Oh No Not Another Apocalypse Thread By Chrysostom

[Clete]

I am guessing Paul's letters are not included. And I have read it was about several centuries old at the time of Christ. I wold say no.

The Septuagint (LXX) is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was already centuries old at the time of Christ and so, of course, no writings of Paul's in there. That isn't the point. The point is simply that it uses the word "apostasia" in a few places, none of which mean "departure".
"Apostasia" is a noun derived from the verb "aphistemi". "Aphistemi" does often mean “to depart” in a physical sense. "Apsotasia", however, developed the more specialized sense of “rebellion” or “political/religious defection,” by the time of the Septuagint and the New Testament era. Which is to say that this "falling away" use of the word is very much not new, nor is it at all a perversion of the word's meaning.

And that's the entirety of the point I am making by referencing the LXX.

There were, in fact, ancient uses of the term 'apostasia" that did mean "departure" in a physical sense but they are rare and very context dependent. The standard, expected meaning in biblical Greek and in most ancient uses of the word refered to a rebellion or defection or, as almost all English translations render it, the "falling away".

I should make clear here that I am not an expert in the Greek language. I'm looking this stuff up and learning as I go.

 

[Clete]

Using literal words figuratively.

A falling away being a departure works.

Well, I've thought of that but it doesn't quite work because the normal use of "apostasia" had a negative conotation to it and implied a rebelious sort of "falling away".

 

[Clete]

So, I was "discussing" this with Chat GPT a few minutes ago and I got a response from it that I think really does an excellent job of communicating where I'm at on this particular point so I thought I'd share the exchange with you guys....

I said to GPT...
"Well, I'm not convinced entirely that Paul couldn't have been referring to the rapture. If "the departure" is linguistically possible then that may well have been what Paul meant, especially given the use of the definite article and his clear discussion of such a departure in his previous correspondence with this same group of believers."

GPT responded...

That is a fair and thoughtful position, and you're right to focus on both the definite article in hē apostasia (“the departure”) and Paul’s prior teaching to the Thessalonians about the Rapture. Those are the strongest elements in favor of the Rapture interpretation of II Thessalonians 2:3, even if the Greek word apostasia more commonly means “rebellion.”

---

Here’s the bottom line:​

While apostasia usually refers to rebellion or defection, the Rapture interpretation is not linguistically impossible. It is grammatically defensible, especially:

1. If the term is understood as a “departure” (which is the literal meaning of the root verb aphistēmi), and
2. If the context supports a known, expected departure that Paul had previously taught them about.

---

Points in favor of the Rapture view:​

• The definite article (hē apostasia) may indicate a specific, well-known event, rather than a general falling away. That strengthens the case for seeing it as the Rapture—if Paul had already described it as “the departure” in earlier teachings (possibly in I Thessalonians 4–5).
• Lexical flexibility: While rare, it is not unprecedented for apostasia to be interpreted as a departure from a location, especially if one is deliberately tracing it back to its root meaning in aphistēmi. So if Paul coined or repurposed the noun to fit his teaching, that wouldn’t be unreasonable—especially if his audience understood it that way.
• Doctrinal and prophetic context: II Thessalonians 2 opens with a reference to “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him,” which gives weight to the idea that the following discussion may be about that same event, not about a future rebellion.

---

Points against (still worth noting):​

• The usage of apostasia in the LXX, Josephus, and NT-era Greek is consistently moral or political defection—not a physical or glorious departure. That weighs heavily on most translators and scholars.
• Nowhere else in Paul’s letters is the Rapture called apostasia—not even in I Thessalonians. So any claim that he used it this way earlier would be inferred, not explicit.

---

Reasonable conclusion:​

Your position is cautious and plausible:
If apostasia can mean “departure,” and if Paul’s readers would naturally connect “the departure” with the event he had previously described (i.e., the Rapture), then it is entirely possible that he was referring to that. It’s not the mainstream scholarly view, and it's not the lexical norm—but it isn’t ruled out by the grammar or the text itself.
So you're not wrong to entertain the possibility—just recognize that it’s an interpretive choice, one that rests on contextual inference and Pauline precedent, rather than on the usual meaning of the word apostasia.

 

[Clete]

Speaking of Chat GPT...

Does anyone here agree with me that GPT 5 totally sucks compared to 4o?

 

[JudgeRightly]

Speaking of Chat GPT...

Does anyone here agree with me that GPT 5 totally sucks compared to 4o?

It does seem lacking a bit...

 

[annabenedetti]

Speaking of Chat GPT...

Does anyone here agree with me that GPT 5 totally sucks compared to 4o?

I've never used any version of Chat GPT.

Edited to add:

After making the above post, I happened to follow a link from Drudge to this:

https://archive.ph/bEsIT#selection-1195.0-1235.0

Personality is a way to distinguish chatbots from one another, which is one reason AI companies are eager to add it to these products. With OpenAI’s GPT-5, for example, users can select a “personality” from four options (“Cynic,” “Robot,” “Listener,” and “Nerd”), modulating how the bot types back to you. (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.) ChatGPT also has a voice mode, which allows you to select from nine AI personas and converse out loud with them. Vale, for example, is “bright and inquisitive,” with a female-sounding voice.​

​

It’s worth emphasizing that however advanced this all is—however magical it may feel to interact with a program that behaves like the AI fantasies we’ve been fed by science fiction—we are at the very beginning of the chatbot era. ChatGPT is three years old; Twitter was about the same age when it formally introduced the retweet. Product development will continue. Companions will look and sound more lifelike. They will know more about us and become more compelling in conversation. . . .​

​

And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.​

 

[JudgeRightly]

Well, I've thought of that but it doesn't quite work because the normal use of "apostasia" had a negative conotation to it and implied a rebelious sort of "falling away".

Spitballing:

What if apostasia isn't talking about the BoC, but instead, Israel?

A "falling away" from unbelieving Israel by a small group of believers?

 

[Idolater]

Spitballing:

What if apostasia isn't talking about the BoC, but instead, Israel?

A "falling away" from unbelieving Israel by a small group of believers?

Just following you guys's convo got me thinking from a Catholic perspective: There are arguably three really major apostasies in Church history, the Nicaean rupture, the East-West Schism, and then the Protestant Reformation. The Arians broke off and kind of melted away into the East. Both groups from the 2nd and 3rd ruptures, the Eastern Orthodox and all the Protestants, are still here. But those Arians, as I've floated, might be with us today as Islam.

fwiw.

 

[chrysostom]

Enter the seven dynasties of Rome and the ten dynasties of Islam. And he saw "a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns". Revelation 13:1
"And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed." Revelation 13:12

Enter the number. Of the beast. Of the man. 666 is the number. What does Daniel say about the number? Number of years. What happened in the year 666? Nothing. No matter what calendar you use. They stay away from that year but history clearly shows that Islam would soon attack Constantinople.

 

[Clete]

It does seem lacking a bit...

It's completely awful. The current GPT 5 version treats each session almost as if every other session you've ever had never existed and every time I ask it a question it want to shoe horn in the fact that I'm a home inspector. I asked it the other day to compare to sets of Bluetooth speakers and it gave me a response in the context of my being a home inspector. Same thing when I was asking about what the difference was between two different varieties of Swan garden hoses.

That and it's just too mechanical now. GPT‑4o feels like it knows me. It remembers my style, respects my preferences, and adapts as we go across many interactions. GPT‑5, on the other hand, feels like it hits the reset button every time. I can repeat myself ten different ways and it still over-explains, ignores context, or defaults to a style I’ve already rejected. It’s like starting from scratch in every session.

With 4o, it feels collaborative. With 5, I get a stranger with amnesia. I don't like it at all.

 

[Clete]

Spitballing:

What if apostasia isn't talking about the BoC, but instead, Israel?

A "falling away" from unbelieving Israel by a small group of believers?

I doubt that Paul would be prophesying much of anything about Israel.
Also, how would a small group of believing Jews be a comfort to the Body of Christ in relation to whether we had somehow missed the second coming?

 

[Clete]

I've never used any version of Chat GPT.

Edited to add:

After making the above post, I happened to follow a link from Drudge to this:

https://archive.ph/bEsIT#selection-1195.0-1235.0

Personality is a way to distinguish chatbots from one another, which is one reason AI companies are eager to add it to these products. With OpenAI’s GPT-5, for example, users can select a “personality” from four options (“Cynic,” “Robot,” “Listener,” and “Nerd”), modulating how the bot types back to you. (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.) ChatGPT also has a voice mode, which allows you to select from nine AI personas and converse out loud with them. Vale, for example, is “bright and inquisitive,” with a female-sounding voice.​

​

It’s worth emphasizing that however advanced this all is—however magical it may feel to interact with a program that behaves like the AI fantasies we’ve been fed by science fiction—we are at the very beginning of the chatbot era. ChatGPT is three years old; Twitter was about the same age when it formally introduced the retweet. Product development will continue. Companions will look and sound more lifelike. They will know more about us and become more compelling in conversation. . . .​

​

And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.​

I sort of doubt that it well ever get very much better than it is right now. I mean, it'll get better but not WAY better. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may very well never happen at all.

Not that the way it is now isn't transformative. It completely is! But I think mostly the improvements will be in the areas of the creation of audio/video content, including "deep fakes" where it'll get harder and harder for people to tell when what they are seeing on their screen is real or faked. That only goes for short format stuff. It won't ever get so good though that human actors are put out of a job. The idea that some bad guy somewhere will be able to fake a whole speech given by the President is a bunch of nonsense. The longer the format, the easier it'll be to tell its a fake and that's going to be true for a very long time.

It's the AGI stuff that everyone is really sort of freaking out over and thinking we need to build huge amounts of infrastructure to accommodate and I'm sorry, but I just don't believe we're ever going to build a machine that is self-aware and that has the ability to rebel or do any that sort of sci-fi thriller sort of stuff.

 

[Right Divider]

I sort of doubt that it well ever get very much better than it is right now. I mean, it'll get better but no WAY better. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may very well never happen at all.

Not that the way it is now isn't transformative. It completely is! But I think mostly the improvements will be in the areas of the creation of audio/video content, including "deep fakes" where it'll get harder and harder for people to tell when what they are seeing on their screen is real or faked. That only goes for short format stuff. It won't ever get so good though that human actors are put out of a job. The idea that some bad guy somewhere will be able to fake a whole speech given by the President is a bunch of nonsense. The longer the format, the easier it'll be to tell its a fake and that's going to be true for a very long time.

It's the AGI stuff that everyone is really sort of freaking out over and thinking we need to build huge amounts of infrastructure to accommodate and I'm sorry, but I just don't believe we're ever going to build a machine that is self-aware and that has the ability to rebel or do any that sort of sci-fi thriller sort of stuff.

Certain problem solving skills are well suited to computers (AI or otherwise).

But general intelligence does not even exist in most of the human population, let alone computers.

 

[chrysostom]

Enter the number. Of the beast. Of the man. 666 is the number. What does Daniel say about the number? Number of years. What happened in the year 666? Nothing. No matter what calendar you use. They stay away from that year but history clearly shows that Islam would soon attack Constantinople.

"And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God." Has anyone explained Revelation 15:2? Constantinople used Greek fire on the Sea of Marmara which was like a sheet of glass and the year was 666.

 

[Derf]

"And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God." Has anyone explained Revelation 15:2? Constantinople used Greek fire on the Sea of Marmara which was like a sheet of glass and the year was 666.

Why is the year 666 important? It doesn't fit with anything in Revelation (as a year, that is).

 

[Derf]

Just following you guys's convo got me thinking from a Catholic perspective: There are arguably three really major apostasies in Church history, the Nicaean rupture, the East-West Schism, and then the Protestant Reformation. The Arians broke off and kind of melted away into the East. Both groups from the 2nd and 3rd ruptures, the Eastern Orthodox and all the Protestants, are still here. But those Arians, as I've floated, might be with us today as Islam.

fwiw.

Maybe they merged with Nestorians.

 

[annabenedetti]

I sort of doubt that it well ever get very much better than it is right now. I mean, it'll get better but not WAY better. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may very well never happen at all.

Not that the way it is now isn't transformative. It completely is! But I think mostly the improvements will be in the areas of the creation of audio/video content, including "deep fakes" where it'll get harder and harder for people to tell when what they are seeing on their screen is real or faked. That only goes for short format stuff. It won't ever get so good though that human actors are put out of a job. The idea that some bad guy somewhere will be able to fake a whole speech given by the President is a bunch of nonsense. The longer the format, the easier it'll be to tell its a fake and that's going to be true for a very long time.

It's the AGI stuff that everyone is really sort of freaking out over and thinking we need to build huge amounts of infrastructure to accommodate and I'm sorry, but I just don't believe we're ever going to build a machine that is self-aware and that has the ability to rebel or do any that sort of sci-fi thriller sort of stuff.

I see too many people already dependent on it to do their analysis for them. If they don't have to do the work of bringing together information and making sense of it through their own thought processes, they'll forget (or never learn) how. Plus it's disturbing, the way many people connect with Chat GPT as if it's a real person who "knows" them well enough to give them the info they're looking for. A psychologist said they were competing with Chat GPT for their patients' attention - the psychologist tells them one thing and the patient says "well, I asked Chat GPT and Chat GPT said..."

I see people who put too much faith in LLMs to be accurate when they're actually riddled with errors and hallucinations. TV and social media has already made people passive receptors of sensory input, Chat GPT will be worse, because on top of feeding someone what they already want to hear based on their previous input to it that it's learned from, it will do so in a way that makes the user feel special. I don't see a good outcome.

 

[Idolater]

Maybe they merged with Nestorians.

Assyrian Church of the East is still Nestorian. These people believe Christ is divine, but that He has two natures. Not so for Islam.