The Rapture | Belief, Definition, & Predictions - Encyclopedia Britannica

Scriptural basis and views

The belief in the Rapture emerged from the anticipation that Jesus would return to redeem all members of the church. The term rapture, however, does not appear in the New Testament. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Lord will come down from heaven and that a trumpet call will precede the rise of “the dead in Christ” (4:16). Thereafter, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up” (in Latin, rapio, the standard translation of Paul’s original Koine Greek) “in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). A similar idea is also seen in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, which states, “Look, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (15:51–52). The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) mention Jesus’ return to earth from heaven; e.g., the Gospel According to Mark cites Jesus as foretelling a “ ‘coming in clouds’ with great power and glory” (13:26).

Keep Exploring

• Revelation to John
• Second Coming
• Last Judgment
• Four horsemen of the apocalypse
• Antichrist
• Whore of Babylon
• Seven seals
• Number of the beast

Belief in the Rapture is often connected with a belief in the literal coming of the millennium, the 1,000-year rule of Jesus Christ after his return, as mentioned in chapter 20 of The Revelation to John (also known as the Book of Revelation), although there are also amillennial interpretations of the belief that reject that notion. There is also a divide among pre-tribulationists, who believe that the Rapture will occur before a period of tribulation on earth mentioned in Daniel (12:1) and Matthew (24:21) and preceding the End, and post-tribulationists, those who believe that it will come after that period. Finally, dispensationalism, the notion that God periodically enters into a new covenant with his people, has had some influence on the belief, insofar as some believers in the Rapture consider themselves to be dispensationalists.

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