The problem for me here is that the Jews date their calendar from the Exodus. So it has been 5768 years since the People of Israel left Egypt.

For them, that was, and remains, a very significant date, yet very significant things happened before that date too.

So Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the fathers of the Twelve Tribes of Israel were all dead and gone hundreds of years before Year Zero on this calendar.

And very significant things happened to them, too! The whole Human Race came out from a flood through Noah; all Semitic peoples came out of Ur through Abraham, who also settled the Land of Canaan; Isaac was saved from death at Abram’s hand by God’s intervention, if he had died, there would have been no Israelite nation.

Was any of these less significant than the Exodus? Debatable. So that is why I have a problem dating the return of Jesus from the Jewish calendar.

The idea of 6000 years, however is not a bad one. To set the scene, let me tell you about James Ussher

Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) was the Anglican Bishop of Armagh, and eventually he became the Primate of All Ireland. He was seriously clever, and worked on the text of the Bible, trying to calculate backwards down the genealogies to find out the date of the Creation week. He deduced that Creation began in the evening preceding October 23 4004 BC.

Several other scholars had been doing similar calculations at this time, ending up with dates such as 3929BC and 3949BC. However, they were not the first, Bede had calculated 3952BC, 900 years earlier.

However, calculating based on the presupposition that the Genealogies are complete in Hebrew is a distinctly dodgy business.

It is normal in Hebrew thought to refer to any of your ancestors as your “Father”. In Matt 3 9, Jesus criticises the Jews for claiming Abraham as their FATHER, yet not repenting of their ways. So, what they meant by “Generations” was not necessarily the same concept as we use in these years of Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

Some say Ussher was influenced by the fairly accurate, corrected, estimate of the date of the Birth of Jesus. When the modern calendar was produced, a guess was taken as to when Jesus had been born, and the number of years it had been since then was taken as the actual date AD.

But later, further more accurate calculations were done, and the actual date of Jesus birth was then reckoned to be 4 BC by our calendar.

In Usssher’s day, the idea was popular that the earth would have a lifespan of 7000 years, 4000 from Creation to the Birth of Jesus, 2000 after his birth, and 1000 years of the Millennium. That meant that there was a lot of pressure to come up with a date of Creation in BC 4004, which Ussher duly supplied.

Many Christians have accepted Ussher’s chronology, almost as an Article of Faith, theough the Bible does not require it. The difficulty is that 1997AD was, on this Chronology, exactly 6000 years after Creation. And we are still here!

Actually, IF I were to work out this sort of Chronology, I would much prefer to take into account Daniel’s prophetic words from the angel in Daniel 9 26. The angel does not date God’s Chronology to the BIRTH of Jesus, though that is mentioned, but to his DEATH.

Now! That is more interesting! 2000 years after Jesus’s death would work out to around 2030, give or take a few years.

No, you are right, we won’t really know till much nearer the date, and it could still be hundreds of years off. But it COULD be then, or even sooner.

Be Ready!