That is just absolutely amazing. The vulture language is definitely not something good. Read REvelation 19 to see what the vultures actually mean, they are eating the corpses of the people, not good, you dont want to be taken to that supper.
Read the text itself before you attempt to use another text to interpret it. It is a parable answer to their question using something familiar to nature. Jesus describes bird circling to a meeting place in the sky not on the ground and you have no authority to change his description.
There is no reason to assume that the use of vulture makes it automatically an allegory of evil people. It is more like a parable not an allegory. It is using something familiar from nature, which is the scene of birds (like buzzards) that circle in the sky in greater and greater numbers making quite a spectacle from the ground if you've ever witnessed it. The picture he is painting is not of them on the ground, but of the act of them gathering over a body long before they actually land.
36Two
men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
37And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body
is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.
The people will be gathered to one location like when vultures circle in the sky when a body is on the ground. This natural phenomenon was familiar to them. It may be to you also. In some places you can lay still in a field and watch as vultures slowly circled high overhead. First one, then two then many all coming from different locations but gathering in the sky because they think there is a body below. Then after an hour you get up and walk away and they disband.
The text says he asked "where" meaning Where will they be taken too. And the answer he gets is a parable about vultures gathering in the sky. If you want to find another text that matches this it is more likely the one that says we will meet in the clouds in the air. This also paints a picture of a visible gathering in the sky.
So the question is, Was Jesus referring to vultures gathering in a circle in the sky because a body is spotted on the ground as a parable of something familiar in nature to answer the question where these taken will go next? Such as the believers meeting Jesus in the sky, Or was he saying that everyone in the world who is taken will be taken from their location, all over the world and deposited into some location in the Middle East to be eaten by birds on the ground?
If you prefer the second option I can't understand why as it makes no sense to me.
Since the raptured saints meet with the risen dead in Christ in the air, in the clouds it seems to me that the natural phenomenon of circling vultures that we have all seen is the answer to their question. That is what it will look like when the rapture occurs. Not a secret disappearing as some have imagined but a physical glorification of transfiguration and shining and then a gathering to a central point in the sky that people will observer from the ground. That central location will be where Christ is. The people on the ground looking at it will be those left behind.
This might not be the correct interpretation but it makes more sense to me than the idea that those taken are deposited to the Middle east to be eaten by vultures on the ground. That does not work at all.
I think that if you study this text you will find that most agree that Jesus was talking about the way vultures circle in the sky.
I doubt one could read two or three commentaries by textual experts and not discover that the circling in the sky of the vultures who find a body is the picture he is painting. Now what you think that means if you don't think it means the rapture is to be discussed, but the fact that Jesus was talking about circling birds in the sky is fairly agreed upon by the experts.
Why don't people use commentaries. It would avoid so many of the most obvious mistakes so that they can focus on the really challenging issues.
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