While reading a volume on prophecy and eschatology in the history of the USA, one encountered the following, showing that the LDS Church and other groups belonging to the broad “Mormon” restorationst movement are not the only ones who claim to have 12 Apostles, similar to the primitive Church:
John Darby and the Rise of Dispensationalism
While patriotic popularizers found a glorious destiny for the United States in prophecy, evangelical ministers and Bible scholars (and soon a great many ordinary believers) responded to a very different interpretive approach, which originated in Great Britain in the 1820s. The key figures were Edward Irving, Henry Drummond, and John Darby. Irving, a minister of a Scotch Presbyterian chapel in London in the early 1820s, won a following for his charismatic preaching, sharp social criticism, and proclamation of Christ’s imminent return He elaborated his eschatological views in an 1828 Edinburgh lecture series on John’s Apocalypse. Excommunicated by the London presbytery in 1830 for heresy (he taught that Jesus’ earthly nature was sinful), Irving continued to preach by encouraging glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) as one of the “signs and wonders” foretold by Jesus as a harbinger of the last days.
In 1835 Irving’s followers organized the Catholic Apostolic Church, led by twelve apostles, of whom at least one was expected to be alive at the Seconding Coming. (When the last of the original twelve died at an advanced age in 1901, the sect died out.) (Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture [Studies in Cultural History; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1992], 86-87)
