There won't even be a 2012, according to Camping. His website displays the number with a red slash through it.
Just as the Wright brothers figured out flying, Camping has predicted Judgment Day where so many others have failed, said Chris McCann, 49, of Darby, a married father of four who retired from his job in the mailroom at a financial-services company.
McCann is so confident of Camping's prediction that he and 20 others, most from the Philadelphia region, spent 10 days in Ireland and Scotland this month distributing thousands of May 21 tracts.
"This will be the day," he said.
In a phone interview last week from his Oakland, Calif., office, Camping warned that those who do not accept his complex calculations, including even devout Christians, will face "sudden destruction" when Jesus returns.
Although many have lacked Camping's down-to-the-minute surety, predictions of time's end have been burbling up almost since time began, notes University of Wisconsin history professor Paul Boyer, a scholar of apocalypticism.
"Prophetic belief gives order and shape to human experience, and meaning and drama to history," he said last week. "We need beginnings. We need endings . . . Each generation somehow finds evidence that the end times are upon us."
He cited St. Paul; the medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen; the English Pilgrims; the 19th-century founders of Jehovah's Witness and Seventh-day Adventism. Philadelphia's own the Rev. Donald Barnhouse, one of the first radio evangelists, warned for decades that the end was near, without getting specific.
