Harold Camping apologized for being wrong about the type of judgment God would bring on the earth on May 21, and set a new date of October 21 as the time when the rapture would take place together with the end of the world.

Camping, 89, and the President of the Family Radio stations, was making his first extended comments on the Open Forum show after May 21 passed without a cataclysmic disaster he had predicted. The comments were being aired live from Oakland, California to the Family Radio network of stations.

He said that on May 21 there had been spiritual judgment instead of a physical judgment by rolling earthquakes around the entire planet.

On Sunday, in brief comments to IBTimes, Camping said he had to live with the fact that May 21 didn't match his expectations and told the San Francisco Chronicle he was flabbergasted about the result.

I'm looking for answers, he told the Chronicle.

On Monday he apologized in part, as reporters allowed into the taping of the radio program pressed him on whether he would.

If people want me to apologize, I will apologize, he said, after being asked if he would. I did not have all that worked out as accurately as I should have had it. That doesn't bother me at all.

It was just spiritual, he said of the May 21 Judgment Day.

In Camping's predictions ahead of the event, he said that the May 21 day would see the return of Christ and all the true believers would be taken to heaven. He had also predicted that five months of natural disasters would strike the earth and that the earth would ultimately be destroyed on October 21.

The timing, the structures, the proofs, non of that has changed at all, he said.

He said his calculations had not been wrong, but rather their interpretation, citing an invisible judgment.

Camping also said that a person did not have to be a Christian to be saved, saying that if God had saved them, they would be taken to heaven.

They don't have to know about the Bible, they don't have to know about all the things we learn in the scriptures, he said.

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