Annex DDetailed matrix: Missler, MacArthur and Smith on 37 placements
The full comparison that underlies the three pretribulational lanes: one row per timeline placement, a status chip and a one-line position for each teacher, and, in the expanded row, the scoring rationale, a short quotation where one was found, and links to the sermon, commentary or article the position came from. Scores here are per placement; the fourteen-criterion ranking in Part III condenses them.
Matrix: 37 placements × 3 teachers (click a row label for reasoning and sources)
| Timeline placement | Chuck Missler | John MacArthur | Chuck Smith |
|---|
The three teachers in profile
Where the three disagree with each other
| Question | Missler | MacArthur | Smith |
|---|
Where their disagreements with the text-only reading come from
Nearly every red cell in the matrix traces back to one decision. The three men hold that the church is removed before Daniel’s seventieth week begins. The text-only reading could not reach that, because 2 Thessalonians 2:1–3 orders “our being gathered together to him” after the rebellion and the revealing of the man of lawlessness, and Matthew 24:29–31 puts the trumpet and the gathering of the elect “immediately after the tribulation.” All three handle those two passages the same way: the gathering of Matthew 24:31 is Israel or the tribulation’s elect, not the church, and in 2 Thessalonians 2 it is the day of the Lord, not the gathering, that must wait for the man of sin. Once that move is made, the resurrection of believers, the judgment seat, the marriage supper (for Missler) and the “last trumpet” all leave the return window and move to a point before −1,260 that the timeline has no event for.
The second source is structural and changes almost nothing on the axis. The timeline read Revelation’s seals, trumpets and bowls as overlapping views because each seventh item describes the same final earthquake. All three men read them as telescoping. Yet their day-placements still fall inside the timeline’s ranges, since both readings put the trumpets and bowls in the second half of the week and the bowls at its end. The third source is the opposite problem: where the timeline left an event unanchored because the text gives no number, the three men anchored it from inference (Ezekiel 38–39, the 30 and 45 extra days, the identity of the witnesses). Those cells are amber, not red, because the text allows the placement; it just does not require it.