Matthew 23:36
Matthew 23:3636Truly I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation.
Jehovah's Witnesses rarely focus on in isolation, but it becomes critical in discussions of and the "this generation" doctrine. The Watchtower teaches that "this generation" in 24:34 refers to anointed Witnesses whose lives overlap with those alive in 1914. When pressed on this reading, JWs must account for 23:36 — just verses earlier in the same discourse — where Jesus uses the identical phrase ("all these things will come upon this generation") and clearly means his contemporaries. The Watchtower's strategy is to treat 24:34 as the single exception, but provides no exegetical basis for doing so. also features in discussions of the great tribulation, where the argument that "this generation" consistently means Jesus' audience reinforces the case that the Olivet Discourse was fulfilled in AD 70, not in a future Watchtower eschatological sequence.
Reformed and covenantal interpreters treat as the interpretive key for "this generation" throughout the Olivet Discourse. Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees that "all these things will come upon this generation" — a clear reference to the people standing in front of him. This establishes the baseline meaning of the phrase, so that when Jesus repeats it in 24:34, the natural reading is identical: his contemporaries would witness the fulfilment. The strategy is devastatingly simple — compare every Gospel occurrence of "this generation" (Matt 11:16, 12:41-42, 23:36, ) and observe that each one refers to Jesus' audience. is no exception. If "this generation" means what it plainly says, the Olivet Discourse was fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, and the entire 1914 framework collapses. As Jeff Durbin argues, making "this generation" refer to a group 2,000 years later would make Jesus a false prophet by the Watchtower's own standard ().