From the Latin word millenniu, meaning literally “a period of a thousand years.” Millenarianism, and another more modern word, “Millennialism, each stem from a statement given in Chapter 22 of the Bible Book of Revelation that claimed to know the actual date of the Day of Judgment. Similar claims are said to be found in a miscellaneous collection of Jewish apocalyptic literature called the Kabbalah.
At the end of the first millennium, certain Christians thought that something momentous was going to happen at that time. Chief among these were two sects which in the second century had been declared by the early Christian church to be heretics, namely the Gnostics, who believed that only by concentrating on the spiritual element in mankind would there be redemption, and to this end they declared the body corrupt; the other was an extreme ascetic sect called the Montanists. But the mass of the peasantry and the country priesthood would have been ignorant of such predictions. The chronicler Rudulfus Glaber (985-1047), a well read monk and considerable traveler, was well aware of the millennium and observed that there seemed to be little interest in the event. Today, as we approach the year 2000, many more people are aware of the ancient sources and fears are rising that something might happen at this millennium.