This article is titled the concept of parousia in New Testament: It’s Implication for 21st
Century Church. The paper attempts to reconcile the tension between the imminence of the
parousia and its delay in New Testament. This writer discovers that it is improbable that Jesus ever taught or suggested that his return would definitely and necessarily happen soon. Rather Jesus, like Paul, may have considered these events as possibly imminent, but the timing was uncertain since it was unknown. The fact remains that both Paul and Jesus, like some of their Jewish and Christian contemporaries who wrote on eschatological matters, were capable of combining the language of possible imminence with a discussion of events that must transpire
before the end comes. If at most Jesus or Paul spoke of imminence of the final intervention of God or his agent in human history, then it is not appropriate to speak of Paul or for that matter of Jesus as attempting to cope with the problem of the delay of the parousia.
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