April 29: Origins of the Rapture (John Nelson Darby)

The peculiarly American concept of the "Rapture" didn't exist in Christianity until the 18th century, when it was briefly mentioned by Increase and Cotton Mather. Starting in 1827, the doctrine was honed and popularized by John Nelson Darby, an Irish-American evangelist with the Plymouth Brethren. His views would be disseminated by the Brethren, by Darby's follower Dwight Moody, and by the Scofield Reference Bible (based on Darby's own translation of scripture).

The "Rapture" is suggested directly in just one passage of the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: "[T]he Lord himself will come down from heaven... and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."

To explain: this passage reflects the prevalent Jewish view that on Judgment Day, the dead will rise bodily from their graves and return to God. What the apostle Paul was addressing was the question of what would happen to living human beings during this event - a pressing question, since Paul assumed the apocalypse was imminent. His extremely brief description of what came to be known as the "Rapture" was not given much attention or weight until early progenitors of American evangelicalism seized on this line in 1 Thessalonians.

Linking up this Pauline quote with Revelation's rather non-Pauline description of the end-times (ie, the Tribulation), Darby and others came to espouse "premillennialism". This was a new doctrine created with an eye toward sparing the faithful from earthly suffering under the Beast 666, red dragon, scorpion-tailed locusts, and other colorful denizens of the Bible's last book.
 
This term, "premillennialism", drew on the existing "millennialism" - the literal belief in a coming thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, as described in Revelation. Premillenialism holds not just that this reign will be preceded by the Tribulation Revelation describes, but also by a "Rapture" which will be wedged in just before the Tribulation, as suggested by 1 Thessalonians (and only there - not in Revelation - to be doubly clear). It's important to note that however familiar this Rapture scenario is today, it is a relatively recent American invention unknown to Christians of earlier eras.
 

Among Darby's other influential views is Dispensationalism, which holds that God has a sequential plan for humanity in which he manifests himself to the world in distinct phases - even while He remains unitary and unchanged in His own self. In particular, Darby held that after the death of Christ, a "Church Age" began in which God's chosen people are no longer the Jews - since they rejected Jesus - but instead the worldwide "church" of true Christian believers.

Darby died on April 29, 1882.

April 26: Y1K in southern France

In 1018, the French monk Ademar de Chabannes wrote of a pre-dawn panic and trampling before the Abbey of St. Martial, sparked by fears of the Antichrist. Cases of heresy were reported to be widespread throughout southern France at the time. A prolific writer - and forger - Ademar produced 500 folios of speculative writings/fictions about the apocalypse before his death in 1034.

As a footnote, Ademar wrote the oldest surviving autograph musical manuscript in the western world: a mass written to support his fraudulent claim that the historical St. Martial was an apostle during Christ's life, rather than a bishop in Gaul in the third century.

April 24: Tens of Thousands Await Aliens' Emergence from a French Mountain

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9531861.stm

The BBC story above is from last year, but there's some more recent information in the link below. Including Raelians and Ramtha followers, 20,000 people have apparently gathered at a mountain near the French village of Bugarach, with authorities fearing that this number may increase to 100,000 as December approaches.

The cultists expect the world to end cataclysmically on 12/21/12, with the space aliens who live inside the mountain emerging just in time to spare all humans dwelling nearby.

http://www.earth-issues.com/20000-cult-members-await-doomsday-in-french-village/

April 23: Don't Ask

April 23rd, 1957, was the date of the apocalypse according to a California pastor named Mirhan Ask. Ask's prediction was published in the January, 1957 edition of the Jehovah's Witnesses' periodical "The Watchtower".

April 22: "The Last Myth"

Here's a Huffington Post feature by the authors of The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America. Which is also a really good book; I read it this last week.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mathew-gross/9-ways-the-world-might-en_1_b_1435648.html

The Last Myth claims that fears of the apocalypse have been on the rise in America, in large part as tools of worldview vindication. That is to say - a Christian may look toward the Rapture with the hope of being proved right about her religion; whereas an environmentalist might be accused of feeling a little frisson of vindication whenever another Rhode-Island worth of Antarctica calves into the sea.

I think the authors are pretty successful in saying that an impulse to believe in imminent disaster is deeply connected with feeling one's political or religious views are under threat. But by politicizing the apocalypse, they want to say, ugly scenarios which are actually evaluable by science - global warming, peak oil - get regarded merely as quasi-religious personality traits, and not a matter of evidence and fact. "You believe in climate change because you're a liberal" becomes a statement that can make sense in America, whereas, "You believe in gravity because you're a conservative" is not a combination of words anyone would even think of.

April 19: New York to be Leveled for the US' Complicity in Establishing the State of Israel

New York was to be flattened on this date in 1997 by an enormous temblor, according to Bashir Muhammad Abdallah, author of The Great Earthquake (and numerous other works of eschatology). This earthquake was to come as punishment to the West for its support of the establishment of Israel 50 years prior.

Immediately after the quake was to begin a worldwide war between Islam and the powers of the "Dajjal" - an antichrist-like Jewish figure leading Western civilization, according to some Muslim apoaclypticists. The Dajjal is expected to be defeated (beheaded, more specifically) by Jesus, when he returns to Earth along with other major prophets.

April 19: The Branch Davidian Siege

On April 19, 1993, the Waco, TX compound of the apocalyptic cult the "Branch Davidians" was destroyed by fire, killing 76. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had surrounded the compound 50 days prior to serve a warrant to search for illegal firearms. This sparked a firefight in which four Federal agents and six Davidians were killed.

Cult leader Vernon Howell (AKA "David Koresh") had taken control of the group - an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists - in 1989, following a protracted schism with George Roden. Roden had first challenged Howell to a "resurrection contest", leading Koresh to denounce Roden to prosecutors for corpse abuse. Later, a firefight broke out between both parties, resulting in no deaths, seven acquittals, and a hung jury for Howell. Howell's final success in gaining control over the Davidians would only happen the year after the trial, when Roden was committed to a mental hospital in 1989 after murdering a Davidian with an axe.

Since 1989, Howell had been stockpiling weapons with his followers and extensive harem at the Davidian compound at Mount Carmel in preparation for Armageddon, which was to occur in 1995.

***

It is probably also worth noting that Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City - while not apocalyptically motivated in itself - was timed to fall on the anniversary of the Waco disaster.

April 18: The Great San Francisco Earthquake

A second event for April 18:

In 1906, the Great San Francisco Earthquake killed upwards of 3000 people and led to the city's gradual destruction by fire in the days after. The event was seen as apocalyptic by some. Of course there were doubters of this, as demonstrated in a bit of doggerel circulating at the time about the city's largest distillery:

If, as they say, God spanked this town For being much too frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down And save Hotaling's Whiskey?

April 18: William Miller's Second Disappointment, of Three

The New England Baptist preacher William Miller convinced a substantial following that the Parousia (Second Coming of Christ) would occur during the year 1844. When the world did not end by his first deadline on March 21, Miller recalculated and determined it would end on the current date, April 18. (When that date failed, he would go on to project a third Second Coming for October 22.) Miller's system drew loosely from the book of Daniel in claiming the world will end 2300 years after the Babylonian Captivity and reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Despite the failure of his predictions, Millerites went on to form the Seventh-Day Adventists.

April 17: The Ill-Fated Revelation of Na Prous Boneta

On April 17, 1321 (Good Friday of that year), a nun named Na Prous Boneta was taken bodily up to heaven and told that the Papacy is the power of Antichrist on earth, and must be defeated for the millennium to begin. Lending authority to the vision, Boneta met St. Francis and Peter John Olivi and was told they were the two "witnesses" from the book of Revelation. For this vision she was burned at the stake in 1325.

April 16: "Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist"

During the year 992, Adso of Montier-en-Der died. As abbot of the monastery at Montier-en-Der in France since 960, he authored a tract called "Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist", in the form of an open letter to the widow of Louis IV, then an abbess.

April 14: Silent Spring

The conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson died on this date in 1964. Less than a year and a half earlier, her book "Silent Spring" had appeared, warning of the human-caused chemical collapse of world ecosystems.

April 13: Financial Advice for the Mayan Apocalypse

Folks with regular cable TV have probably seen this so many times by now that they're queasy. But I spotted it for the first time earlier this evening, and find it interesting that the 12/21/12 date is now soaked deeply enough into the popular consciousness to be eligible for parody in ads by financial advisors.

April 12: Mad Max

On April 12, 1979, George Miller's post-apocalyptic action thriller "Mad Max" was released in Australia.

April 11: Edward Wightman

On May 11, 1612, Edward Wightman, an English Anabaptist, was executed for preaching apocalypse and claiming he was (1) Elijah, (2) Paraclete (ie, the Holy Spirit), and (3) Savior of the World.

April 10: Abu 'Isa

Abu 'Isa ("son of Jesus") led a late Jewish Messianic movement in eighth-century Persia. Combining elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abu 'Isa's movement provoked sharp repression from Persian Muslim authorities. The dates of Abu 'Isa's movement are uncertain, but his followers believed long after he was gone that he would return from a mountain to lead them to the promised land.

April 9: Nanomachines Turn the World to Grey Goo

This month in 2000, Wired Magazine published "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", an editorial by co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy. Joy warned that the advent of nanobots could lead to the incorporation of all carbon-containing matter on earth in a runaway scenario once described by Eric Drexler as "Grey Goo".

April 8: Aleister Crowley's "Book of the Law"

On April 8, 1904, Aleister Crowley received The Book of the Law from his wife Rose, who entered a trance state during their honeymoon to the Great Pyramid. In proclaiming this book to the world, with its core Rabelaisian principle of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", Crowley believed he was ushering in a new world-age of the child, following earlier matristic and patristic periods.

Though Crowley took much amusement in calling himself "The Beast 666", and in implying he was the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi (see May 31), he was not a Satanist as is often claimed. But his messianic pretensions ran deep. At the end of his life - destitute in an English boarding house in on-again, off-again heroin addiction - Crowley claimed he had transcended the bonds of humanity and become a god.

April 7: Montanus

Montanism was an early-Christian splinter movement originating in the middle of the second century. Montanus, traveling with two prophetesses, preached against marriage - since, he said, God was about to lower a city from the sky into the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia. This city would be known as New Jerusalem, and become the center of a Christian new world order.

Though defended in some of his teachings by key church father Tertullian, Montanus was condemned as heretical in the year 177 by a synod presided over by the Bishop of Hierapolis. Though small, his movement persisted perhaps until the 6th century.

April 6: Good Friday, Albrecht Durer

Three dates to note for April 6:

--Celebrated as Good Friday by Christians, today is the day Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth was executed by the Romans in Jerusalem, probably in 33 CE. Though Jesus himself was a Jew, after his death his movement spread principally among Gentiles, who have been anticipating his imminent return ever since.

--In 793 Beatus, Abbot of Liebana, had claimed the world would end on Easter Sunday. On this Easter Eve his parishioners fasted and held a day-long vigil in anticipation of Jesus' return.

--In 1528, Albrecht Durer died. The famous German artist created an iconic series of woodcuts depicting the events of the Book of Revelation.