Here is story that is over six months old that belongs in my Johnny Carson “I DID NOT know that!” category. I am so amazed that considering the theological paths I travel in that nobody brought this to my attention until now. (Or maybe someone did, but I was too dense to pay attention to it.) Read the whole article at: http://coffeehousetheology.com/annerice.htm But here is the synopsis.

Anne Rice is horror fiction writer who was converted back to Christ about 10 years ago. Only recently did she announce this in a fictionalized novel about the life of the child Jesus. (An excellent book, by the way, The Lord Christ: Out of Egypt.) The main point of interest to me is the following except. She prophetically points the church to refocus on some “lost” historic doctrines that are covered in detail in two videos I produced, The Real Jesus and The Beast of Revelation: IDENTIFIED.

When you consider the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., much of the meaning of New Testament can be rediscovered in its correct covenantally orthodox interpretation. A recovery of this truth will once and for all refute both the liberals historical critics” and the oddball yet conservative dispensationalist theologians. Here is the except. Be sure to read the highlighted part! Ken Gentry of course, is the featured speaker in The Beast of Revelation: IDENTIFIED.

The Gospels: Written Long After The Fact?
By Anne Rice

Another point bothered me a great deal. All these skeptics insisted that the Gospels were late documents, that the prophecies in them had been written after the Fall of Jerusalem. But the more I read about the Fall of Jerusalem, the more I couldn’t understand this. The Fall of Jerusalem was horrific, and involved an enormous and cataclysmic war, a war that went on and on for years in Palestine, followed by other revolts and persecutions, and punitive laws. As I read about this in the pages of S.G.F. Brandon, and in Josephus, I found myself amazed by the details of this appalling disaster in which the greatest Temple of the ancient world was forever destroyed. I had never truly confronted these events before, never tried to comprehend them. And now I found it absolutely impossible that the Gospel writers could not have included the Fall of the Temple in their work had they written after it as critics insist.

It simply didn’t and doesn’t make sense. These Gospel writers were in a Judeo-Christian cult. That’s what Christianity was. And the core story of Judaism has to do with redemption from Egypt, and redemption from Babylon. And before redemption from Babylon there was a Fall of Jerusalem in which the Jews were taken to Babylon. And here we have this horrible war. Would Christian writers not have written about it had they seen it? Would they not have seen in the Fall of Jerusalem some echo of the Babylonian conquest? Of course they would have. They were writing for Jews and Gentiles. The way the skeptics put this issue aside, they simply assumed the Gospels were late documents because of these prophecies in the Gospels. This does not begin to convince.

2000-Year Embarrassment

Before I leave this question of the Jewish War and the Fall of the Temple, let me make this suggestion, When Jewish and Christian scholars begin to take this war seriously, when they begin to really study what happened during the terrible years of the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the revolts that continued in Palestine right up through Bar Kokhba, when they focus upon the persecution of Christians in Palestine by Jews; upon the civil war in Rome in the ‘60s which Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., so well describes in his work Before Jerusalem Fell; as well as the persecution of Jews in the Diaspora during this period—in sum, when all of this dark era is brought into the light of examination—Bible studies will change. Right now, scholars neglect or ignore the realities of this period. To some it seems a two-thousand-year-old embarrassment and I’m not sure I understand why. But I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that hey were written before all this ever happened. That’s why they were preserved without question thought the contradicted one another. They came from a time that was, for later Christians, catastrophically lost forever.