The truth of the matter is that it was not necessarily either. We do not know the day nor the hour of our Lord's return. Therefore, it could have been in that year, but there was no Scriptural reason that it had to be so. The dating system which we use and which says that 2000 AD is the 6,000th year from the formation of the world was done by a man, not the Bible. He was a 17th Century Anglican Bishop named James Ussher.

As a dating system, it was done quite well. Considering the material he had available to him, it is quite remarkable. However, it is not a system based solely on the Bible; therefore, the Bible cannot be responsible for any errors in Ussher's calculations.

This article is a chronology of Bible time, and what we know about it using only the dates given in the Bible. The modern term for this exercise is called "a Biblically Inerrant approach."  It is an approach which begins with the proposition that the dates used in the Bible cannot be wrong.  If the date for the reign of Saul is said, Scripturally to be 40 years, then we use the 40 years, not any other source which might suggest a different time.   Using only the Bible's dates, we will show that Ussher's dates may be as far off as 100 years.

We wish to be very clear on one point. We are not saying that Christ's return is not for 100 years. We believe that Christ will be in the earth well before the end of the 6000 years, perhaps nearly 100 years before, meaning he may come at any time. Nor are we saying that Ussher's dates are definitely off that far. We are simply pointing out that the information given to us in the Bible allow for Ussher's dates to be off that much.

For the purpose of answering the question as to whether or not the Bible allows for time beyond the year 2000 A.D., we will take the clues given to us as, and assign the shortest period possible to those clues, to determine the longest possible time for the end of the 6,000 years of God's plan.

This chronology will show that Ussher's dates do not necessarily correspond to the dating of the Scripture, and do not require that Christ returned to the earth in 2000 AD.

In our chronology, we will rely entirely upon the Bible as our source for exact dates.  We will not altar in any way, the times given us in the Bible.  This means that a 40 year period must equal forty years.  We will note the arguments of the world's chronologists, and point out interesting coincidences where they exist, but we used none of the world's chronologists to arrive at our conclusions.