I got this from http://theologyreview.com/index.php?topic=7011.0 I consider it the clearest and most thorough explanation I have heard to date of why evangelicals believe what they believe about the Endtime.
1. The Jesuits created the modern system of dispensational futurism. Although the Jesuits derived certain aspects of this myth from “futuristic elements” embedded in the teachings of the early church fathers, the evidence is clear that they elaborated the elements of this myth from the early church fathers as a tool to destroy and counter the Protestant Reformation by attempting to lift the heat off the Papacy as the identity of Antichrist.
2. The theological elements of Futurism are derived from the extra-biblical writings, such as: The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Sibylline Oracles, Baruch, 1st and 2nd Esdras, T. Levi, The Ascension of Isaiah, etc. etc.
3. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha writings were written by Hellenistic Jews. These Jews mixed Babylonian, Persian, and Greek paganism with Judaism.
4. Long before the first advent of Christ, mystical Jews believed that an anti-messiah would come and oppose the Messiah; the anti-messiah was called “Beliar”; and he was believed to be the devil incarnate in human form.
5. The early Church Fathers such as Ireneaus, Hippolytus, Apollinaris and others, borrowed Futurist elements from these mythical, pseudepigraphal writings, which served to shape their views of end-time events.
6. The Jesuits created Futurism from the Beliar myth found in these writings, indicating that modern Dispensational Futurist theology is nothing more than pagan mythology convoluted around real scripture.
7. The Protestants of the Reformation era knew about this fable, and Protestants separated the real Bible from the extra-Biblical writings.
8. When the Protestants studied the Bible without the fables of the Catholic Church fathers – the Beliar myth – they clearly identified the Papacy as the Antichrist.
9. Modern Protestant Churches the world over have abandoned the Protestant Reformation, and they now teach Catholic theology from the Council of Trent which commenced in 1545 A.D. The Jesuit Cardinals Francisco Ribera (1537-1591) and Robert Bellarmino (1542-1621) in the 16th and 17th centuries were foremost at setting out to accomplish this Protestant destroying task in scraping every bit of knowledge they could formulate from the Early Church Fathers to concoct and repackage the fantastical Jesuit scheme of Futurism. Jesuit Cardinal Manuel de Lacunza in the early 19th century, also an advocate of Futurism, deliberately attempted to take the pressure off the papacy by proposing that the Antichrist was still off in the future, and also laid the foundation for much of modern-day dispensational ideology. On the other hand, the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Alcazar (1554-1613) in the 16th and 17th century was set to the task of concocting the Preterist scheme. Both schemes blossomed about the same time and successfully got the “heat” off the Papacy from detection of Antichrist. It took about 300 years before the Protestant world allowed itself to become infected by these two deadly viruses. Dr. Maitland, James H. Todd, Henry Newman (who later became a Catholic Cardinal after accepting Futurism), Irving, and later Darby and Scofield all came to accept major elements of Ribera’s and Bellarmine’s fantastical views of a singled-out, future, one-man Antichrist (stemming from the Beliar myth that comes from Persian dualism and Zoroastrianism) as well as the incredible disjointed “gap” theory by which the Jesuits adopted from Hippolytus’ erroneous construing of the first 69 units, or weeks of years, as reaching from the first year of Cyrus (or Darius the Mede) to the incarnation of Christ–a chronological impossibility without elongating the period. This “faulty reasoning” of Hippolytus inspired modern Futurism’s “gap” theory.
10. Dispensationalism is simply another branch of Catholicism—developed by the Jesuits in the Counter Reformation. After all is said and done, the Roman Catholic Jesuits must still be identified as being responsible for concocting and inventing the Futurist schemes of prophetic interpretation seen so rampant today in the Protestant and Evangelical world. Why? Because they concocted their Futurist interpretations based on outdated futuristic elements embedded in the teachings of the Church Fathers who thought the world would end no later than AD 500, not to mention many of their Futuristic views were shaped through the lenses of the extra-Biblical, Psuedepigraphal books written by uninspired authors. After the passing of some 1000 years, the Protestant Reformers were able to look back in retrospect comparing history with prophecy and were clearly able to see the manifestation of Antichrist and that Little Horn of Daniel 7 in the Roman Church State.
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