The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

V. Preterist Lee-Ends Prophecies With Jerusalem’s and Rome’s Fall

The projection of the Preterist view into the discussion in 1830, by SAMUEL LEE (1783-1852)-noted Orientalist and professor of Arabic and of Hebrew at Cambridge, ¹¹⁰ and rector of Barley, Hertfordshire (later canon of Bristol)-brought the three post-Reformation schools of interpretation again into definite conflict-the Historicist, Futurist, and Preterist. Preterism had become well-nigh dominant in the rationalistic universities of Germany. ¹¹¹ And now the noted linguist, Lee, under whom Wolff studied at Cambridge, espoused it. His Events and Times of the Visions of Daniel and St. John, first published in 1830, is strictly Preterist; that is, all the specifications of Daniel and the Apocalypse were allegedly fulfilled in the down fall of pagan Rome and the overthrow of Jewry. PFF3 596.1

A general resume must suffice: Lee builds nearly every thing around the seventy weeks of Daniel 9, not as a definite chronological term but as an indefinite period. He makes the three and a half times of Daniel 7 coincident with the last of Daniel’s seventy mystical weeks, and comprehends within it the two catastrophes-first the fall of Jerusalem and the reprobate Jewish nation, and then the heathen Roman as God’s instrument for desolating Jerusalem. So the three and a half times is the last half of Daniel’s seventieth week. ¹¹² PFF3 596.2

In the Apocalypse the seals, trumpets, and vials are synchronous, according to Lee, and are compassed in this elastic seventieth week-the fourth seal referring to Jerusalem’s fall in the middle of the week, the fifth to the pagan persecutions. The trumpets likewise depict the fall of the Jews. The wit nesses testify in the first three and a half days of the seventieth week, and are assailed in the latter three and a half days by the heathen Roman power, the beast from the abyss. Christ is the child of the church of Revelation 12, and the persecution of the beast of Revelation 13 is under heathen Rome, from Domitian to Diocletian inclusive. PFF3 596.3

Thus the devil is loosed for a little season, Lee holds, as is depicted by the sixth trumpet-the hour, day, month, and year being the same as the three and a half times. Finally, the compassing of the beloved city and the destruction of Satan and his hosts signify the fall of the pagan Roman power, with the apocalyptic new heavens and new earth, the Christian church after Constantine. So the 1,000 years constitute “the apostolic period.” Such was Lee’s strange and yet familiar Preterist view of prophecy, which was as yet shared by relatively few in Britain. PFF3 597.1