Where Did the Term Rapture Come From?
All Christians up until the 1830s believed in basically the same things about the second coming of Christ. During the 1830s Margaret Macdonald, a Scottish member of a sect known as the Irvingites, made the first claim that there would be a trance (or rapture) and the faithful would be gathered to Christ before the period of persecution. The Protestant leader John Nelson Darby picked up this view. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield picked up Darbys views and placed them in the footnotes of his Schofield Reference Bible. This Bible was widely used in England and America and many who read it readily accepted the idea of rapture. Since that time other views on rapture have started, but all are still based on the notion of the rapture itself.
