March 5: The Christian Movement to Establish a Modern Israel

On March 5, 1891, William Eugene Blackstone presented a petition to Congress and the President urging the United States to support the repatriation of the world's Jews to Palestine. A Christian Zionist motivated by hopes of stimulating the Apocalypse, Blackstone's manifesto "Jesus is Coming" was backed by the Stewart brothers (owners of the Union Oil company) who had 700,000 copies of his work distributed in the U.S.

March 4: Saladin, FDR, and Jeff Kluttz

Three dates to note for March 4:

In 1193, Saladin died of a fever in Damascus after successfully defending Jerusalem from Richard I's Third Crusade. As a defender of the Muslim faith, Saladin was seen as the Antichrist by many. The famous eschatologist Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) claimed Saladin was the sixth "head" of the red dragon of Revelation, and last predecessor to the Antichrist.

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed office. Eventually elected to four terms, Roosevelt profoundly changed the scale and structure of the United States government. With the Social Security program in particular, he instituted a national identification scheme repeatedly linked since to the Mark of the Beast in Revelation.

In 2009, Christian eschatologist Jeff Kluttz released the book "Return Of The King: A Prophetic Timeline Of End-Time Events".

March 2: Methodism, Dispensationalism

Two dates to note for March 2:

In 1791, John Wesley died. His populist and progressive (relative to Calvinism) ministry led to the development of Methodism from out of the Church of England. Wesley's denial of other apocalyptic predictions (see February 28) did not preclude Wesley's own belief that Christ would return in 1836.

In 1925, the noted Christian dispensationalist and Dean of Dallas Theological Seminary, Charles Caldwell Ryrie, was born. (More on dispensationalism to come!)

February 29: Fourth-Century Christian "Traitors"

Tyconius was an early-fourth-century Donatist, a sect taking a hard line against Christians who had publicly recanted during the reign of Diocletian (Donatists coined the word "traitor", meaning "one who hands over", to describe Christians who gave up their copies of scripture to Roman authorities).

Tyconius' Commentary on the Apocalypse would influence his fellow north African St. Augustine (at least in the latter's views of the apocalypse - since Augustine was anti-Donatist). In the commentary, Tyconius urged what Augustine would later call a "spiritual" (figurative) reading of Daniel and Revelation. This included the denial of a "millennium" in which Christ will rule bodily on earth. In fact, the spiritual or amillennialist interpretation of Revelation tended to see its prophecies as already having come true - or as continually coming true, in the form of a perpetual allegory of the human spirit. Tyconius also described the Antichrist as being not a living man, but a principle, a sum of the opponents to Christianity in history.

February 28: John Wesley prefers one apocalypse to the other

February 28, 1763, is the date George Bell forecast for the descent of Jesus to Earth. Methodism founder John Wesley preached strenuously against this popular prediction, holding an all-night prayer vigil to help calm the public. (Wesley believed the world would end in 1836.)

February 26: The Nation of Islam

Wallace Fard was born February 26, 1893. Appearing in Detroit after emigrating from Mecca in the 1920s (or possibly instead from California, if public records are to be believed - where, as Wallace Ford, he had completed a three-year drugs sentence in San Quentin), Fard founded the Temple of Islam in 1930. He preached that black Americans should abandon Christianity in preparation for an Armageddon in which their former white slave-masters would be overcome. Fard's successor, Elijah Muhammed, reshaped the organization into the Nation of Islam, which holds that we live at the end of a 6000-year reign of "white devils".

Fard vanished mysteriously in 1934.

February 25: Bicheno, the obese apocalypticist

On February 25, 1851, James Ebenezer Bicheno died. A writer and English colonial official who had devoted his private life to study of the esoteric, he determined that Louis the XIV had been the Beast of Revelation, and that the second coming of Christ would occur in 1864. An obese man, it was also said that three bushels of wheat could fit inside a pair of his trousers.

February 24: Israel's Road Map to Peace

February 24, 1997, was the 1260th day after the signing of the "Road Map to Peace" by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993. After Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, and a handful of passages in Revelation, 1260 days is the period expected to elapse between a significant event in Jerusalem, and the Tribulation. Thus this day became one of the many candidates for the apocalypse which Christian eschatologists have derived from events in the Middle East.

February 23: The beginning of the world, per Sextus Julius Africanus

Sextus Julius Africanus' Chronographai - a history of the world in five volumes - set the date of creation at 5500 BCE. Later apocalypticists would work forward from this date in calculating the end of the world. (A common assumption among early Christian eschatologists was of the "hexameron" - a 6000-year plan of universal history, reflecting the week of creation described in Genesis. The seventh millennium would mark the Parousia, or Christ's second coming to earth.)

Sextus Julius Africanus died during the year 240.

February 21: Calculating the end of the world from the great pyramid

On February 21, 1900, Piazzi Smyth died. As Royal Astronomer of Scotland, he wrote "Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid" around 1860. In it, Smyth concluded that the millennium would begin before the end of 1960.

February 19: Beatus of Liebana

February 19 is the feast date of Beatus of Liébana. His "Commentary on the Apocalypse" (786 CE) predicted that the Sabbath Age, or seventh millennium of creation in which Christ would rule the Earth, would begin in the year 800. Beatus himself died in 800 without evidence of Jesus' return.

February 18: The African Xhosa famine

In 1857, Nongaqawuse, a teenaged Christian millennialist prophet of the Xhosa people, predicted that if the Xhosa would first kill all of their own cattle, spirits would arrive on this date and sweep the British occupation into the sea. Nearly 75% of the Xhosa population of 100,000 would go on to die in the resulting famine, with many of the survivors resorting to cannibalism.

February 14: Thomas Malthus

On February 14, 1766, Thomas Malthus was born. His 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population forecast a cataclysmic future as growth in population exceeds growth in the resources needed to sustain it. These views, though oversimple in their mathematical assumptions, were profound enough to help inspire the theory of evolution independently in the thoughts of both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.

February 12: Ray Kurzweil, and global warming

Two dates to note:

In 1948, Ray Kurzweil was born. He proposes that comprehensible human history will end in a fast-approaching Singularity, in which computers become intelligent enough to build still-more-intelligent computers, in a feedback loop which will become transhuman.

In 1979, the World Climate Conference of the World Meteorological Organization issued a declaration that anthropogenic climate change is real, cementing the scientific consensus on global warming.

February 10: Jose the Galilean

Rabbi Jose the Galilean predicted the arrival of the Messiah would occur three 20-year generations after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem - ie, sometime near the year 130.

February 9: The Apocalypse of Baruch

In the late 100s CE, the Apocalypse of Baruch, a pseudepigraphical (falsely-attributed) work was written, surviving in Greek and Syriac versions. "The youth of the world is past, the vigor of creation is at its end; the coming of [last] times is near."

February 7: Johanan ben Zakai

Dying in 90 CE, the Jewish sage and Mishnah writer Johanan ben Zakai had prophesied that the Messiah could be expected to arrive imminently.

February 6: Joseph Priestley

On February 6, 1804, Joseph Priestley died. Best known for discovering oxygen, this early chemist also wrote "The Present State of Europe Compared with Ancient Prophecies", a tract finding fulfillment of the books of Daniel and Revelation in the French Revolution.

February 5: Foundation of the Branch Davidians

Victor Houteff died on February 5, 1955. This Bulgarian-born Seventh-Day Adventist leader led a splinter group away from Los Angeles to Waco, Texas in 1935, and founded Mount Carmel Ministries. Here he expected to gather 144,000 followers as the world ended ("the elect", per Revelation 7:3-8).

After Houteff's death in 1955, the group renamed itself the Branch Davidians.

February 4: Messiah Jonathan the Weaver

During 73 CE, Jonathan the Weaver led a group from Jerusalem into the wilderness. Interpreted as a messianic bid by the Roman governor, troops were dispatched to massacre them. Jonathan was ultimately captured and burned alive.