He's popular on YouTube, a Pastor, Author, and University Dean. He has an unusual name: Voddie Baucham. He has a sermon on YouTube with a title meant to attract: "Christians, You've Been Lied to about the Rapture."
A summary of his sermon is that heclaims in no uncertain \ terms that the rapture is a false doctrine invented by a man named John N. Darby in the first half of the 1830s and no one ever heard of such a thing until then. He speaks with a dogatic dogmatic and forked tongue. What he says is nothing new; the rapture has been under attack for a long, long time and Darby is usually mentioned in every attack.
But I wonder if such authors and speakers on the attck have consided these facts:
1. In the last decade, classics scholar Francis X. Gumerlock has researched the approximately 500 volumes of the writings of the church fathers, (those who lived after the apostles) that have never been translated into English. He once told Mark Hitchcock in an e-mail over a decade ago that he had three file drawers full of rapture statements from throughout Early and Medieval Period of church history.
2. Gumerlock found a significant number of pre-tribulational rapture statements throughout the history of the church well before the time of Darby. The earliest he has cited thus far is from The Apocalypse of Elijah. Scholars date the sermon around 285 AD. coming from somewhere in Egypt. The rapture passage is as follows:
At that time the Christ will have compassion on those who are his. He will send his angels from heaven, sixty-four thousand in number, each having six wings. Their voices will move heaven and earth, when they praise and give glory. Those upon whose forehead is written the name of the Christ, upon whose right hand is the seal, both small and great, they will be taken on their wings and removed from the wrath.
2. Here is another one, a sermon consisting of 1,500 Latin words preached on the end times as early as the 300s AD:
"Why therefore do we not reject every care of earthly actions and prepare ourselves for the meeting of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that he may draw us from the confusion, which overwhelms all the world? . . . For all the saints and elect of God are gathered together before the tribulation, which is to come, and are taken to the Lord, in order that they may not see at any time the confusion which overwhelms the world because of our sins."
This should suffice to prove that John Darby didn't invent the rapture of the church. Paul revealed it in I Thessalonians 4:13-18 (q. v.) and I Corinthians 15:51ff. What I have brought to your attention is only two examples from three file draws full of the pre-tribulational rapture infomation way, way, way before Darby in the 1830s.
Dr. Tommy Ice summarizes: "Recent research has unearthed plenty of pre-trib rapture advocates before Darby, which are now available when someone brings up that tired, old argument that “No one held to pretribulationism before 1830.” That tired, old argument is now on YouTube.
