The date of Christmas was not determined by Church Fathers by copying the date of a pagan Roman winter solstice festival. Instead, the date was calculated from the Jewish calendar using the date of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, September 22nd, 6 BC, when Gabriel appeared to Zecharias in the Temple according to Luke 1:5. The conception of John occurred “immediately after that” when Zecharias returned home to Elizabeth to the hill country of Judea, by calculation on September 24th, 6 BC.

The conception of Jesus was calculated to have occurred when Elizabeth was “in her sixth month” (Luke 1:26,36) on March 25th, 5 BC, which was also the first day of Passover in that year. John’s birth was June 24th, 5 BC, followed by Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem on December 25th, which was also the first day of Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, in that year. The Church Father, Hippolytus of Rome, in his work Chronicon, saw that each date had allegorical significance.

So why is Christmas celebrated on December 25th?

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Does Daniel 12:2,3,12 refer to the General Resurrection and the Final Judgment?

While the allusion to Daniel 12:1 in Matthew 24:21,22 strongly points to a fulfillment by AD 70, the next two verses in Daniel 12:2,3 seem to refer to the General Resurrection, the Last Judgment and the Everlasting Kingdom. In fact, Daniel 12:2,3 is one of the most frequently used proof texts for these eschatological events. This is certainly one of the most difficult passages in Daniel to interpret from a preterist perspective.

Does Daniel 12:1 speak of events in the first century only to jump thousands of years in the future to speak of events at the end of human history in Daniel 12:2,3?

If we look at how Daniel uses parallelism throughout the chapter, it becomes apparent that the purpose is not to point to a General Resurrection, but to say that the prophecy would be fulfilled long after Daniel had died in the “end of days.”

In short, the passage shows that Daniel and the Jews of that era certainly believed in General Resurrection and a Final Judgment, and the language does refer to these two great events that are yet in our future. But the allusion to a final Resurrection and Judgment is used to delineate the “wise” from the “wicked” – between those who would “understand” the prophecy and receive their inheritance of everlasting life – and those who would not understand and suffer “everlasting contempt” at the Final Judgment. The confusing portion from a preterist viewpoint is the elaboration on what will happen “at that time,” which then speaks of the dead awakening.

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Although tradition does not rule our interpretation, it does guide it. If upon reading a particular passage you have come up with an interpretation that has escaped the notice of every other Christian for two thousand years, or has been championed by universally recognized heretics, chances are pretty good that you had better abandon your interpretation (R.C. Sproul, The Agony of Deceit, 34-35).

What is the difference?

Scripture alone, sola Scriptura, is not the same as Scripture only, solo Scriptura.¹ To put it in other terms, to say that Scripture alone is the only rule of faith and practice – or as the Westminster Catechism says, “is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him” – is quite different than to say that only Scripture is the guide to all truth.

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I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day Click play to connect to youtube The following is an excerpt from the script of a video to be produced in the future, Christ’s Victorious Kingdom: Postmillinnialism Rediscovered. Some of the followi…

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One of the greatest interpretive challenges for modern preterists concerns the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11.

If Revelation 1-19 is primarily about the first century persecution of the Church and the Roman-Jewish War, then who were these two figures?

Were they historical individual figures?

Or are they symbolic?

The text itself doesn’t provide any obvious clues to lead us to the identities of two specific individuals. In fact, the description of the two witnesses only seems to confound the difficulty from preterist literalist perspective. We are given the following descriptions.

1. They shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth (v. 3).
2. They are the two olive trees and the two candlesticks (v. 4).
3. Fire comes out of their mouth and devours their enemies (v. 5).
4. They have the power to cause drought, waters to turn to blood and all sorts of plagues (v. 6).
5. The beast from the bottomless pit shall make war against them and kill them (v. 7).
6. Their bodies will lie in the streets of the “Great City,” but after three-and-a-half days, they will be bodily resurrected and will ascend to heaven (vv. 8-12).
7. Immediately afterward, there will be an earthquake. One-tenth of the city will fall and 7,000 people will be killed (v. 13).

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Some preterist works mention that Nero killed his pregnant wife Poppaea and make note that Nero was the Roman emperor during Paul’s stay in Rome from AD 60 to 62. However, no one has advanced the thesis that Nero may have become knowledgeable of the Hebrew Scriptures through either Poppaea or Paul. Evidently, Nero twisted the prophecies of Scripture and deceived himself into thinking that he was the promised Messiah prophesied by Daniel, the king of the world who would rule from Jerusalem.

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Here I will pose some counterarguments to the most commonly heard “contrary texts” that supposedly refute postmillennialism. I do not deny that there are difficulties in every eschatological system. The difficulty in reconciling our doctrine with all Scripture is the reason for our differences. However, there are the fewest difficulties with postmillennialism as the objections can be boiled down to a handful of categories. Of course, there are more scriptures than the ones I list here. However, other examples will be similar to the contrary texts I have listed below and a similar counterargument will be sufficient to answer each of these.

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At last we will look at Revelation 20 in order to see where the term the “millennium” originated and what is its meaning. In Revelation 20, we see the phrase “thousand years” mentioned by John six times. The words in…

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The 20th century has been termed, “The Violent Century,” by some historians, referring to the two great world wars, the holocaust, abortion, Soviet and Chinese communism killing millions of their own people, famines, the AIDS epidemic, etc., all happening on…

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Here we will briefly survey the power of Christ’s victorious kingdom in history by looking at the faith and teachings of great saints of old, from Athanasius and Augustine to Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hodge, to the revival of the…

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