dgregory

There's a certain amount of repetition that I must do here, since the ground I am going to cover here I have already covered to some degree in my earlier emails.

Restating my basic premise, almost the entire evangelical community has been led astray in the interpretations of Revelation as the result of the very shrewd cunning of a Jesuit priest who was but for a few years a contemporary of Luther himself, namely the late 1500's.

You must understand that what Luther did in his posting of his 95 theses in 1517 was a little bit akin to lighting a stick of dynamite in Europe. Defections from the Roman Catholic Church were multitudinous in number, and the church was not at all happy about it.

Their solution was to hire a Jesuit priest name Ribera. His solution was a re-write of Daniel 9, the last four verses, which you already should know is the vision of the 70 weeks. What he did, simply, was change the 'he' of verse 27, which clearly in the text refers to MESSIAH, and make it refer to the antichrist.

Condensing what I had originally intended to document here from other websites but have since thought to be unnecessary, is that his re-write found its way in to the library of the Anglican church in England, and lay there buried for nearly 200 years. It was then, in the early 1800's that S.R. Maitland, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, found it and shared it with several others who are of lesser importance here.

The one who is not of lesser importance, however, is the editor of the famous study Bible, C. I. Scofield. If you do a Google search of Scofield you will find that his Bible, richly annotated from Genesis to Revelation, did more that any other single volume to promulate what is held almost universally in our day in evangelicalism as the approach to the Book of Revelation, namely that beginning with chapter 6 none of it has started yet.

To conclude this post I draw your attention to only two texts that in themselves lend a strong voice to the error of that approach. The first is Daniel 12:9, "And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end."

The other verse is Revelation 1:3, "Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand."

Close up then, but at hand now, now meaning at the time of John's writing. In witness whereof let it be repeated that ALL the church fathers throughout the ages, right up to the 1800's believed that Revelation was church history in disguise.

In a word, the entire doctrine of futurism had its beginning, insofar as its being published widely, only in the 1800's.

If anyone reading this wants to see my original email that includes a little more detail with regard to the original meaning of Daniel 9, please email me at dgregory17@sc.rr.com.