Rapture or Second Coming? Why the difference matters when reading this timeline

People use "Rapture" and "Second Coming" as if they meant the same thing. In the history of date-setting they often do not, and treating them as one thing can make the record look tidier than it is.

The words

The Second Coming is the return of Christ, a belief shared by almost all Christian traditions. The Rapture is a more specific idea: the "catching up" of living believers to meet Christ, described in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 (KJV): "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air."

The English word "rapture" comes from the Latin verb rapiemur in the Vulgate translation of that verse. The word was used in theology for many centuries before it took on its current popular sense.

Several views among Christians

Christians who accept the Rapture do not agree on when it happens in relation to a period of trial called the tribulation. Three of the main views are:

• Pre-tribulation: believers are taken before the tribulation, and Christ returns visibly later.
• Mid-tribulation or post-tribulation: believers are taken during or after the tribulation, in a single return.
• No separate Rapture: the catching up described in 1 Thessalonians 4 is part of one visible return of Christ.

This site does not endorse any of these views. It records predictions and notes which of them each author held where the sources say.

Where the pre-tribulation idea comes from

Historians trace the pre-tribulation Rapture in its modern form to the 1830s. John Nelson Darby, a leader among the Plymouth Brethren, taught it as part of a system called dispensationalism. A prophetic utterance reported by a young Scottish woman, Margaret MacDonald, in 1830 is sometimes cited as an earlier source. Historians disagree about how much it influenced Darby.

The view spread widely in the United States through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), and then through twentieth-century prophecy books and films. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) was a major step in its popularization, and the Left Behind novels of the 1990s extended it further.

Why this matters for the timeline

William Miller, the best-known date-setter of the nineteenth century, taught that Christ would return visibly to cleanse the earth. His 1844 entry is a Second Coming prediction. The pre-tribulation Rapture as a separate event was not part of his teaching.

Predictions from the late twentieth century onward, such as Whisenant's 1988 booklet, use the language of the Rapture in the pre-tribulation sense. Some others, such as the Watch Tower dates, rest on a different framework: they speak of an invisible presence of Christ and do not use the Rapture concept.

Each entry in this timeline says which framework applies, because it affects what was being predicted and what would count as the event happening.

What this site does and does not claim

The site does not teach a Rapture timing and does not predict one. It reports what others predicted. The one thing it says about the future is what Matthew 24:36 says: no one knows the day or hour.