Bengel points out that here Jesus speaks in the present tense: in his own day Jesus could say “no one knows,” but that doesn’t mean that at a later time no one would know. By studying the biblical prophecies, in fact, later Christians could come to know. The papacy was the Antichrist, the freemasons may have represented the false “prophet” of Revelation, and the end was but a century away (he was writing in the 1730s).
In fairness to Bengel, what is a prophesy if not a puzzle to be solved?
