A recent Naked Data newsletter pointed me to this article on wikipedia which gives a list of when the world was predicted to end throughout recorded history. Its a timeline of when the world was supposed to end, who claimed it would and how/why. It is wikipedia, so its as accurate and complete as wikipedia can be. I figured it would be a nice thing to see on an actual timeline, so here we have it.
This is pretty much all d3.js. The icons are from The Noun Project and one or two of the arrows are from font awesome. Credit for the various icons goes to João Proença, Víctor Fernández, Sergey Demushkin, Julio Yanes, Marwa Boukarim, Ian Mawle, Joel McKinney, Kyle Tezak, Zlatko Najdenovski, Stephen Plaster, Lemon Liu and Pete Baker.
And lastly a big shout out to Sextus Julius Africanus for having the coolest name in history.
Are specific date-setters exclusive from 40-year-window-setters? Harold Camping with his specific date(s), is he all that different from Southern California radio evangelist Raul Ries, who claims THIS is the last generation, that WE will witness the return of Jesus. One predicts it will happen in a 24-hour period, and the other a 40-year window. In the non-fundamentlist timeline of the universe, 40 years is a blink of an eye!
Think of how this list could be expanded if you included “last generation” predictors. The “greatest Apostle” Paul clearly thought The End would come in his lifetime. The End was so near, he tells people to not even bother getting married! (1 Corinthians 7:8)
40% of Americans think Jesus is coming back before 2050. Date-setters didn’t do that, “this is the last generation” preachers like Raul Ries & Bill Graham did that. Paul did it. And many scholoars think Jesus did it, too (Mark 9:1, Mark 13:30). Oh, how the conversation and the treatments for this ill would be changed if we faced the real origins of apocalyptic predictions.
I appreciate the work behind this chart. It is now up for discussion in a free-ranging closed forum run by some avant- garde JWs.
https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/topic/90452-why-keep-predicting-the-end/?do=findComment&comment=178863
For what it’s worth, I wrote a satire some time back on how to predict the end of the world. It mentions Harold Camping, he being the immediate impetus to it. Hopefully, you will enjoy:
https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2011/05/how-to-predict-the-end-of-the-world.html