The Plain Reading Needs Borrowed Machinery It Denies Needing

CBV's redefinitions — death is spiritual not physical, "body of flesh" is a covenantal category, resurrection is corporate — don't emerge naturally from the text. They require an entire imported anthropology: a mid-twentieth-century Hebraic-versus-Greek framework,⁷ without which, the system's own advocates argue, "most Bible students" have misread Paul for two thousand years.

IBV's own adherents won't co-sign that dependency. They say the AD-70 position "doesn't stand or fall" on it.

So the redefinitions that are supposed to be the plain sense of the text turn out to need scaffolding that even the system's own defenders won't universally agree is load-bearing. A plain reading that requires an imported twentieth-century framework to feel non-arbitrary was never actually plain.

Seam Four: Live, Right Now, Unresolved

This isn't a historical curiosity. It's happening in real time, and it runs deeper than one disputed doctrine.

Two full preterists — Thomas Jensen and Brad M. Baker, in the same comment thread, in the same week²⁰ — were asked whether a place for the unsaved dead currently exists. Jensen said yes — Hades remains a real destination for sin. Baker said no — Hades was abolished entirely, for everyone, at AD 70. Same date. Same movement. Opposite answers to a basic question about what currently exists.

That's the smaller version of this problem. Here is the larger one, and it doesn't just pit one full preterist against another — it catches the movement's own most-cited answer to Seam Two contradicting itself.

Edward E. Stevens, in his own foreword to a republished edition of James Stuart Russell's The Parousia, writes: "If the angelic armies literally seen in the clouds at AD 66 were the fulfillment of 'every eye shall see Him' (Revelation 1:7)... then it was also the fulfillment of Acts 1:11!"⁴⁹ That is a claim of literal, physical visibility — armies, seen, in the sky, in AD 66. Elsewhere, discussing the same return, the same Stevens writes: "Since that generation passed, those events (including His return) must already have happened... We now know (historically) the day and hour of His return (70 A.D.)."⁵⁰ Two different years for the one event neither passage treats as symbolic. A compiled archive of full-preterist source material has already put the obvious question to this directly, without ever getting an answer from either side of the movement: "So which is it, AD 66 or AD 70? Can't be both. Or is there a THIRD COMING?"⁵¹

That contradiction alone would belong in this seam. What makes it worth more than that is what it does to Seam Two. This essay's account of full preterism's strongest reply to the witness problem rests on Stevens's own explanation that the AD 66-70 events were invisible by nature — an unseen-realm transition that would, by its very design, leave no eyewitness behind. That explanation cannot be squared with the same man, elsewhere, describing armies literally seen in the clouds. Either something was visible in AD 66, in which case Stevens owes the same witness his own invisibility argument was built to excuse the absence of — who saw the armies, and where did they say so — or nothing was visible, in which case his own foreword is simply wrong about what happened that year. Both branches cost him something. Neither one leaves the invisibility defense standing the way Seam Two originally credited it.

And Baker's own Statement of Faith sides against Stevens on the visibility question specifically: "the Parousia was not a physical return visible to the entire world, but a Spiritual appearing."⁵² Two men, both working inside the individual-body, rapture-affirming wing of the same movement, cannot agree on the single question this entire essay has spent two full seams testing — whether there was anything to see.

A third data point, on a different verse, shows the same pattern isn't confined to Stevens. William Bell, arguing inside the same compiled archive, identifies "the creation" of Romans 8:19-23 as Old Covenant Israel specifically — not mankind broadly, not "even the wicked" the way Baker has framed it elsewhere, but the Jewish nation under the law, delivered from "the bondage of sin-death" at AD 70.⁵³ That's a third distinct answer to a question already shown unresolved between Baker and his own Romans 8:21 argument: who, exactly, is "the creation" being delivered. Jensen and Baker can't agree on Hades. Baker and Stevens can't agree on whether anything was visible. Baker and Bell can't agree on who Romans 8 is even about. The AD-70 date alone settles far less than it feels like it settles from inside the system.