1) Ephraem of Syria spoke in writings we KNOW are his (this one is not one of those) and clearly taught a post-tribulation resurrection and translation of all Believers. See Gundry's "First the Antichrist" pages 167 and 168 for details.
2) Grant Jeffrey has by his own admission gone "looking" for evidence. The problem is, he announced before that he found clear and unambiguous evidence for a pre-trib rapture in the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, Hippolytus, Cyprian, and Victorinus. If I have to, I can google this up, but it has been demonstrated clearly that Jeffrey has been....., lets just say hes is "creatively zealous" in his citations of these texts, to the point of deliberately pulling out selective quotes from these works in an attempt to make them say what they clearly do NOT say. We need an honest broker of info on this, and Grant Jeffrey is not someone I trust.
3) Pseudo-epahraem is just that, Pseudo. There is no evidence that Ephraem wrote it. Rather, what we have is the writing of some person (we have no idea who), probably a couple of hundred years after Ephraem's death, which survived with a mess of textual problems, written in Latin. The end. All the evidence we have is that it was NOT written by Ephraem, including textual, testimonial, and theological.
4) When you actually examine even the sermon itself, it clearly states that the coming of Christ lacked only ONE more sign, which was the coming of the evil one and the consequent great tribulation, thus erasing the possibility of a coming of Christ BEFORE a great tribulation. This is just more of Grant Jeffries monkey business with patristic writings, only this time he doesn't get a patristic writer, but a pseudo patristic. The sermon cannot be made to teach what it does not teach by lifting out one line from it.
5)In closing, we have this gem: "Finally, the Byzantine scholar Paul Alexander clearly believed that Pseudo-Ephraem was teaching what we call today a pre-trib rapture." One can only characterize as either appalling ignorance of Paul Alexander or deliberate misrepresentation. Here is a direct quote from Paul Alexander's teaching on the eschatology of pseudo-Ephraem.
1. Attack of nations of war 212.13-213.17
2. Surrender of the Empire 214.1
3. appearance of the deception of abomination 214.4
4. Blessings of Moses and Jacob on Dan 214.6
5. the "adolescence and maturation" of the person of evil 216.2,11
6. Sitting in the Jewish Temple 217.1
7. the great tribulation of three and a half years 217.14
8. Mission of Enoch and Elijah 219.10
9. Second Coming of Christ and punishment of the Antichrist 220.2"
[Alexander, Paul J., The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp. 218,219]
The most cursory look at this will show that Paul Alexander did NOT believe that pseudo-Ephraem taught a pre trib coming of Jesus. It is either dishonest or ignorant for Ice to claim otherwise.
I may be DEAD WRONG about the rapture, but the way to demonstrate support in the writings of the early church fathers for such a doctrine is not to engage in the kind of either surface reading or dishonesty (I like to give professing believers the benefit of the doubt before hurling around accusations like this, but it is hard to spin in in Jeffries favor on these) as Grant Jeffries, and consequently Thomas Ice offers us. Like I said, I have to pass on this one.
that's the first intelligent response I have seen regarding pseudo Ephraim! Thanks!
I will read your post more closely, but some of the sources you cited I never heard of and will have to search for