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Showing posts with label judgement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label judgement. Show all posts

Sunday, May 22, 2011

A doomsday prophet

Michael Stifel was an ambitious young German monk whose apparent capacity for numerical mysticism and cabalistic interpretation landed him in a great deal of trouble. Despite his fellow clergymen’s attempts to get him to shut up about it, Stifel proselytized that the end of the world would come on Oct. 3, 1533, at precisely eight o’clock in the morning. His congregation was appropriately freaked out by this news, so when the hour came and went, he was summarily ejected from his ecclesiastical quarters and flogged in the streets.