The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The History of an Interpretation 29
the unbelievers? 12
At the end of the fourteenth century, Walter Brute, one of John
Wycliffe’s followers in England offered yet another interpretation.
According to him, the “times of the Gentiles” were the period
when the Christian church was dominated by heathen rites and
customs. This apostasy, he held, started after the death of the last
apostle in about 100 C.E. and would continue for 1,260 years. This
period, and also the 1,290 “year-days,” which he reckoned from the
destruction of Jerusalem 30 years earlier (in 70 C.E.), had already
expired in his days. He wrote:
Now if any man will behold the Chronicles, he shall find, that
after the destruction of Jerusalem was accomplished, and after the
strong hand of the holy people was fully dispersed, and after the
placing of the abomination; that is to say, the Idol of Desolation of
Jerusalem, within the Holy place, where the Temple of God was
before, there had passed 1290 days, taking a day for a year, as
commonly it is taken in the Prophets. And the times of the
Heathen people are fulfilled, after whose Rites and Customs God
suffered the holy City to be trampled under foot for forty and two
months. 13
Since the times of the Gentiles already had expired according to
his calculations, Brute thought that the second coming of Christ
must be right at hand.
Constantly changing dates
Time passed and left the many apocalyptic fixed dates behind, the
predictions tied to them remaining unfulfilled. By now, counting
the 1,260 or 1,290 years from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70
C.E., or from the death of the apostles could no longer produce
meaningful results. So, the starting point had to be moved forward to
a later date.
Groups persecuted and branded as heretics by the Roman
church soon began to identify the ‘trampling Gentiles’ with the
papacy of Rome. These persecuted groups commonly viewed
themselves as “the true church”—pictured in Revelation 12 as a
woman who had to flee into “the wilderness” for “a thousand two
12 Arnold of Villanova, Tractatus de Tempore Adventus Antichristi (”Treatise on the
Time of the Coming of Antichrist”), part 2 (1300); reprinted in Heinrich Finke, Aus
den Tagen Bonifaz VIII (Munster in W., 1902), pp. CXLVIII–CLI, CXLVII. (See also
Froom, Vol. I, pp. 753–756.)
13 From Registrum Johannis Trefnant, Episcopi Herefordensis (containing the
proceedings of the trial of Walter Brute for heresy), as translated in John Foxe,
Acts and Monuments, 9th ed. (London, 1684), Vol. I, p. 547. (See also Froom, Vol.
II, p. 80.)
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