A self-declared Bible “researcher” and conspiracy theorist who has predicted a number of failed doomsday dates is trying a new tack. Instead of giving a date, he’s giving a range.
David Meade, whose views fall well outside mainstream Christianity, told the Guardian that the biblical “rapture” will take place at some point between May and December of this year. When that happens, the world won’t end but rather the faithful will be plucked off the Earth, leaving the rest behind for seven years of tribulation. Then, he said, there will be 1,000 years of peace and prosperity before the world actually ends, which would occur by the year 3025, give or take.
“So the world isn’t ending anytime soon – in our lifetimes, anyway,” Meade assured the Guardian.
Meade previously predicted the world would end on Sept. 23, 2017. At the time, he didn’t offer a specific form of apocalypse. In the past, however, Meade has used “numerical codes” found in the Bible and claimed that a secret planet called Nibiru was on a collision course with Earth.
“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a statement when doomsday predictions involving Nibiru made headlines in 2012.
Mainstream Christians have also distanced themselves from Meade.
“Whenever someone tells you they have found a secret number code in the Bible, end the conversation,” Ed Stetzer, director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, wrote last year in Christianity Today. “Everything else he or she says can be discounted.”