——>Once printing was available, better translations in the original languages were accessible, and folks had more freedom to read and meditate on the Word, suddenly there is an explosion of people who see the same - or very close to the same things.
Yeah, they all saw that the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH was the Antichrist power, like John Knox, in his first public sermon at St. Andrews, on Daniel 7 and the Little Horn.
The Antichrist power is the Papacy. Every Protestant Reformer knew it, because it’s the only answer based on bible prophecy.
The Little Horn/Antichrist power comes out of the 4th beast, PAGAN ROME, and lasts until Christ’s second coming.
The PTR theory is impossible if the Little Horn/Antichrist power is the Papacy. That’s why most who believe in the PTR refuse to discuss it. And that’s EXACTLY why the Jesuits came up with it. They also deny the teachings of the ECF’s on the Restrainer, who almost all saw as PAGAN ROME.
It will rise to be a great power after the fall of the pagan Roman Empire (after 476 AD)
It would uproot three of the ten kingdoms the Roman Empire collapsed into
It will be a geographically small nation (a little horn)
It will rule over many people, nations and tongues (it will be universal)
It will be headquartered in the city of seven hills, Rome
It will be a religio-political entity - a political city-state ruled by a priest-king
Its priest-king will make great and blasphemous claims
It will claim authority over all kings
It will claim its power to change the holy times and laws of God as its mark of authority
It will be an apostate Church that makes the nations drink her cup of apostate doctrine
It will be a “mother” Church, with apostate daughters coming from her
It will be a persecuting power, killing the faithful saints of Jesus Christ as heretics
It will hold power and authority for 1260 years following the fall of pagan Rome
It will suffer a deadly wound that will end 1260 years of dominance and persecution
It will be revived after the deadly wound, and all the world would wonder at its revival
https://www.who-is-the-antichrist.org/
Regarding Brother Dolcino:
Thomas Ice confronted me after our debate at BIOLA (February 2002) about Francis X. Gumerlock’s statement in his book The Day and the Hour (2000), a book published by American Vision and edited by me, that “The Dolcinites held to a pre-tribulation rapture theory similar to that of modern dispensationalism” ((Day and the Hour, 80)).
If Ice and other dispensationalists want to claim the Dolcinites as proto-dispensationalists, they can have them. According to Gumerlock, Brother Dolcino and his followers “believed that they were the only true church of the latter days…. Believing they were living in the last three and a half years of End-time tribulation, Dolcino and his followers, motivated by certain Bible passages, fled ‘Babylon’ for the mountains of Piedmont. In the mountains they armed themselves for conflict with the papal forces of Clement V, in 1307 a bloodbath ensued in which four hundred of them were killed. Dolcino was burned at the stake.” ((Day and the Hour, 80)).
If Dolcino believed in a pre-trib rapture, why would he and his followers escape to the mountains and arm themselves?
As far as I can tell, Dolcino does not make a biblical argument for his views.
There are more problems with using Dolcino’s views to support a pre-trib rapture. The fourteenth-century text, The History of Brother Dolcino, “was composed in 1316 by an anonymous source,” ((James F. Stitzinger, “The Rapture in Twenty Centuries of Biblical Interpretation,” TMSJ 13/2 (Fall 2002), 159. See Francis X. Gumerlock, “A Rapture Citation in the Fourteenth Century,” Bibliotheca Sacra 159 (July-September 2002), 354–355.)) meaning that this text was not written by Dolcino. The original letters of Dolcino are not in existence.
Dolcino and his Apostolic Brethren were a violent cult hell bent on the purification of the Roman Catholic Church through violence that ended in their destruction. ((Gian Luca Potesta, “Radical Apocalyptic Movements in the Late Middle Ages,” The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, eds. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2003), 300–302.))
Dolcino justified the actions of his followers by appealing to Titus 1:15: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted.” “As reported by the Anonymous Synchronous, Dolcino maintained “[…] that it was legitimate for him and his followers to hang, behead, […] people who obey … the Roman church and burn down, destroy, […] because they were acting to redeem them and thus without sin.”
Even after all that we know of Dolcino and his cult, Thomas Ice still wants to claim him as someone who taught a pre-trib rapture before Darby.
This is typical of dispensationalists who will enter almost any source into evidence if it can be used to prop up their system.
https://americanvision.org/22451/is-the-pre-tribulation-rapture-found-before-the-19th-century/
Raptured or not raptured? That is the
question. David Malcolm Bennett
David Bennett is currently doing doctoral research on the origins of Left Behind eschatology, through the University of Queensland.
KEY WORDS: Ephraem, Pseudo-Ephraem, Fra Doleino, rapture, tribulation, ‘Left Behind’, millennium.
https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eq/2008-2_143.pdf