Mark 13:30
Mark 13:3030Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.
is one of the synoptic parallels to and that the Watchtower marshals for its "overlapping generations" doctrine. Because Mark's Olivet Discourse is shorter and more compact than Matthew's, JW publications usually quote as the primary text and treat as confirmatory. The 1914 framework rests on reading the demonstrative phrase "all these things" as pointing forward to events still future in our day, with the "generation" stretched by a chain of overlapping anointed lifespans.
is the strongest of the three synoptic "this generation" verses for the AD 70 reading because Mark preserves the demonstrative "all these things" (panta tauta) in the NWT itself — there is no softening to fall back on. The "things" in question are everything Jesus has just described in : the wars, the rumours, the abomination of desolation, the flight to the mountains, the tribulation. All of those happened in the lifetime of his hearers, fulfilled in the Roman siege that climaxed in AD 70. Pair with 's parallel ("Jerusalem surrounded by armies") to make the fulfilment concrete. The Watchtower's stretch of "this generation" to mean two overlapping classes of anointed Witnesses born nearly a century apart is unsupported by any Greek lexicon in 2,000 years and exists only because the prior reading required it.