"This Generation Will Not Pass Away"

There are two blatant possibilities when Jesus says in Matthew 24 that "this generation will not pass away" before the cataclysmic events he just described (Matthew 24:4-35) have happened.  Either Jesus meant that a generation of people living during his ministry and hearing his words would see these events or at least live until they occurred, even if only in some "spiritual" plane, or he meant that a future generation that sees these events (or at least some of them) will be the one to witness the Second Coming.  Neither is explicitly confirmed in his early statements, but the descriptions of the Second Coming later in the chapter conflict with preterism--or they could never be shown to have happened if they manifested in some unseen, allegorical manner.  Of course, if they occurred in an allegorical manner, almost everything about the historicity of the matter is epistemologically up in the air.

The age of the Roman Empire is one of the darkest and most unjust periods of the historical record, but it is still not the case that the entire world's population would have died if "those days were not cut short," as verses 21-22 state.  Death is far from the worst thing that can befall someone, so mere mass death can hardly be said to be the worst humanity could experience with any honesty, but even the total annihilation of the Jews by the Romans in 70 AD would not amount to the loss of all human life.  Even if every Jew and Roman somehow died in the events surrounding the siege of Jerusalem, others would remain alive in other parts of the world.  Many of Matthew 24's descriptions of events before the return of Christ have a scale that far exceeds that of 70 AD outside of extreme hyperbole.

If the events of Matthew 24:4-35 mostly or wholly occurred around 70 AD, yet another example of extreme exaggeration on the part of Jesus would be his prediction that the gospel will be preached in the "whole world" before the Second Coming in verse 14.  Had the passage simply said that the gospel would reach the whole world, the natural ambiguity of language would leave it unclear if he meant the whole known world at that time, as in every region of the world the majority of people could become familiar with from cultural exchanges or stories, or literally every general region of the planet.  However, he specifies that the scope of this includes "all nations."  There is still more beyond even this that poses an enormous epistemological problem for preterism.

No historical evidence whatsoever suggests that any "sign of the Son of Man," angelic trumpet call, or gathering of Christians from around the world as mentioned in Matthew 24:30-31 were involved in the siege of Jerusalem.  If such things did occur in some "spiritual" realm, then they are at best outside the scope of Biblical or other sensory evidences, meaning that no preterist understanding of Matthew 24's grandest contents could ever be supported or even defended except by assuming that the chapter itself already describes a largely non-literal events.  This is the blatant, massive epistemological problem with preterism in the context of Matthew 24 and sometimes elsewhere.  Someone reading certain prophetic passages without assumptions will often not come to the conclusions of dispensationalists, but they will certainly not come to the conclusions of preterists either.

The ultimate consequences that follow the Second Coming itself have not been reached because the world has not been renovated into New Jerusalem by any means.  This refutes full preterism immediately.  Partial preterism then must be adhered to by arbitrarily distinguishing supposedly allegorical prophecies from literal prophecies in a vague, assumption-based manner.  At the very least, there is no evidence that key events referred to in Matthew 24 have taken place, and there is also much evidence against this idea.  The phrasing of "this generation" does not truly prove that Jesus predicted that he would return to Jerusalem in 70 AD in some mystical manner in the form of the Roman army, a group of depraved, vile soldiers that almost all would deserve death according to the criminal punishment laws of Yahweh that Jesus himself affirmed.