In my forthcoming book on Revelation (Title:  Armaggedon: What the Bible Really Says About the End; to be published on March 21), I discuss how evangelical Christians in the 19th century came up with the idea of a "rapture" -- that Jesus was soon to return to heaven to take true believers out of it before the horrible seven-year "tribulation" began.  Here is  a funny story about belief in the rapture from my younger days. At the time I was still a churchgoing 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. [...]

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 [...]