Martin said: You're doing the count on the assumption there is a Year Zero Allen is not alone on that one Martin.. 99.999% of the whole world including Mainstream science had that assumption which was the cause of them miscalculating and celebrating in the New Millenium a year early. I was ashamed of Mainstreem science that year.. Mainly because they just could not understand the correction a few of us around the world were trying to tell them. I might mention here that the two main observatories of Greenwich and the Naval Equivalent (name escapes) in the US, both acknowledged the truth, but refused to do anything active about it. Was it a mistake, or a cold blooded lie? But for what purpose. Philip. ----- Original Message ----- From: Martin Selbrede To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 2:56 PM Subject: [geocentrism] Re: 666 On May 21, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Allen Daves wrote: Me in blue You astound me on the one hand with your eloquence and on the other you "gift" for your lack of understanding and missing any and all verbatim correlation(s) "Trample via gentiles" "the city"within the relevant text as well as the context as a whole itself....you seem to piecemeal Revelation Daniel and Jesus as all separate not related topics and text in sipte of their specific referenced staments ...see previous? The mistake is straightforward. Your count is wrong (for several reasons), because the span of time from 596 BC to 70 AD is not 666 years, but 665 years. You're doing the count on the assumption there is a Year Zero. I made this clear, transparent, and gave TWO examples of how this is to be correctly counted, and even SAID that the 666 year count is wrong, and you still missed it. I can't help you if you don't pay attention to what I'm communicating. The other reason the count is wrong is because you have the wrong start point for the beginning of the 70 weeks prophecy. It begins with Nehemiah's prayer to God, offered in the month of Kislev, the third month of the civil year, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (455 BC). The references to the rebuilding occurring in Ezra are baseless (as if the decree emanated from the 7th year of Artaxerxes, or from Cyrus, which hypotheses fall apart under scrutiny). The 483rd year of the 490 in the set begins at the outset of Christ's public ministry, the middle of the 70th week occurs when Christ is crucified and cut off, the remainder of the 70th week terminates at the stoning of Stephen. In other words, the 490 years overlaps the 70 years, and this circumstance is fatal to the consecutive treatment they receive in the Powerpoint slides. Briefly, your 596+70=666 count is wrong because you need to subtract one year for crossing the BC-AD divide because there's no discretization at that threshold, and even if you hadn't made that mistake, you're off by more than three decades by failing to pinpoint the correct terminus a quo for the beginning of Daniel's prophecy concerning the rebuilding of the wall. Ezra was only allowed to work on the temple -- he had religious freedom there to rebuild, but no civil authority to raise up the defenses of Jerusalem, for which reason the city remained a reproach. I won't go into detail here with the scriptural proofs for this position, and the refutation of alleged counter-passages in Ezra, Haggai, and Isaiah, but I'm ready to bring them into the open if your response indicates this is needful. But I'm very, very well-armed on this, scripturally. So, when you write that "Year zero has nothing to do with those calculations...." you're mistaken. You should have verified this first before reaffirming the same mistake a second time. Had you sat down with paper and pencil and just looked at what you were doing, you'd have seen the problem right away. You merely assumed you were right, and I was wrong. Such assumptions can come back to bite one, especially after you charge me thus: "you did not read very carefully." It takes more than a blunderbuss approach to be a workman approved, not ashamed. Nobody, and I repeat, nobody, is a master of Scripture unless they've first been mastered BY the Scripture. You play so fast and loose with verses, it truly shocks me to see so much boundless zeal put behind such feebly-supported speculations, at the expense of the straightforward expositions and exegeses of the passages. You downplay the "jots and tittles" in order to impose preconceived ideas about context. You merely assume that (1) your take on the context is correct and that (2) its bearing on Rev. 13:18 is determinative. Assertion is not proof. What's particularly annoying is that I, too, have made an appeal to context within Revelation, and you've dismissed it without a second thought. But you charge ME thus: "you don't even grasp the context of what is going on and you want to understand it how?" Having taught verse-by-verse through Revelation as early as 1981 at the seminary level, I know something about the context of what is going on. For that reason, I have very little sympathy for the vast majority of popular "thinking" on the topic. Too many of these folks need to go back and do a little homework before going to press prematurely. On the positive side, if (as I think you're saying) you're teaching that God set up His kingdom prior to 70 AD, I would be in hearty agreement with this view. That would be the correct take on the final parts of Daniel 2, that during the ancient Roman Empire God would set up His kingdom, one that would never be shaken. If this is your view (and it seems to be the case, based on your slide presentation), you'd be in sharp disagreement with much of evangelical Christendom, but you'd nonetheless be correct. The setting up of that kingdom doesn't await some future event: it occurred twenty centuries ago, and the demolition of the Roman Empire is proof of it (the stone cut without hands strikes the statue, and it becomes like the chaff of the summer threshing floors and was driven away by the wind). If I've misunderstood you, and you don't think God set up a kingdom of any kind at that point, we'd again be on opposite ends of an issue. Which tends to be a prevailing situation. As Neville says, there's surely plenty of diversity on this forum. Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.7.6/814 - Release Date: 21/05/2007 2:01 PM