Maybe you saw the bumper sticker: "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned." Maybe you read the Left Behind novels, or watched a youth-group film where a family wakes up to find Mom's clothes folded on an empty bed.
The picture goes like this. Without warning, Jesus takes true believers up to heaven. Everyone else is left behind for seven years of war and disaster called the tribulation. Then Jesus comes back to earth to rule.
Millions of Christians hold some form of it, and many grew up hearing it as simply what the Bible says. It brings together three things: what Jesus says in the Gospels, what Paul says in a letter, and a timeline that took shape in the 1800s. Here they are one at a time.
What Jesus says
Mark 13 opens with the disciples admiring the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus tells them that "not one stone will be left here upon another." Then he speaks of wars, false messiahs and suffering, and after them a coming in the sky.
“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
Mark 13:24-27
"Coming in clouds" is a quotation from Daniel 7, where one "like a human being" comes before God and receives a kingdom. Then Jesus gives a time frame.
Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.
Mark 13:30
Two verses later he adds that "about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father."
Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 AD, and most scholars date Mark to about that time. (How scholars date the Gospels is its own trail of clues.)
One taken, one left
Matthew retells the same speech and adds a comparison to Noah's day, when people went on with their lives "until the flood came and swept them all away."
Then two will be in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken, and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
Matthew 24:40-42
Rapture readers see believers taken up to safety. Other readers notice that in the comparison just before, the ones "swept away" are caught in the flood, and Noah is the one left. On that reading, being taken means being taken in judgment. Both readings have defenders.
"This generation"
Mark 13:30 is one of the most discussed lines in the Gospels. Readers take it three main ways.
- Jesus expected the end soon. Many scholars take it as it stands: Jesus, and the first Christians after him, expected the Son of Man to come within their lifetimes. Mark 9:1 points the same way: "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power."
- It came true in 70 AD. Other scholars, N. T. Wright among them, read "all these things" as the fall of the Temple, which did happen within a generation. In Daniel, the figure on the clouds comes to God to receive a kingdom. So they read the clouds as a picture of Jesus being vindicated by God, rather than of a journey down to earth.
- It means a later generation. Many rapture teachers read "this generation" as the one alive when the signs begin, or as the Jewish people as a whole.
What Paul says
Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians is probably the oldest writing in the New Testament, from around 50 AD, about twenty years before Mark. Paul had to answer a painful question. Some believers in Thessalonica had died. Had they missed the Lord's return?
For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17
Look at the word "we." Paul counts himself among those still alive when the Lord comes. He writes the same way to Corinth: "We will not all die, but we will all be changed."
Paul writes to comfort grieving people, and his next words are "encourage one another with these words." He describes one coming: the Lord descends, the dead rise, the living join them. He says nothing about a seven-year period, or about a second, later return.
Some scholars point to the word "meet." In Paul's world it was used for a city's people going out to welcome an arriving king and walk him back into town, and the trumpet and the cry fit an emperor's arrival too. On that reading, believers go out to welcome the Lord as he comes to earth. Other readers take it as a journey up to heaven.
Where the word comes from
The word "rapture" is not in the NRSVue, and it is not in the King James. It comes from Latin. Where Paul says "we will be caught up," Jerome's Latin Bible has rapiemur, from rapio, "to seize" or "to carry off." "Rapture" grew from that verb.
Rapture teachers answer that a word can be missing while the idea is present. "Trinity" is not in the Bible either. They find the idea when passages are read together: 1 Thessalonians 4, Jesus' promise in John 14, "I will come again and will take you to myself," and Revelation 3:10, "I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world."
Darby, Scofield and the modern picture
The full timeline, a secret rapture first and the visible return seven years later, was taught most influentially by John Nelson Darby, an Irish former Anglican priest and a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, from the 1830s.
Darby divided history into eras, or "dispensations," so his system is called dispensationalism. He kept God's plans for Israel and for the church on separate tracks. He took the seven years from Daniel 9:27, where a ruler makes a covenant "for one week," read as a week of years, and taught that the church would be taken up before it began. He made several trips to North America in the 1860s and 1870s, and his ideas spread through Bible conferences.
Then came the Scofield Reference Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1909: the King James text with Cyrus Scofield's notes beside it, laying out the timeline. Millions of readers took in the notes along with the verses. In 1970 Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth brought the timeline to a mass audience, and in 1995 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins began the Left Behind novels.
A few writers before Darby had spoken of believers being spared the final trouble, and historians argue over how much they count. The system as most Americans picture it is a nineteenth-century arrangement of much older verses.
The thousand years
Christians who agree that Jesus will return still differ over the order of events, and the argument centers on one line in Revelation, about martyrs raised to life.
They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
Revelation 20:4
Churches read it in three main ways.
Premillennial
Jesus returns before a thousand-year reign on earth. Some of the earliest Christian writers, including Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century, expected a reign like this. Today it comes in two main forms. Dispensational premillennialists hold the rapture timeline described above. Historic premillennialists expect one return, after the tribulation, with no separate rapture.
Amillennial
The thousand years is a symbol for the present age, between Jesus' first coming and his return. Augustine taught a version of this in the early 400s. It is the view of the Catholic Church and of many Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed churches.
Postmillennial
Jesus returns after a long golden age in which the gospel slowly transforms the world. The New England preacher Jonathan Edwards held a form of it in the 1700s, and it was common among American Protestants in the 1800s.
All of these readings keep the line many churches say in the Nicene Creed: Jesus "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead." They differ on how, when, and in what order, and each one claims to read out of the text rather than into it.
For further exploration
Four things to read with the text open:
- Read Mark 13 straight through. Mark which verses are about the Temple and which are about the Son of Man. See where the line falls for you.
- Read Matthew 24:37-41. Ask who is "taken" in the days of Noah.
- Read all of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Count the times Paul says "we," and ask who he means.
- Read 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3. It tells readers not to be alarmed that the day has already come. Then read why scholars debate who wrote it.
Sources
- Mark 13:24-27; 13:30; Matthew 24:40-42; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; Revelation 20:4 (NRSVue)
- Also quoted in passing: Mark 13:2; 13:32; Matthew 24:39; 1 Thessalonians 4:18; Mark 9:1; 1 Corinthians 15:51; John 14:3; Revelation 3:10; Daniel 7:13; Daniel 9:27 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, notes on Mark 13, Luke 17 and 1 Thessalonians 4, and the introduction to 1 Thessalonians on Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible
- Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet and on 1 Thessalonians
- Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, on 1 Thessalonians
- Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1970), on Darby and dispensationalism
- Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 (University of Chicago Press, enlarged ed., 1987)
- N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress Press, 1996), on Mark 13
- N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008), on "meet the Lord in the air"
- Robert G. Clouse, ed., The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views (InterVarsity Press, 1977)