John Nelson Darby Quotes

Of the many, many thousands of serious students of the Bible throughout Christian history who pored over every word—from leading early Christian scholars such as Irenaeus in the second century; to Tertullian and Origen in the third; to Augustine in the fifth; to all the biblical scholars of the Middle Ages up to Aquinas; to the Reformation greats Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin; on to, well, everyone who studied or simply read or even just heard passages from the Bible—this idea of the rapture occurred to no one until John Nelson Darby came up with the idea in the early 1800s (as we will discuss in chapter 3).

No one in the church, in 1970, knew that the doctrine of pre-tribulation rapture had never been found in history before 1830, or that it was first promoted by an Irish minister named John Nelson Darby.

Most Christians are unaware that for the majority of Church history, most Christians did not believe that there were specific events in the Middle East that needed to take place before Christ would physically return to rapture his followers and judge the world. This teaching only became popularized in 1830—the same year that Joseph Smith introduced Mormonism—and was promoted by a man named John Nelson Darby in England as Dispensational Theology.