One of the Days of the Son of Man: A Reconsideration of Luke 17:22

Abstract

And he said to the disciples, will come when you will long to see of the of the Son of and you will not see it. (Luke 17:22)Luke 17:22 a puzzle that has confounded interpreters for generations. There are several pieces to the puzzle but no clear way of fitting them together without apparently leaving out a piece or two. The main difficulty revolves around what the disciples will desire to see but will not see, one of the of the Son of (µ?αν τ?ν ?µeρ?ν το? υ?ο? το? ?νθρ?που). Scholars describe phrase as unusual,1 enigmatic,2 highly problematic,3 and a crux interpretum.4 A. R. C. Leaney's assessment still holds true today: Luke 17:22 is a verse for which no satisfactory explanation has been given.5 Any interpretation of phrase must account for two significant problems associated with it.First, it not readily apparent how the phrase to be synchronized with the other temporal designations in 17:22-37. We can list them here:* Days will come (v. 22)* One of the of the Son of Man (v. 22)* The Son of Man [in his day]6 (v. 24)* But first it necessary (v. 25)* In the of Noah (v. 26)* In the of the Son of Man (v. 26)* Until the Noah entered the ark (v. 27)* In the of Lot (v. 28)* But on the Lot leftSodom (v. 29)* On the that the Son of Man revealed (v. 30)* On that (v. 31)* On night (v. 34)The basic problem that one of the of the Son of seems to align itself temporally with the of the Son of (v. 26), which, according to the analogies of Noah and Lot (vv. 26-29) should occur before the of the Son of Man (vv. 24, 30). This creates the scenario where one of the of the Son of cannot refer to the of the Son of Man (i.e., the parousia) because it part of a period that should precede the day. This requires a significant interpretive decision. How does interpret the phrase in relation to Luke's other temporal designations?Second, the phrase presents the idea of multiple days of the Son of but unprecedented in the rest of the New Testament, which speaks of the parousia only as a singular day.7 It not as though Luke unfamiliar with idea of the parousia, since he uses elsewhere in Luke-Acts to refer to it (e.g., Acts 2:20). Furthermore, he uses in the immediate context (17:24, 30, 31). Why, then, does Luke break consistency in 17:22? Why does he write days if he supposedly means day? In view of the unanimous agreement among the New Testament writers concerning the parousia, Luke's uncommon expression suggests that he not referring to the parousia.In study, I challenge two interpretive decisions that I believe led to the problems discussed above: (1) that the days in one of the of the Son of are a temporal period, and (2) that Luke 17:22-37 about the parousia. These interpretive decisions are difficult to sustain when the evidence examined. I argue here for two alternative interpretations: (1) The days in one of the of the Son of are a collection of similar yet distinct days.8 In other words, the days refer to a set of individual that can all be classified as a day of the Son of Man. The one, then, distinguishes a specific day of the Son of from another day of the Son of Man. (2) Luke 17:22-37 best understood as describing the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem (ca. 70 CE).9 Consequently, I argue that the of the Son of (17:26) was a period prior to the destruction of Jerusalem when Jesus and his witnesses suffered and were rejected by this generation, Jesus's wicked and unperceptive Jewish contemporaries (17:25). The day of the Son of Man, then, entailed a revelatory theophany of Jesus as the glorious and suffering-yet-vindicated Messiah in order to condemn this generation (17:24, 30). …