Does the Bible say when Jesus is coming back?

No. Matthew 24:36 says "of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only", and in Acts 1:7 Jesus tells the disciples it is not for them to know the times or the seasons.

Who was the first person to predict a date for the second coming?

Among named Christian writers, Hippolytus of Rome in the early third century is the earliest well-documented case. Working from a scheme in which the world lasts 6,000 years and Christ was born in year 5,500, he placed the end near AD 500.

What was the Great Disappointment?

On 22 October 1844 the followers of William Miller expected Christ to return, based on reading the 2,300 days of Daniel 8:14 as 2,300 years from 457 BC. Nothing happened. Most of the movement dispersed, and one small group went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

What happened in September 2025?

A South African pastor, Joshua Mhlakela, said in a widely circulated interview that Jesus had told him he would return on 23 and 24 September 2025. The claim spread on TikTok under the hashtag RaptureTok and was covered by Forbes, Al Jazeera, Euronews and Newsweek. When the dates passed he attributed the error to a calendar problem and named dates in early October instead.

When Is Jesus Coming Back? Why Every Date Has Failed

Q: Could we know the year even if we cannot know the day?

Some date-setters argue exactly that, reading Matthew 24:36 as ruling out only the precise day and hour. Against it, Matthew 24:42 says "ye know not what hour your Lord doth come" and Mark 13:33 says "ye know not when the time is", both broader statements. Every attempt to name a year has so far failed.

Nobody knows, and Jesus said so in about as few words as the question allows.

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. Matthew 24:36

He said it again after the resurrection, when the disciples asked the same question you are asking. "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7). That is the direct answer, and it has not stopped anyone. For eighteen centuries confident people have named dates, and the record is unbroken: every single one has been wrong. What follows is that record, and then the pattern underneath it, which is more interesting than any of the individual failures.

The record

Year	Who	What was predicted	What happened
about AD 500	Hippolytus of Rome, early 200s	Working from a 6,000-year world scheme with Christ born in year 5,500, he placed the millennium around AD 500	Nothing. His own commentary on Daniel rebukes date-setters a few pages before he sets one
1000	Popular expectation, dramatised later by Jules Michelet and other nineteenth-century historians	That the thousand years of Revelation 20 would close	No documented mass panic. George Lincoln Burr summarised the scholarly rejection of the story in 1901; Richard Landes has since argued some genuine apocalyptic activity did occur
1534	Jan Matthys, an Anabaptist prophet following Melchior Hoffman	That Münster was the New Jerusalem and God would deliver it at Easter	Matthys rode out with about thirty men on Easter Sunday 1534 and was killed. The city fell in June 1535
1844	William Miller, a Baptist lay preacher in New York	Christ's return, from reading the 2,300 days of Daniel 8:14 as years from 457 BC. Samuel Snow fixed 22 October	The Great Disappointment. Tens of thousands waited. Most of the movement dispersed
1914	Charles Taze Russell, Watch Tower Society	The end of the Gentile times and the overthrow of earthly governments	The First World War began and the governments did not fall. The Society later reinterpreted 1914 as the start of Christ's invisible heavenly rule
1988	Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer	The rapture between 11 and 13 September, in 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988	Nothing. About 4.5 million copies sold and 300,000 were mailed free to ministers. His follow-up books for 1989, 1993 and 1994 did not sell
1994	Harold Camping, Family Radio	The end, in a book titled 1994?	Nothing
2000	Y2K writers including Michael Hyatt, and Jerry Falwell, whose video said "Y2K may be God's instrument to shake this nation"	Infrastructure collapse read as divine judgement	Minor faults. Several of the loudest voices publicly stepped back in late 1999
21 May 2011	Harold Camping again	The rapture, with the world ending on 21 October	Family Radio funded thousands of billboards. Camping first called it an "invisible judgment day", then in March 2012 said the prediction was a mistake and that date-setting was sinful
21 Dec 2012	Popular culture, from the end of a Maya Long Count cycle	Cataclysm	Nothing. Maya scholars had said throughout that the date marked a cycle turning over, not an ending. NASA published rebuttals
2014-15	Mark Biltz and John Hagee	A tetrad of four lunar eclipses falling on Passover and Sukkot as a sign of imminent upheaval	The eclipses occurred exactly as astronomers had calculated decades earlier. Nothing prophesied followed. Biltz removed his article from his website
23-24 Sept 2025	Joshua Mhlakela, a South African pastor	The rapture, tied to Rosh Hashanah. He said he was "a billion percent sure"	Nothing. The claim spread on TikTok as RaptureTok, reported by Forbes, Al Jazeera, Euronews and Newsweek, with some users saying they had quit jobs or sold belongings. He then blamed a calendar error and named early October

The four ways a date gets made

Look at that list long enough and the same four mechanisms appear over and over.

A number treated as a calendar. The 2,300 days of Daniel 8:14, the seventy weeks of Daniel 9, the 1,260 days of Revelation, the six days of creation read as six thousand years. Miller, Hippolytus and Russell all worked this way. The arithmetic is usually sound. What fails is the assumption that the number was given as a countdown.

A round number on our calendar. The year 1000, the year 2000, the year 2012. Nothing in scripture attaches to any of them. They arrive freighted with expectation because human beings find zeroes significant.

A calendar coincidence. Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, an eclipse tetrad. The 2025 episode ran on this, as did the blood moon books. The trouble is that feast days recur annually and eclipses are predictable centuries ahead, so the supply of candidate dates never runs out.

A claimed private revelation. Matthys said God told him. Mhlakela said Jesus told him. This one cannot be checked in advance, only afterwards.

The failures were not at the fringe

It would be comfortable if every name on that list were an outsider. They are not.

Hippolytus is a church father whose commentary on Daniel is the earliest surviving Christian commentary on a single biblical book. Miller's movement drew tens of thousands and left behind a denomination that today counts more than twenty million members. Jerry Falwell led one of the largest congregations in the United States. Whisenant's book outsold most Christian titles of its decade. These were not cranks operating at the margins. They were, in their moments, mainstream.

Notice too what usually follows a failure. Not abandonment, but recalculation. Whisenant moved to 1989, then 1993, then 1994. Camping moved from May to October. Mhlakela moved from September to October. Miller's remaining followers kept the date and changed the event. The instinct to adjust rather than reconsider is the most consistent feature of the whole record.

The argument date-setters use

Almost every date-setter has met Matthew 24:36 head on, and the standard answer is worth stating fairly. It runs like this: Jesus ruled out knowing the day and hour, not the year or the season, and Paul told the Thessalonians "ye are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief" (1 Thessalonians 5:4). So a season may be discernible even if a date is not.

The reply is that Jesus did not confine himself to days and hours. Matthew 24:42 says "ye know not what hour your Lord doth come" and Mark 13:33 says "ye know not when the time is", which is broader. And the practical objection is simply the table above. If seasons were discernible, someone in eighteen centuries would have discerned one.

What Jesus told his hearers to do instead was not to calculate but to be ready: "Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh" (Matthew 24:44). Readiness is the instruction that survives every failed date, because it does not depend on one.

What all the views actually share

Christians disagree about the millennium, the tribulation, the rapture, Israel, and how much of Revelation is past or future. Premillennialists, amillennialists and postmillennialists build genuinely different futures out of the same texts.

On this question they do not disagree at all. Every one of those traditions holds that Christ will return personally and visibly, and every one of them holds that the date is not available to us. The Nicene Creed says he "shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead" and stops there, without a year.

So the question worth asking is not when. It is what Jesus actually said would happen before he came, which he answered at length in Matthew 24, and which is a far shorter and stranger list than most people expect.