So Robert Gundry jumped in and bloggers got busy blogging and explaining why PE didn't really mean what the pretribs thought it did. I read a lot of that stuff. Much of it reminded me of the sorts of arguments supersessionists adopt towards biblical texts guaranteeing a future for Israel.
I've previously blogged on PE HERE. One persistent poster informed me that:
the problem is that you also have to take the text by pesudo ephraem in context, and by the lingo that is used in his day so a plain reading would not do...Yes, I've noticed that the "plain reading" never works (on any day) when it doesn't say what you want it to. Shame that. For the record, here's a sample of PE's "lingo":
Woe to those who desire to see the day of the Lord! For all the saints and elect of God are gathered, prior to the tribulation that is to come, and are taken to the Lord lest they see the confusion that is to overwhelm the world because of our sins… ~ Pseudo-Ephraem (c. 374-627)Sounds pretty straight forward to me but... Anyhow, Jeffrey got called a "false prophet" and the usual stuff. The Didache was dutifully rolled out, along with the obligatory Early Church Fathers. They had to quash PE so the customary line could continue to be spun: Darby, Scofield, Lindsey....whatever.
Then along came William C. Watson's Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism.
One may conveniently dismiss Pseudo-Ephraem. But Watson's book provides plenty of other pre-conflagration accounts - enough to keep pretrib skeptics busy for years inventing excuses as to why all those people didn't mean what they actually wrote.
I reviewed the book HERE
Of course, the book won't stop anti-pretrib polemicists from continuing to spin the same Darby-origin lines. It's one of those things critics just can't help doing.
