Appetizer #4: The end is nigh

The message of the book of Revelation is that before lost souls are deposited into hell forever, the world is to be judged. The popular phrase ‘Judgement Day’, however, would appear to be a misnomer because, if the book of Revelation is anything to go by, the period of judgement will extend over at least a thousand years (Revelation 20) - a period of great tribulation and suffering known as ‘The End Times’ or ‘The Last Days’.

Interestingly, mainstream Christianity is very hesitant to name a date for these End Times, although a large number of Christians, perhaps even the majority when looked at globally, believe that it will occur within their lifetime. Of course, there are countless examples of individual amateur prophets, parading around with placards proclaiming that “the end of the world is nigh”, but there are various denominations who peddle this view on a much larger scale. For instance, the Jehovah's Witnesses have, on a number of occasions, argued, or at least implied, that a specific year would mark the end of the world. Needless to say, their track record in this area is not all that it could be. Nevertheless, the Jehovah's Witnesses still hang on to the idea that we are at least living in the “Last Days”, such having begun in October 1914. This conviction is based on a rather convoluted reading of scripture, from both Testaments, together with some arbitrary number juggling, in order to arrive at this specific date.

Please now join me on a journey into the weird and wonderful world of Christian eschatology:

• In the Gospel of Luke (21:24) Jesus says that Jerusalem will be ‘trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ Furthermore, Luke (1:32) and the Old Testament book of Ezekiel (21:27) make it clear that the times of the Gentiles will be fulfilled when Jesus becomes King. This trampling of the Gentiles, argue the Jehovah’s Witnesses, began when Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians in 607 BCE, and its end will signify the return of Jesus and the end of the world.

So, this trampling is crucial it would seem. We know when it began, but how long will it last?

• The book of Daniel (Chapter 4) details a prophetic dream, that King Nebuchadnezzar has, involving a tree being cut down and “seven times”, or in some translations “seven periods of time”, passing over it. Daniel interprets this dream, explaining that the tree is representative of Nebuchadnezzar himself. Turning back to Ezekiel (Chapters 17 and 31), Jehovah’s Witnesses interpret the scripture to mean that trees can be considered as representing rulership. Therefore, they say, the cutting down of a tree can be seen as an interruption of rulership, or a trampling of one.

So the trampling will last for seven periods of time. But how long is a ‘period of time’? How long is a piece of string?

• Chapter 12 of the book of Revelation, verse 6, tells the story of a woman fleeing into the wilderness, and being protected by God from a dragon, for 1,260 days. Verse 14, however, describes the same period as “a time, and times, and half a time”. Jehovah's Witnesses evidently take this to mean that “time” means “one period of time” and “times” means “two periods of time”, because they argue that, based on this passage, 1,260 days equals three and a half periods of time! This means that a period of time is equal to 360 days (or roughly one year), and so seven periods of time must therefore be equal to 2,520 days (or roughly seven years). But, the argument goes, this cannot be the whole story, because seven years is not long enough—obviously the trampling of God's rulership did not stop in 600 BCE—Daniel's prophecy must be talking of a much longer period of time than seven years. (Note that this is not the obvious conclusion to draw here but let’s go along with it for now.)
• In order to square this circle, the Jehovah’s Witnesses return to the Old Testament and the books of Numbers and Ezekiel. In Numbers 14:34 we find God punishing the Israelites for 40 days; one day for each year of faithlessness. In Ezekiel 4:4-6 we find the “son of man” commanded to lie on his left side for 390 days and on his right for 40 days, in order to bear the sins of Israel and Judah respectively; again, one day for each year of sin. These scriptural titbits apparently prove that “one day” can also mean “one year”. Therefore, 2,520 days can be taken as meaning 2,520 years!
• Finally, this in turn means that seven periods of time beginning in 607 BCE would come to a close circa 1914! Phew, got there in the end! By this reasoning, if you can call it that, Jesus Christ was appointed as King in 1914 CE, marking the beginning of the “Last Days”.

Hardly a QED is it? Believe it or not though, the plot thickens...

From these “calculations” various Jehovah's Witness tracts produced over the years have gone out of their way to imply a specific year for the end of the world, revising the date as each prediction fails. The most recent of these 'predictions' implied 1975 as the year to watch out for, and since then they seem to have stopped making predictions (and who can blame them?) Their forecast of the beginning of ‘The Last Days’ however, remains in their literature presumably because it corresponds quite nicely with the onset of the First World War, hence the specific claim of October 1914.

According to the Gospels (e.g. Matthew 24:7, Mark 13:8, Luke 21:10), Jesus said that he would return only after the world had witnessed times of international warfare, famine, earthquakes and plagues. The First World War was obviously unlike anything that had gone before in terms of scale and the Second World War surpassed even that. Accordingly, these conflicts are seen as fulfilment of prophecy, and the plight of starving Ethiopians and events such as the Indonesian tsunami in 2004 can only have served to cynically fortify that position. That is certainly the impression that I get whenever Jehovah's witnesses call at my house and ask me if I am worried about the state of the world by referencing the big news story of the week and then tying it to Matthew 24:7.

This ghoulish evangelism is just a tad too close to schadenfreude for my tastes, but the “1914 theory” also has a number of more common sense objections, both scriptural and secular. For a start, most historians agree that Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 587 rather than 607 BCE. Furthermore, there is no indication in the book of Daniel that his prophetic dream about the reign of Nebuchadnezzar had any wider implications that would necessitate a second fulfilment of the prophecy. Finally, regarding the theory that a day can also means a year, we could just as easily take a different passage from scripture, perhaps one from 2 Peter 3—‘that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’—and use the above 'reasoning' to argue that the end of the world will begin circa 2,500,000 CE!

So, witnesses to the Jehovah incident, it might be time for a rethink...

…and while your at it, you might want to re-evaluate a few other things. Read my book for some suggestions.