The Time of the — Almost — End

The time of the end.

We begin with something on which we agree with everyone.

The "conclusion of the system of things," or the time of the end, exists. It is not the invention of some organization. It is Jesus who speaks of it, on the Mount of Olives, answering a precise question from his disciples: "What will be the sign of your presence and of the conclusion of the system of things?" (Matthew 24:3, NWT).

And Jesus answers. Wars and reports of wars. Food shortages. Pestilences. Earthquakes in one place after another. An increase of lawlessness. The love of the greater number growing cold. False prophets. Great signs from heaven. Men growing faint out of fear (Matthew 24:6-12; Luke 21:11, 25-26).

Let us stop a moment.

There have been those who took these words seriously. They looked at the world around them, compared what they saw with what Jesus had said, and drew the conclusion: this is it.

And they did not keep it to themselves. They announced it everywhere. In the squares, from house to house, from one country to the next. With a zeal no one can deny: mocked, obstructed, at times persecuted by the religious or secular authorities of their day. They kept going.

And about one thing all these people were right. The times are grave.

 

The chronicle

For more than ten years two great powers have been waging war over the control of a territory.[1] Two years ago a pitched battle left the flower of an entire nation's army on the field.[2] A port city held out for a year under siege before surrendering to hunger.[3] Meanwhile, in another country, cities fight one another, and whoever has armed men puts them at the service of the highest bidder.[4]

Wars and reports of wars.

The harvests have failed. Two years ago the price of grain climbed to levels the oldest remembered only from the great famine of their youth, when bread was made from whatever could be found and people died in the streets.[5]

Food shortages.

The world has never been so connected. Goods travel from one end of the continent to the other and beyond, and with the goods travels everything else.[6]

Then the ships arrived.

In the ports, crews disembark whom no one wants to go near. They carry a disease no one has ever seen. It begins with a swelling in the groin or under the arm, then the dark blotches, then death within three days. In the cities there is no time to bury. The graves are mass graves. One man who writes of it says he buried his five children with his own hands.[7] The most cautious estimates speak of one death in three. The others, of one in two.[8]

Pestilences.

In January the earth trembled across half a continent. An entire mountain wall slid into the valley, erasing the villages beneath it. The one who writes of it says it had never happened within living memory, and he links it without hesitation to the epidemic that follows: the earth shakes because God is angry.[9]

Earthquakes in one place after another.

The experts looked to the heavens for the causes. Three planets aligned in a baleful configuration, they say, and from that alignment descended the corruption of the air.[10]

But you do not need an expert. One August evening, above a great capital, at sunset a great and near light appears that does not move. The people in the street watch it. The clergy watch it from their houses. In the dead of night the light breaks into rays and vanishes. One of them sets it down in writing, and adds in his own hand: perhaps an omen of the epidemic. Which indeed arrives a few weeks later.[11]

Great signs from heaven.

In the stricken cities parents abandon their sick children. Husbands abandon their wives. Those who can leave the city and shut the door on anyone who knocks.[12] Whole communities are accused of spreading the contagion by poisoning the water, and are exterminated. In a single city, in a single day, hundreds are burned alive.[13]

The increase of lawlessness. The love of the greater number growing cold.

And through the streets the processions pass. Men who wound themselves until they bleed in public, bearing a message they say came down from heaven: God has decided to destroy the world, and only repentance can stop it. The crowds follow them. The religious authorities condemn them. They keep going.[14]

False prophets. Men growing faint out of fear.

Nor was there any lack of those who read in it the hand of the final judgment: the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani opened his chronicle by calling the plague the sentence that divine justice had sent upon men, "deserving, through the corruption of sin, of final judgment."[15] Another, to leave a record for those who would come, says he writes because the end is near, and perhaps no one will be left to tell of it.[16]

Wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, signs in the sky, lawlessness, love grown cold, false prophets, fear.

Is anything missing from the list in Matthew 24?

 

The dates

Almost nothing is missing. Only a couple of things.

One of them is the date. And we took it away from you, as you will have guessed.

Everything you have read is true, line by line, and it is documented in the notes. But it is not 1914 or 2026. It is 1348.

We did not lie. We merely omitted a date. And that was enough. Of the second thing that is missing we will speak further on. That one we did not take away: it was not there.

 

The denominator

An important premise.

We are about to do some arithmetic on the dead. Millions, tens of millions. Behind every number there is a person, and behind every person someone who mourned them. There is no age in which this was not a tragedy, and no percentage makes it smaller. If we set about counting, it is not out of coldness and not to speculate on those who are gone: it is because someone used those dead as an argument, and an argument must be checked. We are only trying to be intellectually honest, even when the argument is raw.

First of all, the others' best card. We play it ourselves, for them.

The influenza of 1918. Fifty million dead, perhaps a hundred.[17] In absolute numbers, the deadliest pandemic of which we have record in a single event. Never so many dead in so little time. This is true, and whoever cites it is right.

But let us do something that is not usually done: let us put the number under the number.

In 1918 the earth had about one billion eight hundred million inhabitants.[18] Fifty million dead are fewer than three in a hundred. A hundred million, five in a hundred. Terrible, certainly. But five in a hundred.

In 1348 Europe had perhaps eighty million inhabitants. Of these there died, according to the estimates, between a third and a half.[19] Thirty, perhaps sixty in a hundred.

The medieval figures are uncertain, one will say. True. So let us halve them: fifteen in a hundred. That still comes to five times the Spanish flu. Let us halve them again: seven. That is still more than double.

And our own time? The most recent pandemic is said to have killed, counting also the unrecorded excess deaths, between fifteen and twenty million people out of eight billion.[20] Fewer than three in a thousand.

One death in two. One death in thirty. One death in four hundred.

This is the per-capita figure, and it is not a statistical trick: it is the only honest way to compare two ages with different populations. Whoever cites the millions without citing the billions is leaving out the denominator. And it is the first thing we ourselves did, a few lines ago, when we wrote "one death in three" without telling you which century we were speaking of.

With wars it is the same, but there is one further step worth examining calmly.

"1914 saw the greatest war ever fought up to that time." This sentence is correct. Formally, historically correct. We do not contest it.

Only, on this sentence, so correct, a great deal has been built. A starting date for the time of the end. A generation that would not pass away. A sense of urgency lasting more than a century, with its renunciations, its waiting, its disappointments. An entire organization made it its banner. It has not lowered it. But for some years now it has been waving it more discreetly, and it has already torn off a strip without saying so: we will come back to this.[21] All of this rests on a sentence of ten words. And the sentence holds. It is the last word of the sentence that does not hold.

The trouble is the piece that usually passes without the attention it deserves: up to that time.

Because the very same sentence, identical, was also true in 1348, with the two great powers being France and England. It was true for the Napoleonic wars. It was true for every war that, in its own time, surpassed the one before. All of these were the "greatest wars ever fought up to that time." It is a sentence that comes true at every rung of the ladder and says nothing about the rung: it says only that the ladder is climbing.

So let us ask the question no one usually asks.

If "the greatest war" is the yardstick for fixing the beginning of the time of the end, why 1914 and not 1939? The Second World War surpassed the First tenfold in the dead.[22]

In absolute terms — and only so far — the greatest is that one. By the same yardstick, the time of the end would have begun in 1939, and 1914 would have been only an intermediate rung, like all the others and like 1348.

But there is worse. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the yardstick is the right one, the yardstick presupposes something no one can guarantee: that a greater war will never break out. If tomorrow one breaks out that surpasses the Second, the date moves again, and we are back to square one. A sign that must be updated with every war is not a sign. It is a league table.

A partial truth, then. Not false: partial. The true part is "the greatest." The part omitted, or slipped under the counter, is "up to that time."

And "up to that time" changes the result completely: with those three words the greatest war fixes nothing at all, and the claim built on top of it collapses.

Let us stop again.

We are obviously not saying that the people of 1348 were right. We are saying something more uncomfortable: that by the same method they had a stronger case than ours. If wars, famines and pestilences are enough to establish that we are in the time of the end, then 1348 was the time of the end more than 1914 was, and far more than 2026.

And it is not ignorance. The magazines of those who today count the dead of the twentieth century have recounted the Black Death, with these very numbers.[23] They knew the denominator and they left it out.

The condition for proving us wrong, in one line: find a modern pandemic that killed a share of the population greater than that of 1348, and we will rewrite this paragraph, with apologies.

This method was not born in 1348 or at any more recent date. It may seem strange to you, but the method is as old as Christianity itself.

 

The second witness

How long has it been in use?

Since before any organization whatsoever existed. Since before the Middle Ages existed.

The year 252. Carthage, Roman Africa. A pestilence crosses the empire from east to west and carries off, according to the chronicles, thousands of people a day in Rome alone.[24] The empire is at war on two frontiers. The harvests fail. The earth trembles. It is exactly the list of events already seen and counted.

And the bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, takes up his pen.

He writes to his faithful to console them, and he consoles them thus: all of this had been foretold. The Lord had predicted wars, famines, earthquakes, pestilences, and now here they are. Therefore the Kingdom of God, dearest brothers, is beginning to be near.[25]

It is not a mere allusion. Cyprian cites the discourse on the Mount of Olives. He makes the same comparison we have seen made in 1348 and in 1914: he lines up the signs, he lines up the chronicle, and he draws the line.

And in another letter of the same year he goes further. The world, he says, is old. The winter rains are less abundant, the summer sun less warm, the mines yield less, the fields produce less, men are smaller. The world is dying of old age, and the end is its natural end.[26]

We must stop again and reflect on what we have read.

Cyprian was no nobody. He was a bishop, a pastor who stayed beside his people during the pestilence, and who a few years later died a martyr.[27] When he applied Matthew 24 to his own time, he did so in good faith and with a real catastrophe before his eyes.

And he was wrong. The Kingdom was not near. Since that letter one thousand seven hundred and seventy years have passed.

This is the point, and it must be said without irony. The method that is served up to us today as the correct reading of the signs has a malfunction as old as Christianity itself. It was not born in 1914. It was not born with an organization. It is born the moment a sincere believer looks at a catastrophe, opens Matthew 24, and concludes that it is speaking of him and of his own time.

Three ages, three times the same result, three times wrong. The year 252, the year 1348, the year 1914. And if the example were a single one, one might say we chose it on purpose. With two, one might still say they are the two lucky cases. But it is not a matter of cases: it is a matter of method.

This method is an instrument that reads positive every time a generation suffers enough to look up at the sky. It read positive for a bishop of the third century, for a friar of the fourteenth, and in the twentieth it did not stop for a moment — on the contrary. In 1914 someone read it in Brooklyn. In 1970 a book read it in thirty million copies, with the end fixed within one generation of 1948.[28] In 1988 another gave eighty-eight reasons why the end would come that year, and the year after he gave eighty-nine.[29] In 2014 yet another read it in four lunar eclipses.[30] They never agreed on the date, nor on much else. They have always agreed on the method.

And so the question is no longer "which century is the right one," but "what is there in the text that everyone read and everyone left out?"

It is almost midnight. It has been for one thousand seven hundred years. And midnight never comes.

Is anything missing?

Let us return to the second thing that is missing.

We left it hanging at the end of the chronicle: is anything missing from the list in Matthew 24?

Let us reread the chapter. Not a commentary: the chapter.

At verse 3 the disciples ask a single question. At verse 4 Jesus begins to answer, and he does not stop until the end. One discourse, one afternoon, one "you."

Verses 6 and 7: wars, famines, earthquakes. These we all know. They are on every magazine, in every book, in every broadcast that speaks of the time of the end.

Verse 15: the disgusting thing that causes desolation, in a holy place.

Verse 16: "then let those in Judea begin fleeing to the mountains."

Verse 20: "Keep praying that your flight may not occur in wintertime nor on the Sabbath day."[31]

And here we must stop again, and seriously.

Judea. Sabbath. Holy place.

Three verses after the wars, in the same breath, with the same "you," Jesus speaks of a precise place, of a precise day of the Jewish week, of a precise building. There is no paragraph break. There is no "and now instead I am speaking to the Jews." The disciples' question was one, and the answer is one.

What happens to these three verses, without fail, when they fall into the hands of these preachers?

One of two things happens, and there is no third.

Either it is said: those were for the Jews, in the year 70, when Jerusalem was surrounded. A historical fact, closed.[32]

Or it is said: "Judea" is not Judea, it is a figure; "fleeing to the mountains" is not fleeing to the mountains, it is leaving the false religions; and of course the "Sabbath" is not the Sabbath.[33]

Two different cuts for the same result: the word Judea and those who dwell in it vanish from the discourse.

Now the question, and we put it to everyone, to those who count from 1914, to those who count from 1948, and to those who counted from 252:

Who decided that verse 7 applies to 2026 and verse 16 applied only to the year 70? Is there a line in which Jesus changes his addressee?

To the first question the answer is always the same: a man decided it. A governing body, a pastor, an author of books. The preacher of the day, in every century, with no reason that lies in the text or is remotely objective. Only the reason that his teaching does not otherwise hold.

To the second question the answer is: that line is not there. We all know it is not there. And so the criterion by which verse 7 is kept and verse 16 is removed does not lie in the text. It lies outside. It lies in the heads of these gentlemen. It lies in what the doctrine can afford to read.

Let us look at where the cut falls. Not at random, not here and there. It always falls, and only, where Jesus is concrete, geographical, Jewish. Judea. Sabbath. Holy place.

Every line in which the discourse touches ground in a precise place is removed or emptied of meaning. Every line in which it stays abstract — wars in general, earthquakes in general — is kept.

It is not an absent-minded cut: it is a precise direction.

And here the circle closes with the chronicle. In 1348 those three verses could not be applied because there was no Judea to flee from: they were missing by history. Today they are not applied because they have been removed: they are missing by choice. Two different omissions. The same hole.

And beneath the hole, the same root: the conviction — never called into question — that whatever the Bible says must be speaking of me. Of me, of my age, of my church. Never of others.

Whoever is convinced of standing at the center shifts the prophecy to wherever he himself stands. If he stands in Carthage, he reads it in Carthage. If he stands in Paris, in Paris. If he stands in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn. And he does the same with time: he bends it onto the century in which he lives, because the century in which he lives is necessarily the one being spoken of. Cyprian never thought that Matthew 24 might be speaking of another city. The friar did not either. Whoever reads it today does not either. And the text, meanwhile, has an address written on it that no one stops to read: here it is Jews who are spoken of, and Judea.

No one, in one thousand seven hundred years, read that word and stopped to think: perhaps this is speaking of Judea and of the Jews. It is not speaking of me.

We will return to this point in the second part of this article.

If the hole is always the same, in every age, perhaps it is not the century that needs changing but our habit of putting ourselves at the center of everything. Because Jesus' discourse does have a center.

And it is not us.

 

The vantage point

Why does 1348 work?

Not because the people of 1348 were naïve. Because wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes have always existed. In every century. On every continent. Since Cain raised his hand against his brother, humanity has not passed a single century without war, a single century without epidemic, a single century without the earth trembling somewhere.

They are not an exception in history but its normal condition. Certain periods have been worse than others, but they remain the background noise of man's dominion over man.[34]

And here lies the defect of the instrument, at last out in the open. An instrument that measures a thing present everywhere and always cannot tell one century from another. It reads positive in 252, in 1348, in 1914, in 2026, because in all four it finds what it is looking for. It is not broken. It is trained on the constant instead of on the variable. And a thing that is present in every age can indicate no age.

So did Jesus make a mistake in naming them? No.

Jesus names them, but he does not simply say "when there are wars." He says "when you see all these things" (Matthew 24:33), and "these things" in his discourse have an address: a holy place, a Judea. The phenomena are not the sign by virtue of happening. They become a sign when they happen inside the frame Jesus drew: an Israel in which there is a Judea to flee from, a people to whom it may matter whether it is the Sabbath rather than a Tuesday, a time in which the count has begun.[35]

Outside that frame, a pestilence is a pestilence. A war is a war. They are consequences of human dominion, not indications of the presence of Christ. Those of 1348 were. Those of 1914 were. And so, so far, are our own.

And while we are on the frame, there is something we cannot pretend not to notice.

The discourse of Matthew 24 does not begin with the wars, nor even with the false prophets. It begins with the stones. The disciples show him the buildings of the temple, and Jesus answers that not one will be left upon another (24:1-2). It is from there that the question of verse 3 arises, and the question, on rereading, is double. When will these things be — that is, the fall of the temple — and what will be the sign of the presence. Two questions. When Jesus was speaking, a temple existed, and it was about to cease to exist.

And Jesus answers both, but he does not give two answers: he gives one.

He does not say "first I will answer you about the temple, then about the presence." He starts from the stones and arrives at the presence without ever breaking off, and Luke tells us how: Jerusalem surrounded by armies, the temple fallen, and then the city "trampled on by the nations until the appointed times of the nations are fulfilled" (Luke 21:20-24). A single line, from 70 to the end, and it passes through Jerusalem.[36]

Now, Jesus does not say that the holy place is the temple, to be clear. He says "holy place," and Luke in the same passage says "Jerusalem": the place is the city.

But if the model is to be taken whole, and not in pieces as we have just reproached others for doing, then the question about the temple too must be put on the table, and not hidden beneath it: is the temple one of the preconditions of the sign of Jesus' presence? Yes.

Let us say it ourselves, and let us say it before those who are already having red heifers raised: on this they are right. The discourse starts from the stones, and to stones it returns. Where they are wrong is on everything else — on who will build it, on who will be inside and who outside, and on what comes after. But this we have written in three articles to which we refer.[37]

The reason Jesus gave a single answer to a question that is, at bottom, double, is that there is a single answer. And the answer must be held together, both in the model and in the fulfillment.

From here comes the thing that all the stopwatch-keepers got wrong, each in his own way.

Whoever erased Israel — declared it replaced by a "spiritual Israel" or by a Church — removed the frame and set about reading the signs seeing himself as the frame. He saw wars and said "this is it," exactly like Cyprian, and with the same result.

Whoever kept Israel but put himself in front of it — deciding that the signs are for the Church today and Judea will be for Israel afterward, in a future from which the readers will already have departed — kept the frame for others and the signs for himself. He looked at Israel, and that is a merit. But he used it as a stopwatch, not as a vantage point: he took 1948 and made it a starting date from which to count that famous generation.[38]

Here is the vantage point, in a few lines.

We are not saying that the time of the end began in 1948. We are saying that it could not have begun before.

These are two different statements, and they must be kept apart: a precondition is not a date. Israel does not start the count. It is that without which the count cannot even begin, because verses 15, 16 and 20 would have no place in which to come true. An earthquake can be a sign only inside a discourse that also speaks of Judea. And as long as Judea is not there, an earthquake is an earthquake.

This makes 1914 impossible — not because the war was small, but because the subject was lacking. It makes 1348 impossible, and 252, and every other date proposed before the return of a people to a land. And it also makes 1948 wrong as a beginning: the precondition has returned, the count has not. That one has a map does not mean the journey has begun.

There is a consequence, and it is not consoling. If the true signs are the ones inside the frame, then we have not yet seen them. What we have seen — even the worst of the twentieth century — was background noise. And no one can say how strong the signal will be when it begins. It could surpass everything that 1348 and 1918 together showed us. Whoever ticked the boxes on the wars of the last century did not anticipate the end: he used up the alarm before it rang.

In Matthew 24 Jesus names a people, a place, and a day that counts for a single people, and he adds no others.[39]

The time of the end exists, yes: we wrote it at the beginning.

Only, to see it, one must stop seeing oneself as the center of the universe and restore the original place and the original addressees. For one thousand seven hundred years this subject was not there.

Now it is. It does not indicate a date but a precondition.

 

And if a friend were to ask…

"You say that Judea 'was not there.' But Judea has always been there: it is geography. The hills have stayed in their place."

The hills, yes. But Jesus does not speak to the hills. He says "let those in Judea flee," and "pray that your flight may not occur on the Sabbath": a people that dwells in that land and counts the days by that calendar. In 1348 those hills were called Palestine, they were a Mamluk province, and whoever lived there had no need to worry about a Sabbath on which to flee. The name itself had been erased: from the year 135, after the last revolt, Rome had abolished even the word "Judea" from the maps, replacing it with "Syria Palaestina." A Judea without Israel is not the Judea of the discourse. It is a piece of land with another name.

"But you have always contested Israel: you say this State is not the 'true' Israel, you consider it Babylon the Great. And now you use it as a point of reference?"

Yes, and it is not a contradiction, if one distinguishes the State from the people. The State established in 1948 is not the one God approved, and in that sense it is not the "true" Israel: we have written it and we confirm it. But the people who dwell in it are, at least for the majority, that people. The nation Jesus addresses is that one. Daniel has brothers whom the angel calls "violent" — "the violent ones among your people" — and they remain his people (Daniel 11:14). The people before the deportation, whom Ezekiel describes as worse than Sodom, were that people all the same, and the prophets spoke to them for that reason. That it is today, spiritually, a modern Babylon does not change who it is. It changes what is about to happen to it.

"But Jesus calls them signs. Are you saying they are not?"

We are saying that they are not signs by virtue of happening. Jesus does not say "when there are wars": he says "when you see all these things," and the things he lists have an address — a holy place, a Judea, a Sabbath. A war inside that frame is a sign. A war outside that frame is a war, of the kind there have been in every century. We have not removed a line from Matthew 24. We have put back the ones that were missing.

"So, if 1348 and 1914 do not count, nothing counts. Is the time of the end something that cannot be recognized?"

On the contrary: it is something that could not be recognized before, because the place from which to look was lacking. A sign that speaks of a Judea requires a Judea. Since 1948 the place is there. The count is not, not yet. But this is already far more than anyone held in hand between 70 and 1948: they had the list and no place to apply it to. We have the list and the place. What we lack is to see.

"And if you were wrong?"

Then someone will show us an age before 1948 in which verses 15, 16 and 20 of Matthew 24 could come true to the letter, and this article will have to be rewritten. Or they will show us a modern pandemic with a mortality, in proportion, greater than that of 1348, and the section on the denominator will have to be rewritten. We are the ones who put the conditions in writing. Those who came before us — in 252, in 1348, in 1914, in 1988 — did not put them. And when the date passed, they moved the date.

 

In conclusion

We began by granting that those who took Matthew 24 seriously were right. We confirm it: they did well.

They got only one thing wrong, and they got it wrong in every century in the same way: they looked at themselves, their own nation, their own religion, their own time. And to do so they had to eliminate, or change, to some degree, the Jews, Judea and the "holy place" itself — that is, the subject to whom Jesus is referring.

The time of the end exists, and Jesus spoke of it so that we would understand it. The signs exist and can be recognized, if for once we get ourselves out of the way and recognize the subject of Jesus' words. For one thousand seven hundred years this subject was not there.

Now it is there. It does not indicate a date but a precondition.

Two questions remain, however, and they are not small ones.

The first: how can we protect ourselves from the next predictions — false and misleading — that will certainly come, and against which Jesus tells us to be on guard?

The second: how can an instrument that has been getting it wrong since 252 not yet have ended up in the attic, and go on working — that is, deceiving the masses? If a method has been getting it wrong for one thousand seven hundred years and still convinces, it cannot stand on its own. Someone is holding it up.

How, we will see in the second part. Not the conclusions — those we have seen — but the techniques: how a denominator is removed, how a quotation is cut, how a word is quietly changed when the facts contradict it, and so on. We will show them one by one, with the examples, and with a final assignment: do it yourselves, on a year of your choosing, and see whether it works.

It will work. That is the problem.

Notes

[1] The Hundred Years' War between France and England, begun in 1337: by 1348 it had been going on for eleven years.

[2] The Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346.

[3] The siege of Calais, September 1346 – August 1347.

[4] Italy of the communes and the seigniories; the mercenary companies (Werner von Urslingen was active in those years; the Great Company of Montreal d'Albarno from 1353).

[5] Famine in Florence in 1346-47 (Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica); the Great Famine of 1315-17, when bread was made from acorns.

[6] The plague reached Europe from Caffa, on the Black Sea, aboard Genoese ships; Messina, October 1347.

[7] Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, chronicler of Siena, Cronaca senese: "I buried my five children with my own hands."

[8] O. J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History (2004); R. Jedwab, N. Johnson, M. Koyama, "Negative Shocks and Mass Persecutions: Evidence from the Black Death," Journal of Economic Growth 24 (2019). The estimates range from 30 to 60 percent of the European population.

[9] The earthquake of 25 January 1348 (Villach, Carinthia; the landslide of Mount Dobratsch), felt across much of central Europe. Contemporary chroniclers connected it with the pestilence.

[10] Compendium de epidimia, Paris Faculty of Medicine, October 1348: the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars of 20 March 1345.

[11] Jean de Venette, Chronique, year 1348 (ed. R. A. Newhall, trans. J. Birdsall, Columbia University Press, 1953; also in J. Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, 2005).

[12] Boccaccio, The Decameron, introduction to the First Day.

[13] Strasbourg, 14 February 1349 (chronicle of Jacob Twinger von Königshofen; Fritsche Closener).

[14] The flagellants of 1349 and the "heavenly letter"; condemned by Clement VI with the bull Inter sollicitudines of October 1349.

[15] Matteo Villani, Cronica (or Nuova Cronica, the continuation of his brother Giovanni's), prologue / opening of Book I. There the plague of 1348 is read as divine punishment and "final judgment."

[16] John Clyn, Franciscan friar of Kilkenny, Annales Hiberniae, 1349: he writes "in case anyone should survive," and the manuscript breaks off.

[17] N. P. A. S. Johnson, J. Mueller, "Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 'Spanish' Influenza Pandemic," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002).

[18] World population in 1918: about 1.8 billion.

[19] See note 8. On the uncertainty of the medieval figures: the objection was already in use by The Watchtower in 1951.

[20] WHO, excess-mortality estimates for 2020-2021 (about 14.9 million); later estimates up to 20 million.

[21] For the current teaching: Enjoy Life Forever!, Lesson 32, "God's Kingdom Now Rules!" (https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/enjoy-life-forever/section-2/lesson-32/), which presents the conditions Jesus foretold as "evident since 1914" and states that "God's Kingdom is now ruling." For the "torn-off strip": The Watchtower (Study Edition), 15 July 2013, "Tell Us, When Will These Things Be?" (https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2013530), ¶3-5, which acknowledges: "For a number of years, we thought that the great tribulation began in 1914… We also discerned that the first part of the great tribulation did not begin in 1914."

[22] First World War: 15-20 million dead; Second World War: 70-85 million.

[23] "The Black Death Was Not the End," Awake! 22 November 1997 (https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101997841).

[24] The so-called Plague of Cyprian (249-262). The figure for daily deaths in Rome comes from late sources (Zosimus; Historia Augusta, Life of Gallienus).

[25] Cyprian, De mortalitate (On Mortality), ch. 2.

[26] Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum (To Demetrianus), chs. 3-4.

[27] Cyprian was beheaded at Carthage on 14 September 258.

[28] Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

[29] Edgar C. Whisenant, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 (1988); The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989 (1989).

[30] John Hagee, Four Blood Moons (2013); the lunar tetrad of 15 April 2014 – 28 September 2015.

[31] Matthew 24:15, 16, 20 in the New World Translation.

[32] "What Has God's Kingdom Been Doing Since 1914?", The Watchtower, 15 October 1966 (https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1966761), ¶14: "Since the days of Jesus Christ the earthly city of Jerusalem is not what counts."

[33] "Let the Reader Use Discernment," The Watchtower, 1 May 1999 (https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1999323); "The Desolating of Christendom by the 'Disgusting Thing,'" The Watchtower, 1970 (https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1970884). In the Italian edition the latter appeared the following year (15 June 1971).

[34] Genesis 4:8; Ecclesiastes 8:9.

[35] Israel is the center of prophecy: article here (in Italian).

[36] Luke 21:20-24.

[37] article here (in Italian).

[38] See note 28.

[39] Romans 11:17-24. Those grafted in later, Paul says, were grafted onto the same olive tree: a second olive tree was not planted beside the first. The argument in full in the article on the 144,000 (in Italian).

 

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