Critics of early Christian eschatology often allege that Mark 13:30 makes a false prediction that Jesus' second coming will occur before the end of his generation. There are multiple contextual problems with that interpretation, as I've discussed on other occasions (verse 29 excludes the second coming from the "all these things" of verse 30, and verses 32-33 deny that a date can be set for the second coming). But what if a critic would suggest that we remove verse 30 from its surrounding context and take it as a genuine record of what the historical Jesus taught, whereas the surrounding context I've referred to is inauthentic?
There are some problems with that sort of approach as well. For one thing, there's not adequate justification for elevating verse 30 above its context. What would be the basis for doing such a thing? We don't normally divide up texts like that, given factors like the usual trustworthiness of human testimony and the discontinuity of treating two portions of a document differently without a reason for treating them differently. There would have to be some overriding justification that gives us reason to treat Mark 13 differently than we normally treat a text. What would that be?
Secondly, if we're going to elevate any of these verses, verse 32 seems to be a better candidate. As I explained in a recent post, we have multiple reasons for thinking the historical Jesus said what's recorded in verse 32, more justification than we have for accepting verse 30. Verse 32 meets the criterion of embarrassment more obviously than verse 30 does. We'd have to accept something like the skeptical interpretation of verse 30 in order to conclude that verse 30 was embarrassing in a relevant way, but that interpretation is unlikely for reasons I've explained, and that interpretation of verse 30 is less obvious than the assertion of Jesus' ignorance in verse 32. Furthermore, we have a lot of evidence that the early Christians had difficulty with verse 32, whereas we don't have comparable or better evidence for their having difficulty with verse 30. Jesus' comment about his ignorance in Mark 13:32 is absent in Luke 21 and in the similar material in Acts 1:7. Some manuscripts of Mark 13 and Matthew 24 likewise leave out Jesus' reference to his ignorance. Many Christians of the patristic era who commented on Mark 13:32 and Matthew 24:36 struggled with the passages in various ways (e.g., the examples discussed in W.D. Davies and Dale Allison, Matthew 19-28 [New York, New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012], 379). Ancient heretics made much of these passages. And they're part of a larger category. Charges of ignorance were commonly brought against Jesus by ancient critics of Christianity, such as accusing him of being ignorant when choosing Judas as one of his disciples (John Cook, The Interpretation Of The New Testament In Greco-Roman Paganism [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002], 247). Charges of ignorance on Jesus' part were made in other contexts as well, and the early Christians were concerned about anticipating and responding to such objections (ibid., 141-42; Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 99). Because Mark 13:32 has Jesus himself acknowledging his ignorance and doing it so explicitly and in a context using language more associated with divinity than humanity (referring to himself as "the Son" and doing so after saying "even the angels in heaven" and just before mentioning "the Father"), it's especially unlikely to have been made up by the early Christians. So, why give preferential treatment to verse 30 over verse 32 when we have better evidence for verse 32?
Furthermore, the theme of verse 32 about general ignorance of the time of the end (independent of Jesus' ignorance in particular) is much more continuous with ancient Judaism and early Christianity than the critic's interpretation of verse 30 is. Ancient Judaism and ancient Christianity were generally opposed to setting dates, despite occasional exceptions. While Jesus may have differed from Judaism and early Christianity on this issue, that's a less continuous, less likely scenario, so the advocate of that scenario carries the burden of proof.
And how is the critic going to interpret verse 30 once it's been isolated from the surrounding context? How does the critic supposedly know that the second coming of Jesus is included in "all these things" without appealing to the surrounding context in Mark's gospel? By isolating verse 30 from its context, you're left with an undefined "all these things".
If the critic is going to appeal to an intuition, feeling, or some such thing, then that's an inadequate approach. Though something like an intuition would be better than nothing and could serve as a tiebreaker in a situation in which the evidence for two positions is evenly balanced, for example, the evidence isn't evenly balanced in this context, for reasons I've explained. And if somebody else has an intuition going in the opposite direction, as I do, then why should I agree with your intuition?
Furthermore, if Mark 13:32 was a later addition meant to revise an earlier false eschatology, why weren't similar revisions made to other passages critics often cite as alleged evidence of a false date for the second coming (Mark 9:1, Matthew 10:23)? It's unlikely that even one author would be as incompetent in editing his material as skeptics are implying. It's even more unlikely that the same sort of incompetence occurred with multiple gospels from multiple authors while addressing the same topic.
There's also the fact that the hypothetical scenario the skeptic is speculating about offers a worse explanation for the lack of concern about explaining a failed prophecy among the early Christians and the lack of reference to a failed prophecy among the early non-Christian sources. If Jesus, Paul, and other influential figures had spent so many years teaching an eschatology that was so obviously so false, it's highly unlikely that we'd see so little reflection of that eschatology in the historical record and that the Christian, heretical, Jewish, and pagan sources who lived just afterward would not only not mention that failed eschatology, but even go along with a revision of it and corroborate that revision so widely and so consistently. The best explanation for the lack of reference to a failed prophecy among the early Christian and non-Christian sources is that there was no failed prophecy.
The skeptical appeal to Mark 13:30 doesn't make sense in the larger context of Mark 13, Mark's gospel, early Christianity more broadly, or the ancient sources in general, including non-Christian ones. And isolating verse 30 from its context in Mark doesn't save the skeptic's argument. It's a bad argument, and it should be abandoned.
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