Medieval Preterism

Peter Olivi is one of a number of medieval exegetes who placed enormous significance on the fall of Jerusalem. In part, this was driven by anti-Jewish polemics; they argued that prophecies foretold that the Messiah would come and the temple sacrifice would be ended – since the temple sacrifice has ended, the Messiah must have come. Olivi’s preterism, though, is partly driven by Joachimite interests, and also by an effort to work out whether the Jews could have known the timing of the Messiah’s arrival from the Old Testament (he thinks they could, not least from Daniel 9).