"Recycled Rapture
Are you familiar with this End Times publishing success story? A “Bible prophecy expert” writes a gripping novel about the earth’s final days, opening with the Rapture and an airplane flight and continuing on into the Tribulation period. It features a decent but initially unbelieving reporter, a grief-stricken husband whose wife has been raptured while he and his daughter have been “left behind,” a corrupt Catholic leader who becomes the head of a one-world religion, and a charming but thoroughly evil global dictator, the Antichrist. Published by Tyndale, it sells slowly at first but eventually becomes a bestseller.
The Left Behind books by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins? Nope––guess again.
The apocalyptic novel is Salem Kirban’s 666, originally published by Kirban in 1970, then published by Tyndale a few years later and finally republished in 1998 by AMG Publishers. It was the first and perhaps only Rapture novel of the 1970s and, according to its cover, sold over 500,000 copies in its first ten printings. Kirban’s novel is based on the same sort of over-the-top dispensationalism popularized by Hal Lindsey (whose thirty-million-seller The Late Great Planet Earth was also published in 1970). It is poorly written, stereotypically anti-Catholic (discourses on the evils of Romanism are abundant), and sometimes unintentionally funny (the Pope, one character lectures, is able to “beautify . . . saints”). Kirban, a former Vietnam War correspondent, went on to write a number of books on Bible prophecy and the End Times, including his own “reference Bible.”
Tim Lahaye also has a Prophecy Study Bible, recently published also by AMG Publishers. Publishing a “reference” or “prophecy study” Bible in the mold of Cyrus I. Scofield’s influential Reference Bible is apparently a sign that an author has reached expert status in the lucrative and increasingly competitive world of biblical prophecy—or, more precisely, of interpreting what the Bible supposedly states about the future. There is plenty of jockeying for position at the top of the Rapture literary heap, as a visit to your local Christian bookstore will confirm.
Which brings us back to the plot of Lahaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind story (now eight books in length and heading for a total of twelve) and Kirban’s 666. They are remarkably similar, as this comparison shows:"…
Entire article at
Catholic.com:
archive.catholic.com/thisrock/2001/0109fea3.asp
God bless!