Soul Sleep and Premillennialism

So I recently learned of the existence of a book called Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity by Charles E. Hill.  The main thesis of the book is that in the early centuries of the Church there tended to be a correlation between believing that believers are also in Hades between death and Resurrection (which Soul Sleep is a form of, Hades simply means The Grave not the modern understanding of "Hell") and Premillennialism (or Chillialism).

Now the thing is the author intends this to discredit Premilennialism, because yeah the popular Prmeillenialism of modern Evangelicalism tends to be taught by theologically uniformed Christians who absolutely do not want to be associated with something like Soul Sleep.  But for me it has the exact opposite effect, my openness to Post-Millennialism/Partrial Preterism was increased recently as I recorded on this blog in the Baptism of The Beast post.  However for reasons that extend well beyond my Eschatology I firmly believe in Soul Sleep, Paul's most vivid account of The Resurrection clearly states that the physically dead are "asleep".  The idea that we go to Heaven immediately when we die is a product of Platonist Corruption of true Biblical Teaching, as verified by his earliest list of people who taught this, Clement of Alexandria and Origen and then their influence on Cyprian.

Another annoyance I have at this book is contributing to confusing people on the difference between Post-Mill and Amillenialism.  The eschatology he is attributing to Cyprian is Post-Mill not Amill, Amill means you reject the Bodily Resurrection entirely, the chief of all heresies.

But that's the thing, teaching you go to Heaven when you die is essentially the Gateway drug to deemphasizing the Bodily Resurrection and then abandoning it entirely.  What separates Christianity from Paganism is that we do not teach an "Afterlife" we teach the inevitable reversal of Death entirely.  Just read my Do We have a promise to be with God when we Die.

Now this book is often wrong on who it places where.  He wants to argue Polycarp wasn't with Ireneaus and Papias but an Amazon reviewer of the book going by Dakota Sorenson has already argued against that.

"The most significant name on that list is Polycarp. Polycarp is the link between the apostle John and Irenaeus—between the apostle whose writing contains the key New Testament millennial text (Rev. 20), and the chief early defender of premillennialism. The fullest and most systematic early expression of premillennial eschatology occurs in Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.31–36. Irenaeus’s expository discourse on the earthly millennial reign is “by far the most extensive and best reasoned in Christian literature to date” (p. 12). If Polycarp held to an amillennial position, how did his student Irenaeus come to hold a premillennial position? Hill argues that Irenaeus changed to the premillennialist position in the course of writing Against Heresies. Hill says we have “every reason to believe” that Irenaeus’ millennial eschatology “was not received from Polycarp” (p. 254). I would beg to differ. First off, Polycarp hints at the premillennial belief in an asynchronous resurrection of the just and the unjust (Phil. 2.2–3). He states that Christians can be resurrected only “if” (ἐὰν) they fulfill certain conditions, such as doing God’s will and loving the things he loved. This implies that those who fail to meet these conditions will not be resurrected. Yet, Scripture teaches that even the unjust will rise from the dead for judgment (John 5:29; Acts 24:15), which is indicated in Phil. 7:1. Thus the only way to make sense of Phil. 2.2–3 is that the just will be resurrected at a different time than the unjust. Lo-and-behold, this is precisely what the premillennial reading of Rev. 20:4–6 says! This is why Irenaeus taught that the resurrection of the just (“the first resurrection,” Rev. 20:5) chronologically precedes the resurrection of the unjust, with an earthly kingdom phase in between. Polycarp seems to have been a premillennialist who believed in a heavenly intermediate state.

Secondly, Brian C. Collins has demonstrated that there is no evidence Irenaeus changed his mind on the Millennium. He writes, “One of [Irenaeus’] chief arguments against Gnosticism was that he stood in line with the tradition of the elders that reached back to the apostles. But on Hill’s reading, at a fundamental point of debate (a point important enough to provoke a “momentous” change), the Gnostics stand in the traditional position, and Irenaeus outside it. It is difficult to believe that Irenaeus would undercut a major part of his argument from book 3 in this way. In addition, the claim that Irenaeus changed millennial positions and departed from the teaching of Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and others is inconsistent with Irenaeus’ own statements. In Proof 61 Irenaeus attributed the millennial reading of Isaiah 11 to the elders. 

...."

But I would argue his placement of Hippolytus with the Post-Millennialists is also wrong, his Against Plato right from the start makes his belief in Souls Sleeping in Hades clear, and his eschatology which he wrote more about then anyone else pre-Nicaea is clearly Premillennial with him predicting the Millennium to start 500 years after the time of Christ.

Another common Strawman authors like Hill engage in is calling the Millennial Kingdom "temporary", that's not what Revelation 20 implies, what ends the Thousand Years is Satan being let lose, The Kingdom is saved from Satan's attempt to end it and does in my view have continuity with New Jerusalem.  I'm sure I differ with a lot of mainstream Premillenialists on this but to me the New Heavens and New Earth are just as Carnal as the Millennium, it's the Spiritual being added to it that is the distinction.

In a separate article Hill argues agaisnt the assumption that the Montanists were Premillennial, and I think he might be right there, at the very least Tertullian's weird Eschatology is not as identical to theirs as people assume.  But that's the thing, they are another Pythagorean/Platonist influence on Early Church History being among the first Christian Ascetics.  Ultimately though I think the Montanists simply had a weird Eschatology that doesn't easily fit into any modern classification boxes.  However this article argues that the alleged New Jerusalem in Phyrgia idea came form a later offshoot group not the original Montanists.

People talking about this also sometimes say it like "the Chilialists were just a loud minority in Asia" but isn't Asian Christianity exactly who we'd expect people to get Revelation right?  In fact this lineage is specifically tied to Smyrna one of the two flawless Churches, and to Ephesus the Church most praised for Doctrinal Purity.  

At any rate Athenagoras of Athens taught Soul Sleep in-spite of his apparent Platonism and he was independent of this lineage.

Now one could reconcile the Biblical basis for Soul Sleep with Partial Preterist Post-Millennialism by arguing Soul Sleep was true up until the Millennium starts or a little before. But if you take literally Revelation's seeming account of Bodyless Souls in Heaven they seem to have always been there, at least the Martyrs who are were who Tertullian thinks are treated differently.

There is also a lot of debating about "why the Church rejected Chilialism" as if there is no dispute that it did.  The mainstream Hierarchy of the Church seems to have slowly distanced itself from it (though even Gregory of Nysa was clearly still a Futurist in what he says about the Antichrist). But it was never formally condemned by a Council and the common people remained broadly Futurist as shown by popular literature like Pseudo-Methodius.  

Eschatology views Tier Ranking

I'm going to rank various positions on Eschatology in terms of how I personally feel about them at the time of my writing this post on Saturday November 13th of 2021.

S Tier: The Position(s) I currently favor.

I'm currently a Pre-Millennial Futurist with a Rapture Position that can be called "Mid-Trib", but not what many assume Mid-Trib means in that what The Rapture is I view mostly the same as Post-Tribbers, it is the Second Coming, and from my position's own POV the Tribulation by definition ends at The Rapture.  And The Last Trump is the Seventh Trumpet.

I also consider some Idealist readings of Revelation also true, it is also a symbolic summery of The Entire Biblical Meta narrative, but that doesn't conflict with it also being future events, because that's what every good final episode of a saga should be.

A Tier: Positions I'm currently very open to being converted to.

Historicism in it's Pre-Millennial form, Partial-Preterism and Revivalist post-Millennialism, or something that combines elements of those. 

I kind of want to be convinced of something like that now given other things I believe.  But it wouldn't be likely to be any in their current most well known forms, since my hypothetical Preterism wouldn't be 70 AD focused (not for Matthew, Mark or Revelation anyway) and my Historicism would be less fixated on The Vatican viewing Christian Monarchy in general as the Abomination of Desolation.

If I did abandon Futurism I would probably retire this blog and start a new one.

B Tier: Views I consider firmly wrong but not in any way heretical.

Middleism, only in that separating Matthew's Olivette Discourse from Revelation I view as untenable, whichever time period one is about so is the other.

Also any views where my only or main objections come down to not interpreting Revelation as Chronologically as I do.  But thus far everyone I've seen doing that is also guilty of something down below, (It's mainly associated with Post-Trib, Chris White's Pre-Wrath and Preterism).

C Tier: Views I consider tied to Heresy but merely minor ones

Dispensationalism (Pre-Trib, some forms of Mid-Trib, the Pre-Wrath view of Chris White), Supersecessionism (Most forms of Post-Trib, probably some hypothetical forms of Mid-Trib, and also today most Non Futurists).

And also Domminionism which mainly manifests as Reconstructionist Post-Millennialism but can be made compatible with other views.

D Tier: Views heretical in their rejections of core doctrines of the Faith.

Any view that denies a literal bodily Resurrection of The Dead.  Which is firmly required for Full Preterism and Amillenialism.

F Tier: Basically not even really Christian at all anymore.

Any view that identifies the Satan of The New Testament with YHWH The God of The Hebrew Bible.  Like Marcionism and the most well known forms of Gnosticism.

Often goes hand in hand with throwing out Revelation altogether as a False Prophecy.  But they may also selectively use stuff from Revelation.  Also these people are generally also doing the D Tier Heresy.

Mystery Babylon as an Adulteress

The more technical arguments for making Mystery Babylon Jerusalem don't hold up at all.  What does hold up are the more thematic connections to themes in the Hebrew Bible about her as a wife of YHWH engaged in Harlotry with The World.

The problem is a lot of Christians are uncomfortable with accepting that that could be us, we think The Church is supposed to the one people of God who won't fall into the same pitfalls that Samaria and Jerusalem fell into.  Even when more fringe elements are criticizing the mainstream Church it's usually in the context of wanting to deny that they actually count as The Church, as legitimately part of the Body and Bride of Christ.

So Protestants and Evangelicals and Torah Keepers point out the ways in which Mystery Babylon can apply to the Catholic Church, but are unwilling to see how we've been guilty of the same basic sins in our own way.

I'm not an Historicist in remotely the traditional sense.  But I do think it's fascinating how the clues in Revelation about Mystery Babylon both point to Rome and to her being either The or A Church.  Meaning on some level however indirectly this book that even the most skeptical critics can't date to later then the mid second century predicted Rome becoming Christian.

The Revelation is drawing on Old Testament imagery, but it's directed at The Church, at Seven Churches in Asia Minor.  And the Jezebel of Thyatira is associated with a lot of the same imagery as the Harlot of Revelation 17.

However the time when Rome became Christian is also the time when OG Rome on the Tiber River ceases to be the only candidate for who Rome is, because that is when Constantinople was founded.

In my view the only cities eligible to be considered candidates for the Seven Hilled city of Revelation are ones that define themselves that way as a positive because they want to be seen as an heir to Rome.  The main three candidates are modern Rome, Constantinople/Istanbul and Moscow.

God's judgments are for correction, this Harlot no matter who she is should not be seen as being permanently rejected, this all goes back to Ezekiel 16.

I have to admit I've spent much of the last year or two trying to be convinced of a form of Post-Millennialism, The Revivalist form however is the only form I'd accept.  I don't want to be a Prophet of Doom predicting this world has to get a lot worse before it can get better.

And I understand the Post-Mil and Partial Preterist arguments about Revelation 20.  But in my look at Church History I see the Church as fitting the Revivalist Post-Mill interpretation of that Chapter for a lot less then a Thousand years, not more.  We were a Camp set apart and separate from The World not even three hundred years.  Only the Ancient Church of the East (often misleadingly called Nestorians) even came close to being like that for a full thousand years.

What I have become more open to are elements of Historicism, but not the Day=Year theory, so if someone has a form of it that works without that nonsense, point me to it and I'll give it a shot.

How much Patristic support is there for Preterism?

I ultimately don't actually care what the "Early Church Fathers" thought on anything.  I'm true Sola Sciprtura, and my exact views on Bible Prophecy are not 100% in agreement with any interpretation known to have been expressed in antiquity.  If aspects of what I believe genuinely didn't exist before a guy named Darby in the 1800s then so be it, all I care about is what conclusions the Scriptures lead me to.

But preterists both full and partial, amillenials and post-millennialism in all it's forms don't have that option even when they are nominally protestant.  If the history of The Church is the fulfillment of the Thousand Years refereed to in Revelation 20 and/or New Jerusalem, then we should have known that from the start.

I don't necessarily expect the reverse to be true though, the whole point of Pre-Millennialism is that we consider the age of Grace to be one where the follows of the true God are just as capable of getting things wrong as we were before, even at the earliest stage, The Apostles themselves kept misunderstanding Jesus while He was right there correcting them.

So I'm not even making this investigation because I think it could be the ultimate death nail to other views.  It's because I care about history being represented properly, and because I do respect the early Christians, even the ones I most disagree with, and so don't want to see their views misrepresented for the sake of an ideological argument by anyone on my side or agaisnt it.

First let's talk about what does not inherently make someone a Preterist in their view of Revelation.

1. Referring to what happened in 70 AD as being foretold by Jesus.

There seems to be some straw-manning of Futurism going around where some think any acknowledgment that Jesus "not one stone" comment refers to 70 AD is incompatible with Futurism.  When the truth is I've rarely seen that connection denied by even the most extreme futurists.

First of all I don't think we even need the three "Olivte Discourse" chapters to find Jesus foretelling it, in Luke especially he refers to it a lot.  I personally see 70 AD in more prophecies then most of my fellow Futurists.  Of the the three chapters in question I only have a definitively futurist stance on Matthew 24.  However there is also a position called Middleism which takes a Preterist view of Matthew 24 but a Futurist view of Revelation, these terms didn't exist in antiquity but it looks to me like that position was a common one in the Early Church.

2, Viewing the 70th Week of Daniel as already fulfilled.

Lots of Post-Trib Futurists and Historicists (who are generally Pre-Mill and so more akin to Futurism on what I think matters most then Preterism) also view the 70th Week as already fulfilled.  My own view is that the 70th week was 30-37 AD, so on that issue I'm more preterist then the people who obsess over 70 AD.

Basically those are the two most prominent examples of a more general fact that what someone says about other prophecies proves nothing about their view of Revelation.

Yes your view of Revelation will effect how you view other things because it's referencing older Prophets all the time.  But there is no consistency even within a basic view to what conclusions believers will make from those connections.  In my own view sometimes Revelation is claiming to be what that older Prophecy was actually about all along, but sometimes it's more like history repeating itself and/or making an analogy to help us understand what it's talking about.

3. Identifying The Church as now the true Israel in some capacity.

Like the 70th Week example it seems a lot of people opposing Futurism treat it as if Pre-Trib Dispensationalism is the only form Futurism comes in.  Post-Tribbers pretty much all take this view in some way, and I as a form of Mid-Trib hold a position between the extreme Dispensationalism of Chuck Missler and the extreme conflation of Post-Tribers.

There are multiple non Dispensational views on how The Church and Israel relate.  Two-House theology is predicated on specifically equating The Church or at least the "Gentile" Church with Ephraim.  Mormonism is actually based on a form of that view but it's also popular in the Hebrew Roots/Torah Observant movements.

Rob Skiba likes to call "Replacement Theology" a straw man, he says the Dispensationalists are the true Replacement theologists.  He stresses how even in The Torah citizenship in the Nation of Israel was not predicated solely on bloodlines, people not biologically descended from Jacob or even Abraham could be counted in as long as they got Circumcised and kept the Torah.  To him it's about us being the continuation of Israel.

But that's not a Strawman when applied to 70 AD Preterism.  I was recently watching a Partial Preterist's video on Revelation 11 and the Two Witnesses and he made it explicitly clear, God divorced one wife to replace her with another, there will be no redemption for the divorced wife.  This view is known as Supersessionism.  And make no mistake there are Post-Trib Futurists who also see it that way not Rob Skiba's way.  And the sad thing is that seems to be the way the "Early Church" talked about this issue and is the main reason I have no real desire to agree with them, Anti-Semitism creeped into the Greek Speaking Church very early on.

Even when someone is talking specifically about Revelation some things are simply not as inherently Preterist as Preterists looking for support will assume.

4. Identifying Mystery Babylon with Jerusalem isn't inherently Preterist either.

Chris White is a "Pre-Wrath" Futurist who wrote a book on Babylon being Jerusalem, and he was willing to do that even though he's just as much of a Dispensational Zionist as the Pre-Tribbers.  When he says he intends nothing Anti-Semitic by it I believe him, he's simply misguided.  Among the openly Anti-Semitic Conspiracy theorists there are people like Texe Marrs who was Post-Trib from what I've read.

This 4th example I kinda didn't need to include because I'm currently aware of no early Patristic support for it, though I certainly could have missed something.  In fact from what I've seen so far Babylon as Rome is the only Mystery Babylon view I've seen among them.  Instead the Anti-Semitism of the Early Church manifested in viewing the "Antichrist" as a Jewish Messiah claimant The Jews will accept.  So literally the polar opposite of the standard modern Preterist view on the bad guys of Revelation.

Now onto specific claims.

A website called Preteristarchive has pages devoted to a number of early fathers where they concede the Futurist stances of some but spend a lot of time engaging in the above distractions and other tactics to mislead people.  It does not have pages for Tertullian or Methodius and wrongly classified Ambrose of Milan and Eusebius as Ante-Nicene.

Froom is the name of a Historicist who wrote a book called The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers that you can find online.  He generally avoids trying to make anyone sound more in agreement with his views then they actually were, instead trying to speculate on why they were sometimes wrong in his view.  His one mistake in that area was claiming Tertullian made a connection he didn't actually make regarding The Temple of God as The Church and the Temple in II Thessalonians 2.  While I don't always agree with him his book was a key source in the research I did for this post.

An interesting thing about the most popular forms of Historicism is during the Pre-Nicene and even early post Nicene era their view on at least The Antichrist would have still been a pretty Futurist one.  None the less there were still things you could believe back then pretty incompatible with proper Historicism.

His book documents pretty well how Pre-Nicaea it was pretty much only the Alexandrians and maybe Victorinus of Potiou who entertained any position other then Pre-Mill on Revelation 20.

Justin Martyr is the oldest definitely known example of anyone referencing The Revelation at all.  Maybe The Didichae had Revelation 12's description of The Dragon in mind when it says "the world deceiver", if so that was a futurist application inserted into what seems like a futurist application of Matthew 24 (it's very possible Matthew was in fact the only NT writing the Didichae used at all).

The Preteristarchive has a page on Justin Martyr, and it takes a lot of things he said out of context to make it seem like he's explicitly rejecting Pre-Mill, but they exist in the context of him debating with a Jew about the Rabbinic Jewish Sabbath Millennium concept.  Today many Dispensationalists and Hebrew Roots types like identifying the Revelation 20 Millennium with that Rabbinic concept, but Justin clearly didn't.  I myself have come to not like defining the Millennium as a "Sabbath" Millennium because 1 Corinthians 15 defined it as a period that isn't a "rest" at all.

They failed however to quote the one and only time Justin explicitly refers to The Revelation.  I shall provide it here.

Dialogue with Trypho 81.4 "And further, there was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him, that those who believed in our Christ would dwell a thousand years in Jerusalem; and that thereafter the general, and, in short, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place."

Pretty clearly and unambiguously a Pre-Mill interpretation.

More then one website and blog trying to paint the Early Church as non Pre-Mil as possible will inevitably concede the Pre-Mill Futurism of Hippolytus of Rome and to some extent also his "mentor" Irenaeus.

The problem with conceding him and trying to paint him as the ONLY one is NOT their alleged connection to John which I feel is overstated and don't care about.  It's that only he actually wrote in depth on Bible Prophecy at all, it was really not a major priority of the surviving writings we have from the Early Church especially Pre-Nicaea.  It mostly comes up when refuting Gnostics and Origen on The Resurrection, in which context it frequently comes across that the "Proto-Orthodox" clearly seem Pre-Mil when stressing a literal Bodily Resurrection.  Only Hippolytus wrote an entire book on specifically the subject of The Antichrist.  And in so doing expressed many views on the matter I no longer and/or never did agree with, but his view on the matter was definitely a Futurist one.  And he was not speaking as if he was massively breaking with the norm, he spoke as if some of his specific details may be new but the gist was basically what everyone already agreed on..

And when the only unambiguous counter example(s) to pre-mill are Origen and some other Alexandrians linked to Origen, then your side is on the shakier ground since he was condemned as  a Heretic at a Synod in the 540s.  He's connected to a lot of Heresy, but none of his earliest critics like Methodius of Olympus ever objected to his Soterology, it was his Pre-Existence of Souls doctrine and how that effected his view of The Resurrection that was the core issue.

I'm not an Origen apologist the way most of my modern fellow Universal Salvation proponents often are, because I know that Soteorlogy was also supported by many others who shared none of Origen's issues, and a few condemned for going in the opposite direction on the literal/allegorical dichotomy.

I actually feel like 70 AD Preterism is far more incompatible with a God of Love who Saves ALL then Futurism, because as I stressed above they are adamant on YHWH's refusal to forgive Israel, they make YHWH's promises to never permanently cast Israel aside into bold faced LIES.

Origen's view of Revelation was probably more Idealist then 70 AD focused Preterism given his approach to Scripture in general.

On both Tertullian and Hippolytus one Amill blog admits they were Pre-Mill but says "not like modern Premillenialism", by which they mainly must mean not being Pre-Trib Dispensationalists.  Hippolytus was clearly Post-Trib on his timing of the Parusia, though he did support the gaps in Daniel 9 and 11 that are today usually typical of Dispensationalism.  I myself even in how I view The Millennium's nature am not like most modern pre-Millers, but my disagreement puts the Patristics I've looked at as closer to them then to me.

Tertullian was influenced by the Montanists and so occasionally viewed with suspicion by later generations of The Church, but still not as much suspicion as Origen.  Again Froom tried to paint him as the one Pre-Nicene father who seemed compatible with his Historicism, and indeed Tertulian is the earliest example I've seen of explicitly identifying Babylon with Rome.  But he also clearly identified The Two Witnesses with Enoch and Elijah.

Eusebius of Caesarea was agaisnt the Millennium but because of that questioned the Canonocity of Revelation altogether. Thing is a lot of writers at this time saw the Diocletian Persecution and it's relief under Constantine as the fulfillment of the future Kingdom happening then not back when The Church was founded.  Constantinople was in turn viewed as the New Jerusalem as much as it was a New Rome.

 Athanasius, Ambrose, Hilary and Jerome all spoke about things like The Antichrist in ways that show a futurist understanding of that issue, even Gregory of Nysaa the one time he mentioned The Antichrist clearly viewed him as yet future.  Both versions of the Nicene Creed rule out at least Full Preterism by clearly defining the Parusia as having not happened yet..  

Aphrahat one of the oldest Syrian Fathers also definitely taught Premillenialism and a Literal Resurrection.  His Eschatology can be considered a from of Historicism, but does not have the Antichrist view typical of Protestant Historicism.

In 380 Ticonius published a Revelation commentary that became the foundation of Post Millenialism as we know it today, and was in turn the basis for Augustine of Hippo's eschatology.

Over the course of the next few centuries the leadership of the Church became increasingly either Post-Mill or not Prophecy concerned at all as now Jesus overthrowing the current world system became no longer desirable to them.  However the Popular literature of this era implies Futurism was still the preferred eschatology of the masses, like the Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius and other texts related to The Last Roman Emperor tradition.  Meanwhile The Book of The Bee shows that understanding of Prophecy continued to thrive among the "Nestorians" into the 13th Century.

Also identifying The Two Witnesses with Enoch and Elijah seemed pretty universal when they came up all.

The Souls of them that were Beheaded

The use of the word "Souls" in Revelation 20 verse 4 is the linchpin of the argument of those who want to claim at least the First Resurrection isn't a literal bodily one but merely a spiritual Resurrection.

The thing is there are plenty of verses in the New Testament where "souls" is used and yet the "souls" in question are definitely still attached to living bodies.

Acts 2:41 referring to three thousand souls, Acts 7:14 referring to three score and fifteen souls, Acts 14:22 is an example that doesn't involve counting, Acts 27:37 referring to the number of souls on those ships.  1 Peter 3:20 refers to the number of souls on Noah's Ark. And there is Hebrew Bible precedent for it going back to Genesis 12:5, the very first time "souls" plural appears in the King James Version.

You might argue that this usage in Revelation is parallel to Revelation 6:9, the souls of Martyrs under the Altar when the Fifth Seal is opened, where only Pre-Tribbers argue the Bodily Resurrection of believers had already happened.

But to me that's the point, the word Resurrection isn't used in the vicinity of that reference nor is anything else said to imply it's already happened.  The Seventh Trumpet is when we're first told that now is the time for the judgment of the dead.  These verses of Revelation 20 are the last phase of the First Resurrection.   So Revelation 6 and 7 show that Souls simply having some kind of conciseness on their own isn't a Resurrection, at least not in how this book uses that term.

I will say that the mere use of the word Souls in the Fifth Seal account should not be used as an argument agaisnt Pre-Trib, they'll just point to Revelation 20.

The thing is even if I were to concede the possibility that these Saints are ruling with Christ in Heaven not on Earth, which I will admit nothing in the immediate context contradicts.  Jesus wasn't seated at the Right Hand of The Father till after His Resurrection, He was in no way reigning between Crucifixion and Resurrection,  So if even Jesus needs a Risen Body to reign then so do the Saints.

Why was Jesus rejected?

An argument sometimes made by Preterists, Amillennials and Post-Millennials against Futurists and Premillenialism that isn't based on interpreting Prophecy but more as a moral argument.  Is that Jesus was rejected by the Jews of His time because they expected a violent warrior Messiah who'd overthrow Rome not a Suffering Servant, and now we Premillenals have become exactly like them.

First of all I believe in Universal Salvation, so yes mainstream Futurism's desire to see the End Times as Jesus coming back to finally lay the smack down on the heathen and reward us I don't consider appropriate.  However literal the Violence of the Second Coming is, it's ultimately for the benefit of those being judged, and in many cases the harshest judgments will be for those who thought they were righteous believers.

Preterists still think Jesus came back to carry out wrathful vengeance on the heathen, they just think He did it indirectly, using Roman armies to burn Jerusalem and a Roman Emperor to burn Rome.

Secondly, this narrative about why Jesus was rejected isn't Biblical, it isn't even really traditional, it has it's roots in Hollywood fiction of the last 100 years, from Ben-Hur to the 60s King of Kings remake to Jesus Christ Superstar all wanting to depict Jesus as a Gahndi or Martin Luther King Jr figure.  Because it suites those in power to promote a narrative that the peaceful strictly non violent revolutionaries are the ones to be praised and idealized, because when the people actually start breaking things is when regimes get overthrown.  The fact is the narrative that Gahndi's efforts are why Britain left India is itself a product of British propaganda, there were violent rebellions which they couldn't handle anymore, but they didn't want to admit to being beaten so instead want us to believe they just listened to Gahndi's peaceful rational plea for Independence and left willingly.

Now Jesus did teach a peaceful message, to turn the other cheek and love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  But plenty of Christians throughout history have taken part in violent Revolutions and didn't see a conflict.  I'm not making this post to pass judgment on if they were right or not.

But in John 11:43-56 we see that the Priests and leaders of the Pharisees were the ones who thought He was too provocative, not that He wasn't violent enough.  They were the stability obsessed Centrists of their time, comfortable with the status quo and didn't want anyone rocking the boat.  In fact they boldly proclaimed "we have no King but Caesar", they declared their loyalty to Rome.

The only people really expecting Jesus to overthrow Rome at first were His own disciples who still needed things clarified for them at the Ascension in Acts 1.

Also if you read what Josephus said about the Zealots as a sect, you'll find they weren't a particularly Millenarian movement at all, they were political Anarchists in modern terminology and absolutely did NOT want to restore the Davidic Monarchy.  So these scenes in modern works of fiction of the Zealots going to Jesus trying to ask Him to be their Earl of Richmond or Duke d'Orleans are not even remotely plausible.

Some specific rebels here and there did proclaim themselves King.  But even they weren't claiming to be the Messiah or to fulfill any prophecies.  What most people keep saying about there being "Many Messianic claimants in the first century" is actually false, no one was claiming to be The Messiah but Jesus.  Josephus uses that word only of what Jesus was believed by his followers to be.

It wasn't till Bar-Kochba that Jewish Anti-Roman Rebels started claiming religious Messianic Mojo for themselves.  There is plenty of TNAK basis for the Messiah as a Warrior King, but they (when interpreted at face value) depict a conqueror expanding Israel's Empire, not a rebel agaisnt Imperialism.

Jesus' Message was popular with the masses, it was those in power who didn't like it, the "crowd" at the trial before Pilate was a planted crowd.

And what the Pharisees especially really didn't like about Jesus' message was the inclusion of the Gentiles and Samaritans.  Jesus was not a nationalist saying that in His kingdom the Goyim will at best be second class citizens.  He said many of them will get in before some of the Children of the Kingdom.

So yes, I am a Futurist because I take seriously that Jesus has promised to return to the Earth, overthrow the present world order and create a Communist Utopia.  

Now some radical Leftists often don't like Futurism because they feel it neuters Christians from taking action to make any actual progress now by telling us to just wait for Jesus to come back.  But Jesus told us to be the Salt and Light of the Earth, we are to be making an effort to improve things now as much as we can no matter what Eschatology is true.  However a notion that we're already in the Millennium or New Jerusalem encourages Christians to think we're supposed to rule the Earth, which is why that interpretation first emerged the same year Christianity became Rome's state religion.

Modern Futurists are frequently not immune to trying to create a theocracy either, but that's a product of over a thousand years of Christianity being the imperial religion of the West.  My point is there are really no Futurists staying out of politics because they're just waiting for Jesus to come back, the problem is too many Christians regardless of their Eschatology have an inverted concept of what our values should be.

Actually the Christians most inclined to go for being complete separatists staying out of politics tend to also have a "we're already in the Millennium" viewpoint, simply interpreting Revelation 20's picture as the Camp of the Saints being a set apart people and the resurrected Martyrs ruling spiritually in Heaven.  That's the gist of Revivalist Post-Millenialism.

But as for Reconstructionist Post-Millennials.  If to you the Prophecies of the Coming Kingdom are simply fulfilled by Christianity being the Politically dominant religion of The World.  Then it's pretty easy to look at the last 17 Centuries and consider the Status Quo to be Mission Accomplished, or see conquering Heathen nations as how one continues the mission.  And most Reconstructionists in America are just as Conservative as the Premillenials, maybe often more so.

Almillenialism and Full Preterism meanwhile tend to disagree with this world being where The Kingdom will ever manifest at all.  To them New Jerusalem is "Heaven" and the Material world is a Prison they can't wait to escape from.  

It is Premillenialism that naturally leads to seeing ourselves as currently emissaries representing God in a World that still needs fixing.

Chilialsm vs Premillennialism.

I am definitely a Premillennialist but I'm not comfortable with being called a Chilialist.  That might confuse you since enemies of Premillennialism treat the two terms as utterly synonymous.

I'm Premillennial because I believe the visible Parusia of Jesus Christ (and Bodily Resurrection of Church Age Believers) precedes the start of the Millennium described in Revelation chapter 20, and thus since that Parusia obviously hasn't happened yet, the Millennium hasn't started yet.

However what Chiliasm seems to refer to, especially when spoken of negatively by some early Christians, qualifies as that but also seems tied to fundamental misunderstandings of what the Millennium is.  Though those misunderstandings are to varying degrees also held by a lot of my fellow contemporary Premillennialists.

What I'm referring to is also distinct from the disagreements Dispensationalists and Supersecenists and Two House Theology have about what the Millennium is.

I've already discussed on this blog how The Millennium is not a Utopia or a Paradise, the paradise we await comes after that in Revelation 21-22.  The Millennium will probably be better then the world currently is, but it is still to a large extent an era in which the battle against Sin isn't over.  The main place I point to as being an allusion to the Millennium outside Revelation is 1 Corinthians 15:23-28, what Paul places between the Parusia and the General Resurrection.

I have already expressed on this blog annoyance at how many Christian prophecy teachers will refer to various Hebrew Bible Prophecies as being about the Millennium when they are clearly about the New Heaven and New Earth and New Jerusalem, and in fact they are the very Prophecies Revelation 21-22 is quoting, like Isaiah 65-66 and Ezekiel 40-48.

I do think there are some Old Testament allusions to the Millennium, like Daniel 7:12.  My current view of Ezekiel 38-39 means we possibly see glimpses of the Millennium in those chapters, as well as possibly the chapters preceding those.  And Maybe also the end of Zechariah 14.

I've also noticed a tendency for Chilialsm to be linked to viewing the Millennium as the last era of the Physical Word, that Revelation 21-22 are just describing a purely spiritual existence in which anything that looks physical there is merely an allegory, that it's really just about our Spirits becoming one with The Force.  Of course Amillennial and Postmillennial views are often also guilty of that heresy in their own way.  Especially since any view that we're already in the Millennium is an obvious gateway drug to rejecting the Bodily Resurrection altogether.

In my view Revelation 21-22 is a physical carnal world, in fact it is our world perfected to it's Pre-Fall condition.  And any desire to reject or weaken that is Platonic, Neo-Plaotnic or Gnostic heresy.

Basically what most Chiliasts think the Millennium is like is how I view Revelation 21-22.

My last post already addressed the misconception that Premillenialists think the Kingdom has an end.

When I say there was no Amillennial or Postmillenial interpretation of Revelation 20 before Augustine and certainly not before Nicaea, I'm open to being proven wrong on that.  But you need more then just the existence of people not liking Chilialsm and it's implications.  You need to specifically prove that they interpreted the Thousand years of Revelation 20 as not a literal time period and/or having already began.

And again, many people who wanted to reject any notion of a Millennium simply rejected Revelation altogether, like Eusebius of Caesarea.

Update Correction: Ticonius does beat Augustine to forming a Postmillenial interpretation of Revelation, in fact he is who Augustine got it from.  Still his Commentary was published in 380 AD, same year Christianity formally became the state religion of the Empire and after over half a century of being effectively the state region.  And it went hand in hand with being a purely Spiritual interpretation of Revelation.  And he was a Donatist, so officially a Heretic according to the Council of Nicaea.

His Kingdom Shall Have no End.

In Luke chapter 1 verse 33 the Angle Gabriel tells Mary about her Son.

"And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end."

This verse is the basis for one of the additions to the Nicene Creed.

whose kingdom shall have no end.

I have recently learned that many Amillenial scholars want to use this line as evidence that the Second Ecumenical Council condemned Premillenialism.  This PDF I found refuted the notion that Premillenialism was the reason for adding that line.
http://francisgumerlock.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Millennialism%20and%20the%20Early%20Church%20Councils.%20Gumerlock.pdf

However more important then if that was the reason for the line being added, is the matter of if this line even is in conflict with Premillenialism, because in my view it's not.

Every Premillenial agrees that Christ's Kingdom is without end.  Some may start by saying this declaration is more about the Kingdom of New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22 then what Revelation 20 is about.

But I prefer to stress that in Revelation 20 the Kingdom doesn't end when the Thousand Years ends, the only thing that happens exactly when the Thousand years are over is Satan being let out of the Abyss.  He then deceives Gog and Magog, the nations in the four corners of the Earth, to wage war on the Camp of the Saints, but then they are defeated.  The whole point of the Narrative is that the Kingdom doesn't end.

I would argue it's interpretations of the book that make the Millennium and New Jerusalem basically the same thing that are more likely to be hindered by this deceleration.

If anything this statement of Luke 1:33 is more of a problem for a face value reading of 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 then it is Revelation 20, but even then it's just a matter of exactly what Paul means.  I think Christ is still Reigning after He gives all Authority to The Father, there's merely a nuanced difference in how exactly it looks one the Material and Spiritual are no longer separated.

As I've said before, Amillennial or Post-Millennial interpretation of Revelation were very rare before Augustine, those who didn't like the Millennium as a doctrine instead rejected Revelation altogether.

The Origenist attitude condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council is ironically to me exactly the same attitude that leads to Amillenialism.

Genesis 24:60 destroys Preterism and Amillennialism.

Or at least many forms of them.

You see I've seen a common argument that all Bible Prophecy must have been fulfilled by 70 AD.  And well that's just not workable with this verse.

And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, "Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them."

A Thousand Millions is a Billion.  The entire world's Population didn't reach even 1 Billion till the 1800s.  And Human population tends to reproduce exponentially, meaning it doubles about every 50-70 years, or broadly speaking a generation.  Which means there is certainly no way descendants of just Rebekah (Israelites and Edomites) reached at least 2 Billion before 70 AD.

Another factor to point out about population growth is how both Genesis 48 and Deuteronomy 33 foretell Ephraim to dwarf Manasseh in population.  This never happened in the recorded Biblical History of Israel, every census had Manasseh significantly larger in population then Ephraim.  These Prophecies clearly expand into the post exile history of the House of Joseph.

Amillennial and Post Millennialism

If you have trouble telling the difference between these two eschatological models, it's not just cause they seem effectively the same to us Pre-Millenialists, even unbiased scholars are unsure which of these best describes the Eschatology of Augustine of Hippo.

The gist is, Amillenials believe there is no Millennium, while Post-Millenial means you believe the Parusia(Second Coming) happens after the Millennium.  Both however have a tendency to involve believing the Thousand Years of Revelation 20 are not literally that exact period of time.  And both tend to involve not taking the Chronology of Revelation at face value thus putting them in direct conflict with the premise of this Blog. 

My belief that the Resurrection is a literal physical bodily resurrection of the Flesh is core to my understanding of The Gospel itself.  And that is why I have long been opposed to any model saying the first 6 verses of Revelation 20 are already fulfilled.

But, I have recently become aware that some people feel you can believe in both.

Some believe the General Resurrection at the White Throne Judgment at the end of Revelation 20 is bodily, but Revelation 20:4 can be read as defining itself as of Souls not Bodies sitting on those thrones.  And I have been giving this view a very open-minded assessment.

That argument involves citing passages where Paul says we die in Christ and then are Risen in Christ when we become Believers, symbolically pictured in Baptism.  So believers have a spiritual Resurrection before we even die.  Which is why Revelation 20:4 isn't really describing the Resurrection event itself.  Basically Unbeleivers Spirits/Souls aren't resurrected before their bodies but Believers are.

This overlaps with a view on the Second Death that exists among Evangelical Universalists.  In the past I've taken the tactic of saying the Second Death is the death of death, but I've come to realize that only really fits one of the three verses to use the term.  I've now seen it argued by supporters of Universal Reconciliation that the Second Death is when unbelievers become Dead to Sin, which for Believers happened during our mortal life so that's why the Second Death has no power over us.

The first issue is that I'm only open to an argument for Post-Millenialism that doesn't play games with the chronology of Revelation.  You're not going to convince me that Apollyon and Satan are the same entity.  The Book Revelation defined itself as a clear chronology.

Secondly even if I could accept that interpretation of Revelation 20:4.  Revelation 11 is still clearly depicting the Resurrection of the Two Witnesses as bodily, you're not going to convince me that is merely symbolic.  The various Preterist views on the Two Witnesses account for their Deaths but not their Resurrection.

And then there is the mater of the Rapture of The Man-Child which I've shown isn't Jesus but The Church, and the 144,000 being described as already Redeemed from the Earth and as Firstfruits in Revelation 14.  And the Armies following the Rider on the White Horse in Revelation 19.

And the fact remains that it isn't the White Throne Judgment but various events between the 7th Trumpet and first Bowl that resemble how The Olivte Discourse and the Thessalonian Epistles describe The Paursia.

Revelation 20:4 also defines itself as being specifically those Martyred for not taking The Mark.  So it could be they are not Physically Resurrected yet because they were Post-Rapture Believers.

On the subject of rejecting The Millennium altogether.  I've read some anti Premilennial articles expressing how the face value chronology of Revelation 20 conflicts in their view with the plain reading of other passages on the Resurrection and the Parusia like 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Peter 3.

The whole Premise of my Blog is how Revelation right from the first Chapter defines itself as explaining what was unclear before.  The very first verse says that what even The Son didn't know before is being Revealed to us now, from Matthew 24 we know the timing of events is specifically what that was.  So whenever there is an apparent conflict between other passages and Revelation on Chronology, Revelation is the one to be taken at face value.

What's interesting is that Pre-Augustine those uncomfortable with the very idea of the Millennium simply rejected Revelation altogether, wanting to say Revelation was really the work of Cerethius or John the Presbyter.  Pre-Nicea that was mostly a fringe minority, as the Muratorian canon shows Revelation's canonocity was not in question.  And from Tertulian to Ireaneus to Hippolytus to Methodius of Olympus, everyone to speak on Eschatology in the Pre-Nicene Church was clearly Pre-Millennial.  They had other areas of disagreement, but they were all Pre-Millennial.

But post Nicea this Anti-Revelation camp got a prominent supporter in Eusebius of Caesarea.  In his discussions of what books to consider Canon what he says on Revelation is schizophrenic because of how his personal bias infests it.  He acknowledges it as being universally accepted as Canon by all Churches, not even disputed the way Jude, 2 Peter or Hebrews were.  But he also talks about it under spurious books because that's how he viewed it for no good reason.

It was Augustine of Hippo who introduced the idea that you can simply allegorize The Millennium away, along with a lot of other bad doctrines.

Before him everyone who considered Revelation Scripture, (which was the vast majority of Christians, especially who weren't part of some alternative Gnostic or Ebonite cult) believed in a Millennium.  They of course were wrong when they predicted it to begin in the 500s AD, but that date setting mistake was the product of other bad assumptions and shouldn't be blamed on the Millennium doctrine itself.

Gnostic Eschatology

A lot of the things you first think of when you think of Gnosticism are merely cosmetic elements that were not universal (not even all Gnostics were pretending to be Christian).

It is not actually required for Gnostics to view the Yahweh of the Old Testament as an Evil Demiurge, or that there are other gods above him.  Nor to make the Serpent good.  But such things certainly were and even still are common.

It's not too hard to turn Biblical Christianity into Gnosticism with only a few key heresies.  The Greek New Testament uses many of the same key words and phrases the Gnostics later used.  Just like modern JWs and Mormons and other cults uses the same terminology Evangelicals use, but they mean different things by them.

Logos and Sophia are used largely because they are accurate Greek translations of Old Testament concepts, The Word and Wisdom.  Both the terms "Archon of the Kosmos" and "God of this World" used of Satan by Jesus in John and Paul respectively, are used in Gnosticism for the Ialdobath.

The core tenet of Gnosticism is disdain for the physical world.  The Bible tells us the Earthly realm has been corrupted by The Fall.  But it will be Restored in the End in Revelation 21-22.  And those who are Saved will be perfected in The Resurrection.

Gnosticism however views the Physical world as inherently Evil, and our Physical bodies as a prison.  So denying a literal Bodily Resurrection of all Believers is key to them.

This is of course what Amillenial and Full Preterist eschatology requires.  Denying a literal Resurrection.

One Preterist website I had studied talks about how the Resurrection is only spiritual, it's about freeing the Souls of the Saved from Sheol only.

And they tied into that a belief in either The Gap Theory or the Extended Day Theory, I don't recall which one.  They insisted physical Death was always Adam's destiny, the Fall only caused spiritual death.  And some Christians even consider theories that Adam didn't have a physical Body before the Fall.  That idea is refuted to me by him saying Eve was made of his Flesh and Bone, but I do think it's possible Blood (as we currently define it) didn't exist before The Fall.

Augustine of Hippo was both the key popularizer of Amillenial eschatology within the Church, and one of the first to reject a literal interpretation of Genesis.  He came out of Gnosticism, and was open about still revering the Platonic Philosophy from which Gnosticism was derived.

I should add of course you can be Futurist and Premillennial and still hold a Gnostic outlook, if you Believe the Resurrection is only Spiritual, which I have seen examples of.

It's funny how Dan Brown in The DaVincci Code sought to create a narrative of modern Roman Catholicism and the Gnostics as arch rivals.  Brown did not comprehend Gnosticism at all, his version of them was the opposite on this very key defining trait.  (The hardcore ancient Gnostics denied Jesus had a physical body, so their Jesus certainly didn't have sex or have children).  The Vatican meanwhile is pretty Gnostic thanks to how much of Augustine they canonized.

Preterists and Pre-Tirbulationists

I find it amusing when I see people who hold a Preterist and/or Amillenial view of Revelation/Matthew 24 joining the trendy chorus of Post-Tribbers in mocking Pre-Trib and going on about how there is no mass vanishing in The Bible.

However the basic fallacy that lies behind the Secret Rapture doctrine, That Christ's Coming described in 1 Thessalonians 4 could go mostly unnoticed by The World, that he won't be seen by every single living person, is needed for Preterism to work too.

But Pre-Tribbers at least see it as a world wide event, while Preterists mostly think what was visible to the world was only seen in Jerusalem.  Citing Supernatural events described by Josephus and Tacitus and The Yossipon (I could do a whole post on Yossipon if an English version was available to the masses).

Preterism views the 70th Week of Daniel as the 7 years of the First Jewish-Roman War.  With the Abomination of Desolation event happening in it's 4th year in 70 AD.  One Preterist website I was reading cited historical references to what they view as the "Spiritual Resurrection" (reading this website made me realize how Gnostic full preterism tends to be) fulfilling 1 Corinthians 15, places them in 66 AD.

And some will add an event Cassius Dio and Suetonius record Nero seeing in Greece.  This must have been earlier then 70 AD.

One event they refereed to happened on Pentecost 66 AD, at the start of the War.  So they're even specifically Pre-Trib in timing.

And this same Website refereed to multiple returns of Jesus during the 60s and 70s AD.  So they don't even agree with those Post-Tribbers on only one "Second Coming".

All those three basic Biblical points of contention they are with Pre-Trib on more then any other Futurist model.  All they share with Post-Trib is Replacement theology.  And that makes no sense, all Futurists who believe in Two Comings believe it's because he has two covenant people to come back for.  These Preterists have Jesus doing all this back and forth for not much of a reason at all.

On the subject of the Pentecost incident recorded by Josephus, Tacitus and Yossipon (the latter two are merely adapting Josephus to suit their own agendas so no they aren't independent witnesses).

Josephus The Wars of the Jews 6.5.3.

"Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the temple,] as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, "Let us remove hence.""

Tacitus

 “The doors of the holy place abruptly opened, a superhuman voice was heard to declare that the gods were leaving it, and in the same instant came the rushing tumult of their departure.”

Sepher Yosippon, Trans. Dr. Steven Bowman, Ch. 87, Burning of the Temple, cited in Edward E. Stevens, First Century Events in Chronological Order: From the Birth of Christ to the Destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, (Pre-publication manuscript, 2008), 59-60.

  “When the holiday of Shavouth came in those days, during the night the priests heard within the Temple something like the sound of men walking, the sound of many men’s marching feet walking within the Temple, and a terrible and mighty voice was heard speaking, ‘Let’s go and leave this House.’”

 This doesn't seem like a Resurrection to me, but the divine presence leaving The Temple.  Josephus does not claim to have been an eyewitness to this event.  He was near Jerusalem but not in her at the time.  The Talmud says the Door of The Temple suddenly flew open 40 years before The Temple was destroyed, same year I believe Jesus was Crucified.  Maybe Josephus had deliberately changed or been mislead on when this happened.  Maybe this is the divine presence of The Holy Spirit leaving the Temple made of Stone and entering The Body of Christ on the Pentecost of 30 AD.  After the Veil was Torn.

In this same account, during the Feast of Unleavened Bread before this Pentecost Josephus says.

Moreover, the eastern gate of the inner [court of the] temple, which was of brass, and vastly heavy, and had been with difficulty shut by twenty men, and rested upon a basis armed with iron, and had bolts fastened very deep into the firm floor, which was there made of one entire stone, was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour of the night. Now those that kept watch in the temple came hereupon running to the captain of the temple, and told him of it; who then came up thither, and not without great difficulty was able to shut the gate again.

Before this it also talked about a strange Light in the Temple at the ninth hour, and a heifer giving birth to a Lamb.  Both signs that were originally interpreted as positive things but that Josephus insists the learned men knew were signs of disaster.

In Jerome's commentary on Matthew he repeatedly mentions differences that Gospel has in the version used by a sect of Jewish Christians (who's over all views he may or may not be misrepresenting) he called the Nazarenes or Ebonites.  When discussing Matthew 27:51 he says this Gospel claimed the lintel of The Temple was broken and split.

The Talmud actually claims the Veil was Torn because Titus slashed it with his Sword, in a passage Preterists love to quote as proving he committed an Abomination of Desolation.  So there is a precedent for the concept that some people wanted to move things that happened to the Temple in 30 AD up to 70 AD.

Psalm 83 War in 1983, Elam in The Millennium, and Chris White vs Bill Saulus

http://bibleprophecytalk.com/the-psalm-83-war-debunked/
http://bibleprophecytalk.com/bpt-the-psalm-83-war-debunked/
I ultimately agree with Chris White's debunking of the Psalm 83 War.  But I want to add some thoughts.

It's funny how Prophecy In The News has become one of the biggest supporters of Bill Saulus' Psalm 83 War idea.  Because J.R. Church in his very old book Hidden Prophecies in The Psalms had also discussed Psalm 83, way before Saulus.  It foreshadows Saulus' theory in reading the modern Israel vs Isalmic world conflict into the text.  But like Chris White he saw the Psalm not as describing a specific major War per se, but more of a behind the scenes political conspiracy.  The enemies of Israel colluding together, but the outright military conflict part of it being small, and mostly by proxy.

I like the theory of that book.  I wouldn't build doctrine on it, but the foundational aspect of seeing Psalm 48 as predicting Israel's reestablishment as a nation in 1948 is interesting (even though it's equally clear it's ultimate fulfillment is in New Jerusalem).  Also psalm 48 is the first of three Psalms to use the Hebrew phrase that should be translated "The Last Generation", and 1948 is in the middle of the period in which the Baby Boomers were being born.

And the Period between the Camp David treaty being signed and the treaty with Jordan being made in the 90s is in fact the period in modern history when those aligned against Israel most directly matched Psalm 83's list of enemies.  Because that's after Egypt ceased to be an Enemy but while Jordan still was.

People like to read Egypt into Psalm 83 via the Hagarenes, since Hagar was the mother of Ishmael who was an Egyptian so they feel it makes sense to see Hagarenes as a poetic code for Islamic-Arab Egypt.  But the Hagarenes in the Hebrew text are the same people refereed to elsewhere in the KJV as the Hagarites, Hagerite or Haggeri in 1 Chronicles 5:10-20, 11:38, and 27:31.  Where they are clearly a Trans-Jordan tribe, and thus further reason to look to modern Jordan or the Golan Heights if you want a Modern context.

The Hagarites probably are an Ishmaelite tribe, in 1 Chronicles 5 they're linked to 3 other tribes, two of which are known sons of Ishmael and the third has no discernible origin in Genesis.  One of those tribes is Jetur, who are the tribe known in NT times as the Iturians.

So the Lebanon civil war of 1982-83 and it's ties into Israel's other foreign policy and terrorism concerns of the time does happen to fit Psalm 83 pretty well.  But I agree with Chris White that the immediate context was of Asaph's own time.

The more recent theory Bill Saulus has been promoting about Elam and Jeremiah 49:34-39 I find pretty valid.  However I disagree with how he ties Psalm 83 and Gog and Magog and the Pre-Trib Rapture theory into his timing of it.

I want to copy/paste Jeremiah's prophecy here.  With a minor translation adjustment from the KJV.

The word of Yahweh that came to Jeremiah the prophet against Elam in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, saying, Thus saith Yahweh of hosts; Behold, I will break the bow of Elam, the chief of their might.  And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven, and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.

 For I will cause Elam to be dismayed before their enemies, and before them that seek their life: and I will bring evil upon them, even my fierce anger, saith Yahweh; and I will send the sword after them, till I have consumed them: And I will set my throne in Elam, and will destroy from thence the king and the princes, saith Yahweh.  But it shall come to pass in the latter days, that I will bring again the captivity of Elam, saith Yahweh.

I think this disaster could be part of the tidings out of the East that troubles The Antichrist in Daniel 11:44.  And that The Holy Spirit is leading Evangelical Christians in Iran to look to this Prophecy I feel is important.  Because I do believe the Gifts of the Spirit are still here.

I'm thinking based on Daniel 11:44 it may be the result of The Antichrist posing as an ally of Israel (or maybe an Israeli leader himself) doing preemptive strikes against Russia and Iran as they're planning an attack on Israel.  And then passing that off as fulfilling Ezekiel 38&39.

I think this could tie into the Kurds fulfilling ancient prophecies of The Medes.  If Modern Iran collapses then the Kurdish state forming in northern Iraq could expand into the Kurdish regions of Iran.  And thus will look a lot like Ancient Media.

What is most fascinating and unusual is that this is the only place where Scripture describes Yahweh placing his Throne somewhere on Earth other then Israel.  It surprised me to realize that there was such an occasion.

I've explained elsewhere why I feel many Old Testament prophecies we assume to be about The Millennium may really be the New Heaven and New Earth.  Including Ezekiel 40-48, and other key passages of Isaiah.  With those insights in mind, looking at Revelation 20-22 it is arguable that Jerusalem doesn't become God's Earthly Throne until New Jerusalem descends.  Revelation 20 does clearly show that Jerusalem exists in The Millennium, but the only direct reference to it there is at the end, for the Gog and Magog invasion which I do view as the same as Ezekiel 38-39 even though that's unpopular.

Some people do argue that Israel's regathering isn't really complete until sometime during The Millennium.  I think those arguments are valid, but I am firmly Pre-Millenial unlike some who might make such arguments.

With all that in mind.  I'm thinking it could be Elam is where The Millennial Throne of Jesus is located.

Or if it's not there the Entire Millennium then maybe just during a part of it.

Isaiah 61 and Luke 4, The concept of Two Advents.

Luke 4: 17-21

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord," And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.  And he began to say unto them, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."

This is Quoting Isaiah 61:1-2

"The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;" Jesus stopped on a comma here, which is why the people were finding it odd before he even made his declaration of it's being fulfilled.  He quoted only what was fulfilled that Day. The rest is for the Future yet still.

Now I don't know how much I qualify as a Dispensationalist. I certainly don't agree entirely with Darby. And the idea of different Dispensations of Biblical history exists even in Preterism.

It annoys me that even some Futurists/Premillennials tell me I'm torturing the text where I need leaps forward in Prophecy for certain Antichrist passages, like Daniel 11 or Daniel 9.

The fact of The Messiah having two advents was not obvious to The Jews, and still isn't. I could point to Micah 5, or Zachariah 9-11 and they just ignore the point.

But of course that wouldn't be enough for a Preterist or Amillennial, who sees even the prophecies of the Second Advent done within only a generation of The First.

So this demonstration of how Jesus Himself dealt with The Prophets I find vitally important.

The Church Age (and any period roughly analogous to it) isn't the only Gap the New Testament reveals in Old Testament Prophecy however. The Millennium is also one, looking at how Daniel 12 and even John 5:28-29 seem to see the Resurrection of the Saved and Unsaved as seemingly at the same time. But Revelation 20 clarifies there is a Thousand years between them. But many people with weird views on The Millennium insist it's Revelation's more detailed accounts that shouldn't be taken at face value. Never mind what the word Revelation means.

The 69th Week ended in 30 AD

Now for the Seventy Weeks Prophecy as a separate study.  I studied when Jesus died here.

Daniel 9:24-27

Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.  Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.  And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

Why the 7 and 62 weeks are distinct I don't know, I'm sure there is a reason, but distinct or not they're consecutive, the only gap is between the 69th and the 70th weeks, a gap that included the Destruction of the Temple is 70 AD. One possible theory I'm considering is that Nisan of 405 B.C. is when Malachi's book was published, closing the canon of the Hebrew Bible (what we often call The Old Testament).

Interpreting this as referring to 490 years is NOT the Day=Year theory because neither Day or Year is used. The Hebrew word translated "week" here simply means seven and can refer to seven of anything. Leviticus 25 refers to Sabbaths of years. The context of this prophecy was Daniel praying at the end of the 70 year captivity, so the context is years. 2 Chronicles 36:21 cites one of the reasons for a 70 years captivity is that for 490 years they'd failed to keep the sabbatical year.

Ezra and Nehemiah record about 4 different Decrees issued by Persian Kings. Cyrus's decree is the most famous and the first, but the text of the 70 weeks prophecy specifies the entire City including Wall be rebuilt. But the Biblical references make clear that is the 4th and final one at the beginning of Nehemiah. The text in Daniel 9 doesn't refer to The Temple's rebuilding at all.

People have tried to argue from Extra Biblical conjectures that the wall was included in Cyrus's decree anyway, but the texts of the Decree at the end of II Chronicles and the beginning of Ezra talk only about The Temple. Isaiah 44 and 45 do speak of the City, but NO mention is made of the Wall. In a poetic sense the rebuilding of The Temple begins the rebuilding of the City, but to ignore the significance that the Wall was not rebuilt until the time of Nehemiah is to miss the entire point of the narrative of Ezra, that the lack of the Wall kept hindering their attempts to rebuild the City.

The decree recorded in Nehemiah 2:1-8 was given in Nisan, the same month as Passover. One argument against the Nehemiah decree is we don't know the exact day, only the month. All the text of Daniel 9 deals with is years however and Nisan is Biblically the first Month of the Year, so I never word my interpretation of Daniel 9 as saying it was fulfilled to the exact day, only the year. The day the Messiah arrives as well as the day he is cut off is determined by understanding the Spring Feasts. Nehemiah also prayed the same Prayer Daniel prayed in Daniel 9, he's clearly linked to this prophecy.

So clearly the Nisan exactly 483 years latter must be when The Messiah was to be Cut Off. This decree is often erroneously dated to 445 or 444 B.C. Because Nehemiah dates it to the Nisan of the Twentieth year of Artaxerxes, and the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign and the death of Xerxes is dated to 465 B.C. because of Ptolemys' chronicle of Babylonian kings which ignores co-regencies.

Thucydides mentions that the accession of Artaxerxes had taken place before the flight of Themistocles. This places the start of his reign 473 or 474 B.C. And give the date of 454-455 B.C. as his twentieth year and the date of the decree.

Themistocles Seeks Protection from Artaxerxes.
This famous Greek grand-admiral, war hero of the Battle of Salamis, suffered a radical change of fortune. At the time of the betrayal of the Spartan hero, Pausanias, Themistocles, rightly or wrongly, was also implicated of treason toward the very nation-state that he protected. And, having learned of the death penalty meted out to Pausanius - he was actually walled in in the very temple where he sought refuge! - Themistocles decided to not wait for a similar fate. He journeyed to Persia for refuge. Having fought valiantly against the father, Xerxes, he sought protection of the son, Artaxerxes.

Themistocles Meets Artaxerxes, not Xerxes.
First, the passage from Thucydides. Themistocles escaped across the Aegean to Ephesus. The history continues...

"He then travelled inland with one of the Persians living on the coast and sent a letter Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, who had recently come to the throne."

An Eclipse helps to fix the date.
Although this relatively late period of Greek history (in which we have Themistocles's flight) is fairly accurately settled in history (that is, there is no serious controversy as to the dates), one more event transpires that is absolutely ironclad: a near-total eclipse of the sun on August 3rd, 431 BC, at the very beginning of the Peloponnesian War.

Why is this ironclad? There is no slop factor involved. Eclipses can be both predicted as future certainties and corroborated as historical events. Such is the case with the eclipse of 431 BC that Thucydides describes. The NASA website describes this account of Thucydides as the "[o]ldest European record of a verifiable solar eclipse (annular)"

How does this relate to the first event, the flight of Themistocles? They are both reported in the famous History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, a carefully calibrated account that relates all events described (except the very early history of the first chapters) according to a unified chronological frame of reference.

To know the date of the solar eclipse, 431 BC (modernly verified by NASA, for those who require such proof) is to know, by reading the History, the date of the flight of Themistocles, 473 BC. To know that date is to know also the beginning of the reign of Artaxerxes, which happened just a short while before this, 474 or 473 BC.

Numerous Egyptian records also corroborate that Artaxerxes co-ruled with Xerxes during the last decade of Xerxes reign.

So the Decree was in fact issued in the Nisan of 454 BC. 483 years latter takes us to the Nisan of 30 AD.

Ussher agreed with this date for Artaxerxes 20th year, but still insisted on a 33 A.D. Crucifixion, so he insisted the date pointed to the Baptism.

Those trying to make this point to 32 or 33 AD (starting from the incorrect 444 or 445 B.C. date for the Decree) by talking about "God's calendar is 360 days" are just torturing the data. The Jews always synchronized their Lunar calendar to the Solar cycle.

There is a trend of even some Christians, even Futurist/Premillennial ones, arguing that "Messiah the Prince" does not refer to Jesus, or The Messiah at all. First they argue that the definite article "ha" isn't used before Messiah here. The text does use in place of the usual definite article the Hebrew letters Ayin and Res, this is usually left untranslated. Ayin-Resh is the Hebrew word for city. It's foretelling the arrival in Jerusalem of that City's Anointed One and Prince.

The word Messiah is used of individuals who aren't Jesus often, I know. But this is actually the most unique of ALL uses of the word Messiah, only here is it so uniquely paired with the word Nagiyd, not the more common and mundane Sar.   I've seen it erroneously claimed Nagyid is a Persian word not Hebrew. If it were Persian in origin the only Biblical texts it could appear in are Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther and perhaps the very end of II Chronicles. But it's used by Ezekiel in 28:2 (the "Prince" of Tyre here is distinct from The King), many times in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, in Jeremiah and in the Psalms, and Proverbs. And even in Job, which is possibly older then the completion of the Torah in the days of Moses.

It's a far more important and precise occurrence then just using an equivalent of "The". To me No usage of the word is more indisputably about The Messiah Ben-David promised in II Samuel 7. The Triumphal entry wasn't the only time Jesus entered Jerusalem, but it is the only time he did so in a way that matched Zachariah 9:9's prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, with the people singing Psalm 118.

A claim exists that in verse 25 a period should be after the Seven Weeks and before the 62, and that it's only after the 7 weeks that "Messiah the Prince" appears. This is not justified by the Greens inter-lineal Bible I have at all.  Messiah is "cut off" AFTER the 62 weeks have ended.

I've seen some argue the translation "Messiah" as "Anointed One" in verse 26 is inaccurate. This shows complete ignorance of Hebrew, the letter Yot being used in the word the way it is here makes it always a noun, a separate word, messah, is used to simply mean anointing or to anoint. This argument uses the Septuagint version to back itself up. I need to do a whole study on just the Septuagint someday, the Septuagint is very problematic for many reasons and in my view Christians need to stop using it like they do.

This interpretation tries to get the 62 weeks to end in 70 A.D. by citing the same nonsense about the Persian Empire's history being wrong to support the Sedar Olam's dating system on which the modern Jewish calendar is based. This won't hold up under scrutiny because it is well known the Sedar Olam's dates were deliberately fudged to try and make the 70 weeks prophecy point to Bar Kochba, who lived roughly a century too late.  We also have Greek kings-lists backing p the Length of this period, due to Alexander I of Macedon being involved in the first two Persian wars.

The core of this argument is that the focus of the 70 weeks prophecy is about The Temple and Jerusalem, and nothing significant happened there when Jesus died. Their forgetting something important. Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38 and Luke 23:45 all record then when Jesus died on The Cross "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom;". The Temple physically stood for another 40 years, but it's Mosaic anointing ended when Jesus finally became the true Sacrificial offering all the others were only rehearsals for.  I'll again quote the Talmud Yoma 39b

Our Rabbis taught: During the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple the lot [‘For the Lord’] did not come up in the right hand; nor did the crimson-coloured strap become white; nor did the westernmost light shine; and the doors of the Hekal would open by themselves, until R. Johanan b. Zakkai rebuked them, saying: Hekal, Hekal, why wilt thou be the alarmer thyself? I know about thee that thou wilt be destroyed, for Zechariah ben Ido has already prophesied concerning thee: Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars.

So actually even what this wrong interpretation says the 62 weeks points to happened in 30 A.D. So I've come to interpret "Messiah be cut off" as having a double meaning, both referring to Jesus' death on the Cross, and the removing of divine presence from The Temple when the veil was torn.

Jerome records in his Letter to Hedibia 120.8 that some early altered versions of Matthew's Gospels added to Matthew 27:51 that the lintel of the Temple collapsed.

After the Triumphal Entry Luke 19:41 records that Jesus.

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.

And goes on to foretell Jerusalem's coming destruction. The people were judged for failing to recognize prophecy had been fulfilled. And not just because what he did matched what Zachariah 9:9 described, a false Messiah could attempt such a thing. The phrase "in this thy day", clearly tells us timing was the key. The context of the coming destruction of Jerusalem clearly tells us to look to Daniel 9, no where else does the Hebrew Bible speak of Jerusalem being destroyed again in addition to the destruction in 588 BC. And then in verse 44 the matter is made more clear "because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

So using Scripture to interpret Scripture, that settles the matter for me.

All I'll say here on the 70th Week, is that based on the Interpretation I've laid out of the first 69, the 70th Week must begin with the consecration of the Third Temple. The view of some that it'll not be finished being built till the halfway point I feel is erroneous and potentially sets the stage of part of the End Time deception.  My understanding of Revelation 11 being the first half of the 70th Week backs that up.

Update March 2024: A Huge Section of this was Copy/Pasted form somewhere else without credit and now I don't even remember what the source.  I'm Sorry about that.