Counting the Days: The Connection Between Chronology and Eschatology in the Early Church

Counting the Days: The Connection Between Chronology and Eschatology in the Early Church

Oral - Textual or Investigative

This research examines the connection between the world-week eschatological/apologetic schema and the development of Christian chronicons from the early church until the Carolingians. For young age creationists, knowing the age of the earth is incredibly important for constructing a working model of world history. Within the last decade, this has prompted renewed interest in the study of ancient Christian chronicons, specifically to understand what, if anything, the early church did with the systematic differences in the reported ages of the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies. This engagement, primarily done by Henry Smith of Associates for Biblical Research and Lita Cosner of Creation Ministries International, has largely been to “recruit” church fathers rather than revisiting them, seeking to understand their theological context and motives. One major point of theological context that is commonly ignored is that of the concept of the world week and its use as an apologetic tool and an eschatological framework. This research begins by examining the Jewish context of Messianic chronological schemas and messianic date setting formulas in such as “The Book of Jubilees,” “the Book of Enoch,” “The Testament of Adam,” and the Babylonian Talmud. From this background, the Christian development of the world-week formula from an eschatological date-setting formula to an apologetic argument based on LXX numbers will be traced from Pseudo-Barnabas to the Carolingian shift from AM to AD. This world-week formula also serves as one among a host of reasons why many in the early church made use of the LXX in their chronicons rather than the MT.