From Bible to Bizarre: UFOs, Wine, and War on Doctors - Chino Ross

Hello and welcome to another episode. Of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast, I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host, minister, and friend, Chenle Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding, scripture, and truth by Chenle D. Ross, YouTube channel.

Chenle, it's good to be back and today is a momentous day in world history because so many different groups said that this pope that we had was the Antichrist, and this was the coming end of the world, the doomsday was coming, the end time army of Christians, the so-called end time army of Christians was rising up, and so now the pope has passed.

So I think that means if the Antichrist died, we have to be living in total bliss. I didn't come prepared with anything on the Roman Catholic papacy, unfortunately. I am teaching this wonderful series that we all are enjoying on the book of Revelation. We're in the end of chapter six, so we haven't gotten to the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beasts and all these things that people are so fascinated over. But you know, it's nothing new. John Calvin and Martin Luther thought the papacy was surely somehow connected to the Antichrist and that was 500 years ago, and the world is still continuing. I think there will be an Antichrist, but I do

not think it's the Roman Catholic Pope. Yeah, and if anybody has read my research, you understand that this all came from white supremacy. Even the focus on Israel that we have today, the positive focus on Israel came from the negative focus on Israel, which is a conundrum, but the Christian identity movement, all of these things that we see, that all of these different various cults and cult-like groups point to as the in-time army to battle the... I can't even put into words the fantasy world that they've created, but that's what it is. It is a fantasy world. I guess that

is putting it into words. But if you take a step back in history to what we're talking about now, we're talking about Hobart Freeman, and he built off of the fantasy world that was created during the post-World War II healing revivals, and so it is a shift through time. If you think about what we're seeing today with all of the various nonsense that's happening in the religious and political world. You still had the political nonsense back then, but the religious things that we're talking about today build up and cascade over time into what we see in the in the geopolitics

and geo-religion. I can't wait John till you and I in the future can talk some about this end time army business. I know you've done that with some other guests. Hobart had his own twist on that which I'm not going to get into today and it wasn't Joel's army, it was Gideon's army from an alleged prophecy he had, but all of that is easily traceable back to latter-rain movement that there's going to be this great end time army and so forth. But I can't wait till we can get to some of that. But where we have been, you know, you're an expert on William

Brannum's background and you probably didn't know as much as you now know about Hobart Freeman, but now you kind of an expert on Hobart Freeman and people that have followed him over the years or for myself earlier in my life. I was a regular follower devotee of Hobart Freeman.

And I, that's full disclosure, I believed everything that he said. When I first heard him, when I was 17, 18 up into my early maybe even up to my mid-20s, you know, it was a process of time.

I had tried to explain through these podcasts how some of that came about, but we all heard his story. I was a part in 1952 and I just heard that story literally a hundred times in the messages that I listened to. And I didn't recognize what was going on back then, but I do now anytime that because I didn't have the experience, I didn't have anything to judge or filter things with.

But any now, if I hear a minister and he tells the same story too many times about himself, I go, there's an issue here. I always come to church to hear about Jesus and God in the Bible, not about you. And we've had this conversation before. But in looking back, Hobart City got saved on the way home from a nightclub in 1952 in Tampa, Florida. And I don't know exactly when did he get saved? Was it on the road in the car? It could have been. I don't know. I just think he told that story because it sounds like a saw on the road to Damascus kind of story. It just sounds like

a radical conversion. And I'm not saying that it wasn't. I'm just saying the story was told the same way. He was on the way home from a nightclub. It makes it sound like, what were you doing at a nightclub? When you hear all the stories, he was a photographer.

and he was trying to sell some glamour shots to some of the starlets there. And business wasn't good, they declined to make any purchase. And so he went home, dejected and somehow God used that experience to bring him to Christ.

And I'm not doubting that, but it's just the stories. And so then he's teaching this healing message. And he believes that this is the message that God has given him. And early on, as we discussed last time, John, it was a very positive message.

It was something new that I had not heard. Neither had a lot of people that perhaps God would heal you. That's the kind of the way that it was. Perhaps he has provided healing for you.

And perhaps all you need to do is ask him to heal you and he will heal you. And that was wonderful. That was good news, especially for people who were really sick. I wasn't, because I was a teenager, not in anything wrong with me at the time.

But it was good news for people who were sick. And unfortunately it was a trap and even a death trap. It became for people who had serious illnesses. But as you follow Hobart from 1974, two years after they moved in the glory barn, to 1984, the year that he died.

Just a 10-year period, you'll see a drastic shift in the tone of the message. It went from, thank God, he's provided healing for us in Jesus. And we can ask him. And I don't have anything wrong with a simple message along that line.

Pray to God for your healing and ask him to heal you. It went from that to, you better trust God, not a privilege, but an obligation. Whatsoever's not a faith is sin. Romans 14, 23, they love to quote out of its context, by the way, as they did everything.

You better trust God. If you don't trust God, you're gonna have a judgment come upon you. And then it went from that. You're thinking, oh wow, I don't, man, I've got a trust God.

Well, what about medicine and the doctors? Then that became the last part of his healing message. It wasn't a healing message. It was an anti-doctor message is what he'd become. He did not teach about the wonder and privilege and glorious opportunity that the believer has to trust Jesus.

It was all about the medical statistics. It was all about doctors are evil, they're bad. He began doing his pseudo research on Greek terms like pharma, kea, in the New Testament. And that was never, you could never find a reference to that.

I challenge anyone on any of the tapes in the 1970s. That was purely burly, 80. days after they were in the new building when he is trying to bring the hammer down hard on this healing message and trying to force people. I mean, put it out there as an option that God has provided healing and invite people, why don't you trust him to heal you and leave it at that. But, you know, Hobart was a Pharisee of the Pharisees and he was not going to leave well enough alone. He was going to force you to follow his method. And so you were warned

of the fact that drugs, pharmachia really means sorcery and that all medicines and all medicinal herbs and any kind of thing that could possibly be called medicine because the word for sorcery and the King James has his Greek pharmachia. Oh, then that somehow has to do with pharmacy and pharmacology and that has to do with drugs. And so that means this was just pseudo research and pseudo science on his part that anything that has to do with pharmachia is definitely demonic evil spirit in origin. And so then it got so bad, John, by the very end because people were

continuing to have so many struggles in their lives. His message of healing didn't deliver people. People still had it. They were claiming that they were delivered, but they weren't. So the search was always on for what is the problem? What's the missing ingredient? What have we not done right?

Oh, Hobart found it. You need to go back to even your childhood days when your parents put you on penicillin when you were five years old. You need to find the names of all of these drugs and you need to name those as a demonic spirit and take yourself through deliverance.

Casting those demons out of you or away from you or whatever the terminology would be in effect, closing those open doors, which had allowed demons access into your life, which had prevented you from experiencing your healing. And of course, I smile when I say this because at the end of the day, after all that had been said and done, the people still had the same sickness. So the proof was in the pudding that deliverance did not deliver them.

You know, Channel, I study things to know in and it is to my downfall in many cases because I go down some pretty good rabbit holes, but I grew up in a T totalistic religion. You know, we were not allowed any alcohol whatsoever. Alcohol was the devil. And I was indoctrinated to the extent that as a child, I thought, well, I'm sad to say this, even as an adult, I thought that even if you had like a little table spoon, you'd just get fall out drunk because it was so indoctrinated in my head, man.

In the first time I got around somebody who was actually drinking, I was like, wait a minute there, they're not fall out drunk, they're actually normal people. But I did a study because the medicine thing really bothered me in the colt of William Brannum.

We weren't to the level in extreme that Hobart Freeman was, but it was preached against and they wanted to preach it in such a way where they couldn't come out and tell you don't take the medicine because, oh by the way, they might get sued if they did.

Instead, they wanted to project into your mind that it was wrong for you to take it or it was dangerous for you to take it. When they're preaching in the Brannum colts and this actually spread throughout all Pentecostalism, they would talk about the medicine and then they would shift to God as the healer and they would quote the scriptures, then they would shift back to and look what we have today.

You go to the doctor and you take this little pill and that pill, you read the little warning signs on it and it's got a list of warning signs longer than this pulpit. I've heard, I can't tell you how many sermons.

I remember I was just thinking through my mind and about that and I was researching Brannum and his history and I found some weird oddities during prohibition. In fact, I found another William Brannum and his mother had the same name as our William Brannum's name, but they were running whiskey and they got caught in Pikeville, Kentucky.

So then my mind jumped from, okay, now we've got a whiskey dealer. Is it the same Brannum? I don't know. Interestingly, I still don't know, but that led me to thinking about how medicine was made because they were largely during prohibition here.

They were running medicine medicinal whiskey and that's how the mob was getting their whiskey. So I got to thinking about that and that led me to whenever you get a cold, the old Kentucky people used to pour some honey and some cinnamon and they would drink that and it was a great whiskey cure.

So then I did a study, a full study on just medicine in general. How much of it has alcohol in it? And everything from scope, you know, when you're taking mouthwash to Nyquill to some of it had stronger levels of whiskey than if you were to go by a beer, it got to that weird extreme.

And then I shifted over to, I got down, I got to thinking about all of the statements that they talked about similar to what you just said about the evil sorcerers in the Bible and how they would they would produce their own type of medicine and that was evil and today we have God and God is our medicine.

It was that kind of thing similar to what Hobart would have said. So I did a study on it and the ancient cultures did have medicine. and the witch doctors, the sorcerers, all of the different medicinal people had ways of coming up with it.

So I'll give you an example. In ancient Egypt, they found that the bark of the willotry when scraped and purified would cure common pain elements. Like if you had a headache, you would take it.

And it was the bark of willotry. Well, modern world, the aspirin originated from the bark of a willotry. So if you're taking an aspirin today, you're actually doing the same thing as the sorcerers and the witch doctors of old.

It's just in a different form and purification. The difference is the ancient world claimed that it was an ancient evil deity that was giving them this power. And instead, they were just using bark of a willotry or different things like this.

So every argument that I could find in the divine healing movement that applied to medicine and doctors, all of it was complete fiction and mythology. And as you say all this, John, my mind races to all these different thoughts I've had in the past.

And all of the things I've heard Hobart say, you started on alcohol, which took me to Paul's statement to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4, drink no longer water, but drink a little wine for your stomach's sake and for your often infirmities.

And it was so interesting how he would deal with that verse. And again, I always have to say when you're 17 years old, everything you're hearing is new. You're hearing it for the first time.

It takes a little time and it takes a little growth and maturity to hear him explain that now for the third and 15th time and you're going, wait a minute, something's not making sense.

And there were two things about that. One, John, is he was very much just like you said, you guys were. He was opposed to all alcohol for any reason. And the argument was well in American culture, we have a problem of alcoholism and they didn't have that in Israel.

And I thought, what have you never read the Old Testament? How many drunkards and how many warnings there are against drinking too much? The warnings were against drinking too much. The warnings were not against drinking at all.

It was just about drinking too much. So I thought, that's not even, that's not a true, accurate, faithful statement. So you're gonna, even though Paul told Timothy to drink wine and that's in the Bible, we can't drink wine because we live in America.

So it just seemed like number one, he was culturalizing everything and number two, he was denying that they had an alcohol problem in Old Testament Israel. But then the other point about that was, What about Timothy not just claiming by his stripes I am healed?

Why didn't he recommend Timothy to do that? Why didn't he rebuke Timothy for his lack of faith? Why didn't he get on Timothy's case for even being sick in the first place? And then finally, why instead of doing those things which he didn't do, why did he tell Timothy, here's what you need to do.

You need to drink some wine and that will help you with your stomach condition and with your often infirmities. That's what the text actually says. That's what it says. And I'm just not comfortable.

This is where we all need to be in our life. We should not be comfortable taking the text and saying, well, let me see if I can make it mean what I want it to mean or say what I want it to say.

Just leave it there and then it gives us the opportunity to change your own theology. And that's what we end up having to do. Any time you read a verse and you're not comfortable with it, there's nothing wrong with the verse.

There's something wrong with me. If I'm reading a verse and I'm not comfortable with it, the problem is with me, not with the text. So if I let the text stand, then I see an example of someone who was not told by the apostle Paul, just claim your healing.

He was told, drink some wine. And then Hobart would go on, the other problem I had that I just, to this day, would shake my head over, Hobart's still trying to get around anyone being able to use that verse against his healing theology and philosophy.

And so he would say, well, now you got to remember, you know, because he would say, I've been to Israel. I've been over to the Middle East. You got to remember, you know, the water's bad over there.

And those of us in America, we're not used to that water. And so when we go over there, you know, we can't drink the water. And so that's why Paul was telling that to Timothy.

And then I'm saying to myself, Timothy's not from Indiana. Wait a minute, Timothy was a native. He was used to the water, Timothy's not from Indiana. He's a local person there. So Hobart was bringing up this argument based on his cultural context living in northern Indiana that has nothing to do with Timothy, nothing to do with Paul, nothing to do with the verse, nothing to do with the context.

And it was just dozens, literally, John, of episodes like that, like you have experienced in your life, dozens and dozens of episodes like that told me, wait a minute, this guy, Hobart Freeman does not know what he's talking about.

He either knowingly is deceiving people and knows that he's doing it or he is so confused and deceived himself, he can't help but teach deception, but one way or the other. this man is not right. You're bringing back so many memories man, both in the cult and after the cult. We grew up, and this is common in across Pentecostalism. So when I say this, I'm probably going to be laughing and poking fun, and this is important to Pentecostalism, but please understand, I'm not making fun of you directly, just the absurdity of it is kind of

funny. But whenever I was in the cult, I read my Bible. I'm one of the few Christians who has read their Bible. Sadly, I'm learning that there's just so many that don't, and that's why we have the messes that we have. They have no idea what is in it. But I'm reading it, and I'm understanding what is the communion that Jesus is talking about. And it's all about fellowship. He's given an example, come together, when you come together, think of me, and the examples he gives like the footwashing. This is the lowest form of nastiness in all of the ancient world, because

everybody wore the sandals, you're walking through the sand, your feet get nasty. So when he's doing this, he's literally showing them to humble themselves to the lowest possible servant, and be that way to other people. Give yourself freely to other people and be a servant to one another. And the wine come together in your homes, in your small groups, in your churches, whenever you come together, fellowship and drink wine. The greatest miracle of all the miracles was the turning of water into wine. And yet we were not allowed to drink wine in the Brannum cults, and largely throughout Pentecostalism. This is a thing. So I'm sitting here, my mind was a

curious mind growing up. I'm sitting here thinking of all of that. In a communion and footwashing service, they combine those two in the Pentecostal religions. So everybody lines up and they go wash everybody's otherwise clean feet that's under their socks. And I'm thinking this is no way shape or form matches what they're doing in the Bible. It's becoming a ceremony. It's ceremonial, and it really doesn't serve the same purpose that Jesus was doing it. That's the thought that went through my head right or wrong. If you're Pentecostal, I'm not making fun of you. That's just my

thought process. But then a step further, right before we did this, we all lined up and we went to the pulpit and we drank wine in a church that is telling you that when you get together outside of this building, you cannot drink wine. But oh, by the way, we're going to just ignore our doctrines entirely while you're in this building for one time a month. We're going to do this.

And I'm sitting here thinking about the absurdity of that and I just started laughing. People next to me in the service are looking at me, why is John laughing in the communion service? But it's just absurd and it's kind of funny when you think about it. But the thought came to me whenever you're talking about Timothy drink a little wine for your stomach.

During the time times that this was. I was an adult. I was married. We were in the brand new cult. And I was drinking wine. And I got to thinking about that first. Drink a little wine for your stomach.

And the thought actually came into my head. Man, I sure wish I could drink a little wine because I have acid reflux disease. And my stomach is constantly upset at that point in my life.

So this was, you know, I can't remember what year that hit me, but I was in the cult until age 37. So maybe it was 10 years, 50, I don't know what it was.

But for this long period of time, I had acid reflux disease. And I struggled to eat anything. If I eat pizza, it was like eating broken glass when it went into my stomach. After I left the cult, I had, it's a long story, which I've told in other places I won't hear.

But long story short is, I got convinced to drink a glass of wine. And it cured all kinds of ailments. I had severe chronic depression due to anxiety. And just a little bit of wine a week would cut the anxiety.

And I want to say it was only three months. I was off of my depression meds and anxiety meds because of this. Now, I can't say it was 100% of the wine. I also left a cult.

So it could have been that too. What? Long story short, I drank wine and I was able to get off of that. And also, so I have been off of my depression medication and my acid reflux medication since that day.

And I think that was the year 2012 or 2013. Wow. Just from a little wine for the stomach, just by doing what Paul said. Wow. Well, John, I didn't know this would become an interview and podcast on wine drinking, on wine bibbers.

But in our country, we have obviously in the United States of America, we have a long, confusing and checkered history with alcohol. We had an amendment to the Constitution that said, no more of this.

Nobody can ever drink again. It was called a prohibition era. And then, of course, that got repealed. So we have, obviously, in our country struggled with the whole question of alcohol. But I don't think that's any different than probably any culture.

And so as a result, what Hobart, you know, fought the best thing to do is just outlaw it completely. I find it interesting that in your communion services, you would drink wine. But of course, it was outlawed outside.

Whereas in most of the Freeman circles, of course, it was outlawed outside the church, but they would use great juice. And always, we never, in my church, when I was a pastor and a teacher, and we'd have communion, we had wine.

Because I believe that's what they had in the Bible. And because there wasn't any reason not to. And I know the arguments, the arguments are what if there's a former alcoholic in the church, and he has a little thimbleful of wine, and he's going to go back drinking. And of course, that's always possible. And of course, we don't want to do anything that would cause a brother to stumble. But I just don't think that's a weighty enough argument to bring great Jews into the service.

I just think that obviously Paul, and as you just said, and the first miracle that Jesus performed was turning water into wine. And that was after they had already consumed all the available alcohol. And then he turns the water into wine. I think this is in the early chapters of John's Gospel in John 2. And that to me also was a fascinating story. And I couldn't get past that's what our Lord and Savior did. And I couldn't get past that to agree with Hobart that all alcohol is wrong and use this. Well, we live in America and we have alcohol, alcohol problems.

And so that's why it needs to be outlawed. I just saw, no, they had huge alcohol problems in Israel. Just read the Old Testament prophets. They had huge problems. And there were constant warnings.

There are constant warnings in the book of Proverbs of not over drinking. But to be a teetotal or no, that was never taught in the Old Testament. It was never taught in the New Testament.

And looking back on our struggle as an American society with the whole problem. And then you mix in with that the holiness, Pentecostal movement that just wanted to make sure nobody had any way to have any measure of fun regarding anything. I mean, it was like the Puritans all over again. That's the old definition of the Puritanism, the secret fear that someone somewhere might be having fun in their life. God forbid that happened. That's what Puritanism was all about. That's probably a caricature of Puritanism. But it's similar to the Pentecostal holiness movement. Let's make sure

women are covered from head to toe where you can't see any skin because God forbid a man may see some skin and lust and it'll be her fault that he lusted after her. You know, that is just the most bizarre, crazy stuff. How could anyone teach and believe nonsense like that? Lust comes from within the heart. You as a man have to deal with that yourself. I didn't have anything to do with her.

Quit putting all that on her. So you take all this away from people, which is what we've spent some time earlier talking about John with Hobart. He was a master at that taking away your games and your clothes and your jobs and your education and your bank loans.

and your medicine and your wine and your beer. And he just took everything away. Just show your laser focused on him, his church, his ministry, his message. And we know that does not produce a healthy situation.

That is the most unhealthy social environment you could possibly find. The poor little boys and girls, they couldn't date. It's almost like an arranged marriage. And if you ever had as a young boy, you know, kind of a thought about sex.

Oh, that, you're damn to hell for that. That's a normal fault when you're 18 and 21 years old. That fault does it damn you to hell. You need to be, they needed to be instructed how to handle that, how to deal with that.

And they say they were, but they weren't. It's just everything was spooky, spooky. No, no, demon, demon. Everything was. And those poor people did not have, they did not have a chance to grow up normal and turn out normal.

And consequently, when some of them finally did, get out of the faith assembly cult, they might have gone a little too far in the other direction. And I don't blame them and I can't fault them for that.

And I don't think, you know, as long as you rebound back to the middle of the road where you need to be, I think that's fine. That's a normal human experience. When you have been in a religious cult that has literally said no to everything, except Bible study and prayer on your knees.

They've said no to everything. Then people come out of that and maybe they have never even had alcohol before. Some of them haven't. And, you know, just a small amount. They're probably underneath the table over that.

And then they feel terribly guilty. That's not the unpardonable sin. You're simply trying to navigate your way out of a very dangerous and destructive religious cult. And some people did it better than others.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to subscribe to the channel. Sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

I know it seems I'm getting off topic a bit, but there's actually a method to my madness. So I understand that the Hobart Freeman called had different rules, but in Brannumism, we had a set of rules that developed into the Hobart Freeman's rules.

The medicine doctrines that we had obviously were not nearly so crippling as they were with Hobart Freeman. The alcoholism that, you know, it may have stayed the same to some extent, however, in the Brannumite cults, what happened is they came up with these sets of rules and they're trying to build the notion in your minds that if you can get enough, we called it rapturing faith.

If you can get enough faith, you can make it into the rapture. You too, friend, can make it into the rapture. And they would preach these sermons that would just make you scared to death that you was going to miss it.

One in a million. There's only one in a million. And even Brannum invented Bible verses by combining and merging and manipulating multiple verses, smashing them into one, and then coming up with a new verse that would scare the bejesus out of you.

And it reminded me, I don't know if you remember those Super Bowl commercials, but I think it was a Budweiser commercial. One guy would say, I want to watch ballet and other, I want to watch sumo wrestling.

Let's do both. And they'd smash the beer down. You'd see a sumo wrestler and a ballerina outfit, right? That's what Brannum did with Bible verses. And the one that was the most problematic, he used a verse, and I'm drawing a blank off of where these come from, but you can type it in on my website.

But one passage was talking about the family of Noah, and it said, wherein God was so faithful that one single family out of the entire face of the planet, he cared so much about them that he protected them and saved them through the flood.

That's essentially what the verse is saying if you read in the proper context of that verse. And then the other one had a different context, but talking about the same story, talking about how the world backed in was evil, and only so many people were spared in Noah's family, right?

Well, Brannum combined those two to say that he took another verse which was, as it was in the days of Noah, so also shall it be in the coming of the Son of Man.

Well, in the manifested sons of God, doctrine, Brannum was the coming of the Son of Man. You had to believe this nonsense, and he combined those three passages to invent the saying that as it was, as it is going to be in the coming of the day of the Son of Man, it will be the same that it was in Noah wherein only eight souls were saved.

bidding they're literally thinking there's only going to be eight people and that I think his it was one of his more famous sermons. I think it was called one and a million or something like this. It was literally projecting the idea that it would be just this little, little tiny elite group. And oh, by the way, they must believe me as the prophet. That's how this worked. What happened was they didn't have the rapturing faith. They didn't make it into heaven like he claimed. And they were trying to earn their way into heaven by piling all

of these rules on the heads of the people, added weights on their shoulders. And so what happened when they didn't make it? Well, let's add a new rule. Maybe we don't have enough rules to earn our way into heaven, to earn our salvation. And it turned, it basically flipped the gospel upside down. But you're no longer looking at Jesus as the means for your salvation.

You're looking at what you can do off of the own sweat of your back. That's literally how this comes out to be. And that thought really didn't hit me until after I left. And I was thinking through, in fact, you mentioned the skin. I was thinking through just simply that. So God created all of the human race. And you really think that God is going to find the skin that he created objectionable. And that led me down one of these other rabbit trails of study. I was studying what does it mean? The Pentecostal faith likes to use

that passage. I can't remember what what book it's from. But it's basically be adorned in modest apparel. And what is modesty? So I got to thinking about we had at that time I was in a different church than I, my family goes to now. They were sending out missionaries into, I think it was Haiti right after the big tornado hit or big monsoon hit it there.

So they were helping to rebuild and they were going down there. And the pastor told the people that were going, now don't dress fancy. Don't wear a bunch of jewelry. We're going to a bunch of really poor people. And we don't want to show ourselves like we're the rich elite. We just want to wear casual everyday clothes. And it suddenly hit me. What Paul was saying in that passage, as you're going out, don't dress like you're better than the people you're going to witness to had really not, I don't think it had anything to do

with skin. Because you can't really say that God doesn't like the skin that he created. Yeah. And we've talked about this, Sean. That is just a hallmark of Freeman's ministry, especially, you know, the last five or six or seven years. It became law upon law upon law. And we have had this discussion before that it definitely did upfuscate the gospel where you couldn't even see the gospel anymore. All you could see were all of those legalisms.

And he would tell the stories to frighten people. So as I was saying earlier in our discussion today on this message of divine healing, which became Not a message of divine healing. It became a message against medical science.

He talked about that all the time. He would go to a healing verse or a healing passage. And as I said last week, they would have a communion service. And he would say, we're going to talk about the redemption of the full man.

And you'd think, okay, we're going to hear something about Salvat, no, it's about the body again. He never gave a message on the full man. He was always on the healing of the body, not the healing of the soul at all.

And I, again, as I began to hear these things that over the years, I thought something is way out of balance here. And so rather than talk of the positive side of healing, he would tell stories, which he did not do early on, of people who had gone to the doctor and who had died.

So those are those fear tactics that you just, you should not be using as a Christian minister. And so if someone did go to the doctor, they're basically under the disfellowshipping eye and attitude of the church.

I told the story of the family who was a part of Jeff Barnett's group down in that white land or new white land area south of Indianapolis. And Jeff Barnett was a freemanite. He's no longer that today.

He wears glasses, goes to the doctor, celebrates Easter, Christmas, everything, you know? But have never apologized to everyone for being so mean-spirited toward people who did those things earlier in his ministry. So he had a family where the husband, he had ruptured his insides and he was in the hospital for 21 days.

He was gonna die. It was a terrible situation. And rather than, you know, run to the aid of the family,

the family from the pulpit because the wife of the husband has told me this story and I have told this before, but it comes from my mind again because it's such a glaring example.

From the pulpit, the family and the man in particular are mocked rather than mourned. If going to the doctor is a sin and he committed a sin, those of you that are spiritual in the spirit of meekness should build up the brother and build up the family and encourage them and get them back on the right track and right path to serving God.

That's what the Bible says, if that is a sin, if that is a sin, you should do everything you can to restore and encourage and build them up. Of course, that's not a sin to go to the doctor when your intestines or your appendix rather has ruptured and you're gonna die.

Of course, that's not a sin to go to the doctor, but when they did go to the doctor, then from the... pulp at their malt, it's they're made fun of. Well, now we just want to warn all of you, brothers and sisters out there, we've had a brother who has turned to the arm of the flesh in his time of need. Instead of seeking God, he has gone and solved the medicine man, instead of the son of man, Hobart had stupid sermon titles on things like that, instead of following the son of man, you're following the medicine man,

and this poor family almost lost their husband and their father. This is not a Christian group, I'm sorry people, this is not a Christian group who would have someone go through an experience like that, and rather than if they sin, mourn for them and restore them, if they haven't sined, and if they have, regardless, be right there beside them as Christian brothers and sisters, be there for their aid, and the pastor, the leader, Jeff Barnett, of all people should have been at the hospital, ministering to the man, should have been with the family, making sure the wife and the kids are taken care of. So my point is, I know I'm

belaboring it, but my point is Hobart would use these stories, his little underling ministers would use these stories of doom and gloom, dire threats and judgment and punishment and illness and death, and demons are going to possess you. This was a message, it was not a happy message of let's hold hands and trust God for our healing together, it was you better not go to the doctor, and then later in his life, you know, then he began to look for the medical statistics, which became just a joke, it was just a complete joke, but it was a scare tactic of his,

where he would read the number of times a doctor had misdiagnosed something, the number of times that the left leg was to be amputated and the amputated the right one, whoops, my bad, sorry, you know, now you've got no legs. He would tell these stories and people would go, wow, that's what they do at the hospital, you know, because people hadn't been in a while because they had been warned and threatened you better not go, and so their only source of information, the pipeline was Hobart Freeman's mouth, and he was getting that from Reader's Digest, from Newsweek and from Time

Magazine, that was the extent of his research, and they would say, wow, I didn't know they cut off the wrong limbs when you go to the hospital, well, I'm never going to go to the hospital, if that's what they do, he would talk about them butchering people, and of course the doctors occasionally make a mistake, but they're in the minority or they would not be in business today.

all humans would be dead if that was the track record of all doctors. And so then I stumbled across another little interesting statistic that I'm going to have to set the scene for to make sure people understand this.

But you've got to follow my train of thought is I'm working my way through first of all believing everything Hobart said because he's got all these verses in the Bible to looking at the Timothy and his wine to looking at all of these situations that I don't think Hobart did justice to, to hearing all the terrible stories of people dying in the hospital, to him turning a healing message into a bad medical statistics message to Pharmakia being sorcery and so all drugs have demonic origins.

And I'm just saying this is not at all what the Bible has to say. And it's not even what Hobart had to say 10 years earlier. And so then, you know, I am really paying attention.

And so in a message, John, in title, people can look this up themselves in a message entitled Strange Fire Part 4. Let me set the scene. Hobart was teaching a new series of messages in 1982 that he called Restoration of Divine Order.

You know, everything's out of order, everything's in disorder. And God is in these last days restoring divine order. The first four messages were in title Strange Fire. And many ministers have preached messages on Strange Fire.

It has to do with Nadab and Abihu, the two older sons of Aaron, who offered an unauthorized incense on their sensor that was strictly prescribed exactly how that incense was to be made. They offered a strange incense, which was strictly forbidden under the mosaic law, and they both died as a result of that.

And so Hobart took that type and said that ministers today who were teaching shepherdship, bondage, the JDS, heresy, whatever Strange Fire you're offering to the Lord, he was going to correct that. And then in the next tapes, he went on with divine order in the home.

And you know, you know where that went, that was Hobart's order, that wasn't divine order. So on the fourth tape, he gives a quotation from the apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus. Now we all know in the Bible there's a book called Ecclesiastes.

If you were raised Roman Catholic and you have a Roman Catholic translation such as the Jerusalem Bible, and I even taught some messages on all of this. So I'm fairly familiar with this. The Catholic translation, one of them is the Jerusalem Bible, and it has books.

books that the Protestant Bible does not have in it. It has a list of books called The Apocrypha. Things like 1st and 2nd, Asteris, and 1st and 2nd Maccabees. And one of the books is Ecclesiasticus, not Ecclesiastes.

And so I'm listening to this tape. It's the fourth one entitled Strange Fire. And Hope Art comes across a verse from Ecclesiasticus. And it's chapter 38 and verse 15. And I'll just read his quote.

And then I'll tell you what is the insurmountable problem with him bringing this up and trying to use it in the way that he does. Ecclesiasticus 38.15. This is Hope Art's quote. If you have an apocrypha, you can go read it yourself.

He that has sinned against his maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician. And then he laughs afterwards. People wonder about what Israel's opinion was. You can get it from the Bible.

You can also get it from some extra biblical books. They thought that was sufficient punishment. The worst punishment they could think of just let him be sent to the doctor and let him practice some medicine.

Oh boy, I like that. So he's got this quote. If a man sends against his maker, let him fall into the hands of the doctor. And Hope Art said, see, that's even an extra biblical proof of what the Jewish attitude was towards medical science that they were opposed to medical science.

But guess what? I just so happened, when I heard that later, I just so happened to be teaching a long series in our church on biblical and extra biblical literature. I think I spent five years on it.

I have over 240 messages where I was simply working our way through biblical languages. How do we end up with our canon of Old Testament and New Testament? What was the process and principles behind canonicity to the manuscripts?

We didn't have book, we didn't have paper and pen. So what were the methods and materials of writing? So we looked at parchment, we looked at papyri, what those materials were. We looked at the unsholes, the codices, the menascules.

We looked at all of this technical stuff. And then we got into Bible translations and then I did some study on the apocrypha and the pseudopegrypha. And so I have a message. It was done on August the 16th of 1985, where I am teaching on ecclesiasticus.

And I was able to share this complete misrepresentation of the text by hope. Bart Freeman with the people I was teaching. The first half of ecclesiasticus chapter 38 is in praise of medical science.

Their skills and their blessing and their wisdom and the tactics and the techniques, it is all in praise of medical science. It is not against medical science. And so when my people were wondering how in the world was Hobart able to come up with that verse, I said, I can only guess, but what I would guess, how he pulled that and used it against medical science when the whole chapter is in favor of, he obviously wasn't reading it himself or he would have read it in the context.

I mean, if he did read it himself and in the context and he's just blatantly lying, but my guess is, he came across that quote in somebody's writing somewhere. And he read where it said, he that had sinned against his maker, let him fall into the hands of the physician.

Oh, that'll be a great thing. I can bring into my message to prove to the people that the Jewish point of view was always anti-doctors and that's not the context at all. So when I saw that, these are the things that are the building blocks in my theology, leading me away from Hobart,

you are so sketchy on your scholarship that you read a quote from somewhere and it sounded good and you never did the research yourself to find out where is that, what is the context?

Let me make sure that I'm not misrepresenting this. That's what it told me, John, that he had seen this in somebody's literature somewhere, pulled it out of context and then used it in a sermon.

And of course, when the people hear that, they go, wow, even the books between Malachi and Matthew in the Jewish time period, wow, even those books are anti-medical science. He used that as one of his statistics and it was completely wrong, completely deceptive and not true to the context at all.

And it just set up such a red flag to me. You know, I say, you cannot trust anything that comes out of this man's mouth. If he's quoting a statistic, I need to know where it came from.

So when he's telling me, as we've said before, that John G. Lake and his church in Washington state had 500,000 confirmed authenticated healings

over a five year period. I wanna see where that's authenticated and of course it's not. You know, I go through a funny exercise. Whenever people leave the cult and they really get to thinking about things in a very analytical way, I always recommend that they go back and read some of the books written by Plato.

I've read maybe not all of them, I've read most of them, the ones that come to mind are the apology in the Republic. When you read it, first off, if you don't understand the world that he's describing, some of it reads like nonsense, you're thinking, what was this guy thinking?

But if you really, if you're a critical thinker, you start to understand that the worldview that he held is different from the worldview that we understand, and what he's writing, some of it he truly believes in that he's talking about religion and politics and all kinds of good stuff.

But what it did, it taught me the different styles of literature from the ancient world that existed. And if you can critically think about that, and then understand that the Bible itself isn't meant to be read in the way that we think about reading a book today, it was written by the ancients and the ancient styles, and you start to understand the ancient styles.

And I'm heading to actually a good point that doesn't offend everybody, hopefully. But we were taught to read the Bible in such a way that every single passage was meant to be some way of God instructing your life.

And when I got to the old mosaic law, and I'm reading about, there's a whole section of how not to grow mold in your hut. And I thought, you know, that doesn't really, it's good that they had it back then, but that doesn't really apply to me, it was mold in their hut.

I can go by some bleach and I can kill the mold, it's different styles of literature. I began to understand that there's different genres of literature. And then I went through the process of understanding how the Bible canon came to be, how they chose the books, all of, enough stuff that it's for another podcast, not this one.

It's led me down all kinds of paths. But it got me to thinking about the extrabiblical sources, because in the laterane movement, William Brannum especially, like Hobart Freeman, was going to extrabiblical sources as confirmation of his doctrine that he couldn't say by just reading the Bible.

And so I got to studying, that'll lead you down all kinds of paths. But the biggest of which is you find that the Dead Sea Scrolls, they, I can't remember what year it was, like 1945 if they found that, that cave and nag, naghanai, I'll probably pronounce that wrong.

But it wasn't until the mid fifties that those came into the United States. And when it came in the mid fifties, they started getting these weird doctrines coming out of laterane. With different conformations, and they're studying all of the, you can tell that they're obviously studying the Gnostic books.

And Brannum introduced one of the, I don't think this is Gnostic, but the Book of Enoch, had fragments of the Book of Noah, and the fragments of the Book of Noah, talked about Enoch living for 500 years.

Well, that became a doctrine in Laterane that the Bible was incorrect on the lifespan of Enoch on Earth, which was 365 years in the Bible. Branum started claiming that it was 500. So he was clearly reading from these sources.

And also along with this came the notion of Enoch's watchers. Because in the 50s, they started talking about all of the UFOs and all of the UFO scares that you're talking about. Well, this became mainstream doctrine.

And you can go find like from coast to coast, if you have a newspaper subscription, you can find these Laterane guys preaching Jesus and UFOs. That's how far you can go away from the Bible and the gospel if you go to these extra biblical sources.

And that's the danger that I see that these guys are doing. So hopefully if you have a critical mind, you can take some of this that I've said. And hopefully it will satisfy some of your curiosity.

But there's so much more that could be said and I think I'll save the rest for the next episode. John, yeah, we will have too. Because just things you just said right then, oh my goodness, there's so many things that people don't know about Freeman Hobart did teach that the UFOs, that they were seeing, these are on his late 60s and 70s tape that those are some of the signs of the times predicted in Matthew 24.

I can give you the exact tape, the exact timestamp, where he says, so he believed in UFOs that they were literally signs of the times. He even says on one tape that man landing on the moon has something to do with the moon turning blood red.

And that was a sign that we are in the last days. I kid you not, that is on a Hobart Freeman tape. And we will not go down that path today. And the stuff about the Dead Sea Scrolls is actually very fascinating.

If I could just add that's historical thing. Yes, they were discovered by some bedwins in the caves there, not far from Masati in the late 1940s. And they did have some extra biblical works like what you're talking about.

The great thing for Christian people and for biblical scholars is there were books and also fragments of Old Testament manuscripts like the Book of Habakkuk and Ezekiel and different prophecies that predated the Christian era where prior to the discovery of those manuscripts, the Hebrew Bible that people use today is based on what we call the Masoretic text.

And that only goes back to the 900s AD. And what was so fascinating with the Dead Sea Scrolls is they were dating 200 BC. And when you took the dead... C scrolls and compared them with the Maseradec text, a thousand years apart, we found out that Maseradec text was pretty darn reliable.

That not a lot had changed over the thousand years of the scribes doing this. So that was the benefit, the glory of the discovery of the Dead C scrolls, for what it's worth. It's all fascinating to me that you can tell I'm like itching to get into that, but we'll do it another time.

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 www.William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.