L.B.: Muggletonians

Left Behind, pp. 301-302

As Chapter 17 begins, LaHaye and Jenkins seem suddenly to realize that they've scarcely made any headway through the End Times Checklist. Rapture? Check. Antichrist? Check. Woes, seals, trumpets, scrolls, angels, horsemen, witnesses, martyrs, dragons, talking eagles? Nothing yet and we're already 300+ pages in.

So here's where they start making up for lost time, plowing through the Book of Revelation with stretches of pure, unadulterated exposition.

It is still the Longest Day and Rayford still can't sleep, so he turns on his new TV and puts on CNN. Instead of the usual Larry King reruns the not-really-24-hour network shows in the wee hours, he sees a report from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:

"No one knows the two men," said the CNN reporter on the scene, "who refer to each other as Eli and Moishe. They have stood here before the Wailing Wall since just before dawn, preaching in a style frankly reminiscent of the old American evangelists. Of course the Orthodox Jews here are in an uproar, charging the two with desecrating this holy place by proclaiming that Jesus Christ of the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Torah's prophecy of a messiah.

"Thus far there has been no violence, though tempers are flaring, and authorities keep a watchful eye. Israeli police and military personnel have always been loath to enter this area, leaving religious zealots here to handle their own problems. This is the most explosive situation in the Holy Land since the destruction of the Russian air force, and this newly prosperous nation has been concerned almost primarily with outside threats.

"For CNN, this is Dan Bennett in Jerusalem."

Bennett's reference to "the old American evangelists" is puzzling. It's possible he means old as in old-fashioned, or old-style -- as though these two men were preaching like Billy Sunday. But it seems here more like he's saying "old" in recognition of the fact that all of the American evangelists have disappeared. If that's the case, Bennett is the first person -- apart from those who have watched the ICR video -- to have realized that the disappeared are all either children or born-again RTCs. It's hard to know which is meant here because, of course, neither Bennett nor L&J allows CNN's camera to show us the two men so we don't get to hear them speak firsthand. The rushed exposition of Bennett's report doesn't really require him to be "on the scene" at all (which is, sadly, not an inaccurate portrayal of much of CNN's reporting).

L&J have tried to make Dan Bennett talk like a reporter, and that's how he comes across -- as someone who's trying to talk like a reporter. What we end up with is a mix of reporter-ish phrases ("authorities keep a watchful eye"), slightly altered prophecy-conference jargon ("fulfillment of the Torah's prophecy of a messiah") and gibberish ("almost primarily"). The details of Bennett's report don't ring true either, such as his use of the term "Wailing Wall" instead of Western Wall, and his apparent assumption that everyone knows what that refers to and why it is regarded as holy. His suggestion that military personnel are "loath to enter" the area of the Western Wall is only true if by that he means that most are too busy monitoring the checkpoints they have encircling the site, checkpoints through which every visitor to the wall must pass under the close scrutiny of heavily armed military personnel.

The authors also don't seem to be aware of Jerusalem Syndrome, a form of psychotic religious delusion that afflicts about 100 visitors to that city each year. In this fascinating Journeyman Pictures video on Jerusalem Syndrome, the head of the city's Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center describes some of the many sufferers he has encountered and treated over the years -- dozens of people claiming to be Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and even one Canadian tourist who claimed to be Samson and who tore out the bars of a window to escape his hospital ward. (Note: When treating mental patients who think they're Samson, cut their hair before putting them in the locked ward. And keep them away from stone pillars.*)

The situation Bennett reports on here -- two guys claiming to be Moses and Elijah creating a public spectacle as street preachers -- is actually a fairly routine occurrence in Jerusalem. This would be nothing the Israeli police hadn't seen before, and nothing they wouldn't know how to deal with. Once Eli and Moishe began to incite any kind of disturbance, they would be whisked off to Kfar Shaul. ("Where should I put Moses and Elijah?" "Moseses go in Ward 3 with the Abrahams. You'll have to put Elijah in with the Jesuses, the Prophet Ward is getting crowded.") Eventually they'd be sent back home to Texas or Indiana, where they could get the help and treatment they need.

The last thing that Israeli authorities would do in a situation like this, as tempers and tensions rise, would be to leave the situation to "religious zealots" to deal with. Most people suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome are harmless but some, like Australian tourist Michael Rohan, are not. In 1969, driven by the voices in his head which he believed were divine, Rohan set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, sparking international rioting and chaos. Since then, Israeli officials have been vigilant to ensure that JS-sufferers are not exploited by the many varieties of religious zealots who want to see a repeat of such chaos because they think it would hasten their longed-for End of the World scenarios.

In Left Behind, however, the Israeli police have also read the back of the book jacket, and therefore recognize that they're not dealing with your run-of-the-mill Jerusalem Syndrome cases here, but with the actual Moses and Elijah, which is to say with L&J's version of the "two witnesses" described in Revelation 11.

Even by the standards of Revelation, this is a perplexing passage. Here's the key part:

I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. These men have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want.

Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them. Their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.

But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, "Come up here." And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on.

At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.

L&J claim to read this passage "literally." Good luck with that. Their "literal" interpretation causes them to regard things like CNN as fulfillments of biblical prophecy. Follow that? The passage says that people from every corner of the earth will see the dead bodies of the two witnesses. Clearly, John is describing satellite television. What else could it possibly mean?

I don't have any idea what to make of Revelation 11. Set aside the opaque symbolism and numerology, I can't even make sense of its verb tenses. I'm OK with that. I'm pretty sure that one can live a full life and be a faithful Christian without knowing what to make of passages like this.

The InterVarsity Press Commentary suggests that the two witnesses represent an aspect of John's own testimony in his apocalypse. Could be, I guess, OK. The commentary also offers a bit of a cautionary tale regarding those, like L&J, who view such passages as transparent and obvious in their meaning:

Who are John's "two witnesses"? Identifications have been varied and sometimes eccentric, ranging from the apostles Peter and Paul martyred in Rome (Munck 1950) to two 17th-century London tailors named John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton! The latter interpretation created a sect known as the Muggletonians, which lasted for three hundred years.

The Wikipedia entry on the Muggletonians** underscores the commentary's warning, ending with this weirdly poignant sentence:

The last Muggletonian, Mr. Phillip Noakes of Matfield, Kent, died in 1979.

Lest we find ourselves doomed to repeat the sad, lonely fate of poor Mr. Noakes, let's avoid delving much further into the esoteric symbolism of this passage. I should note, however, that L&J's placement of the two witnesses here, in the earliest days of the Tribulation, is regarded by some of their fellow Darbytonians as controversial. We needn't get into the details of this intramural dispute -- that would be too much like walking into a room full of conspiracy theorists arguing over who Jack Ruby was really working for -- but it's worth keeping in mind that such disputes helped to shape the authors' imagined audience for this book. It's not only about reassuring their followers and condemning the pagans and False Christians. It's also about condemning the mid-Trib Rapturists and all the other PMD factions whose tribulation timelines vary from L&J's preferred version.

Want more details on these variations and the ins and outs of these disputes? OK, but be careful -- remember Phillip Noakes. Some of the more splendid timelines I've found online can be viewed here, here, here, here, here and here. The first is the prettiest, but the last one is probably my favorite since it's tied in to specific dates in 2009. L&J have their own version, but it's not online because they want you to buy it. Some of LaHaye's earlier versions can be found here. If you really want to spelunk further into these intramural disputes, try googling "secret rapture," a contentious term used by L&J's opponents (or, perhaps, by their allies, it can be hard to tell).

Finally, you may be wondering why the authors identify these two witnesses as Moses and Elijah when, as we have seen, Rev. 11 never mentions them. In part it's because Moses and Elijah are said not to have died, per se, but to have been taken up to heaven by God. (That reasoning strikes me as unfair to Enoch.) It's also because Moses and Elijah are mentioned by name in the Synoptic Gospels' accounts of Jesus' "transfiguration." How does that story, which is not included in John's Gospel, fit in with this seemingly unrelated story from John's apocalypse? Well, when LaHaye shoved his Scofield Bible into his 86hp, hydraulic-feed Darby-matic wood chipper, a fragment of a page from Rev. 11 landed next to a fragment of a page from Matt. 17, so, clearly, these passages are related.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* [woody]"We needed the eggs."[/woody] Speaking of chickens and eggs, there's some dispute over whether Jerusalem Syndrome is really something that happens to otherwise healthy people visiting the city, or whether it's more a matter of the Holy City's particular attraction to those who already are afflicted by religious delusions. See also, Graceland.

** The Muggletonians were obsessed with, among other things, denouncing Newtonian cosmology as antibiblical. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco has a collection of Isaac Frost's Muggletonian astronomical charts which are, in their own way, oddly beautiful (see also here). Compare the craft and care of these lovely prints with the wanton ugliness of contemporary geocentrist Marshall Hall's Web site -- or with what passes for art among PMDs (as in this painting). The modern world is witnessing a lamentable decline in the craft and aesthetics of its religious quack fringe groups. The Shakers produced beautiful furniture. The PMDs produced the World's Worst Books. But at least we still have Howard Finster.

Comments

[Drak Pope]

Only if all of their communications systems were down, any of which would make them aware that every child in the world had disappeared.

What are you talking about? The rapture is actually suspiciously under-reported in this universe. They would more than likely hear endless news reports of Jews and international bankers doing things and the UN getting a new Secretary-General and news of Buck Williams resurfacing after his apparent assassination and... everything but the Rapture.

[L]

They picked the wrong dialect, of course, but why should that matter?

Because they're thinking of a stereotypical northeastern U.S. Jewish accent, not the way Hebrew is actually spoken in Israel. It's a sign of their usual degree of exhaustive research and attention to detail.

But why should either of them speak in any modern dialect? No doubt the language has changed just a tad in the 3500 years or so since Moses last gave a speech. They're lucky to be understood at all. Although if they're speaking Hebrew, and the CNN reporter is describing what they're saying in English, I wonder why he should give names in Hebrew? But they must not be -- they're saying things like "Jesus Christ" is the anticipated "messiah" and aren't getting all tangled up in their terminological underwear. (Greek "christos" simply translates Hebrew "moshiach". Although I suppose it's possible that L&J have taken "Christ" to be a surname instead of a title.) So if they're speaking English, why do they speak Hebrew only to name each other?

[Andrew Wade]

So if they're speaking English, why do they speak Hebrew only to name each other?

Sounds like the French Knights in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": "Ah'm French! Why do you think I have this out-rrrageous accent, you silly king?!" I think I've got Python on the brain; Fred's description of the "intramural disputes" made me think of the dispute between the "People's Front of Judea" and the "Judean People's Front".

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Then again, this is LB Israel, which in L&J's timeline has somehow managed to win peace and brotherhood with all its Middle Eastern neighbors (however improbable that scenario may be). So maybe security in Jerusalem has relaxed somewhat as a result.

Even taking that into account, though, Israel will still have, at minimum:

1. Jews and Arabs;
2. Religious-secular splits within both the Jewish and Arab populations;
3. Among religious Jews: modern Orthodox, national-religious, various sects of hasidim and ultra-Orthodox mitnagdim;
4. Various flavors of Christianity, which sometimes get into turf disputes (Eastertime factional brawls between Catholic and Greek Orthodox clergy are traditional);
5. Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, russim, kavkazim, Ethiopians, Druzim, white Bedouins, black Bedouins, Domi (gypsies), ethnic Palestinians (who may or may not think of themselves as such), naturalized foreign workers and all the many and multifarious subgroups of each;
6. Well-off towns around Tel Aviv and on the coastal plain, and neglected ones in the periphery

And that's without even starting on the political fault lines. If two guys riling up the crowds at the Kotel are the biggest thing to happen in Jerusalem since Russia tried to nuke the place, then it's been switched for some other city - or maybe for Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum - while nobody was looking.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Book of Revelation: For three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.

Fred: L&J claim to read this passage "literally." Good luck with that.

Yeah, no kidding. It's like this weird, twisted Christmas: "In celebration of the peace and quiet the great Beast did give to us by ridding us of those meddlesome prophets, we exchange gifts on the Feast of the Deaths of the Annoying Bloody Wankers. But we exchange them anonymously, leaving them at each other's doorsteps, lest we repeat the sins of Them Two Obnoxious So-n-so's by irking each other with our overbearing presence. And anyone who is seen whilst going a-tip-toe to his neighbor's door must immediately make amends by hosting a lavish dinner those that saw him."

It would be like a cross between Christmas and that whole "he who gets the king cake baby has to throw the next king cake party" thing.

his mackeral-snapping soul....

What-the-what? I can't even make sense of that slur. I mean, logically. Is it a sneer at the whole fish-on-Fridays thing?

"No," comes back the answer, "this is the Serious Burns Unit."

I should like very much to retroactively cause the involuntary face-slapping this punchline elicited in me to be felt at twice the impact by your wicked, wicked forehead, Erick. IOW, *groan*.

And the Swedenborgians had William Blake.

No no no! Blake hated Swedenborg! Smacked him upside the head and downside the ass all over his writings! (didn't he?)

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

oh, just in case anyone gets worried, don't worry, I know the slur thing was meant ironically, really, I got that. 's OK. I just don't get it, is all.

[Mark Z.]

But why should either of them speak in any modern dialect? No doubt the language has changed just a tad in the 3500 years or so since Moses last gave a speech. They're lucky to be understood at all.

Besides which, Moses grew up speaking Egyptian. They shouldn't even be able to talk to each other. (If Enoch had been there, he would of course speak Enochian. :-) ) Since they're here by miraculous manifestation, I assume they're getting around this via the Gift of Tongues.

For those only familiar with the Pentecostal version of this, the original Gift of Tongues is described in Acts 2:4-12, and enables the Apostles to be heard in all of the languages of a multi-ethnic audience. In this scene we never hear the two prophets speak, only a news report quoting them. (This is L&J. We're lucky not to get a paraphrase of a phone call about a news report.)

Conclusion: the CNN reporter is from Brooklyn, so to him it sounds like "Moishe". Also, to him, they speak in ironic rhetorical questions ending in "already", and everything they eat looks like pastrami on rye.

(Or, as L&J describe it, "a steaming pile of meat, on bread of some kind".)

[Charles]

I'm pretty sure that the authors identify the two witnesses as Elijah and Moses because those are the two people in the Bible who, respectively, "have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want." Apparently, L&J don't believe that two people can have the same super powers, so the witnesses MUST be the originals.

[Col Bat Guano]

we exchange gifts on the Feast of the Deaths of the Annoying Bloody Wankers

When are the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances?

[Jesurgislac]

Jeff; Do we really need to tally bus bombings vs apartment bombings?

No: we can tally children shot down in the street, too.

Does it really matter?

Does it really matter? Well, depending what time of day the Rapture happened in the Middle East (um, if it happened in the middle of the night transAtlantic, what time of day was it in Jerusalem?) it would be a very standarI d Palestinian parent's nightmare: your child goes out to play, and never comes home. Not, this time, because she or he was killed by the IDF, but because all the children have disappeared. Who took them? Who's to blame?

When you have a real obvious live enemy to be blamed, why not blame that enemy? I was envisaging a scene of rioting parents - the scene the authors of Left Behind evidently never contemplated - meeting each other at a checkpoint, yelling and screaming at each other, almost at flashpoint before someone (several someones) manages to convey that they have all lost all their children, Palestinians and Israelis both.

[Jessica_Guilford]

I just wanted to go on record as saying that I like Andrew Wade's suggestion, above. Anybody who can reanimate a trilobite is someone you can trust. And if s/he reanimated a breeding pair of trilobites, that's all the evidence I'd need for divinity.

[Redem]

I wonder why Revelation Timeline are always are complex beyond the world history ones

[Redem]

I wonder how anyone managed to get their name considering they always busy preaching

[Robert]

I was going to upbraid Jessica for having such a low standard of divinity, but then I thought about Hox genes and how little we actually know about them and how being able to to recreate the genotype based only on the phenotype is pretty wicked sweet. So, yeah. Give me a bunch of breeding trilobites so we can dissect some and make sure they aren't complex simulations and I'd give up some major props as well.

As for Jeff replying to aunursa ...
As someone pointed out on a previous thread, if such disappearances really happened as described, then the immediate global consensus would be that it was the Rapture, and skeptics would be compelled to provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Someone did indeed make that contention, but it was not compelling.

I think I'm one among many making that argument, so allow me to amplify.

As they say on Arrested Development, COME ON! You've got multiple, simultaneous mass vanishings across the globe leaving behind clothing without so much as a run in pantyhose. This includes not only the whirling globe but people on jets above it and (presumably) submarines below it. If that's not godlike power I don't know what is. If most of the survivors didn't scream Rapture it would quickly turn up during research.

Some kind of attack by a godlike being is the default hypothesis. Whether it is God or not and the End Times is kind of immaterial. Whatever did this at the very least wants us to think that's the scenario going down. Either way anyone with any knowledge of Rapture theology would be scooped up and interrogated. Of course the people doing so would then run into the intramural squabbles that our host discussed which would cloud any prophetic value.

[telesilla]

Fred, you're always good, but you really hit it out of the part today, humorwise. This is all totally of the WIN!

[telesilla]

Or you know...out of the "park."

[mcc]

We're comparing two loudmouthed guys to the simultaneous detonation of the entire Russian nuclear arsenal (and Ethiopia's!). Even as a metaphor, it doesn't measure up.

Well, even at the time of the attacks nobody seemed to take much notice of them. Maybe the way to interpret this is not "CNN takes two street preachers in Jerusalem so seriously it's akin to the third attempted nuclear strike in world history" but rather "CNN took so little attention of the third attempted nuclear strike in world history that it was akin to two street preachers in Jerusalem".

Religious-secular splits within both the Jewish and Arab populations;

So far we seem to keep winding up at or near violence and certainly with a lot of controversy entirely within the population of Jerusalem over just the yearly attempt at a gay pride parade. I guess did Dr. Rosenzweig's Miracle-Gro somehow resolve all that too?

[mel_anon]

Like Robert, I was one of those people in a long-ago thread arguing the "Rapture as global consensus" position, so I'm delurking to give a feeble defense of myself. I'm a bit surprised, really, that people find this uncompelling, because it's giving L&J more credit than they've earned (perhaps you're feeling sorry for them).

Yeah, some characters in LB act like they've read the book jacket, but that itself isn't an unreasonable assumption; after all, L&J believe they are accurately describing events that will imminently happen in our own world, and they're letting us read the whole damn book. So characters in LB should know something about PMD eschatology, if not from Lehaye's doppelganger then Lindsey or some other predecessor, but no one with any power or influence seems to.

Two reasons 1) L&J's fundamentalist conceit that no one in the Heathen Secular world knows anything about their little racket and 2) being Bad Theologians as well as Bad Writers, they don't want to explain how any of the items on the Tribulation Checklist can happen if everyone knows they're coming ("Wasn't there some old crackpot who said millions of people and all the world's child population would disappear, then some Romanian bureaucrat would take over the UN and make it a one world government? Maybe electing Robert Sundancescu wouldn't be a great idea.")

There's no way L&J are benevolent enough to take away all the seminary professors or religious studies majors who are wise to their game. Sure, there'll be people who claim the Space Aliens did it to make it look like the Rapture, but they'll be looked at with the same skepticism as people who claim God put fossils in the ground to make the Earth look billions of years old. It could be true, but you haven't got proof, and you'll look silly standing next to the Rapture theorist with his stack of PMD literature on the cable news shows.

[Socks of Sullenness]

I wonder how anyone managed to get their name considering they always busy preaching

I think they are handling their preaching like a chat show - when one has said what he needs to say about the Old Testament prophesies, he will then say "And now, Moishe, I believe you have something to tell these good people about the coming of the Messiah!" And so on, back and forth, standing there like a pair of candlesticks (KJV) in sackcloth (which makes them sound as if they've been wrapped up for the removal men).

[Dramatic Smiles]

Dramatic Smiles is the leading supplier to dental professionals worldwide. Dramatic Smiles offer safe and effective teeth whitening products to achieve caring results. Now any one can get whiter teeth instantly, with dramatic results. ...

[ED.: Spam, obviously. Leaving a fragment of it here as context for Mabus' (funny) response below.]

[Nick Lamb]

The only people I can imagine convincingly arguing with the Rapture hypothesis are those who'd know better and might have previously been reluctant to discuss it.

That would include anyone who's actually divine "Hi, I actually am the second coming of Christ, and uh, this definitely wasn't scheduled so you should start looking for an alternate explanation. Here are some trilobites, they're spikey so be careful, also, for those who don't know what a trilobite is, look, I can levitate, and not by bouncing or by standing at an odd angle, I'm totally floating 2 metres up in the air"

and any resident aliens "Hi, you have invisible aliens teleporting people off your planet. Just local punks really, messing with you, but they've got nowhere to keep all those people, so you know, wherever they went they're not coming back. I called the intergalactic police about it, but they're pretty busy with that collapsing spiral galaxy you can just about see with Hubble. Said they should have someone here to take statements in a few hundred years. Gotta go now, my Manhattan-sized spaceship just rose out of the middle of the Atlantic ocean - so watch out for the tsunami. Oh, and I actually have a recipe somewhere for trilobite, those were tasty. Couldn't stop myself, you know how it is with snacks, you just have to have one more."

[Mabus]

Okay, that was disturbing. At first I thought the Dramatic Smiles spam was somebody's parodical commentary on some event in LB. Like, maybe after the preachers breathe fire at people their teeth are covered in soot? "Got a dirty mouth? Clean it up..."

Though actually those commercials would work better with the bystanders..."Use Orbitz gum or get burnt to death at the Wailing Wall!"

[Chris]

They had good hymns, too;

"In God the Father we believe
And also Muggleton and Reeve:
We believe in God the Son
And likewise Reeve and Muggleton..."

[Tonio]

Question - I had read that the later LB books have vignettes where former Jews relate their conversions Christianity. As written by L&J, the new Christians seem to equate their old religion to an alcohol or drug addiction. Are there any such scenes in the first LB novel?

[the opoponax]

"Some kind of attack by a godlike being is the default hypothesis."

Not really. There would be TONS of default hypotheses around the world depending on time of day, local superstitions, degree of Fundiegelical population, etc. There's almost no way someone in, say, Yemen, is going to realize the kids are gone and think "omigod it has to be Teh Rapture!"

Another compounding factor is that the book specifically mentions that some people who formerly professed to be Born Again were not raptured, because they did not truly believe with their heart of hearts, and other people who were not "out" as Evangelicals were raptured because they'd secretly said the magic words (the pope, for instance). On a micro level, this would produce a pattern of disappearances that may not seem to correspond to "The RTCs and the kids". Even knowing a little about PMD belief and living in a part of the world where I'm able to know a significant number of Evangelicals, since as stated the disappearances wouldn't correspond to Evangelicals directly, I might not consider that a real possibility. i would see that the pope was also gone, and I would think "OK, there's no way -- RTC's hate Catholics, and this pope was a Nazi, anyway, there's no way he could possibly be Raptured."

I would not parse this as "The pope must have been secretly Born Again!" unless I had read the book jacket.

[the opoponax]

"So characters in LB should know something about PMD eschatology"

Why? I didn't know anything about PMD eschatology until I read this book. If I were a character in Left Behind, I would probably not assume it was The Rapture without having read the book.

Big hint: the only people who know anything about PMD eschatology are other PMD-ers and unfortunate souls in the Bible Belt who are forced to listen to them bloviate. And the likelihood that all the "forced to listen to the bloviators" folks would come together and realize it had really happened for real, and that they would be a significant enough group to be anything more than yet another point of view among the chorus of "Aliens!" "No, Kali!" "No, the Chupacabra!" "No, an extremely weird plague!" is highly unlikely.

People need to SERIOUSLY realize what a tiny minority (even in the US, home to Evangelical Christianity) PMDers are. Yeah, they make a lot of noise, and maybe you'd have read something like this in a Chick Tract or seen it on the 700 Club, but since when have most thinking people given that any real creedence?

[Dean Booth]

I have a plan for Rayford to be a hero. He should gather up a group of his pilot friends, rent a bunch of those fire-fighting water-dropping helicopters, and baptize everyone in Israel!

[hapax]

@Mabus:

Personally, I was enchanted by the juxtaposition of screen names. I mean, Socks of Sullenness magically transformed into Dramatic Smiles!

[hapax]

@opo: "Why? I didn't know anything about PMD eschatology until I read this book. "

You mean that there are still people left out there who are missing the snarkoliscious goodness that is LB Fridays? What is WITH you people? Go out and spread the word, folks!

[Jesurgislac]

Ooh, I've just thought: if the Pope's been Raptured, one of the things LB is missing out on is the conclave of cardinals to elect a new Pope. At least, once the Church has determined that the Pope is definitely dead, not kidnapped, etc. (I wonder how long that would take?) There are 8 (I think) Cardinals currently resident in the US: if LB had been at all into Dramatic Irony, those eight US Cardinals flying to Rome to take part in the conclave to elect a new Pope, discussing the rumors they've heard that people are saying the Event is really the Rapture, would have been a fantastic scene.

[LM]

There's a cult out of Colorado called simply "Concerned Christians" and the leader claims he's one of the two witnesses. They went to Israel in 1999 and wound up being deported. A handful of news stories. Funny thing is Jenkins is also from Colorado so I'm a bit surprised he didn't take a hint. ;p

And I keep looking for an excuse to throw up a link to Jews for Judaism which was designed to help Jews when they're confronted by missionaries. It includes some explanations of why Jesus doesn't meet the criteria for certain prophesies and I admit I just sort of found it an interesting read. ;p Of course, some of it does feature picking out random passages to prove points such as trying to prove Jesus was mentally ill but I admit I just sort of find it giggle worthy given I think it makes a bit more sense than what's going on when the "other side" uses that same tactic so I can't say I see it as any more or less offensive. That and it reminds me of stuff I remember thinking to myself my final years as a Christian. :P

[Andrew Wade]

The only people I can imagine convincingly arguing with the Rapture hypothesis are those who'd know better and might have previously been reluctant to discuss it.

That would include anyone who's actually divine "Hi, I actually am the second coming of Christ, and uh, this definitely wasn't scheduled so you should start looking for an alternate explanation. Here are some trilobites, they're spikey so be careful, also, for those who don't know what a trilobite is, look, I can levitate, and not by bouncing or by standing at an odd angle, I'm totally floating 2 metres up in the air"

Well sure, all the trilobites would prove (after careful examination) is that the supposed christos isn't just another ape-descendant with a wristwatch and hidden FM receiver who knows some FX people. But that alone would make him/her far more credible than they would otherwise be.

[damnedyankee]

Personally, I find that PMD painting linked in Fred's post to be a little more telling than perhaps the creator intended. I notice how the passage to Heaven is lovingly rendered while the mere humans below look like they took about five minutes to scribble up, all together. It's that detachment I mentioned in a previous thread, I think.

[Ursula L]

When and if people did figure out that the missing adults were all Christians of some sort, I doubt the conclusion drawn would be "gee, they were right, it was the rapture!"

A more likely conclusion would seem to be "what did the Christians do wrong, to loose so many of their own?" or perhaps "what did these disappeared Christians do to take away our children?" with the RTCs being framed as some type of kidnapping conspiracy that has gone underground, taking the children with them.

No one who is left behind, and sane, is going to read the disappearance of children as being good or desirable. And the biggest suspect for the crime would be the people who disappeared with the children, in the same way that if someone is murdered and their spouse or best friend takes off, the spouse/friend is immediately a suspect.

And they'd be right, too, since it seems that the rapture-believing RTCs were doing all they could to bring about the rapture and the end-times, making them at least co-conspirators in god's great kidnapping.

A sensible Antichrist would probably play up the fact that these Christians disappeared with the kids. It would be an ideal way to ruin the reputation of anyone still trying to preach the RTC message - "this is the ideology that managed a global conspiracy to kidnap you children."

If the Antichrist can blame Christ/the Christians for the disappearances, then being the Antichrist becomes a big plus for him - he's the one who is going to try to stop, or punish, or otherwise get back at, the people/god behind the kidnapping of your child. It would be the otherwise sensible, peaceful people who fell behind Shrub's warmongering after 9/11, times about a thousand.

[the opoponax]

Another way to think about it: anybody remember the Heaven's Gate cult? They thought the Hale-Bopp Comet was a spaceship come to take them away to heaven. When the astrological time was right, they committed mass suicide in order to liberate their bodies from their souls and join the comet/ship to heaven.

Nobody assumed the Heaven's Gaters were right, and they really were simply liberating their souls from their bodies to escape this worldly plane. Everybody assumed they were a freakish suicide cult.

Once people realized that a good chunk of the fundies were gone (especially if L&J are right and it would be limited to the absolute fundiest of the fundies), the assumption would not be "oh, they must have been right after all," it would be "wow, they were freakier than we thought -- and they took our children, too!"

[Thlayli]

For those only familiar with the Pentecostal version of this, the original Gift of Tongues is described in Acts 2:4-12, and enables the Apostles to be heard in all of the languages of a multi-ethnic audience.

In the second book, on one of the rare occasions when Buck does something that could be vaguely construed as "journalism", he finds out that this is in fact the case.

[Andrew Wade]

@opo

Once people realized that a good chunk of the fundies were gone (especially if L&J are right and it would be limited to the absolute fundiest of the fundies), the assumption would not be "oh, they must have been right after all," it would be "wow, they were freakier than we thought -- and they took our children, too!"

Remember that there will be much video footage of children simply vanishing. Organizations such as the Lord's Resistance Army do cause thousands of children to disappear each year, but they don't vanish on camera.

[the opoponax]

"there will be much video footage of children simply vanishing"

There will be? The Rapture happens circa 11pm, Central Time, which means that it will be after bedtime for most under-10's in the Americas. Which is the only region with enough Evangelical Christians to make a dent.

Even in Europe and Western Africa, where it would be very early in the morning, you'd have to be pretty far east by the time we're even talking about the school commute. Further towards Asia, it's the school day, but how many Asian elementary schools are under routine video surveillance? And there are almost no Evangelicals in any Asian country except South Korea, where their presence is hardly staggering.

[cjmr's husband]

Opo - you forget that ALL children are raptured, not just RTCs. Someone in the world has a videocamera going.

[the opoponax]

oh, and the Rapture takes place on a Tuesday (i believe?) -- definitely a week day/night. Meaning it's unlikely that very many people would either be up late in the US taking home movies of their kids, or out and about with the kids in eastern Asia/Australia (the only world region where it would be waking hours).

The only kids who'd be disappearing on camera would be child actors in Asia, or a freak home movie occurance (school pageants and the like, probably). And it would take weeks for the owners of these tapes to recover from the intense PTSD and come forward with video. And of course in almost none of those countries is there a sizeable enough Evangelical population for people to even be aware of the Rapture as a possibility.

[the opoponax]

but CJMR -- ok, let's say that on Wednesday morning, some Indian film crew is shooting a scene set in a kindergarten, and suddenly the whole cast dissapears. Why would said film crew, who've probably never heard of the Rapture, suddenly think "OMG the Rapture!!"?

my point was that even if you had footage here and there, the witnesses in those particular parts of the world would still have to have read the book jacket to hit upon the Rapture as the "default" answer.

remember, again, that in terms of world population, only a miniscule amount of people have ever even heard of PMD theology (and many/most who have would also be Raptured). So people whose first impulse would be that the Rapture just happened would be a tiny minority of the remaining world population. Probably for several months, the prevailing theory would be "the evil eye", which is a far more common element of world folklore and superstition.

[ako]

I think the Rapture theory would get more play than the books give it, but I don't think there'd be mass consensus on it being the Rapture. Too much depends on knowing the particulars, and while it wouldn't be all the theologians, darbyites, or pre-millennial dispensationalists vanishing, it would be enough that relatively few people would have their checklists to wave. More than the book shows, but less than you get now.

As time went on, the Rapture theory would gain support, particularly given that you could flash the chart, and explain how neatly it fit. Only after everyone learned the charts, though. Cause popular conceptions of the Rapture are scant and variable.

I mean, mass vanishing of children? Sure, it could be the Rapture. But mass vanishings, natural disasters, ridiculous political events, etc. all of which match the fancy chart? Tremendous persuasive power.

Now if we applied logic, we'd get all the Real True Christians hearing about the comically implausible events in Israeli politics, and screaming "Imminent Rapture!" into every media outlet they had. And then vanishing. That would make the Rapture the default assumption in some countries, at least.

[the opoponax]

another idea, re video.

if you've ever seen those silly conspiracy theory/close encounters/transcendent experience "documentaries" that occasionally come on the Discovery Channel and the like, you're familiar with the trope that, of course, the conspiracy theorist or occult expert or whoever turns on the video cameras to document this paranormal activity/UFO/whatever, once and for all. when, of course, the cameras go dead, the DAT recorder goes to static, the mikes fail, the streetlights blink, and we get nothing conclusive (even though the "expert" in question has apparently continued to witness the phenomenon).

if i were all-powerful YHWH, i'd probably do something like that during the Rapture. i'd make it something vaguely plausible, too, so that scientists in the aftermath would say something like, "oh, it was probably some kind of solar flare" to explain why suddenly almost all recording equipment in the world burped at exactly the moment of the dissapearances.

[the opoponax]

i will agree, with Ako, that within the next several months, it would obviously become incredibly apparent to anyone who was aware of the checklist, and if those folks were persistent enough, it might be of media interest, which would enable them to convince people who previously hadn't heard about this of the reality that it was the Rapture.

but in the immediate aftermath? no way. the default assumption? hell no, except maybe in Colorado Springs or something.

[Zzyzx]

Another point to remember is that the RTC believe that we will be tricked by God during this period to allow the anti-christ to come into power. We're deceived into taking the mark and therefore we deserve to be punished eternally. Ummm ok...

[Jeff]

Jonathan Edelstein: If two guys riling up the crowds at the Kotel are the biggest thing to happen in Jerusalem since Russia tried to nuke the place, then it's been switched for some other city - or maybe for Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum - while nobody was looking.

LOL!

Mark Z: "a steaming pile of meat, on bread of some kind"

Covered in Russian Dressing!

Jesu: I was envisaging a scene of rioting parents - the scene the authors of Left Behind evidently never contemplated - meeting each other at a checkpoint, yelling and screaming at each other, almost at flashpoint before someone (several someones) manages to convey that they have all lost all their children, Palestinians and Israelis both.

That would be terrific. So why throw a "They're worse than we are" in there (as an editorial comment)? It weakens the point that these parents have all lost too many children, for the sake of scoring some "group-think" points. Both sides are wrong to be killing children -- can't we leave it at that?

hapax: You mean that there are still people left out there who are missing the snarkoliscious goodness that is LB Fridays?

A lot of us discovered LB and PMD through slacktivist.

[cjmr's husband]

Opo - I agree; any god that spends two thousand years covering up His existence while demanding that we all Believe would certainly fry every video camera in the world during Teh Rapture. This would even make sense with Nicky Appalachia's theory that it was "some kind of electromagnetism". (Too much sense to happen in these books!)

BTW: I've been watching last year's Doctor Who this week (in preparation for this year's!) The episode Fear Her deals with just one street's worth of children disappearing. And you know what? The parents *react*. And they try to find out *where they went*. And no one, but no one, thinks anything good has happened to them. (Note to self: not a good episode to watch when the kids are off on vacation)

[Zzyzx]

cjmr - too bad that's such a crappy episode though.

[hapax]

Actually, I was thinking of Connie Willis's heartbreaking novella, THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS. The rioting, the laws, the touching insanity shown by people everywhere over the disappearance of their *dogs* fer crying out loud, is a million times more authentic and heartrending than that shown by L&J over the vanished children.

And even though everyone knows the precise physical reason why all the dogs died (and they died, not just leaving empty collars), there were still a lot of people embracing supernatural explanations.

Which is not to say that everyone in LB should have started to spontaneously research Darbyite checklists. But it does make more sense to assume that they would be shouting "It's God's/Allah's/Shiva's/Susanoo's Judgment!" then to blithely accept, "Hmmm. Electromagnetism. Okay."

[cjmr's husband]

Zzyzx - it must be good, it's got a Chloe in it!