God doesn't grade on the curve.

I have never done the research to find if the works of Clarence Larkin were impacted by real scholars or others with influence in Biblical Studies.  Larkin, heavily influential over the flawed thinking of modern End Times prognosticators like Tim LaHaye, John Walvoord and Hal Lindsey, self-published a book in 1918 with lots of charts and pictures of his own that illustrated his ideas of the biblical messages in Revelation, Daniel, etc.  Between page 127 and 128 is a chart that I ran across a few years ago when doing research on the ridiculous notion that the fig tree of Matthew 24 represents Israel (many of the end times “experts” have whipped up foolish frenzies over this passage by their calculations regarding Israel becoming a nation in 1948).  This chart of Larkin’s shows the 7 church “ages” he has calculated on the basis of his notion of each of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 being representative of that idea.  When you do the math, his system comes out to be a Bell curve.  100 years of Ephesus, 150 years of Smyrna, 300 years of Pergamos, 900 years of Thyatira, 250 years of Sardis, 150 years of Philadelphia, and 100 years of Laodicea (years are approximate… Note that Larkin’s perspective is the old school notion that there was no overlap between the eras. This overlap idea is a more modern development (from the 70’s…probably invented by LaHaye) that overlaps Philadelphia and Laodicea in order to claim that there can be some “true Christians” in what they are designating as the “Laodicea” era). 

A Bell curve is a measurement of human conditions or activities and largely anti-biblical (Good example of a Bell curve in operation is to survey a busy Wal-Mart parking lot in relation to the entry doors…most people gather in the middle lanes instead of on the fringe where they may actually be closer to the door according to proximity absolute). When the Holy Spirit wrote the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, there was no Bell curve of 6 generations, 12 generations, 58 generations, 12 generations and 6…or some such nonsense.  Larkin’s interpretative overlay is a purely human construct and should be discarded as unsupportable.  A good test for it would be: can we make it work in Ethiopia?  What do we know about the history of the church in Africa from 33 AD to the present?  Does the biblical message apply to Christians throughout the world at all times or only to select persons who are in an area where some measure of history was recorded and preserved (Calvin’s ridiculous notion of the elect…another Bell curve dynamic)?  If the YES goes to the universality of the message, then we have to reject Larkin’s work and his heir apparent in “End Times” studies, Tim LaHaye.