Stolen Revelation: William Branham's Plagiarization

Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Brannem Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannem Historical Research at William-Brannem.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 Brannem and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals. Charles, today we have an episode that I like to refer to as the never-ending story. I began, whenever I left the cult of personality, I began trying to determine where did all of this come from.

William Brannem claimed to be this in-time messenger and that he received all these divine revelations from God. And when I started discovering that, wait a minute, these didn't really come from God. They came from other places.

I began to start the never-ending story of trying to find where all of this came from. And probably every year since I've left the message, we've identified something that he got from somewhere else.

I really don't believe that he introduced a single new thing into Christianity, but instead he either outright plagiarized from other men, or he took something that another man introduced and twisted it a bit to call it his own.

It's still essentially the same, but he would call it his own. And like I said, it's just the never-ending story of trying to figure out where did this guy steal his revelations from. Yeah, that's a good introduction, John. And I am also very excited for today's episode because we're going to start showing you where William Brannem copied some of his so-called revelations from. And for me, John, this is one of the main factors that caused me actually to wake up and realize something was very, very, very wrong.

And today, I hope we can demonstrate just a little bit about the sheer depth to which William Brannem employed deception about where he got his teachings from. He totally deceived us, utterly deceived us into believing he was getting s- special messages directly from God, when in fact he was just repeating what he was reading out of his library books.

And that is breathtaking. And it's something else, John, and you know, for me, John, I generally don't use the word plagiarism myself when I describe what William Brandham did, because I don't think it's a strong enough word for what William Brandham did.

It's a fine word to use, but it is not strong enough. And some people, they do just like to get off into the weeds, you know, and argue about words. So plagiarism, you know, I can take it or leave it, whether I use that term or not, because to me, what William Brandham did is far, far worse than plagiarism, okay?

He wasn't just copying someone else and saying, hey, this is my work. He was copying someone else and saying, hey, this is God, holy cow. And you know, that is much, much worse than simple plagiarism, John.

So again, I, you know, I really don't got a problem with the preacher who learned something from another preacher and repeats what he learns. Like I, I think that's pretty normal, really. But pretending that that thing you learned from another preacher was actually a supernatural vision and experience you got from God, boy, that is utterly reprehensible, John.

And that is exactly what William Brandham did. Maybe one more point I'll make before we dive into this, you know, you don't even have to get into the weeds of whether these guys are right or wrong that William Brandham copied from when you look at this, right, then.

You can just set aside whether these things are right or wrong to begin with. And that's what I did. The point that really matters here is William Brandham was deceiving us about where his ideas and revelations came from.

That's the point. And, and I want to try and buy best to focus on that, like a laser. William Brandham was deceiving us about the origins of his revelations. William Brandham was lying to his audiences about supernatural visions and supernatural experiences.

And with the evidence we'll look at today, William Brandham has been caught, red handed perpetrating a hoax. And if you pay just close attention, we'll share enough evidence in this episode that you can see beyond a shadow of a doubt, William Brandham was lying about his visions.

And supernatural experiences. Yeah. You know, you're an IT guy, like I'm an IT guy, and I'm certain that you know how this works. I think in most of the IT world, to some extent, people have different varying levels of awareness of this, but there's this thing in the modern world called keyword hijacking.

Like you said, there's really nothing wrong with taking something that somebody else preached and preaching it for yourself, as long as there's a collaborative effort towards truth. In other words, if Billy Graham makes a great statement, whether you recognize him for or not, you know, most of his statements that are doctrinally inspired come from a passage in the Bible and maybe Billy Graham finds this wonderful passage in the Bible and William Brannum also finds this wonderful passage in the Bible that he observed how wonderful it was because he heard Billy Graham say it, then he can take this doctrine and he can

preach it and build upon it and the two become almost even though they're not working together, they become almost collaborative because both are building on the same biblical theme. In other words, it's not pleasureism, it came from the Bible.

Whenever the teaching was grounded in the Bible, you really can't call it pleasureism. But with keyword hijacking in today's world, what happens is somebody will publish some information and they'll put the keywords that you can search in your internet search engines, and you'll find that there are these groups that they want to be recognized and so they heavily emphasize that keyword so that when you search, they rank up towards the top. In other words, without this keyword, nobody would even know that this thing exists. This too is not a problem.

When people are working collaboratively, if you're doing a search and you want to find more information, everybody can kind of work with each other. This also is not pleasureism. The problem is that there are groups that exist that hijack keywords and become malicious.

In other words, their intent is not to further truth. Their intent is to suck people away from the truth and you find corporations use this as a legal form of malicious intent because you can publish misinformation. This is especially the case during the elections. You see this onslaught of news with these keywords and all these malicious companies are trying to suck the people out of the real truth and give them the propaganda. What we see with William Brannum, he's name dropping, he's taking themes from others, he's claiming them as his own and there's a point in time in which

it looks like he might be building on something that's grounded in biblical truth but then he takes it away from the Bible and calls it revelation and then turns it into extra biblical quote-unquote truth. In other words, he's hijacking the keywords. We see this with the thinking man's filter.

This was a phrase that he heard from Billy Graham and he even mentions on recording that he heard it from Billy Graham. Well, over time, after hijacking that phrase that people were kind of excited from Billy Graham, William Brannum then turns it into this divine inspiration. This angel told me to stop and pick up the cigarette packet.

Oh, I got this divine inspiration from God, thinking man's filter. But he'd already said that he got it from Billy Graham, right? This is what we call keyword hijacking with malicious intent. Before we dive in, let me share some resources for people because we're just going to skim the surface as we look at this.

But you can go deep. The rabbit hole is deep on this one and a few places I'll point you to. If you go to my website, christiangospelchurch.org, there's a track section where I actually have a couple lengthy articles, especially looking at the seals, where William Brannum copied all the key elements of the seals.

William Brannum Historical Research website has excellent resources. You got them on your site, John, several great articles. Believe the sign has some great articles, prove the claims, have some great articles. And if you want probably the best resource of all that I know, which is in print, is this book right here.

It is investigating William Brannum, the unfolding story of plagiarism and errors by Brian Smalls. You can get this on Amazon. This is probably the best resource currently in print on this topic. And he goes through this book and he analyzes quite a few sermons, especially the seals, the church ages, heavenly home, a few of the, some of the more prominent sermons.

And he goes line by line through those sermons, footnotes, and takes you back to exactly where William Brannum copied all of the essential elements and key pieces in those sermons from. And so that's a great, great resource, a terrific book.

And Brian Smalls did a great job of putting that together if you want to check that out. So that's the best resource out there I know of. That is a good book. And like I said, there are just so many instances of William Brannum taking what somebody else said and claiming it for his own and then twisting it and morphing it into something extra biblical.

I doubt we even get through all of it in the show today, Charles. There are just so many things that, you know, when I was growing up, I thought that he was this messenger of the last age and he was bringing something new.

I want to say the most interesting thing that I found that he introduced and claimed his, as his own was marriage and divorce. This sermon called marriage and divorce was, even my grandfather would get behind the pulpit and he said, how would we know about marriage and divorce if the prophet had not brought it to us?

And then this whole thing, there's nothing really said that wasn't already in the Bible. So not only is he taking the things that others say and claiming God gave him this divine revelation and God spoke to him for this quote unquote divine mystery, he's actually taking things from the Bible.

and claiming that those were divine mysteries. And then you've seen the marriage in divorce sermon, Charles, he twists it so bad out of context that what he ends up with, yes, there's this little tidbit in the sermon that is about divorcing and remaring that he did get from Bible, but there's this massive amount of extra biblical things that all the way down to the women of the earth are designed by Satan.

That's how bad it gets, which is, you know, that's polar opposite from what the Bible says. Right, you know, William Brennan had a number of books like this in his library, which is basically just preacher's handbooks.

And you'll find things like that when he preached marriage into divorce. He would go through these books, which he has in his library. It's kind of compile what each one of them says and then repeat that as his sermon.

This, that is how he would do it. Do it. Hold that book up to the camera, Charles. Yeah, sure. And the title of it is What the Bible teaches by F.G. Smith. Yeah, and this is a widely accepted book in the 1940s and 50s in assemblies of God's type circles.

So this is in alignment with, you know, early century Pentecostalism, you know, the beliefs in this book. And we know William Brennan owned copies of that book. Like I have caught pictures of that book in his library.

And we know all of the books that William Brennan had. And here's only believe magazine. This is published by William Brennan's daughter, Rebecca Brennan. And in this magazine, which all these pictures are on your website, John.

They're also in some of the resources I've already lined out. There is detailed pictures of William Brennan's library. You know, in all of the different books you can make out the titles, the names, the authors.

So we know what books William Brennan had access to. We're not even guessing it at all of the books he had. We know exactly what books that he had, right? And we have him on tape, even mentioning a lot of these books by name, the authors by name is saying that he read the books.

So, you know, when I was in the message and I heard about William Brennan going to the library, John, I used to imagine he, you know, tried it down to the public library and checked out a book and took it home.

But the truth is, William Brennan owned a large private personal library, a huge library of books. And when you look at the material in his library, John, I just want to point out, like, I have collected a lot of these exact same books.

That's where I'm, I've got them piled around me right here. I might show a few as we go through this, go through here. He collected a lot of these books. And now in the message, I just want to point this out to you how his stage persona conflicts with what he did in private.

You know, in the message in according to his stage persona, you know, he, was supposed to be opposed to theologians, opposed to education, opposed to studying theology, opposed all of this stuff, right? He was supposed to be getting all of this stuff in divine revelation from God, and that's how the preachers and the message you're supposed to be, you're supposed to just sit around and meditate and let these thoughts just drop into your head, right?

You're not supposed to be reading books for all this stuff. No. All right. You're supposed to be getting all your revelation directly from God and living in this supernatural realm and the sect that I come from, it's a send to own books like this, John.

Yeah. This is one of the things I was heavily attacked for. How dare you read a book? They found out I was reading books. I got in big trouble. I'm not kidding. I got in serious trouble for reading these books.

And it's something else yet. William Brannum owned a huge library of these things, right? And that contradiction comes actually from William Brannum himself, right? The contradiction of, you're not allowed to read any of this stuff.

Yet he read all of this stuff and that's where all the stuff come from. So it would be like, Charles, if you sent your children to learn algebra, and there's this man who's teaching them algebra, and he's got all these books that he's learned the algebra from, and then he suddenly condemns every other algebra teacher for studying and learning from each other, algebra.

We're going to school to learn algebra. William Brannum did the same thing with Christian ministers. He would tell them you're not supposed to go learn in a seminary about the Bible, which is just so ironic.

But then he was doing it. So he had, what he wanted basically was to dumb down all the other ministers so that he had this level of insight that they didn't have because they weren't allowed to learn.

And he even says on recording, how can I teach them algebra when they don't even know their ABCs? Well, he's keeping them in the ABCs. You know what I'm saying? That's well said, and you hit the nail on the head.

And I really think that is why the message is opposed, especially where I come from, especially William Brannum opposed to anybody looking into or reading these books. I think it's why they always condemn theologians, doctors or divinity, all of these guys.

It's why they condemn them is because they don't want someone to actually go open up one of these books and realize, oh, wait a minute. This is where all of the stuff we believe come from that was supposed to be divine revelation from God.

I mean, it's incredible. He also would not let them, you know, now this den is a full open place where people can go see, I think, with that appointment. But there was a period of time when William Brannum was alive.

Nobody got to see this thing except for the cult elite. And here's the problem for me, Charles. All of these leaders in the message who are basically who built the cult of personality that exists today, they all knew that William Brannum had these books.

They knew exactly what was in them. Some of them even had some of these books. So when William Brannum got up to the platform. says, God told me this thing that I'm reading from this book that you, ministers, secretly know that I'm reading, well, they all knew it, man.

And yet today, after he's dead, they still go on and on that he brought us this special mystery of truth. And they know exactly what book it came from. Yeah. My pastor, Raymond Jackson, was personally given copies of these books by William Brown.

So William Brown personally gave copies of these books to the ministers around him. Yeah. They knew they knew where this stuff come from. You can even find them talking on tape about William Brown.

I'm giving them these books on tape directly. So it really is something else and it really is something else. It just shocks me, John, that they knew this all these years and many of them kept up that charade that all this stuff had came directly from God.

And he's most of the authors that you look at in that William Brown him used. The most notable ones is Clarence Larkin, Uriah Smith and Charles Tase Russell. Clarence Larkin was a Baptist, Uriah Smith was a seven day Adventist, Charles Tase Russell is the founder of the Jehovah Witnesses.

And those are the three men that William Brown him borrowed the most heavily from. And of those three Clarence Larkin tops the list, he's the one he copied from the most. And when you think about that again, just logically in the message we believe we have a special truth that the rest of no one else out there has.

But obviously not, right? Because we copied it from all these other people, right? So the truth that we have in the message is not nearly as special as we were led to believe. This is just the message is just an amalgamation of other men's ideas, right?

If Clarence Larkin believed the fifth seal wrong, or the fifth seal the right way, John, then don't they have the revelation of the fifth seal in where he come from, right? And if Charles Tase Russell believed the Jehovah Witnesses believed the first seal, right?

Where they're from, don't the Jehovah Witnesses have the correct revelation of the first seal, right? It don't. These things that were told in the message don't make sense. Because William Brennan copied these things, almost verbatim from these other places, and just mixed and matched and gave us these ideas.

And so there's something seriously wrong with the logic of the message once you discover these things are not special and unique to the message. They're out there in other groups. You know, people have often asked me, what was the one thing that made you wake up and realize that this was a cult?

And I'll be honest, there wasn't a one thing. There were many, many different things, and they all seemed to hit me about the same time. But I will say that the one thing that sealed the deal was Clarence Larkin.

This I realized just how heavily that he was just lifting things. things right out of Larkin's work, like dispensational truth. You can find, I don't know, once he got that book, you can find it scattered all through his sermons everywhere.

And once I realized this, I just, you know, that was it. That was whenever it was over. I had had some struggles trying to believe the things that I knew were false and the things that even my grandfather knew were false.

You know, when I approached my grandfather, Charles, he told me, he said, John, people have known these things for years. What does it hurt for you to believe it anyway? In other words, people knew this thing was false.

Just keep your mouth shut and pretend like you believe it. That's essentially what he was saying. But when I discovered Charles Clarence Larkin, that was the end, man. This guy was taking Larkin's work, claiming divine revelation, and it is just a horrendous abuse of the people.

And even still today, we have, I don't know if you've seen it, recently one of the comments in our, I think it was in our podcast feed. This guy says, but what about the future home sermon?

This was the most beautiful, inspiring revelation that God gave our prophet William Branham. And I remember the first time I learned that that sermon was just almost completely lifted from Larkin, Charles, it blew my mind.

I could not believe how he didn't even try to cover it up. Like, he lined by line. He went straight through Larkin's work and called it his own. Yeah, it's the same for me, John, as far as catalysts leave in the message, there was a lot of things that built up.

But probably the thing that pushed me over the edge was discovering the depth to which William Branham had copied his sermons from other people. And specifically the seals. When you realize that he fully, totally, 100% end to end, copied the seals from other people.

And if you had, or in the message and you haven't discovered that, you haven't looked hard enough. Okay? When he, you figure out he'd have copied it end to end. I mean, it's unbelievable, John.

And so I just, at that point, I'm like, wait a minute. The core of the message has to be wrong. When you start to figure out that some of these divine revelations weren't actually from a divine source.

And the church ages, same thing, end to end, and the church ages are 100% copied. He's got, there's three different books that he took pieces of them out of. And just end to end copy.

The only tweak he made in the church ages was he changed the starting date of Leo to see it. He tweaked that in order to match up with his birthday, basically. So, which is ridiculous.

And then he changed messenger number seven to himself, which the... of witnesses believe messenger number seven was Charles Tase Russell. So he basically just changed messenger number seven to himself and adjusted the date to his birthday for messenger number seven.

Otherwise, I mean, it is. It's completely copied from other people and heavenly home is a great one, John. That's a great one for us to look at because it is. And if you want to start looking at this, I would suggest heavenly home.

Just look at the heavenly home sermon. Look through that one. That is a great spot to start. Let me also share just a little story about this for me, John, because I had a church I went to.

There was an elderly man used to go to the tabernacle, new brother, brown him. I sat next to him on the bench for years. And one one day I, you know, I'm out making my rounds as the minister visiting the sick, the elderly and what have you.

And I dropped by his house and I visit him and his wife, who was, you know, not in good health. And as we're there, he pulls the heavenly home sermon off the shelf. And he hands it to me and he says, you should read this.

This is the most amazing thing. There's never been nothing like this ever preached. You know, William Brandham just had such amazing, insightful revelation. And he hands it to me. And I say, yeah, I'll take a look at it, which I hit.

Well, you know, I was already familiar with the sermon. And so I took it home and by that point, I already collected a lot of these books. And I sit down and like, okay, where are the odds?

I'm going to find this sermon in there. So I just take a little time, open up all of these books on the, you know, the heavenly Jerusalem sections. And yeah, William Brandham copied the whole sermon.

Pretty well word for word, all the central points out of the books in his library. And why don't we just, we just, maybe we could look at a couple of those. Let me give you, let me grab one of the books right here.

Let me just read a couple of them. Why not? I mean, show the readers. Here is, this is the book of Revelation by Clarence Larkin. Here is the inside of the book. This is page 205.

You know, you've got a beautiful picture of New Jerusalem right there. And, and, and we can put a picture of this up on the screen. And, and let me just read what William Brandham says.

He's reading directly off this page when he reads the sermon. He says that this is a deep revelation from God. And I'll just stop here. None of these other things. I'll bring the rest of this up, the Lord willing.

But notice here, when you turn over into the book of Revelation, you can see how it's measured by cubits and by furlongs, 300. So now we find that the city is measured 1500 miles square.

You know how far that would reach? I measured it off this week. It would reach from main to Florida, from the eastern seaboard to 600 miles past the Mississippi. In other words, half the United States.

Just for the city, you say there ain't no room. When the sea is gone, there will be because pretty near four fifths of it will be in the water. That's right, the explosion dries up the sea to erupts the earth.

Oh my, remember 1500 miles square. What a city. But remember the C is gone. Now, that don't necessarily mean it's being equal. It's that it's square. It said the walls and the foundations were equal.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's a cube or a square. There's another geographical measure that dimensions are the same. That is a pyramid. Four square. Lyethore square and the walls are the same. So, you just take that quote right there.

Isn't it really weird how William Brownham uses the exact same illustration? And the exact same words that Clarence Larkin used in his book? And you can go through the whole Sermon on Heavenly Home and all the key elements given by William Brownham are just like that.

He's reading it out of this book and a couple others in his library. The problem for me whenever I started digging into the depths in which William Brownham lifted the commentary from Clarence Larkin was this.

In the message, we're falsely told that William Brownham opened the seven seals. And remember Charles, in the book of Revelation, it says specifically, no man was worthy to open the seals. But we were twisted and manipulated to believe, well, William Brownham was more than a man.

So it's okay if he's a man and he opened the seals because he was more than a man. But the Bible specifically says, no man. And the Bible is referring to no human. William Brownham, like it or not, was a human.

And he's doing this thing allegedly that the Bible says he cannot do. But when it really comes down to it, after you've deprogrammed and you step away from it, Clarence Larkin, even though his theology, I somewhat disagree with now, he is going through the book of Revelation, point by point, in this area of research that William Brownham is lifting from him.

And he is literally just taking Bible passages and then he's adding his commentary to it. And his commentary, in my opinion, is sometimes theologically unsound. But the root of the substance of what he's saying comes from the book of Revelation.

Then William Brownham, quote unquote, opens the seven seals. And his commentary is actually on Clarence Larkin's commentary, which is on the book of Revelation. So the things that Larkin got wrong, William Brownham also got wrong.

But in William Brownham's commentary, he got it further wrong. So the substance, the source, is still the book of Revelation. And when it comes down to it, there is nothing new, there's not even a revelation of the seven seals.

It is a commentary of a commentary of the book of Revelation. And what astounded me, this was even during the time that I was in... message, Charles. People would say, William Brannum opened the seven seals and he told us this, this and this. Well, if you open up the book of Revelation, it says this, this and this.

I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing revealed here. And I'm scratching my head even in the message. I'm like, how can you really say he revealed that? Man, I'm, I was seven years old whenever I first learn these things that are supposed to be revealed. They're in the Bible, you know, some of them.

Now, William Brannum twists some of them out of Bible context, which is another story. But again, William Brannum is giving a commentary of a commentary of the book of Revelation. And he's claiming that God gave him this divine inspiration when it's literally a commentary of a commentary of the book of Revelation. The things that he borrowed from these other men's commentary, because other than, you know, Euryah Smith and Clarence Larkin, they didn't present this as anything but a commentary. And it's just their own thoughts, right? They never claimed some divine something, you know, they just claimed this is the best of our knowledge based on how we're

thinking about this today, you know. But William Brannum took that and he elevated it to prophecy, to being something prophetic, which is they didn't do that when they wrote it to begin with. And for William Brannum to then elevate it, it's bizarre, right? So it really, it doesn't have a prophetic authority. It's just William Brannum twisting these things into something he was never intended to be, right? It was like you said, you know, there's elements in here which is could be good and useful. And then there's other elements where these men could very well be mistaken,

right? And for William Brannum to hide the intermediate source from us, for us to be able to go back and study his sources, right? To see was he building on something solid or not? That is very shameful, honestly, very deceptive. And what turns Larkin into a messenger for the messenger if you take William Brannum's theology? You know, like I said before, too, there's not really anything wrong, I think, with sharing something you learned from another preacher. But let me read where William Brannum said he got this stuff from, John, these are quotes from the heavenly home sermon. Let me

read you two quotes from that sermon, how William Brannum would explain that he would get his sermons. At the start, he says, now this morning, I have a very important subject to me. It's a blessful one. I hope it strikes you the same way. And if I could only give it to you in the inspiration in which I received it in, right? So this is, he's setting people up to believe he got this heavenly home sermon through some divine experience. And later on in the same sermon, he says, now I always find my messages by prayer. I'll be sitting in prayer and something reveals to me. And I wait

on it a few minutes and see if it's right and I feel it closer. And then sometimes I keep waiting till it breaks into a, vision, right? So he's saying there in the heavenly home sermon that he had a vision and he got all this from God. But John, William Brownham is lying. He's bold, faced, lying about getting a vision from God. And this is so terrible, right? I mean, what in the world can you do with that? I mean, it scares me. You know, as a message believer, when you see this, this should scare you to death.

William Brownham is bold, faced, lying about getting visions from God. You know, and when you find him doing that, how in the world can we trust anything any more that he says? How do we know that any of the visions wasn't a lie? And if you've been listening to this podcast, we have documented quite a number of times where beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was faking visions. And now here, again, we got solid, unquestionable proof that he was faking visions about his heavenly home sermon. That's just one excerpt that we read. There's the whole sermon is out of that book.

And this is not the only time he did this. He did this many, many times, John. And to me, this still breaks my heart. Like this is a knife in my heart. Like how could he deceive us like this?

It's unbelievably painful to me to this day that William Brownham did this to us. He is personally guilty of this. He's responsible for pretending to be something he wasn't. And we believed him. And we were his victims. And believing him, especially us message preachers, he turned us into his accomplices, you know, for all the things that we did in the name of his untrue things. And let me give another example here out of the heavenly home sermon. Just and just catch how deceptive this is. So there's Clarence Larkin had multiple books. This piece is out of his book, Dismanstational Truth. Here is a picture of the page where this is happening on,

or he's copying this from. And William Brownham says in his sermon on heavenly home, he says, now how many of you want to put down this word? The Greek word, pass away. It comes from the word, I had to find out. I thought how is the world going to pass away? And yet we're to live on it.

But if you'll notice, some of you people that wants to put it down, I'll spell it for you. I couldn't pronounce it. P-A-R-E-R-E-C-H-O-M-I-A. I don't know how to pronounce it. Now that way, as I said, when I get, the inspiration strikes me for something, then I go back and find out that word. Now here, I can't even spell the word. I can't even pronounce it. But the Lord has still given it to me in that way. So, John, I don't even know what to say, right? How can you make anything of that but pure deception? He was pretending like he just pulls this word out of

the ether. He didn't even know how to pronounce it or what it meant. But he knew how to spell the word. And so he's just plain lying, right? He's just read that word out of Clarence Larkin's book. When he was looking at the heavenly home pieces and the New Jerusalem pieces in Clarence Larkin's book. And so how can you ever trust a prophet once you discover his inspiration, his fake? I mean, that is clearly beyond a shadow of a doubt, deception that William Brannum was employing there. He was faking beyond a shadow of a doubt, getting

this stuff from God. What William Brannum is doing, it's very wicked. It's very wicked and it gets much, much worse. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm afraid. No, for me, it's even deeper. It's not the question isn't for me. How do you trust a prophet? The question really becomes, how do you trust a false God? Because Charles as you know, William Brannum is highly controversial in Christianity, even still today. And you'll find everyone who thinks he's the closest thing to God to, you'll find people who think he was God in the flesh all the way to people think he was the devil in the flesh. It's

that wide of a variety. But the general consensus among the evangelical community who are aware that William Brannum was a false prophet who claimed to be working with an angel on the platform. They, by and large, believe that he was working with a spirit guide. In other words, he had a demon there on the platform with him that he was claiming was an angel of God. But it's even deeper than that because William Brannum often referred to this angel as Jesus Christ. And this was lifted largely from Charles Tay's Russell because William Brannum taught that the Archangel Michael was Jesus Christ and William Brannum taught

that theology. So William Brannum would say, here on the platform with me is this angel who is Jesus Christ and this angel has followed me all of my life. Well, so William Brannum is claiming that this angel is God, which is fully anti-biblical. You know, the Bible clearly states that Jesus is above the angels. But when William Brannum quote, unquote, open to the seven seals and he's reading from Clarence Larkin's commentary, he introduces the first seal, the very first one, March 18, 1963 in the sermon, the first seal. He said, if I could just stand here at the platform and reveal it to you, the way it's revealed to me in the

room, it would be marvelous. Now, with the seals, if you go back and you listen to these sermons and keep in mind every single, every single item of substance came from Clarence Larkin's work. During the course of these sermons, he was pretending that he knew absolutely nothing about these seven seals before the morning of the sermon, and he was saying that the angel would go meet him in the room and give him this information, and he's telling the people that this angel is, in fact, God.

So what it ends up to being is a false God. God is not an angel. Jesus is not an angel. It's anti-biblical. So he's pretending to have this false God, who's telling him that Clarence Larkin's commentary is a divine revelation, and oh, by the way, you've got the book, so you can just quote it verbatim and read it. For me, it really comes down to the fact this was a false God. I no longer believe that this was an angel or a demon or a spirit guide or anything like this, because Charles, I've read the book. This did not come from

a spirit guide. He is copying this book by Clarence Larkin. You know, William Brannum had so many of these hoax visions that he supposedly got through supernatural revelations. It's really disturbing when you take the time to just realize the depth to which he was doing this. And I said, I have collected all of these books. I've studied them extensively, John, and I can say certainly everything was copied all of it.

There's not one stitch of original revelation in the message that has not been copied from someone else. Not one stitch is original. And like I said before, if people in the message, especially the preachers, you say that's not true. Again, I say it's because you have not looked hard enough, right? Shame on you. You don't know what you're talking about, but the church ages is copied. Every single interpretation of prophecy from the book of Revelation is copied. Every last one of them, even the multiple conflicting versions are copied from these books, John. Yeah, the interpretations of the Old Testament prophecies are copied. The

interpretation of Jesus' parables are copied. Malachi 4.5 and 6 is copied. Revelation 10.7 is copied. Serpent seed is copied. It's all copied. All of it. 100 percent was copied from other people.

And every time he said those things were divine revelations from supernatural experiences, William Brandon was deceiving us. Not even the revelation of the seals is original, which of everything I think got me the most, John. And like I said, I won't do any sort of a full analysis of those sermons here. But let me, I've already looked at that example from the fifth seal, which, well, no, I did. Let's look at an example of the fifth seal.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me look at an example of the fifth seal.

You know, in the message, we know the souls under the altar or Jewish martyrs, right? And here is what Clarence Larkin says in his book, The Book of Revelation. Concerning this. We can put a good picture up on the screen, but let me just read what William Branham says, one little excerpt from his 1963 sermon on the fifth seal. He says, I have always thought these souls under the altar were the martyrs of the early church.

And well, I'm sure that well, Dr. Eurea Smith and every one of them says that, see? I thought so myself, but when the Holy Spirit showed division, it wasn't so. And then William Branham goes on to say that the Holy Spirit, you know, it revealed to him that the seven the souls under the altar were Jewish martyrs.

He just read that out of Clarence Larkin's book, and he boldface lied to us in the sermon that no one else believed that. And he had the book and read it like, this is the level of deception he was employing.

You know, just being dishonest, so dishonest. And again, you know, you don't have to argue at this stage about whether it's right or wrong that the souls under the altar are Jewish souls or Christian souls, like you don't got to even argue about that. But we can say for sure, William Branham was definitely outright deceiving us when he told us the Holy Spirit told that to him in a supernatural vision. He was outright deceiving us. That's not how he learned that. He learned that reading this book right here. And these seals are supposed to be the

pinnacle of the special revelation of the message, but it's just copied out of these books. You know, the first four seals he copied from Clarence Larkin and other parts from Charles Russell. That's mainly where the first four come from. The fifth seal, the sixth seal, and the seventh seal are 100% out of Clarence Larkin's books, almost 100% out of Clarence Larkin's books, a little bit of the seventh seal is also out of Charles Tase Russell's books. And, you know, we, it's something else, John. It's something else. Something else. Because this was the most important supernatural event of the message, right? Yeah. And to find out he made up the most

important supernatural event of the message, getting it out of a library books. It's heartbreaking to find out it was all a hoax. And it's outrageous that William Branham was so deceptive. And it's even more outrageous that men today are continuing going on perpetrating this deception.

You know, I mentioned earlier that the number one thing that sealed the deal for me was when I realized that he was copying Clarence Larkin and he was claiming divine revelation. But the depth of what I thought through at that moment, I think is critical to understand because it really is problematic. I don't know how it is in your sect or not whenever you're administering this. But in the main sect of the message, the seventh seal doctrine, or the quote unquote revelation of the seventh seal was very, very closely tied to the seven church ages. And we were taught that

William Branham through divine revelation or this angel on the platform or angel on the room or whatever, brought him the notion that the extra biblical notion that the seven churches of Asia Minor that are described in the book of Revelation were not churches as history and the book of Revelation states, but instead were ages and William Branham brought this divine truth allegedly.

And then I discovered afterwards that this was nothing new, this is called dispensationalism and it has existed. I think it came from a Jesuit priest if I remember the origins correctly, but it goes all the way back to John Darby and John Darby brought it into the United States through this, through C.I. Scofield, C.I. Scofield was heavily dispensationalist in his commentary of the Bible.

In William Branham, that's another one of the sources that he plagiarized. He would just read the Scofield notes and those would become divine revelations as well. But the moment that really was the turning point for me is really, really deep when you think about it because I suddenly noticed that William Branham took Clarence Larkin's Church Age commentary.

He directly lifted it from this page that there's this big drawing that says, the messages to the seven churches compared with church history in Clarence Larkin's book. And he gives this big diagram of showing how each one of these actual churches were instead an age and he gives the dates of these ages.

And William Branham copied those exact dates. Now where William Branham twisted it is he added a quote unquote messenger to each one of the ages so that for the last age, the one before the Doomsday, he could insert himself and suggest that he was the final messenger.

In other words, back to the algebra example. If you took your child to study algebra from this guy who's telling everybody else they cannot study algebra so that he can have a superiority complex.

And then he suddenly says, oh, and by the way, I'm the messenger of the age to your child. You just kind of laugh at him, right? Because he's telling all these people, you can't go study this and that's why he has this knowledge.

Well that's exactly what William Branham did. And in doing so, William Branham did not care enough to see if the quote unquote messengers that he appointed was even alive during their church age. So he chose Columbus who was not even alive during his church age.

He died outside of his quote unquote church age. That was the point for me that this whole thing just came apart. Number one, William Brannum is doing this solely to point to himself as a supernatural authority.

There could be no other intention of doing this. He was pointing to himself, yet he did not even care enough to take the time to make sure that what he said was correct. So once I reach this point, I'm like, well, what else is incorrect?

If this was a divine inspiration from God, why is God giving incorrect information to the people through this quote unquote messenger, William Brannum? It's either a false God, or this guy is just outright lying, and you know, I, a false God definitely was behind this thing, obviously, but I've come to the conclusion that he was just lying through his teeth for the sole purpose of self-promotion.

Yeah, you know, when you, you take the church ages, for example, you would read Clarence Larkin's book, and when you see the church age dates identical to Clarence Larkin's book, that's pretty shocking right there, right?

Because again, we believe more or less he got those dates divine revelation, right? He didn't, but then you, you grasp, oh well, wait, he's still got the, well, he got the church age messengers then by divine revelation, because that's not in Clarence Larkin's book, right? He got that out of another book.

So, um, right, the, the book that those things come out of, so, um, Charles, Charles Tase Russell actually named all the seven church age messengers in his book, and, but that's not where William Brannum copied all of them from either, but he did repeat some of Charles Tase Russell's church age messengers, he copied some of his, the rest of them, he had another book in his library by a lady named Rachel Hazelteen who wrote a book How Did It Happened? I've got an electronic copy of that, I can show you John, but he copied these people

out of her book, right? She had like a list of important historic figures for each period of time, and he just copied the historic figures out of that book, you know, whoever he felt like in, and what's very interesting is you notice William Brannum copied people who seemed to have halos or something over their head, right? That seemed to be the thing that, that was the factor in who he copied. He chose people who there was some report of them having a halo or supernatural light, that's not, you know, in the histories, and which is so messed up, John, so messed up, and

if you actually go back to Charles Tase Russell, when he copied his, when he made up his people, he actually had a solid, I won't say solid, he had at least some biblical rationale as to the men that he chose, right? There was some basis in scripture for the men that he chose. William Brannum just pulls people out of the ether, it seemingly, but really he's just distilling that list from Rachel Hazelteens' book. It's shocking, John. And again, people say that some of this is unique. No, you just haven't looked hard enough.

You just haven't looked hard enough. I have looked hard enough. Look behind me. I have looked. I have went through it. I have looked and you can do the same thing. Let me give another example out of the seventh seal, John. Just so again, I want people to see just how clearly William Brannum was doing this. And the seals is so important because if William Brannum didn't get the seals through divine revelation from God, I mean, it breaks the core of the theology of the message, right? If this is not divine revelation straight from God, to William Brannum,

the message is broke beyond repair. Because William Brannum told us that the seals were hidden mystery before 1963, right? Like this is very clearly taught to us. All the preachers said this. William Brannum said this. The seals were never known by anyone before 1963. That's exactly what we were told before he revealed it. So when you find the seals broke down in a book before William Brannum was even born, it actually undermines the foundation at its very most fundamental level.

Because we believe William Brannum's one of his key purposes as a prophet was to reveal what these seals meant. So when you find out that William Brannum is not actually the man who received this revelation of the seals from God, but he's the man who copied this revelation of the seals from other men who may have remained out of receipt of the seal from God, right? It breaks the message.

William Brannum didn't get these from God. So even if you go down the path and say these seals are still correct, right? Which people may or may not do. I have my opinions on that, I'm not sharing here. Even if you go down that path and you say that the revelation of the seals is still correct, William Brannum is not the man who originated that revelation. Someone else did.

So then you got to go back to them people are the one who got it from God, right? And so you just can't have that and have the message make sense anymore. Don't work. But it's the truth. And some people have tried to switch things up, John. Some people have tried to switch things up and say, well, William Brannum was filling in the blanks. William Brannum was tying up the loose ends, right? And you find people who are in that mode of logic right now. And I appreciate you saying that because you're admitting that that William Brannum lied because William Brannum didn't say he

tied, filled in the blanks. William Brannum didn't say he was tying up loose ends. William Brannum said he got all of this directly from God in supernatural revelation, right? So people who do that, you are admitting that William Brannum lied, right? Because William Brannum didn't say he was tying up loose ends. He said he got all this directly from God. And so yeah, if the seals didn't come directly to William Brannum from God, it fundamentally undermines the core theology of almost every single sect of the message. Yeah. It's interesting to me how much we have managed to change the message

cult of personality. over the last decade, because I remember sitting through sermon after sermon, how he was the closest thing to Jesus Christ, and how William Brannum had all these divine revelations that nobody knew about, and he brought it to a lost and dying world, and we would have never known had he not done these things.

And sometime, I want to say it was about 2005 or six, after we'd published lie after lie after lie after lie, William Brannum lying through his teeth to the extent, at some point, I just came to the conclusion that he was a serial liar.

The cult theology shifted such that William Brannum lied a lot. I've actually heard a minister in the cult say this, William Brannum lied a lot, but that's okay because Abraham of old was a liar.

I seriously heard a cult minister say this, and then now that we have introduced the fact that William Brannum was just lifting things out of these books, I want to say this was probably, I don't know, three or four years ago, I came across a sermon by a cult minister who's saying that, yes, William Brannum got all these divine revelations by picking and choosing which portions of others works that he was copying and deciding which one of those was correct.

And then he still gets it incorrect because Colombo cannot live during his church age. So we've twisted the way in which the message presents itself to the people, which is good. But when it comes right down to it, there is a huge problem for me in that many of the people William Brannum copied from had their own cults of personality.

In other words, these were scoundrels. Charles Fox Parham, the founder of the Pentecostal faith, before he created his cult of personality, known as the Paramites, he went and studied how John Alexander Dowey became labeled the richest man in the West, how he convinced all of his cult of personality to forfeit everything, financially, and come, come be part of his cult.

And he also went to Frank Sanford, did the same thing. He actually went to this tour of different cult leaders. He did not go to the good guys. He went to the scoundrels, then created his own cult of personality.

And that's literally what birth modern Pentecostalism. And then you have William Brannum, who's doing the same exact thing. He's going to this source, who was a cult leader, Charles Stase Russell, the leader of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the central figure for the Jehovah's Witnesses.

And he's copying from Dowey, he's copying from Larkin, he's copying from all of these people who were scoundrels. And how can we not call William Brannum a scoundrel when he's giving the message from the scoundrels?

Yeah, William Brannum did not not all of these sources that William Brannum used which were reputable. You know, we can say that for sure, right?

I think everyone in the message would agree that oh witnesses is not a movement that's just that's from God, right? Yeah, I mean, and so then William Brannum imports Jehovah witness theology into the message. So what do you do with that?

Yeah, it's something else. Let me give one last example from the seals, John, and I'm just trying to use some simple examples on these things. So here's the seventh seal. You can do this all through these versions. I actually got a copy of William Brannum's Church Age book and I went through and I annotated the source for everything all the way through that book.

Before I found Brian Smalls book, I did all of that myself just figuring it out and Brian Smalls has done a great job of it. So you can just use his source. But here's the here's the seals seventh seal and William Brannum again said he got this kind of more or less divine revelation. He said he saw the thing unfold in a vision and William Brannum says in his in his sermon on the seventh seal. He says everything runs out in this time.

The end of the end of the seventh seal notice is the end of the church age. It's the end of the seventh seal. It's the end of the trumpets. It's the end of the vials. It's the end of the ushering in of the millennium. That's on the seventh seal. It's just like firing a rocket into the air and the rocket explodes here and it goes up and then it explodes again and it puts out five stars and one of those stars explodes and blows out five stars from it.

And then one of them stars explodes and blows out five stars from it. See? It fades on out. Right. And I think that it's those little illustrated things where you see he is even copying the illustrations themselves from Clarence Larkin that just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he was reading this stuff out of the book. Right.

And it's unbelievable when you hear William Brannum say he got this stuff from God when you have to be deranged to not be able to see that he was just reading this stuff out of these books. Right. And it just makes me sick at the level of deception unadulterated deception that William Brannum was employing here.

Yeah. You know, for me, the simplest example Charles is the Jehovah's Witness Cult. It's funny to me when you're in a destructive cult, you like to condemn other cults. They're doing the same exact thing that you're doing, but you condemn them so that the people don't really think about the similarities. And in the message, I don't know about your sect, but in the main sect, we condemn the Jehovah's Witnesses.

These are the guys who knock on our doors during dinner. and spread this false theology about Jehovah, right? And it comes from a mis-translation. There was a mis-translation by one of the Bible translators, and there was a J, instead of YHWH for Yahweh,

there was J H V H, and it became Jehovah. And so Charles Tase Russell says, this mis-translation is divine inspiration by God. I have been told by this angel, I can't even remember the angel's name, that Jehovah is our God.

Jehovah of the Old Testament is Jesus of the New. And I remember sermons where message cult pastors would condemn the Jehovah's Witnesses because they just took a mis-translation and they ran with it, and they created a whole cult off of a mis-translation.

But then if you do a search in the message, you're gonna find, here's an example, 1950, in August of 1950 in the sermon, who is God? William Brandham said, give people faith. Sometimes it startles them.

They can't realize the presence of this great thing, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the Jesus of the New. And I mean, this is the substance of Charles Tase Russell's theology and it's scattered and sprinkled all throughout William Brandham's ministry.

If you just do a search for Jehovah in Jesus, New and Old, you'll find all of these quotes. They're, it's from start to finish. So for me, the simplest example is just, why did he have to copy Charles Tase Russell for the foundation of his theology?

Things like that, I hate to say it's just so stupid, right? Cause these are people who just never took time to really study anything out. So, we could go on a long rabbit hole with this.

You know, like the, so in the original Latin alphabet, there was no J and there was no W. Like those letters did not exist, okay? There was, and so why is, so that's why, that's why, you know, it is the way it is.

And in the original Latin alphabet, the letter Y was pronounced like J, J, and the V was pronounced like W, what? So when in, you know, a Latinized speaker would read the word Jehovah and they J over, they would pronounce it Yawa, right?

But in English, you know, we added additional letters and then we pronounced the letters differently, so we say Jehovah. So, so you and I, an English reader would look at the word Jehovah and pronounce a Jehovah, a Latin reader would look at the same letter words and say Yawa, right?

And so I just hate to say it. And they never bothered to study out. They just pretended like they were experts and authorities on linguistics and language and words in Greek and Hebrew. They didn't know the first thing they were talking about.

I mean, all of these guys, Charles, they did not do this because they were bored. These guys had intent to, make money. That is why these guys did this. That is why I don't care what people have told me. They say William Brannum was the most humble man on the face of the planet and that he was poor as dirt. But no, you cannot be humble and claim that you are the closest thing to Jesus Christ. That exists on the earth today, which is what William Brannum insinuated.

You cannot be humble and claim to be above every other person in your church. That is not humility. We know from Sarah Brannum's letter, he was not poor. This was a very, very, very rich man. This guy had more money than I will ever see in my lifetime. These guys did this for money. I argue that they weren't morons. They were financial geniuses, but they were wolves in sheep's clothing.

John, as we bring this episode to a close, this will not be the last episode we do on this topic, but so come back next week for more. There is already enough, I think, just in what we have looked at today, especially when we see how William Brannum was misleading us about where he got the revelation from the seals. There is enough right in there to totally undermine the core of the message theology. Like I said, we barely scratch the surface. If you want detailed analysis of where all of this stuff comes from, get Brian

Small's book. Go to my website, read the tracks there. There are details with pictures, put notes. John, your website, believe the sign, prove the claims. There are plenty of good resources out there. There are even videos. Believe the sign has a pretty decent video series out on just where some of the key elements of each of the seals was copied from.

There are lots of resources out there that you can get a hold of and just see the central elements where it's copied from. If you'll get these books and do a detailed search yourself, you'll find out that you can lay your finger on pretty well every last significant thing that William Brannum preached in those sermons in these books.

The problem is not that he's being enlightened or learning from other people. The problem is he lied to us and told us he got all of it from supernatural revelations from God. It's not true. William Brannum lies about visions. He lies about supernatural experiences.

He lies about telling us where these things come from. You just cannot trust somebody who does that. This is the equivalent of false prophecy. This is false prophecy right here. He is saying he got things from God that he definitely did not. It's terrible.

I really fear for people in the message you're continuing to carry on this delusion, John, especially the ones who know better, which is the preachers. Preachers listening to this stuff, looking into this stuff.

You know better, you know better, has to go on with this stuff after you clearly see this level of deception that William Brannum is engaged in. You're going to lose touch with reality, you probably already are, you know, something is broken in the minds of the people who can go on saying these things are from God when clearly they are not.

So let's just pray for those people. Yeah, there are really only two ways that you can look at this, Charles. The ministers who are saying that these things came directly from an angel or a vision or a prophecy or from God himself, these men who knew that William Brannum had these books, they knew exactly what's in the books, these men are either radicalized and they've lost their minds and they're unstable and it's very dangerous to be with them.

Or they too are charlatans, you can really only go one of these two choices because these men knew these things. My grandfather was in that den, my grandfather knew these things and I'm sad to say that I have to look at my grandfather much differently than I did when I was a child, my grandfather was part of the problem and he, he knew these things and he did them by his own words.

He knew these things and he did them anyway, he said them anyway and that is sadly, that's a wolf and sheep's clothing, sheep's clothing. So my advice, read Brian Smalls book, it is very, very good. If you want a deep look into all of these things that we're talking about, this book has everything in it.

For the listeners who are wondering how this came to be, we said, Charles and I got together and we said, let's do an episode on the plagiarism and we started talking through all the bullet points and we're like, there's no way we'll fit that in one. Let's go to two.

Well, I was in the back of my mind, I was saying, man, this could go to 100. You could literally, you could literally start in 1947, which is the earliest we have access to read in here.

If we had the others, I'm sure we could go even deeper, the cult has hidden the pre 1947 sermons, but you could go sermon by sermon by sermon and you're going to find something that he claimed revelation on that already existed before he even started.

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 in the Healing Revivals, read preacher behind the White Hoods, a critical examination of William-Branum in his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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