NARRATOR: A temple of geometric precision and symmetry built atop the holiest place on earth. For many, this reconstruction of an ancient monument is a prophecy fulfilled. The location, Israel.
The year, 2060. The prophet is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, and he has forewarned the completion of this temple heralds the arrival of the Antichrist and the end of the world. For thousands of years, prophets around the world have predicted the end of days.
More than one suggests the apocalypse is fast approaching. We call this theoretical convergence between doomsday prophecies and today's events the Nostradamus Effect. [inaudible] Sir Isaac Newton, one of the world's greatest scientific geniuses and father of physics, this intellectual master helped create calculus and discovered the laws that rule the universe.
But Newton also possessed a dark side, as an obsessive mystic who became convinced he had uncovered a secret Bible prophecy identifying 2060 as the year of Armageddon. This is one of several predictions by the famed British scientist who lived from 1643 until 1727. Some believe he foretold a series of events that would culminate in the return of a messiah to the Holy Land, to engage in a final battle with the supposed Antichrist.
Newton really isn't interested in science and mathematics. He's doing theology. He was a very secretive man.
He would reveal some of his findings only to a select group of followers. NARRATOR: Interpreters of his work suggests that Isaac Newton was an obsessed student of the Bible, especially the Book of Daniel and the contentious Book of Revelation. Exactly what was he attempting to discover?
How did he use mathematics to decipher these ancient biblical texts? What did he predict correctly that may be a sign his prophecies are coming true? And are those events unfolding now?
We will neither refute nor endorse these theories, merely present the evidence. In 1936, at Sotheby's in London, a box of mysterious papers, unseen for more than two centuries, surfaced for auction. They held a shocking secret.
The papers in this box contained coded messages and complex mathematical formulas, that according to their author reveal the exact year that the world will end, 2060. The information for this prophecy comes from the Bible. And the code breaker, Isaac Newton, a man most closely associated with the rational world of science.
I think one of the reasons why people found the 2060 story so compelling is that, for most people, it was unexpected. Who would have thought that Isaac Newton, who is presented in popular culture as a kind of cold, rational thinker, could have been working on biblical prophecy? NARRATOR: These papers are Newton's secret writings, writings based on his detailed study of the Bible, that scholars suggest he had been afraid to publish in his lifetime because of their radical and sacrilegious content.
So matters of belief were still very, very, very risky. Newton, for example, had beliefs about the nature of God, which he had to keep secret his whole life. There were ever so many executions and punishments of a religious kind in England during the middle of the 17th century.
NARRATOR: Newton was keenly aware of these executions. He writes, "I have learned what's to my convenience, which is to let what I write lie by till I am out of the way. " It would take over 200 years for the seemingly terrible truth hidden within the papers to surface.
Newton was convinced he had uncovered a secret biblical puzzle that had been concealed in these sacred texts, and that he alone understood when mankind would end. He was very interested in trying to figure out the order and what the significance of various Bible passages was on calculating the order of the events of the end times. NARRATOR: What did Newton actually say about 2060?
How did he reconcile this spiritual pursuit with his scientific work? Most importantly, why was his ominous prophecy kept secret for so many years? A clue may be found in Newton's understanding of Christianity.
I think that Newton considered himself the best Christian there was, because he worked hard at understanding scripture. He saw in the Bible a god speaking to mankind. NARRATOR: Some say the famed scientist predicted events taking place before us today.
An increase in wars, pandemics, and ecological disaster in the 21st century that would culminate in a doomsday scenario during our lifetime. He's also got the common Christian conception that the world's going to end at some point. It's just gonna stop, because God's gonna intervene.
That's what the word "apocalypse" originally meant. So Newton has a big interest in calculating the date of the apocalypse. And that's why he does biblical chronology.
NARRATOR: Interpreters of his work believe Newton never shared this discovery with anyone. If we accept this notion as true, that Newton knew of such a monumental prophecy, why did he not tell anyone when he was still alive? He never published anything about biblical chronology for good reason.
Because if he had, he would have got into big trouble. NARRATOR: Trouble, because Newton's beliefs, based on his biblical analysis, were considered blasphemous by the established church, and threatened the status quo of the institution's hierarchy. Newton knew he would be killed if anyone learned of his research.
But cracking the Bible code became an insatiable obsession for the famed scientist, and this passion came to dominate reason. Newton believed that it was only a matter of time before these prophecies would be fulfilled. NARRATOR: To evaluate Newton's 2060 calculations, interpreters have re-examined the Bible code evidence.
But to better understand Newton's process in deciphering the code, our investigation must first examine Isaac Newton the man. Isaac Newton is usually considered, along with Albert Einstein, one of the two greatest scientists who ever lived. Strictly speaking, practically everything we know and everything we do derives from something that Newton did.
Basically, everything that goes on, on Earth, in terms of light and in the motions of bodies, derive from something that Newton figured out. NARRATOR: This driven genius was also responsible for breakthroughs in optics, astronomy, mathematics, and physics. He helped define the rational, observable world we all live in.
By the time he died in 1727, he was probably the single most famous person in Europe. NARRATOR: But the dark and bizarre side to Newton is perhaps revealed in thousands of his papers, long hidden from distinguished academies and the public. These papers are said to reveal his unorthodox interpretations of the Bible and the nature of God, spelled out in his obsessive and compulsive writings.
Newton knew more about Scripture than many theologians in his day. Newton also thought that there was ancient wisdom about the natural world that scientists or natural philosophers should try to uncover as well. NARRATOR: Some believed Newton, who never married and seems never to have had a close relationship with anyone, hoped to use his abilities, particularly in mathematics, to find this biblical wisdom.
A central doctrine of the established church is the belief in the Trinity, that God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are all equal, 1 in 3, 3 in 1. Newton, always fiercely independent, rejected this idea, based on his own interpretation of the Bible. Newton was an anti-trinitarian, and that was in fact illegal in England in the 17th century.
Newton himself didn't believe he was a heretic. He believed that he was a true believer, that he represented in his own beliefs authentic Christianity. NARRATOR: Despite the danger to his own life, Newton continued to secretly and obsessively explore biblical texts.
His mathematical mind intuitively detected patterns, figures, dates. He began to organize and reorganize these numbers methodically, convinced they were a coded message from God himself. Determined to connect the dots and possessed by his mission, Newton pored through biblical texts for many years to calculate the exact date of the end of the world.
He could lock onto a problem and gnaw it through until he'd gotten right to the marrow of the bone and in a way that I don't think almost anybody else has ever been able to do. NARRATOR: But what exactly were Newton's mathematical formulas? And how did he derive them from the Bible?
Three dates in particular stand out, dates tied to key events that he believed would trigger Armageddon. According to biblical prophecy, these three events occur in the Holy Land, culminating in the Antichrist returning to an historic temple, ushering in the final days. A stunning discovery of hidden papers points to cataclysm in our time.
These documents say the world will end in 2060. The prophet of this ominous warning? Famed scientist Isaac Newton.
Some suggest that Newton was secretly a dark heretic, who calculated exactly when the end of days would come, using clues he found in the Bible. But is this possible? Did his computations allow him to anticipate the Holy Land erupting in a nuclear apocalypse?
Newton writes, "a few scattered persons which God hath chosen can set themselves sincerely and honestly to search after truth. " Researchers with extensive knowledge of his life and work say Newton obsessively studied the Bible for years. They believe the most closely examined texts by the scientist were the books of Daniel and Revelation.
These books tell of God's plans for the end of the world, of the final battles between Christ and the Antichrist, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. And he began his search for clues within them. He would go through these texts, verse by verse, look at the symbols, and try to piece together the overall interpretation.
Newton believed that the Book of Revelation was a more or less continuous history from the time of Christ until his second coming. So from his point of view, a roughly 2,000 year span of history. NARRATOR: Newton was certain the apocalypse was inevitable, because he believed God had promised it in key biblical passages that Newton interpreted as prophecies.
He believed that if he could successfully connect concealed messages in these texts, he would uncover the actual date when the apocalypse would occur. Newton said that the authority of prophecies is divine. That's a quote.
NARRATOR: Newton called these Bible prophecies "histories of things to come. " What might Newton have meant by that? Well, what he's saying is that biblical prophecy, amongst its other purposes, shows history in advance.
So it's as if history was written centuries before it happened. NARRATOR: According to interpreters, Newton's papers show that his first step into biblical decoding involved passages describing the Temple of Solomon. The temple prophecies are a critical clue to all of Newton's doomsday calculations and how he arrived at 2060 as the date for Armageddon.
Newton studies in great detail, and he combines that study with biblical chronology in order to try to figure out when the big day is going to come, so that his study of Solomon's temple was in that context. The better your understanding of the temple, the better or the closer you get to understanding God and his creation. The temple is a blueprint of God's mind.
NARRATOR: This was the original Temple of Solomon, built in Jerusalem around 1000 BC and destroyed by the Babylonian invasion 400 years later. A second temple was rebuilt on the ruins of the first, 70 years later, and according to the New Testament, was visited by Jesus. But it, too, was destroyed, this time by the Romans in 70 AD.
This marked a time when the Jewish people were driven by the Romans out of Israel and into exile. Another reason why Newton was interested in the temple was because he believed it was going to be rebuilt near the end of time. NARRATOR: The Bible states that when the end of days is near, the Jews will return to ancient Israel and rebuild their temple for a final time.
So he believed that if you understood the structure of the temple, you could make better sense of the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. NARRATOR: The Book of Revelation states, "blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written therein, for the time is near. " Newton sees Revelation as the story of Christianity, of the initial dissemination of the truths of Christ, and then the gradual corruption of it by, as he sees it, Catholics, who believe in the Trinity.
NARRATOR: According to biblical scholars, what God promises in Revelation is that this new temple will trigger a series of horrific tribulations, leading to Armageddon, the final battle that will seemingly destroy our world. Revelation further states, "and in those days, men will seek death but will not find it. They will long to die, and death will fly from them.
" There is the assumption that before the day of coming, the temple of Jerusalem will be rebuilt. And it has to be done, again, exactly under the same specifications. So for all those reasons, it's important to get the essence of it correctly.
NARRATOR: Newton spent years converting Bible passages into elaborate drawings and mathematical formulas, convinced that God had directly designed Solomon's temple. He was haunted by its architecture, calculating that it would reveal insight into the creation, return of the Jewish people to Israel, and finally the apocalypse. We now look at the apocalypse as referring to the end of the world, but actually the apocalypse literally means the entire unfolding, the revelation of prophecy to John on the island of Patmos in the last book in the New Testament.
And Newton sees revelation as the story of Christianity. NARRATOR: Interpreters say Newton was convinced that the solution to the riddle of Armageddon lay in the Bible. In the Book of Daniel, the first step toward a decisive cataclysm involves the return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem.
There are certain standard tools that people used, where Daniel will say that the return of the Jews is going to be at a certain time in the future. And he describes it in terms of days. The standard interpretation is that Daniel's days really refer to years, and there is a period of 1,290 years in one place.
NARRATOR: 1,290 years, this is when Newton calculated that the Jewish people would resettle in their former homeland. But 1,290 years from when? He has to decide when that period begins.
So throughout his life, he speculates with various commencement dates. One idea that he thought about was that it could have started in the year 609 AD. NARRATOR: 609 AD is when the Roman Empire ceded part of its authority to the church.
Adding 1,290 years to 609 results in the year 1899, a time when Zionism was attracting more followers. Zionism is a movement that supports the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. And we also see around that time in the 1890s the first Zionist Congress.
So these are events that signal the beginning of Jewish Zionism. So some people point to the significance that his prediction about the 1,290 year period was actually fulfilled. NARRATOR: The final chapter of Daniel contains another figure, 1,335.
Adding this to the 609 AD starting point comes to 1944. Clearly 1944 is roughly the end of the Second World War. It was the end of the Jewish Holocaust.
And both those events precipitated the birth of Israel in 1948. So it's possible to look at that particular apocalyptic interpretation, that particular chronology, and conclude that, well, maybe Newton was onto something. NARRATOR: But what of the supposed apocalypse?
Newton struggled with identifying this date longer than any of his other prophecies. He cross-referenced the various apocalyptic books, the various prophetic books to develop an overall picture. He also developed a very interesting series of apocalyptic time charts.
He lays out all of the symbols that he sees in the Book of Revelation in a chronological progression. NARRATOR: Newton's charts show time starting at the top and progressing toward apocalypse, with a cluster of events toward the bottom that are most associated with the end times. A Resurrection, a great battle, the return of the Jews to Israel, and finally rebuilding Solomon's temple.
To predict the date when the world would end, Newton ultimately returned to the final chapter of the Old Testament and the Book of Daniel. "How long shall it be until the end of these wonders? And I heard him swear by the one who lives forever that it would be for a time, two times, and half a time.
" This same phrasing of quote, "time, times, and half a time" is also written in the Book of Revelation. "But the woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly to the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. " Interpreters say that these prophecies were the key to Newton's obsession.
What does Newton think the time, times, and half a time represent? Well, he believes that a time is a year. Times is two years.
And then half a time represents half a year. Newton believed that the Book of Daniel was using a 360 day year. So you end up with 1,260 days.
Newton also believed, according to the day for a year principle, that those days represent years. NARRATOR: Armed with the critical figure of 1,260 years until Armageddon, he could finally calculate when Revelation intended the timeframe for the apocalypse to begin. Later in life, he seems to have settled on the year 800 AD.
Now, it turns out that in the history of the Church, in the history of Europe, 800 AD is a very, very important year. This is the year that the pope crowns Charlemagne the king or the emperor of what becomes the Holy Roman Empire. And he's crowned on Christmas day, 800 AD.
So we see the beginning of this political system, which lasts for just over 1,000 years, the Holy Roman Empire. NARRATOR: Add the number 1,260, the timeline to Armageddon that Newton calculated, to the year 800, when Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and you arrive at the year 2060 AD, Newton's year of the apocalypse. Newton writes, "the time, time, and half time do not end before 2060 nor after.
" A date that for him was more of an abstract date, because he knew that he wouldn't live to see it. But of course, history has caught up with that date. NARRATOR: If Newton truly believed he knew the year of the end of times prophesied in the Bible and where it would occur in the Middle East, he certainly knew he would not live to see them.
He arranged to conceal these secret papers and keep them hidden until after his death. Newton would never learn whether they would resurface in time to do what he had perhaps intended, warn mankind of its destruction. One of the world's greatest scientists, Isaac Newton, predicted the world would end in 2060.
Using numbers scattered throughout the Bible's books of Revelation and Daniel, Newton believed he had calculated the timing of events leading to the apocalypse, events that some believe may have already occurred, like dominoes setting off a chain reaction that ultimately leads to Armageddon in our lifetime. But scholars say he mysteriously hid his discovery from humanity. Why?
Newton was one of many making prophetic statements in the late 17th and early 18th century. He would hardly have been alone. The 17th century, in my opinion, was an age of prophecy par excellence.
Not just about the end times, but in general. The end of the world was considered to be imminent by many people. NARRATOR: But experts say Newton did not write his doomsday warning for his contemporaries, but rather for us, those likely to be living in 2060, when he believed Armageddon would come.
He really is writing for people who are going to come in the future. And those people who are around him are not really fit to receive what he's writing. NARRATOR: And there was the danger that Newton's calculations would be dismissed as the work of a lunatic, a charge that much of Newton's behavior seems to support.
Much like his search for clues to a biblical apocalypse, he also scoured the Bible, looking for supposedly hidden formulas to explain alchemy, the mythical process that turns base metals such as lead into gold. By the 18th century, alchemy had been mostly discredited as mystical folly practiced by would-be sorcerers. Yet Newton, one of the pillars of rational science, irrationally obsessed over it.
He pursued the field for about 30 years or possibly more. We have experimental notebooks of his that have survived that are literally filled with hundreds of experiments that he did. NARRATOR: Newton's obsession with alchemy suggests that his belief in a prophecy code hidden in the Bible might be a manifestation of an unstable mind, undercutting his hypothesis of a doomsday calendar in Revelation.
Ironically, Newton was appointed later in his life as head of England's mint and given charge of all coinage and precious metals in the entire British realm. The job's function also included regularly sending counterfeiters to the gallows, a gruesome task that may have contributed to Newton's tormented interest in the final judgment of mankind by God. He writes, "gravity explains the motions of planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion.
God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done. " Based on his doomsday calculations, some scholars have even taken to calling Newton the dark heretic. Well, Newton certainly believed, like virtually everybody else, that the prophecies of Daniel and of the Revelation should be taken literally, and the world indeed will come to an end at some point.
NARRATOR: The Book of Revelation states, "behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. " He believed in interpreting biblical prophecies, which he regarded as a science just as much as astronomy or mechanics.
NARRATOR: What might have been driving Newton? God, science, an undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder? Were all these endeavors linked?
Or were they all separate? Well, recent work on Newton's papers and studies of Newton's biography suggests that there were common links, and it's fair to say the chief goal of all his work was to discover God. NARRATOR: Experts say that Newton likely considered his prophecies the greatest and possibly most dangerous among all of his work.
This is perhaps the reason why he went to such trouble to keep it secure after his death. 1727, London, England, Isaac Newton dies, most likely of mercury poisoning. Soon after, his secret papers containing apocalyptic predictions mysteriously disappear.
For more than two centuries, virtually no one is aware of their existence. Was this a calculated move by Newton? Part of his plan?
After his death, they're put into a trunk, and they are stored at an aristocratic home in Hampshire for the better part of 200 years. Virtually no one had access to them. NARRATOR: Then, just as they had mysteriously disappeared in 1727, they mysteriously reappeared in London.
In 1936, they were auctioned at Sotheby's of London. One of the buyers was the 20th century's most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. I think Keynes felt there couldn't be anything that would be the product of a mind like Newton's that wasn't worth saving and studying.
And he was afraid that when those manuscripts were sold, they'd be spread out all over the world. NARRATOR: Another large portion of the papers was purchased by businessman and scholar Abraham Yehuda. Yehuda is a very interesting character.
He was a Palestinian Jew. He had a lifelong fascination with the Bible, with biblical prophecy. So for him, this was a bonanza, an opportunity to see Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in history, wrestling with some of the same issues that I think Yehuda was interested in.
NARRATOR: But both of the manuscripts' owners mysteriously withheld them from the public until after their respective deaths. More than a half century would pass before the papers finally became public. Yehuda kept these manuscripts of Newton's until he died in 1947.
And when he died, he left them to the newly established state of Israel, and that's why they're in Jerusalem at this time. Strictly accidental. Just accidental, but it's fascinating.
NARRATOR: The very existence of the location of Newton's doomsday calculations, the newly established state of Israel, is one of his Bible prophecies, a possible domino that, according to believers of end times, will perhaps trigger doomsday. These papers only became known in the early 1970s, and they weren't really looked at in any great detail until the late 1980s and 1990s. NARRATOR: Now that Newton's biblical prophecies have finally been revealed to the modern world, how precise might they be?
Could he actually have calculated the return of the Jewish people to Israel? And did he accurately reveal other signs that biblical Armageddon may be coming true today? The answer may lie in three key dates.
A calendar for Armageddon, based on numbers found in the Bible three centuries ago. This is the work of Isaac Newton, made in secret at the high point of his career. The original documents containing his doomsday calculations now reside in a country considered by many the holiest land on Earth, the state of Israel.
Some suggest that Newton's harrowing prediction for the end of the world may actually be unfolding there today. He believed that the date for all the great events of the end time, the battle of Armageddon, the return of Christ, the return of the Jews to Israel, all of this would happen in the 20th or the 21st century. NARRATOR: Consumed by a powerful drive to identify the final date for Armageddon, Newton worked day and night to crack the Bible's so-called code.
His prophesied year for the end of days? 2060. But what, if any, are signs that Newton's predictions are coming true?
And does actual proof lie in the volatile Middle East region as the famed scientist believed? If Newton were alive today and could see the state of Israel, I think in some ways, he would be very pleased. Because he would see this as a very clear, very precise, very accurate fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
NARRATOR: Newton believed that the role of the Jewish people in God's plan was frighteningly clear, that the final chapter of the biblical Book of Daniel prophesied their return to Israel as the beginning of the end. Newton also foretold that another sympathetic country would help bring this about. He writes, "the commandment to return and to build Jerusalem may perhaps come forth not from the Jews themselves, but from some other kingdom friendly to them, and precede their return from captivity and give occasion to it.
" But we don't know, because Newton did not himself specify which country he had in mind. But it is quite possible that Newton was thinking of Britain. NARRATOR: After World War II, the British aided in the creation of modern Israel.
And the United States was the first country to officially recognize the new nation. I tend to think that if Newton were alive today, and he saw actually the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, that he would have been excited. NARRATOR: Experts say the return of the Jewish people to their holy land can be traced to the Zionist movement initiated in the 1890s.
This is the first of three key dates used by Newton to identify the date for Armageddon. Israel was created in the wake of World War II, which ended in 1945. That year follows the second key date culled by Newton from the Book of Daniel, 1944.
And Newton believed other biblical prophecies also identified Jerusalem as the center of the universe. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that Newton saw the city of Jerusalem as the most important city on earth. For him, it would be the site of the capital of the future Kingdom of God.
just as it was the capital of the Kingdom of Israel at the time of David and Solomon. NARRATOR: 1967, Israel. In just six days, the Israeli military emerges victorious from its decisive battle against three Arab countries.
It gained significant new territory. The most critical of all is East Jerusalem. For centuries, this 27 square mile plot of land had been under Muslim control.
Some firmly believe that this fulfills the biblical prophecy that the Jewish people would retake Jerusalem as their own. When Islam came there in the 600s, it was a barren location, and the Muslims located what they believed to be the spot of Muhammad's ascension to heaven. NARRATOR: On that very site in Jerusalem today sits the Dome of the Rock.
It is one of the most important shrines in all of Islam. And it is central to Newton's prophecy. Here lies the Temple Mount, foundation for the Dome of the Rock.
The Temple Mount is the location where the Temple of Solomon stood. This is precisely where Newton believed the end of days would occur. Another reason why Newton was interested in the temple was because he believed it was going to be rebuilt near the end of time.
NARRATOR: According to the Bible, as the end of days approaches, the Jewish people will return to Israel and rebuild their temple for a final time. Newton saw Jerusalem as the city that was chosen for the Jewish people to have as their final capital, and he saw a rebuilt temple taking center stage within that as a place where the world would come for worship. NARRATOR: Here, three major religions converge, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
For over 50 years, this site has ignited religious passion and unrest on an unprecedented level. Some believe that rebuilding Solomon's temple may very well trigger a war that would devastate the Middle East region and possibly the world. It's very dear to Muslims.
And so the discussion about the tearing down of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque and building a temple in its place would for certain arouse the anger of the Muslim world. I think it would be Armageddon. NARRATOR: Newton believed that just as God had created the world, so would He destroy it, exactly as described in the Book of Revelation, and in keeping with Newton's timeline.
According to believers, many signs of the supposed apocalypse seemed to have happened just as Newton predicted. But does this support the idea that the sacred Temple Mount is actually the nerve center for Armageddon in 2060? Some contend that the final resolution will perhaps be at hand with the return of the Bible's darkest foe, the Antichrist.
2003, London, England. The secret papers of famed scientist Isaac Newton are re-examined after a mysterious absence of more than 200 years. In them, a prediction that the world will end in the year 2060.
Newton felt that he had been given a gift of understanding, first of all through his amazing discoveries in mathematics and the sciences. But he also felt that he had been given a key of wisdom to interpret Scripture. That Scripture is sort of one big code.
It's full of secrets. It's full of things that mean nothing unless you hold the key to its interpretation. He did believe that prophetic interpretation would pick up speed toward the time of the end, that people would come to an increasingly accurate understanding of the biblical prophecies.
And it's possible that he would be pleased if people were aware of his prophetic works in this age. NARRATOR: Are today's political violence and instability, especially in the Middle East, random acts of hostility or a sign of something more ominous? The divine plan envisioned by Newton?
He writes, "the ruin of the wicked nations, the end of weeping and of all troubles, the return of the Jews captivity, and their setting up a flourishing and everlasting kingdom. " These events prophesied by Newton, Nostradamus, and others are also contained in the end times of the Book of Revelation. "Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth.
" According to believers, the past has converged with our present to set the conditions for the end of everything. Now, one of the important things about Newton's belief in the return of the Jews is that he believed that when it happened, and he was absolutely convinced that it would happen, that this would be one of the great signs that prophecy was valid, that the Bible was the word of God. NARRATOR: Throughout many prophecies, from those in the Bible to the quatrains of Nostradamus and works of Isaac Newton, the greatest sign of imminent danger may lie in the presence of one central figure.
For thousands of years, he has been prophesied to emerge after the return of the Jewish people. He is the Antichrist. And according to the Bible, he will rally people first into a false religion and ultimately to their final demise.
Newton writes, "this identification of the Antichrist is no idle speculation but a duty of the greatest moment. " According to the Bible, this will be followed by other seminal events, the return of Jesus, resurrection of the dead, and finally the climactic battle between good and evil, Armageddon. The promises that would see Antichrist's reign eventually being challenged, a great battle in which Christ and the forces of good would intervene, vanquishing Antichrist on the plain of Armageddon, and the final conflagration, which will destroy the earth as we know it, and perhaps turn it, Newton argued, into a wandering star, a comet shooting across the heavens.
NARRATOR: Some Christians today embrace Newton's apocalyptic vision. To them, the conclusions he drew from the Bible are irrefutable proof that the second coming of Christ is not only imminent, but that many of us today may live to see it. Christian fundamentalists see three definite signs before Jesus will return.
The first was the gathering of all the Jews in Israel. And that of course has happened in 1948, when the state was declared. The second was the taking by the Jews of Jerusalem.
And that of course, happened during the war of 1967. The third is the rebuilding of the temple. NARRATOR: Those who believe in the imminent return of Jesus agree with Isaac Newton's hypothesis that God deliberately chose the Jewish people to help trigger the end times.
For this reason, he is regarded by many today as among the first Christian Zionists. Christian Zionism is a movement to try and usher in the end of time. The true gospel is going to be preached.
There's going to be a resurrection. There's going to be a great battle of Armageddon, and the temple is going to be rebuilt. Those apocalyptic events, those events associated with the time of the end, from Newton's point of VIEW come to pass around 2060 AD.
NARRATOR: Though we cannot be certain that 2060 will be the end of everything, the date is approaching. Religious conflict and wars do not seem to abate. In many instances, they have increased.
Revelation states, "and there were flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake. And every island fled away, and no mountains were to be found, and great hailstones dropped on men from heaven. " Although the vision for Armageddon in biblical passages portends a fiery destruction, scholars say Isaac Newton ultimately looked beyond its horrors.
They suggest he was most anxious about God's ultimate purpose. Newton appeared to focus more on the aftermath, which Revelation says will eventually lead to 1,000 years of a paradise, and of God on earth. Once more, the scientist turned to the Book of Revelation.
"God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tears from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.
" In the mind of Isaac Newton, science and religion would emerge as one and the same. Believers look to his 2060 prophecy as a critical signpost of what may inevitably occur in a few short decades. For Newton, it's absolutely science, because the proof is going to be in the historical event.
It's the events that will prove the apocalypse. NARRATOR: We watch and wait to determine whether 2060 will come like any other year, or serve as the end of everything.
