So I was running an online booksearch today (all part of the job) when I came across this…

Another fruit-loop attempting to crack the mysteries of the Apocalypse – this time it’s one claiming that the whole process started last December, just prior to Christmas (a day on which, as Mr Stollorz helpfully notes, “nothing publicly noticeable happened”). What Stollorz and his fellow prophets of doom fail to realise is the contextual disconnect between what they’re predicting and what the writers of their beloved prophecies actually thought…

Like every other doomsday activist, Stollorz bases most of his theory on the books of Daniel and Revelation, with a smattering of Jesus’ more pessimistic pronouncements thrown in. These are the predominant biblical apocalypses: tales of strange dreams and portents with an underlying sense that the end of the world is imminent. As EbonMuse points out in his essay “2000 Years Late”, Jesus himself thought that the endtimes were just around the corner, and the writers of Daniel and Revelation were no different. Both were writing for a people undergoing a period of persecution (Daniel’s author was working during the occupation of Israel by the Greek Selucid empire, Revelation’s was writing during the early days of the Christian church, at a time when Christianity was not a popular lifestyle choice around the Mediterranean), and both were attempting to convey the same message – hang in there guys, soon the bastards will get what’s coming to them. In many ways, this is also at the core of Jesus’ teaching – the Sermon on the Mount, with its predictions of imminent glory for the downtrodden, is a classic piece of apocalypticism. The idea that God will come soon to punish the wrongdoers and raise his faithful to new heights of shininess is an ideal sop for a group of people currently being pissed upon from all sides.

Reading such books as a prophecy of the future is to completely misunderstand their purpose. The book of Daniel is a prime example. Written around the 2nd century BC, during or just prior to the Maccabean uprising, it purports to tell the story of a fictional Jewish prophet during the Babylonian exile (some four centuries earlier). The character Daniel predicts the events of the 400 year gap, including the rise to power of Antiochus IV, the ruler whose oppressive edicts catalysed the Maccabees to revolt. The ingenuity of the tale, though, lies in the book’s attempted future predictions – having had his prophet accurately foresee the events leading up to the present, the author then puts his own optimistic apocalypse in Daniel’s mouth. It’s noteworthy that beyond the Selucid predictions, the book of Daniel has to be interpreted very loosely and figuratively… Nonetheless, the writer’s intend was straightforward. Claiming that a Babylonian prophet had anticipated all the events that the Jewish people had experienced up to that point, he was then able to have said prophet foretell a glorious victory for Israel, led by one “like a son of Man”. The underlying point is clear – “this guy could predict the future, right, and he says it’ll all turn out for the best, so hang in there, ‘kay?”

Daniel (post-Selucid), like Revelation and the apocalyptic statements of Jesus, is a fiction; a message to the persecuted not to give up hope, because God’s Kingdom is just around the corner. Trying to use them to predict a date for Armageddon is futile, since they weren’t writing about us – they were writing for and about the people around them, millennia ago. God is no more coming in a cloud of glory this week than he was in 160BC, and whilst the Rapture Ready may find the same comfort in Daniel’s tall tales as his original audience did, they will also be joining those ancient Israelites in looking to a future that doesn’t exist.