How would you come to a pre-tribulational rapture view from scratch?

One of my close friends has recently taken to believing in a pre-trib rapture, and out of respect for her, I've tried my best to understand why she believes it. I've seen the texts which the pre-tribulationists use to support their views (mainly 1 Thess. 4:13-19, 1 Corinthians 15:50-58, John 14:1-3, Matt 24, Rev. 3:10, and many others) and heard their arguments but I'm still perplexed by how the logic works. I can see how, if you already had the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture, you might think some or all of those verses support that interpretation. However, what I can't see is how you anyone came up with the idea in the first place. Clearly, someone did, since there has not been a continuous tradition of pre-tribulationists and the evidence that anyone at all held that view before the 19th century is pretty scanty. So, what I want to understand is how did the idea of a pre-tribulational rapture originate (or re-originate, if the pre-tribbers are correct and it was the original doctrine)? How does one get to the idea of a pre-tribulational rapture without already having it in your mind? To be clear about what I'm asking (I don't think it's a duplicate of https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/7239/what-scripture-is-used-to-support-a-pre-tribulation-rapture) : I want to know how one would use Scripture to build up the picture of the pre-tribulational rapture, i.e. that Jesus will return in a secret way to gather the church off the earth and we all go into heaven prior to the seven-year Tribulation period, during which many (all?) ethnic Jews will become believers, after which Jesus will return in glory and destroy the anti-Christ and rescue the faithful Jewish believers. If you read the Bible with no pre-conceived notions of the eschaton, what kind of reasoning would lead you to believe that it teaches this timeline?