Eighty-Eight reasons why the rapture will be in 1988!

The name Edgar C. Whisenant (1932-2001) is probably an unfamiliar name to most commentators on Discus today.  However, back in the day (1980s), he became famous, within evangelical circles, for his authorship of two religious booklets: 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could be in 1988 and On Borrowed Time… Whisenant predicted that Jesus would return to rapture His church sometime during the Jewish holiday of Rosh-Hashanah in 1988, which was from sunset, September 11, to sunset, September 13. Before those dates, The World Bible Society, which published the booklet, printed 3.2 million copies and distributed 200,000 of them to pastors throughout the United States. https://www.equip.org/articles/88-reasons-what-went-wrong/

REASON #23 (Joe Civelli) “If we start at 27/28 A.D. and add 1960 years (280 Sabbatical cycles X seven years each = 1960 years), we arrived at Sabbatical year of 1987/88. Coincidentally, this is the year we arrived at in our conclusion for the start of the Tribulation. Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so!”— From Whisenant’s work on 88 reasons for the rapture. It read like the work of a raving lunatic.

Whisenant, a former NASA rocket engineer turned prophecy teacher.  There must be something in engineering that turns normal people into so-called religious prophets.  As two decades earlier, in the 1960s, another engineer, Henry Madison Morris, was sacked from his engineering professorship for his religious views interfering with his work, and became one of the founders of the Young Earth Creationist movement.

Everything about the messiahship is a Christian invention, a myth, or a Big-Lie by any other name.  The messiah had and has nothing to do with Christianity, it is a belief of a saviour in the Judaism faith!  Yet, today we find faiths such as Christian, Islamic, and others have messiahship claimants. With evangelicals obsessed with the rapture, who are influenced by the works of an anonymous amanuensis. Writing on the dictation of Paul or Saul of Tarsus, a known liar and false apostle (Acts 1:21), wrote about people caught up together in the clouds to meet Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4:17; also, the anonymous author of Mark 9:1 broached a similar subject too, some two millennia ago.  But all so-called rapture dates have been and passed without any event, and gone in the religious dust bin for fool’s errand.

The history of the rapture is of necessity a history of pretribulationism, since most other views do not distinguish between the two phases of Christ’s return—the rapture and second advent. The partial rapture and midtribulationism have been developed only within the past 100 years.https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=pretrib_arch

With Darby’s 1830 invention goes back only 194 years. This is positive evidence that Christians invented their religious eschatology as they went along.

The Myth of the Rapture: Calling a Spade a Spade.

The eminent New Testament scholar Ehrman wrote in 2015:  am sometimes torn between wanting to be sensitive to people’s deeply rooted religious convictions and calling a spade a spade.  Think many readers would be surprised (and dubious) that have this sensitivity, since I’m often blasted precisely for trouncing people’s religious beliefs. But that’s almost never my intention. The one exception is when it comes to fundamentalism. I have no qualms about attacking Christian fundamentalist thinking head-on. But even then try to be sensitive to the people holding onto this kind of thinking, and I try to engage it with reason and evidence rather than with ridicule. But there are times when it is worthwhile calling a spade a spade, and sometimes we ought to just do that. I’ve been thinking about the passage summarized in the post yesterday from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the passage from which the fundamentalist view of the “rapture” principally comes from. Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven, the dead in Christ rise first, and then those who are alive who are his followers are snatched up into the air also to meet Jesus in the clouds. This is something that is going to happen very soon. How do know that Paul thinks it is going to happen very soon? Look at the language he uses. It is the “dead” who will first rise. And then it is “we who are left, who remain until he comes.” Which group does Paul include himself in? He’s one of the ones who will be living at the time. He expects it to happen in his lifetime. So what spade am I calling a spade? Don’t see any way to assess this passage other than to say that it embodies and is embedded in an ancient Christian mythology. [The Bart Ehrman Blog, August 8, 2015.]

The late TV evangelist, Pat Robertson, who saw non Christians as “Termites,” and called Muslim people, and Islam as “Christian Heresy.” He was not a nice person who defamed all religions such as Islam, Buddhist, Hindus, and certain Protestant sects as being demonic, in true Christian intolerance of other religions.  However, prediction that the end of the world was coming in October or November 1982.   In the May 19, 1982, broadcast of The 700 Club, Robertson stated, “I guarantee you by the fall of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world.” Well, let’s hope he is suffering damnation in Hell (if there is such a place for him) for his anti-humanity stance. What do you say?

J.E. Jeanne p.p. Jero Jones.

R&I ~ MJM