Hello everyone,
It is based in Oakland, California. It comes from Family Radio.com.
Here is part of the interview from NPR's Talk of the Nation trying to explain everything.
Jerry Walls joins us from the campus of the University of Notre Dame, where he's senior research fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion. He's also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Eschatology.
Nice to have you with us again.
Mr. JERRY WALLS (Oxford Handbook of Eschatology): Great to be here.
CONAN: And why this Saturday?
Mr. WALLS: Well, you know, he has a very esoteric numerology, which he's worked out, going back to the flood, which he has dated at 4990. So even though scholars by and large agree that we have no idea when the flood actually occurred, he's got it down to the exact year.
CONAN: And you're saying he. Who's he?
Mr. WALLS: Oh, he - I'm talking about Harold Camping, the man that everybody is talking about, that's got all this second coming talk astir again. He is a radio mogul, head of a radio empire, has lots of followers. He wrote a book originally several years ago called "1994?" question mark - in which he predicted the Second Coming of Christ in 1994.
Now, that did not materialize. Strikingly enough, he still has a lot of followers and has now come up with a new scheme saying that he misread important parts of the Bible that he hadn't really carefully studied. So, of course, that's an interesting question. A guy who admits he hadn't carefully studied with his first prediction, you know, but now he - now apparently he's got all the gaps covered, and he says it's absolutely clear this time.
And again, his starting date is the flood, which he says happened in 4990 B.C. Now, the second crucial number goes back to Genesis 7:4. After Noah has built the ark, God then says to Noah, in seven days the flood is going to occur. So sort of the idea is that seven days you can preach to people, warn them, seven days the flood is going to start.
So he takes the seven days to symbolize a thousand years each because there's a verse in the first - in the New Testament, First Peter or Second Peter, I think it is, 3:8, says that one day with the Lord is as thousand years, a thousand days, or a thousand years is as a day.
So each day represents a thousand years. So you add 7,000 to 4990, that's how gets 2011 as the actual date of the Second Coming.
Now, it's more specific still. He's got an exact day, and again, this is really, really complicated how he arrives at that. I've got this written down in front me. It's rather complicated.
He believes that Jesus was crucified on April the 1st 33 A.D. And again, scholars, you know, reputable scholars do not think we can pinpoint that, but he has. And he says there's 722,500 astronomical days from that date to May 21, 2011.
Now, here's how he arives at that. In the Bible, he says five signifies redemption, 10 signifies completeness, and 17 signifies heaven. So 722,500 is made up of two sets of five times 10 times 17. So you see, it's a rather convoluted numerical kind of a figure, and again, that's part of what's fascinating about these kind of predictions. The more esoteric they are, the better they are. It's kind of like someone, you know, that has special insight that nobody else could have come up with or seen has suddenly hit the, you know, the loadstone, and nailed this thing in that way that everybody else missed before.
CONAN: And...
Mr. WALLS: So - go ahead.
CONAN: Oh, I was just going to say, and then the sequence that comes after that is - I guess the apocalypse sequence that everybody has become more familiar with as the result of the "Left Behind" series of...
Mr. WALLS: Right.
CONAN: ...terrible time - the rapture...
Mr. WALLS: True Christians will be removed from the world, raptured, after which the rest of the population will undergo enormous judgment. And I heard him say in a clip I watched the other day, millions of people per day would be dying, you know, so apocalyptic disaster of unspeakable proportions follows, until October 21, which is literally the end of everything, the literal end of the world.
CONAN: Well...
Mr. WALLS: So that's the scenario.
CONAN: That's the scenario.
Mr. WALLS: So anything you need to get done, do it now.
CONAN: Drink the good wine now.
(Soundbite of laughter)
CONAN: So as we look ahead to this - I mean, we make jokes, this group has to know that when they published this date as they did in 1994, they're going to be mocked. This is going to be the punchline of every comedian on the planet.
Mr. WALLS: Right. Already has been and will be even more. But the amazing thing is, despite this track record, people continue to do this. And, again, this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Back in the 1970s, there was a book, a bestseller called "The Late, Great Planet Earth" by Hal Lindsey, in which he more or less implied that the end of the world would happen probably around 1998, which was a generation after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. So he more or less, you know, predicted what happened sometime within a generation of the founding of the state of Israel. Well, that didn't happen. That book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s, okay?
Now, in 1988 there was another - another guy wrote a book called "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988." And again, this is fascinating to me. The guy who wrote this was a NASA engineer. Camping is also an engineer, a civil engineer. So it's something about a fascination with numbers.
CONAN: It's a little unusual to come up with a sequel, though, after the first one doesn't come up right.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WALLS: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But again, everybody thinks they have hit on the formula that other people have missed, all right? So he wrote his book. And, again, this book sold like 4.5 million copies, okay? Okay. And a lot of people, again, were astir. You know, he didn't predict an exact date, but he gave up like a three-day window. But it was going to be in 1988, within a three-day window. That didn't happen, so he again predicted it in 1989, 1993 and 1994. Now, you know, he lost a lot of his following after the first time it didn't happen. But Camping has maintained a rather large following despite his previous failed prediction.
CONAN: Well, we do know that many faiths do. Just as they have creation myths, they talk about the end of days.
Mr. WALLS: Yes. I mean, I mean virtually everybody thinks there's some kind of an end of the world, at least in the theistic religions. Now, in some of the non-theistic religions, they don't believe there will be an end of the world. They, in fact, think the world is eternal, has been around forever and always will be. And so history is not aiming to a target in the way that it is in the great theistic religions.
But even for the naturalists, people who don't believe in God, there's an end of things, and it's a rather dismal, bleak kind of an end of time billions of years into the future, when the sun burns out, and not only our sun but all the other suns burn out. And the universe just keeps expanding and disintegrating into oblivion. So you got...
CONAN: Entropy, I think, that's called.
Mr. WALLS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you got the end of the world either way. And so the question is, is the end of the world the end of hope or is the end of the world something to be hoped for? So people who see the end of the world as something hopeful, see it going somewhere that will end up - end up in a positive way.
I hope this clears up things.
I DON'T believe in this. Actually, it's making my job harder. I'm in security.
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Still no thunder or wind... but at least it's starting to look like what it's supposed to! lol
