Significance of 40 years transition period
Gary DeMar (1996)
"But now once at the consummation of the ages He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself" (Hebrews 9:26). Jesus was manifested, not at the beginning, but "at the consummation of the ages." The period between A.D. 30 and 70 is, as the apostle Peter describes it, "these last times" (1 Peter 1:20). As time drew near for Jerusalem's destruction, Peter could say that "the end of all things was at hand" (4:7).
Lohse, TDNT
"The idea of the millennium which the divine works out here is to be understood against the backdrop of the Jewish apoc. traditions that he adopts and uses. In the expectation of an intermediate Messianic kingdom which shall precede the end and the coming of the reign of God, Eth. En. 91:12f; 93:1-14; Sib., 3, 652-660; 4 Esr. 7:28f; S. Bar. 29:3; 30:1-5; 40:3, two forms of eschatological hope are combined. Acc. to the older view the Messiah will be the end-time king restoring the Davidic monarchy and raising it to new heights. In apoc., however, a very different concept of the future age of salvation develops. On this view God's envoy will appear from heaven, the dead will rise again at his coming, and all men must come before his judgment-seat. Later an attempt was made to fuse the older national concept with the universal eschatology by putting the reign of the Messiah-King before the end of the world and the beginning of the new aeon. The earthly Messianic age will be for a limited term and it will be followed by a last assault of the powers of chaos prior to the commencement of the future world." (TDNT, Vol. IX, page 470)
Philip Mauro (1923)
"Yet the predicted judgment did not immediately follow; for Christ prayed for His murderers in His dying hour, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lu. 23:34). In answer to that prayer the full probationary period of forty years (A.D. 30 to A.D. 70) was added to their national existence, during which time repentance and remission of sins was preached to them in the Name of the crucified and risen One, and tens of thousands of Jews were saved. " (Seventy Weeks, ch. 5)
Ernest Renan (1873)
"THE period covered by the present volume is, after the three or four years of the public life of Jesus, the most extraordinary in the entire development of Christianity. Here, by a singular touch of the great unconscious Artist who appears to rule in the seeming caprice of historic evolution, we shall see Jesus and Nero - Christ and Antichrist - set, as it were, in contrast, face to face, like heaven and hell. The Christian consciousness is now full-grown. Hitherto it has known little else than the law of love: Jewish intolerance, though harsh, could not fret away the bond of grateful attachment cherished in the heart of the infant Church for her mother the Synagogue, from whom she is still hardly sundered. Now at length the Christian has before him an object of hate and terror. Over against the memory of Jesus rises a monstrous form, the ideal of evil, as He had been the ideal of holiness. Held in reserve, -like Enoch or Elias, to play his part in the last great tragedy of the world, Nero completes the cycle of Christian mythology: he inspires the first sacred book of the new canon; by a frightful massacre he lays the corner-stone of Romish primacy, and opens the way to that revolution which is to make of Rome a second Jerusalem, a holy city. At the same time, by a mysterious coincidence not infrequent in great crises of human destiny, Jerusalem is overthrown; the Temple disappears; Christianity, disburdened of a restraint already painful and advancing to a broadening freedom, follows out its own destinies apart from conquered Judaism. " (Antichrist, Intro.)
A.T. Robinson (1976)
"I believe that John represents in date, as theology, not only the omega but also the alpha of New Testament development. He bestrides the period like a colossus and marks out its span, the span that lies between two dramatic moments in Jerusalem which boldly we may date with unusual precision. The first was when, on 9 April 30, 'early on the Sunday morning, while it was still dark,' one man 'saw and believed' (Jno. 20:1-9). And the second was when, on 26 September 70, 'the dawn of the eight day of the month Gorpiaeus broke upon Jerusalem in flames.' Over those forty years, I believe, all the books of the New Testament came to completion, and during most of that period, if we are right, the Johannine literature was in the process of maturation." (p. 311)
H.J. Schoeps (1966)
(on the traditional views concerning the length of the intermediate Messianic kingdom) "fix a very short interval for the interim period, namely, forty years (R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus; Bar in Sanh. 99a; R. Aqiba: Midr. Teh. on Ps 90:15; Tanch. Eqeb 7b, Pes. Rabb. 4a). The two Tannaites, commenting on Ps 95:7, derive this time indication from the Messianically understood v.10 (forty years I loathed that generation) and from Deut. 8:2 by a parallelization with the forty years in the desert." (Paul, p. 100)
The Talmud
"Our Rabbis taught: During the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple.. the doors of the Hekal would open by themselves, until R. Johanan b. Zakkai rebuked them, saying: Hekal, Hekal, why wilt thou be the alarmer thyself (Predict thy own destruction) ? I know about thee that thou wilt be destroyed, for Zechariah ben Ido has already prophesied concerning thee: Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars" (The Soncino Talmud, Seder Mo'ed, vol. III Toma, p. 186)
B.F. Westcott (1889)
"Jewish teachers distinguished a 'present age' (this age) from 'that age' (the age to come). Between 'the present age' of imperfection and conflict and trial and 'the age to come' of the perfect reign of God they placed 'the days of the Messiah,' which they sometimes reckoned in the former, sometimes in the latter, and sometimes distinct from both. They were, however, commonly agreed that the passage from one age to the other would be through a period of intense sorrow and anguish, 'the travail-pains' of the new birth (Mt. 24:8). The apostolic writers, fully conscious of the spiritual crisis through which they were passing speak of their own time as the 'last days' (Acts 2:17; James 5:3; comp. 2 Tim. 3:1); the 'last hour' (1 Jno. 2:18); the 'end of the times' (1 Peter 1:20; 2 Pet. 3:3); 'the last time' (Jude 18)."
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