Matthew Henry John Bartlett

In Jesus and the Victory of God, NT Wright says:

As a prophet, Jesus staked his reputation on his prediction of the temple’s fall within a generation; if and when it fell, he would thereby be vindicated. As the kingdom-bearer, he had constantly been acting … In a way which invited the conclusion that he thought he had the right to do and be what the temple was and did, thereby implicitly making the temple redundant. The story he had been telling, and by which he had ordered his life, demanded a particular ending. If, then, the temple remained for ever, and his movement fizzled out (as Gamaliel thought it might), he would be shown to have been a charlatan, a false prophet, maybe even a blasphemer.
   But if the temple was to be destroyed and the sacrifices stopped; if the pagan hordes were to tear it down stone by stone; and if his followers did escape from the conflagration unharmed, in a re-enactment of Israel’s escape from their exile in doomed Babylon-why, then he would be vindicated, not only as a prophet, but as Israel’s representative, as (in some sense) the “son of man”.