The dragon had given to the beast ‘his power, and his seat, and great authority.’ Rev. In The Great Controversy, she simply wrote that in the sixth century “the bishop of Rome was declared to be the head over the entire church. This shows up in several written works, including Uriah Smith’s Daniel and the Revelation and The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary on the book of Daniel, among others.Īn important exception to this trend is Ellen White. This legal approach, I believe, provides a firmer basis for this, and perhaps other, prophetic time periods.Īs early Adventists adopted the prophecy as part of the historicist heritage, most prophetic expositors tied the timing of the beginning of the 1,260 years with military victories of Rome to the final uprooting of the three horns by the little horn of Daniel 7:8, 20, 24. In this article I maintain that rather than military events, we should consider the creation or dissolution of legal structures. This approach has also gained ground in relation to some other prophetic time periods, such as those found in the fifth and sixth trumpets of Revelation. This has caused some scholars, including some Adventists, to move away from viewing the 1,260-year prophecy as having a literal, historical application, and as being more of a symbolic number. The lack of a clear answer has caused some expositors to argue that 538 has no inherent significance, and was merely chosen because of its convenient relationship to the decisive ending in 1798. So what made the 538 battle so much more prophetically significant and decisive than similar victories in the 540s and the final battle in 553? 2 The Ostrogoths were not fully defeated until about A.D. The Ostrogoths regained Rome in the 540s, and needed to be dislodged again. The event was just one stage in an ongoing conflict that continued for at least two decades. The trouble was that the decisive “defeat” appeared a little anticlimactic, as it involved the breaking of the Ostrogoth siege of Rome by Belisarius. Some thought that the beginning was signaled by the third horn of Daniel 7 being uprooted, which was the defeat of the Ostrogoths by Justinian’s general Belisarius in 538. 538 that matched the clarity of a pope being exiled and dying in jail. 1Īfter the shock and clarity of the events of the 1790s subsided, however, some scholars could not see a decisive event in A.D. It was a matter, then, of running the period backward to find the starting point, which would be A.D.
But with the rise of Napoleon, and the exile into captivity of the pope by French general Berthier, there was a rare moment of near prophetic unanimity among Protestant expositors, who declared that this period ended in A.D. Prior to the French Revolution, Christian thinkers gave a range of views about when the period started and ended. 7:25, KJV), has been historically understood by Adventists as comprising a period of 1,260 years during the Middle Ages. The prophetic period of “times and times and the dividing of time” (Dan.
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