Well, you have my sympathy. I’d love to know if you manage to finish the whole thing. I read a few when I was writing a paper on Christian fiction for library school, and a few after that in a sort of horrified fascination, but I couldn’t take the whole series, esp. the Second Coming one. I do enjoy bad writing from time to time, but it got too painful. The worst was how they would spend 60% of the book narrating some short episode in excruciating detail, then skim 6 months for the rest of the book, then end on a sort-of-cliffhanger.
I did look into the theology a bit at the time, and from my (very basic) understanding, it’s a fictional treatment of a religious idea that first came up in the 19th century and was popularized in the 70’s. Before that, no one had heard of the Rapture as described by this scenario, and it’s limited to Evangelical Christians. (BTW I’m a lifelong Mormon, and a few months before I started this paper I had to ask a friend what that bumpersticker meant about the Rapture and the vehicle being unmanned, what?–I had never heard of any of it.) I can’t remember the details now, though, of how the whole theory all got developed. I know it’s based on a very literal reading of Daniel, Revelation, and a few other books, which is then all mapped out in great detail, but they take verses here and there and put them together in a certain way to get it.
I think “The late great planet Earth” was part of what got the whole thing going in the 70’s, so you might want to find a copy of that to look through. Evidently it made a huge splash in the Evangelical community, but I don’t know more than that and I have to go to bed now.
I read them all a couple of years ago, when I needed to do some human diversity reading for work (I’m also Jewish). I found them very helpful for understanding a more extreme fundamentalist Christian mindset. I was also glad I bought them used so that there was no financial gain for the authors. MsRobyn, used, new, or library copies?
I’m getting them through the library, precisely because I don’t want to contribute to the authors. I’m fortunate that my library has most of them already, and the ones they don’t have can be requested from other branches.
It’s interesting that the Rapture theory (which seems to have had one proponent in the mid-1700s, one Morgan Edwards) really gained ground in the British Isles from three different sources- the charismatic visionary teenager Margaret Macdonald, the Anglican-turned-Plymoth-Brethren theologian John Darby (who pretty much invented dispensationalism), and the Presbyterian-turned-“Catholic Apolstolic” (charismatic) pastor Edward Irving IN the decade of the 1830s.
That was an interesting decade, hmm?
Btw- I second your recommendation for Hal Lindsey’s THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH to understand the Rapturist mindset. While LaHaye also wrote non-fiction on the Rapture et al in the early 70’s, it was Hal who captured the popular imagination back then. He wrote several fund’ist evangelical best-sellers throughout the 1970s, but has never really recaptured his former audience (his 2 or 3 divorces may have something to do with that also).
My personal thought on the number of books sold is that it doesn’t reflect the number of readers. It reflects the number of readers plus the number of relatives who got the things for Christmas and birthday presents. I mean, if you have relatives who are thinking wrong thoughts because they read too many of the wrong books, and you hear about a right book. . .
That’s part of the problem with estimating readers given sales figures. But it’s only one side of the inaccuracies - one also has to account, then, for the copies that are going to be read by more than one person: Library copies, informal book clubs, and simply friends and family who share books. All of which will translate to not a single book sale representing a single reader, but a single book representing as many as fifteen or twenty readers. Or even more, for library copies.
To give you an example of what I’m talking about - my mother subscribes to one of Harlequin’s Silhouette imprints of romance novels. She reads then. Then my father sometimes reads them. I often read them, and my sister, too. Then they get donated to nursing homes. Each book is a single sale, but it’s fair to say that each sale represents, on average, four readers. A little of that goes a long way to counter the ‘unread’ sales you’ve brought up.
I knew my numbers for readers were going to be off - but trying to guesstimate all the ways that sales only approximate the numbers of readers - I went for the most simple reduction of the numbers, even though I knew it was going to mean that my final numbers were very, very approximate.
But without getting a good statistical sample, it’s the best we can do, I think.
I hate to say it but a much better full-length comic treatment is Jack T. Chick’s
CHAOS. I don’t know if he’s changed that one to make the Beast & the False Prophet into Catholic dignitaries- in the original, the B was in a business suit &
the FP was a bearded robed man.
CHAOS btw is NOT on the Net like Jack’s little comics are, or I’d link to it.
There is just this mini-blurb on
"The world in turmoil, a super leader rises, promising peace. Marty sees Bible prophecy being fulfilled…and learns that he needs Jesus. "
Marty being an Israeli tour guide to whom all this is being explained by
the two main Crusader comics guys & their Fund’ist Theology Prof.
It really is dull. The judgments themselves, which should be fairly exciting, are sort of glossed over. The characters spend an inordinate amount of time traveling to look for each other and staying one step ahead of the Global Community police, who seem to be rather incompetent and, frankly, stupid. It’s the literary equivalent of watching Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif schlepping across the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. The few minutes of genuine excitement are overshadowed by the clunky exposition and plodding pace.
Terrifel, the reason I say that I’m not the target audience isn’t just because I’m Jewish. I’m sure there were a fair number of Messianic Jews who bought and read the series, and I’m sure there were copies given to Jews in an attempt to persuade them to convert. However, the series wasn’t marketed to Jews, and any effort to do so would have resulted in a great deal of controversy and possible boycotts by mainstream Christian groups who feel that the Jews should not be targeted for conversion. In any event, I and the Jews I know were aware of the series and its popularity, and for the most part, we just ignored it.
In terms of the anti-Semitism, I’m not sure there is genuine hate, but there is a certain amount of disrespect. Conversion happens because they are expected to do so. I’m about halfway through The Indwelling (book #7, so I’m about halfway through the Tribulation), and Chaim Rosenzweig is the only Jew who has not converted. The concept of a righteous, observant Jew who does not wish to convert is nonexistent in the LB universe. It may also be a result of the one-dimensionality of the characters, but the willingness to convert is too easy. They listen to Tsion and that convinces them to convert.
There’s a blogger who’s been slogging his way though the first book for the past few years. He posts more or less weekly updates (he’s been pretty good lately, but there was a period where they were pretty intermittent) critiqueing the book from multiple angles. The one that I found most interesting is the theological side. I knew essentially nothing about the millenialists prior to reading these reviews.
Anyway, the blogger is a fundamentalist (but not crazy) Christian who offers a lot of insight into the community. You can find his posts at slacktivist.typepad.com for Left Behind Fridays. (There’s an archive link on the scroll bar at the right.)
Rosenzweig eventually pussies out and converts to Christianity too. In LaHaye and Jenkins diseased theology, only those Jews (who number 144,000, according to their retarded, unlettered exegesis) who convert to Christianity can be “saved” from their psychopathic Jesus. The books are not exactly antisemitic in that they have any racial animosity towards Jews but they are deeply anti-Judaic (i.e, the hostility is religious rather than racial). They are invariably contemptuous and disrespectful (not to mention misinformed and ignorant) of Jewish theology and practice. They really trhink that any Jew who doesn’t bow down to their mass murdering scumbag of a Jesus is going to burn in Hell.
Not only does the action drag (and as an apocalypse-loving science fiction reader, I’m very willing to read religious science fiction), but every time something happened at the Western Wall, I couldn’t quite figure out the logistics. Maybe the security points and lesser walls have been moved since I was last there. Also, I recall that the attempts at phonetic rendering of accents (and the non-English grammar some characters use) didn’t match up to Hebrew or any other language I know.
