May 18: Under the Volcano

Mount St. Helens erupted on this day in 1980. The event, killing 57 people, may not have been apocalyptic in its own right. But a supervolcanic eruption is certain to occur someday in the Cascadian range, at the Yellowstone Caldera, or at some point along the Pacific Ring of Fire. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption, for instance, killed over 35,000 people. But a genuinely vast supervolcanic eruption could have global effects, sending enough ash into the air to reduce worldwide sun exposure for years and drive severe famine or waves of extinction.

May 17: Internet doomsday!

Only 53 days left...

May 16: "Do not try this at home."

Moses Maimonides wrote of a man known as the Yemenite Messiah, arrested in Fez (contemporary Morocco) in 1172 during a period when Arabs in the region had begun compelling Jewish conversions to Islam. The Yemenite Messiah preached division of wealth with the poor - and despite the name that became attached to him personally, he taught that this sort of piety would hasten the coming of the true Messiah.

When his Arab captors asked for proof of the divinity of his cause, the Yemenite Messiah suggested that they behead him so he could come back to life. So they beheaded him. He did not come back to life.

May 14: Formation of Israel - Monte Judah's Tribulation Timeline

On May 14, 1948, the Jewish People's Council declared the formation of the state of Israel. The original failure of New Testament prophecy - "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." (Matthew 16:28) - has been interpreted by many contemporary Christian evangelicals to mean the Second Coming will, for some reason, occur instead within a 40-year generation of Jerusalem's reclamation by the Jews.

In 1978, Colin Deal published Will Christ Return by 1988? 101 Reasons Why. Like Hal Lindsey and others, Deal principally argued that Jesus would return to earth in 1988 because Israel had been formed 40 years before.

***

Monte Judah is a Baptist preacher who has embraced kabbalah, declared himself a Hebrew, and formed Lion and Lamb ministries in Oklahoma. He predicted that the world would end on May 14, 1997. Though this prophecy failed, Judah maintains a Tribulation Timeline on his website which is no longer attached to a specific date.

May 13: Pentecostalist predictions

In 1916, the Assemblies of God Council, embracing hundreds of Pentecostal ministries from across the United States, was just two years old. In its May 13 Weekly Evangel, the council claimed the advent of the Great War had marked the beginning of the End Times, with Armageddon to occur in 1935. The council would go on to make a number of similar failed predictions.

May 12: a late Messianic movement in Babylon - David Alroy

David Alroy was a Messianic Jew in Seljuk-ruled Babylon during the middle 1100s. He proposed an enormous one-two strategy of leading a Jewish uprising against Muslim rule in Mesopotamia, then joining forces with Christian Crusaders to liberate Jerusalem.

As trouble began to mount, David - who had reportedly performed a number of magical feats - proclaimed angels would fly him and his Baghdadi followers to Jerusalem, but the prediction failed. Instead by one account, David was killed by his own father-in law, who had been paid off to do so - sending on the decapitated head to the Seljuk Sultan in tribute. Jews throughout the region were forced to pay severe indemnities for the uprising.


Alroy's story was turned into a novel by Benjamin Disraeli in 1833. Sounds interesting! I'm going to try giving it a read.

May 11: The Mayan Longer-Count Calendar

In what must be a complete non-surprise to almost everyone, this newly-revealed find in Guatemala does seem to show that Mayan calendar-makers did not believe the world would end in December 2012. With thanks to Kristal for first pointing it out --

Newly Discovered Mayan Calendar Goes Way Past 2012

May 10: a late messianic movement in north Africa

During a period of pogroms whipped up by the fervor of the First Crusade, a Moroccan scholar named Moses a-Dar'i predicted that the Messiah would arrive on Passover of 1127, freeing the Jews who lived under the Almoravid dynasty of Morocco. In fact this dynasty - which, though short-lived, controlled much of Iberia and founded the city of Marrakesh - collapsed in a rebellion in 1147.

May 9: Poll - one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming

The authors of the book "The Last Myth" argue that end-times hysteria is higher now than in much of the past - but on that point I have trouble agreeing with them. I would imagine this figure of one-seventh actually may not compare too badly with end-of-world expectations throughout history.

Reuters - One in Seven Thinks the End of the World is Coming

May 8: A little book of doom - and asteroids strike twice

Two dates to note:

In 1774, a vicar in a small village called Boazum published a "little book of doom" which caused a sensation throughout the Netherlands. The vicar, Eelco Alta, claimed that an alignment of the visible planets early in the morning of May 8 presaged the "demolition" of the solar system.

In 1998, the movie "Deep Impact" was released, preceding another large-budget film about an asteroid strike on earth - "Armageddon" - by just seven weeks.

May 6: Jansensism

The Catholic movement of Jansenism rose to great popularity in the latter half of the 1600s, despite staunch opposition from the Jesuit orthodoxy. A 1653 papal bull made a five-point charge of heresy against the Jansenists, with official tolerance of the movement ending in a second bull of 1713.

Among the beliefs of the Jansenists, first expressed in the writings of Cornelius Jansen, was that the Second Coming would occur in 1733. Jansen died on this date in 1638.

May 5: Ice or earthquake? We're not sure.

An alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn with the sun and moon on this date in the year 2000 was expected to cause sudden and globally-catastrophic climate change. This according to Richard Noone ("Ice: The Ultimate Disaster") and Jeffrey Goodman ("We Are The Earthquake Generation").

May 4: Rosicrucianism

On May 4, 1689, the Kabbalist and founder of Rosicrucianism, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, died. His "Proper Exposition of the Aspects of the Book of Revelation", 1680, proclaimed that the Catholic Church would fall by 1860, precipitating the second coming of Christ.

May 3: The Domesday Book

During 1086, a census of English property holdings was made for William the Conqueror, who had assumed control over the island after invading 20 years prior. The reason this survey was sardonically called the "Domesday Book" is that its assessments, whether accurate or not, were as unchangeable for tax purposes as the Last Judgment is supposed to be for souls.

May 1: Supernova!

Over the night of April 30/May 1, 1006, Supernova SN1006 appeared. This was the brightest stellar phenomenon in recorded history, with an apparent radius about half that of the full moon. Reported worldwide, the nova was visible through the daytime and sufficient to read by at night. Astrologers viewed it as a portent of war, famine, and cataclysm. Remaining at its greatest magnitude for about three months, the nova faded over the following 18.

April 29: Origins of the Rapture (John Nelson Darby)

The peculiarly American concept of the "Rapture" didn't exist in Christianity until the 18th century, when it was briefly mentioned by Increase and Cotton Mather. Starting in 1827, the doctrine was honed and popularized by John Nelson Darby, an Irish-American evangelist with the Plymouth Brethren. His views would be disseminated by the Brethren, by Darby's follower Dwight Moody, and by the Scofield Reference Bible (based on Darby's own translation of scripture).

The "Rapture" is suggested directly in just one passage of the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: "[T]he Lord himself will come down from heaven... and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."

To explain: this passage reflects the prevalent Jewish view that on Judgment Day, the dead will rise bodily from their graves and return to God. What the apostle Paul was addressing was the question of what would happen to living human beings during this event - a pressing question, since Paul assumed the apocalypse was imminent. His extremely brief description of what came to be known as the "Rapture" was not given much attention or weight until early progenitors of American evangelicalism seized on this line in 1 Thessalonians.

Linking up this Pauline quote with Revelation's rather non-Pauline description of the end-times (ie, the Tribulation), Darby and others came to espouse "premillennialism". This was a new doctrine created with an eye toward sparing the faithful from earthly suffering under the Beast 666, red dragon, scorpion-tailed locusts, and other colorful denizens of the Bible's last book.
 
This term, "premillennialism", drew on the existing "millennialism" - the literal belief in a coming thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, as described in Revelation. Premillenialism holds not just that this reign will be preceded by the Tribulation Revelation describes, but also by a "Rapture" which will be wedged in just before the Tribulation, as suggested by 1 Thessalonians (and only there - not in Revelation - to be doubly clear). It's important to note that however familiar this Rapture scenario is today, it is a relatively recent American invention unknown to Christians of earlier eras.
 

Among Darby's other influential views is Dispensationalism, which holds that God has a sequential plan for humanity in which he manifests himself to the world in distinct phases - even while He remains unitary and unchanged in His own self. In particular, Darby held that after the death of Christ, a "Church Age" began in which God's chosen people are no longer the Jews - since they rejected Jesus - but instead the worldwide "church" of true Christian believers.

Darby died on April 29, 1882.

April 26: Y1K in southern France

In 1018, the French monk Ademar de Chabannes wrote of a pre-dawn panic and trampling before the Abbey of St. Martial, sparked by fears of the Antichrist. Cases of heresy were reported to be widespread throughout southern France at the time. A prolific writer - and forger - Ademar produced 500 folios of speculative writings/fictions about the apocalypse before his death in 1034.

As a footnote, Ademar wrote the oldest surviving autograph musical manuscript in the western world: a mass written to support his fraudulent claim that the historical St. Martial was an apostle during Christ's life, rather than a bishop in Gaul in the third century.

April 24: Tens of Thousands Await Aliens' Emergence from a French Mountain

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9531861.stm

The BBC story above is from last year, but there's some more recent information in the link below. Including Raelians and Ramtha followers, 20,000 people have apparently gathered at a mountain near the French village of Bugarach, with authorities fearing that this number may increase to 100,000 as December approaches.

The cultists expect the world to end cataclysmically on 12/21/12, with the space aliens who live inside the mountain emerging just in time to spare all humans dwelling nearby.

http://www.earth-issues.com/20000-cult-members-await-doomsday-in-french-village/

April 23: Don't Ask

April 23rd, 1957, was the date of the apocalypse according to a California pastor named Mirhan Ask. Ask's prediction was published in the January, 1957 edition of the Jehovah's Witnesses' periodical "The Watchtower".

April 22: "The Last Myth"

Here's a Huffington Post feature by the authors of The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America. Which is also a really good book; I read it this last week.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mathew-gross/9-ways-the-world-might-en_1_b_1435648.html

The Last Myth claims that fears of the apocalypse have been on the rise in America, in large part as tools of worldview vindication. That is to say - a Christian may look toward the Rapture with the hope of being proved right about her religion; whereas an environmentalist might be accused of feeling a little frisson of vindication whenever another Rhode-Island worth of Antarctica calves into the sea.

I think the authors are pretty successful in saying that an impulse to believe in imminent disaster is deeply connected with feeling one's political or religious views are under threat. But by politicizing the apocalypse, they want to say, ugly scenarios which are actually evaluable by science - global warming, peak oil - get regarded merely as quasi-religious personality traits, and not a matter of evidence and fact. "You believe in climate change because you're a liberal" becomes a statement that can make sense in America, whereas, "You believe in gravity because you're a conservative" is not a combination of words anyone would even think of.