Seminary student here, this is something I felt moved to talk about because I know, eschatology can cause a lot of trauma- one of my best friends had to deal with apocalypticist parents, and it was as destructive as you would expect.
Prior to 1830, no recognized church preached the rapture.
The Gospels themselves do not directly connect the return of Christ and the following judgement, with references to being brought up in the clouds imagery evoked by Thessalonians. Paul is a separate voice from Jesus, and is subject to the time-sensitive context of his correspondence, and pseudepigraphic writings (an interesting rabbit hole on the ancient world and philosophical tutelage.)
The rapture is not accepted by the majority of global Christianity- it is not canonized by the Catholic Church, nor recognized by Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, etc. It is primarily an American idea aligned with evangelical doctrine. At the bottom of this post I'll include a bit about premillennialism an post postmillennialism to give you a bit of a cheat sheet on church history, they're linked to the rapture but, I'll go ahead and get to the point.
The "rapture" was an oral doctrine born in the 1800s and championed by American evangelical Dwight L. Moody; it was given credibility by him and by the fact that the Scofield Reference Bible featured one reference to it, when it was published in 1909. Scofield was a confederate veteran and who was a dispensationalist, a weird numerologic system of dividing human history into seven pre-determined ages and floating a lot of ideas about zionism which I'll leave at the door. The only place the Scofield Reference Bible mentions the rapture is in a passage heading, the little descriptive sentence at the start of a section to explain what it is; where the word of Christ is preceded by the label "Jesus predicts the rapture." Scofield also inserted his own commentaries through scriptures in his Reference Bible, on his theology, and his own interpretations in the style of well, a seminary student. And trust me, that is not going to hold up, I speak from experience.
Scofield got the idea of the rapture from Moody. Moody got the idea of the rapture from a British evangelical preacher named John Nelson Darby, who also invented dispensationalism. His source for rapture theology is greatly debated and can't be determined. Sometimes it's said to be from a 15-year-old girl who had visions that Darby himself reported as "demonic" or in general error theologically, but some of his writings on it predate that by a few years, so it seems, Darby is his own source. He either says he got it from Special Revelation (IE, a secret directly given to him ala, which is what Joseph Smith said when he founded Mormonism, if you are unfamiliar with the term) or, that while recovering from an injury, he had time to come to the conclusion of the rapture in his own interpretation of scripture.
I would recommend reading up on Premillennialism/ Postmillennialism because that is the debate that the concept of the rapture is really rooted in. Up until WWI-ish, it was a debate in the 18th to 20th century on if we were before, in, or after the 1000-year reign of Christ spoken of in Revelations; boiling down to this:
Premillenialist = the world will keep getting worse until Christ comes back
Postmillenialist = the world will keep getting better until Christ comes back
Amillenialism = maybe there isn't a thousand-year reign of the righteous alongside Jesus?
...And that was basically it. two world wars, the great depression, and some other things made postmillenialism fade away because we came to terms with the fact life was, still rough.
and some further reading. :)
https://jmichaelrios.wordpress.com/2016/06/30 /scofields-abominable-study-bible/
https://www.knowingjesusministries.co/articles/is -the-rapture-taught-in-the-bible/
Thanks for this. Through my own faith journey, I believe in ascension of spirit, which isn't bodily resurrection and I'm not sure how it made it into the creeds. Can you shine any light on that?