(July 19, 1731 – c. June 18, 1801) was a Jesuit priest who used the pseudonym Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra in his main work on the interpretation of the prophecies of the Bible, which was entitled The Coming of the Messiah in Majesty and Glory.

The son of Carlos de Lacunza Ziaurris and Josefa Díaz Durán,[1] wealthy merchants engaged in colonial trade between Lima and Chile, Manuel entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1747.

After the usual Jesuit training he was ordained to the priesthood in 1766 but began his service as a teacher of grammar in the es:Universidad Pontificia Colegio Máximo de San Miguel in the Chilean capital, where he gained moderate fame as a pulpit orator.

[3] In 1773 Lacunza received another blow when, by the bull "Dominus ac Redemptor", the pope dissolved the Jesuit order in return for territorial concessions by France and Spain who were threatening the Papal States, the so-called "Patrimony of St Peter".

Combined with the theological and Biblical study he had undertaken, this personal trauma led Lacunza to adopt a millenarian view of the near future.

His developing ideas were first published in a 22-page tract known as "The Anonymous Millennium" which was widely circulated in South America (there is evidence that Lacunza did not authorise this publication and was annoyed by it).

In 1790 Lacunza completed the three volumes of his major work, "The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty" (La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad).

Recognising that royal patronage was the surest guarantee that his work would be published and that he would be protected against his enemies, he made repeated attempts to obtain approval by the Spanish court, but in this he was unsuccessful.

Despite the prohibition of the Inquisition, "La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad" was secretly printed in Cadiz in 1810 or 1811 under the Jewish pseudonym of Rabbi Juan Josaphat ben-Ezra.

A pamphlet denouncing Lacunza's book, published in Madrid in 1824, was subtitled, "Observations to Guard the Public against the Seduction the Work can Cause".

"[7] He protested against the common teaching that at the end of the world, the earth would be consumed by fire and quoting from an Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon text, which is found in Catholic Bibles, but not in Protestant Bibles, declared: How can it be a universal fire which burneth up and consumeth every thing without exception upon our globe, and the globe itself, when the scripture saith, 'Then shall the right aiming thunderbolts go abroad; and from the clouds, as from a well drawn bow, shall they fly to the mark – Wisdom 21.

In 1540, Basque knight Ignatius Loyola and a handful of followers received permission from Pope Pius III to form the order of the Jesuits, who would provide shock troops for an intellectual assault on Protestant beliefs.

While the Roman curia maintained its traditional Augustinian reticence on things apocalyptic, it occurred to the Jeuits that the reformers were surprisingly vulnerable in this area.

If they could show that Luther, Zwingli and Calvin had ignored the Apocalypse, they could cut the ground from under Protestant feet and present themselves as the defender of scripture.

Citing Western and Eastern church fathers, Ribera argued that this destroyer would be a Jew who would appear in Jerusalem, rebuild Solomon's Temple, accept the worship of the Jewish people, before ruling for that terrible period of three and a half years.

Still respected Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine set about importing Rebera's key concepts of the individual Jewish Antichrist and the three-and-a-half-year tribulation into mainstream Catholic theology.

Positioning the Roman church as the defender of scripture, he publicized the reformer's doubts on whether the two apocalyptic books of Daniel and the Revelation had any place in the Bible and even suggested a way in which the name 'Luther' could be converted to the beast's symbol, 666.

In reference to this passage of the Bible, Martin Luther wrote: Oh Christ, my Master, look down upon us and bring upon us your day of judgment, and destroy the brood of Satan in Rome!

He wrote that the antichrist would rebuild Jerusalem, abolish Christianity, deny Christ, persecute the church and dominate the world for three and a half years.

In Death of the Church Victorious Ovid Need Jr. asserts that although the Jesuits then tried to introduce this system into Protestant theology several times over the next century, they were not successful until Presbyterian Pastor Edward Irving read Lacunza's work under the pseudonym of "Ben Ezra, A Converted Jew" and then translated it into English: The pressure was on Rome, especially the word of God in the hands of the average person.

So in order to turn the blame away from the Papacy, the Roman Catholic Jesuits started teaching that the Antichrist was some future individual that would come at the end of time.

The following passage demonstrates that Hippolytus' identification of the Antichrist (which is also germane with Irenaeus' views), then espoused the underlying principles of Futurism, when he identified the last prophetic week of Daniel 9:27 with a future tyrannical Antichrist who will cause "the sacrifice and oblation to cease", at which the prophets Enoch and Elijah will return to preach "clothed in sackcloth", for "1260 days" (three and a half literal years), shortly before the second advent of Christ.

[29]According to Froom, Lacunza differed from the typical interpretation of the "Metal Man" of Daniel 2, which had been given in previous centuries by Irenaeus, Hippolytus and the Reformers, by stating that the kingdoms of Babylon and Persia constituted the head of gold, the Macedonian Empire as the chest and arms of silver, the bronze thighs as Roman, "but the ten toed legs, the Romano-Gothic professedly Christian kingdoms of 'divided' Western Europe.

Certainly, by the time the Albury meetings were concluded, Irving had well perfected the new Ben-Ezra ideas when he took it to the 1833 Powerscourt conference – the loose ends were tied together … We should mention that Darby answered the question, 'Is there a prospect of a revival of Apostolic churches before the coming of Christ?'

It developed into its full bloom at these meetings … Though others e.g. Irving offered a secret rapture idea, its origin has since been attributed to Darby by most scholars.

The Scofield Bible quickly became widely influential among fundamentalist Christians within the United States and most other countries, as these notes became a significant source for popular religious writers such as Hal Lindsey, who was the author of the best-selling book The Late, Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970.

The 'time' prophecy which is largely responsible for this, is the Dispensationalist view of the prophetic 70 'weeks' of Daniel chapter 9, as it incorporates Lacunza's ideas of a future Jewish Antichrist decimating the entire earth in three and a half years of tribulation.

The Book of Daniel is treated in a similar manner, as in Futurism: "The prophetic clock stopped ticking with the death of Jesus on the cross (end of the 69th week) and will commence again when the Antichrist leads a great army against the people of God.

"One of the foundational innovations of the Protestant futurist school has been the introduction of a "church age parenthesis" into the time prophecy of the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9.

"[37] As Need states: And so, through ideas gleaned from Irving by the writings of Lacunza, and … then subsequently claimed by Darby as his own discovery, the war of the millenarians against the Papacy was defused.