APOSTLE JOHN - THE "FOUNDER OF PRETERISM" ("Jesus the Preterist"?)

Gospel of John
Chapter Twenty-One

JOHN 21:22
Did John Live Until Christ's Return? 

"Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me"

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 Tarry while I am coming ?
(cf. Matthew 26:64 - 'from henceforth')

B.F. Westcott - "abide till I come] The exact force of the original is rather "while I am coming"). The "coming" is not regarded as a definite point in future time, but rather as a fact which is in slow and continuous realisation.  The prominent idea is of the interval to be passed over rather than of the end to be reached. Comp. ix. 4, xii. 35 f. ; Mark vi. 45 ; I Tim. iv. 13 ; Luke xix. 13 ; Matt. v. 25."

Alfred Edersheim - "The saying went abroad among the brethren that John was not to die, but to tarry till Jesus came again to reign, when death would be swallowed up in victory. But Jesus had not so said, only : 'If I will that he tarry while I am coming.' "

Henry Barclay Swete - "But Peter gained nothing by his curiosity but a rebuke, and a renewal of the personal command : If I will that he tarry while I am coming? what is that to thee ? follow thou me? Strange that the restoration of this great Apostle should need to be balanced, like the reward of his confession, by a stern reproof!"

J. W. McGarvey - "And there seems to be a studious indefiniteness in " If I will that he tarry while I am coming, what is that to thee? Follow thou me."

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Sir Thomas Browne (1646)
"Againe, they were mistaken in the Emphaticall apprehension, placing the consideration upon the words, If I will, whereas it properly lay in these, when I come: which had they apprehended as some have since, that is, not for his ultimate and last returne, but his comming in judgement and destruction upon the Jewes; or such a comming as it might be said, that that generation should not passe before it was fulfilled: they needed not, much lesse need we suppose such diuturnity; for after the death of Peter, John lived to behold the same fulfilled by Vespasian:⁷ nor had he then his Nunc dimittis, or went out like unto Simeon;⁸ but old in accomplisht obscurities, and having seen the expire of Daniels prediction, as some conceive, he accomplished his Revelation." (Pseudodoxia Epidemica VII:x)

Alfred Edersheim
"As He spake them, He joined the symbolic action to His 'Follow Me.' This command, and the encouragement of being in death literally made like Him — following Him — were Peter's best strength. He obeyed ; but as he turned to do so, he saw another following. As St. John himself puts it, it seems almost to convey that he had longed to share Peter's call, with all that it implied. For, St. John speaks of himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved, and he reminds us that in that night of betrayal he had been specially a sharer with Peter, nay, had spoken what the other had silently asked of him. Was it impatience, was it a touch of the old Peter, or was it a simple inquiry of brotherly interest which prompted the question, as he pointed to John : ' Lord — and this man, what ? ' Whatever had been the motive, to him, as to us all, when, perplexed about those who seem to follow Christ, we ask it — sometimes in bigoted narrowness, sometimes in ignorance, folly, or jealousy — is this the answer : 'What is that to thee ? follow thou Me.' For John also had his lifework for Christ. It was to 'tarry while He was coming ' — to tarry those many years in patient labour, while Christ was coming.

But what did it mean ? The saying went abroad among the brethren that John was not to die, but to tarry till Jesus came again to reign, when death would be swallowed up in victory. But Jesus had not so said, only : 'If I will that he tarry while I am coming.' What that 'Coming' was, Jesus had not said, and John knew not. So, then, there are things, and connected with His Coming, on which Jesus has left the veil, only to be lifted by His Own Hand — which He means us not to know at present, and which we should be content to leave as He has left them." (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, p. 651)

Ellicott’s Commentary
“Of the four, St. John alone, so far as we know, survived the destruction of Jerusalem.” (vol. 3, p. 150).

Thomas Newton (1754)
"'The coming of Christ' is also the same period with the destruction of Jerusalem, as may appear from several places in the Gospels, and particularly from these two passages; 'There are some standing here,' saith our blessed Lord, 'who shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom,' Matt xvi. 28, that is, evidently, there are some standing here who shall live, not till they end of the world, to the coming of Christ to judge mankind, but till the destruction of Jerusalem, to the coming of Christ in judgment upon the Jews. In another place, John xxi.22, speaking to Peter concerning John, he saith, 'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?' what is that to thee, if I will that he live till the destruction of Jerusalem? as in truth he did, and long. 'The coming of Christ,' and 'the conclusion of the age,' being therefore only different expressions to denote the same period with the destruction of Jerusalem, the purpose of the question plainly is, when shall the destruction of Jerusalem be, and what shall be the signs of it?'" (Newton, p. 374)

B.F. Westcott
John 21:22 "abide till I come] The exact force of the original is rather "while I am coming"). The "coming" is not regarded as a definite point in future time, but rather as a fact which is in slow and continuous realisation.  The prominent idea is of the interval to be passed over rather than of the end to be reached. Comp. ix. 4, xii. 35 f. ; Mark vi. 45 ; I Tim. iv. 13 ; Luke xix. 13 ; Matt. v. 25. "Abiding" is the correlative to "following;" and according to the manifold significance of this word it expresses the calm waiting for further light, the patient resting in a fixed position, the continuance in life. The "coming" of the Lord is no doubt primarily "the second coming" (John ii. 28) ; but at the same time the idea of Christ's "coming" includes thoughts of His personal coming in death to each believer. And yet further the coming of Christ to the Society is not absolutely one. He "came" in the destruction of Jerusalem. Thus St John did tarry till the great "coming," nor is there anything fanciful in seeing an allusion to the course of the history of the Church under the image of the history of the apostles. The type of doctrine and character represented by St John is the last in the order of development. In this sense he abides still. Comp. xiv. 3, note; and Rev. ii. 5, 16, iii. 11, xvi. 15, xxii. 7, 12, 20."  (The Gospel According to John, p. 71)

F.W. Farrar
“But the age which he attained — far surpassing, if some of our accounts are true, the ordinary three score years and ten — only deepened the impression that he would not die till Christ returned. He did not die till Christ had returned, in that sense of the ‘close of the aeon' to which His own words and that of His Apostles often point  (Farrar, The Early Days of Christianity, pp. 403-404).

John Lightfoot
“Till I come: that is, till I come to destroy the city and nation of the Jews.” (John Lightfoot, vol. 3, p. 451).

"This generation shall not pass, &c. Hence it appears plain enough, that the foregoing verses are not to be understood of the last judgment but, as we said, of the destruction of Jerusalem. There were some among the disciples (particularly John), who lived to see these things come to pass. With Matt. xvi.28, compare John xxi.22. And there were some Rabbins alive at the time when Christ spoke these things, that lived till the city was destroyed, viz. Rabban Simeon, who perished with the city, R. Jochanan Ben Zaccai, who outlived it, R. Zadoch, R. Ishmael, and others." (vol 2., p. 320).

John Humphrey Noyes
"I first advanced into actual heresy in the early part of the summer of 1833 while still a student at New Haven Seminary. In the course of my Bible studies my attention was arrested by Christ’s expression in John 21:22: "If I will that he [John] tarry till I come, what is that to thee." This seemed to imply that Jesus expected his disciple John to live until his second coming, and the disciples so construed it. The church on the contrary taught that Christ’s second coming was still far in the future. I had long been in the belief that the Bible was not a book of inexplicable riddles, and I determined to solve this mystery. Accordingly, I read the New Testament ten times with an eye on the question as to the time of Christ’s second coming, and my heart struggling in prayer for full access to the truth." (George Wallingford Noyes, ed. The Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1923), 69. )

T. Zahn
“....we can now understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of his parousia as of an event which some of his contemporaries would experience (Matthew 10:23; 16:28; John 21:22): he was referring on these occasions to the fall of Jerusalem.” (Quoted by Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Future, p. 130).

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