it was already probably clear to everyone that something bad was going to happen to the Temple
I actually think this was a recontextualization of what the original saying was about.
If you look at a Mark as a work, it has a bunch of what’s called in scholarship “didactic scenes” or “Markan sandwiches” where Jesus says something in public, and then suddenly off in private is giving further explanation to the disciples.
Look more closely at the part that’s said in public in Mark 13:1-2:
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” 2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
The rest of the chapter is his private explanation to only Peter, James, John, and Andrew, where it’s suddenly very much about the temple.
But on its own, that first part could instead have been more like the theme of Shelley’s Ozymandias, that all buildings and works will eventually fall. Not a prophecy of imminent demise but the futility of escaping the ravages of time.
This is similar in tone to sayings attributed to Jesus in apocrypha, such as in the Gospel of Thomas, which has a non-linear view of time and depicts the world as already being a corpse (the work seems to connect to themes in Lucretius, who does state that the world is like a body that will one day die):
Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.”
This isn’t the only place where an apocryphal Jesus seeming to be referring to contemporary philosophical ideas in a public statement is given a didactic scene in Mark.
For example, in Mark 4 you have the sower parable, which not only borrows Lucretius’s language referring to random interactions of seeds and what survives being what multiplies (Lucretius’s work explicitly described survival of the fittest, trait inheritance from each parent, and used the term ‘seed’ in place of ‘atomos’ as it was written in Latin and not Greek) - the parable literally refers to seed that failed to reproduce as “falling by the wayside of a path,” a turn of phrase Lucretius used in book 4 of his poem to refer to failed human reproduction. And in Thomas that parable appears immediately after one about how the human being is like a large fish being selected from small fish.
But suddenly in Mark, there’s a secret explanation (the only secret explanation for a parable in the work), where it’s about proselytizing.
One of the problems with Biblical scholarship is that there’s an extensive anchoring bias towards cannonical Christianity, and that’s on top of the literal survivorship bias around the texts themselves. (The only reason we have Thomas was a single person who buried the text in a jar around the time it became deadly to possess.)
Edit: In fact, a lot of this schism in the first century seems to be centered around the women disciples the canonical tradition tried to erase. If anyone’s interested, I can go a bit more into that.
I actually think this was a recontextualization of what the original saying was about.
If you look at a Mark as a work, it has a bunch of what’s called in scholarship “didactic scenes” or “Markan sandwiches” where Jesus says something in public, and then suddenly off in private is giving further explanation to the disciples.
Look more closely at the part that’s said in public in Mark 13:1-2:
The rest of the chapter is his private explanation to only Peter, James, John, and Andrew, where it’s suddenly very much about the temple.
But on its own, that first part could instead have been more like the theme of Shelley’s Ozymandias, that all buildings and works will eventually fall. Not a prophecy of imminent demise but the futility of escaping the ravages of time.
This is similar in tone to sayings attributed to Jesus in apocrypha, such as in the Gospel of Thomas, which has a non-linear view of time and depicts the world as already being a corpse (the work seems to connect to themes in Lucretius, who does state that the world is like a body that will one day die):
This isn’t the only place where an apocryphal Jesus seeming to be referring to contemporary philosophical ideas in a public statement is given a didactic scene in Mark.
For example, in Mark 4 you have the sower parable, which not only borrows Lucretius’s language referring to random interactions of seeds and what survives being what multiplies (Lucretius’s work explicitly described survival of the fittest, trait inheritance from each parent, and used the term ‘seed’ in place of ‘atomos’ as it was written in Latin and not Greek) - the parable literally refers to seed that failed to reproduce as “falling by the wayside of a path,” a turn of phrase Lucretius used in book 4 of his poem to refer to failed human reproduction. And in Thomas that parable appears immediately after one about how the human being is like a large fish being selected from small fish.
But suddenly in Mark, there’s a secret explanation (the only secret explanation for a parable in the work), where it’s about proselytizing.
One of the problems with Biblical scholarship is that there’s an extensive anchoring bias towards cannonical Christianity, and that’s on top of the literal survivorship bias around the texts themselves. (The only reason we have Thomas was a single person who buried the text in a jar around the time it became deadly to possess.)
Edit: In fact, a lot of this schism in the first century seems to be centered around the women disciples the canonical tradition tried to erase. If anyone’s interested, I can go a bit more into that.