Questioning the Millennium

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Glaber’s tale provides a striking lesson in the dangers of an idée fixe. He was still alive in 1033, still trumpeting the forthcoming millennium—though he admitted that he must have been wrong about Christ’s nativity for the beginning of a countdown, and now proclaimed that the apocalypse would surely arrive instead at the millennium of Christ’s Passion, in 1033. He read a famine of that year as a sure sign: “Men believed that the orderly procession of the seasons and the laws of nature, which until then had ruled the world, had relapsed into the eternal chaos; and they feared that mankind would end.”

  My own position had favored skepticism until I attended an international conference devoted to this subject (“The Apocalyptic Year 1000,” Boston University, November 3–5, 1996). There I learned how rich and complex this debate has become. First of all, the “panic terror” has long been a political football in historical circles. French romantic historians of the early nineteenth century loved the legend and constructed an elaborate set of arguments to justify a potent and widespread apocalyptic episode. But positivist historians of the subsequent Third Republic, imbued with the rationalist spirit of the late nineteenth century, adopted an opposite and skeptical attitude that has dominated the profession to the present day.

  Medieval historian Richard Landes, convener of the conference, convinced me that sufficient evidence now exists to support at least a modest claim for substantial millennial stirring, especially in peasant and populist strata of society—the very groups that leave so little historical record of their potent concerns, all the more so in this distant age before printing. At least I am convinced that my strongest reason for skepticism can be laid to rest. I had not even been persuaded that a year 1000 existed in the consciousness of most people at the time. Our current B.C.–A.D. system for counting years did not arise until the sixth century (see Part 2), and I thought that this scheme had made little headway into popular consciousness by the year 1000. But Landes and others have shown that the famous chronologies of the Venerable Bede, that redoubtable eighth-century English cleric and scholar, had been copied extensively and widely distributed to almost canonical use among ecclesiastical timekeepers throughout Europe. Bede followed and popularized the B.C.–A.D. system. Through his works, the advent of the year 1000—and its millennial implications—had probably diffused to all social classes.

  This tale of the year 1000 establishes the last link in our progression from the original millennium as a future epoch of a thousand years to our current use of the same word for ends of thousand-year periods centered on nice round years with three zeros. One common character anchors this shift in meaning: Jesus Christ himself. The original millennium specified the length of his reign after the Second Coming. To forecast this blessed event, early Christians postulated a six thousand year duration for ordinary earthly time, parsed as six periods of a thousand years apiece. To make these calendrical millennia turn at years with three zeros, fraught (like the forthcoming year 2000) with such earnest and worldwide anticipation, we must center our system for counting years on an event that supposedly occurred at one of these “nice round” moments.

  Our current system of counting uses the traditional birth of Jesus as such a centering point. The architects of our calendar counted backward from this beginning, in packages of millennia B.C., until they reached the creation of the world. They then counted forward, in packages of millennia A.D., to fulfill the six thousand years of human history, and to specify the apocalypse of the Second Coming. It all makes sense. A mathematically inclined God, mindful of the allure of cycles and numerical repetitions for the lovable and fallible creatures that he had crafted in his own image, would surely have incarnated his only begotten son at a crucial turning in the cosmic cycle of thousands.

  Only one question now remained—the most practical and portentous of all: At which thousand-year turning had Jesus been born? How many of the six possible millennia had preceded his birth, and how many would be left for our future? The people who succumbed to the panic terror of the year 1000 thought that five millennia had preceded the birth of Jesus, and that the apocalypse must therefore arrive at the next turning.

  Once again, and as always in the history of apocalyptic thought, the appointed time passed and the earth endured. Traditionalists therefore revised their theory in the obvious minimal manner: four thousand years must have elapsed between the creation and the birth of Jesus—and the current world could therefore endure until the year 2000.

  The beginnings of modern historical scholarship in the seventeenth century provide a final chapter to our story. Creation in 4000 B.C., and destruction in A.D. 2000, could be validated by symbolism and allegory. But why not seek corroboration from the data of human history? The Bible and other historical documents presented the chronology of human life. Why not count backward from the birth of Jesus, through the duration of Roman and Near Eastern empires, the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel, the ages of the patriarchs (including Methuselah’s maximal 969 years), and the week of creation, to see if a beginning in 4000 B.C. could be squared with the historical record?

  Available documents had already made estimates “in the right ballpark,” thus auguring well for the success of a more rigorous application. Using somewhat different systems of reckoning, the Hebrew Bible had set creation at 3761 B.C., while the Septuagint (the Greek Bible, translated by the Jews of Alexandria) favored 5500 B.C. Several pre–seventeenth century scholars had also tried their hand, with similar results. The Venerable (and apparently ubiquitous) Bede had calculated 3952 B.C., a figure tantalizingly close to the preferred date of 4000.

  But the seventeenth century marked the golden age in this enterprise of scouring historical records to set the limits of time. We tend to scoff at these efforts today, branding them as the last holdout of an unthinking and anti-intellectual biblical idolatry. I will not, needless to say, defend the enterprise for any factual acuity. These scholars made a crucial error in choosing to regard the Bible as literally true. Since the “week” of creation is too short by several orders of magnitude, the calculated dates obviously bear no relationship to the true extent of geological history! But we cannot fairly invoke our present knowledge to castigate past scholarship based on different and honorable (if incorrect) premises. The calendrical counters of the seventeenth century included the brightest and most learned scholars of the time. Their efforts marked a high point in traditions of humanism, for these scholars committed themselves to an exclusive use of data and reason (though we now view their data as insufficiently accurate, and their reasoning as crucially misguided on the fundamental issue of biblical literalism).

  Archbishop James Ussher, the Anglican Primate of All Ireland (an ecclesiastical title for a leader among bishops, not a zoological designation for a monkey’s uncle), published the most famous of all chronologies in 1650: Annales veteris testamenti a prima mundi origine deducti (The Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced from the First Origin of the World). Ussher set the moment of creation at a day that would live in both infamy and memory—4004 B.C. (at noon on October 23). Let no one saddle the good archbishop with any charge of imprecision!

  Ussher’s figure lies so tantalizingly close to the expected date of 4000 B.C. Only one tiny question of reconciliation remains—and we may bring this inquiry to a close: Where did Archbishop James Ussher find those four little extra years, and why did he feel compelled to include them? Did the biblical dates just add up to this sum? Did the good archbishop then decide, after so many years of such concentrated labor, that calendrics could work like horseshoes—one of the few human enterprises, or so the saying goes, where “close enough” counts? Or do the four extra years arise for an interesting and principled reason that can round out our story?

  The Opening of the Fifth and Sixth Seals, the Distribution of White Garments Among the Martyrs and the Fall of Stars (1498), Albrecht Dürer. Woodcut from The Revelation of Saint John. (illustration credit 1.7)

  Happily, the more interesting
alternative applies. As I shall show in Part 2, the sixth-century inventor of the B.C.–A.D. system made an unfortunate little error in setting the birth date of Jesus at the crux of his transition. Herod, you see, died in 4 B.C. So if Herod still ruled at the birth of Jesus—and think of how many good stories must disappear if he did not (the slaughter of the innocents, the return of the three magi to their own country)—then Jesus must have been born in 4 B.C., if not earlier. Ussher therefore tacked these four additional years onto his chronology—for theory dictated that exactly four thousand years must pass from the creation to the birth of Jesus, thus setting the beginning of the world at 4004 B.C.

  Ussher fully accepted the standard view that exactly six thousand years must pass between the creation and the Second Coming. He performed his calculations partly to determine when the world must end, and in the hope that this blessed millennium would arrive soon enough to fuel human hope, but at a sufficient distance to spare his own life and power. Ussher was also a partisan of the switch from millennium as apocalypse to millennium as calendrics. That is, he advocated the notion that earthly time should be counted in units of 1,000, and that each millennial transition should be marked by a great historical event to signify the overall beauty and internal logic of God’s system—with the last moment, the inception of the true millennium, at exactly six thousand years from creation.

  Ussher argued that Solomon had completed his temple at the halfway point of 3,000 years, and that Jesus must appear exactly a thousand years later at 4000 A.M. (Annus Mundi, or “year of the world”). Moreover, Ussher followed the old medieval theory of types that viewed each story in the New Testament as a symbolic replay of an Old Testament event—so that time’s six thousand years formed two great and coincident cycles, with the completion of the second cycle marking the end of business as usual and the advent of the millennium. Thus, although we may now view the bases of comparison as far-fetched or even risible, Mary, when pregnant with Jesus, served as the type of Moses’ Burning Bush—because both held the fire of God within themselves yet were not consumed. And the Resurrection of Jesus must replay the deliverance of Jonah from the whale—because both men were buried in death and darkness, but exited from their tombs on the third day. For Ussher, the birth of Jesus represents the type for the completion of the Temple—the establishment of the new and old orders. A neatly numerical God, working within his six thousand year framework, would surely place these events at two successive millennial cruxes, separated by a thousand years.

  So four thousand years must separate the creation from the birth of Jesus, who appeared on earth at exactly 4000 Annus Mundi. But that nasty little problem about Herod’s death had thrown God’s elegant reckoning four years out of kilter with the erroneous, but official, B.C.–A.D. system that regulated the secular calendar. Thus, on our flawed calendar, Jesus was born in 4 B.C., and the world—necessarily created exactly four thousand years before—began in 4004 B.C. Ussher wrote (and I quote from my own copy of this amazing book):

  The true nativity of the Savior was full four years before the beginning of the vulgar Christian era, as is demonstrable by the time of Herod’s death. For according to our account, the building of Solomon’s Temple was finished in the 3000 year of the World, and in the 4000 year of the World, the days being fulfilled in which the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, was to bring forth Christ himself (of whom the Temple was a type) was manifest in the flesh, and made his first appearance unto man: from which four years being added to the Christian era, and as many taken away from the years before it, instead of the Common and Vulgar, we shall obtain a true and natural Epocha of the Nativity of Christ.

  Ussher’s large folio volume represents an immense labor of calculation and scholarship (requiring knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). You can’t simply spend a rainy afternoon counting the begats in the Bible, for gaps and ambiguities abound, and the record is incomplete in any case—for the chronology of the Old Testament ends with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century B.C., and the New Testament doesn’t pick up again until the time of Jesus. Thus, one has to move laterally from the biblical record into the historical documents of other societies (particularly to Babylon, where biblical and Babylonian records can be correlated for the captivity of the Jews), then forward to Roman history, and back again to the New Testament.

  We could be uncharitable and suspect that all Ussher’s work amounts to little more than an elaborate scholarly smokescreen for a preconceived conclusion. Ussher “knew” that the earth must last for precisely six thousand years, and that Jesus must have been born in exactly 4000 Annus Mundi—so didn’t he just jiggle and poke the data until the dates came out “right”? Perhaps, but I don’t think so—or at least I am confident that Ussher proceeded with honorable intentions and methods (even if his preconceptions unconsciously affected his procedures). All scholars must begin with a theory in mind, and work to test—and to reject if necessary—an original preference. Ussher knew what he wanted, but he began with no guarantee that the data would validate his desires.

  To be fair to the cynics—who stress the implausibility of getting real data to match an admittedly nonsensical, and floridly false, theory with such precision—Ussher must have massaged all the gaps and ambiguities to his advantage. The data contain enough “slop,” enough missing intervals where a scholar must extrapolate across a gap, to provide a great deal of “play” and plasticity for squeezing information into expectations. But the same data also impose strong constraints upon a vivid imagination. The actual information must come pretty darned close to four thousand years for the distance between creation in a literal Bible (where the days of God’s first active week can have no more than twenty-four hours) and the birth of Jesus. If the stated lifetimes of the patriarchs, and the given reigning times of the kings, added up to ten thousand or two thousand years, then this enterprise would be cooked, and a system of allegorical reasoning would have to be invented by those who still “knew” when the world must end. So let’s be kind to Ussher and honor his substantial labor. I don’t doubt that he read all questionable points in his favor, but he did count, and labor, and read, and ponder, year after patient year.

  So the world must end, and the millennium begin, at exactly 6000 Annus Mundi, precisely two thousand years after the birth of Jesus. Well, the year 2000 lies just around the corner, so maybe we should be preparing by learning how to gnash our teeth, and by inventing some really good (and noncarcinogenic) asbestos substitute for the forthcoming fire and brimstone. But wait a minute. Jesus was born in 4 B.C.—so 6000 Annus Mundi has already come and gone, precisely on October 23, 1996, by Ussher’s chronology. What happened?

  Well, something suggestive did transpire on that date. George Burns once said, with undeniable justice, that the victory of the New York Mets in the 1969 World Series constituted the first indubitable miracle since the parting of the Red Sea. So if God, by his common touch, now signals us through crucial events in our secular culture, October 23, 1996, did feature a prominent miracle. The New York Yankees, dangerously behind, two games to one, in their World Series with the powerful Atlanta Braves, were hopelessly in arrears, six to three, with only five outs left in the eighth inning of the crucial fourth game—where a loss, and a consequent three to one deficit, would have sealed their fate. The Yankees won that game in one of the most miraculous and improbable comebacks in the history of sport. So, on the eminently reasonable assumption that God is a Yankee fan (and both a kindly and inscrutable figure as well), He may have used 6000 Annus Mundi to send a signal and solicit our earnest preparation before He runs out of reasons for delay and must ring down the truly final curtain on earthly business as usual.

  But wait one really last minute. As the next section will show, October 23, 1996, was not 6000 Annus Mundi after all! Dionysius Exiguus, that pesky sixth-century monk who also committed the four-year blunder about Jesus’ birth, made another portentous decision in establishing the B.C.–A.D. system. He didn’t
include a year zero in the transition—the reason, as we shall see, for the perennial debate about whether centuries begin with the ’00 or the ’01 year, and whether the new millennium arrives in 2000 or in 2001. Thus, thanks to this missing year, 6000 Annus Mundi will occur on October 23, 1997, by Ussher’s chronology!

  Whew! for I am writing this essay in January 1997—so I still have a little time to prepare (and I better watch out, and better not pout). Thus, dear readers, we end this chapter with a reprise of the classical test for apocalypses—the theme that has circulated throughout these pages, and throughout Western history. This book will bear a November 1997 publication date. But if the theory of 6000 Annus Mundi holds, and if Ussher got his chronology right, the world will end on October 23, 1997. So, if you are reading this book—as I fervently hope you are—then the anticipated apocalypse has been postponed once again. The only truly repeated pattern of the ages—the failure of apocalyptic predictions—has played one more time to perfuse our spirits with the satisfaction of a knowable world order. God must be in His heaven—and all must be right with the world!

  * As I read the galley proofs for this book in late March 1997, a tragic event—the suicide of thirty-nine people in the Heaven’s Gate cult—made me realize how parochial, even a bit condescending, I had been in writing this statement. I said that some of the saddest results of apocalyptic beliefs resulted from a kind of unholy alliance—when non-Western people selectively chose some Christian bits and pieces and welded them with traditional beliefs to form an unstable and incendiary new doctrine. I should have realized the universality of such propensities and not placed an implied blame upon “others” from cultures so distant from our own. Fully westernized people are equally capable of fusing apocalyptic Christian bits and pieces with folk myths of our own contemporary culture to form the same kind of destructive and incendiary doctrine. The Heaven’s Gate cultists made just such a mixture of traditional millenarianism with American pop culture myths of science fiction in general, and UFOlogy in particular—and the result cost them all their lives. In thinking that their immortal essences resided only temporarily in an earthly body, that the body’s individuality must be rigidly suppressed, that their essences would reunite with extraterrestrial higher powers upon their bodies’ deaths, and that a space ship awaited behind the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet (which, at this very moment, shines so brilliantly outside my window as I write) to take them “home,” they consciously combined Christian millennialism with modern science fiction. Their official statement, prepared before their mass suicide, explicitly said so (and even followed a common pattern in misspelling millennium with only one n). They wrote: