A History of Pre-Darby Rapture Advocates

Critics of pretribulationism frequently state that belief in the rapture is a doctrinal development of entirely recent origin. They argued that the doctrine of the rapture or any semblance of it was completely unknown before the early 1800s and the writings of John Nelson Darby. While it is clear that pretribulationism was not widely known since the days of the New Testament writers, there have been clear examples of some form of pretribulationism sprinkled throughout church history...