Stop forcing a link between Matthew's field workers and Paul's “caught up” when neither writer makes one. Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians around A.D. 50–51, decades before the Gospel of Matthew, which is commonly dated to around A.D. 80–90. The fact that Matthew appears first in our Bibles doesn't make it Paul's source. In fact, the written Gospel couldn't have been. Matthew says one person is taken and another left, but never says anyone flies into the sky. He never writes the word “rapture” anywhere in his Gospel. Paul, much earlier, actually does describe believers being caught up into the clouds to meet the returning Jesus. And since we know Paul couldn't have been explaining Matthew's written account of the workers in a field, perhaps he was foretelling something else? The same thing Matthew was looking back at. And the same thing that, roughly fifteen years after Paul's letter, around the beginning of the Jewish-Roman War in A.D. 66, Josephus says eyewitnesses reported: chariots and armored troops warring in the clouds above the cities. Tacitus later preserved a remarkably similar account of armies battling in the sky. Neither historian says people were caught up into the sky, but the rest sounds strangely familiar across the board. Trying to cobble together a Rapture out of Matthew's account and Paul's description is counterintuitive and defies how time works. Maybe Paul was predicting something the ancient world would later claim actually happened, something Matthew may have been looking back at and Josephus and Tacitus would later record.
Two soldiers sit together in a foxhole. One turns his head. When he turns back, his friend is gone. We understand exactly what happened without imagining that anyone vanished into the sky. So why, when Jesus says two people will be in a field and suddenly only one remains, do we immediately imagine a rapture? Matthew never mentions the word “rapture” at all. Jesus never says anyone flies away or disappears into the sky. Especially when He prefaces the whole thing with Noah and the Flood. When the Flood came, the people who were “taken away” weren't rescued. Noah was the one left behind.
Elisha witnesses Elijah's whirlwind abduction after a chariot of fire appeared before them. Ezekiel saw something in the sky with glowing metal, fire and wheels moving in impossible ways. Centuries later, Josephus recorded eyewitness reports of chariots and armored troops moving through the clouds in the years before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Ancient people described extraordinary things in the sky using the limited vocabulary they had. If something flew over their heads two thousand years ago, nobody was going to call it a UFO. Fiery chariots = lit-up spaceship. Whirlwinds = beam me up, Scotty. Glowing metal = advanced metallurgy. Wheels within wheels = some kind of propulsion system. Maybe some of the Bible's heavenly encounters sound crazy because the witnesses were trying to describe technology they had no words for. What if it turns out that they were just watching an advanced screening of Star Wars?
Revelation describes a war in heaven. But was John writing about our future, or his present? Josephus, a Jewish historian, recorded eyewitness reports of chariots and armored troops appearing in the sky around the beginning of the Jewish-Roman War. Tacitus, a Roman historian, later recorded a remarkably similar account of armies battling in the sky during the same period. The war ended with Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed in A.D. 70. Most scholars date Revelation about 25 years later, while a minority date it to the very period when the war was beginning. So here's a possibility: what if they're all writing about the same event? If the late date is right, John was looking backward. If the early date is right, he may have been writing while it was happening. Either way, maybe Revelation's war in heaven isn't something we're still waiting to see. Maybe Michael and his angels already fought against the dragon.
Roman officials kept records, yet no contemporary Roman record of Jesus, his trial, or his execution survives, and virtually nothing survives from Pilate’s administrative files at all. A cynic would say that’s evidence Jesus never existed. A strategist would consider that the absence itself served a purpose. Next door, Egypt preserved mountains of mundane paperwork from the same era, but maybe God never intended to leave a convenient government file proving Jesus was here. And He didn’t need to miraculously erase anything overnight, either. A misplaced record here, a discarded file there, war, weather, human error and two thousand years could slowly blot out the paper trail. And since faith is the lynchpin running through the entire Bible, perhaps faith is exactly what is required. Not a catalog of evidence, but a collection of letters and accounts passed down by those who believed God walked among them for a time. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
About 666. Papyrus 115, one of the oldest surviving copies of Revelation, gives the number of the Beast as 616. But that doesn't really matter. Historians say 666 means “Neron Caesar,” transliterated into Hebrew. 616 means “Nero Caesar,” dropping the final n. The Beast was most likely Nero, emperor of Rome from 54–68 AD.
Since the 616/666 code probably calculates to Nero, the “mark,” charagma, takes on an interesting meaning. It was an engraved or stamped impression, the kind of mark found on coinage. Nero’s coins bore his image and name and passed through the hand in buying and selling. John’s warning may have been brutally simple: if you’re willing to take Nero’s coinage in your hand, you’re going to wear his mark on your forehead whether you like it or not. His audience knew that slaves could be marked on the forehead as a sign of servitude. Take Nero’s mark in your hand to participate in his economy and you’ve declared who your master is.
BIBLE THEORIST
