The Whole Story

Take the whole age of the universe and squeeze it into one calendar year. The beginning is midnight on January 1. Now is midnight on December 31.

On that calendar, the earth forms in early September. The first people like us show up about twelve minutes before midnight. Writing appears in the last twelve seconds.

Everything anyone ever wrote down fits in those twelve seconds. Every king list, every letter of Paul, every newspaper. That is about 5,200 years out of 13.8 billion.

That is not a reason to feel small. The Bible opens before any of it: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). The God who made the whole year stepped into the last few seconds of it.

This walk has two pictures. The first shows the whole span. The second zooms in on the part people wrote down, and shows where Christians read it differently.

Picture: Chart 1, the gold box at the bottom.

Look at the top strip of Chart 1. One even scale runs from the beginning of the universe on the left to billions of years from now on the right. The red line is now.

The universe began 13.787 billion years ago, give or take 20 million. That figure comes from the Planck satellite's map of the oldest light in the sky. The earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. Rocks from space and the decay of lead give that date. By about 4.4 billion years ago there was liquid water. Tiny crystals from western Australia show it.

The earliest life that scientists broadly accept is about 3.48 to 3.43 billion years old. Older claims go back past 3.7 billion, but they are disputed. Oxygen filled the air between about 2.46 and 2.06 billion years ago. Animals burst onto the scene about 538.8 million years ago.

Now look right of the red line. That purple zone is the future, as science models it. In about a billion years the Sun will be bright enough to start boiling the oceans away. About 5.4 billion years from now it will leave its main life and swell into a red giant. One careful study puts the end for the earth at about 7.59 billion years from now: the Sun will swallow it. Some older studies thought the earth would escape.

That is the longest horizon on either chart. We will come back to it at the end.

Picture: Chart 1, strip 1.

Follow the yellow wedge down to strip 2. It takes the last sliver of strip 1, the last 600 million years, and stretches it across the page.

Plants reach land about 470 million years ago. Animals walk on land by about 390 million years ago, judging by their tracks. The dinosaurs end 66 million years ago, when an asteroid hits what is now Mexico.

Follow the next wedge to strip 3, the last 3 million years. The oldest jaw that scientists place in our genus, Homo, is about 2.8 million years old. It was found in Ethiopia. Homo erectus appears about 2 million years ago and leaves Africa soon after.

You may have heard "humans, one million years." That is not the standard date. By a million years ago, people of the genus Homo were already living in Europe. Our own species, Homo sapiens, is about 315,000 years old. The oldest fossils come from Morocco. Modern humans spread across the world between about 70,000 and 50,000 years ago.

When was Adam? The record does not date him, and Genesis gives no year for him in any way the record can check. The views do not agree. Chart 2 shows where each one puts him.

Picture: Chart 1, strips 2 and 3.

Follow the last wedge to strip 4. Here the scale is years BC and AD, and you can finally see history.

On the left is a cold snap called the Younger Dryas. Ice cores from Greenland date it from about 10,900 to 9,700 BC. The world warmed quickly after it. Farming starts in the Fertile Crescent between about 10,000 and 8,000 BC. Göbekli Tepe, the great stone circles in Turkey, was built in the middle of the 10th millennium BC.

Copper smelting appears about 5000 BC. Writing appears in Sumer and Egypt about 3350 to 3200 BC. Then comes the gold band. That is all of written history: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the machine age from about 1760.

Now find the green marks. They show one reading of this stretch, from the Michlaude book Before the Flood. The book places Noah's Flood at the start of the Younger Dryas, about 10,800 BC. The book itself labels that PROPOSED, not proven.

Record check (judgment). The record puts the start of the Younger Dryas at about 10,900 BC, close to the book's date and within the dating error. The book also says the chemical markers at that layer are "not seriously disputed." That claim does not hold. A large 2023 review disputes the markers themselves, not just what caused them. You can read the book at michlaude.com/discipleship/before-the-flood.

Three brown marks show where the Bible's story sits on this strip: Abraham, Moses and the exodus, and Christ. They sit well inside the gold band.

Picture: Chart 1, strip 4.

Turn to Chart 2. It has one time axis from left to right. The red zig-zags mark where the scale changes. The time before writing is squeezed, the first century is stretched, and the future on the right is drawn in order only, with no dates.

The bands across the top are the record. Each one is a civilization dated by its own writings, king lists, radiocarbon, and eclipses. In Mesopotamia: the first cities of Uruk (about 4000 to 3100 BC), the Sumerians, Akkad, Ur, and Hammurabi's Babylon. In Egypt: the Old Kingdom of the pyramids (about 2543 to 2120 BC), then the Middle and New Kingdoms. Then Assyria, the new Babylon, Persia, the Greek kingdoms, and Rome.

These dates are not perfect. Older Mesopotamian dates can shift by about 60 years depending on which system you use. But the order is firm, and so is the rough length of each one.

The pink band near 1200 BC is the Bronze Age collapse, when the Hittites and many other kingdoms fell.

Israel lived in the middle of all of this. That is why these bands matter. They are the outside witnesses.

Picture: Chart 2, the record lanes.

Look at the four lines on the left, below the record. Each is a different way of dating Genesis 1 to 11. Each runs on its own line until it joins the shared story at Abraham (B1).

The brown dashed line is Archbishop Ussher's count, made from the Hebrew text. Creation in 4004 BC, the Flood in 2349 to 2348 BC, Babel in 2247 BC.

The gold dash-and-dot line uses the Septuagint, the old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Its numbers in Genesis 5 and 11 are bigger. From Adam to the Flood the Hebrew adds up to 1,656 years, and the Greek to about 2,262. So this count puts creation about 5554 to 5411 BC and the Flood about 3298 to 3155 BC. (Why do the copies differ? Building the Bible tells that story.)

The green dotted line is Before the Flood. It takes an old earth, places the Flood at the Younger Dryas, and dates Babel and the spread of the nations to about 3000 to 2100 BC.

The pale green line is Reasons to Believe, an old-earth ministry led by the astronomer Hugh Ross. It places Adam between 15,000 and 130,000 years ago and a local flood about 50,000 years ago. Both are off the left edge of this chart.

Now follow the orange dashed lines up from the two young-earth Floods.

Record check (judgment). Ussher's Flood falls inside the Akkadian empire and Egypt's Old Kingdom. The Septuagint's Flood falls in the late Uruk period. None of these records breaks at those dates. They keep going, with the same cities, the same kings, and the same writing. The same standard applies to every line on this chart, and these marks are where the young-earth counts fail it.

Picture: Chart 2, the creation fork. Layers: young earth, old earth.

Now the four lines join one thick black line. That is Israel's story, and every view shares it. It begins in a dashed box, because this stretch has no fixed date.

Two things move the dates here. The first is the exodus. The Bible gives a clue: "In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites left Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel" (1 Kings 6:1). Solomon's fourth year was 966 BC. Count back 480 years and you get about 1446 BC. That is the early date.

Many scholars prefer a late date, about 1270 to 1260 BC. They point to the city of Rameses in Exodus 1:11 and to Egyptian history. The black line splits into two paths here, and they meet again at David.

The second thing is the 430 years of Exodus 12:40. The Hebrew counts them from Jacob's entry into Egypt. The Greek and the Samaritan copies count them from Abraham's call, and so does Paul in Galatians 3:17. Put the two questions together and Abraham's birth lands anywhere from about 2166 to 1770 BC.

The first time the name "Israel" shows up outside the Bible is on an Egyptian stone, the Merneptah Stele, about 1208 BC. Look for the blue dot in the lane marked "Outside anchors."

Picture: Chart 2, the dashed box and the two exodus paths.

Find 931 BC. The kingdom divides there. Israel goes north (the short line that ends in 722) and Judah goes on.

From here on, the Bible's kings line up with Assyrian and Babylonian records, often within a year. Follow the blue dots in the anchor lane:

• An eclipse on June 15, 763 BC fixes the Assyrian year lists.
• King Ahab fights at Qarqar in 853 BC, on the Kurkh Monolith.
• King Jehu bows on the Black Obelisk in 841 BC.
• Sennacherib besieges Jerusalem in 701 BC.
• The Babylonian Chronicle records Jerusalem taken on March 16, 597 BC.
• Cyrus takes Babylon in 539 BC.

Then the black line goes dashed for the exile. Jerusalem falls in 587 or 586 BC. The return comes in 538 BC, and the Second Temple is finished in 516 or 515 BC.

So from 931 BC to the time of Christ, the Bible's dates and the record's dates run together. Before 931, the main question is the exodus.

Picture: Chart 2, the kingdoms. Layer: base.

Under the black line is a thinner gray one: the family line from the exodus to Jesus.

Matthew 1 runs it through David's son Solomon and the kings of Judah. Their dates are listed under the ticks, from Rehoboam in 931 BC to Zedekiah in 597 to 586 BC. Luke 3 runs it through another son of David, Nathan, down to Heli. Scripture gives no dates for those names, so the chart does not invent any.

One detail is worth seeing. Matthew arranges his list in three groups of fourteen. To do that he leaves out four kings: Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah and Jehoiakim. He also counts one name twice. That is not a mistake. Bible genealogies were often shortened on purpose to make a point. It is also one reason many readers do not use them as a calendar.

Picture: Chart 2, the line of promise.

Follow the black line into the stretched part of the axis. A century takes up a long span of the page here, because so much happens.

Jesus is born in 6 to 4 BC, if Herod died in 4 BC as most scholars hold, or in 3 to 1 BC if Herod died in 1 BC. He is baptized between AD 26 and 29. Luke 3:1 dates that by the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius. He is crucified and raised in AD 30 or AD 33. The chart marks both. Pentecost comes 49 days after the resurrection Sunday. Pontius Pilate governs Judea from about AD 26 to 36.

Then the Jewish War breaks out in AD 66. In AD 70 the Romans burn the temple. The Jewish historian Josephus dates the fire to the 10th of the month Av. By the calendar that is about August 6.

Every view on this chart agrees that these things happened. They disagree about what they mean. That is where the black line ends.

Picture: Chart 2, the first century.

At B2 the black line splits into three. The first place they part is a prophecy in Daniel 9: "Seventy weeks have been determined concerning your people and your holy city" (Daniel 9:24). Most readers take the weeks as weeks of years, so seventy weeks is 490 years.

Look at the gray box low on the chart. It shows three ways of counting.

The dispensational count starts with Nehemiah 2 in 445 BC. Using years of 360 days, it reaches AD 32 after 69 weeks. Then it stops. The 70th week is still future. (Calculated: Sir Robert Anderson said the count came to exactly 173,880 days. His own start and end dates give 173,882.)

The partial preterist count (Kenneth Gentry) starts with Ezra 7 in 457 BC and reaches Jesus' baptism after 69 weeks, about AD 26. The 70th week is Jesus' ministry, with the cross in the middle.

The full preterist count of David Green starts with Cyrus in 538 BC. It stretches the 70th week from Jesus' ministry all the way to AD 70. Don Preston, in what was read for this chart, gives no starting year, but he also puts the cross in the 70th week and its end at AD 70. That makes the "week" about 40 years long.

The question is whether the 70th week follows the 69th at once, or whether the whole church age falls in between. That question is B2, and the three lines go their own ways from here.

Picture: Chart 2, B2 and the Daniel box. Layers: all three end-times views.

Follow the long-dashed blue line up and to the right. Its writers include C. I. Scofield, John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie and Thomas Ice.

In this view the prophetic clock stops after the 69th week. AD 70 was a real judgment on Jerusalem (Luke 21:20–24), but it was not the 70th week. Revelation was written about AD 95, under the emperor Domitian. The church age, from Pentecost to the rapture, is a parenthesis that the prophets did not see.

What about Jesus' words, "I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Matthew 24:34)? Here "this generation" is read as the generation that sees the signs. Scofield read it as the Jewish people.

The future, in order: the rapture of the church (before the tribulation, for most, with some placing it in the middle or at the end), then seven years of tribulation, which is the 70th week, when the Antichrist is revealed. Then the visible return of Christ, a literal thousand years on earth, the Great White Throne judgment, and new heavens and a new earth.

Record check (judgment). Some teachers inside this view set dates. Hal Lindsey's reading pointed to about 1988. Edgar Whisenant named 1988. Neither happened. Scofield, Walvoord and Ice, as read for this chart, set no dates.

Picture: Chart 2, the dispensational line. Layer: dispensational.

Follow the solid purple line to the right. Its writers include Kenneth Gentry, R. C. Sproul, David Chilton and Keith Mathison.

Here "this generation" in Matthew 24:34 means the people Jesus was talking to. The Olivet Discourse and most of Revelation were fulfilled by AD 70. The great tribulation is the Jewish War of AD 66 to 70. AD 70 is Christ's coming in judgment on Jerusalem. Revelation was written before that, under Nero, about AD 64 to 68.

But the story is not over in this view. Look right: the return of Christ is still future, visible and bodily. One general resurrection and one final judgment follow, and then the new creation in full.

The line splits in two over the thousand years. The postmillennial wing says the gospel age grows into a golden age before Christ returns. The amillennial wing says the thousand years is simply the present age.

Record check (judgment). The early date of Revelation rests on evidence inside the book itself. The earliest outside witness, Irenaeus, writing about AD 180, places John's vision near the end of Domitian's reign, about AD 95.

One outlier is in the data. J. Stuart Russell (1878) put the return, the resurrection and the judgment all at AD 70. Russell sits at the edge of this view.

Picture: Chart 2, the partial preterist line, B3 and B4. Layer: partial preterist.

Follow the double red line down and to the right. Its writers include Max King, Don Preston and Ed Stevens.

In this view every prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70, the return of Christ included. The resurrection and the judgment happened then too. Stevens and the International Preterist Association add the rapture. The "thousand years" was the forty years from the cross to AD 70. Writers inside the view disagree about the resurrection. King and Preston see a corporate, covenant change. Stevens sees individual saints raised out of the place of the dead.

After AD 70 the line simply runs on. Since then, this view says, it has been the new covenant age, without end. Nothing is left to come.

Record check (judgment). By the view's own account, the AD 70 resurrection was unseen, and most writers in the view say the return was unseen too. Stevens adds that the armies seen in the clouds before the war in AD 66 were a visible sign of the return, and the record can test that. For the unseen parts, the record can neither confirm them nor refute them. Those questions have to be settled from the text.

Picture: Chart 2, the full preterist line. Layer: full preterist.

Turn on every layer and step back.

On the left, four ways of dating Genesis 1 to 11 join at Abraham. In the middle, Israel's story runs on one line, tied to the record from 931 BC on. On the right, three ways of reading the end part at Daniel's 70th week and go to very different futures.

At the top right is the farthest horizon science can see: a Sun that will one day swallow the earth. None of the three lines puts its hope in that schedule. Each one, in its own way, hopes in a person, not a date.

This chart does not tell you which view to hold. It shows where each one puts the events, in its own writers' words, and it marks every place where the record speaks. If you want to weigh the end-times views, Three Ways People Read the End of the Story is on michlaude.com.

Whatever you decide about the dates, the dates are not the point. "Now this is eternal life—that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent" (John 17:3).

Picture: Chart 2, the whole chart. All layers.