Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was not only one of the greatest scientists of all time, but also devoted decades of his life to the study of the Scriptures, striving to learn the will of God, the truth of history, and the understanding of end-time prophecies. His revelations were uncanny. The story is amazing, dumfounding, mind-boggling! What did Newton think about the the prophecies of Daniel, and the coming of the end of the days as we know them now”?

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A video biography of Sir Isaac Newton: his far ranging thinking, discoveries, theories and of course calculus, From PBS and Nova:
From the History Channel, Isaac Newton: Beyond the Big Bang and Gravity

According to the Biblical research of famous scientist Sir Isaac Newton, and other evidence, the road to the end of the days as we know them now and the final battle between good and evil are imminent!

PBS and Nova aired a program on Sir Isaac Newton (17th Century-in the1600’s). It pointed out that not only was Newton a great astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and one of the greatest geniuses that has been born. He discovered optics, divided the spectrum of light in crystal and showed that white light is composed of 7 major colors of light which altogether make white, discovered the laws of motion and the law of gravity.

But what people don’t know is that he dedicated the last few decades of his life to the study of the Bible scriptures and ancient history in an effort to decode God’s messages for mankind and the future. He had tremendous understanding. Back in those days if he had let his real beliefs be made known public, he would have been put to death for being a heretic. Papers were discovered in the last few decades written by Newton and recently auctioned in England. A past Nobel Prize recipient bought some of the papers and some of the papers are now at Hebrew University in Israel. It was found that Sir Isaac did not believe in the Trinity but considered it pagan and stated that the Roman Catholic Church is the “great whore of Babylon.” He was right in understanding that paganism had engulfed Christianity.

He sought to understand the meaning of Biblical prophecy, especially the books of Daniel and Revelation and the time lines in those books. Newton came up with three very basic principles of prophecy being fulfilled and that were going to be fulfilled centuries after his lifetime. He came to the understanding that in the Bible in prophetic terminology, a day equals a prophetic year being fulfilled which is a very basic principle of prophecy.

Newton’s Prophecies
Most of Newton’s manuscripts on religion were long concealed from the world. Some would say, even suppressed, lest Newton’s Biblical discoveries should “tarnish” his reputation as a scientific genius. Others may well have wanted to cover up Newton’s prophetic and doctrinal writings because they would have the authority of such a brilliant scientist behind them, and therefore many might actually BELIEVE them, and turn from the establishment’s churches!

In 1936 Newton’s papers were auctioned at Sotheby & Co., and afterwards Professor Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a collector fascinated by the Bible and science, bought most of them, piece by piece, from the new owners. He was a Palestinian Jew and important Arabic scholar and collector of manuscripts. He believed that there was evidence of the historical accuracy of the Bible.

In 1940 Yahuda became a refugee in the United States. He brought his vast collection with him, and with the help of Albert Einstein, tried to get Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to take them over, but all three refused. On his deathbed, Yahuda bequeathed his entire manuscript collection to the Hebrew University.

His wife contested the will and ended up committing suicide over the matter. Only in 1969 was it decided by the courts, after an 18-year long struggle, that the will would not be broken, and the papers were delivered to the library in Jerusalem.

Albert Einstein confessed that his own discoveries would have been impossible without the scientific work of Newton and his amazing discoveries. He also wrote to Yahuda, “Newton’s writings on biblical topics seems to me especially interesting, because they reveal a deep insight into the spiritual character and the working method of this significant man. For Newton, the divine origin of the Bible is unconditionally certain. . . . From this belief arises the firm conviction that the parts of the Bible that appear obscure must contain important revelations, which require only the decoding of the symbolic language used in them in order to be illuminated. Newton attempts this decoding or interpretation by means of his acute, systematic thinking, in which he carefully makes use of all the sources available to him. . . . These writings, mostly unpublished, thus provide a highly interesting insight into the spiritual workshop of this unique thinker” (signed by Albert Einstein, Sept. 1940, at Lake Saranac).

Newton’s Exegesis
Newton made predictions based on his intense study of Jewish history and ideas. He studied Hebrew so he could read the Old Testament in the original language. In a July 26, 1985 interview with Professor Popkin, the Hebrew newspaper Hamishmar quoted Newton as saying that the Jews will return to Jerusalem in the twentieth century (Moore, p.492).

Newton believed that the world “was moving inexorably toward a cataclysm, a great conflagration, to be followed by a yet undefined form of renewal. His explication is in one of the normative exegetical traditions of the Talmudic rabbis and Puritan divines, whose underlying assumption was that Scriptures do not contain a single superfluous phrase, or even a letter that does not have significant meaning – a sort of law of parsimony” (p.521).

In his prophetic interpretations, Newton used numerous mathematical calculations, including gematria (translating the Hebrew letters of a name into their numerical equivalents). Newton’s works were also punctuated with emotional outbursts against Roman Catholicism. According to Newton, the original Christian religion was plain, but, he said, “men skilled in the learning of heathens, Cabbalists and Schoolmen corrupted it with metaphysics, straining the Scriptures from a moral to metaphysical sense and thereby making it unintelligible.”

Newton was a careful historian of the first centuries of the Church, and distinguished three principal agents in the propagation of the metaphysical evil – the Jewish Cabalists, the philosophers, among whom Plato and the Platonists were the worst offenders, and the Gnostics, of whom Simon Magus was the arch-culprit and ringleader (Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, p.66-69, quoted in Moore, p.522; see Acts 8 and Eusebius’ Church History).

UCLA Professor Richard Popkins notes that a little-known revolutionary innovation of Newton was to use astronomy to scientifically verify and validate the time-frame of Biblical events in history. He used astronomical discoveries and constructed a chronology of events based upon the positions of the stars described in Scripture and other ancient writings. He came to the conclusion that the Bible is the oldest historical document and is historically accurate. More accurate than Greek, Egyptian, or Babylonian histories. Newton proved Biblical history to be accurate, and claimed that this meant that God had presented His message from the very beginning of the world through the history of the Hebrews, and through their prophetic insights given to them (Moore, p.523, Popkins, Essays on the Context, Nature and Influence of Newton’s Theology, p.111).

Popkins noted: “Newton did a great deal of original historical research to discern the events in world history which constituted the fulfillment of the prophecies. Some of his interpretations have been accepted by later Bible interpreters, especially among the fundamentalists. Newton studied the history of the Roman Empire, the European Middle Ages, and the rise of Islam in the Middle East in order to identify what actually happened in history with what was predicted in prophecy. . . . Newton broke new interpretative ground both in the application of modern scientific techniques to the understanding of the Bible and in the historical interpretation of prophecies” (Moore, pp.523-524, Popkins, p.114).

Newton’s historical research in interpreting fulfilled prophecies was later taken over by many fundamentalists who regarded him as one of the very best in the field. He was in the forefront of critical scholarship of his time, applying modern science to understanding the Bible.

Isaac Newton believed that Christ dominates both Old and New Testaments; that all appearances of the LORD in the Old Testament are actually appearances of Christ; that it was Christ who walked in the Garden of Eden; it was Christ who gave Moses the Ten Commandments, who appeared to Abraham as an Angel, who fought with Jacob, and who gave the prophecies to the prophets.

Newton and the End of Days
Newton dedicated 50 years of his life to analyzing works of Bible prophecies. He deemed his religious discoveries too controversial for public release during his own lifetime. His theological studies remained a secret until recently, when scholars discovered them in the collection of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem.

Newton was not trying to “set dates.” He declared in a manuscript which gives a timeline for the battle of Armageddon and the end of the days as we know them now, “I mention this period not to assert it, but only to shew [show] that there is little reason to expect it earlier and thereby put a stop to the rash of Interpreters who are frequently assigning the time of the end.”

The 1260 Years
Isaac Newton’s manuscript describes the events of the End Times as the culmination of 1,260 years of apostasy – a total abandonment of faith and sound religious values. But, Newton wrote, those who “hold fast” to God’s love and the pursuit of TRUTH are destined for salvation.

Those are the two great virtues that Newton revisits time and time again. By exercising the love of God and the pursuit of truth, any one of us can join the ranks of the elect. According to Isaac Newton, we can prepare ourselves for that fateful time and the worst horrors at the start of the end of the days as we know them now, by exercising those two virtues every day of our lives.

To encourage the love of God, he recommended praying daily, reading selected Scriptures such as Matthew 5:3-11, giving generously to those in need, developing friendships with those of different faiths, and helping with children by volunteering at day care centers or church youth groups. To encourage the pursuit of truth, he recommended reading about every new scientific advance, testing everything with experiments at home, where possible, and asking questions of those in authority.

Newton declared, “Through the asking of such questions is one liberated from those who would hide behind deception, for the architects of such sundry falsehoods view the Question as a deadly foe and go to extremes to avoid the Honest Answer, even if that answer be that the answerer does not yet know the whole truth; for the wise man freely admits that the greatest mystery is that Ultimate Truth designed by the Great Architect of Creation in whose shadow we all stand.”

Isaac Newton was a very humble man, and avoided all argumentation and public dispute as unbecoming for a Christian. He said of himself, shortly before his death, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” (Moore, p.518).

Daniel’s Dates
Isaac Newton studied the three major prophetic time periods that Daniel speaks of – the 1260, 1290, and 1335 “days” (Dan.12:7, 11-12). Newton understood these referred to years. He understood that this was talking about the prophetic Biblical year of 360 days, the original year as it was in the days of Noah.

Newton determined the 1290 days (years) began 609 A.D. What occurred on that date to begin the countdown? The beginning of horrendous, massive apostasy! Write Will and Ariel Durant in their classic, The Study of Civilization, “In Rome, the Church, under Pope Boniface IV and his successors, instead of permitting the further disintegration of pagan temples, reconsecrated them to Christian use and care: the 19 Pantheon was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All Martyrs (609), the temple of Janus became the church of St. Dionysius, the temple of Saturn became the church of the Saviour” (vol.iv, page 530).

The period of 1290 years ended in 1899 which was the institution of Zionism and the forming of the first International Zionism Conference in Switzerland for the purpose of helping the Jews to migrate back to their homeland in Israel. So it is a very significant date – the start of the Zionist movement. The 1335 day prophecy he said would end in 1944 A.D..
That is, 1290 [1899]+ 45 years = 1944.

If we add another 45 years to the date of 1899 A.D., we would come to the year 1944 which was toward the end of WWII, which set the stage for the Jews to have their own homeland. A Jewish state was approved in 1947 by the United Nations, and began in 1948. Newton knew Bible prophecy foretold a Jewish state in the Middle East at the “time of the end.” Thus this also was significant.

The third major time date Newton studied was the 1260 days (which equals a “time, times, and half a time” (Dan.12:7) or 3 ½ years of 360 days each. However, apparently Newton came up with the idea that one must start with king Charlemagne who was crowned by the Pope in 800 AD. By adding 1260 years to 800 AD it comes to 2060 AD.

However, is this date correct? Or did the counting begin at an earlier date?

1260 Years and the end of the days as we know them now
What date did Newton arrive at for the end of the days as we know them now? Newton’s year 2060 A.D. is the culmination of 1260 years of ongoing apostasy. This would have placed the beginning of the countdown in 800 A.D.

Newton’s major focus was Christian apostasy – and the apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church! Apparently Newton himself used the date 800 A.D. for the great apostasy – the date when Charlemagne was crowned king of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope. 800 + 1260 years would take us to the date of 2060 A.D.

Did Newton believe the world would end in 2060?
No, not in a literal sense. For Newton, 2060 A.D. would be more like a new beginning. It would be the end of an old age, and the beginning of a new era—the era Jews refer to the Messianic age and the era premillenarian Christians term the Millennium or Kingdom of God.

What did Newton believe would happen around the time of 2060?
Newton was convinced that Christ would return around this date and establish a global Kingdom of peace. “Babylon” (the corrupt Trinitarian Church) would also fall and the true Gospel would be preached openly. Before the Second Coming, the Jews would return to Israel according to the predictions made in biblical prophecy. The Temple would be rebuilt as well. Slightly before, or around the time of Christ’s return, the great battle of Armageddon would take place when a series of nations (the “Gog and Magog” confederacy of Ezekiel’s prophecy) invade Israel.

Christ and the saints would then intervene to establish a worldwide 1000-year Kingdom of God on earth. Citing the prophet Micah Newton believed this Kingdom would usher in a time of peace and prosperity, a time when people would “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” and when “nations shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Micah 4:3). Although the documentary chose not to focus on this message of hope, Newton did believe that there would be a positive outcome to the war and destruction that would take place at the end of time. Newton took seriously the prophetic vision of world peace found in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4—a vision that sees Jerusalem as the beginning of peace. It is thus perhaps appropriate that the largest collection of Newton’s prophetic papers now resides in Jerusalem.

Why are his theological and prophetic beliefs important to our understanding of Newton?
Newton was not a “scientist” in the modem sense of that term. Instead, he was a “natural philosopher”. Practiced from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, natural philosophy included not only the study of nature, but also the study of God’s hand at work in nature. Newton was committed to a notion of natural philosophy that saw the discovery of God and His attributes as its chief end. For this reason, any serious study of Newton’s natural philosophy must include an understanding of his theological views.

For example, Newton’s famous concepts of absolute space and time were fundamentally based on his notion of God’s omnipresence and eternal duration. It is also clear from his private manuscripts that Newton believed the ideal natural philosopher would also be a priest of nature. For Newton, there was no impermeable barrier between religion and what we now call science. Throughout his long life, Newton labored to discover God’s truth – whether in Nature or Scripture. Although he recognized disciplinary distinctions, Newton believed that truth was one. Thus, Newton’s study of Nature and Scripture were in a certain sense two halves of a whole: the discovery of the mind of God.

See: Tom Tamarkin letter to Mitt Romney and note this reference to Sir Isaac Newton in paragraph 3.

Author’s reflections
Tom Tamarkin

I have personally been to the library at the Einstein Center, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel where the vast collection of Newton’s papers on religious topics are held, and looked through many of Newton’s writings…in English and some in Hebrew.

Newton, of course was a learned scholar who studied Torah, Talmud, Mishnah and all the commentaries in their original Hebrew and he performed all his “religious calculations” based on the Lunar Hebrew calendar. He was intimately familiar with the Bircat HaChammah or 28 year solar cycle celebrated by observant Jews as the “Blessing of the Sun” and renewal of creation. Newton resolved through calculation the facts that in the year 2009, the 28 year solar cycle was coincident with the resetting of the 19 year lunar cycle. Thus Newton was aware that the next renewal of creation in 2037 and therefore could certainly mark the “end of the days as we know them now.” This coincidence of the resetting of the solar and lunar cycle will not happen again for 532 years.

See “Secret of the Sun” for the significance of this window and its connection to energy. Keep in mind the fact that God gave us roughly 400 years’ worth of worldly fossil fuels to power a world inhabited by 8 billion people. Those fossil fuels will be long used up before the next 532 solar/lunar coincidence takes place.

In my article co-authored on May 7, 2011 with Pat Boone, we noted:

Fundamental to man’s ability to control his life is access to energy.

  • The more people that crowd onto this unique planet, the more energy must be developed and available. Energy is absolutely required for:
    • agriculture, in all forms, and production of potable water; transportation;
    • production of virtually all goods required by humans;
    • Provision for man’s comfort and survival in all weather conditions.

    And…man is different than all other animals. Whereas other animals adapt to their surrounds, man shapes his surroundings according to his intellect and knowledge.
    In terms of energy, long term our only hope is energy produced by the process of nuclear fusion, wherein two light element atoms are fused into a slightly heavier atom, along with a corresponding release of dynamic energy. To scientists (and I’m not one), a well-known and understood example is the fusion reaction of D (hydrogen 2) + T (hydrogen 3) > He4 (helium) +17.6 MeV (energy units) + n (neutron). There are many other fusion reactions, each having distinct advantages and disadvantages.

    This appears to be the very process, the “big bang” if you will, by which God initiated – or created – everything we know. This is also the fundamental process of the sun, which is generating the energy giving us life right now. Follow this link to read the entire article