I have addressed this question many times here and have shown that not only is there no evidence for this, but it is indicative of how many pretribs white-knuckle their pretrib Tradition. To be sure, there are many pretribs and some of their most noted theologians who think this is a really bad argument for pretribulationism. Nevertheless, there are popular pretrib teachers who continue to promote this argument despite it having been refuted. Case in point is my public debate a couple of years ago with Tommy Ice where in the cross-examination Ice admitted that he was not able to provide a single document in all of the Koine period where the Greek noun apostasia ever means a “physical or spatial departure” (see the video clip in this link).
All this to say is that recently I have been asked to comment on another angle of the “apostasy refers to the rapture” argument that was promoted at a recent pretrib prophecy conference. I will be devoting an episode on this issue later this week on The Biblical Prophecy Program. Stay tuned!
