The timing of the Millennium

I have recently been dialoguing with a new full preterist friend, Patrick Stone, about the timing of the millennium. Early on in the conversation, the possibility was raised that the First Resurrection of Rev 20.4-6 occurred at the beginning of the Roman-Jewish war and corresponds to the resurrection of the martyrs at the time the fifth seal is broken (Rev 6.9-11). Patrick has been exploring the viability of this interpretation, and has come out in the affirmative with this extensive article. As a bonus, his interpretation makes some very interesting suggestions about the nature of the Resurrection.

In this article, Patrick utilizes a hermeneutic for reading the recurring symbology of Revelation that I find to be quite plausible for a conscious first-century author: it has the virtues of not viewing Revelation as either a reckless jumble of imagery or a composition of wholly ecstatic origin, decipherable only with an esoteric “key” (usually some ad hoc rubric favorable only to a predetermined interpretation). Of course, one of the biggest problems with interpreting Revelation is its undeniably cryptic usage of numbers, which for futurists has strangely not called into question the idea that the “millennium” must require a time period that at least resembles 1,000 years. Patrick gives a novel but quite simple numerical interpretation that makes some sense of the millennium in relation to other time periods mentioned in Revelation.

This is a large article, and I haven’t read it all the way through yet. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Related posts:

1. The reign of Christ during the Millennium As my regulars probably know, I like podcasts. One I listen to regularly (it comes out daily) is Renewing Your Mind with Dr. R.C. Sproul...
2. The Millennium and the Resurrection of the Dead I am firmly indebted to Don Preston for his presentation on the Millennium at the 2004 Preterist Research Institute Conference for much of the layout...