Tuesday, October 17, 2023

David Chytraeus (1530-1600) Setting the Date for the End of the World to 1695

  

Taking the cosmic week as his basic scheme for the duration of the world, he considers the seventh millennium as the eternal Sabbath. He then puts forward two calculations (neither of them his own) of how many years are left until the end of the world. Some—by adding up 1,290 days and 1,355 days in Dan. 12.11—reckon that there are 2,625 years from Daniel’s time until the end of the world. Another possibility is to take 2 Pet. 3.5 as a basis and t calculate that there are as many years between Christ’s coming and the end of the world as there are between the creation of Adam and the time of the Flood, in other words, 1,565. This hypothesis has the backing of Christ himself who compares the Flood to the last Judgment in Luke 17.26. Moreover, notes Chytraeus, this figure corresponds to the number of years between Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection, if we count in terms of Jubilee years. Christ rose form the dead at the age of thirty-three, and he will come back to judge the quick and the dead after thirty-three Jubilee years, in other words, 1,650 calendar years. This means the end of the world is due to take place either in 1684 (according to the calculation of Jubilee years) or in 1695 (going by the calculation based on 2 Pet. 3.5). The further advantage of this hypothesis is that it takes in the forty-two months or three and a half years of the Apocalypse, if one counts three and a half Jubilee years, that is, 175 calendar years, from the revelation of the Antichrist until the Last Judgment. Given that to Chytraeus there is no doubt that the Antichrist was fully revealed in his own century, in the year 1520 (with the publication of the bull Exsurge Domine), the world should come to an end in the year 1695. (Explicatio, 1564, 381-382) (Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 128)