Ever wonder when the end of the world was coming? Or who the Antichrist is (or was)? Many have (and all incorrectly so far). I don't know that this is a book you could read from cover to cover, unless you like lists of dates and of the incorrect prophecies. Still, it's a fascinating read.

This is not really a book one reads linearly from beginning to end, though you could. It is more a reference guide to "last days madness" (to borrow the title of another of American Vision's books) as it has manifest itself throughout the centuries. The book is broken up into chapters each of which is devoted to a specific aspect of eschatology such as the millennium, the abomination of desolation, the anti-Christ, wars and rumors of wars, the "rapture", etc. Within each chapter are date headings under which we find some of the beliefs expressed at the time regarding the return of Christ. What becomes immediately obvious after reading several of these is that our present day does not have the market cornered on the belief that we are the last generation or in assigning prophetic significance to contemporary world events.

We find out for example that in A.D. 449 a deacon at Carthage named Quodvultdeus wrote in a book called Book on Promises and Predictions that "the barbarian invasions in his lifetime were signs of the End. He identified the Goths and the Moors as Gog and Maygog." Kind of a 3rd century The Late, Great Planet Earth !

Later we read that Sir Walter Raleigh in 1615 believed that Gog and Maygog were the Pope and Spain and that the Turks were the locusts in the Book of Revelation.

Examples of this kind go on and on for a variety of eschatological topics. The one thing they all have in common is that they were later proven wrong by the passage of time. Another interesting feature of the book is a series of some 20 charts outlining things such as candidates for the anti-Christ at various points in history or different views on the meaning of the mark of the beast. As with the narrative examples, the common thread is that all of these beliefs have been proven wrong.

Some examples in the book have been proven wrong before the very eyes of people still living today such as Chuck Smith's prediction that the "rapture" would occur in 1981.

Having been raised on dispensational premillennialism, I remember it coming as a surprise to me that others throughout history had made similar predictions to those being made by people like Hal Lindsey. As with many in this belief system, I felt that what men like Lindsey were teaching was unique to our time and was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. A book like this which has essentially done all the research for you (the footnotes are extensive for those interested in tracking down original sources) is an valuable resource for debunking that thought and the newspaper exegesis going on today. ( )