The Commonly Held View of the millennium asserts that, essentially, it constitutes a calendar period of one thousand years since the advent of Christ Jesus, and that we are presently concluding the second millennium. (And despite the popular notion, the new calendar millennium actually begins on January 1, 2001, not January 1, 2000.) But what does this particular calendar date mean to someone living in a small village in China, where their calendar is based on entirely different starting points? Or to a Bushman in the Kalahari Desert, where his people have never known a calendar? Or even to the two thousand orthodox Christian monks who live in monasteries on Mount Athos along the Aegean Sea, where they still use the Julian calendar, thirteen days behind the rest of the Christian world? When will the millennium come for the Athonite monasteries?
From a spiritual perspective, the millennium really has nothing to do with a specific date on a calendar.
Dictionaries Define millennium not only as "a period of 1000 years" but also specifically as "the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20 during which holiness is to be triumphant and Christ is to reign on earth." Webster's Third New International Dictionary further defines millennium as "a period of prevailing virtue or great happiness or perfect government or freedom from familiar ills and imperfections of human existence."
