18, Hebrews 1:6, Revelation 3:10, Revelation 12:9, and Revelation 16:14.

2. The universe, the world. Hebrews 2:5 stands here, referring to “the οἰκουμένη to come” (ἡ οἰκουμένη μέλλουσα), a consummate state of all things following Christ’s return.

Vine’s Expository Dictionary reaches the same conclusion, categorizing the NT uses as (a) “the whole inhabited world,” which includes Matthew 24:14; (b) “by metonymy, the Roman Empire,” limited to Luke 2:1, Acts 11:28, and Acts 24:5; and (c) “the inhabited earth in a coming age,” for Hebrews 2:5. Both lexicons place Matthew 24:14 squarely in the “whole world” category, not in the “Roman Empire” category.

BDAG, the standard lexicon for New Testament Greek in modern scholarship, distinguishes four senses of οἰκουμένη:

① “The earth as inhabited area... the inhabited earth, the world.” Under this sense, BDAG lists Matthew 24:14 alongside Luke 4:5, Luke 21:26, Romans 10:18, Hebrews 1:6, Revelation 3:10, and Revelation 16:14.

② “The world as administrative unit, the Roman Empire.” And here BDAG adds a revealing parenthetical: this usage occurs “in the hyperbolic diction commonly used in ref. to emperors” where “the Rom. Emp. equalled the whole world.” BDAG assigns only Acts 24:5 and Acts 17:6 to this sense. The lexicon itself calls the “Roman Empire” meaning imperial hyperbole, precisely the point Calvin made when he identified it as synecdoche and Gill when he called it “the boasting language of the Romans.”

③ “All inhabitants of the earth... world, humankind.” Under this sense, BDAG places Acts 17:31, Acts 19:27, and Revelation 12:9. Most remarkably, it also places Luke 2:1 here, explaining that “the evangelist considers it of great importance that the birth of the world’s savior coincided with another event that also affected every person in the ‘world’.” The very passage DeMar treats as the paradigmatic “Roman Empire” usage is classified by BDAG not as a political reference but as a theological statement about universal scope.

④ An extraordinary use in 1 Clement 60:1, where οἰκουμένη “seems to mean the whole world” including the realm of transcendent beings. And Hebrews 2:5’s “the οἰκουμένη to come,” the eschatological world subjected to the risen Christ.

The implications are stark. All three lexicons place Matthew 24:14 in the “inhabited earth” or “whole world” category, not the “Roman Empire” category. BDAG labels the “Roman Empire” sense as imperial hyperbole and limits it to two verses. It classifies Acts 17:31, the near-verbatim quotation of LXX Psalm 95:13, under “all humankind.” And it places even Luke 2:1, the preterist’s controlling parallel, in the universal category, not the Roman one.

And a survey of the fifteen NT occurrences makes clear why. Several of them simply cannot be read as referring to the Roman Empire without producing problems:

In Luke 4:5, the devil shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the οἰκουμένη.” Satan is not offering Jesus the governorship of Roman provinces. He is offering dominion over the entire world.

In Hebrews 1:6, God “brings the firstborn into the οἰκουμένη.” The Son of God is not being introduced into the Roman Empire. He is entering the created world, and all God’s angels are commanded to worship him.

In Hebrews 2:5, the author speaks of “the οἰκουμένη to come” (τὴν οἰκουμένην τὴν μέλλουσαν), a world that does not yet exist. A “coming Roman Empire” is not in view. This is the eschatological world subjected to the risen Christ.

In Revelation 12:9, Satan is described as the one who “deceives the whole οἰκουμένη.” His deception is not limited to Roman territory. It encompasses all of fallen humanity.

In Revelation 16:14, demonic spirits go out to “the kings of the whole οἰκουμένη” to gather them for the battle of the great day of God Almighty. These are not merely Roman client kings.

And in Acts 17:31, God “will judge the οἰκουμένη in righteousness.” As we have already seen, this is a near-direct quotation of LXX Psalm 95:13. No one reads it as God judging the Roman Empire specifically.

Of fifteen New Testament occurrences, the lexicons assign at most three to the “Roman Empire” sense (and BDAG assigns only two). The remaining occurrences refer to the whole inhabited world, the world of nations, or the eschatological world to come. The lexical evidence does not merely fail to support the “oikoumene = Roman Empire” reading of Matthew 24:14. It actively contradicts it.

Acts 17:31: Paul Enacts the Psalm

If the Psalm 96 connection to Matthew 24:14 still feels speculative, Acts 17:31 should tip the scale. Here is Paul, standing in Athens before the Areopagus, among the nations, proclaiming good news, and the climax of his speech is this:

καθότι ἔστησεν ἡμέραν ἐν ᾗ μέλλει κρίνειν τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ, ἐν ἀνδρὶ ᾧ ὥρισεν, πίστιν παρασχὼν πᾶσιν ἀναστήσας αὐτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν.

“because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Now set that beside LXX Psalm 95:13:

κρινεῖ τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ

“he shall judge the world in righteousness.”

The phrase κρίνειν τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ in Acts 17:31 is virtually verbatim from the psalm. The only difference is a shift from the future indicative (κρινεῖ) to the infinitive (κρίνειν), a simple grammatical adaptation for the new syntactical context. This is not a vague thematic echo. It is a quotation. And scholars have long recognized it as such: the Expositor’s Greek Testament explicitly cross-references Acts 17:31 with LXX Psalm 95:13 (and Psalm 98:9), and Matthew Poole directs readers to Psalm 96:13.

What makes this so significant is not just the verbal match at the climax. It is the way the entire Areopagus speech reads like an extended meditation on the very psalm we have been discussing. Consider the echoes running through the whole address:

Paul declares that God "made the world and everything in it" (Acts 17:24). The psalm declares that "all the gods of the heathen are devils: but the Lord made the heavens" (LXX 95:5, Brenton). Paul critiques the idols: "we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man" (Acts 17:29). The psalm commands the nations to forsake their worthless gods and worship the true Creator. Paul announces that God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). The psalm calls upon "all the earth" and "all the nations" (95:1, 3, 10). And Paul concludes: "now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed" (Acts 17:30-31). The psalm concludes: "proclaim his salvation... publish his glory among the Gentiles... he shall judge the world in righteousness" (95:2-3, 13, Brenton).

Paul is not merely quoting a line from the psalm. He is enacting it. He is literally doing what the psalm commands, εὐαγγελίζεσθε among the ἔθνεσιν, and his message climaxes with the psalm’s own announcement: God is coming to κρῖναι τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ. The situation of Paul at the Areopagus is the narrative arc of Psalm 96: proclamation of the true God to the nations, the exposure of idolatry, and then the warning that judgment is coming upon the whole inhabited world.

This has two consequences for our argument. First, it confirms that LXX Psalm 95 was a live source text in early Christian eschatological preaching, not a dead letter waiting for modern scholars to notice. Paul clearly drew on it, consciously and directly. If Paul did so on Mars Hill, there is nothing improbable about Matthew drawing on the same psalm in the Olivet Discourse. The well was being used.

Second, it makes the “oikoumene = Roman Empire” reading even harder to sustain. In Acts 17:31, the judgment of the οἰκουμένη is God’s final, universal assize, accomplished “by a man whom he has appointed,” and “of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). No one reads this as God judging the Roman Empire specifically. The word carries its full cosmic weight, exactly as it does in the psalm Paul is quoting. If the same psalm stands behind Matthew 24:14, then Matthew’s οἰκουμένη carries the same weight. The word is not a political boundary. It is a theological category: the whole inhabited world that God made, and the whole inhabited world that God will judge.

The DeMar Dilemma

No one has pressed the “oikoumene = Roman Empire” reading more influentially than Gary DeMar. Across several works, DeMar builds his case on the word choice in Matthew 24:14. In Last Days Madness, his landmark defense of preterism, he writes:

“The Greek word translated ‘world’ in Matthew 24:14 is oikoumene, ‘the inhabited earth’...”

He then maps this directly onto Luke 2:1, where Caesar Augustus decrees a census of the whole oikoumene, meaning, of course, the Roman Empire. In his Hal Lindsey Redux article on American Vision, he draws the contrast more sharply: “The word most often translated as ‘world’ in Mt. 24:14 is not the Greek word kosmos but oikoumene, the same word that’s used in Luke 2:1.” And in another American Vision article, Using the Wrong Text to Make a Point, he states it with full force:

“If Jesus had wanted to convey the idea of ‘the whole wide world,’ He would have to use the Greek word kosmos, a word that is used eight times by Matthew.”

The claim is clear and falsifiable: the word oikoumene proves a limited scope, and kosmos would have meant something bigger. Had Jesus used kosmos, the preterist would have a problem. This line of argument has been echoed widely by writers like Evan Minton at Cerebral Faith, who puts it plainly: “Had Jesus meant that the gospel would be preached throughout the entire planet, He would have used a different Greek word; Kosmos.”

So far, so good. It sounds rigorous. But then DeMar takes a second step. In footnote 5 of that very same article, Using the Wrong Text to Make a Point, he writes:

“Paul uses kosmos instead of oikoumene. So even if Jesus had used kosmos in Matthew 24:14, a first-century fulfillment was still in view.”

The body of the article: Jesus would have to use kosmos to mean the whole world. The footnote of the same article: but even if he had used kosmos, it still wouldn’t mean the whole world. The oikoumene/kosmos distinction, which was presented as the linchpin of the argument, turns out to be load-bearing in one direction only. If the text says oikoumene, that proves it means Rome. If it had said kosmos, that would also prove it means Rome. Heads I win, tails you lose.

This is not exegesis following evidence to a conclusion. It is a conclusion in search of exegesis. The word-choice argument was never the real foundation; it was rhetorical scaffolding erected around a predetermined result. The moment DeMar admitted that kosmos wouldn’t change anything, he revealed that his case doesn’t actually rest on the meaning of οἰκουμένη at all. It rests on the prior commitment that Matthew 24 was entirely fulfilled by AD 70, and whatever Greek word appears in the text will be retrofitted to serve that thesis.

The LXX Psalm 95 allusion makes this problem even sharper. If Matthew’s οἰκουμένη is not a borrowing from the political vocabulary of Caesar but from the theological vocabulary of the Psalter, where it means the world God created and the world God will judge in righteousness, then DeMar’s Luke 2:1 analogy collapses at the source. The word didn’t arrive in Matthew 24:14 carrying the scent of a Roman census. It arrived carrying the weight of a cosmic enthronement hymn: Proclaim the good news. Declare it among the nations. The Lord reigns over the oikoumene. And He is coming to judge it.

An Underexplored Allusion?

I should be candid: I have not found a published scholarly work that explicitly argues Matthew 24:14 is alluding to LXX Psalm 95. Most intertextual discussions of “gospel of the kingdom” look to Isaiah, and most discussions of οἰκουμένη in Matthew focus on its Roman-political connotations. The two threads haven’t been braided together through this psalm.

But the evidence is hard to dismiss. LXX Psalm 95 appears to be the only passage in the Greek Old Testament that combines εὐαγγελίζεσθε + ἔθνεσιν + βασιλεύω + οἰκουμένη + ἔρχεται κρῖναι in a single literary unit. The density of shared vocabulary is remarkable, and the narrative logic (proclamation of the kingdom, then divine judgment of the inhabited world) matches exactly. Acts 17:31 confirms that the early church was already reading this psalm as a script for its own eschatological mission: preach the good news to the nations, because God has fixed a day on which he will judge the oikoumene in righteousness.

Whether Matthew was consciously citing this psalm or simply drawing on a shared pool of Septuagintal language that had already shaped his eschatological imagination, the structural parallel is, at minimum, worth noticing. It may be that the gospel of the kingdom preached to the oikoumene before the end was not a new idea in Matthew 24. It was already there, sung in Israel’s hymnbook, waiting to be fulfilled.

1. https://www.foundationspsalter.com/psalm96

2. A note on where I'm coming from. I still consider myself an orthodox preterist. I believe that some of the Olivet Discourse describes events that found fulfillment in the first century, particularly the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. But I also believe there are two different things at work in the discourse: the events of AD 70 and the “end” of history. The signs were for that generation; the end belongs to the unknown "that day and hour" of Matthew 24:36. Orthodox preterism affirms what the creeds affirm: a future bodily return of Christ, a future resurrection, and a final judgment. Full preterism, which denies these, is another thing entirely. What I am offering here is not a rejection of orthodox preterism but a challenge to one particular exegetical move that has become common across preterist circles; the limiting of οἰκουμένη to the Roman Empire. I offer it as something for us to chew on.

3. Craig A. Evans, “Mark,” in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 1068.

4. Calvin, John, and William Pringle. 2010. Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Vol. 1. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.

5. Gill, John. 1809. An Exposition of the New Testament. Vol. 1. The Baptist Commentary Series. London: Mathews and Leigh.