Irenaeus, a disciple of a disciple of the apostle John, taught the pre-tribulation rapture in the second century

Irenaeus sat under Polycarp, who had known the apostle John personally: a real, well-documented chain, two links from an apostle. Defenders of the pre-tribulation rapture sometimes point to a line in his Against Heresies (5.29.1) where he writes that "the Church shall be suddenly caught up" right before a period of tribulation, and argue that proves the doctrine is ancient, not a 19th-century invention.

The same sentence undercuts the claim the moment you keep reading: Irenaeus calls the tribulation "the last contest of the righteous, in which, when they overcome they are crowned with incorruption": meaning the church is still there, in the fight, being refined by it. The section right before this one makes the point explicit: tribulation is necessary for the saved, who Irenaeus compares to wheat "broken up, and rendered fine, and sprinkled over by the patience of the Word of God, and set on fire", quoting the martyr Ignatius's own words about being ground by wild beasts' teeth to become pure bread. One chapter later, Irenaeus gives the church practical instructions for recognizing and resisting the Antichrist: not something you tell a church that's already been evacuated. And later still, in 5.35, he describes Christians who "suffered tribulation, as well as escaped the hands of the Wicked one": suffered it, and came out the other side, not spared it beforehand.

Irenaeus was a chiliast (what we'd now call premillennial, someone expecting a literal future thousand-year reign of Christ), and it's easy to confuse that with the rapture, but the two are separate claims. Irenaeus was premillennial and had the church endure the tribulation; John Nelson Darby, roughly 1,700 years later, was also premillennial but added a secret pre-tribulation removal no earlier writer had ever taught. The lineage from John to Irenaeus is real. What it hands down is endurance through hardship, not an early exit from it.