Originally published in the WordPress edition and preserved here as part of the site’s research archive. Links and interactive elements have been updated for this edition.
The Track Record
Every prediction, and what actually happened
A public ledger of dated end-times predictions going back eighteen centuries — who made them, on what scriptural basis, and how they resolved. Then a place to log your own, on the record, where it can be checked.
Every site in this field has an incentive to bury this history. We publish it, because the pattern it reveals is the most useful single thing a newcomer can learn: the predictions were specific, the reasoning was careful, the people making them were sincere and often brilliant, and the dates passed.
That is not an argument that the book is empty. Preterists would say the central prophecy resolved in the first century; idealists would say dating it was always a category error. It is an argument about method. What follows is a record of what happens when interpretation is tied to a calendar.
The ledger
Dated, public, checkable claims. Not an exhaustive list — a representative one.
| Predicted | Who, and the claim | Basis | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| c. 170 | Montanus and the New Prophecy — the New Jerusalem would descend on the plain at Pepuza in Phrygia | Revelation 21 | Failed |
| 500 | Hippolytus, following a chronology from Julius Africanus, placed the end 500 years after the birth of Christ | A six-thousand-year world scheme read out of Genesis and the Psalms | Failed |
| 1260 | Joachim of Fiore and his followers — the dawn of a third age | The 1,260 days of Revelation 11 and 12, read as years | Failed |
| 1533 | Melchior Hoffman — Christ would return to Strasbourg. His movement fed directly into the seizure of Münster, which ended in siege and massacre | Revelation, read through a radical Anabaptist frame | Failed, with a body count |
| 1656 | Christopher Columbus, in his Book of Prophecies, calculated the world had 155 years left | A chronology assembled from Daniel and the prophets | Failed |
| 1843, then 1844 | William Miller — perhaps fifty to a hundred thousand followers sold property and waited. The revised date of 22 October 1844 became known as the Great Disappointment | Daniel 8:14, the 2,300 days read as years | Failed |
| 1914 | Charles Taze Russell and the Watch Tower movement — the end of the Gentile times | Daniel 4, the seven times | Reinterpreted |
| 1936, 1943, 1972, 1975 | Herbert W. Armstrong — four separate dates across four decades, each revised after the previous passed | Assorted prophetic chronologies | Failed, repeatedly |
| c. 1988 | Hal Lindsey, in The Late Great Planet Earth — a generation from the founding of Israel in 1948, with a generation implied to be forty years | Matthew 24:34, plus Ezekiel 38 read as the Soviet Union | Failed |
| 1988 | Edgar Whisenant, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 — millions of copies distributed, many given away free to clergy. Followed by revised books for 1989 and beyond | Eighty-eight separate arguments, mostly chronological | Failed |
| 1994, then 2011 | Harold Camping — 21 May 2011 announced on billboards worldwide at a cost of millions, then revised to 21 October. Followers quit jobs and spent savings | A numerical scheme built on biblical chronology | Failed. Camping afterward called date-setting sinful |
| 2014–2015 | The blood moon tetrad — four consecutive lunar eclipses falling on Jewish feast days were said to signal a decisive turn | Joel 2:31, Acts 2:20, Revelation 6:12 | Failed. Tetrads on feast days are an ordinary consequence of the Hebrew calendar |
| 23 September 2017 | The Revelation 12 sign — a planetary alignment matching the woman clothed with the sun, widely circulated online | Revelation 12:1–2 | Failed |
What the pattern shows, stated carefully. Not one dated prediction on this list resolved as announced. The reasoning in several cases was genuinely sophisticated — Miller’s arithmetic is internally consistent, and Lindsey’s geopolitics looked compelling in 1970. Sincerity, intelligence, and rigour were all present. They were not enough, because the method itself is the problem: any interpretation tied to a calendar can only ever be disconfirmed, never confirmed, and the disconfirmation is always explained away rather than absorbed.
Log your own prediction
On the record, dated, with a stated way to be wrong. That last part is the whole idea.
Reading the table above and concluding that everyone else was foolish is the easy move, and the wrong one. The harder and more interesting move is to put your own reading on the record under the same conditions — specific enough to check, dated, and with a stated condition that would settle it against you.
That last requirement is not a trap. It is the line between a claim and a mood. A prediction that cannot fail also cannot inform, and every entry in the table above was made by someone who was certain. Submitting here means accepting that in a year, or ten, your entry will be sitting in this ledger with an outcome next to it.
How entries are judged
- The window closes on the date you set. Not a season later, not on a revised reading. If you want room, build it into the window when you submit — you cannot widen it afterward.
- Your own falsifier decides it. We resolve entries against the condition you wrote, not one we prefer. This is why the field is required and why vague answers are rejected at submission.
- Revisions are recorded, not hidden. You may amend an entry. The original stays visible beside it. Every movement on this list has revised rather than withdrawn, and that pattern is itself worth seeing.
- Nobody is mocked. A failed entry is logged as failed and left alone. The people in the table above were serious and mostly sincere, and the ledger loses its value the moment it becomes a scoreboard for dunking.
Argue about it
The comment section below each entry is where the actual work happens. Two requests that make it worth reading. Quote the specific sentence you are objecting to rather than the general position, and state what would change your mind before you argue — the same discipline the form asks of the people submitting.
We are building a structured debate format to replace comments: a claim, the strongest case for, the strongest case against, and a poll that reports results broken out by which lens the voter holds rather than as a single number. Until that ships, this page and its comments are the ledger.
Related
The counting of 666 is the same story in miniature — two thousand years of careful people arriving at the name of whoever they already feared. Screen vs. Scripture covers how several of the predictions above reached the public through novels and film. And Revelation 13 shows the four readings that most of these claims are drawn from.
Historical entries are drawn from the public record and each is checkable; where accounts differ on numbers of followers or exact wording, we have described the claim rather than asserted a figure. Corrections are genuinely welcome and get priority over argument. This site does not set dates, does not endorse any prediction logged here, and does not publish entries naming living individuals.