Today there are two dates worth noting:
--In 202, Irenaeus
died. His enormous, five-volume "Against Heresies" was a milestone in
consolidating the doctrines of early Christianity. In it, Irenaeus
expanded on the concept of the Antichrist: a
figure mentioned just five times in the New Testament. All five
references occur in the first two of the so-called letters of John
("so-called" because it is generally believed today that these two
epistles were falsely attributed to the Gospel writer, and composed by
later Christians). Building on the undetailed concept of the Antichrist in the Johannine letters as a mere "false teacher", Iranaeus described a much more robust Antichrist who
would reign over Earth for three and a half years (a duration echoing
the book of Daniel) to close the sixth millennial "day" of
creation. After the fall of the Antichrist would begin the seventh "day" of Christ's return to Earth for 1000 years
of rule.
--The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was
assassinated today in Sarajevo in 1914, sparking the First World War. As
the deadliest war of human history to that date, it was apocalyptic in
its own right. But an independent fundamentalist prophet from Pittsburgh
named Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916) had predicted that the
apocalypse would unfold during 1914, and for at least the second half of 1914 his prophecy probably appeared to have some traction. Russell
had formed a group called the Bible Students, and would form another named the
the Watchtower Society (renamed, after Russell's death, as "The
Jehovah's Witnesses"). By 1914, The Watchtower Society boasted around
30,000 members, despite the fact that Russell had already failed in
predicting apocalypses for 1910 and 1874.
In addition to the
three failed dates Russell predicted in his life, the Jehovah's
Witnesses went on to add many others. Among these was 1994, which the
group claimed would be the end of the world on the reasoning that
Russell's final, failed prediction of 1914 had actually been correct - but
only correct in marking the beginning of an 80-year generation whose
culmination would produce the true end. When this date, too, fell on its
face, the Jehovah's Witnesses declared publicly that they
would no longer make specific announcements about the end of the world.
As Kitten Week continues here at Today's Date in Apocalypse History,
here is a video of the kitten Maru (who appears not to be the Japanese
viral-video star Maru, the kitten I was searching for).
