Mark recounts that Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked Jesus privately, as he was sitting opposite the Temple on the mountain, "Tell us, when will these things (plural) happen?

Henry Alford argues that the use of the plural, these things, "implies that they viewed the destruction of the temple as part of a great series of events, which had now by frequent prophecy become familiar to them".

[15][16] It was the general belief that if the Messiah had arrived in Jerusalem, the final Messianic victory and the kingdom of God were close at hand.

[18] Acts of the Apostles 5:36-37 contains a description given by Gamaliel about Theudas and Judas the Galilean, both also mentioned by Josephus, who also claimed to be leaders of new movements.

Mark inserts his own comments to the reader about the abomination, suggesting the phrase was some kind of code between him and his audience.

He then uses the parable of the Man Going On a Far Journey to describe his followers as his servants watching their master's house waiting for him to return.

The most straightforward is that there will be a horrible event in Judea and that at some unspecified time Jesus will come and gather his "elect", the term early Christians used to refer to themselves.

The statement that "this generation" will still be around to see the coming of these things has posed problems for those who hold that this is a literal prediction of the end of the world, and has given rise to such legends as the Wandering Jew.

Others think Jesus is just using the apocalyptic language of his time symbolically, as many Jewish prophets did, to highlight the fact that Christian suffering and Jerusalem's destruction, though seemingly the end of the world, are necessary to achieve what Jesus deems will be the final victory of good over evil and that this generation refers to seeing Jerusalem's destruction.

By using these two quotations together, Jesus might be comparing the Roman domination Israel is currently undergoing to the Babylonian captivity it had undergone six centuries previously.

"The elect" will be "gathered" from every part of the world and "unto Heaven", a reversal of Zechariah 2:10 where God would come and live among his chosen.

God rounding up his chosen people is found in many Old Testament books, but none have the Son of Man doing this, showing how Jesus had altered the prophecies about the Messiah.

Paul, in 1 Thessalonians, probably the earliest surviving Christian document, speaks of how Jesus rescues us from the coming "wrath" or "anger" in 1:10.

He also says that "we", Paul and the other Christians, would see Jesus return to raise the dead in their lifetime in 4:13-18, but not exactly when, saying immediately after in chapter 5:2 that it will come like "a thief in the night".

The ideas of Jesus' imminent return and the final messianic triumph coupled with that of it being delayed until an unknown date in the future, or perhaps until after death, have always characterized Christian thought through the ages.

A description of the end times is greatly expanded in the Book of Revelation, which describes itself as a vision given by Jesus after his death to the author.

Here, too, are predictions of immediate upheavals (1:3) coupled with delays in the final working out of God's plan of thousands of years or even indefinite periods of time (20).

[26] Jesus entered Jerusalem in Mark 11 in the manner of the messiah who would bring God's kingdom on Earth, then cursed the fig tree outside the Temple in which he fought with the money changers.

He then ends with a prediction of the Temple's destruction and then uses the fig tree as metaphor to show how what Jesus has described will lead to the coming of God's kingdom.

In the next and final section Mark shows the necessity of suffering, Jesus' Passion, as a part of God's plan.