I do not believe 1260 ever refers to 1260 years in the Bible. It is always 1260 days. Always! It pertains to the last 42 months of the Tribulation called the Great Tribulation. If you treat 1260 as years either from the time of the Dome on the Rock to 1948 or when Roman Church was formed from 538 AD to 1798, in either case you will take the mark of the beast and be deceived into who the Antichrist really is. If you think the 1260 pertains to Muslims then you will look to the Antichrist as a Muslim Antichrist (e.g. perhaps Barack Hussein Obama 675=666). Or if you think the 1260 pertains to the Roman Church you will think the next Pope which does come to 666 is the Antichrist. Again, you will be deceived.

We know the Antichrist will hate the Roman Church according to Revelation 17.16: "The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute." So that excludes the Antichrist coming from the Roman Church. But Muslims still hate the Roman Church also at the end of the day, but of course a man of power will not come from an Islamic country, for the Gross Domestic Product of Islamic countries is a fraction of United States and the European Union, BRIC countries, Japan and Korea.

The Vatican will be nuked and Israel might nuke Iran which brings the nations into the Great Tribulation.
According to 666man.net:

There are good reasons for why 538 was chosen as the start date of the
1260 years, but it is not obvious to most people because they don't
understand the history, the identity of the power it applies to, and they
ofter don't understand exactly what the prophecy actually prophesied would
happen to mark the 1260 days, or in other words, they don't know what the
1260 days is all about.

To begin, consider Daniel 7:25, which says:

Dan 7:25 And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall
wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws:
and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the
dividing of time.

The important part is the phrase which says "and they shall be given into
his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time." In the Bible,
to be given into the hand of a king was to be placed completely within
their power. They had it within their power to decide for life or death
for a person and a person was subjected to it, like it or not. It also
says that this would happen for a time period of 1260 days, which is
symbolic of 1260 literal years because a "time" in that era was
representative of a year.

Now, the point of this is that the power that I like to call the Talking
Horn will have power even of life and death over the people of God and
would have this for a period of 1260 years. This is what the 1260 year
was actually about. It was not about power over the kings of the nations,
unlike what some people like to think it was, but those people usually do
not read their Bibles carefully.

The next logical question is: when does this 1260 days (literal years)
start and who does it?

It is easy to figure out who does it because this power "think(s) to
change times and laws" (Daniel 7:25) The only law and times that this can
refer to is that found in the ten commandments, specifically, this points
to the time in the law and also to the law itself. This must refer to
God's laws as the laws of the Romans would be of much less significance to
God than his own law. He would not count it a sin for some power to think
to change the Roman laws or the laws of some nation. Now, in the ten
commandments, there is a law that refers to time, which is the Sabbath
commandment. The Catholic Church has for centuries claimed that it
changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. If you go back into history
and read about the Council of Trent in the mid 1500s, you will find the
Catholic authorities discussing the fact that they changed the Sabbath.

So, what this does is tell us that the Talking Horn is the Catholic
Church. The Catholic Church also changed other aspects of the ten
commandments. They removed the prohibition against the making of images
of God or worship of them or worship of any other false god or even
serving them. In order to make the ten commandments be ten in number,
they divided the last commandment into two commandments. They have
claimed that they can change the law of God at will. However, God sees it
differently. He says that he will never give his glory to another (Isaiah
42:8), meaning that he will never give his position and authority as God
to anyone - never in all of eternity will he do that. If the Catholic
Church is right about their claim, then God is a liar. It is that simple.

You get to choose who you will believe - the popes or God.

Thus, they thought to change the times, the Sabbath commandment, and the
law, specifically the other commandments. The Catholic churh fulfills
this precisely and nobody else does so.

Now, what is interesting is that the Talking Horn is said to rise to power
after the ten other horns on the head of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 rose
up. This means that this power rises after the fall of Western Rome and
after the Roman Empire has been divided among the successor nations. What
we know in history is that the Catholic Church was given authority over
the people of God long before 476 (the fall of Rome), but God ignores this
and says that this power over the people of God will rise after the fall
of Rome and would then last for a period of 1260 years. That does not
imply that the Catholic Church did not exist prior to the fall of the
Roman Empire, but God was marking this time period out as one of their
characteristics so we would have further information to identify them and
know what they would do.

In history, the power over the people of God was given to the Catholic
Church through the laws specifying that heretics (some of whom were
genuine heretics, but the remainder of them were God's people) were to be
punhished by the legal authorities. Such power was given to them through
decrees of Roman Emperors long before the fall of Western Rome. In order
for such decrees to be properly carried out, the legal authorities had to
be properly informed as to who the heretics were. The Church was the only
entity capable of making that decision. Thus, the Catholic Church was
given the task of deciding who was a heretic and who was not a heretic and
could then have the heretics prosecuted by the authorities for heresy by
merely handing these people over to the authorities and accusing them of
heresy. This gave them the power of life or death over the people of God.

The power that the Catholic Church got over the people of God prior to the
fall of Western Rome lasted for at most a few hundred years and was taken
away from it at the fall of Rome in 476. The way this happened is that
when Rome fell, the Roman army, led by one of the members of the Barbarian
tribes, turned on Rome and killed the youthful emperor and then installed
their Barbarian leader on the throne. That man's name was Odoacer
(sometimes spelled Odovaker). When he took over the emperor's throne by
deposing the previous emperor, he declared that all he wanted to rule was
Italy. This spelled the end of the Western Roman Empire because the
Eastern Roman Empire had not the resources to rule what was left of the
Western Roman Empire in 476. So, the Western Roman Empire just fell apart
and divided into some 50 nations of various sizes. The ten horns on the
head of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 is symbolic of all of these nations.

Odoacer was an Arian, meaning that he was a Christian, but did not believe
that Jesus was divine. He also continued to rule by Roman laws that had
been in place before he took over in 476. But there was one important
exception to the Roman laws that existed prior to his takeover of the
throne: he granted everyone, Arian, Catholic, or pagan, to have religious
freedom and they could worship as they pleased. The decrees in the Roman
laws granting the Roman Catholic Church the right to have power over the
people of God was taken away from them through the decree granting
everyone religious freedom and the right to worship as they saw fit. You
see, if the authorities would no longer prosecute anyone for heresy, then
the Catholic Church could not have anyone they deemed a heretic tried and
convicted for heresy and then punished. It was impossible after the fall
of Western Rome. So, when Odoacer granted everyone religious freedom, the
right for the Catholic Church to have power over the people of God was
destroyed at that very moment.

In 493 the Ostrogoths took over Odoacer's kingdom and ruled it until
ousted by the invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire, beginning in 535 and
continuing until 561. The Ostrogoths were wanting to be a separate people
from the Romans, but they did work with the Roman Senate and
administration that was still in place from the days of the Western Roman
Empire. The ostrogoths ruled their own people by ostrogothic laws and the
Romans by Roman laws. However, again, the Ostrogoths were Arians and they
too granted everyone, Romans and Ostrogoths, the right to have religious
freedom, to worship as they pleased. As a result, the Catholic Church was
unable to have heretics prosecuted for heresy. You can be sure that they
missed having that power for having power like that often breeds a hunger
for more.

Now, to get at the specifics of your question. In December of 536, the
troops of Justinian marched into Rome from the south side and at the exact
same time, the Ostrogothic troops were leaving out the north gate because
they did not think they had enough troops to defend Rome. However, they
left word that they would be back and would contest they takeover of Rome.

They planned to retake it - and they would have succeeded had not events
intervened that greatly weakened their efforts and eventually forced them
to give up the siege. They began their siege of Rome in, as I recall,
February of 537, and continued it until March of 538, at which point they
gave up. One major factor in causing them to give up was that they broke
open the aquaducts supplying Rome with water, hoping to force
capitulation, but instead only caused the breeding of millions of malaria
loaded mosquitos that found the Ostrogothic troops a very close and very
tasty meal which so weakened them that most of them could not fight.

They gave up their siege and left in March of 538. Thus, they ceased to
contest the Eastern Roman Empire's claim upon Rome at that moment.
Now, here is why 538 is chosen for the date. Before the troops of
Justinian took over Rome, obviously they had no jurisdiction over it. If
they did not own it, their laws did not apply there. This is sensible, is
it not? Some people try to claim that the Eastern Roman Empire did own
Italy because the Ostrogoths did technically recognize the ownership of
the Eastern Roman Empire of Italy. But, if the Eastern Roman Empire truly
owned Italy, then why did they have to send troops in to capture it? You
don't do that to territory which you own. Now, once Justinian's troops
got into Rome, the city was held by them, but their hold on it was
contested until March of 538. Until the siege was lifted, nobody at that
time could say for sure who would win in the final outcome of the battle,
though it is true that the Eastern Roman Empire was the stronger of the
two. Thus, until the siege was lifted, there was a question as to who
would ultimately own Rome and that would decide whose laws applied to the
people of Rome and also to the Catholic Church in Rome. The question was
not decided until March of 538. Once the question of jurisdiction was
decided for the foreseeable future, THEN the laws of the Eastern Roman
Empire applied to the Catholic Church in Rome. Here is the final decisive
factor: the laws of the Eastern Roman Empire were largely the same as
those of the Western Romen Empire, with a few additional laws that the
Eastern Romen Emperors had added. Both sets of laws included the laws
giving the government the right to prosecute people for heresy, which in
turn gave the Catholic Church the right to decide who was and who was not
a heretic and hand them over to the government for prosecution. However,
while it is true that the laws of the Romans was applied to the Romans in
Italy under the governments of Odoacer and the Ostrogoths, those
governments also granted everyone religious freedom, Romans and other
nationalities alike. However, by granting everyone that right, it
automatically nullified the laws giving the government the right to
prosecute people for heresy. Thus, in the kingdom of Odoacer and the
Ostrogothic kingdom later, the Papacy was not permitted to find heretics
and turn them over to the government for prosecution. In other words, the
persecution laws were not valid in those kingdoms. But when Justinion
gained uncontested rightful jurisdiction over Rome, this power over the
people of God was restored - in March of 538. The reason it was restored
is because the laws of the persecution of heretics, which was the law in
the Eastern Roman Empire, would then cover the pope in Rome.

There are those who argue that there was no administration to carry out
those laws until about 540, which is true, but the law was still the law
and that is what actually applies. You can be sure that Roman laws
applied with or without an administration to carry out those laws. They
had soldiers and officers on the ground in Italy and they could administer
the law until a proper administration was set up. I am sure that if
someone stole the property of others, I doubt that the Eastern Romans
would have ignored it but would have punished the wrongdoer for his deeds.
If they did not, then anarchy would have soon prevailed. Anyway, when
the laws of the Eastern Roman Empire went into effect in Rome, this
fulfilled the prophecy in Daniel 7 because AFTER the fall of Rome
(followed by the division of the Roman Empire into many kingdoms), then
the Talking Horn rose to power. That is precisely what happened because
in 538 the Papacy regained the power to have so-called heretics prosecuted
for heresy, giving it power over the people of God. It gained the power
of a king over the people of God, the power of life or death over them.

The return of the laws permitting the Catholic Church to have people
prosecuted for heresy is just like having a new decree written for them
and applied on that date because it was a new law to the people of Rome
and the Papacy, a law that was no longer enforceable. Justinian had a
compilation of the Roman laws done just prior to his invasion of Italy,
and those laws that were compiled together from previous emperors were put
back into effect by his publication of them. Apparently many of them had
been forgotten over the years and were no longer being used. Thus, 538
was the year in which a decree was implemented in Rome.

Some historians do recognize that the year 538 set up the pattern for the
next 1260 years. Here is what one historian said about this date:
"By this time (speaking just prior to that of Justinian's excuse to invade
Italy in 535), Catholicism was victorius everywhere in the West except in
Spain where the Visigoths would retain their Arianism for another fifty
years, and in Britain now divided between Celts and Anglo-Saxons.

Elsewhere, the older Latin civilization represented by the aristocratic
and often monastic-disciplined episcopate prevailed over the Germanic
national churches. Success had fallen to superior organization and
civilization backed by the passive support of the mass of the people. For
good or ill, medieval Europe would be based on the papacy, and on the
Catholic but barbarian monarchies the most powerful of which was that of
the Franks. And in the background, thanks largely to Justinian, would be
the imperial idea whose ghost was destined to survive until the Napoleonic
era." (W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, page 815, Fortress Press,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 1984)

While it is true that this statement does not point specifically to 538,
it does point to early in the campaign by Justinian in Italy for the setup
of a trend, a trend that remained in place until Napoleon came along and
put an end to it once and for all for the Roman Church in 1798 and soon
after for the nations of Europe.

Once this happened, then God started the clock ticking on the 1260
prophetic days (literal years) and it continued to tick until the power
over the people of God was formally removed 1260 years later in 1798 by a
decree of the French government five days after French troops took over
Rome. A law created the power over the people of God in 538 and only a
reversal law could remove it, something that was accomplished in 1798. As
near as I can tell, there was no reversal law passed by any other power
that owned Rome from 538 untl 1798.

It is interesting that once the law was in place in 538, God did not stop
the clock ticking until 1260 years later, in spite of several apparent
short interruptions to the application of this law.

There are people who argue that the Ostrogoths came back and retook Rome
twice from the Eastern Romans, which is true, and so they argue that the
538 date is wrong because there was an interruption in the ability to
enforce the prosecution of heretics laws, so the 1260 years does not
apply. This appears to be a valid argument on the surface of it, but the
fact is that it fails to take into account one key fact: there was a law
reversing the right of the Catholic Church to prosecute people for heresy
that was written and enforced in 1798 upon the church, exactly 1260 years
later. Is that just some odd coincidence? If so, why did it occur to the
power that this prophecy is clearly applied to? Thus, the 1260 days
started in 538 and continued onward until 1798 - a total of 1260 years
just as predicted without regards for the short interruptions that
occurred.

Wendell