The Fullness of Time

Halfway along his chart, Adams stops drawing and starts explaining. In the middle of p. 80, under the heading Explanation of the Plan of the Chart, he prints a block of plain prose and tells you how to read everything you have seen so far. The long black line is the stream of time; the upright pillars mark each hundred years; the red lines mark ten; and when a nation is conquered or absorbed, “its stream terminates.” Every key you have used to this point is written there in his own words, and he chose to put it just before the cross.

The centuries around that block are the ones the Old Testament leaves silent, and Adams fills them. Just below the strip printed in the book he runs two of the kingdoms that grew out of Alexander’s empire, Egypt under the Ptolemies and Syria under the Seleucidae, with the thin band of Judaea squeezed between them. A ribbon rises from the years of Antiochus IV, “Jerusalem taken by Antiochus, 40,000 Jews slain,” and then Judaea’s band reads “Government of the Maccabees begins.” Jesus would one day keep the feast that remembered the cleansing of the Temple (John 10:22).

Under the explanation runs Adams’ list of Roman government, year by year from the founding of the city in 753 B.C. On the right Cleopatra sits in her ship. After Actium she takes her own life, and in 30 B.C. Egypt becomes a Roman province, another stream that ends in another. Adams dates the empire itself from January 1, 30 B.C., so the empire Jesus is born into is, on this chart, less than thirty years old when the count of years turns.

It turns at the pillar marked 4004. Above it Adams writes 4004 A.M. Christian Era begins: to the left he has counted years from Creation, and to the right the big numbers over the pillars count the centuries of the Christian era, from A.D. 1. In that same column three wise men stand on a hill above Bethlehem with a star overhead. Adams draws the cross just past the pillar of 4004, at the opening of the Christian era; the year of the death, A.D. 33, is written at the end of the line from Adam (“JESUS, 33 A.D.”). Over the cross he prints Pilate’s title in English and in Latin.

Now look under the stream of time. The line of names that began with Adam at the far left of the chart arrives here: Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, Jacob, Joseph, and then Jesus. Paul wrote that God sent his Son “when the fulness of the time was come,” and on this spread you can see what he meant. One empire holds the whole sea, a Greek Bible already waits in the synagogues from Alexandria outward, and in a small land under Herod old Simeon is still waiting for the consolation of Israel.

Past the cross the chart does not fall silent. Peter, Paul, John and Barnabas ride short colored bars beside it, and a red circle marks the first council of the apostles at Jerusalem, A.D. 50. The story that ran for four thousand years toward one birth now starts running outward, from Judea toward the uttermost part of the earth.