(18 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
Loading...Discussing the mythology found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 has made me remember something that happened some 35 years ago. It’s a pretty funny story.
At the time I was still a church going Christian. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and its strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word of God, but I did not think that it was infallible or true in every way. I had already come to see that parts of it contradicted one another, that there were historical implausibilities, and mistakes of various kinds.
For me at that stage, the Bible was not so much the words God had given his human authors as it was a book that was written with real religious insight by special authors whose words were a medium through which God could deliver his message to humans. It wasn’t the only way God spoke to people, but it certainly was one way, and a cherished way. Still, not all of it could be taken as literally true.
At that point I had come to realize that the whole idea of a “Rapture” in which the dead would rise to meet God and then the living believers in Jesus would be taken up to meet them all in the clouds was a metaphorical description of how in the final analysis, however the end comes, God will make right all that is wrong in this world. The passage is ultimately about how God is sovereign. This world may be a cesspool of misery and suffering now, but God will overcome all that is evil and will repay all who do it, and he will reward his faithful, somehow or other. It was a passage meant to inspire hope, not a passage that was meant literally as a indicating a calendrical event that was to occur sometime next Thursday.
I had a bunch of intellectual Christian friends in Princeton at the time (I was working on my Masters degree), and all of us had come up through fundamentalist circles. One of them invited us over for a pool party; she and her husband were house sitting at a gorgeous place off in the country outside of town, where they had a very nice pool, tennis court, and other niceties. And as happens in groups like that, we all started telling stories about our fundamentalist pasts, having a lot of very good laughs about how we used to be. (Included in the group were two people who were to go on and also to be publishing academics, one a philosopher and another a historian.)
As we talked we eventually got around to our former ideas that there would be a rapture. The conversation took on a specific topic. We had all been influenced by, and at one time had loved, a fundamentalist movie that had been popular in the mid 1970s, called “Thief in the Night.” This was obviously many, many years before the “Left Behind” books and films, but the movie was a kind of earlier incarnation of all that.
It was about a liberal Christian minister who, because he was heretically liberal, did not believe in the literal meaning of the Bible, including and especially the view that Jesus was literally coming back from heaven to take his followers out of the world before the tribulation appeared. The minister, obviously, was the bad guy. And then something happened. In fact, the rapture happened. Suddenly millions of people disappeared from earth. Completely vanished. They had been raptured. But not the liberal minister. He had been left behind.
The movie is about the tribulations that then hit the earth as catastrophe after catastrophe struck. And this liberal minister had to live through them. He of course came to realize (whoops, too late…) that the Bible *is* literally true, and he has a life-transforming change of heart, repenting of his sin of thinking that human reason can be used to understand God’s holy word.
So we’re at this pool party, and we start talking about this movie and having a good laugh about it, reminding each other of this scene and that scene and so on and laughing about the idea of this one guy in particular being left behind. One of our friends wasn’t saying much though (he was one of the ones that later became an academic) (I’m not mentioning his name. He’s actually a well known scholar). When we were finished talking about it, someone asked him why he wasn’t saying anything.
He replied that his father was the actor who had played the liberal minister.
Yikes! 🙂
Quite a story! Thanks for sharing it. I think one of the fascinating parts of apocalyptic expectations that don’t materialize is how people in such groups often then adapt, spin, and modify their understanding yet more or less keeping the gist of their basic faith. For example, one such group in the 1950s, after an expected second coming did not occur, then came to believe that their “faith” had prevented the imminent destruction of the world that they had expected. It makes me wonder how much the disciples of Jesus may have, in a similar way, modified their beliefs after His death.
A Thief in the Night was popular with my family, as was the “rapture” theology. The minister of our church preached it (saying “I believe there are young people here in this service that will not die” (meaning they’d be “raptured”)
One fundamentalist lady used to host bible study for the little kids in the neighborhood, including my little sister. After one such session, where the rapture was taught, my little sister came home with a question. “If the rapture happens and I’m inside, will I get stuck on the ceiling?”
Ha!!
What a funny story! I am thinking that the “rapture” is but an answer to suffering. ( I just finished watching your lecture at UC Berkley on “suffering” around the time of publication of God’s Problem). It offers hope as you said, and is an all-inclusive solution to the problem of suffering. End this miserable world, and bring on the next one that will be without pain and suffering. It’s a wonderful idea, but I don’t think it will ever be executed. Yet, it is so common for that solution to come out of the mouth of my minister friend who thinks the forces of evil need to be eradicated and bring on the paradisal world/heaven/whatever. If anything, it is a central question to man’s existence and one for which there is no solution. I happen to like the movie “Groundhog Day” because it is philosophical and merits answers to what life is: one character said “It’s now big crapshoot, any who.”
The character said, “It’s one big crapshoot any who!” He was defining life as the movie does so on several occasions. I need to edit my witting! Ugh!
Great story! But it’s too bad he wasn’t willing to chime in, tell about his father’s experience of making the movie, and whether his father actually *believed* that sort of thing. (I hope the group hadn’t been panning his acting!)
Say, I have a question that “backtracks” a bit, to the things you said about Mark. I was surprised at how well that Gospel lends itself to the Gnostic interpretation.
Do you think it’s possible that a significant number of early Christians (possibly including the author of Mark himself), who *wouldn’t* have bought into the Gnostics’ esoteric notions, *did* agree with them on the one point of a divine or semi-divine entity’s having entered into Jesus at the moment of his baptism, and possibly left him before his death? That would be similar to the concept of “Elijah’s” having somehow entered into John the Baptist.
I’m afraid there’s no real way to know!
My wife’s family believes the rapture will happen and they use Matthew 24 to defend it.
That third paragraph describes exactly where I am now.
“It was a passage meant to inspire hope, not a passage that was meant literally”
Paul believed this to be literal, correct?
I would assume so.
When I first saw the title I thought you were referring to 1 Thessalonians 5:2 at first 🙂
Havent blogged for a while been busy with personal stuff. Again love this blog and its purpose don’t give up Bart. Let this be a sign to you. I love signs get them all the time. Blog about Baalbek ! 🙂
Funny story!
I was raised in a small evangelical church. We talked about our church as the body of Christ, and other religious people was more like the harlot described in the revelation. The rapture was a part of the teaching. The bride, mainly our church would be raptured up to heaven before a lot of suffering happened on earth. I found this view disturbing. Is this a great God? Why all this suffering and evil? God have defined all the rules and created everything, but there is still a lot of suffering and evil, and when the kingdom of heaven comes, it will be still more suffering for the common man. I could see my colleagues at work burning in hell, for what? They are not evil people? Why do they deserve this treatment? Who is this God that will do these things to people I care about.
I talked to some friends about this, and some of them still believes things like the rapture and a lot of disturbing things that will happen in the end time. I have to say, Dr Ehrman, that you typical are described like a mislead sheep that are thinking to high thoughts about yourself in these circles. I have referred to your books occasionally, but I have been told that almost every bible scholar have an agenda against the bible, and referring to scholars seems to strengthen their arguments.
I am sad that people still thinks that scripture is true in every aspect. I think that it build up barriers between members in families and between friends. I don’t believe what I heard in this church anymore, but it came with a price. I lost some friends, and ended up with a more tense relationship to my family. I think your work is important, and are grateful for your books and articles.
Wow, that’s neat you met someone connected to the film. I’m still impressed that some independent filmmaking christians managed to produce those movies in the 70s. It would’ve cost a lot, and they even managed to get that haunting orchestral score as well.
I’m confused as to how you came to develop a metaphorical understanding of the passage but yet you believe Paul intended it as a literal event. It seems to me, as it relates to this particular passage, either you would believe Paul was speaking metaphorically or he was speaking literally. If he was speaking literally, would that not also imply his intended meanings should be taken as such?
I think he does mean it literally.
I grew up in a fundamentalist household and I watched “Thief in the Night” and its sequel “A Distant Thunder” with my parents. I was maybe 10 or 12 years old at the time and those movies scared the crap out of me. Like most evangelicals, I had a deep insecurity that I wasn’t really saved, perhaps because I wasn’t sincere enough when I “asked Jesus into my heart” or because I had committed the wrong sin and inadvertently lost my salvation. I remember often waking up in the middle of the night and quietly creeping into my parents’ bedroom – I wanted to check and make sure that they were still there and that the Rapture hadn’t occurred while I was asleep.
Every fundamentalist kid growing up in the 80s has stories where they thought the rapture occurred and went to go check on mum/dad/grandma 🙂
I too remember the movie. I grew up Southern Baptist in the middle of the rapture craze of the 1970’s. My wife is from a denomination that doesn’t believe in it. I joke with her that it’s going to be rough living through 7 years of tribulation while I’m in heaven having been raptured away. She usually just gives me the finger and a bad look.
Actually, Bart I was doing a little digging on the rapture subject, and it struck me that 1 Thessalonians 5:2 has the first reference to Jesus being “a thief in the night”. The next chronological reference would be Matthew 24:43. I found it fascinating that Paul uses this phrase before it shows up in the gospels. Did Paul use a, what would you call it, a ‘proto-gospel’ as a source for the thief-in-the-night concept? If so, it’s odd he wouldn’t say much at all about anything else Jesus did in said gospel. Maybe it was an oral tradition that Paul had heard. Or perhaps Matthew (or Matthew’s sources) stole the idea from Thessalonians and put the words in Jesus’ mouth.
Any thoughts on this?
Yes, I’d say it’s almost impossible to know the relation between Paul’s words and Jesus’ at this point. Did Paul’s views influence later traditions of Jesus’ sayings? Did Paul know a form of Jesus’ sayings? Something else?