What Did the Early Church Believe About the Rapture? - Chris White

In one sense there is no real debate about what the early church fathers believed about the timing of the rapture. However those holding to a pretrib rapture position have offered up various theories concerning the Didache, Pseudo Ephraim and a host of other documents which they claim support their view as opposed to the traditional view. I think this discussion is as facilitating as it is frustrating. So join me as I mostly refute the paper by James F. Stitzinger published by the Masters Seminary: https://tms.edu/msj/msj13-2-1/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderea Acts. I'm just listening to
the Fringe Radio Network while I clean these chimneys with
my gass livers. Anyway, so Chad White, the fringe chowboy,
I mean, he's like he took a leave of absence
or whatever, and so the guys asked me to do

(00:26):
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I know, I was gonna say it, fringe radionetwork dot com.
What oh chat? Oh yeah? Do you have the app?
It's the best way to listen to the fringe radio networks.

(00:48):
I mean it's so great. I mean it's clean and simple,
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have to log in to use it. How do you

(01:10):
get it fringeradionetwork dot com right at the top of
the page. So anyway, so we're just gonna go back
to cleaning these chimneys and listening to the Fringe Radio Network.
And so I guess you know, I mean, I guess
we're listening together. So I mean, I know, I mean well,
I mean, I guess you might be listening to a

(01:32):
different episode or whatever, or or maybe maybe you're listening
maybe you're listening to it, like at a different time
than we are. But I mean, well, I mean, if
you accidentally just downloaded this, no, I guess you'd be Okay,
I'm rambling. Okay, Okay, you're listening to the Fringe Radio

(01:53):
network fringeradionetwork dot com. There are you happy? Okay, let's
clean these chimneys.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Welcome to Bible Prophecy Talk with Chris White. This is
a best of episode which I think you will like.
But first, if you're interested in my non Bible prophecy
related Bible teaching, you can check out my new podcast,
vine Abiders, where in addition to posting the new Deformation
series where I'm currently through part four. It's more technical writing,

(02:31):
but I'm also posting it as a podcast on that feed.
Also on that feed, though, is the vine Abiders live stream.
That's something I'm doing on Wednesday nights at seven pm,
which is basically down to earth Bible study stuff. It's
pre recorded on the feed, but I am live in
the chat on YouTube and Facebook on Wednesday nights. Just
search for vine Abiders wherever you get your podcasts or

(02:54):
on YouTube, Facebook or substack. And now back to the
best of Bible prophecy talk. Today, I wanted to talk
about the so called early Church Fathers, or just the
Church Fathers in general. This is a term that we
use for the people the early Church, the writings of
the early Church, and what they believed, specifically about the
timing of the Rapture. As many of you know, I'm

(03:14):
working on a film about the Rapture, and one of
the sections of this film will be about what the
early Church believed about the rapture. Now, it's important, and
I know most of you know that whatever the early
Church believed about something doesn't really mean anything. On the
one hand, that's not how we get doctrine. We get
doctrine from the Bible alone. That being said, all the

(03:36):
doctrines that we hold today, we can find evidence, some
evidence in the Church fathers. And it would be weird, indeed,
to believe something today fervently, some doctrinal belief that had
no history in the early Church. That would be a
weird thing. So the question is what did the early

(03:57):
Church believe? And I guess I should make this distinction.
The Church Father's writings are sometimes grouped into various groups,
but probably the most important of these groups is sometimes
called the Anti Nicean Fathers Anti meaning before Nicea, the
Council of Nicea. So this is the first three hundred
years or so of the early Church. And the reason

(04:20):
there's a hard distinction there is because somewhere around there,
around Nicea, not necessarily because of Nicia, but somewhere around there,
they started interpreting the Bible in a much more allegorical way.
Some early teachers, like Origin and Augustine later on, really
kind of embraced this allegorical interpretation of the Bible. So,

(04:40):
for example, the Anti Nicean Fathers, the early guys, they
looked a lot like we do today. They believed they
were pre millennial. They believed that there would be a
future thousand year reign, that the Antichrist was going to
come in the future, that there was going to be
a rapture, you know. They believed kind of what we
futurist Christians believe today. Whereas after them they started to

(05:02):
get more into the idea, oh a thousand years really
isn't a thousand years. It was just sort of symbolic
and that kind of once you go that direction and
what the Bible says something not doesn't really mean that.
Let me tell you what it means. Once you go
open that door, you can basically change whatever doctrine you want.
So it really wasn't until the Reformation, where people finally
got the Bible in their own language and they can

(05:23):
read it for themselves again that they really started saying, hey,
this actually says this, I think that we should believe that.
So they got back to the anti Ic and Fathers
after a thousand plus year detour. So the big question
is what did the early Church believe about the timing
of the Rapture? And just to kind of set the
stage a little bit further, pre wrathers post tribbers mid

(05:47):
tribbers have been saying forever that there's no evidence of
pre tribulationalism anywhere in the early Church, writing it's not
the early Early Church, not the Middle Ages Church, not
the anywhere Church fathers up until the early eighteen hundreds
with the Plymouth Brethren and Darby. But on the other side,
pre tribbers seem to constantly be publishing articles in these

(06:08):
peer review journals like Bibliotheca Sacra Dallas or the pre
trib Resource Center with Thomas Iisser, or this one we're
going to deal with today. But they'll say, hey, look
we've proven pre tribulationalism in the early Church. Look at
this church church father, or this church father. They have
these bold headlines to say, once again, we found more
evidence of pre tribulationalism. But if you read those articles,

(06:31):
and probably more importantly, if you take the quote that
that article is about and read it in context, it
becomes plain to everybody who cares to seek the truth
here that they have not found anything that would suggest
pro tribulationalism in the early Church. And they know it.
And I think that's what we're going to see today.
All right, So let's get into this. And probably the

(06:52):
most important issue to understand here is that really there
is no debate in terms of the scholars. You know,
when you get into academia where you really can't say,
you know, pretend things don't exist or whatever. Everybody knows.
The pre trib scholars know, the pre rapt scholars, and
the post trip scholars. Everybody knows that the early Church,
those that taught about the rapture and some other event

(07:12):
in the end time, so you could tell what they
believed about the actual timing of the rapture. Everyone believed
that the Church would be raptured after the Antichrist was
revealed and after the Antichrist began to persecute the church.
That's what they believed. That's the answer to the question
what did the early Church believe about that? It's almost
completely unanimous, and not just the early Church. Fils I

(07:33):
didn't mention that distinction, just to say, ah, these are
the ones that believe that the others don't. No, we
could keep going all throughout the history of the Church,
and it's this pretty consistent picture that at least with
that very basic idea that the church would be raptured
after the Antichrist is revealed and it begins to persecute
the church. Not every one of them mentioned the seven

(07:54):
year time period or anything like that, but those that
did mention it, you can tell that they believe that
the rapture was the very least after the midpoint. That's
the cutoff. I mean, that's the bare minimum. Some of
them believed it would be later or whatever, but the
bare minimum was sometime after the midpoint. There's no evidence
whatsoever of pre tribulationalism in the Early Church in that sense.

(08:15):
In other words, a pre tribulational scholar knows very well
that they would always, every single time ten out of
ten lose an argument about did the Early Church believe
in pre tribulationalism. The answer is a pretty quick no.
They did not. However, and again this isn't just me
a pre rather saying this. This is when you read
papers by pre trippers on this issue. Again, and it's

(08:38):
peer reviewed a journal. They can't lie, but they do
every single thing that they can to try to get
around it. So you have to. But take Larry Crutchfield,
who I mention all the time, a pre tribulational scholar,
also an expert in the Early Church, concluded his paper
with the idea that he couldn't find evidence of pre tribulationalism,
but he could find what he called intrast tribulationalism, the

(09:00):
exact opposite of pro tribulationalism, that the rapture would happen
in the midst of the tribulation, which is of course
what I just said. And then another paper kind of
the updated version of that from James Stitchinger. This is
a paper from a master's seminary, and I talk about
that a lot in the film. I kind of use
it as a template, and I like it because because

(09:21):
it is more contemporary, it's taking crutch Field and building
on it. And he agrees at the beginning of his
paper anyway, he says, and most would see the church
suffering through some portion of the tribulation period, So he
reluctantly doesn't go into much detail about what that means
or what everybody says, Yeah, there is some okay, well,
they believe that they be raptured through some portion of
the tribulation period. So again, how do you define pre tribulationalism?

(09:44):
And I would say that a very lenient definition would
have to be before the tribulation. And of course, in
pro tribulationalist speak, the tribulation means the entire seventieth week
of Daniel, so the rapture has to occur before the
seventieth week of Daniel. But even more fundamentally, I think
that they would agree that it can't be pre tribulational

(10:05):
if the church is being persecuted by the Antichrist. I
think that's just a deal breaker. It's just not a
pre tribulational rapture. If the rapture actually comes after the
Antichrist begins persecuting the church at the midpoint, there's just
a million things that are anathema to a pre triber
in that statement, right, So it's just fundamentally not true.

(10:26):
So I won't say all pre tribulational scholars know this,
because not all pre tribulational scholars specialize in the Church fathers.
But of those that do, this is common knowledge, and
they admit as much in their papers. So in order
to get around this, the first thing that they need
to do is minimize any talk about what I just
said about what the early Church really believed. They won't

(10:48):
deny it, they'll just not offer any of that up
free of charge. You know, even in these papers that
are supposed to that are on that very subject, that
as a normal course in research would bring up those
kinds of things. It's just, I mean, other than those
one lines that basically have to admit it, the early
Church actually believe that the rapture would happened during the tribulation.

(11:09):
You know, one line that shows that they really know
the truth. The rest of it just kind of acts
like it doesn't exist. They'll quote it out of context,
even when the very next line in the quote that
they're quoting actually is talking about the Antichrist persecuting the Church.
They just won't mention that. So there's a lot of
that going on. The deception is more or less depending

(11:30):
on the author. Some of them get really deceptive with it,
others try to be a little more faithful, but it's
basically minimization is the watchword for pre tribulationalists talking about
the Early Church. The next and most important thing that
they do to try to deal with this issue is
to kind of change the criteria for what equals pre

(11:51):
tribulationalism in the Early Church. And this is really important.
This is the idea of eminence in the Early Church.
If you read a lot of the articles, you'll see
this buzzword of eminence. They're replacing basically pre tribulationalism with eminence.
In a lot of articles, they're claiming that they've found
evidence of eminence in the Early Church, or maybe that
the article really means they've found what they think is

(12:13):
evidence of eminence in the Early Church. But the headline
is we found evidence of pre tribulationalism in the Early Church.
So they really interchange the ideas a lot. In other words,
they know they're never going to win the actual argument
about the timing of the raptures. So they've said, if
we can find eminence in the Early Church, we get
to claim pre tribulationalism in the Early Church. So that's
the basic idea. And if you haven't seen or heard

(12:35):
the podcast I did about eminence, a couple podcasts that
go check it out. I think it's called a more
Clear Refutation of eminence and goes through a lot of
the different ways they try to prove it in the Bible,
because they all apply here because basically they're quoting passages
where the early Church fathers are quoting the Bible saying
that the rapture will be a near, the rapture will

(12:58):
be soon, that you should watch for the rapture, all
the things that they use in the Bible to say, ha,
the Bible does teach eminence, which, as we've said a
million times, none of those things mean eminence. That's just
not what they mean in English or in Greek or
anything else. The rapture can be near. Anything can be near,

(13:18):
but it doesn't mean it will happen at any moment
without any preceding events. The harvest can be near or soon,
a feast can be near or soon. My birthday can
be near, but it's not eminent. It's just they have
yet to actually prove an instance in the Bible where
eminency is true. They've just, basically, for so the last
one hundred years, told their congregations that if when you

(13:41):
see the word watch for something, it means that the
writer believed that the rapture could happen at any moment.
Which isn't that an oxy more on in itself to
watch for something that has no signs? What are you
exactly looking for? Anyway? What I love about this particular
situation is because it is the death knell not just
their idea of pre tribulationalism in the early Church, but

(14:04):
also it shows the utter bankruptcy of the way that
they're trying to prove eminence. It's beautiful, really, And also
understand that this is no small part of their argument.
This constitutes in this paper one third of his argument.
Five of the fifteen Church Fathers that stitching your quotes
in this paper are all basically just real simple lines

(14:27):
about the church father believing that the rapture would be
near or something like that. So he's I just called
him fake eminency quotes. So he'll say, look, this church
father said that the rapture was near, Therefore that church
father believed the rapture was imminent or can happen at
any moment. So that constitutes a full third of his argument.
But the one that I love because it helps illustrate

(14:48):
some of the others in this that will come back
to is from the Dedicay. The Didicay spelled kind of
like Didachi, is one of the earliest documents outside of
the New Testament that we have. It was you know,
it's pretty widely dated to about the first century, about
almost a century before one of the first church fathers, Irenaeus.

(15:13):
So this is a really early document, and it's a
very rich document too. It's like a commentary in the Bible,
so there's a lot of very detailed information about the
timing of this thing and that thing. It's a really
interesting document. You should read it. But anyway, pre trippers
will quote one line from it and very typically not
quote any of the rest of it the line that

(15:35):
they quote. Well, let me read what Stitchinger in this
paper says of this. First, he says, the final chapter
of the dedicate provides quote, one of the clearest and
most comprehensive statements on imminency. So he is saying that
this is going to show us that they really believe
that the rapture could happen at any moment with no
preceding signs, and he quotes this line, be watchful for

(15:57):
your life, Let your lamp not be quenched, and your
loins not be ungirded. But be ye ready, for ye
know not the day or the hour in which the
Lord cometh. Okay, this is a pretty typical. This is
the Lord's Parables. In the latter part of Matthew twenty
four and twenty five. He says this several times, that
you don't know the day or the hour, so be ready,
be watchful. So they're just re quoting that. But again,

(16:20):
in pre trip speak, the idea of being watchful and
being ready, not knowing the day or the hour means
that it could happen at any moment that there are
no preceding signs. So that's what he said. He said
this is one of the clearest and most comprehensive statements
of eminency. So, as I said, this shows how utterly
bankrupt this way of proving imminency is, because they don't

(16:41):
quote the rest of the de decay and the lines
after this, because then it gets into all the things
that they think are going to happen, starting in verse
three in this chapter. For in the last days, the
false prophets and the corruptors shall be multiplied, and the
sheep shall be turned into wolves, and the love shall
change to hate. For as lawlessness increased, they shall hate

(17:03):
one another, and persecute and betray, and they shall appear,
And then shall appear the deceiver of the world, as
a son of God, and shall do signs and wonders,
and the earth shall give over into his hands, and
shall commit iniquities which have never been seen since the
world began. Then shall the creation of mankind come to
a fiery trial, and many shall be offended and be lost,
But they who endure in their faith shall be saved

(17:24):
by the curse itself. The curse itself is a reference
to Jesus, who is ac cursed on our behalf, etcetera,
et cetera. And then shall appear signs of the truth,
first the signs spread out in heaven, and then the
sign of the sound of the trumpet, and thirdly the
resurrection of the dead. What I take from this is
eighteen signs that Remember, the thing that they're quoting is

(17:47):
them saying to be watchful. Well, they're saying to be
watchful of this no less than eighteen signs that come
before the rapture. I need you to get this. The
pre trippers are saying that being watchful because you don't
know the day or the hour that means iminence. There's
no arguing that in their mind. They can't prove it,
but there's just no way to argue that. This person,

(18:07):
definitely who wrote the dedicate did not believe that telling
his readers to be watchful because they don't know the
day or the hour, he definitely did not mean that
as imminence. Because he believes that there are signs including
the Antichrist, including the persecution of the church, including signs
in the heavens and all kinds of stuff before the

(18:29):
resurrection of the dead. He just did not believe in imminence. Period.
He does a similar thing with Barnabas Barnabas is a
guy who rode around one seventeen one thirty eight somewhere
early second century. And the quote that he uses in
this paper is this. It says, for the day is
at hand, on which all things shall perish with the
evil one, the Lord is near and his reward. So

(18:52):
the Lord is near in his reward, which is almost
certainly talking about the rapture. And again in the pretribed mind,
you can't say that the Lord is near. That means
to them it's imminent. It can happen at any moment
with no preceding signs. And first I need you to
realize how flimsy that concept is. Why have we continued
to buy that him saying that the Lord is near
means it is imminent. With the Church fathers, we have

(19:15):
this perfect way to show how dumb that is. Barnabas,
if you read his writings, believed that the Antichrist was near.
He talked a lot about, you know, the ten kingdom's
reign in the earth and the one is going to
rise up, and he was very concentrated on the Antichrist.
He believed he was in the end time. Then that

(19:37):
the Antichrist is going to show up next. So he
was always telling his readers to prepare spiritually for that
for trying to face the Antichrist. So if Barnab believed
anything was imminent, it was the appearance of the Antichrist
and the signs that Jesus talked about in the all
of the discourse. And so we know that when he

(19:57):
says the Lord is near in his reward, he can
mean in the same way I can say that as
a pre rather and it just means the Lord is
near in his reward, and it just doesn't mean imminence.
So and notably, of course, is what's absent from this
first part of about the anti Ician fathers, because from
this section this writer goes straight to the Middle Ages.
So we're gonna be in the Middle Ages next. But

(20:19):
what he doesn't quote in any part of this paper
is those wonderful quotes from the best church fathers out there,
the Hippolytises and the irenaeus Is and on and on,
where we have these clear statements of definitely not pre tribulationalism.
So all that stuff is skipped in lieu of these
flimsy quotes where he says it means eminence, but is

(20:42):
provably not eminence. All right, So let's move on to
the next one cited in this paper. And as I mentioned,
this is in the Middle Ages now, so we're well
past the Early Church. But this one is one that
I think is kind of the centerpiece of pre tribulational
arguments about the Early Church. It's called Pseudoephrium. And in

(21:02):
this paper he actually concludes the paper by citing this
quote and saying, yet, and this is why we now
know that I've proven the case that pretribulationalism did in
fact exist before Darby, and he mentions this in particular,
So I mentioned that to say this is a big deal.
So Pseudoaphrium. We call it pseudo because it's a false name.

(21:23):
Everybody knows that Efrium, who was a real church father
writing around the three or four hundreds, did not write this.
This was a guy who just kind of wanted to
put a name on it that had some gravitas, so
he wrote this. And I know that sounds like I'm
leading the witness. I'm sort of making this seem like
it's not an important document or whatever. But it does

(21:44):
come up later, this false name situation. But for now,
let's just get to the quote. It says, all the
saints on the 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. Okay, so there are a lot of things

(22:05):
to do here. Number one, we need to know what
this Pseudoaphrium believed about the end times. Did he think
that the church would face the Antichrist? If so, when
would that happen. That will help us to understand what
he means by before the tribulation, because really that's the
key issue here. What do you mean by before the tribulation? Everybody,
and I can't imagine a pre tribulationalist would not admit this,

(22:27):
but everybody knows that he didn't mean tribulation in the
way that modern pre tribulationalists use the term tribulation. Nobody
ever used the term tribulation like that until recently. Tribulation
in the Greek. I think he wrote this in Sirious,
so I'm assuming that this was written in Greek, so

(22:47):
probably Fillipsus. I didn't look that up. But in any case,
in the Bible, the word Phillipsis or tribulation can mean
a number of things. It can mean persecution, it can
mean the wrath of God, can mean all kinds of stuff.
The question is what in context does it mean. I
should also mention that the term great tribulation that is
megasth ellipsis that, on the other hand, does become kind

(23:09):
of a technical term in the Bible and in theological circles,
and it means the persecution of the Antichrist that begins
after the abomination of desolation at the midpoint. So the
Great Tribulation everybody knows, is not seven years long. It
is a period that begins at the midpoint. Just the
blank term tribulation is ambiguous, So we just need to

(23:30):
know what the context is. So what does pseudo Afriam
mean by before the tribulation, because that's kind of where
this ends. Because I believe that if this means before
the tribulation, which is to come at any time, so
we won't see the confusion that's going to be important later.
Does the writer mean the confusion is that the wrath
of God? Because then I totally agree we're going to

(23:51):
be gathered together raptured before the tribulation so that we
won't see the confusion that overwhelms the world because of
our sins, then I'm totally on board. But if he
means we're going to be gathered together before the tribulation
and his mind, tribulation means, you know everything, the Antichrist
showing up, the Antichrist persecuting the church before the seventy
fieth Week of Daniel begins. So we need to know

(24:12):
that before we can make any kind of judgment on this.
But a pre tribber doesn't even go into any of
those details. In his mind, he's already done it. He
wants his readers to do the dumbest thing ever, to
think that this writer meant the word tribulation in the
same way that modern pre tribulationalists use it, that is,
to refer to the entire seventieth Week of Daniel. He
wants his readers to do that and makes no other

(24:33):
sort of provision. Okay, but look how bad this is. Okay,
So he goes on and he says this about this quote.
He says this about pseudophrium in general. This is Stissinger
in this paper. He says it describes that as pseudoephrium
describes and the eminent rapture, Oh does it? I didn't
catch that, followed by here it is followed by three

(24:54):
and a half years of great tribulation under the rule
of the Antichrist, followed by the coming of Christ, the
defeat of Antichrist, and the eternal state. Wow, that's what
he said. So now, if this is true, I gotta
say that I'm wrong, Okay, because this this sort of
interpretation of this, and he's going off other things that
he read in Pseudophrium, which we're gonna look at. He

(25:15):
doesn't quote them in the paper. He just sort of
summarizes it. Here. He says that he wants us to
believe that what we just read that pseudo Aphriums saying
before the tribulation we're going to be gathered together. He
wants us to believe that what Pseudoephrium thinks is that
after we're gathered together, then the Antichrist shows up and
then starts, you know, doing stuff for three and a
half years, and then Christ comes to judge him, and

(25:39):
the eternal state begins. That's what he just told his readers. Now,
let me read you the last paragraph in this. In
this what he's quoting from this. There's a couple different
versions of pseudo Aprium, but the one he's quoting from
it says, and when the three and a half years
have been completed. Okay, So now I would admit that
when the three and a half years have been completed

(26:00):
he can be referring to the first half or the
second half of the three and a half years. It
doesn't really matter, because none of this works with what
he just said. And when the three and a half
years have been completed, the time of the Antichrist, though
which he will have seduced the world, will come the
sign of the Son of Man, and coming forward the
Lord shall appear with great power and much majesty, and

(26:21):
also even with all the powers of the heavens, with
the whole course of the saints, and with those who
bear the sign of the Holy Cross upon their shoulders,
as the angelic trumpet precedes him, which shall sound and declare, Arise, O,
sleeping ones, Arise, meet Christ, because his hour of judgment
has come. Then Christ shall come, and his enemy shall

(26:42):
be thrown into confusion, and the Lord shall destroy him
by the spirit of his mouth. Okay, So what is
important here? There's a couple really important things. The first
is that what we see here is that Pseudoephrium didn't
believe that after the three and a half years, the
Antichrist would then rule. After the three and a half
years have been completed, the Antichrist would be judged. The Antichrist,

(27:06):
according to this paragraph, will be judged at the resurrection
of the dead, not not another three and a half years.
Try to get three another three and a half years
out of this. As the angelic trumpet precedes them which
shout and declare, ariseo, sleeping ones, Rise, meet Christ, because
his hour of judgment has come. Then Christ shall come,
and the enemy shall be thrown down into confusion. The

(27:28):
Lord shall destroy him by the spirit of his mouth.
Did you read him there somewhere that between the rapture
and the destroying him with the spirit of his mouth,
that the Antichrist ruled for three and a half years. No, this,
Remember this thing started with and when the three and
a half years have been completed. This is he quotes.
He says the exact wrong thing. He tells his readers
the exact wrong thing. He does not quote this. He

(27:49):
doesn't want his readers trying to figure this out. Okay, look,
I'm going to try to give him the benefit of
the doubt here. I know I'm a little hot and
this issue does make me a little frustrated, I have
to admit, but I want to give him the benefit
fit of the doubt. This writing from Pseudoephrium is actually
a lot like another false writing from somebody called pseudo Methodius.

(28:09):
They came out at the same time in Syria in
the Middle Ages, and if you read them, they are
hyper confusing to somebody who kind of has a biblical
understanding of the end times, because and I talked about
this in my book The Islamic Antichrist debunked. A big
section about in that book is about this, you know,

(28:30):
idea about Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi and all this stuff.
All that, all that the concept of what we get
the Mahdi and all this stuff is really weird, you know. Well,
it all developed in Syria as a result of these
pseudo particularly Pseudoephrium and pseudo Methidias, and it was it
was a genre that started showing up at that time
that really took a lot of weird elements of this

(28:53):
thing called the Last Roman Emperor. Okay, so this is
right at the end of Rome. Rome was dying. It
was really weird for people Roman around for a thousand years,
so the concept of Rome falling and being no more
was kind of a big deal and hard to handle.
So they had started to develop this theory that this
Roman emperor would show up and he would be awesome,
and the Huns in some cases, or sometimes it's Islamic

(29:16):
people or whatever. Before any of that happens, the last
Roman emperor has these epic battles that to the untrained
reader would seem like the Battle of Armageddon or whatever.
But this human, last Roman emperor will have these epic battles.
He will defeat all these enemies, and then Rome will
be restored to its former majesty and glory, and he's

(29:37):
going to rule for like seven to ten years. And
then after that's all done, then the Gogme Gog War
will happen, which is another really sort of typical weird
thing in these writings. And then after the war, then
the Antichrist shows up. Then you have the rapture of
the return of Christ et cetera, what we kind of

(29:57):
commonly understand as the regular end Times events. So if
you want to look at it like this. There's all
these weird false starts to the untrained eye. So a
person like Stitzinger really could read this quote early on
and think that what he's reading with this the last
Roman emperor trope of defeating the earthly enemies. He could
think that that's armageddon or something. If you don't know

(30:19):
what you're reading, you could believe that. And maybe if
you pretended like this last paragraph didn't exist, I could
see how you could plausibly not feel too deceptive in
saying what he said. So I'm trying to give him
the benefit of the doubt. It is kind of a
weird concept, and I know I spent way too much
time on this particular thing, but oh, I did want
to do one more thing with Pseudoaphrium, and that is

(30:41):
to check our facts to prove what I'm saying is true.
And that is in this last thing, when he says
and the angelic trumpet precedes him, and which she'll sound
in nuclear Arise of Sleeping Ones, arise me Christ. The
only hope for the pre trigger here is to say, ah, Chris,
that's not the rapture, even though he's talking about the
last trumpet and the erection of the dead and a

(31:02):
rise of sleeping ones to meet Christ, which sounds a
lot like the rapture. But their argument would have to
be now he's talking about some like the resurrection at
the end of the seventieth week or something. Maybe the
rapture happened earlier. Well that's not a possibility because of
this line after he says, you know, rise of sleeping ones,
rise meet Christ, because his hour of judgment has come.
Then Christ shall come and the enemy shall be thrown

(31:24):
into confusion. So we know that this trumpet sound and
the rising of the sleeping ones is the rapture. Therefore,
after the anti Christ and after the three and a
half years have been completed, because what we escaped by
the rapture according to this writer, which is, I guess
in his mind what he thinks of as the wrath

(31:46):
of God is being thrown into confusion. The Lord shall
destroy by the spirit of his mouth. So we're escaping
confusion according to this writer, which again look at that
first quote that the pretribpers actually do quote which which
as all the saints in the elect of God are
gathered together before the tribulation which is to come, and
are taken to the Lord in order that they may

(32:07):
not see at any time the confusion. So it's a
theme with this writer that the rapture is there to
escape the confusion. And what that does is it allows
us to look at this last paragraph and know exactly
that this writer, what this writer's viewpoint was in terms
of the timeline and friends and neighbors. This ain't pre
tribulational one single bit. I don't want to abhor everybody

(32:29):
to tears here, so I will try to speed up
here another third. Another five of the fifteen quotes in
this paper are from about fifteen eighty six to seventeen
ninety five, and they're from what are called pre millennial
historicists who believed in something called the pre conflagration theory. Now, well,

(32:52):
it's interesting about this. In this paper he does not
mention this. He wants his readers of this paper to
just take these quotes at faceback value, to read whatever
they want to read into them. He's leading them to
believe something that they meant something by these things. And
a see if I have a quote here at handy, Yeah,

(33:13):
this is one is from Peter Julie, who died in
seventeen thirteen, he said Christ would come in the air
to rapture the Saints and return to heaven before the
Battle of Armageddon. First of all, there's nothing really particularly
offensive about this. All of these quotes actually can be
filed under the heading of yeah, pre Wrath believes that too,
So these aren't that offensive. But there's something even dumber

(33:35):
going on here, because of course pre Wrath believes that
the rapture will happen before Armageddon. Really, this is like
pre trips always do. They think that if they can
show something that's against some post tribulationalists, that somehow they've
proven pre tribulationalism. So some post tribulationalists believe that Armageddon
and the rapture are basically the same thing. So they

(33:57):
think that by showing, hey, this writer believe that the
raptor would have before the Battle of Armageddon, looks like
pre tribulationalism is true. No, I mean, at best, it
looks like you know, pre Wrath, and it looks like
some guy in the seventeen hundreds believed that more like
pre Wrath or pre trib or mid trib or basically anybody.
But some post tribulationalists, so it's a dumb argument to

(34:19):
begin with, and all of them are like that. But
even worse, all of these five quotes, which one of
them is the one he quotes and said, you know,
this is the greatest thing ever come from this guy
named Mead who created this theory called the pre conflagration theory.
He again does not mention any of this in the paper.
But what the pre conflagration theory is basically that these

(34:42):
people would be right before the Battle of Armageddon. They
would be raptured in the air, and it could be
hours or something like that, maybe hours, maybe days at
the most, but they're basically raptured and they come right
back down to Earth. It is definitely not a pre
tribune real rapture. And it's actually interesting because Thomas Ice,

(35:04):
who I typically don't agree with much, who is the
pre Triber resource Center guy, he wrote a paper which
is effectively rebuking people like Stitchinger and others who use
these particular five quotes and claim that they're supporting pre tribulationalism.
Because as Ice, who is obviously a pre triber notes,

(35:27):
quote meeds interval the pre conflagration theory between the rapture
and the second Coming is likely only hours or days,
but not years as required by a pre tribulational viewpoint.
The second Peter three to ten conflagration is a final
destruction of heaven and earth in preparation for the millennium
within Meads system, he's also not mentioning that this conflagration

(35:48):
is the wrath of God. That's what they're escaping, not
the Antichrist persecution or anything like that. So there's just
no reason for this to constitute one third of his
cherry picked quotes from the Church Fathers prove pre tribulationalism
at best. This proves that there are some people in
the seventeen hundreds that believe that the rapture would happen
before Armageddon. And he's not telling people that these people

(36:10):
were one hundred and eighty degrees not pro tribulational, and
that the only thing that they're talking about escaping is
the wrath of God. It's just borderline. I don't know,
it's dishonest at best. There are just a few more here,
and I'm just going to really quickly breeze through them
because they are easily pushed aside. One is this codex.
I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right,

(36:31):
Amey and tenis written around seven hundred BC. It literally
just mentioned the word rapture rapturo in the title, so
it's in Latin, I guess, and I read through Stitchensher's argument.
I mean, it just says rapture in the title. It
doesn't talk about anything pro tribulational, So that one is
just like, what's this even doing here? One of them

(36:53):
was a real deal cult leader in the thirteen hundreds,
even the guy that and actually Alan knows and has
talked to. Alan Kirshner knows the guy who actually found
this quote in the early Church and says, of this
guy's views, if you read the rest of the paper,
the guy clearly believed that he was in the last
three and a half years of the end time tribulation.

(37:13):
So whatever he believed, it was definitely not pre tribulationalism.
And then the final one I have here, he talks
about John Calvin and the quote is coming on christ
teaching and the Gospels. He writes, Jesus wishes the disciples
to be uncertain as to his coming, but to be
prepared to expect him every moment, so that every moment,

(37:35):
and I have to admit, you know, that's a little
close for comfort in terms of eminence. And the thing
about it is that I need to say this too,
of course, that there's one sense in which the rapture
will be imminent once the Antichrist begins to persecute the church.
Once the signs that Christ told us to watch for
have happened, then the rapture really will be imminent. We're

(37:58):
going to be the rapture can happen. We don't know
the day or the hour we are commanded, however, to
know the general signs. Once we've seen the general signs,
then we know that the rapture will be iminent. So
I don't want to entirely prejudice everybody against the concept
of an any moment rapture. There will be in any
moment rapture, but only after a number of precursors take place.

(38:18):
I mentioned that because it's likely that Calvin probably did
believe in eminence. But Calvin, of all the people on
this list, is unique because Calvin believed that the Antichrist
was on earth and persecuting people at the time that
he was writing. So that's unique among Calvin. So it's
actually biblical in one sense. In other words, Calvin believed

(38:42):
that the Antichrist was the pope or the system of
the pope on one of those things. And of course
all the persecutions of the Catholic Church on the Reformers
were just horrendous, of course, so you know, they had
a reason for thinking that. The idea, though, is his
concept of the rapture being in any moment or every
moment is says here that's at least biblically accurate, a

(39:03):
biblically accurate usage of eminence. So that's a little bit
tricky for me. I suppose of all these here, but
it's also, as I said, the only person on this
list that actually believed that the Antichrist was on earth
and killing people at the moment