Some of the early Christians wrote the millennium would begin at 500 AD. Wasn't their prediction proven false? Why did they think they knew when it would be when Jesus said, " Concerning that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only. " So there's kind of two questions here about the millennium would begin at 500 AD. Was the prediction false? He seems to see some early Christians claiming that. And then why did they feel justified in making claims like that?
Okay, yeah, excellent question. All of these were so good. I was really impressed by the quality of the questions. Can I just briefly say hi to Boaz and Rebecca, they're friends of mine? I just see them there on the screen. It's such a pleasure seeing them. So the question and I'm not sure if this came from your own reading of the early church or if this was from a book, it is almost accurate, but it's a little bit misleading that they said the end would come in the year 500 AD.
And that's because the division of AD and BC as we know it didn't even come about until after the year 500. So yeah, no one ever said, oh, in the year 500 AD, this is going to end because like you say, that chronological division didn't happen until after that. And it didn't become well known until around the year 800 or so during the Middle Ages. But it is based on something that is accurate. And that is, I think it's Hippolytus. I'm going by memory on a lot of these.
He worked up a chronology, and he calculated that Jesus was born in the year 5, 500 after the creation of Adam. Now, it was a very common view among the early Christians. I'm not sure what it is based on, but it is so widespread. I wonder if it was something the Jews in general thought and that was carried over from the Jews?
I'm not totally sure, but it was a very common view that just like there were six days of creation, that the existence of man would be, well, or seven days, the seventh day being a time of rest. It would be the same with man. Seven days, each of which would be 1,000 years based on what Peter says about 1,000 years is as a day with God.
So a very wide number of them felt that after man had been here 6,000 years, which would be like six days in using 1,000 years for a day, that then the end of man's rule would come, and then the last 1,000 years would be the millennium. It was never dogma that you had to believe. I don't know that everyone believed that, but many did. And so Hippolytus, like I say, his chronology then would have had this happening 500 years after Jesus was born.
That doesn't necessarily mean 500 AD as we know it, because He wasn't working with that same exact set of calculations. Now, as far as I know, Hippolytus is the only one who calculated Jesus being born in that year. And if any of you have read different, you can correct me on that. So, of course, when he was writing that, that would have been around the year 200. So that was something 300 years in the future.
So it was nothing like the date setting, time setting that we see today that people haven't all worked out and it's going to come in this year and that. As I shared at the beginning, you know I went through that as a Jehovah's Witness. But then there are plenty of evangelicals who do that too. And you know the end was going to come in, what was it? 1988, I think. Yeah, ' 88, I think somebody had predicted. And then several dates after that, there's always date setting.
None of the early Christians that I know of outside of the Montanists were predicting that in their lifetime. But they did have that concept that several centuries in the future, the end would come. Now, of course, Jesus said no one knows the day or the hour. He didn't say the year. But like I say, other than Hippolytus, I don't know that anyone even tried to calculate the year. I think the lesson we can learn from it is be very careful when you're dealing with chronology and prophecy.
The quote from the early church that stuck in my mind when I read them first 35 years ago, it was from Irenaeus. And he said, " Prophecy is best understood once it has been fulfilled. " And to me, that's something we ought to have posters and stick that in every church and have it on everyone's walls, that you know no one understood those prophecies about Jesus until he came and died, and then he opened people's eyes.
And then, oh, you can see all throughout the Old Testament, there's all these prophecies, but no one understood them ahead of time. They all were fulfilled in a different way than people were expecting. And so I think it will be with his second return. I think it's maybe if it's just a hobby to delve in chronology and prophecy, I think that's fine. But when we start taking it overly seriously, I think we can get wrapped up in that and lose our focus on our daily living with Christ.
Yeah, I was going to ask, I think you already answered it. Is this something that was a hobby horse of very many early Christians, or has this been accelerated in more recent years? Yeah, no, it wasn't. It was nothing like you see today. You can read those quotes and get a very wrong perspective, because those few quotes, you know seven or eight, are out of you know tens of thousands of pages of writing. You have just that little bit.
Whereas in our day, you go to a Christian bookstore, at least when you used to when they used to have Christian bookstores, and you know there'd be whole rows of nothing but prophecy, you know and every bit of it, no doubt wrong. And yeah, so this thing of being so caught up in it, where I'm sitting right now, our church, our congregation rents a building from the Seventh Day Adventists.
And you know every three or four months, they hold a series of prophecy conferences, and they go into how all of this is going to be fulfilled in the future, totally ignoring that, hey, they were saying all of this was going to be fulfilled in the 1800s, and they were wrong on that. And yeah, that doesn't seem to slow them down. They're still saying the same thing just like Jehovah's Witnesses are. Yeah.
So would you say prophecy, the biggest benefit is less about trying to figure out exactly Christ's return and more as a benefit for us to not be either our faith shooken or shaked as things arrive, if persecution comes, like we should be expecting these types of things to exist. That's the benefit of prophecy rather than trying to nail down specific events that are going to happen. What would be a beneficial use of prophecy in that sense? Yeah.
I totally agree with you that I think the two big things or maybe several big things. One, he is going to return. That's the exciting thing. He is going to return, and this time it will be in power. Another thing, there is going to be a day of judgment and a resurrection when he returns. Number three, there is going to be a great tribulation. And so we can expect persecution before Jesus returns. It may not come in our lifetime, but we should be prepared for that. And like you say, it shouldn't discourage us.
On the other hand, just because persecution comes doesn't mean the end is at hand. Baptists were persecuted in the 1500s. A lot of them assumed the end is right at hand. And you know when they looked at the Pope as the Antichrist and the prophecies seem to be being fulfilled. And I think that's good if it helped them to stay faithful during the persecution. But if you build too much on that, yeah, then you're disappointed the persecution ends and Christ hasn't come back. So we need to be careful.
And then I think the other thing is that there will be, and we'll get into that in another question, a man of lawlessness or perdition, an antichrist that will mislead people. So we need to be very cautious on that respect. And we'll, I guess, get into that later. Yeah, very good. And I think one of the other, and maybe I'm wrong in this, one of the other dangers of trying to set down timelines within our lifetime too clearly, is that it can maybe give us a tendency.
Well, if we just hold on long enough, Jesus will return rather than going out and doing something and establishing the Kingdom of God. If we just stay where we are and don't move and hold fast as a community, retain what we have, not risk it, then we'll be secure in the future or soon rather than being on the offensive for the kingdom of God and going out there and starting new things and starting new churches and planning new movements and spreading the gospel.
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