Featured History of an Error: Wrong dates can lead to Bad Theology

This post is helpful background to understanding a certain error that has crept into modern eschatology. A seemingly trivial point actually has profound Christological application. But before we get to the application, the error has to be corrected.

History of an Error
Wrong dates can lead to Bad Theology​

They don't usually. But in the case of Archbishop William Ussher and his dates that did happen. Or at least, let us say, it needlessly obfuscated an already complicated problem. However, as we shall see, the original obfuscation started happening thousands of years before Ussher.

But first the more recent boo-boo: In 1701, thanks to a well-meaning scholar, Church of England's Bishop William Lloyd, the English Bible began to be side-noted with dates. These dates were based on Ussher's chronology of a half-century earlier. Throughout the Bible Lloyd faithfully followed Ussher dates - - - except where he didn't. Case in point is the passage that describes, as I had earlier written, the permission that starts the 70 weeks of Daniel 9. This is Nehemiah 2. Ussher sets this permission that Artaxerxes grants to Nehemiah as 454BC. However Lloyd sets the date at 445BC.

This error has both a fruit and a root.
The fruit is that more recent Bible editions - most famously, that of C.I. Scofield - followed this innovation of Lloyd's. And many other reference Bibles and authors have since followed Scofield's lead. This date is now the most common one put forth for the permission in Nehemiah 2. The result is that, given the math ...

490 - 445 - 1 = 44 AD,

or, shaving off the last week,

482 - 445 - 1 = 36 AD,

the end point is clearly beyond the usually accepted time for Christ's earthly ministry.

This needlessly causes scholars to look elsewhere for the starting point of the seventy weeks; usually either Ezra 7 (same king, earlier date) or Ezra 1 (earlier king, Cyrus, much earlier date).

The ones who settle on Cyrus are then forced to part what God has joined together - the seventy weeks - contrary to any Scriptural example or precept. This is where the unscriptural gap is introduced, and stop-watch chronology. Sir Robert Anderson, knowing that the math did not add up, added an innovation of his own: a 360-day year! Though the Jews did use months of 30 days, never do we read of a whole year of 360 days, and especiallly not larger spans of time entirely made up of these artificial - and fictional - units of time. But Anderson needed to tweak the dates to finesse the endpoint to the time of Christ's earthly ministry.

The Root came much earlier.
I wrote "needlessly" above because that is exactly what all this is. This brings me back to the original, root mistake that happened well over two thousand years ago.

Once again we have a very careful historian, like Ussher. And once again we have a later generation of less careful historians covering up the tracks of the first; to the point where the testimony of the first - Thucydides, a contemporary of the actual events he writes - is discounted, or even forgotten, in the shuffle of time.

The importance of all this - and of the previous article - is that the Seventy Weeks prophecy has all been fulfilled in the time of Christ's earthly ministry. No further fulfillment is looked for.

 

The biggest error that it leads to IMO is to cover up the fact that Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy panned out in a remarkably straigtforward way. The dates - once the correct beginning point is determined - lead very neatly to Christ's earthly ministry.

The Jews of the first century understood this. This is why we had a larger influx of them in Jerusalem in the time of Christ's ministry. Read more on this in Pierce's editor comments in Ussher's Annals (I don't have my book at hand here in China). I think Josephus also mentioned this, but I could be mistaken.

To get thse dates right leads to a proper understanding of the the full fulfillment of the 70 Weeks Prophecy in that first century.

It also necessarily leads to a better understanding of this present kingdom we are in now.

It also undermines much of today's (misnamed) eschatology, replacing it with, well, "Mere Christianity".

 

Your sentence - from what I can understand of it - shows you missed my point entirely.

Seriously, use more punctuation. Your sentence can be understood in (at least) two different ways.

 

Thank you.

BTW, this is not really about Preterism. I had come to the above conclusions when I was still Amill. (Although I was now faced with an inconsistency I didn't notice at first)

And about the gap: We have been so conditioned to accept it that we no longer see how illogical it is. Your example is good. I also used to example that I had one time I would return from Kansas in two weeks. It would be an outright lie if I ruined that promise, rendered it meaningless, by inserting a gap of two more months.

Why would God, in the middle of a much needed promise to His own people of that generation - insert a gap that would render all of what He just solemnly promised a lie?

 

Why don't you look at Paul's answer? It is in the same passage you quoted, 1st Corinthians 15. Notice also Paul's use of Isaiah. I had written all of this in my earlier thread and got no response to that point, so I am not really inclined to type it all out again.

 

Ever hear of dangling modifier? Your sentence has it. I have to run now. If you still don't see it I will come back and show you.

 

This is true. Preterism, or the lack of it, is bound to affect a wide range of other isms.