Rapture?

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 NASB

Will not grieve– Why does Paul offer comfort to the believers in Thessalonica?  What causes them to be grieved?  The answer is in the text.  These people thought that their loved ones who died would miss out on the inauguration of the Kingdom.  In other words, they expected Yeshua to return and set up God’s Kingdom on earth in their own lifetimes.  But it didn’t happen.  Some of them died.  Anxiety grew.  What would happen to those who died before Yeshua returned?  Paul offers comfort.  “Don’t worry.  They will be raised up.  Yeshua will come for them.  Everyone who believes will be raptured.”

Or so we think. Two thousand years later, we still wait.  And we draw comfort from Paul’s words.  But we should notice something.  We should notice that both Paul and the community expected the end to occur beforevthey died.  We know better.  We know that they all died and Yeshua did not return.  We know that hundreds of generations have come and gone, and Yeshua has not returned.  We are informed.  They were not.  But we have reinterpreted the text so that it never applied to the audience it was written for.  We read it as if Paul, divinely inspired, spoke to all those who have died since.  We see Paul as some kind of fortune-teller, writing to give comfort to a group that he knew would all die before Yeshua returned.  In fact, we read Paul as if he were writing to us—and he knew it.  We universalize the text instead of hearing what he said to that particular audience.  We have forgotten that Paul intended one particular audience to be comforted because what he expected and what they expected hadn’t happened yet.  We read Paul as if he were a contemporary preacher instead of a radical end-times evangelist.

Paula Fredriksen points out that the earliest texts of the apostolic authors are decidedly apocalyptic.  They are about the end of the world.  These authors anticipated Yeshua’s imminent return and they wrote accordingly.  They wanted a public validation of Yeshua’s messianic status, and that validation would occur when he came again in power and glory to establish Israel as God’s great Kingdom on earth.  This apocalyptic fervor permeates their words, and it does something else, something we should have recognized in our examination of the culture, the time, and the audience in proper exegesis.  It sets the stage for the reinterpretation of passages from the Tanakh to portray them as messianic. In other words:

“Ancient scriptures then provided them with their interpretive building blocks to generate new, confirming traditions about Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and second coming.  All of these creative revisions were already in place when Paul wrote to Rome. . . Later church fathers will smooth out this messianic awkwardness, too:  Mary herself will also become descended from the house and lineage of David.”[1]

“These authors were unconstrained by any historical knowledge.  They were therefore free to allow the scriptures to generate the biographical ‘data’ of Jesus that they needed.  Their purpose in writing was not to preserve ‘memories’ or to relate a plausible history: It was to persuade their hearers about the messianic identity of their protagonist.  The gospels first of all are proclamations, not histories. The evangelists’ only constraint was biblical tradition itself.”[2]

“Eventually, as the years stretched on, evolving traditions would de-eschatologize the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.  It shifted from being a time-indicator (‘Jesus is raised, therefore the Kingdom must be coming soon!’) to being a status-indicator (‘Jesus is raised, therefore he must be the messiah!’). . . In short, the expectation of Jesus’ second and public manifestation as messiah was dictated by the failed Parousia of his initial resurrection appearances.”[3]

You may find this quite disturbing.  I did.  But that doesn’t mean it is easily dismissed.  It can’t be theologically ignored because it doesn’t fit our current view of revised Church history.  Exegesis is still about what the original authors tried to communicate to the original audience within the historical and cultural environment of that audience.  And if the original message was, “The end of the world is coming,” then we are required to deal with that orientation, as painful as it might be.  Perhaps we’re at the edge of another paradigm revision. Perhaps not.  You will have to decide.

Topical Index: rapture, Fredriksen, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17

[1]Paula Fredriksen,  When Christians Were Jews, p. 123.

[2]Ibid., p. 117.

[3]Ibid., p. 106.