The Year Day Principle

While the Year Day Principle used to be popular in Christian Theology from the 1600-1800's most Christian scholars have left it behind. After so many people used the principle to make predictions or to analyze prophecy with less then memorable results the principle has fallen out of favor.

The Lesson Study Guide has left the year day principle till after the seventy sevens prophecy of Daniel 9. However as George Desnoyers points out in his article on the year day principle this use of the 490 year prophecy is unrelated to the year day principle. Does The Bible Support The Year-day Principle As Used In SDA Prophecy Interpretations?

An older article from the Adventist Today Website is of interest (update, as the AToday Website no longer hosts many of its old articles Eduard Hanganu sent me a PDF of his paper which is revised and much more complete then the Adventist Today Article.): "The Year-Day Principle Reexamined" By Eduard Hanganu


A Scholarly article dealing with Shea's views on the year day principle which summarizes Shea well but overall is in my opinion not a well written article, but worthy of investigation is Was Daniel a Historicist? An examination of the year-day principle. (pdf) By by Fred Mazzaferri, Ph. D.

On a related issue which has no doubt been discussed in many Sabbath school classes here is an article which seeks

To expose some falsehoods in anti-Catholic polemic on this subject, specifically, the assertion that futurism and preterism were allegedly invented by Jesuit theologians in the aftermath of the Protestant Revolt, in order to discredit the historicist view, which view was taken up with gusto by the Protestants in an effort to show that the Pope was the beast of Daniel and of Revelation etc.

Did the 16th century Jesuits "invent" Futurism and Preterism as a Smokescreen against Historicism?

For a fairly complete explanation of the problems involved with the 2300 days and the idea of 1844 made simple see the following site. The 2300-day Dilemma The TRUTH about 1844 Made Simple This article will be helpful for next weeks lesson on Antiochus.