Before All These Things: Is Luke 21 Really Describing the Same Event as Matthew 24?
Authors: Jeffrey Bramlett
There is an assumption about the Olivet Discourse that seems so natural that it is rarely examined closely.
In Matthew 24, Jesus tells his disciples that when they see “the abomination of desolation” spoken of by Daniel standing in the holy place, those in Judea should flee to the mountains. In Luke 21, Jesus tells them that when they see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, those in Judea should flee.
The parallel seems obvious. Matthew has an abomination followed by flight. Luke has armies followed by flight. Therefore, it is commonly assumed, Luke's armies must be his way of describing Matthew's abomination.
Perhaps they are.
But the conclusion does not actually follow from the similarity alone.
Two different warning signs can require exactly the same response. A fire alarm may tell someone to evacuate a building; visible smoke may tell that same person to evacuate. The common response does not make the alarm and the smoke identical. In the same way, two events that both require people in Judea to flee need not therefore be the same event.
Once that possibility is allowed, something interesting happens. Instead of beginning with the assumption that Luke must be paraphrasing Matthew, we can ask a simpler question: What sequence of events does each Gospel actually describe?
That question leads to a rather different picture of the Olivet Discourse.
A Small Phrase That Changes Luke's Chronology
Luke begins much as Matthew and Mark do. Jesus warns about deceivers, wars and disturbances. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes, famines and pestilences, along with terrifying phenomena and signs from heaven.
Matthew and Mark give this complex an important description: these things are the “beginning of birth pains.”
That metaphor should not be passed over too quickly.
The significance of labor pains is not simply that pain occurs. Labor is recognizable because a pattern of events is unfolding toward a particular climax. The pains mean something precisely because they belong to a process that portends what is approaching.
That does not mean Jesus supplied a mathematical prediction requiring earthquakes to increase by some measurable percentage or wars to follow a statistical curve. But the metaphor becomes virtually meaningless if no recognizable pattern is required at all. Wars, famines and earthquakes have occurred throughout human history. Merely finding examples of each does not explain why Jesus called the complex the beginning of labor pains.
The proposed fulfillment must therefore account for more than isolated occurrence. The events must plausibly function together as the recognizable beginning of a developing travail.
Then Luke does something unexpected.
After introducing this larger complex, he says:
“But before all these things…” — Luke 21:12
Those words are easy to read past, but chronologically they are significant. Luke has just described one group of events and then expressly tells the reader that what he is about to discuss happens before them.
What follows is persecution. The disciples will be arrested, brought into synagogues and prisons, appear before kings and governors, give testimony, receive wisdom their opponents cannot resist, suffer betrayal and, in some cases, death.
The resemblance to the apostolic experience recorded later in Acts is difficult to miss. Acts repeatedly presents arrests, synagogue opposition, imprisonment, appearances before rulers, testimony and martyrdom. Stephen's opponents are even described as unable to resist the wisdom with which he spoke, closely recalling Jesus' promise in Luke 21.
The important point is not merely that these things happened in the first century. It is that Luke explicitly places this persecution material “before all these things.”
Luke's order on the page, therefore, is not simply chronological. He has introduced one horizon and then deliberately moved backward to describe events that precede it.
That observation should make us cautious about assuming that every paragraph following Luke 21:12 must correspond sequentially to the paragraphs occupying the same approximate position in Matthew and Mark.
And what Luke describes next makes that caution even more important.
Luke Tells Us What Happens to Jerusalem
All three Synoptic Gospels begin the Olivet Discourse with the same historical problem.
Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple.
Matthew records him saying that not one stone will be left upon another. Mark records essentially the same prediction. Luke does as well.
The disciples are looking at the actual Second Temple standing before them, and Jesus tells them that it will be destroyed. That prediction has an obvious historical fulfillment in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in A.D. 70.
But after announcing the Temple's destruction, Matthew and Mark never give the kind of explicit description of Jerusalem's fall that we might expect.
They do not later tell us that Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies. They do not describe its inhabitants falling by the sword, survivors being carried captive among the nations, or Jerusalem entering a continuing period of Gentile domination.
Luke does.
Jesus says:
“When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.”
Those in Judea are to flee. Those inside Jerusalem are to leave. Those outside are warned not to enter. Jesus describes days of vengeance and wrath upon the people. Some will fall by the sword. Others will be led captive among the nations. Jerusalem will then be trampled by Gentiles “until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”
This is not a vague description of distress. It is a remarkably concrete Jerusalem-judgment narrative.
And that raises a question that deserves more attention than it normally receives.
What if Luke 21:20–24 is not Luke's substitute for Matthew's abomination passage at all?
All three evangelists began by announcing the Temple's destruction. Luke may simply be the evangelist who preserves the explicit portion of Jesus' answer describing what happens to Jerusalem when that judgment arrives.
If so, we no longer need to assume that Matthew's abomination and Luke's armies are identical merely because both warnings result in flight.
Luke may be describing the historical catastrophe of Jerusalem that all three Gospels announced at the beginning, while Matthew and Mark preserve additional prophetic material.
And Matthew himself gives us a reason to consider that possibility.
Matthew Does Not Tell Us to Interpret the Abomination Through Luke
When Matthew introduces the abomination of desolation, he tells the reader where to look for its meaning:
“the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet.”
He even adds, “let the reader understand.”
That is an explicit interpretive instruction. Before defining Matthew's abomination by Luke's armies, we should first ask what Daniel contributes to the expression Matthew deliberately invokes.
Daniel 11:31 is particularly instructive. There, military forces arise, the sanctuary is profaned, the regular sacrifice is removed, and the abomination is established.
The military forces and the abomination clearly belong to the same crisis. But that does not make them the same thing. The forces participate in producing the sanctuary crisis in which the abomination is established.
That distinction is simple but important.
An army can cause an abomination. It can protect an abomination. It can establish an abomination. It can participate in the events surrounding an abomination.
None of those propositions means that the army itself is necessarily the abomination.
Consequently, the presence of armies in Luke does not by itself explain Matthew's explicit appeal to Daniel.
The historical background associated with Daniel makes the distinction even more interesting.
An Earlier Abomination Had Already Created a Pattern
Long before the Olivet Discourse, Jewish history had already witnessed a crisis associated with the abomination language of Daniel.
Under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the sanctuary was desecrated, legitimate Jewish worship was suppressed, and Jews who refused apostasy suffered persecution. Some fled. Mountain and wilderness refuge became necessary. Possessions were abandoned. Families were endangered. Sabbath observance itself became a point of deadly vulnerability.
Now compare the pattern in Matthew.
Jesus speaks of the Danielic abomination in a sacred location. Those in Judea must flee to the mountains. The person on the housetop must not return for possessions. The person in the field must not turn back for a garment. Pregnant and nursing women face special danger. The disciples are even instructed to pray that their flight will not occur on a Sabbath. Then comes great tribulation.
This does not prove that Jesus was merely predicting a replay of Antiochus.
It establishes something more modest and, for our purposes, more important. Jewish readers already possessed a historical framework in which military power, sanctuary desecration, abomination, persecution and flight belonged to one crisis without being identical events.
That makes it much less obvious that Luke's surrounding armies should simply be renamed Matthew's abomination.
There is another difficulty as well.
A Warning Sign Has to Come in Time to Warn
Jesus does not present Matthew's abomination merely as something future historians will recognize after the fact.
It is a warning.
The order is straightforward: see it, understand it, flee.
That sequence places a practical constraint upon any proposed fulfillment. Whatever the abomination is, it must become recognizable while obedience to Jesus' command remains possible.
This creates problems for interpretations that locate the abomination only after the Temple has been conquered or at a point when Jerusalem and its surrounding population are already trapped.
A sign that becomes identifiable only after escape is no longer possible does not function naturally as an evacuation warning.
The proposed fulfillment therefore has to do more than resemble something abominable. It must fit the chronology Jesus gives:
sign, recognition, flight.
Luke's warning works exactly that way. Jerusalem surrounded by armies signals that its desolation is near. The surrounding armies are therefore an approaching judgment signal.
Matthew's warning must likewise be allowed to perform the function Matthew assigns to it.
But the largest chronological problem appears when we compare what happens after these respective crises.
Luke Says “Until.” Matthew Says “Immediately After.”
Luke's Jerusalem narrative does not end when the battle ends.
Some inhabitants fall by the sword. Others are carried captive among the nations. Jerusalem enters a condition of Gentile trampling.
Then Luke gives that condition a boundary:
Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.
Luke does not tell us in this sentence how long that period lasts. It would be equally unwarranted to extract two thousand years from the word until as it would be to assume that the period must terminate within a few years.
What Luke does tell us is that Jerusalem's condition extends toward a terminus.
The conquest can initiate that condition without requiring the act of conquest to be continuously repeated throughout every moment of it. The important chronological point is simply that Luke carries Jerusalem forward under Gentile trampling until something reaches fulfillment.
Matthew's sequence is different.
After the abomination, flight and great tribulation, Matthew says:
“Immediately after the tribulation of those days…”
Then the sun is darkened, the moon is affected, the stars fall, the powers of heaven are shaken, and the Son of Man appears.
Matthew therefore gives us a tightly connected sequence: abomination, flight, tribulation, immediately after, cosmic signs and the Son of Man.
Luke gives us Jerusalem's judgment, sword, captivity, dispersion, Gentile trampling, until, and then cosmic signs.
Those structures fit naturally if Luke's Jerusalem catastrophe and Matthew's later tribulation occupy different positions in the larger discourse.
But if Luke 21:20–24 and Matthew 24:15–28 are assumed to describe exactly the same event, a question immediately arises:
How does Luke's “until” relate to Matthew's “immediately after”?
The command to flee cannot answer that question.
And then something remarkable happens in Luke's text.
Suddenly, the Three Gospels Line Up Again
Immediately after Luke mentions the times of the Gentiles, he begins describing signs in the sun, moon and stars. The powers of heaven are shaken. Then the Son of Man is seen coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
At this point the correspondence with Matthew and Mark becomes extraordinarily close.
Matthew describes the sun, moon and stars, the shaking of heavenly powers, the Son of Man, clouds, power and glory.
Mark describes essentially the same sequence.
Luke does too.
That level of correspondence is much more distinctive than the similarities used earlier to identify Luke's armies with Matthew's abomination.
“Danger,” “desolation,” “Judea” and “flight” can occur in many historical crises. But the ordered cluster of sun, moon, stars, shaken heavenly powers, Son of Man, clouds, power and glory is highly distinctive.
This creates an intriguing structural possibility.
Perhaps Luke diverges from Matthew and Mark because he has moved backward to preserve the apostolic persecution and Jerusalem-destruction material. He follows Jerusalem's catastrophe through captivity and Gentile domination to its stated terminus. Then, at Luke 21:25, he rejoins the prophetic horizon Matthew and Mark have been describing.
If that is what Luke is doing, the sudden convergence is exactly where we should expect to find it.
The argument is not based upon one word. It is based upon the changing pattern of correspondence itself.
And there is one more suggestive contrast.
Jerusalem Is Scattered; the Elect Are Gathered
Luke describes Jerusalem's population being carried away into the nations.
The direction is outward: from Jerusalem into the nations.
Matthew later describes angels gathering the elect from the four winds. Mark does the same.
The direction is now reversed: from widespread locations into a gathering.
This does not prove that Luke's captives and Matthew's elect are identical populations, and the argument does not require that claim.
The narrower observation is enough.
Luke's Jerusalem catastrophe ends in dispersion.
Matthew and Mark's consummative sequence ends in gathering.
Placed within the chronology we have been examining, the movement is striking: Jerusalem is judged and its population scattered among the nations; a Gentile period follows; cosmic signs appear; the Son of Man comes; and the elect are gathered.
Again, no single feature proves the entire reconstruction. But the pieces continue to point in the same direction.
What Happens If We Stop Forcing the Accounts Together?
A different reading of the Olivet Discourse now becomes possible.
Jesus begins by predicting the destruction of the Temple.
He introduces a complex of events that Matthew and Mark call the beginning of labor pains—not merely isolated calamities, but the recognizable beginning of a process moving toward culmination.
Luke then explicitly tells us that he is moving backward: “before all these things.”
He describes the persecution of the apostolic witnesses and then gives the Synoptics' clearest account of Jerusalem's historical catastrophe: armies, evacuation, vengeance, sword, captivity and dispersion. Jerusalem enters Gentile trampling until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.
Matthew and Mark, meanwhile, preserve the Danielic abomination complex: the abomination, urgent flight, great tribulation, false christs and prophets, extraordinary deception and signs.
Matthew then says that immediately after that tribulation the cosmic disturbances occur.
And at precisely that point Luke, Matthew and Mark are once again describing the same highly distinctive sequence: cosmic signs, shaken heavenly powers, the Son of Man, clouds, power and glory.
Matthew and Mark then describe the gathering of the elect.
Read this way, the discourse is not fragmented. It is reconstructed by allowing each evangelist to contribute information the others may omit.
Nor does this reading require denying the significance of A.D. 70.
Quite the opposite.
The destruction of Jerusalem is genuine fulfillment. Jesus predicted the destruction of the Second Temple, and Luke gives an explicit account of the catastrophe that befell Jerusalem.
The question is whether that fulfillment exhausts everything Jesus described.
That is a different proposition.
The Question Worth Asking
The usual identification of Luke's armies with Matthew's abomination feels persuasive because the two passages look similar when placed side by side:
Matthew has a warning followed by flight.
Luke has a warning followed by flight.
But once the complete event sequences are compared, the resemblance is no longer the only evidence that matters.
Luke explicitly moves backward with “before all these things.”
Luke alone gives the detailed Jerusalem siege, sword, captivity and dispersion sequence.
Matthew explicitly tells his reader to interpret the abomination through Daniel.
Daniel distinguishes military forces from the abomination they establish.
The earlier Maccabean crisis demonstrates how abomination, military power, sanctuary desecration, persecution and flight can belong to the same crisis without becoming the same event.
Matthew's abomination must function as an actionable sign: see, understand, flee.
Luke carries Jerusalem's condition forward until a terminus.
Matthew moves from his great tribulation immediately after to the cosmic signs.
And precisely where Luke reaches those cosmic signs, detailed agreement among Matthew, Mark and Luke suddenly becomes unmistakable again.
That cumulative pattern deserves an explanation.
Perhaps A.D. 70 has not been given too much significance in the Olivet Discourse. Perhaps it has been given the wrong kind of significance—treated not merely as a genuine fulfillment within the discourse, but as the chronological container into which every subsequent prophecy must be placed.
The more fundamental question is therefore not, “How can Luke's armies be made equivalent to Matthew's abomination?”
It is this:
What chronology emerges if we first allow each evangelist to say exactly what he says, and only then decide which events should be identified with one another?
That question does not settle every controversy surrounding the Olivet Discourse.
But it may change where the investigation begins.