Critics cite specific passages in Matthew (21:41-45, 22:7, 24:15, and 27:25) as betraying knowledge of the Roman War, thus requiring a date after 70 for the Gospel as a whole.

The most obvious point to make is that a denial of predictive prophecy often lies behind such arguments. Once this epistemological barrier is acknowledged, these additional points can be made which defuse charges of prophecy written after the fact:

• The context of Jesus' statements indicates a time before the temple was destroyed. Passages in the Gospels refer to the Temple in present tense, or in a very casual way that suggests that it is still standing. The story of the fish and the coin in particular (Mt. 17:24-27) would have been irrelevant once the Temple had been destroyed, and indeed, highly problematic, since after 70 the Temple tax went to support the pagan temple of Jupiter in Rome.
• Jesus' warning to flee to the mountains does not fit the picture. By A.D. 68, Jerusalem was isolated, and there were Romans and hostile Sicarii (Jewish terrorists) in the mountains. At that point, people fled into Jerusalem, and to forts like Masada and Herodion, not from Jerusalem and into the mountains. Christians, according to Eusebius, fled to Pella in the Decapolis, which is decidedly not where Jesus said to flee.
• A prediction of the destruction of the Temple is hardly unique. Destruction of the temple (or Jerusalem) would not be too wild a guess, in light of how turbulent relations with the Romans were in Jesus' time. Several contemporaries of Jesus made similar predictions. The most familiar of these predictors, mentioned by Josephus, was Jesus the son of Ananias, who made predictions of the Temple's destruction between 63-70 A.D. Prior to Jesus' time, there were also predictions of the Temple being destroyed to be found in the Old Testament and in the intertestamental book of 2 Maccabees.

Other passages which are appealed to as showing knowledge of the war against Rome are simply too vague to be useful. Matthew 22:7, for example, speaks of an army being sent to burn and destroy a city; far from being able to be said to be a specific description of Jerusalem being conquered, this is merely "a fixed description of ancient expeditions of punishment" using "the standard language of both the Old Testament and the Roman world describing punitive military expeditions against rebellious cities."