O' Course I never attended any of man's theological universities (thank you, JESUS) So just put my take where you wish.

But re: the rupture, I never actually heard of such a thing explained until some folks on the various boards started trying to sell it to people. This was over 20 years ago. It fit nothing I had previously known. When it was explained to me, I knew it was BS. So I set about trying to research it.

Of course the word rapture is not found in the KJV at all, So some quoted their Scofield Reference Bible notes to me. Well, I did indeed know about ’saint’ Scofield. And it turns out the ’rapture’ was totally unknown doctrine until about 1830. It began from a sour pickle dream of one Margaret Mcdonald that was picked up by one James Darby, and trumpeted by the ’Plymouth Brethren‘ society, which then enlisted a charlatan named Cyrus Ingersol Scofield to popularize it with a ‘reference Bible‘ He was well funded from the ‘secret six‘. Scofield began his work while he was in prison for embezzlement, and finished sometime later. That’s it in a nutshell.

There are tons of articles written on all this BS, much more than it deserves, actually.

To me, the ’rapture stuff’ is just smoke from the bottomless pit, and not very dense smoke at that.

For those interested here are some links;

The origin of the rapture theory http://www.askelm.com/essentials/ess025.htm

“Saint Scofield” http://home.earthlink.net/~bobseller1/id86.html

The rapture of the wicked http://home.earthlink.net/~bobseller1/id9.html