I am sending, in three separate emails, the manuscript's introduction and first chapter. I hope you can appreciate my love for Scripture and my genuine effort to communicate with John, prior to writing my manuscript. (My frustration in this attempt is another reason for my less than serious style, as I also indicate in the manuscript's introduction.)

THINGS JOHN NOE DOESN'T KNOW

INTRODUCTION

THE CANNON IS LOOSE!

This is a serious book about a guy who takes himself much too seriously. The trouble is he’s convinced a lot of other people to follow his lead. He’s been on Larry King Live and the 700 Club. He’s presented papers at meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society. He’s been endorsed by Edward Stevens, a former editor of Christianity Today, and, last I heard, a second edition of his book, Beyond the End Times, was planned.

He thinks he’s Martin Luther, and he touts his writing as if its a modern version of The Ninety-five Theses. In fact, you can actually find 9.5 Theses posted on his website. He even signs letters and e-mails in a way that shouts that his “preterism” is going to set the church right again. He has been known to emblazon, across the bottom of his correspondence, “Your brother in the next Reformation, John Noe.”

Preterism[1] is the belief that Jesus “returned” to oversee Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70 and to cinch up the church’s role as God’s permanent abiding place on earth. This was the Second Coming, and the church is now experiencing the new heaven and earth, according to most preterists. That’s a far out idea, but not nearly as far out as the man with the plan to defend it. Let me tell you about my first scary adventure into the mind of John Noe.

I had read in one of his essays that the phrase, “God, coming in the clouds” or its equivalent, is a standard Old Testament expression. The way John tells it, this was a uniform figure of speech among the prophets. It depicted God’s presence and approval when sinful nations were overthrown by invading armies.

Therefore, John concludes, when Jesus told the Jews that He was coming in the clouds, He meant He was sending an army to destroy their city. Here’s how John puts it:

Christ’s “coming on the clouds” is a metaphoric phrase borrowed from Old Testament portrayals of God descending from heaven and coming in power and glory to execute judgment on ancient wicked nations...With this same cloud-coming imagery...the Son of man was prophesied by Daniel to come (Dn. 7:13)...Thus, it was a technical way to speak of Christ also coming in judgment, strength and power of war...[2]

John argues that all informed first century Jews who heard Jesus talk about returning in the clouds would immediately know His meaning. They would understand that He was talking about divine justice and an invading army dispatched to enforce it. According to John, no one would think Jesus meant He was coming to raise the dead, literally, and then establish a kingdom on earth. So John writes:

The Jews of Jesus’ day studied the use of “cloud” phraseology in their synagogues and were well familiar with its application to...historic fulfillments. Its similes and figurative language portrayed God’s divine intervention, presence, power and wrath, and, most often, His use of human armies as His means of judgment...[3]

Pretty impressive, if John can back up his claim with concrete examples. But what does he give as proof that he is right about this standard, technical figure of speech? He gives an extensive list of Old Testament references, minus actual quotations. We have to look up those for ourselves, or do nothing but robotically scan the list that includes a number of full chapters. Slowing down, opening the Bible, and reading the scriptures indicated, yields this result:

Of the one thousand eighteen total verses that John lists in his essay, only one verse asserts that God was coming on a cloud to judge an ancient nation.

The verse is Isaiah 19:1, and it is obviously poetic. It pictures God “riding” on a “swift cloud” with the idols of Egypt trembling in fear as He approaches. This is a very vivid and imaginative statement, but it is not a parallel to New Testament descriptions of the Lord’s return. The promise made in Acts 1:11, for example, is certainly not poetry. It is part of the account of the apostles watching Jesus ascend into a literal cloud, and then being told that He would come back as He went. The context is clear. The promise is a straightforward prediction of a coming event, and it is typical of New Testament references to the return of Christ.

In two of John’s Old Testament references, Ezekiel 38:16 and Jeremiah 4:13, Israel’s enemies are said to come against the nation as clouds, but this is not God coming on or in the clouds.

My reaction, when I had done this research was, “What is this guy thinking? Why would he appeal to verse after verse that offer absolutely no support for his case?” But that was only my introduction to the mind and imagination of preterism’s most active advocate. Believe me, as bizarre as his cloud-coming idea is, it’s far from his quirkiest. And yet, as noted above, lots of people think he is a legitimate authority on Bible prophecy. At the time I read his essay, John Noe was the hottest thing going in the preterist vs. futurist[4] prophetic debate. So a second thought came to me, “Uhoh! The cannon is lose!”

I wrote down some of my research and sent it to John, challenging him to reconsider his claims, but all I got back was some ranting about how goofed up I am because I believe certain prophecies have not yet been fulfilled. When I later e-mailed him about other things that we will discuss in this book, I got more of the same.

Okay, John, if you choose to rant, I choose to laugh.

It’s a scary thing, as I said, to try to understand and communicate with John Noe, but it’s also kind of funny. And just maybe a lighthearted approach will wake him up. Or perhaps his friends will read this and take action to tie the cannon down before even more sincere Christians get hurt.

LOOK OUT! THE DECK IS FULL OF ’EM!

John Noe is not the only untethered weapon careening around out there. Prophetic futurists and others who write about Bible prophecy can get things pretty twisted too. So John is right in some of his volatile protests against others. A lot of people have written and said things that are as crazy as some of John’s ideas.

So the man with the plan is only the most extreme among a weird assortment of extremists that are being widely published and read. To be fair and complete, we’ll take note of some of the shenanigans of these other guys as we review and report Things John Noe Doesn’t Know.

NOTES

1. What I call “preterism” some call “full preterism” or “hyperpreterism.” All these terms are contrasted with “partial preterism.” Advocates of partial preterism leave room for some literal prophecies that will be fulfilled in the Second Coming, resurrection of the dead, etc.
2. The source of this quote and other material about John’s cloud-coming idea is an essay titled, “Seven Reasons Why Jesus Returned How and When He Said He Would,” available on his website, www.prophecyrefi.org. 3. See footnote 2, above.
4. In this book, I mean by “futurist,” those who believe that all the prominent New Testament passages that seem to speak of the Second Coming and the end times should be understood literally. This definition would include the belief system of most prophetic historicists. I am using “futurist” to contrast with both “preterist” (which would be the extreme position of denying the literal meaning of any of these Scriptures) and “partial preterist” (the denial of the literal meaning of many of these Scriptures).

CHAPTER ONE: JOHN'S ADDICTION TO VERBAL AND TEXTUAL ABUSE

Pronounce his last name NOH-ee, and remember it because, according to his website and book cover, he has taken his place among the great figures of history. The Church will be restored and renewed, we are told, because of the crusading work of this man and his sympathizers.

Like Martin Luther and the other reformers, John Noe and those who stand with him think they have recovered a lost article of faith that had been suppressed by an apostate theological hierarchy. The abused doctrine that he and his kind are said to have restored is, according to them, the plain teaching of Christ about His Second Coming. They tell us that Jesus said he would “return” in AD 70 to oversee the destruction of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Church Age. Otherwise, contrary to popular notions, there is no Second Coming of Christ and no end of the world to go with it.

But note that extreme preterists like John Noe aren’t merely engaging in a theological dialogue. They believe that all who disagree with them are enemies of the Word of God who have betrayed Christ. John is especially unpleasant toward those with contrary views. Within the space of four particular pages in his book, Beyond the End Times, he twice writes, “It was the evil servant who said, ‘My Lord delayeth his coming’” (Mt. 24:48). Just so no one will miss his meaning, he adds, “The Church has been preaching ‘delay’ for 19 centuries.”[1]

So if you don’t agree that the Lord has already come, as and when John Noe says He did, you and all your kind, throughout the history of the church, are evil! Not a real winsome touch, is it? Yet, John and his friends are confident that they’ll eventually woo us to them. They believe that their understanding of prophecy will become the majority view.

John informs us that, when enough of us wake up to the truth of preterism and abandon all this talk about the end of the world, the Church will regain intellectual credibility and cultural relevance.[2] Then we can forget the bulk of what has been taught about the end times and give credit where credit is due, to John Noe and his friends.

John has made a noticeable stir--writing, traveling, speaking on national television (including the Larry King Show), and debating the director of the Pre-Trib Research Center, Thomas Ice. As a result, we can say accurately that John Noe is probably the most visible recent advocate of preterism.

With his extensive resume in mind, I settled down, some time ago, to read what I thought would be an intellectually challenging essay he had written on his favorite topic. Boy, was I in for a shock. His shallowness and lack of logic startled me. I could not understand how anyone can take John Noe seriously. But perhaps I was judging him too quickly. So I bought and read his book, Beyond the End Times. I discovered that the book is filled with the same kind of absurdities, parading as scholarship, that fill his essay.

Now I was in a quandary. I didn’t know whether to pity him for his incompetence or condemn him for his con artistry. After attempting to correspond with him, I’ve decided that he is sincere, at least for the most part, but he suffers a severe form of mental disease that we have all contracted at one time or another. He appears to be so eager to prove his point that he handles his sources recklessly. He victimizes words, ideas, and authors with no mercy. As indicated, this is a temptation for each of us, but with John, it has become an addiction.

After carefully studying the weirdness he puts out, I began to wish there was a Better Business Bureau for Prophecy Writers. “Somebody ought to do something,” I kept telling myself. So I’m giving it a try. But to keep from crying or pulling my hair out, I’ll go at this thing from the lighter side, for the most part. Still, I have a serious purpose.

I kid you not, and I exaggerate not, John Noe is a loose cannon who’s going to hurt somebody. He already has! His way of reading and emasculating what others have written is a form of verbal and textual abuse. The authors John quotes suffer and so do the readers to whom he serves his semantic concoction.

In this chapter, we’ll analyze five examples of verbal cruelty in John’s use of sources outside the Bible. We’ll get to his use and misuse of Scripture in the next chapter. To introduce the remainder of this one, I will list symptoms I noted in John’s addictive behavior, and leave it to you to decide if my diagnosis is right, based on further explanations.

A SUMMARY OF SYMPTOMS

In the first example that we will study (concerning Christopher Columbus), I discovered that John sometimes creates evidence the way God created the world, ex nihilo, out of nothing. That’s okay for the Creator who likes to make things, but it’s not okay for us mortals when we are supposed to be explaining what others have written.

In the second example (from a news story by a science writer), I discovered that John can leap from sensible things that others have written to conclusions that make no sense at all. Well, they make no sense to anyone who thinks twice about them. But John doesn’t like to think twice. He prefers to walk where angels fear to tread, with no time taken for a second opinion and no reverence for convention. Caution is no virtue in his mind.

In the third example (from the ancient historian, Josephus), I discovered that John is oblivious to the subtleties of language. I attempted to communicate with him about what Josephus could and could not have meant in the reference John cites. My complete failure to connect with his disturbed and disturbing mind was my greatest frustration in dealing with the Noe Phenomenon. After I could not get him to understand what I was saying, I decided to write this book.

In the fourth example (from C. S. Lewis), I discovered that John sometimes leaves out absolutely essential elements in reporting and interpreting what someone else has written. What he does to Lewis is the worst example of textual abuse you'll come across.

In the fifth example (John’s prized “Millennial Book Award”), I discovered that he takes himself so seriously that he cannot take a joke. There is no Millennial Book Award. The article that reported that John’s book had been knighted was an attempt at humor by a Christianity Today editor. The editor was fed up with all the Y2K hype that was circulating at the time. Like me, he resorted to laughter. In his case, he laughed as a means of coping with the sensationalism that came with the winding down of the twentieth century.

Now, put me to the test. Read the evidence below and decide. Have I not correctly noted the symptoms? Do we not have on our hands an offender, addicted to abusive behavior? John has never gotten physical, as far as I know, but verbal and textual abuse are written all over him, and all over everything he publishes in defense of preterism.

VICTIM NUMBER ONE: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

In one section of his book, John expounds the thought that he and his fellow reformers are Columbus-like figures. But in clarifying the parallel, he expresses a critical but non-existent detail.

He attempts to help Peter Marshall and David Manual by filling out a quotation given in their book, The Light and the Glory. But his completion of the quote comes from his imagination, not from anything that had actually been written.

Marshall and Manual give the following citation from Columbus’ Book of Prophecies:

For the execution of the journey to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied...[3]

At this point, the quotation breaks off, but John completes it with a fictitious explanation:

Columbus referred to Isaiah 40:22, which declares that the earth is a 'circle'.[4]

John believes, against informed historians, that Columbus had to convince scholars and European rulers that the earth was round; otherwise, they would not invest in his expedition. John also thinks the explorer had gotten this idea from the Bible, specifically from the verse he adds to Columbus’ quote. In reality, educated Europeans already knew that the earth was a sphere.[5]

So why did kings and scholars give Columbus such a hard time? Why didn’t someone get on board right away, so to speak, and finance his history-making voyage?

Columbus was having trouble convincing others that he was right about the size of the earth, not its shape. He finally convinced some folks in the Spanish court that the earth’s circumference was of manageable distance to allow a short cut to the trading riches in the East. So he was supplied with ships and sailors and was off to the Indies.

Ironically, his calculation of the earth's size was wrong, and his opponents’ geographical measurements were right! But, fortunately for him, there were a couple of continents between Europe and the lands he was trying to reach--continents that no one included in their calculations. So, when the dust cleared, everyone in the debate failed to understand the nature of the proposed voyage, but, as is clear to any serious student of history, no one involved was wrong about the shape of the earth.

Therefore, when Columbus cited Isaiah, he was not contributing to the flat-earth-versus-round-earth debate. Instead, as is obvious to anyone who reads Columbus’ full statement on the matter, he used the words of the prophet to show that God had always planned to spread His glory to distant places. Columbus believed that his journey to the East by way of the West accomplished this by bringing believers and the influence of the church to the earth’s far corners. So, sorry John, Isaiah 40:22 was not included among the verses Columbus quoted.

William Federer informs us of the explorer’s actual citations--all from Isaiah. They are 42:10; 49:1, 6; 51:5; 60:9; and 65:1.[6] The “coastlands” are prominent in several of these verses and the theme is, spreading the knowledge of God, far and wide--ultimately to the ends of the earth. If John had taken the time to search available sources, he would have known this.

But do not overlook the fact that John Noe does not indicate that he is speculating. He doesn’t say that Columbus might have had Isaiah 40:22 in mind. He says that this is the sole verse Columbus cited. John had no objective evidence for making this statement. The idea exists only in his imagination and is contrary to fact.

Creatio ex nihilo, commendable in God, despicable in an author when citing another.

VICTIM NUMBER TWO: THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

John cites a newspaper article that explains the theory that the universe will keep expanding rather than eventually collapsing.[7] Then, by some kind of mental leap, he announces that the article states that those who hold this theory are questioning science’s second law!

The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of usable energy in the universe is finite and will eventually be depleted. But John believes the earth and the heavens, as they now exist, are eternal. Since the second law is incompatible with his belief, he would welcome any evidence against it. He now thinks he has this evidence in hand.

John reports his findings in these words:

“Strong new evidence” presented by...astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope contradicts this leading theory/law. They claim the universe is expanding and “will continue expanding forever instead of snapping back in a ‘big crunch.’ ” [8]

I guess John was fooled by the term “forever” in the phrases he quotes. If so, he took the word too literally. The scientists quoted were not suggesting that the universe would be perpetually energized. And the article states absolutely nothing about the second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, it includes no information or speculation that would prompt us to conclude that the law is invalid. But John is too eager to discover anything that would relieve his preterist theory of the implications of this scientific principle.

Kathy Sawyer, author of the article John cited, e-mailed a note to me that confirmed what was already obvious. She wrote:

The second law of thermodynamics is safe from the likes of me, and no reputable scientist I know of has questioned it. The expanding universe, even an accelerating one, accommodates it if you look into the somewhat complicated details.

No hope there for John Noe. He is not a detail man. He wants to keep everything simple. His mind is made up. Do not disturb him with the facts, especially if they are complicated.

VICTIM NUMBER THREE: JOSEPHUS

John believes he has found evidence that first century Jews called the Jerusalem temple “a Heaven and earth.” Therefore, he argues, when Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away” (Matthew 24:35), He was talking about the temple, not the literal heaven and earth.

John paints, in preterist colors, the scene in which Jesus made His well known statement. He writes:

It’s not hard to imagine Jesus sitting on the Mount of Olives (just a short distance across a small valley from the Temple) gesturing toward this Jewish “heaven and earth,” and speaking his prophetic words: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away” (Mt. 24:35; Lk. 21:33)...His Jewish audience also might have recalled these other words of the prophet Isaiah and so understood that the “world” of heaven and earth which was to be destroyed was the Temple and the Jewish religious system, “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath; the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail.” (Isa. 51:6)[9]

Viola! John Noe has conjured up yet another New Testament reference, that fits nicely into an Old Testament reference, documenting that the Second Coming of Jesus is to be equated with the Temple’s demise in AD 70.

The supposed evidence for John’s interpretation of Jesus’ heaven-and-earth phrase is found in the writings of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, in the form of an allegorical explanation for the symbolism of the temple. This allegory is found in Josephus’ book, The Antiquities of the Jews.[10] The allegory is extensive. It includes such things as the detailed meaning of the high priest’s garments. But the core of the allegory focuses on the temple’s two major sections, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, the first standing for the earth and the second for Heaven, in Josephus’ explanation.

Before we look closely at Josephus’ words and see why they can’t help John Noe’s case under any conditions, we need to recognize that Jospehus was not even born until four years after Jesus’ crucifixion. And the book John cites, Josephus’ Antiquities, was written about AD 93. The lateness of Josephus’ writing is enough to sink the idea that his words are evidence of the way Jews of Jesus’ time thought.

To be thorough, however, we’ll forget the timing of Josephus’ statements and look at the nature of what he wrote. As already indicated, whatever the conditions and time of Josephus’ Antiquities, its statements about the temple do not help John’s case.

In Josephus’ analysis of the temple’s symbolic meaning, the outer chamber of the temple (the Holy Place) corresponds to “man’s dwelling place.” In describing the human habitat, symbolized in this part of the Jewish house of worship, Josephus included lots of details--the earth, the land, the sea, even the plants and flowers that grow here (depicted on various vessels and on temple curtains). The symbolism of this outer room also included an important element that John Noe fails to include in his summation, the celestial bodies that surround the earth.[11] Notice that all these things, including the stars and planets, are a part of man’s abode, represented in the more external portion of the temple.

Josephus further explained that the inner chamber (the Holy of Holies) corresponds to Heaven, “God’s dwelling place.” He added that this Heaven is “inaccessible to man.”[12]

WHY “HEAVEN AND EARTH” CANNOT BE A REFERENCE TO THE TEMPLE

There are two reasons why Josephus’ temple allegory cannot be used to show that “Heaven and earth” was, at any time, a standard Jewish reference to the temple: 1. Josephus never called the temple Heaven and earth. 2. The kind of ideas Josephus expressed have nothing to do with the thinking of common Jews of Jesus’ time or later.

To our explanation of these reasons, we will add a third observation concerning John Noe’s use of Isaiah 51:6, in this context. We will note and explain that Isaiah’s prediction that “the heavens” would vanish is not compatible with John Noe’s explanation of Matthew 24:35, which would be a statement that “Heaven” (God’s dwelling place) would vanish.

The test begins. See if you can do better than John Noe at grasping explanations of the three points just listed. Our first point is:

Josephus never called the temple “Heaven and earth” because that would have been a metaphor, and, in this case, Josephus used similes that were arranged into an allegorical analogy.

A simile is an objective, detached comparison between two things. It is analytical in its intent and structure. That is the way Josephus viewed the temple. He was stating that the holy structure was like Heaven and earth in its arrangement and contents. Specifically, he wrote that the temple was “an imitation” of these realities.[13] “Like” and “imitation” are words that introduce similes and analogies, not metaphors.[14] Similes and analogies maintain some distance between the things being compared.

By contrast, metaphors are much more intense in suggesting comparisons. One thing is identified with another in a metaphor, and the identification often either exalts or degrades the thing being compared. “The Lord is my shepherd” (a metaphor) emphasizes God’s care for his people in a way that “The Lord is like my shepherd” (simile) does not. Likewise, when John the Baptist called hypocritical religious leaders “offspring of vipers” (metaphor), the reference stuck and stung in a way that “you are like the offspring of vipers” (simile) never could.

Josephus saw an analogy between the temple and the realities that he believed it represented. He was being objective. A metaphor would not have served Josephus’ analytical purpose. He did not intend to identify the temple with Heaven and earth in a figurative way. So he never wrote that the one is the other. He only wanted to show how the temple resembled and represented greater realities.

How are you doing so far? Do you get the difference between metaphors and the weaker forms of comparison, similes and analogies? Do you see that Josephus used the latter and not the former? that he never gave the temple the title, “Heaven and earth?” Now, to our second point:

The kinds of things Josephus wrote about the temple were of no value to the common Jew because Josephus was a Neoplatonist, and most Jews, in Jesus’ time and afterward, were not.

William Whiston, who translated Josephus’ works into English, wrote that the ancient author’s allegory of the temple was borrowed from the Neoplatonic philosopher, Philo. Whiston stated that Josephus’ explanation of the temple is “fitted to Gentile philosophical notions,” not to “ancient Jews.”[15] So--and we can keep this very simple--whatever Josephus wrote would not have been taken seriously by most Jews of Jesus’ day, even if he had lived at that time and common Jews had heard about them. (I am not aware of any evidence that Neoplantonic philosophical discussions, from any source, ever made it to the streets of first century Jerusalem.)

No lengthy pause is needed here. We have made our case if we said nothing more. And our case is, John Noe has no case. Josephus never used the metaphor, “The temple is Heaven and earth,” and the sort of things he wrote could have had no bearing on the thought patterns of the Jews to whom Jesus was speaking in Matthew 24.

Our third point is a little more complex, but if you’ve followed everything so far, the rest should give you no problem, and you’re way ahead of John Noe.

In this point, we emphasize the disjunction between the metaphor that John thinks Josephus and Jesus used and the statements about the fate of the heavens and earth that were common among the prophets. The third point is:

Isaiah’s prediction that “the heavens” would vanish is not compatible with Jesus statement that “Heaven” will pass away, if we go along with John Noe and say that Jesus had a Josephus-like meaning.

If for argument’s sake we were to accept John’s use of Josephus’ allegory to explain what Jesus said, then the “heavens” in Isaiah 51:6 would not be the “Heaven” in Matthew 24:35. John missed this fact because he didn’t catch the significance of an important element in Josephus’ temple allegory that he mentions and another element that he didn’t catch.

John summarizes Josephus in this way:

Josephus calls [the Temple's] outer tabernacle “an imitation of the system of the world” and “sea and land, on which men live.” By contrast, the inner, Most Holy Place he terms “a heaven peculiar to God.” The veil that separated the two “was very ornamental, and embroidered with all sorts of flowers which the earth produces.”[16]

Now check out a couple of things about John's explanation of Josephus. First, notice something that John has written here. He tells us that God has a dwelling place that is “peculiar” to Him. Second, notice something that he has omitted about man’s dwelling place as Josephus described it. (We have already mentioned this detail earlier.) Josephus includes the visible heavens as part of the place where man dwells. Let’s take these details, one at a time.

THE NEOPLATONIC HEAVEN

As John reports, Josephus’ version of Heaven is “peculiar to God.” But what does that mean? John gives no explanation, but Josephus did. He stated that Heaven is “inaccessible to man.” So Heaven is peculiar to God, in Josephus’ mind, because no one else has access to it. To a Neoplatonist like Josephus, Heaven is an eternal place that is too pure to entertain anything less than the Eternal God alone. Because John rotely repeats a key phrase from Josephus and fails to probe its meaning, he doesn’t catch the Neoplatonic twist in Josephus’ view of Heaven. Now we turn to what John leaves out of his summary.

THE NEOPLATONIC “HEAVENS”

John does not give the full inventory in Josephus’ list of the things that are within the scope of man’s dwelling place. Josephus’ rather extensive itemization of the human habitat included more than what was on the surface of the earth. Man’s world, in contrast with God’s, includes the celestial bodies that are visible from earth. So the heavens that Isaiah talked about are part of the “man's dwelling place” that Josephus talked about. And the Heaven of Josephus was not a part of Isaiah’s prophecy at all! When the prophet wrote that the heavens would vanish, he was not talking about God’s eternal home, in either a Jewish or Neoplatonic sense. Furthermore, since Heaven, in Josephus’ allegory, is a place where no man can go, except in thought, it’s a place that can never be destroyed.

Now we will state this third point in one sentence. (This is a little technical so we’ll break it down.) (1) If, contrary to fact, we assume that Josephus used a temple-equals-Heaven-and-earth metaphor and (2) if we assume that Jesus accepted such a metaphor and used it in Matthew 24:35, then (3) Jesus’ statement would not parallel Isaiah’s.

Isaiah stated that the visible heavens will vanish, but Jesus would have been saying that God’s eternal home will pass away! John Noe believes that both “the heavens” and “Heaven” are figurative expressions to be applied to Israel’s fall. But that is beside the point I am making. The statement of Isaiah that John Noe quotes, Isaiah 51:6, and the statement that he imagines Jesus made in Matthew 24:35 are radically different.

I now include a reaction to John that will be dealt with more extensively in chapter two and even more thoroughly in chapter three. This comment has to do with the supposed figurative intent of Isaiah 51:6. John states, matter-of-factly, that Isaiah meant to say, “the ‘world’ of heaven and earth which was to be destroyed was the Temple and the Jewish religious system.” Just how realistic is John’s explanation of Isaiah’s statement in 51:6? Was Isaiah being intentionally nonliteral when he talked about the passing of the heavens and earth?

WILL THE REAL HEAVEN AND EARTH PLEASE--VANISH!?

Let’s read the prophecy again in The New King James Version, and then consider a few comments about it:

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look on the earth beneath. For the heavens will vanish away like smoke, the earth will grow old like a garment, and those who dwell in it will die in like manner; but my salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will not be abolished. (Isaiah 51:6)

“The heavens” and “the earth” in this prophecy do not stand for something else. They are not figurative. Good grief! Isaiah told his hearers to look at the heavens and then look at the earth. He was talking about them, not something they represent.

I can imagine John Noe painting another pretty preterist picture of Isaiah, as he did of Jesus in Matthew 24:35. This time, Isaiah would gesture toward the temple, instructing the people to focus in that direction while he spoke. These are the kinds of additions to Scripture John must make if he is to maintain his preterist belief.

The Bible tells us nothing about the movement of either Isaiah’s or Jesus’ hands or eyes at the time they made their statements. And there is a good reason why these details are not reported. Isaiah and Jesus did not have to gesture to convey their meaning. They both were talking about the sky above and the earth beneath. Both stated that a cosmic, heaven-and-earth holocaust is coming. This is especially obvious in Isaiah’s prophecy.

When expressing a figure of speech, a person doesn’t instruct his hearers to use their eyes to study precisely what he is talking about. Isaiah could have found no better means of emphasizing the fate of the heavens and earth than to tell his hearers to look at them while he predicted their destruction. The only figures of speech in Isaiah’s statement are the similes, “like smoke” and “like a garment,” that describe the fate of the cosmos.

Now, we return to the discussion at hand, John Noe’s verbal abuse of Josephus.

A SUMMARY OF THE MEANING OF "HEAVEN AND EARTH" IN MATTHEW

Though our third point was a little technical, I hope you’re still with me. Let’s review all three points in order to avoid any confusion. Have I been clear enough in each of them? After pointing out that Josephus wasn’t born until four years after Jesus’ public ministry, I argued that, even if we ignore the chronology:

1. Josephus did not call the temple “Heaven and earth.”
2. Ordinary Jews of any time period would have paid no attention to the kinds of ideas Josephus advocated, no matter what they were, because they were rooted in Gentile philosophy and not the ancient faith.
3. Thinking in a purely hypothetical way, if Jesus had used the metaphor that John Noe falsely attributes both to Josephus and Jesus, the Lord’s statement that Heaven will pass away would have gone far beyond Isaiah's statement that the heavens will vanish.

If you understand all this and if you know John Noe, please tell him that he is wrong about Josephus, or at least explain he must answer these legitimate objections. If he continues to spread his version of Josephus’ temple allegory without explaining away its weaknesses, he joins the famous category of teachers that Jesus labeled “the blind leading the blind.”

VICTIM NUMBER FOUR: C. S. LEWIS

The most disturbing example of John’s abuse of sources outside of Scripture is the accusation he brings against C. S. Lewis. He slanders the work and memory of this great Christian apologist by misquoting him and attributing antichristian ideas to him. This will be crystal clear to you after we review things Lewis actually stated and examine John Noe’s distortions of them.

In a brilliant essay titled, The World’s Last Night, Lewis accurately summarized the accusations of present day skeptics who say that Jesus “shared, and indeed created” the “delusion” that He would return in the first century. These accusations were represented by Lewis in the form of a hypothetical quotation of skeptical scholars who address the believing church.[17]

Lewis responded to the skeptics by pointing out that Jesus had stated, “this generation shall not pass away till all these things be done.” But the Lord followed these words with a confession of His ignorance of the time when His prophecies would be fulfilled. Jesus stated:

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven nor the Son, but the Father only. (Mark 13:32)

In his essay, Lewis eagerly defended the idea that both the firm statement about “this generation” being the time of His return and the qualifying statement of Jesus’ personal ignorance were actually made by the Lord and were not conjoined by some later editor of the Gospels. Lewis indicates the unlikelihood of a Christian teacher creating either or both of these statements and attributing them to Jesus. Lewis’ point is that Christ both created a sense of strong expectation that He would come soon and limited the certainty of that expectation by an indefiniteness that should exist in every mind but the Father’s.

Lewis went on to explore the mysteries of the incarnation of the Son of God, suggested by the thought that Jesus “as a man” had a limited understanding of such things as the time of his return. The question Lewis dealt with in this part of his essay is intriguing: How can one who is God be limited and uninformed about the Second Coming or anything else?

Lewis defended the compatibility of Jesus’ human ignorance and His deity by highlighting the mysteriousness of the arrangement. His reasoning about this helps us focus on the fact that it is beyond our imagination to understand a number of necessary conditions that result from the coupling of the true deity of Christ and his true humanity. In this way, Lewis stated that we cannot get our minds around the fact that the Eternal Son was, in his human nature, without knowledge of important truth. Then he added:

Nor indeed can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined, nor the twilight of reason in his infancy; still less his merely organic life in his mother’s womb.

So C. S. Lewis was convinced that Jesus “as a man” strongly believed that His return was imminent and yet knew that “as a man” he could not be sure. Another way of saying this is, Lewis embedded in the doctrine of the Incarnation, his understanding of Jesus’ prophetic limitations. As God, Jesus knew all things. But His deity was suppressed. (Most theologians would say it was voluntarily suppressed.) So Jesus lived His human life honestly, as a mere man.

ENTER THE ABUSER

John Noe quotes part of Lewis’ essay, but somehow he either misses or hides the point of Lewis’ words. He thinks the apologist agreed with the skeptics! I add the possibility that he has intentionally hidden from the reader Lewis’ intended meaning because of the apparently deceitful way he records what Lewis had written.

Without informing us, John has eliminated from the Lewis’ quote four important elements. Each omitted factor makes a sharp contrast between what negative critics have to say about the faith and how Lewis responded:

1. John eliminates the quotation marks that separate the hypothetical words of the critics from Lewis’ response to them. 2. He eliminates the explanatory phrase, “we shall be told,” that further clarifies that it is the critics who have spoken such words, not Lewis himself. So he has Lewis, not the critics, saying,

“...[T]he apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false...Their Master...shared, and indeed created, their delusion.”[18]

3. He eliminates a paragraph division that makes Lewis’ reference to “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible” seem to be a final climactic statement rather than, in a new paragraph, the beginning of a powerful explanation and response to the enemies of our faith. 4. He ignores the context that brings to full light Lewis’ defense of the authority of Christ and the ultimate truth of what He taught.

Notice what I have already stated above, John gives no indication that he has eliminated anything from the quote. At best, this is poor practice for a writer. In this case, assuming that John has the basic gifts of reading and note taking, it is unethical because his unrevealed omissions completely change Lewis’ meaning.

John openly states that C. S. Lewis believed that Christ was deluded. And he arrogantly writes that he is “embarrassed to report” Lewis’ error, that Lewis was “embarrassed” by Jesus’ supposed error, and that he (John Noe) will show that “the embarrassment belongs to C. S. Lewis.”[19] My response is that most examples of John’s verbal twisting should merely embarrass us. In this instance, however, we should be deeply offended.

This is not funny, John, and I don't have any way of making it seem to be. You owe the heirs of C. S. Lewis, the reading public, and the Lord himself a deep, heart-felt apology.

VICTIM NUMBER FIVE: CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Our last example of John’s addictive behavior in this chapter comes from information that used to appear on his website, www.prophecyrefi.org.[20] There John had posted an announcement in capital letters, “UNIQUE END-TIMES BOOK RECEIVES AWARD FROM CHRISTIANITY TODAY," followed by:

Christianity Today magazine has named John Noe’s latest book Beyond the End Times: The Rest of the Greatest Story Ever Told as one of the top three end-times books to receive a Millennial Book Award.

In light of John’s erratic research methods, I wondered how in the world Christianity Today came to cite him as a major author on the theme of Bible prophecy. So I read the article referred to on his website, “The Millennial Book Awards,” from the October 25, 1999 CT issue.

Right away, it was obvious that the whole thing was a joke. Evidence of this was found all through the article. What serious publication would actually give awards for “the best books of the millennium,” for example--that's "of" the Millennium, not "about" the Millennium? The best books in the last thousand years? Come on. And what are we to make of the “hedge-your-bets category?” Or the division in which John Noe’s book was cited, the “and-now-for-something-a-little-different” group?

To be fair and thorough, I e-mailed the author of the article, Managing Editor Mark Galli. I asked if these book awards are to be taken seriously, and I mentioned some of John Noe’s pseudo research. Galli’s response included the following:

The “Millennial Book Awards” were done tongue-in-cheek. They do not represent real awards...Regarding Noe’s book: I am indeed aware of the research he has done.

CONCLUSION

In this last example, as with all or most of the others, I don’t think John Noe deliberately misrepresented his source. I think his problem is, he does not read things carefully. He vigorously expresses and expounds what he thinks he sees in books, newspapers, and periodicals, and he seems to be tireless in his efforts. But that doesn’t change the fact that John Noe is sadly, pitifully wrong in his abuse of what others have written. Still we should heed Napoleon’s advice:

Do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Now we turn to some of the obvious examples of John’s mistreatment of biblical authors.

NOTES