In this Dec. 12, 2002 file photo, Harold Camping speaks while holding the Bible, in San Leandro, Calif. A loosely organized Christian movement has spread the word around the globe that Jesus Christ will return to earth on Saturday, May 21, 2011, to gather the faithful into heaven. While the Christian mainstream isn't buying it, many other skeptics are believing it. The prediction originates with Camping, the 89-year-old retired civil engineer, who founded Family Radio Worldwide, an independent ministry that has broadcasted his prediction around the world. (AP Photo, File)
According to Harold Camping, leader of the Oakland, California-based ministry Family Radio Worldwide, the rapture will happen on May 21, 2011. There’s only one problem: what time zone is the Rapture in?
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Even though there were no time zones during biblical time, Camping told The Atlantic that he knows exactly when it will happen. It is officially the Rapture at 6 p.m. on May 21 at 180 Longitude. That will be 2 a.m. in New York. It will start with an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and the Rapture will slowly move across the globe, hitting at 6 p.m. in every time zone.
“Everyone will be weeping and wailing because they’ll know in a few hours it’ll come to their city,” the 89-year-old said in the interview.
“Saved” individuals will “glorified spiritual bodies to be forever with God,” while the “unsaved” individuals are left to exist in a world of unfathomable destruction and chaos. The world officially ends October 21, 2011.
Camping says that Judgment Day is definitely May 21, 2011, and he knows this from studying the Bible for several decades. He explained that God warned Noah of the flood seven days before it began.
“ Using the language of 2 Peter 3:8 that “a day is as a thousand years,” it is like saying through Noah, who was a preacher (2 Peter 2:5): “mankind has seven days or 7,000 years to escape destruction.” Since 2011 A.D. is precisely 7,000 years after Noah preached, God has given mankind a wonderful proof that Judgment Day will occur in the year 2011,” he wrote on Family Radio’s website.
There will be no gathering, Camping said, as Family Radio Worldwide is not a church or a religion.
In 1992 Camping published a manifesto titled “1994?” There he said that the end of the world was most likely September 1994.
