- Authenticity
- John P. Meier discusses this in vol 2 of “A Marginal Jew” (pg 347) and his analysis is compelling to others:
…the criterion of embarrassment makes it likely that Mark 13:32 in particular is authentic: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” If this verse is authentic, the natural conclusion would be that the contradictory verse, 13:30, is not. It will not do to try to harmonize 13:32 with v 30 and the preceding list of signs by claiming that 13:32 simply means that the exact date and time of the end (alternatively, of the coming of the Son of Man) are not known except to the Father. Verse 32 is actually quite general in its sweep: “But no one knows about [or concerning: peri] that day or hour.” The ignorance is about the final day in general, not simply about its exact time. When one considers the wide range of Gospel sayings in Mark, Q, M, and L that are attributed to Jesus and that prophesy the events preceding the end, one appreciates how embarrassing Mark 13:32 really is. To deny its authenticity, one would have to suppose that some early Christian prophet went out of his way both to attribute ignorance of the Son of Man’s coming to the exalted Son of Man himself and to contradict various prophecies about the end already attributed to the Son of Man. The authenticity of 13:32 seems a much more likely hypothesis, but that in turn connotes the inauthenticity of 13:30.
In sum, the three sayings that are the most promising candidates for logia in which Jesus sets a time limit for the kingdom’s arrival (Matt 10:23, Mark 9:1 parr.; Mark 13:30 parr.) all appear, on closer examination, to be creations of the early church.
Meaning 📜
The point of Jesus’s non-knowledge of the timing of his return in the context of Mark is only the father can know the timing of the parousia. Even if the disciples can see the nearness of the event, the exact timing is not yet known. v. 32 may be contextually related to the warning against false prophets and false Christs in v. 21-22 who may announce “Look, there he is” (the Lukan parallel adds a warning against those announcing “the time is at hand”, cf. ho kairos eggus in Revelation 22:10-12), and this warning follows a prediction that God would shorten the days (Mark 13:20), so the day and hour would be a time of God’s choosing. The rhetorical effect of v. 32 is that if the Son and the angels do not know, then surely no human would as well. Also the list of signs include things that one could claim to predict in advance. The reference to the abomination of desolation in v. 14 derives from Daniel 9:27 which is the terminus of a timeline of 490 years, and the parallel texts in 8:14, 12:11-12 have varying amounts of days and half-days leading to the end (2,300 evenings and mornings, 1,290 days, 1,335 days). Josephus was impressed that Daniel “did not only prophesy of future events, as did the other prophets, but he also fixed the time at which these would come to pass” (Antiquities 10.267). The effect of Mark 13:32 is that it is useless to determine the date through interpreting Daniel. Also Mark 13:24 says that “the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light” just before the coming of the Son of Man, and in the first century solar and lunar eclipses were perfectly predictable. Dio Cassius (Roman History 60.26) mentions the edict promulgated by Emperor Claudius announcing the 1 August AD 45 solar eclipse and explaining that it will be a natural event and not a portent of doom. One also could not know the date of the end through eclipse prediction. The time would be one of God’s choosing alone.