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Preface In the few years leading up to the year 2000 there was, quite understandably we might at first presume, something of a boom in millennial expectation . An informed observer, however, might wonder why—after all, January 1, 2000 is an entirely human, and indeed Christian, construct: a date that ought to be without much significance at all to most of the people in the world. And even for those for whom the Christian faith is a matter of ultimate concern, there is still a question of why the year 2000 should mean anything in particular, since even if we were to think that God would indeed do something special to mark his Son’s two thousandth birthday, it surely would not have come with the turn of the year 2000. This is not simply to argue that Jesus was born in 7 or perhaps 4 B.C.E. (though he probably was), nor yet to note that if December 25 is correct (and there is about a 1 in 365 chance that it is) the big apocalyptic bang should perhaps have been set to occur on that day and not at the New Year. It is not even to note that for much of Christian history each new year began on March 1 and not on January 1 (which is why the month we now call September is called September—it is the seventh and not the ninth month of the year, according to the “old style”). In fact, while all these points are valid, the nonsignificance of the year 2000 is perhaps even more vii transparent than this: there was no year zero. This being the case, if God were going to do something in the two thousandth year after the birth of his Son, even a very uncritical reading of the timescale ought to have meant that this something should have been due to happen not in 2000 but in 2001. It is possible, of course, that it is simply wrong to think the reason that the year 2000 was important to some Christians was because of its assumed connection with the birth of Jesus. Perhaps we ought instead to be thinking more in terms of the much older tradition that the earth would last for six thousand years and then be followed by a Sabbath-millennium. After all, to the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day (2 Pet. 3:8), and the week of creation, including the Sabbath day of rest, might be a foreshadowing of the history of the world. Such a view was embedded in the Christian tradition at least as early as the second-century work the Epistle of Barnabas (and in Jewish sources it is probably older than that). It can be seen also in the writing of William Whiston (1667–1752), who charts the six thousand years of Christian history from creation to the dawn of the millennium in his work (published in 1706) on the interpretation of the book of Revelation.1 But again there is a problem here. Archbishop Ussher, whose chronology is accepted by many fundamentalists, worked out that creation was in 4004 B.C.E., which means that, again taking a rather uninformed view, the end should have come in 1996 and not in 2000. However, the absence of the year zero is again a factor: accepting Ussher’s chronology but allowing for this absence of year zero would mean that the end should have been due in 1997 rather than 1996 or 2000. The interested observer might then indeed wonder why the year 2000 became so important in popular culture. But that it did so is beyond question—many will well remember the buildup to the year 2000. The discussion above is designed to illustrate a point: millennial apocalypticism operates much more at an emotional than a cerebral level. No one who had given more than a moment’s thought to the issue could really have come to the conclusion that the year 2000 would see anything particularly significant happen. Nevertheless “PMT” (premillennial tension) was evident on all sorts of fronts as the year 2000, or Y2K as it became colloquially known, loomed large. Something in the individual and collective consciousness simply would not give in to the dictates of plain reason. The number with those many noughts on the end surely must herald the event of something, even if most were not sure what. As Y2K...

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