Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 101:402 (Apr 1944)
Article: A Bibliography of Dispensationalism: Part 2
Author: Arnold D. Ehlert

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BSac 101:402 (Apr 44) p. 199

A Bibliography of Dispensationalism:
Part 2

Arnold D. Ehlert

(Continued from the January-March Number, 1944)

{Editor’s note: Footnotes in the original printed edition were numbered 21–54, but in this electronic edition are numbered 1–34 respectively.}

Introduction

2. Historical Background.

a. The Sex- and Septa-Millenary Tradition.

iii. Christian.

The Christian sex- and septa-millenary tradition dates back at least to the Epistle of Barnabas, the earliest of the Apostolic Fathers (70–79 A.D.).1 The Epistle contains the following lines: “And even in the beginning of the creation he makes mention of the sabbath. And God made in six days the works of his hands; and he finished them on the seventh day, and he rested the seventh day, and sanctified it.

“Consider, my children, what that signifies, he finished them in six days. The meaning of it is this; that in six thousand years the Lord God will bring all things to an end.

“For with him one day is a thousand years; as himself testifieth, saying, Behold this day shall be as a thousand years. Therefore, children, in six days, that is, in six thousand years, shall all things be accomplished.

“And what is that he saith, And he rested the seventh day: he meaneth this; that when his Son shall come, and abolish the season of the Wicked One, and judge the ungodly; and shall change the sun, and the moon, and the stars; then he shall gloriously rest in that seventh day.”2

In the fragment known as “The Book of the Secrets of Enoch,” reputed to have originated “somewhere about the beginning of the Christian era,” and to have “come to light through certain manuscripts which were recently found in

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Russia and Servia and so far as is yet known has been preserved only in Slavonic,” we find a similar reference: “And I appointed the eighth day also, that the eighth day should be the first-created after my work, and that the first seven revolve in the form of the seventh thousand, and that at the beginning of the eighth thousand there should be a time of not-counting, endless, with neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.”3

Justin Martyr (c. 100–163/67), Christian apologist, in his “Dialogue with Trypho,” is credited with the following words: “We may conjecture from many places in Scripture that those are in the right who say six thousand years is the time fixed for the duration of the pr...

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