The Short Version (1 of 2)

Here's what this whole paper is about, in plain words.

Full preterism is the belief that everything the Bible ever promised about the future — Jesus coming back, the dead rising, the final judgment, a brand new heaven and earth — already happened. Not almost. All of it. In the year 70, when the Roman army destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. On this view, there is nothing left ahead of anyone, ever. History already reached its ending point almost two thousand years ago.

This is a real belief a small but serious group of Christians holds today, built mainly on the work of one man, Max King, starting in 1971. This paper asks the same hard question of full preterism that a companion paper already asked of the "rapture and tribulation" story most people are more familiar with: does this belief actually hold together the way its own teachers say it does, or does it need a lot of extra explaining that its cleanest one-sentence version hides?

Short answer: it needs a lot of extra explaining.

The single biggest problem is that full preterism's own people can't agree with each other about what "everything already happened" is even supposed to mean. Ask a roomful of full preterists twelve basic questions about their own belief — is the resurrection something that happened to individual people, or just to Israel as a group; is Jesus's own body still real somewhere, or was it destroyed; do spiritual gifts like prophecy still happen today — and in one real, documented exchange, ten out of twelve answers got rejected or seriously changed by another full preterist answering honestly. Only the bare date, the year 70 itself, survived the argument. Everything built on top of that date came apart.

Other things this paper checks, and finds standing on very thin ground:

• Nobody who actually watched the events of the year 70 happen — including a detailed Jewish historian who was there and wrote about the war page by page — ever mentions graves opening or Jesus visibly coming back. If the biggest event in human history happened that year, the one man positioned to see it never saw it.
• Two men in this movement, in the very same online conversation, in the same week, gave opposite answers to a basic question: does a place for the unsaved dead still exist right now? One said yes. One said no. Same date, same movement, no agreement on what currently exists.
• The way full preterism reads difficult verses as symbols instead of literal events has no natural stopping point built into it. Some people inside this same movement have used that identical method to argue there was no literal Adam and no literal flood either — which, once you see the method, isn't a coincidence. A method with no brakes doesn't stop where you'd like it to.
• The New Testament itself names this exact teaching — "the resurrection has already happened" — and calls it a wound spreading through the church like a disease (2 Timothy 2:17-18). That's not a modern critic's opinion. It's Paul, writing directly against the claim this movement makes.
• The church has kept taking communion "until He comes" and telling people to "watch, for you don't know the day" for almost two thousand years since the date full preterism says all of that already happened. Either the church has been saying words that point at nothing, or the coming they're pointing to is still ahead.
• One branch of this movement leans heavily on the word "mystery" to describe exactly the events that create the biggest evidentiary problems — and in the New Testament, "mystery" never means "an event nobody could check." It means something once hidden that God has now made known. That's the opposite of how the word gets used here.
• If this really happened once, it's supposedly been happening to every believer who has died for nearly two thousand years, one at a time, unseen. Nothing that large and that long-running should leave zero trace anywhere in how Christians have actually described dying, across every century and every tradition — and that trace isn't there.
• Where this movement's more radical wing denies Christ's own risen body was a real, physical body, that runs straight into Jesus eating fish in front of frightened disciples specifically to prove He wasn't a ghost. That's not a symbol. That's Him settling the question Himself, on purpose, in the moment it mattered most.
• Paul says the last thing that has to happen before God's kingdom is fully handed over is death itself being destroyed — not a covenant ending, not a law being canceled. Revelation says the finished new world has no more death, no more crying, no more pain. Both of those are still happening, every day, right now.