Did the first Christians expect the world to end?

Writing to Thessalonica, probably the earliest Christian text that survives, Paul says "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep", and then describes the descent, the trumpet and being caught up in the clouds.

The first person is the part that matters. He is not describing a distant event for other people; he puts himself in the group that will still be here.

To Corinth he writes that "the time is short", and advises accordingly: those who have wives should live as though they had none, and those who weep as though they did not.

Mark has Jesus say, after describing the end, "this generation will not pass away until all these things happen".

The translation being quoted here footnotes the word rendered generation, noting it could also be rendered race, family or people. That footnote is more than a piece of lexicography. It is one side of the argument, in a margin.

2 Peter, among the latest books in the New Testament, quotes the objection directly: "Where is the promise of his coming? For, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."

The answer given is that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years", and that what looks like slowness is patience.

The significant thing is not the answer. It is that the question was being asked loudly enough, around the turn of the second century, for a book to be written that addresses it.

One position takes the plain sense: the earliest Christians expected the end within their lifetimes, and they were wrong about the timing. On this reading 2 Peter is the movement absorbing a failed prediction, which movements do, and it is notable mainly for doing it inside its own scripture.

Another position holds that the language is drawn from a Jewish prophetic idiom in which imminence is a way of speaking about certainty and demand rather than about dates, and that reading it as a schedule is a modern category error.

A third holds that something did happen within that generation, and points at the destruction of the temple in 70.

A movement that expects the world to end shortly has little reason to build institutions, to plan for centuries, or to reform the arrangements around it. One that has settled in has every reason to do all three.

How much of the shift from the first thing to the second the delay explains is argued. One line of scholarship counts the fading of the end as the focus of faith among the marks of an early Catholicism in the latest New Testament letters; another explains the first fixed offices as a defence against false teaching. The chapter cited here asks a prior question, whether the New Testament writers really expected an imminent return, and ties it to mission. This page does not report its answer, because it could not read it.

The imagery is borrowed from an apocalyptic literature with its own conventions, and nobody now can say with confidence how literally a first-century reader took a trumpet and a descent through clouds.

That is not a convenient escape. It is a genuine limit, and it cuts both ways: it also means a confident claim that they expected a literal timetable is a claim about how they read metaphor, which is not recoverable.

Christianity still holds that this age ends and that Christ returns, and has held it through nineteen centuries of not happening. The creeds keep it. The Catholic eucharist still prays for it, as the Didache already did: Maranatha, "Our Lord, come!"

Augustine already called date-setting vain, citing "It is not for you to know the times", and the Catholic catechism calls the return imminent in the same sentence in which it refuses to date it. The catechism calls the present "a time of waiting and watching", in which that coming "could be accomplished at any moment".

Naming the year is old. Augustine knew of people who put the final coming four hundred, five hundred or a thousand years after the ascension, and others have named dates since, among them the Millerites of nineteenth-century America. What happens to a movement when its year passes has a literature of its own, and the overview cited here is titled for the case it studies: prophecy fails and faith persists.

2 Peter makes a milder version of the same move, with no year to explain: the hope stays, and the wait is rethought. The pattern is about as old as the texts.