A few days ago as I was studying the question of the chronology of Luke 3 I learned of the possibility of A.D. 26 for the baptism of Jesus. One problem in this date was its correlation with the 70-week prophecy of Daniel. This would necessitate a 458 B.C. date for the beginning of the 2300 days, would place the baptism of Christ in the fall of 26 and the death of Christ in the spring of 30, and the conclusion of the 2300 years in 1843. For the first three dates there were fairly good evidences, and the conclusion of the 2300 day-year prophecy in 1843 would harmonize with the generally accepted dating of the 1335 years of Daniel 12:12, which is 508-1843. The major contradiction to this system is the clear statement in The Great Controversy, page 399, which unequivocally states, “Reckoning from the autumn of 457, the 2300 years terminate in the autumn of 1844.” Since I accept The Great Controversy as divinely inspired, this reference led me to give up any consideration of the 458-26-1843 system, and I then faced the problem of why the 1335 day prophecy seeks to identify the two prophecies with the same event. Everything I have read on the 1335-year prophecy seems to identify the two prophecies with the same event. Did God make a one-year mistake? Of course not. What, then, is the explanation of the one-year discrepancy between the two?
I began to restudy the 1260-year prophecy to see if there could be any way of reshuffling the dates of the prophecies of Daniel 12 so that the period indicated in Daniel 12:12 would end in 1844. I came to the same conclusion as that expressed by C. Mervyn Maxwell in his Master of Arts thesis entitled “An Examination of the Beginning and Ending of the 1260 Days of Prophecy with Special Attention Given to A.D. 538 and 1798.” In the abstract of this thesis, as published in The Seminarian of July-September, 1952, he states: “The coincidence between this reinterpretation of the prophecy with the undisputed events of history leads inevitably to the conclusion that, in spite of the spurious nature of some of the arguments used to establish 538-1798, nevertheless these dates stand apparently acceptable. Indeed they are the only ones adequate to satisfy the requirements of the prophecy.” This date for the conclusion of the 1260 years is also clearly supported in The Great Controversy, page 356, which reads: “This period ended in 1798.”
Daniel 12 refers to the close of the 1260-year prophecy as marking the “time of the end,” which would then begin in 1798. There follows in verses 11 and 12 the introduction of two more time periods: “And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.”
The common dates assigned to these prophetic time periods by Adventist interpreters through correlating the 1290-day period with the ending of the 1260-day period is 508-1798 for the 1290 years and 508-1843 for the 1335-year period. There is one substitute system that makes some sense for the 1335-year period. That is a 496-1831 scheme of dating that would begin with the date of the conversion of Clovis, leader of the Franks in 496, which gave the church a strong political ally and an effective sword for more than 12 centuries (The SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 4, pp. 836, 837). The 1335 years would then terminate with the beginning of William Miller’s preaching of the 2300-year prophecy. However, the 1290-year prophecy does not fit into this scheme.