WILLIAM BRANHAM WAS GOD IN HUMAN FLESH (PART II)

“William Branham Was a Charlatan & a Fraud”

By Akin Ojumu

When T.L. Osborn took to the podium to give a rousing eulogy at the William Branham Memorial Service held in 1966, I doubted the audience imagined the level of obsequiousness that he would sink. 

As though expecting to be lambasted for the over-the-top praises he was about to heap on William Branham, Osborn let the audience know that he knew they would think what he was going to say would sound sacrilegious or off doctrinally, but he couldn’t care less anyways. 

Without so much of a moment of hesitation or misgiving, Osborn proceeded to tell the gathered audience that William Branham was God in human flesh, the re-incarnate Christ sent as a special sign to this generation. In Osborn’s opinion, Branham came as a forerunner of Christ’s second coming the same way John the Baptist came as the forerunner of Christ’s first coming.

Well, let me now show you some of the things that this God in human flesh believed. Come with me as we examine a few of William Branham’s sordid practices and the errant nonsense he taught.

FRAUDLENT CLAIMS & STAGED MIRACLES

William Branham claimed he visited and prayed for King George VI of England while enroute to Finland in 1950. He claimed the king was healed through his prayers. Researchers found no evidence that Branham ever met King George; King George was chronically ill and died about a year after Branham claimed to heal him (Source: Wikipedia).

Likewise, Branham claimed he prayed for and healed the granddaughter of Florence Nightingale at a London airport. Branham’s campaign produced photos of an emaciated woman who they claimed to be Nightingale’s granddaughter. However, Florence Nightingale never married and had no children or grandchildren (Source: Wikipedia).

At meetings in Vancouver during 1947, newspaper reporters discovered that one young girl had been in Branham’s prayer lines in multiple cities posing as a cripple, but rising to walk after Branham pronounced her healed each time. An investigative reporter suspected Branham had staged the miracle. Reporters at the meeting also attempted to follow up on the case of a Calgary woman pronounced healed by Branham who had died shortly after he left the city. Reporters attempted to confront Branham over these issues, but Branham refused to be interviewed (Source: Wikipedia).

At his 1947 meetings in Winnipeg, Branham claimed to have raised a young man from the dead at a Jeffersonville funeral parlor. Branham’s sensational claim was reported in the news in the United States and Canada, leading to a news media investigation to identify the funeral home and the individual raised from the dead. Reporters subsequently found no evidence of a resurrection; no funeral parlor in the city corroborated the story (Source: Wikipedia).

ONENESS THEOLOGY

William Branham was an advocate of Oneness theology, a heretic belief that affirms that God simultaneously manifest as Father (transcendent), Son (incarnate), and Spirit (in the Church) as one indivisible God. It is a form of modalism which teaches that God exists in different modes. This is contrary to the traditional Biblical view that God exists as three distinct, co-equal, co-eternal Persons: Father, Son (Christ Jesus), and Holy Spirit, sharing one divine essence. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. However, the Father is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit. The Son is not the same Person as the Father or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son.

Based on his Oneness view, Branham taught that baptism must be done in the name of Jesus only and that believers who were baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit must be re-baptized.

SERPENT SEED DOCTRINE

According to William Branham, the sin that Eve committed in the Garden of Eden was that she had sexual intercourse with the serpent. Again, this is a view that contradicts what the Bible teaches, which is that Eve ate the fruit of the tree she was forbidden to eat. 

Branham taught that Cain was conceived following Eve’s illicit sexual intercourse with the serpent.

BRANHAM DEITY CULT

The Branham Deity Cult, aka Message Believers, are the followers of the teachings of William Marrion Branham. They interpret Branham’s teachings and prophecies as divine revelation, emphasizing his unique doctrines like the “Serpent’s Seed.”

RACE

Branham’s sermons laid the foundation for the belief that black people are members of an inferior race. Branham used the term “hybrid” to describe anything which he believed was tainted by the serpent. Branham accused Eve of producing a “hybrid” race, and he provided a way to trace the hybrid line of the serpent’s seed to Africans and Jews through Ham the biblical progenitor of the African peoples, King Ahab, and Judas Iscariot (Source: Wikipedia).

ANNIHILATIONISM

Contrary to traditional Church views of eternal damnation, William Branham taught that hell is not a place of everlasting punishment. Rather than suffering eternal conscious torment in the Lake of Fire, Branham believed that sinners would eventually cease to exist after an indeterminate period of punishment in hell.

WORD OF FAITH/SPOKEN WORD/RHEMA

In the mid 1950s not long after Paul Cain, a founding member of the Kansas City Prophets and a man who was closet homosexual, began working with Branham, the Branham deity cult became more public. The group began to claim that members of the Branham faction could utter the so-called Eternal spoken word of God under the framework of the Manifest Sons of God Doctrine. Members were trained to believe they could create a new word of God by simply speaking and believing it. This concept would later become a foundational teaching for T.L. Osborne and Kenneth Hagin in the Word of Faith Movement. The Spoken Word Publications was the original entity formed by Branham’s associates after his death to publish his sermons as books and transcripts. The publication was named after the “Rhema” or “spoken word” doctrine of the Latter Rain Movement. Kenneth Hagin would later name his own organizations, such as Rhema Bible Training College, after this New Age/New Thought belief of spoken word (Source: Unknown).

ZODIAC AND PYRAMIDS AS EQUAL TO SCRIPTURES

William Branham also taught that God revealed divine truth in three holy books, i.e. three bibles, namely, the Zodiac, the Egyptian Pyramids, and the Bible.

The Zodiac

Branham claimed the Zodiac was God’s first form of revelation, written in the sky for humanity to look up to. He interpreted the Zodiac as telling the story of Jesus Christ’s coming. It begins with the constellation Virgo (the Virgin), symbolizing Christ’s first coming through a virgin birth, and ends with Leo (the Lion), symbolizing His second coming as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

The Egyptians Pyramids

Branham considered the Great Pyramid of Giza to be the “second Bible,” a prophetic message built in stone by the biblical figure Enoch before the Great Flood. He taught that the pyramid’s architecture held symbolic and prophetic meaning. For instance, he noted that the Great Pyramid never had a capstone and saw this as a symbol of Christ, the rejected “Headstone.” Branham also claimed that the pyramid was perfectly centered on the Earth’s axis and cast no shadow, a geographically and mathematically incorrect assertion.

William Branham’s claim to fame did not stop at his mumbo-jumbo rambling of aberrant beliefs, erroneous teachings, and distorted Scriptures. The man’s credentials included the fact that he was a false prophet with a track record of false prophecies. For instance, Branham predicted that the end of the world would come in or before 1977. Fifty years later, we are still very much here.

While delivering a speech in Los Angeles in April 1965, William Branham predicted that a massive earthquake would hit Los Angeles that would cause the city to sink beneath the Pacific Ocean. According to Branham, God had spoken to him, calling Los Angeles “Capernaum,” and warning that the city would sink beneath the ocean. Again, sixty years later, Los Angeles is still standing and the city of Angels has not yet sunk.

Considering all of the above heretic beliefs that William Branham held, which were well known and documented, do you think T.L. Osborn would still have deemed the man “God in human flesh” if he wasn’t a card-carrying member of the Branham Deity Cult? 

If Osborn were not a follower and a firm believer in Branham, it is inconceivable that he would have considered him the forerunner who would usher in the second coming of Christ. The reason he did was because Osborn and Branham were cut from the same cloth. Both of them were heretics.

Please don’t take my word for it. Next time, I will share an excerpt of T.L. Osborn’s eulogy to Branham which you can read yourself and make your own conclusions. I must warn you, however, that even though it is an excerpt of the actual speech, it is pretty long. But you’d be doing yourself a great favor if you read it all.