I heard that the idea of a Rapture originated in the dreams of an ill woman who relayed the vivid images to some gullible nearby clergymen who then went on to back up the dream with certain verses in the Bible itself.
15According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever
The Hope-of-Israel site in the second link of the OP is being a little bit disingenuous when it claims that “neither the word ‘rapture’ nor the teaching of a secret rapture is mentioned in ANY Christian literature prior to 1830 – including the Bible!” As Earl points out, something that could easily be called a/the “rapture” is certainly mentioned by Paul.
On the other hand, the basic message of that link is correct.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul is most likely still working on the assumption that Jesus was about to return, soon. In this context, he is encouraging the new converts at Thessalonica to not despair as some of their members have begun to die off. They are concerned that those who have died are going to miss the big event when Jesus returns, (and, perhaps, will not be saved because they have already died). Paul reassures them that those who have died will actually be the first who participate in the Resurrection, but that no one will be left out. He then depicts an image in which Jesus returns amid great fanfare to bring together all who are saved. (Hardly the secret rapture embraced by the Left Behind crowd.) Paul does not even address the issue of what might happen to those who are not saved.
This is where the Irving/Darby connection comes into play, as they splice this single verse from Paul (taken out of context) into a whole separate set of images taken (often out of context) from the apocalyptic book of Revelation and attempt to construct a series of stage directions to explain to God how to manage the end of the world. The Irving/Darby version is not entirely cut from whole cloth as there were a couple of preachers in the 18th century who also had fanciful ideas on how God should be directed to act in the Last Days, but they certainly gave it the most popular spin and grabbed the largest number of adherents.
Why was Irving credited with being the first to preach about the Rapture if it is (sort of) in the Bible?
Or, why hadn`t the idea caught on centuries ago?
A Welsh Pastor in mid-1700s America, Morgan Edwards, seems to have been the first to distinguish the Rapture (taking up of Christians to Jesus) from the Return of Jesus at Armageddon in a college paper he wrote. There is no record if he ever preached about it. Back in the 1600s, some English Puritan clergy spoke of Christian experiencing a “rapture” before Christ’s return, but it’s more likely they meant a spiritual experience of Christ’s presence than a physical translation.
Otherwise in the 1830’s, prophetic utterances in Edward Irving’s “Catholic Apostolic Church” (a proto-charismatic congregation), Scottish teen girl Margaret MacDonald’s prophetic utterances (first made when she was recovering from severe illness), and the Bible studies of Anglican priest-turned-Plymouth Brethren minister John Nelson Darby all jump-started the pre-Trib teaching. Like Edwards, the Irvingite messages & M McD’s vision were mid-Trib, seeing an interval of 3 1/2 years from Rapture of the Christians to Return of Jesus. Darby, who focused on developing a thorough system of Bible interpretation- Dispensationalism, was the first to claim a seven-year interval ("the 70th Week of Daniel Ch 9). The McD family had some contact with Irving’s congregation & also with Darby. Darby certainly knew of the Irvingites (& probably did not think highly of them) but it’s unclear if there was any real contact.
I did some research on this for a presentation at my pre-Trib Rapturist church (Assembly of God) as to why I was a late-Trib Rapturist. The presentation btw was quite well-received tho it changed no minds, which was OK. S
Btw, pre-Trib teacher Grant Jeffreys likes to claim a sermon on the End-Times pseudononymously attributed to Syrian St Ephraim (or Ephrem), dating 500-800 AD) first distinquished the time of the Rapture from the Return, but a close reading shows the sermon spoke of Christians being given safe refuges on the Earth during the Tribulation, not being taken to Jesus physically.
Jerome’s Latin Vulgate
4:17 deinde nos qui vivimus qui relinquimur simul rapiemur cum illis
in nubibus obviam Domino in aera et sic semper cum Domino
erimus
The JN Darby Translation
4:17 then we, the living who remain, shall be caught up together with them
in clouds, to meet the Lord in air; and thus we shall be always with
Lord.
The Latin “rapiemur”, related to the Latin root for “Rapture” is the Vulgate translation for “caught up”. The original Greek btw is from the root hrpzo.
It seems pretty likely that Jesus’s description of the end times was the same thing Paul had in mind. From Mat 24 (KJV):
(Luke 17 contains some of the same descriptions.)
It seems pretty clear in v.31 that the gathering of the elect is simultaneous with the return. I’ll note that the verbs used here are not the same as in Thessalonians, though.
I can see how the idea of some “left behind” in v.40-41 would be appealing to the modern Rapture view. In context (cf. Luke 17:34-36) it seems to be more about the surprise of the event as well as a stark division between some who are saved and some who are not.
Irving gets credit because he deserves the credit (if credit it is). Note that what he actually did was to take two different passages from two different works in the New Testament and put them together in ways that were different than the meanings of the original authors. (Something similar has been done to the word antichrist. That word appears three times in two epistles of John, each time used as a general reference to any person who opposes the spirit of the message of Jesus. The followers of Irving and Darby have then used that descriptive word, converting it into a title, and applied it to events mentioned in Revelation, then building a whole set of predictions about what “The Antichrist” will do when “he” comes, despite the fact that there are no such predictions actually made in either the Epistles of John or the book of Revelation.)
As to why no one prior to Irving and Darby (and Edwards?) came up with the idea of the rapture: either God did not inspire anyone previously to see the connection or else no one else thought it useful to apply the statement of Paul to the very different situation described in Revelation. Remember, the Irving/Darby “Rapture” involves a lot more than simply Paul’s declaration that Jesus will gather His own, dead and living, at the end of time; they have created a scenario in which Jesus takes his people away and then goes on to do lots of things to the people who are “left behind” after that event. (They are also sufficiently unclear in their interpretation of their reading of Revelation that people who follow them continue to dispute the sequence of events that will occur.)
Lets generalize. If you believe that Christ died for your sins then you go to heaven, so say most Christians (if you believe you will be saved). Then if thats true, what more can Revelation add that could be beneficial to the saving of ones soul?
The salvation of the soul seems pretty straight forward, so what`s with all the bells, whistles, caveats, numbers and such wrapped up in some of the NT books especially Revelation?
If I believe, then I am saved, -who cares how or when, right? Whether it be in a manner resembling Rapture or some other sequence of events, what difference does it make in the long run?
The majority* view of the book of Revelation is that it was addressed to a group of Christians in Asia Minor (mostly current Turkey) in the first century who were being persecuted. It uses a literary form that we now call apocalyptic (from the Greek word for revelation) to use wild imagery in order to paint a picture of great threats and terrible persecution being overcome by the even greater power of God. There are several chapters of Isaiah and Ezekiel that use apocalyptic imagery, much of Daniel is written in an apocalyptic style, and there were several works of the period that have never been accepted as scripture that were written in the same genre. The people for whom those books were written were aware of the style of writing and realized that the imagery was symbolic. It was only in the last couple of hundred years that some people began to believe that the imagery was a matter of foretelling specific events of the future rather than a symbolic assurance of the power and protection of God.
(There are a couple of apocalyptic passages in the New Testament, notably in Luke, that use apocalyptic symbolism, but they are limited to individual passages. Only Revelation uses the style extensively.)
*(Reckoning majority by the number of commentators throughout the history of all Christianity rather than the volume and publishing numbers of a current group of believers in the U.S.)