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You've probably heard that the pretribulation rapture
view was published by a Rev. Morgan Edwards in 1788 and also by a
Medieval writer called Pseudo-Ephraem 1000 years earlier. The Edwards
claim (promoted by John Bray and copied by Frank Marotta, Thomas Ice,
Tim LaHaye etc.) is based on a 1980 book by Thomas McKibbens and
Kenneth Smith, while the claim for Pseudo-Ephraem (promoted by Grant
Jeffrey and copied by Thomas Ice, J. R. Church, Jerry Falwell, Tim
LaHaye, Chuck Missler, Dave Hunt, Hal Lindsey etc.) rests on a 1985
book by Paul Alexander.
Not only have these promoters covered up and twisted
what McKibbens/Smith and Alexander have written, but they've also
concealed and perverted Morgan Edwards' and Pseudo-Ephraem's own
words! Let's focus first on Morgan Edwards (hereafter: M.E.).
Promoters see a pretrib rapture in the following words by M.E.:
"...the dead saints will be raised, and the living changed at
Christ's 'appearing in the air' (I Thes. iv, 17); and this will be
about three years and a half before the millennium...."
If promoters had been sure of their pretrib claim,
they never would have had to collusively cover up the following M.E.
statements that contradict their claim: On p. 14 M.E. described the
"Turkish or Ottoman empire" (which began around 1300 A.D.)
as the "beast that started out of the earth" (Rev. 13's
second beast). (Since Bray etc. repeatedly claim that M.E. had only a
"futurist" outlook, without which M.E. couldn't have
logically expected a pretrib rapture, Bray deliberately skips over
the historicism in M.E.'s "Ottoman" remark - historicism
being the belief that the tribulation, covering many centuries, began
at some point in the distant past.)
On p. 20 M.E. wrote that the "wicked one"
(II Thess. 2:8) has "hitherto assumed no higher title than 'the
vicar general of Christ on earth'" and described
"Antichrist" as "popery" and a "succession
of persons." (Promoters emphasize M.E.'s comments about the
"last" Pope and ignore M.E.'s view that "popery"
had "hitherto" (for many centuries) been playing the role
of II Thess. 2:8's "wicked one" while wearing a
"mask" (as he put it) - a first beast that historicism
could easily see during the second beast's reign!) Since historicism
- and not preterism or futurism - is the only one of these three
schools which often thinks "years" when reading
"days" in the Bible, it isn't surprising to find such
year/day historicism in M.E. On p. 19, for example, while discussing
Rev. 11's two witnesses, M.E. says "there are no more than about
204 years between now and their death:
I should therefore expect that their appearance is not
far off." (Bray quotes M.E.'s very next sentence, on another
matter, but ignores this one! Could a futurist ever apply a couple of
centuries - instead of only 1260 days - to those witnesses?)
Something else. The authoritative 1980 book about M.E. that inspired
the claim promoted by Bray, Ice, LaHaye etc. never classified M.E.'s
view as "pretrib," or even remotely resembling it, and the
book's authorship had the same conclusion when later interviewed by
both phone and correspondence!
And when Thomas Ice's "Pre-Trib Perspectives"
newsletter (Sep./Oct., 1995) ran his own article promoting Edwards
as a teacher of "pretribulationism." he couldn't find any
of the heavyweight authorities on Edwards, that he listed and quoted,
evaluating that 18th century pastor as a pretrib! In light of the
fact that Edwards embraced historicism (which can see some future
things yet to be fulfilled) and not pure futurism (which sees no past
tribulational fulfillment), it's easy to believe that Edwards, like
some other historicists of that period, saw a three-and-a-half-year
period at the end of a 1260-year tribulation - the same percentage a
futurist would have if he were to see a period of three and a half
days at the end of a 1260-day tribulation; such a percentage would of
course be a posttrib view!
At least I don't have to juggle or cover up historical
data to come to such a conclusion!
But now it's time to analyze Pseudo-Ephraem
(hereafter: P-E), the name attached by scholars to manuscripts that
were possibly, but not provably, written by the well-known Ephraim
the Syrian who lived from 306-373 A.D.
And what's the discovery in P-E's early Medieval
sermon on the end of the world that's led pretrib promoters to see
pretrib in it? It's basically these words: "For all the saints
and elect of God are gathered, prior to the tribulation that is to
come, and are taken to the Lord lest they see the confusion that is
to overwhelm the world because of our sins." A pretrib rapture
is seen by promoters in the phrase "taken to the Lord." It
needs to be emphasized that pretrib in P-E has been palmed off on
unsuspecting Christians by promoters seeing rapture aspects in P-E's
sermon where none exist and by covering up such aspects where they do
exist in his 10-section sermon! In Section 2, P-E says that the only
event that's "imminent" is "the advent of the wicked
one" (that is, Antichrist).
Nevertheless, Grant Jeffrey in his 1995 book, FINAL
WARNING, had the audacity to claim that P-E "began with the
Rapture using the word 'imminent'" and added in the next
sentence that "Ephraem used the word 'imminent' to describe the
Rapture." (If he and other P-E promoters can look at a coming of
Antichrist and see a coming of "Christ," is it any wonder
that in his endtime view folks will look at Antichrist and see
"Christ"? Ephraim the Syrian, reportedly P-E's inspiration,
said the same thing (SERMO ASCETICUS, I): "Nothing remains then,
except that the coming of our enemy, Antichrist, appear...."
(Nobody's ever found even a trace of pretrib in this earlier work!)
In the before-the-tribulation sections, P-E mentions
neither a descent of Christ, nor a shout, nor an angelic voice, nor a
trumpet of God, nor a resurrection, nor the dead in Christ, nor a
rapture, nor meeting Christ. So where does P-E place the rapture? The
answer is found in his last section (10) where he writes that after
"the sign of the Son of Man" when "the Lord shall
appear with great power," the "angelic trumpet precedes
him, which shall sound and declare: Arise, O sleeping ones, arise,
meet Christ, because the hour of judgment has come!" (Like
Morgan Edwards and Manuel Lacunza, Pseudo-Ephraem has the nasty, non-pretrib
habit of blending the rapture with the final advent!) In the
July/Sep., 1995 BIBLIOTHECA SACRA, Dallas Seminary's journal, Thomas
Ice and his co-author Timothy Demy pulled off one of the worst
revisionisms of P-E ever: when summarizing Section 10 they carefully
deleted what P-E included between "trumpet" and
"judgment" (deleted the distinctive I Thess. 4 aspects in
that posttrib setting), giving unsuspecting readers this utterly
misleading condensation: "A trumpet will sound, calling forth
the dead to judgment." But P-E says much more, as can be seen;
he places the resurrection of those who sleep in Jesus and the
rapture of those who meet Jesus (details found only in I Thess. 4) at
the Matt. 24 coming!
A moment ago I said that Edwards and Lacunza had the
same rapture/advent blending. Here's evidence. Edwards in his 1788
work (pp. 21-22) speaks of "the son of man in the clouds, coming
to raise the dead saints and change the living....The signs of his
coming, in the heavens, will be 'the trump of God [I Thess. 4:16],
vapour and smoke, which will darken the sun and moon [Acts
2:19,20]....'" Lacunza's 1812 work THE COMING OF MESSIAH IN
GLORY AND MAJESTY (Vol. I, p. 113) declares: "...you will find
St. Paul and the Gospel speaking one and the same thing: He shall
send his angels and they shall gather his elect from the four winds;
who can be no other than those very ones who are in Christ, who sleep
in Jesus." (A few have assumed that there's pretrib in an
earlier Catholic, Franciscus Ribera, but in his 16th century
Revelation commentary he viewed Rev. 12's "woman" in the
tribulation as the Christian Church!)
But let's go back to Pseudo-Ephraem. Dr. Paul
Alexander, the leading authority whose book inspired the P-E claim,
is portrayed in Jeffrey's book, FINAL WARNING, as "perhaps the
most authoritative scholar on the writings of the early Byzantine
Church." But this misleading statement, designed to make readers
think that Professor Alexander supports the P-E claim, covers up the
fact that this world famous scholar sees not even a smidgen of
pretrib in the same Medieval writer!
In fact, Alexander writes that the phrase "taken
to the Lord" (which has become a bonanza for pretrib history
revisionists) means "participate at least in some measure in
beatitude." While Jeffrey and Ice do include this
"beatitude" phrase, all P-E promoters carefully avoid
revealing that the Catholic doctrine of "beatitude,"
according to the NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, has to do with "the
highest acts of virtue that can be performed in this life" -
works on earth and not being raptured off earth! (Elsewhere in his
sermon P-E repeats the importance of doing "penance,"
because of "our sins," so that church members will be
"sustained" during the tribulation!)
In fact (again), Alexander has two summaries (textual
and outline), in chronological order, of P-E's endtime events. And
guess what. Alexander demonstrates both times that P-E saw only one
future coming ("Second Coming of Christ" for the
"punishment of the Antichrist") which follows (!) the great
tribulation ("tribulation magna lasting three and a half
years") - claim-smashing summaries that self-serving promoters,
with malice aforethought, have jointly swept under their "secret
rapture" rug!
Since "Dr." Thomas Ice is the most rabid
pretrib defender who's long promoted the (false) claims for John
Darby and, more recently, Edwards and Pseudo-Ephraem, and at the same
time covered up or twisted the (true) claims for Margaret Macdonald
and the Irvingites, it's fitting to quote the first sentence of a
recent news item: "WorldNetDaily reported on March 7 that a
Texas district court has ordered the Tyndale Theological Seminary to
pay fines totalling $170,000 for issuing 34 theological degrees
without receiving approval from the state education agency."
This is the Fort Worth seminary that gave the title of
"Dr." to Ice - which is at least an improvement over
"Dr." C. I. Scofield who, in the 1890's, began deceitfully
adding "Dr." to his name instead of waiting for some
institution to confer it upon him!
Well, I didn't mean to write a book here; I merely
wanted to share some long covered up facts about pretrib
dispensationalism. My 300-page book THE RAPTURE PLOT (with footnotes,
index, bibliography, appendices, plus great commendations from
leaders, and obtainable by calling 800-967-7345) has the sort of info
I've just outlined plus much, much more. If you decide to get a copy
of my PLOT book, I won't have to tell you about the rest of the
bizarre history of the 171-year-old, British-born pretrib rapture view.
I won't tell you that the same promoters have used the
same unscrupulous, "twistorical" methods to try to
discredit Margaret Macdonald, the real pretrib originator in early
1830, and cover up the fact that other partial rapturists who
followed her and taught the same thing have all been classified as pretribs!
I won't tell you that promoters who claim that John
Darby was pretrib as early as 1827 won't admit that he then had only
his "heavenly church" theme, that he was still clearly
posttrib as late as a Dec., 1830 article (he was waiting "to
meet Him in the air in order to His judging of the nations"),
that he wasn't clearly pretrib before 1839, that in 1839 Darby's only
pretrib basis was Rev. 12's "man child" symbol (which
symbol had been Edward Irving's pretrib basis since 1831!), that in
his 1991 book (p. 100) R. A. Huebner admitted that his source for his
1827 claim for Darby could just as easily refer to something
completely un-rapturesque, and that Ice since 1991 has covered this
up and continues to declare, while searing his conscience, that
Huebner "documents" his belief that Darby was pretrib in 1827!
I won't tell you that all of Darby's so-called
"thoughts" which promoters for generations have claimed led
him to pretrib (thoughts like the "Gentile parenthesis,"
"Church/Israel dichotomy," and the "literal
method") were taught by others much earlier and that he subtly
plagiarized them! (Dispensationalist scholars must have known that
airing even a tiny fraction of this would have been a deathblow to
their system!)
I won't tell you that throughout most of the 1800's
the leading church historians - whether Irvingite or (Plymouth)
Brethren - overwhelmingly credited the Macdonald/Irvingite orbit with
pretrib; none credited Darby!
I won't tell you that in 1880, a year after his
Christian conversion, C. I. Scofield was in jail in St. Louis for
forgery (he'd stolen his mother-in-law's life savings by means of a
real estate scam; would most non-Christian crooks do this?), that
after he deserted his wife and children she divorced him in 1883 and
he remarried three months later and covered everything up, and that
as late as 1899 he still owed thousands of dollars he'd stolen 20
years earlier and had been writing phony IOU's to keep from paying
back the money!
I won't tell you that after Darby's death in 1882, the
editor of his many books, William Kelly, plotted to steal credit for
pretrib away from the Macdonald/Irvingite connection and give it
posthumously to Darby, that he achieved this between 1889 and 1903 by
changing and covering up portions of early Irvingite and Brethren
documents, and that 20th century British and American publishers have
conspired to continue this historical revisionism in order to enjoy
phenomenal sales of pretrib rapture material!
And I won't tell you that during the past century and
a half, some of the most influential pretrib rapture books, by
British as well as American authors, have been filled with sloppy
scholarship and, what's worse, breathtaking amounts of plagiarism and
even occultic teachings mixed in with evangelical theology!
Or that my PLOT book and my later book THE THREE R'S
reveal, with comparison quotes and in more or less chronological
order, embarrassing plagiarism in writings by John Darby, Joseph
Seiss, E. W. Bullinger, Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Merrill Unger, Jerry
Falwell, Ed Dobson, Ed Hindson, Charles Ryrie, David Jeremiah, C. C.
Carlson, Paul Tan, Chuck Missler, and Jack Van Impe, for starters!
Finally, let me say that although I've been
researching rapture roots more than 30 years now, I've been into
computers only a relatively short time. The discovery of the extent
to which misinformation about the pretrib origin has been circling
the earth at computer speed still boggles my mind! But authors are
only part of the problem. After all, if an author gets royalties of,
say, 10 percent, the other 90 percent goes to the publisher - which
means that publishers can have much more incentive to keep churning
out bestselling books that are filled with historical error and even
deliberate deception simply because they receive far more money than
the authors!
Which leads me to give you some of my reactions to
publishers that are less than pleasant. After I gave proof to a
well-known publisher in the Chicago area that one of its authors had
plagiarized one of my books, I received a sympathetic letter from the
publisher expressing concern; but no changes to my knowledge were
made in the dishonest book which was kept in print, and neither my
publisher nor I was ever financially reimbursed. I know a pretrib
book publisher in California that was caught publishing a pretrib
book that was a huge plagiarism of a book that had come out several
years earlier. After being confronted by the other publisher, the
offending publisher promised to withdraw the book, which it did for a
while. But sometime later the offending book was quietly reissued -
with the same old plagiarism but with a new book title to avoid detection!
In recent years Hal Lindsey has learned what
publishers have always known, that there's far more money if you can
be your own publisher or at least control the publishing of your own
books. If a person looks closely at his 1999 book, VANISHED INTO THIN
AIR (published by the same Western Front Ltd. which was, oddly
enough, his "neighbor" when his home was in Palos Verdes,
California), he discovers that more than 200 pages (out of 396 pages)
are virtually carbon copies of corresponding pages in his 1983 book
THE RAPTURE - with no "updated" or "revised"
notice included!
This is robbery on a grand scale for unsuspecting
buyers who've been assured that VANISHED is a "new" book!
Hal has done the same nervy thing with several of his books,
something that's allowed him to live in million-dollar-plus homes and
drive cars like Ferraris!
And what about Lindsey's THERE'S A NEW WORLD COMING
which Harvest House Publishers has ownded and been republishing for
years? During the same time Lindsey has been peddling his reportedly
"new" APOCALYPSE CODE, much of which is word-for-word the
same as the Harvest House book! And there's no notice of
"simultaneous publishing" in either book! Think of the
feelings of customers who buy Lindsey's version only to find out that
it's largely a mirror image of the other publisher's version which
they had bought previously! Talk about greed!
And then there's Tim LaHaye. His 1992 book NO FEAR OF
THE STORM, published by Multnomah Press Books, has an entire chapter
entitled "MacPherson's Vendetta." Relying on miscopied
secondhand sources that in turn miscopied still earlier sources, he
gives the impression that my decades of rapture roots research is my
revenge for the troubles pretrib caused my family in the 1950's
including my expulsion from Biola in downtown Los Angeles. (My mother
went to be with the Lord not long after I was "raptured
away" from L.A.) But LaHaye's "crystal ball" is
cracked because I didn't even wonder about the pretrib origin, or
start any research on it, until two decades later - long after the
chief troublemakers had been off the scene and forgotten! Since my
origin research has never had any reason to hide or twist any
historical facts, my practice in my eight book titles has always been
to give proper credit and list sources when quoting or discussing
others including pretrib critics. In light of LaHaye's chapter about
me, maybe he (or Multnomah) can explain why he doesn't list any of my
books in his footnotes or even his bibliography!
But his bibliography does list John Bray's 1982
pretrib origin booklet, containing only 34 pages of "origin"
text, even though LaHaye has denounced Bray's claim that Lacunza
taught pretrib (the same Lacunza that Bray has long since
de-emphasized!) and even though Bray's little booklet is packed with
miscopying errors, misspelled names, and even two instances of his
plagiarism! How fair is it for LaHaye to discuss me at length without
listing my books and publishers so that readers can learn what I've
actually written?
The same LaHaye book (reprinted in 1998 as RAPTURE
UNDER ATTACK) is filled with mountains of copying errors and missing
footnotes, and his inclusion of Margaret Macdonald's short 1830
revelation account has 48 missing words - the same 48 words that
Thomas Ice somehow left out (which changed the meaning) when he
reproduced it three years earlier!
Why is it that Multnomah and other pretrib publishers
almost never make any changes whenever errors and dishonesty in their
books are pointed out to them? Don't they have time or money for
necessary proofreading? Don't they have any self-respect? Don't they
fear God? One happy exception to publishing dishonesty is Thomas
Nelson Publishers. After I convinced that company, with a stack of
photocopies of marked pages, that David Jeremiah's and C. C.
Carlson's ESCAPE THE COMING NIGHT (1990) is a massive plagiarism of
Lindsey's THERE'S A NEW WORLD COMING, a top TNP official sent me a
letter, part of which revealed that "we at Thomas Nelson are
very concerned about this matter. Accordingly, we are destroying all
our current inventory of this title and will not reprint the book.
Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention." (Anyone
wishing a copy of this TNP letter can send a SASE and request it from
me: Dave MacPherson, Box 1226, Monticello, Utah 84535. You may also
view the letter by clicking
here.) But as I've shown, many pretrib publishers are
a far cry from Thomas Nelson. Their bottom line consists of three
things: money, money, and money! They don't care that pretrib is less
than 200 years old and that it didn't take over American
evangelicalism much before "Doctor" Scofield's Bible in
1909! They don't care that the late Corrie ten Boom stated in a
published article that pretrib leaders are "the false teachers
Jesus was warning us to expect in the latter days" and that
pretrib caused the deaths of "millions" of Chinese
Christians when the Communists took over China!
And they don't care that the dishonest pretrib theory
they peddle for money in fact makes them accessories to the past,
present, and future mass-murder of fellow believers!
Since the same evanjellyfish publishers don't care, I
intend from now on to focus as much on their business practices and
personal lives as I have on past and present pretrib authors. If
anyone can send me documented evidence in this regard, I'll be happy
to share it on the internet and in other ways.
But I really must stop. If this article has whetted
your curiosity, call 800-967-7345 in South Carolina and get my book
THE RAPTURE PLOT, the most detailed and documented book on the
pretrib rapture's astonishing and long hidden history. Or you can
order it through online bookstores such as armageddonbooks.com.
As a historian I confess that I am no expert on where
the different kinds of "wrath" (e.g. Satan's wrath and
God's wrath) should be placed on prophecy charts. To me, a really
important "wrath" question is whether or not the rapture
will happen before the coming of pretrib wrath against those who
expose pretrib dishonesty!
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