William Branham's Halo Photograph Exposed

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister and friend, Charles Paisley, the founder of Christian Gospel Church.org.

And together we're examining the history and the intersections in history between William Brannum and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals. Charles, we have a fun episode ahead today for anybody who was not in the William Brannum cult of personality.

This could be considered one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time. But for those who were influenced by the cult of personality, this is going to be something that they have to think through and examine.

And we were so indoctrinated to believe that this thing, this publicity stunt was of God. And so we've got literally a split in the crowd. Half of the crowd is going to be trying to think through and piece together.

Well, did it really happen this way? And the other half are going to be thinking, this is incredible how somebody could actually have pulled this off and had the long lasting effect that it had.

Yeah, this is one of the most famous events to happen during the healing revivals. And it really is something else because in the message, this event is legendary. And we could categorize William Brannum and FF Bosworth were staring down the devil, right?

And they're defending the doctrines of divine healing. And it's just something very special. And God miraculously vindicated the prophet at the end of the debate. This is a huge event in the message. But as we go through, we'll find out things are not entirely as they seem.

So today, we're going to be talking about William Brannum's revival at the Sam Houston Coliseum in January of 1950. And kind of before we get up to that revival, we're going to talk just a little bit about what happened in 1948 and 1949, because what's being debated in the Sam Houston Coliseum?

in in a lot of ways is a direct product of events that have transpired in in the in the two or three years before then. Now, if if you remember in January 1948, William Brannem met FF Bosworth.

They started touring together, started preaching together and Bosworth is is really he's probably preaching just as much or more than William Brannem at these meetings and actual, you know, sermons. People are being taught the doctrines of positive confession and divine healing and Bosworth is playing a key role in helping to, you know, put out how people are going to believe that. And him and William Brannem are very simpatico, basically what what happened once they team up. And as time goes on, you get four months down the road from meeting Bosworth, oral Roberts comes to one of William Brannem's meetings. And this is before oral Roberts himself

is really touring or doing anything. He meets William Brannem. And he likes what he sees and William and oral Roberts goes out and starts doing the same things. He gets a 10. He's doing miracles.

He's got a sign in his hand. People are being healed. Then after that, a Allen and on and on and on. Great popular evangelist after popular evangelist just springs up out of nowhere. And overnight, they start doing the same things William Brannem is doing. The same ways he's doing, copying his methods, his styles. And the healing revival just explodes. There are dozens of other evangelists out doing the same thing. Oral Roberts and A Allen being probably the most two other prominent ones to follow will behind William Brannem and start doing this. So that's happening. And then at the

same time, the latter reign revival is taking off, which, you know, started in Canada and is moving through churches with just a huge emphasis on the sign gifts and the manifested sons of God theologies coming together. So all of this is happening at the same time. And all of it is because William Brannem has has popularized these practices and these ways of doing things. And these people are following him. And as this goes on, there are all kinds, just hundreds of testimonies of healings and miracles that are pouring out of all of these meetings. And William Brannem,

they end up starting voice a healing magazine, you know, and they're they're publishing articles about all the different things that are happening. William Brannem is the one who started this magazine actually. He started it with with Gordon Lindsey. And they're just publicizing all of these miracles. And so that's the side of it that in the message we know about. There's all these miracles. There's all these healings. It's amazing. It's miraculous. But there's a side of things going on in these years that the message never tells us about, right, John? Yeah. It's not all signs wonders.

and healings. There's also a whole lot of people that are actually also dying and being pretty badly hurt by these revivals, right? And that's the side of things that no one, no one ever talks about or everyone pretends, don't even happen. But it was happening all along through these revivals. There were people going that were being told they're healed, and instead of being healed, they died. And there's all kinds of bad fallout from that.

Right. So before we get into this, I think I'll throw out a few disclaimers for the various groups of people that are watching this, for those who are interested in the critical history and are interested to see how this thing that became the new apostolic reformation formed.

I'd like to also remind everyone of the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God's sect that Roy Davis had created. William Brannum is still holding revivals under the auspices of the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God's sect as late as June of 1953. He's advertising himself as holding Pentecostal Baptist Revivals as late as June of 1953. So at the time that this photograph is taken, William Brannum is still a member of a bishop in Roy Davis's sect. Basically, he has sort of rebranded it. He's not openly using this name, but he is to the newspapers. And I'll throw one of the newspaper articles up. So for the historians, this is critical to understand

that he's still a member of a different cult that would later be rebranded as the message cult of personality. For those who are working with members of the cult trying to rescue them to help them out, I also want to hone in on something that Charles said to the people in the message, this is the most famous event in message history. But to the people who've never heard of William Brannum, they've never heard of this thing. They see the Halo photo and really don't know what it is.

The fact that nobody has heard of it in of itself unravels this whole story because if God really had his picture taken as the message claimed, you wouldn't have just this little subset that God announced himself to the subset of people. This would be one of the most famous events that the world has just learned that, hey, God is in this ministry. We need to go hear the messenger for the ages they proclaimed. And that is why you'll find that the leaders in the cult of personality try so hard to claim that the photograph, which is held in Washington, DC, as the cult

claimed. but at the Library of Congress, it's located in the Library of Congress in a collection of other photographs, so it is in the art section of the Library of Congress, but it was held there for copyright purposes, not for investigative purposes as the cult has claimed.

So for people who are working with, you know, trying to help people out of the message, you have to understand that there are a lot of misunderstandings of what happened with this photograph in the history, and you have to literally get through all of that indoctrinated programming to help people understand, well, if God wanted the world to know that there's a messenger, God's going to show everybody that, you know, if you took his picture with the messenger, it's not going to be just this little tiny group of people that saw the picture.

God is wanting to announce everyone, you know, whosoever is willing to come, let him come, as the Bible says, but the cult takes it in a different way, well, God only wanted this little group to see the halo, which doesn't make sense at all.

And then the disclaimer for the people who are in the message, we're not trying to, you know, be little this event, because I was in this. I understand how significant this is to a person who's been indoctrinated, but we want to give you the real history that the cult has hidden from the people.

Right, John, because pretty well, everything the message told us about this debate, like every key detail is actually not true. We'll work through all that. So within the group, you know, we had a totally wrong perception of what happened at this meeting, they just misled us about everything.

And a lot of it is because William Brennan himself had misled us about everything that happened at those debates. And just like he misled us about what happened at the debates, we were also misled about what was going on in the healing revivals leading up to it, because the debate that happened at this meeting didn't just happen out of the blue.

It wasn't just a preacher who decided he hates divine healing and's gonna come challenge them. No, things are going on here. People are dying, people are dying. That is what there are bad things happening.

And nobody, people in the message, John, I'm guilty. I used to be the same way. We would pretend this never happened. And a lot of it is nobody told us about it. And, but if you get them more scholarly biographies of William Brennan, like look, this biography has the very picture we're talking about on the cover, the Prophet Healer by Doug Weaver.

If you get the book by David Edwin Harrow called All Things Are Possible, these books go through these details and they actually share the accounts. There was something going on here. Even it's... these earlier days in the late 1940s that people are dying in these revivals and the leaders in the Pentecostal churches that William Brannum is going around, they are starting to recognize something's not right here. They're recognizing all of the dead people, right? I mean, because you can't hide the dead people and the leaders are recognizing it and trouble is slowly starting to brew, even at this point. But the leaders in the Pentecostal churches

let me just read a couple of accounts real quick because I just want, again, I want the readers to know, or listeners to know, that people were not all being healed. In fact, a lot of them were dying and there were bad fallouts. I'm going to read one account. This here is from Alfred Pol.

This man was the, he was the missionary secretary of the Pentecostal assemblies of Canada. He was one of the highest ranking officials in that denomination and he was Brother Brannum's personal guide on his tours in Canada. I'm just going to read one of many testimonies he gives.

He says one afternoon during the healing campaign, I answered a telephone call. The call was from a Pentecostal pastor from Ontario. He had just flown in with his wife sick with cancer and her nurse.

As on other occasions, I admitted them to a dormitory room and in due course she was prayed for by Mr. Brannum and pronounced healed. Again, there was much rejoicing and I remember that the pastor handed me a check of a sizeable sum of money to pass on to Mr. Brannum. As he did so, he remarked he couldn't afford to give that much, but that Mr. Brannum deserved it because his wife was now healed. And he had spent thousands of dollars on doctors that couldn't have helped her.

It was several weeks later that I as the missionary secretary of our denomination visited and ministered to our churches in Ontario and I made an inquiry into the wife's state of health, only to be told that she had passed away. What a blow that was to our dear brother, but that was not all. I was told he had a good radio ministry in a city and when he had returned from the healings in Saskatoon, he announced over his radio broadcast that his wife had been wonderfully healed. However, just a short while after that, he had to inform his radio audiences

that his wife had died and it dealt a severe blow to his ministry. So the preachers know that people are dying. The leadership in these churches know what's happened and these things are not happening necessarily in a completely hidden way. Like that preacher, this was over his radio program that this stuff happens. And so these things are coming out.

And I want to read one more testimony. This is, I'm just picked two preachers out of Pentecostal assemblies of Canada. One more. This is from a book called Healing Through the Centuries. It's by Ronald Kidd. It's another good scholarly book. Talking about the same time in Canada, he says The same charge was laid against William Brannum by W.J. Taylor, the district superintendent of the Pentecostal assemblies of Canada.

He and his executives called for a thorough investigation, and while he expressed a warm regard for Brannum as a person, Taylor presented strong evidence to suggest that the claims of the number of people healed were vastly overestimated, and he commented, I firmly believe there is a possibility that this whole business is wrong.

So the leadership in these Pentecostal churches in the late 40s are recognizing something is wrong. A lot of people are dying, and William Brannum is not living up to his height. But what happens is they keep this kind of secret, somewhat behind closed doors that they're questioning and all this stuff, John.

And what happens, you'll notice, if you get to, by the end of 1949, really Pentecostal assemblies don't invite William Brannum back anymore. And those investigations in Winnipeg that we've talked about in the past actually came out of these leaders seeing all the people dying.

And they start doing investigations, the preachers, the leaders of the churches, and finding out that William Brannum's claim to be healing all these people, it's not true. There's a small percentage being healed, but most are not.

And what's happened is there's cases where people are dying, just like the one I read about that preacher's wife, and it's raising concerns behind the scenes in the leadership of the established denominations. And so that is what's happening in the years leading up to this debate with Reverend Best.

William Brannum is praying for people. He's telling them they're healed, even very prominent people, and they're dying. They're dying. And so when they get to this meeting in Sam Houston, Call of Zim, what we see happen here is really the very first time that William Brannum and his campaign get confronted in a very public way over their divine healing practices.

And that's what's going on here at Sam Houston, Call of Zim. William Brannum is for the first time experiencing a backlash from another minister out in normative Christianity. Right. And if you examine what is actually going on in the background, it's not just Reverend Best, although he's the one that gets named, but there's a community of ministers that are concerned with what is happening because this is very extremely problematic.

And for, you know, if you had a serial killer that was in the city, you would be warning people, be careful, lock your doors. There is a serial killer in the streets. Well, these ministers are realizing that there are people who are dying that could, many of them could otherwise have lived.

because the whole premise of this divine healing crusade that started in the early years ironically is vastly different than the way it ended up in the later years so a lot of the message cult of personality has no idea that this was a thing but they were actually promoting the notion in the early years that the healing was also tied to your salvation if you submitted yourself you know by faith to God your case by faith and God gave you the healing he also gave you the salvation and they were trying to raise the argument that it was

a new breed of Pentecostalism remember this is the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God sect not UPC not PCI not any of the other groups that existed though they worked with those groups and they were trying to say that tongues was not the evidence of the Holy Ghost but instead healing was the evidence of the Holy Ghost so you had all of these ministers who are pleading with people this is not the case but yet you had thousands of people who believed that it was and they would take their faith to extremes so if William Brandham said if you

believe and do not doubt you'll be healed and then he would make these comments and I'm sure you've seen them Charles he would talk about how penicillin was destructive and there are a lot of people dying of penicillin it caused cancer he said various medications they're denouncing the medications they're not explicitly saying don't take them because legally they would be sued if they were to say this and somebody died but what happens is they plant the idea in the people's head that the medicines are part of the problem just like John Alexander Dowey told his people his victims and that the

if you have faith you really God is the one going to heal you not the medicine so the question gets planted in people's minds is taking the medicine doubting my faith and so people begin to challenge their own faith and again this is not explicitly at the instructions of Brandham he just planted all of the seed so they could jump to the next conclusion and as a result there were hundreds of people who were dying many of which who were supposed to have been healed and for me that's one of the big reasons why I for a long period of time I assumed

that William Brandham had a spirit guide on the platform and that the spirit guide was performing actual miracles I bet I believe that for probably the first five years after leaving the message but after reading the testimony of Alfred Pol which you just mentioned and several others Poles not the only one who is giving these accounts I realized that it's really not a spirit guide. William Brandham is making a lot of false claims, but the critical information has been withheld from the public.

Right. And, you know, my opinion, John, because we don't have access to the investigations that were done by the Pentecostal assemblies. We get little bits of it here and there, but we know they actually did perform investigations. We have the evidence that they were called for by their leaders. We don't have the outcomes of them, but we can see that William Brandham stops being invited into their churches after this, so we can only assume that they were negative, and we can also safely assume that the details that do come out about them being negative or true. And William Brandham, I want to point this out to John. It was in the

fall of 1948, the same time that these investigations are unfolding, that William Brandham has his second documented nervous breakdown, actually, in these years, too. And we'll talk more about, you know, his his mental health in in a full episode, somewhere down the road, but I also believe that that that mental breakdown he had in the fall of 1948 was probably connected to this stuff happening, too, because behind the scenes, the leaders know that this stuff is happening. And as you read, especially Alfred Polz testimony, the leadership, even though they know it's happening, and even though they're kind of stepping back from William Brandham, the Pentecostal leaders

go a little bit into coverup mode, because they're on the hook with Brandham. They're the ones that invited him through and everything. So there's a there's an element of them who are just kind of washing their hands and trying to pretend this thing never happened. And just let William Brandham drift away, but it's not that's that's their immediate response to this. Let's just hope William Brandham goes away. But instead his fame and popularity just keeps growing and growing.

And so as he comes to the Sam Houston call a Ziam, like you mentioned in Houston, Texas, there's a whole there there is actually a large committee of preachers in the Houston area, Reverend Best being one of them, who are concerned. And they start warning their people.

There's some funny business going on here. Please don't go to these revivals. There's this isn't all that it seems to be. And what happens is, you know, we're told in the message that Reverend Best challenged them to a debate, but actually the other way around, FF Bosworth challenged Best to a debate because they they found out that this these other preachers in the Houston area warning their people not to come to the meetings. So they issue a challenge, come debate us on divine healing. And the committee gets together and they decide they're going to send

Reverend Best, and Reverend Best volunteers to go and be the debater against what's happening in the divine healing practices in these ministries. And so Reverend Best goes to the Sam Houston call the Zim, which is primarily hostile territory, honestly.

The majority of the crowd there is on the side of William Brown, I'm an FF Bosworth, but he goes to hostile territory to have this debate. I used the phrase earlier that this was one of the greatest publicity stunts.

You have to realize that I do not believe that they, that Reverend Bosworth and Reverend William Brannum knew that this debate would actually take place, but the way that their sermons are structured, William Brannum would always issue challenges, and they were blind challenges.

He would say, I challenge your faith, or I challenge anybody to come and prove that this isn't right. He makes these, he's bluffing, he's making these claims frequently, and no one ever challenged him except for this one, no one publicly challenged him except for this one case.

So I believe that they made one of these bluffing claims, which was again in the pattern of John Alexander Dowey, they're, they're continuing the same type of, of ministry that Dowey became famous and created his empire for.

So I think what happened is they issued one of these blind challenges behind, from behind the pulpit, and there were ministers from the community who disagreed with them in these meetings to see what, what these men were doing.

They wanted to know more, to understand. And so what happened, again, best wasn't the only one. There's a whole community of ministers. Best was in, at that time, he was a Baptist minister, and there was a community of Baptist ministers, but they weren't the only ones that were warning the people that these men are doing these very, very dangerous things with your lives.

But best is the one who rose up and decided to publicly challenge them. And once the public challenge is issued, that's the point in which it turns into a publicity stunt, because, you know, William Branham F. F. Bosworth, they realized the power of the controversy.

So they wanted this to explode into what it became. And quite frankly, if you look at the aftermath, this was one of the most ingenious things that, that William Branham and Bosworth ever did.

Yeah, and there's, there's all actually quite a lot of different news articles and paper pieces that ran on this. So the whole debate is fairly well documented and everything that happened in it is pretty well covered.

It really, it really kind of the... Gins with like I mentioned really they they William Brannum's campaign issued the issued the challenge and best takes it up like you said and You know William Brannum told us so much stuff about this debate John and I think we want to talk about the debate itself, but maybe we talk about just some of the things that William Brannum said It was not true about it. Yeah, you know one thing is William Brannum said that They said of course that Reverend best challenges end of the debate That's probably the first point that they that they were dishonest with us about

But all of the newspaper accounts that we can read actually. It's the other way around Um, we see that Bosworth it seems was the one who initiated at least the challenge Um, and then one of the things William Brannum says was that God got so angry with the Reverend best Challenging them that the only picture he let be developed was his halo picture Out of the whole thing right That that picture that Charles is holding up for our listeners who don't have video Charles is holding up a picture of Reverend best standing at the pulpit

You know challenging FF Bosworth we were told in the cult that because of the halo because God was having his picture taken with William Brannum that not a single photograph could be developed and Cult leaders when we published this article this newspaper article that has the image cult leaders began saying well It was just one role of film that didn't develop But but think of think of what that means so so God was powerless to All of the other roles of film you know William Brannum's claim was specifically that God would only allow the photograph

Of the halo to be taken because of the significance of the halo Yeah, and and that is not the only Picture and that's not even the only picture on that that role I don't have the other pictures, but there were other pictures on the same role that also did turn out right They just they didn't they didn't tell us the truth on that you know, and again, you know, why why did they Why the need to embellish and exaggerate and tell us things about this that wasn't true And another thing that they would tell us about it was that

William Brannum after the halo picture was taken. I'll just hold it up on the cover of Of Doug Weaver's book You know, William Brannum told us that after the halo picture was taken That it was sent to the FBI and the FBI investigated the picture to confirm it was authentic didn't he John yeah But that's not true either not true at all and a lot of people don't realize this I've not really published this as much as I should but It was taken by two photographers of Douglas studios who were deeply connected to the cloud photograph, which is interesting

But they were two counterfeiters. They were one of the men was actually Prosecuted for counterfeiting and the other one helped him so These are literally two criminals who are helping establish William Brannum's Halo photograph.

And because of these two criminal minds, we have this religious photograph that is in thousands of books and literature. Right, it features really prominently even in his official biography. And the... Hold that book back up again.

There's another interesting fact. I'm going to interrupt constantly because this is so fascinating to me. This man sent from God book. That was supposed to have the photograph on it, I believe. I could go back and pull it up.

But in the voice of healing, they mentioned that the book itself was held up because they could not use the photograph because Douglas Studios, the two criminal photographers, had sent it for copyright. So in the voice of healing magazine itself, on the front page, it completely undermines William Brannum's story about this photograph.

So the man who did investigate this photo, his name is George Lacey, and they publish his testimony of what... Basically his report on what this photo is, is right here, it's also in the man sent from God book.

And I have a blow-up copy of it over here, but so we know exactly who the man was that investigated this photo. And here's his report. Before we talk about that, let's just say very clearly, this man was not nor did he ever work for the FBI.

No. This man was a private detective, right, who they paid to do this. Not any official government agency, a private detective. And we have from the FBI themselves, here's an open record request from the FBI, right?

Where the FBI clearly states, George Lacey has never been employed by the FBI. So this man never worked for the FBI. And so again, William Brannum made that story up. Right, and if you know the history, which I've got published on the website, but Lacey was actually ineligible to work for the FBI because Lacey himself was also a criminal.

That's right. Lacey had been involved in local law enforcement and had been working in a prison. And he had been dismissed and discharged from his duties in that prison because he had been, if I recollect the newspaper article, correct John, he had been beating African-American people that were in the jails.

Yeah. So we've got William Brannum, who was, his whole ministry was literally created by the second and command of the Ku Klux Klan, who is touring in a denomination on the, under the auspices of the Pentecostal Baptist Church, a denomination of faith founded by the second and command of the Ku Klan, who has been touring.

with Caleb Ridley, the imperial chaplain of the Ku Klux Klan. And then you've got Lacey and, you know, the Klan's records are not public. So we can't say specifically that Lacey was in the Klan.

However, Texas had a very strong Klan presence. And there were later publications of key public figures who were in the police force, the detectives, the, you know, all the way ranging from your average layman and the church up to, we're talking politicians, we're in the Klan.

And there were men connected to Lacey's business that were definitely in the Klan. So while we can't say Lacey was in the Klan, we can say Lacey was literally convicted for beating black people in prisons.

And he's working with men who are connected to high-ranking Klan members. Right, there's, there's every indication that he was a white supremacist and, you know, every, every, I mean, he was guilty of violence against, against, against blacks.

So clearly he's not, he's, he would be friendly towards the ideas of the Ku Klux Klan. The other thing about this is William Brannum, a lot of times he would cite this report that Lacey gave out, Lacey wrote.

And he would say this report says, this is a rough quote, rough paraphrase. This is the only picture of a supernatural being ever captured on film, right? He would say this reports that this is the only supernatural being ever captured on film, referring to his halo, but you can get this report, you can read it, it says no such thing.

No. Let me read his conclusion. He says, based upon the above described examination and study, I am under the definite opinion that the negative submitted to examination was not retouched, nor was it a composite or a double exposed negative.

Further, I'm of the definite opinion that light, that the light streak appearing above the head in a halo position was caused by light striking the negatives. The question that I always ask, we have photographs from the Houston Coliseum, you can go look them up in historical archives.

And they had stage lighting all around, they had stage lighting to the sides to the back of the speakers. And Charles, if they captured, we've got a photograph of basketball players who have the same, and Charles is holding up one of the Beatles, it has the same type of stage lighting, right?

They're angled specifically so that the shadows aren't cast. So this photograph of the Beatles, if this photograph were submitted to George Lacey, would that report have read the same exact thing? Is the question I always ask people?

And I'll ask you on the screen. Oh, yeah, I mean, that this is this halo right here is caused by light striking the negative. I mean, absolutely. Yeah, the halo picture was caused by light striking the negative.

Of course it was. That's how all pictures of lights on negatives are created, right? Light struck the negative. And the thing about this Beatles photo, I believe, John, and I went back and I believe this is in Sam Houston, Coliseum, too, this actual picture.

And there's there's several other pictures from Sam Houston, Coliseum, other events that were held there. And the same, the same slanted light configuration can be seen over the heads of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, of Ed Sullivan, of other figures in these events.

And so there's nothing, you know, when, when, when you see the exact same halo over Ed Sullivan's head, that was overly branded at the same place, yeah, at the same angle. Yeah, you're kind of, it takes them, the mystique out of it.

Don't you, John? I studied it deeply. And they had these, these basically they were metal tears that went behind the stage. And they were specifically designed so that when you took a photograph, the lighting would not have shadows and make people look scary.

And the dark, you know, these are, these are dimly lit coliseums at night. So they wanted lighting to basically eliminate all the shadows on the platform. So the lighting array that is used in this photograph that you're holding, they had the same array in Sam Houston, Coliseum.

They had the same array in many coliseums and many auditoriums, because this was a very common thing. This was not unusual. Yeah, you know, another thing is that a fact that they told us that wasn't true is they told us that we brand them said that when this pillar of fire descended down over his head, that everybody in the audience or a lot of people in the audience saw this pillar of fire come down over him, right?

Like after the fact he kind of alluded to that, you know, years down the road. He didn't say it the next day, you know, his stories grow with time, right? But eventually he say and everybody saw that pillar of fire.

But again, we have all kinds of newspaper accounts and stuff about what happened at that event and not a single one of the mentions a pillar of fire coming down over William Brannum's head and those meetings.

He seems to have just made that up after the fact, even the men in the background of the photograph, they're sitting there and they're not paying any attention at all to this light. You can see him. The cult has actually doctored the photograph to make it darker and take those men out of the photograph and now the cult prefers to use one that's colorized because they can paint the paint them in out, but there are clearly men in the background of this photograph.

And, you know, if there were even a subset, even if the cult's argument was right, that only a subset of Christians could see this light, well, don't you think that out of the thousands of people in this auditorium, out of the tins that saw it, that one of them would have mentioned this to the newspapers or, you know, even the reporters who are after talking, there would be people sitting sitting in this event who after the event would have been talking said, oh my gosh, did you see God came down on the platform? And there were so many reporters

present because this was a public event, they would have certainly heard this thing and they would have at least questioned it and there would be some indication that this actually happened. I know. I would think that if Reverend Best saw a pillar of fire to send out a heaven and an overwillian brand of his head, he would have got down on his knees and begged for forgiveness or you know, something like that would have happened. Absolutely. But instead, this thing actually breaks out in violence at the end is where this thing actually ends up at. That's another point that I

wanted to bring out that's actually very critical to this. Again, these are ministers who are warning people that you can die if you get sucked into this thing. You can die. And whenever they issued the challenge, Reverend Best was actually concerned for his safety before going to it because they were so charged with this militant style Christianity. Again, this is a it's growing from a militant version of Christianity called the Ku Klux Klan. They're actually fearing for their lives to even go to the to this debate. So that's the kind of atmosphere that is going on in these meetings

and these meetings, this isn't like they challenge the debate and then the meetings were held. This was a two week revival, two full weeks that after the two weeks, they held the debate. So these men have already been in these revivals. They already see that these are people that there's something really wrong here. They probably didn't understand mind control on how these cults operate, but they knew that something was vastly wrong and they were in danger for going to this debate. And I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't ever remember any statements

from William Brannum that this debate ended up with violence breaking out. Did he ever mention anything? No, they didn't mention that at all. By the time this ends, people punch in each other and Reverend Best moves quickly to escape out the exit because this thing starts to descend into violence as the debate comes to an end. And it's truthfully, as I read through the debate, I mean, my honest opinion is that Bosworth was goading these people and stirring it up and feeding into the violence that ended up breaking out at the end of it, which

is covered in some of the newspaper articles about it. So, you know, it's something else. And Bosworth, remember, came out of John Alexander Dauy's cult. He watched how John Alexander Dauy literally grew his entire multi-million dollar empire.

In that empire, if you go back and study the history of it, it was created because of controversy. The Bosworth knew that if you can make this very controversial to the extent that it breaks out in a fist fight at a Christian event, this is going to be very powerful towards lifting William Brannem up into fame.

The degree to which we were misled in the message about everything that went on around this debate, you know, and the events leading up to it is just amazing to me. Like I still struggle to just fully wrap my mind around the depth to which we were told the wrong stuff about this debate, right?

This whole thing was something other than what we were told. And I think, to me, John, perhaps the most interesting thing for me to discover that they misled us about is they actually misled us about Reverend Best's beliefs about divine healing, even.

Because again, the message is built on so many straw-man arguments, saying that other people believe things they don't really believe. And Reverend Best, it's clear that's kind of what they're doing with Reverend Best here.

And so, you know, we, you can not find out exactly what Reverend Best believes on divine healing. He was a fairly well-known preacher. He preached lots of sermons. And there's a trust that runs that still keeps a lot of his sermons out there.

His name is, full name is Wilburne Elias Best. And you can go out and I have done this. I went out and I got his sermons on divine healing. I just read them because I was curious what did he believe about divine healing.

And I just wanted to kind of compare it back to, you know, what FF Bosworth, you know, published in his book, Christ the Healer. But, you know, let me, I just got a couple quotes here from Reverend Best that I want to read to our listeners.

And again, if you're in the message and you're familiar with this debate, it's going to blow your mind to hear of some of these statements that Reverend Best is going to make. But from his sermon, the faith healing part one, he says, quote, no Christian denies that God heals.

Unquote. I remember reading that and that completely shocked me because we were programmed to think that this man is a champion of the devil. Yeah, he didn't, he didn't believe in healing. He said, again, quote, no Christian denies that God heals, unquote, but you know, that he's exactly what the meant.

Such told us this man believed that he didn't believe in divine healing. No Christian denies that God heals, but best believed God was a healer. And if you read on through what Reverend Best said in his sermons, he's quite clear that he believes that God hears prayers and is fully capable of healing people who pray.

And here's another quote from one of Reverend Best's sermons. And again, just he says the Hebrew root word rafa means healing of all kinds, particularly of wounds by outward application. It means to cure heal or make whole.

He's talking about the Jehovah Rafa name of God, you know, God. And he uses the exact same logic or explanation of the Jehovah Rafa name, honestly, that FF Bosworth does. And William Brannum said this was part of the cult indoctrination that Bosworth's main challenge to Reverend Best was that he that best did not believe that the redemptive names of Jehovah were applied to healing.

Well, here's Reverend Best who's saying exactly what we were told that he did not believe. Yeah, quote, the Hebrew word rafa means healing of all kinds, particularly of wounds by outward application. It means to cure heal or make whole.

What in the world, John, they completely distorted what Reverend Best, I mean, it's a total straw man argument that they do. It's just incredible to me that how the totality to which they misrepresented Reverend Best beliefs to us.

And, you know, honestly, now that I've been out of the message while I find more and more, this is the case with all things. In a lot of ways, they just misrepresented to us what the other, what mainstream Christianity believed.

You know, and they made straw man arguments out of so many things. What the message told us other churches believed and other preachers believed is not actually true in a lot of cases. And I'll say this, if you're still in the message, you better be very careful.

What you say about other churches and what their beliefs are because if you're basing what you think they believe on simply on what you heard William Brannum or your message preachers say, they're probably not being completely honest with you.

And thing is either they're dishonest on purpose or they're misled themselves. What's really interesting is I've read the book Christ the Healer that was written by FF Bosworth. And Bosworth was a strong influence on William Brannum's theology in the early years.

And during the early years, you'll find even William Brannum making some of the same claims. But again, they believed that healing was strongly tied to salvation. And that's why William Brannum called it the gospel of divine healing.

Well, after Bosworth died and other men became stronger influences than Bosworth, William Brannum. sort of abandons this notion. And so message cult members today will have no idea that that existed during the early years of William Branford's ministry. And instead, if you were to hand them the same sermons by Reverend Best, this is the part that really shocked me when I read these sermons. If you were to hand these sermons to a message believer today and black out the name W.E. Best from all of it and just say, here's a minister who's in the message who's talking about William Branham's divine healing. They would actually

believe that a message cult minister spoke these sermons because it literally matches what the message as almost as a whole believes today in most cases. To me, it's really incredible. As I know in my sect of the message, we definitely drifted back into a more or less Baptist view of divine healing. But here during the healing revivals,

they're in positive confession land. They're in their in word of faith territory with what they're doing. And honestly, what they're doing is the seeds that eventually grow into the prosperity gospel in the word of faith. And somewhere along the way, we somewhere in the message, at least in my sect, started heading back towards a Baptist view of divine healing. But that was not the case here at this point in time. They were full on preaching, name it and claim it. They were preaching positive confession. They were preaching that at this point in the revival. And that's

exactly what FF Bosworth believed. And to me, the real big difference here in what Reverend Bosworth believed and Reverend Bess believed is really the point where probably the majority of Christianity would end up differing with the prosperity gospel, the name and claim it or positive confession. Reverend Bess did not believe in that. He did not believe in name and claim it. He did not believe in positive confession. And most of Christianity believes that it's not always God's will to heal somebody, right? But with positive confession and that line of belief, they believe it is always God's will to heal somebody. But throughout the Bible, you find you

know, all kinds of cases of people who were godly believing people. And it wasn't God's will to heal them. I mean, you look at King Hezekiah, you look at Joe, look at King David's a little baby boy who died, right? He begged God to heal his boy. But God said, you know, I'm not going to heal your son, right? The possible Paul Timothy had stomach problems. I mean, you can just go all through the Bible and find people who had sicknesses and they prayed to God and they were from everything the Bible tells us.

devout believers, the God, for whatever reason, chose not to heal in that case. And I think in normal Christianity, you know, they recognize that God does not heal everybody every time. Sometimes God gets glory, I guess I put it this way.

God gets glory out of some other instance of this illness in some way. So I think that really is the point where Reverend Best and FF Bosworth have their real conflict. Reverend Best takes a high view of God's sovereignty in healing.

But Bosworth and at the message here, I guess I would say the healing revival is at this point, have really no view of God's sovereignty in healing. It's just purely an act of faith.

And that's honestly, that is where positive confession and name it and claim it in word of faith type belief start to break down. And that's where it ends up leading into abuse, honestly, because if you believe that divine healing is going to have a 100% success rate, right?

And the only reason it's going to fail is because you have unconfessed sin or you don't have faith. What ends up happening, and this happens over and over. We find this through all of these testimonies of people that didn't get healed.

What happens is that person who don't get healing ends up getting turned into a victim. Like that, for example, that that preacher's wife who died in Ontario, they clearly believed that gift of healing.

They clearly believed that she was healed, but then she died. And what happens? What do you say to that person? You say, either, well, your wife just didn't have faith or she must have had unconfessed sin, right?

So that's where it starts to turn abusive. When you have people who don't get healed, even devout Christian people like that that are dying, the explanation is they died because they were not having enough faith or they died because they had unconfessed sin.

And so the stigma starts getting attached to the people who are not being healed. And this is exactly what FF Bosworth and William Brandon believe. That's exactly what they published in their in their articles.

And so they start victimizing these people who don't get healed even further, even beyond them not being healed. They start becoming victimized with accusations of lack of faith and accusations of unconfessed sin. Yeah, it's really, really problematic.

I have several family members and friends who have endured chronic illnesses throughout their life. Some of them have actually died from chronic illness. And even in the churches that aren't as destructive as what William Brandon initially was, where they don't condemn the people who are sick.

Same people are listening to these sermons where William Branemas presenting this notion that if you remain sick, you're still, you know, you've got sin in your life, you're an unbeliever. Well, internally, they try to reconcile what's happening to their body by convincing themselves that the reason that they're sick is because they don't believe they have sin in their life.

And it actually amplifies their conditions. They become actually more struggling with their diseases more because mentally, they believe that there's something wrong in their lives. Right, because, you know, when, and so, you know, as a minister, John, I know I have been, I've met other ministers in the message who still believe it, this name and claimant kind of a way.

And I, one of the things I did as a minister frequently was go to the nursing homes, go to the hospitals, I visited the sick and the dying quite a bit. And you could tell when the name and claimant preacher had been there before me.

And these people a lot of times were in spiritual turmoil because they had been convinced that they did not have faith. They had been convinced that it was their fault that they were dying or they had unconfessed sin.

And so at the time of their, you know, instead of using a gift of healing or a promise of divine healing or something like that in a way to encourage or help somebody, it actually gets used in such a way that when they leave, that person is now got a spiritual condition, a spiritual turmoil on top of their physical illness.

And they're physically ill and now they're beating themselves up mentally. Oh, I have some unconfessed sin I need to discover so I can confess to God and be healed. Or there's something wrong with me or I'm just a terrible Christian, I don't have any faith.

And it's very easy for these divine healing views with positive confession, with word of faith, with name and claimant. If you carry them out to their logical end, the logical conclusion is if you're not healed, it is your fault.

That's the logical conclusion of the divine healing beliefs that William Brannum and FF Bosworth were preaching at this point in their ministries. And really if you apply logic to this, think of this. So Reverend Bosworth, Reverend Brannum, they decide to use this debate as a publicity stunt.

Logically, they knew that if they could bring enough controversy, people would see this thing as bigger than it was. And it worked. I'm going to say that it actually worked. But logically speaking, if this were Christianity instead of the show business type gospel, why did they not go to a hospital and empty the hospital as a publicity stunt?

Or remember, back then they were claiming that salvation and healing were both strongly linked together. If that's the case, if this is, as they called it, the gospel of divine healing, why not go empty out of hospital?

Exactly, exactly. And you know, The message don't like to look at that side of things, right? You know, we just would pretend that didn't even exist. The side of, okay, there's all these people over here who are not being healed and some of them are being hurt even, right?

Like, there's not even a willingness to look or acknowledge that those people exist. But if you will be honest with yourself, and you'll look at the Carol Ruth Strubler's, if you'll look at the Donnie Mortons, if you'll look like at that preacher's wife that I read at the opening, and you look at that, and you got it somehow in your mind come to a conclusion of those people were hurt by what happened.

Was that okay or not, right? What am I going to do? Am I going to defend William Branham, or am I going to further victimize these people by accusing them of a lack of faith or unconfessed sin, right?

And that's what a lot of people miss with this, right? They think, well, I'm defending William Branham. I'm defending a doctrine of divine healing. But they don't at all consider that in doing that, that they're victimizing the Carol Ruth Strubler, that they're victimizing the Donnie Morton, that they're victimizing the preacher's wife in Canada, right?

They don't think about that side of it at all, right? And so, you know, if you're in the message and you're listening to this podcast, that's what I would encourage you to do. Take some time and put yourself in the shoes of these people who died, and think about how they would feel hearing you say that they died because they didn't have faith or they died because they had unconfessed sin.

And if you truly believe that, right, then you believe what they were preaching at the time. But if you have some other reason that you think they died besides unconfessed sin or besides a lack of faith, you don't believe the message.

Yeah. That's the truth because that is what the message taught at this point in time. And it's in black and white, it's in William Brown's own sermons. This photograph for me is the clearest example between Christianity and idolatry.

We actually have several photographs of men who are actually praying to this photograph. We have pictures of people who are pictures that were taken during baptism, where the minister is holding up this photograph because it has to the message cult turned into an idol.

And if you compare the idolatry that exists within this message cult to the Bible, it's just clearly not Christian. But even more to the point, people who are praying to this photograph have no idea that they're praying to the result of convicts and exconvicts, it's not in any way, shape, or form, remotely close to Christian, this photograph.

Right. I mean, in the message, this photo, they literally believe they have a photo of God. And people bow to this picture, they pray. this picture. And one thing about this picture that is incredibly interesting to me, John.

So in our sect of the message, we were told that after William Brannum died,

your grandfather and all the people at the Brannum Tabernacle took down the picture of Jesus and put up this picture behind the platform. But that's not true, is it, John? It's not true. When did your church, and there's photos of this, when did the picture of William Brannum and the halo get hung up behind the platform at the Tabernacle?

I was shocked when I saw this. We have black and white photographs of William Brannum standing in front of himself with this photograph in the Tabernacle. He's preaching to the people with a picture of himself behind him. William Brannum himself hung the picture of himself up behind the platform at the Brannum Tabernacle. It was why William Brannum was still living that that was done. And so that shocks me so bad, John, because that means that the preachers in our sect of the message, they were at the Brannum Tabernacle, John, in those days.

They lied to us about this. They lied to us about, they told us that your grandfather and the people at your church took the Jesus picture down and put up brother Brannum's picture. And so you've got to make sure you put up a picture here of William Brannum preaching with that picture behind him on the platform. You know, it's really a clear example of a cult because you've got the central figure, it's literally standing in front of the central figure.

And it's the clearest example of self-promotion. Here's me speaking and here's me in a photograph behind me. One of our researchers has commented on our YouTube feed asking about just simply the name Brannum Tabernacle. How common is it that ministers will name their church after themselves instead of this is the Christian church or this is a church about Jesus or something that resembles Christianity instead of a central figure of a cult? And I went up and I went into the newspaper archives and looked up the other churches in the same city at the time that Brannum Tabernacle was formed

as the Billy Brannum Pentecostal Tabernacle. You had St. Luke's Reform Church, Wall Street Methodist Evangelical Church, First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian, Park Methodist Evangelical Church, the First Christian Church, Morton Memorial Church, United Brotheran, the Maple Street Methodist Church, and St. Paul's Church. You have out of all these churches none are named after the minister speaking. Some are named after the Apostles, some after Jesus Christ or Christianity, but here is a church named after the man who is the central figure of the cult, where there is a photograph of the central figure of the cult standing right behind the platform where

he is standing. Yeah. It's unbelievable to me, you know, from the vantage point of my sect of the message, I am floored to discover that William Branum actually put that picture up there while he was still living.

That flores me. And that just kind of goes to, it says a whole lot, don't it? I mean, that you would hang up a picture of yourself on the platform with the halo over your head.

And especially as you get towards the end when he starts saying, you know, the Elijah of this day is the Lord Jesus Christ, it's quite startling and it's clear that he was heading in this direction for quite a long while in his ministry.

And this picture, people believe it's a picture of God. But message people, I think a lot of message people have it in their homes, hanging on their walls, right? It's far and wide. You can find people bowing down, do it, praying to it.

It really is something this picture, but I think as we've went through in this episode, our listeners hopefully can see that this picture is not all it's cracked up to be. Right. Charles, I think this episode I have interrupted you more than any other podcast that we've had so far, it's just so fascinating to me.

And I've not even skimmed the surface of all the information that I would like to bubble up to the surface. You can go to our website and you can find, you know, the rest of the history if you want to read through it.

But I think for me, the biggest thing here is, as you've pointed out, the information that is given to cult members is so vastly different from the actual history that the leaders in this cult of personality are controlling and manipulating the history so that people who are in this thing won't question it, won't find out what actually happened.

To the extent that there are people who are raised in this that believe the wrong version of history, who became connected to actual Christian historians, and some of this false information has actually made it into mainstream Christian history.

Whenever this history was being written, you know, as it happened, it was so vastly different than the way that it has actually been written in history books. So for me, the big question to end the show is, why would they manipulate history if this was actually a move by God?

It's something else. I'm glad if we went through this episode, I think there's a whole lot of interesting tidbits in here, and it's amazing to discover the depth to which they misled us and deceived us about this topic.

And again, I want to encourage all of our listeners in the mess... message, think about these people who died, and think about what you would have to say to them and their family as to why they died, right?

And that, I have to say that is one of the big things that opened my eyes up on this topic. As you read through like Alfred Poles book, he had to explain to these people that he literally met the families of these people who died, and he was in the position to have to explain to them why Brother Brandon's healing didn't work, right?

And acknowledge these people exist, they existed many of them, and what do you say to them? What would you say to them in that position? And think about that. See what that does for you.

Well, and think of this, again, I could talk about this for the next five hours if you wanted to, Charles. But think of this, reverend best, who actually championed Christianity against this thing that was a false gospel.

Like no mistake, that's what reverend best was doing. Reverend best was in a community where people were actually being sucked into this thing, who likely died because we have clear examples of this throughout William Brandon's ministry.

So reverend best, who was championing Christianity against this false gospel, would have also had to explain to family members that these other family members and friends who died because of this thing, died because of a false gospel.

And for me, this is hugely problematic because we were indoctrinated to think of reverend best as the bad guy. He is actually the good guy of this story, right? Let me maybe finish with a quote, I'm going to read one more segment from Alfred Pol.

He said, the divine healing campaigns were very popular. They attracted large crowds from far and near, often a great expense to the sick who needed special care and transportation, but also for most of the sick, they proved disappointing.

Their expectations had been raised so high, only to be dashed after all the excitement was over. Some seemed to experience a momentary relief from pain, but all too many would discover no lasting benefit.

And by that time, the healer was gone, and the person would be too far away to explain or answer. The sick person was then simply left to accuse themselves of a lack of faith, and in many cases, they threw their faith overboard.

So you know, that is a man who is dealing with the actual fallout of the people who were not healed across all kinds of churches that he was responsible for. There has to be a right way to look at that.

I mean, was that man crazy out of his mind? Did he imagine all those people died? And how was he supposed to respond to his people when they were dying and they were supposed to have been healed, right?

And then you have to ask yourself, was did William Brown have helped those people or did he make them worse? And my conclusion is, is he made those people worse, John. Those people through their faith overboard, not they probably were more inclined to throw their faith overboard after having been told they were healed by William Branham, rather than someone giving them some kind of positive encouragement in their final days.

Yeah, I agree. We see it often in the ex-message community, we have support groups for people who have left the cult. And there's a large number of people, sadly, who were deeply bruised by this thing, that they were told was Christianity, and they have no interest in church or God, or anything to do with this, because if Christianity looks like this, then they won't know part of it.

And again, this is just so vastly different from Christianity that I can't put into words how evil this thing is, and how much I respect Reverend Bass for fighting against it, because again, this was pure evil.

But Charles, I know we could talk for the next five, 10 hours about this. I still have about 20 points that I wanna get through, and I think I'm gonna save them and sprinkle them through the next few episodes, because there's just so much here to talk through, and this is one of the biggest building blocks to the next episodes, what's coming.

So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org and Christian-GospelChurch.org. For an overview of the historical research of William Branum and his healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William Branum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

Join us again next week. We've got a great episode coming. You