In a Nutshell
William Marion Branham (1909-
The Rest of the Story
Material on the unofficial William Branham Home Page declares him to be the fulfillment of the promise of "Elijah" to come before the Messiah.
Enough, yes, more than enough is presented in this Home Page to catch the attention
of, and fully persuade the elected predestinated Seed of God that God has indeed
fulfilled Malachi 4:5-
At the end of one of his campaigns he was conducting a Water Baptismal Service in
the presence of all these people. As he was about to baptize the seventeenth person,
he heard a still small Voice say, "Look Up!" Looking up he saw It descending toward
him -
"As John the Baptist was sent to forerun the First Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, so you are sent to forerun His Second Coming."
Branham claimed, and his devoted followers believed (and still do), that God spoke primarily with one man in each "era" of the Church, who was then the "messenger" to that Church era. These eras were believed to be sequential time periods from the first century to the twentieth century. Each of the "Seven Churches of Asia" in the Book of Revelation was believed to represent one of these time periods. The messengers of the final three eras, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea, were believed to be Martin Luther, John Wesley, and finally William Branham.
Many of the claims for Branham's prophetic role are based on alleged "miraculous signs" which were captured on film. It is admitted by Branham's promoters that the phenomena in the pictures were not noticed by the people present at the time, but showed up only when the film was developed. It is further claimed that none of the negatives or prints were tampered with (although it would be impossible to establish that double exposure, faulty chemicals in the photography process, or other factors had not affected the outcome of the photo printing process.) Below are some of these pictures:
This photo is alleged to be of a "pillar of fire" (or, by some, a "halo") over Branham's head.
These photos, taken a short time apart, allegedly show a miraculous "fiery altar" that suddenly appeared around Branham at the lectern. Note again that it is not claimed that anyone at this meeting saw, either physically or "in vision," this alleged manifestation.
Excerpts from:
By Eric Pement
... At the time of his death in 1965, he claimed he was the only prophet on earth sent from God to bring the Christian church into final truth. ...
Miraculous visitations and supernatural events supposedly followed Branham from his earliest days. He claimed a visible light hovered over his crib the day he was born (similar to the Star of Bethlehem, marking the birthplace of Jesus).
... Branham reported that in May 1946, God led him to a secret cave in Indiana, "which no man can find," where he met an angel who told him God had commissioned him to carry the message of divine healing to the world. The angel said that if Branham would be sincere and could convince the people to believe in him, nothing would be able to stand before his prayers, "not even cancer." Branham would be given two supernatural signs: first, the power to diagnose diseases through physical changes in his left hand; and second, the ability to tell the secret thoughts and deeds of people. If the first sign didn’t convince people God was at work, the second sign would. Branham’s public ministry began that same month and spread like wildfire across the United States. The angel from the cave accompanied Branham onstage during the healing services. This angel also directed Branham in other ways, sometimes telling him to cancel scheduled meetings. It is widely reported that many remarkable physical healings occurred at his services. David Harrell, premier chronicler of the healing and charismatic revivals of the forties and beyond, agrees that "the power of a Branham service … remains a legend unparalleled in the history of the charismatic movement."
Lifelong pentecostals stood in awe at the specific detail packed into Branham’s gift of "discernment" (as he called it), as Branham would reveal names, addresses, ailments, and personal details of people whom he had never seen before.
... Branham also claimed God revealed to him a complex doctrine known as "serpent’s seed." In a nutshell, Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden was not eating a fruit but having a sexual relationship with the serpent. Before the fall, the serpent "was somewhat in between a chimpanzee and a man, but closer to a man." Satan entered the serpent and seduced Eve. Thus, Cain was begotten by Satan not Adam.
Ever since, there always has been a race of people whose ultimate ancestor is Satan. When Jesus told the Jews in John 8:44, "You are of your father the Devil," He was speaking literally. These descendants of Satan never can be saved because they are the "seed of the serpent."
At the same time, there is also a "seed of God," a lineage of people irrevocably predestined for salvation. This group is the true Bride of Christ. They are predestined to hear and receive the "message" of Brother Branham.
Furthermore, there is a middle category of humans who are neither the seed of God nor the serpent’s seed. They are not predestined at all but are saved or damned by their own choices. Branham taught that the vast majority of the traditional Church is in this category. Those Christians who reject Branham’s message will suffer through the Great Tribulation when it arrives, whereas the Bride will be raptured off the earth before the Tribulation begins.
… He claimed that the passageways in the Great Pyramid and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, though inferior to the Bible, were also revelations from God.
He decreed that for a woman to cut her hair was grounds for divorce, according to the Bible (see Matthew 5:32 on this one!); and that unborn children are not alive until they take their first breath. "You say, ‘Oh, it’s alive!’ No, it isn’t! That’s little nerves jerking, muscles. …The baby hasn’t received life till it’s born."
… One of Branham’s doctrines, which seems to have affected some of the modern "word/faith" teaching, involves the power of the "spoken word." Kenneth Hagin, an extremely popular teacher of the "word/faith" message, seems to pay a good deal of respect to Branham’s teaching – in one of his publications he calls William Branham "a prophet."
Branham believed that one of the marks which would identify him as the prophet for this age was the power to call things into existence out of nothing. Branham’s term for this gift was "the third pull," and he believed this "new ministry" could never be duplicated by anyone else. In essence, though, it involved the power of the spoken word to create things – anything – ex nihilo. "Just speak the word, and there they would be standing there."
… Finally, those who accept Branham’s message ultimately teach that a Christian’s depth of spirituality is not gauged on whether he merely follows the Bible, but on whether that person also accepts Branham’s revelations. In essence, Branham taught that if you accept his special teachings ("the word for your age"), you are in the Bride of Christ. If you reject them, it is evidence that you are not "in the truth."
Branham's claims to be able to "call things into existence" included a claim at one
point that a number of one dollar bills in his pocket were miraculously changed into
twenty dollar bills. One would have to wonder why Branham would have then ever needed
to accept offerings from followers-
When Branham died in 1965 from injuries received in an automobile accident,
many
of his followers expected him to be resurrected within three days.
He was not.
The following excerpt regarding the ministry of William Branham is from Is Healing in the Atonement?, an article by David W. Cloud:
Alfred Pohl was a worker in one of Branham's crusades in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Pohl was right by Branham's side during the meetings and attended Branham when he prayed over the bedridden cases following the evening healing services.
Alfred Pohl made the following statements about this crusade in an interview with the editor of O Timothy magazine, February 21, 1990:
O Timothy: Now, did many claim to be healed, or did it seem that many were healed in the meeting?
Pohl: In the meetings? Ah, yes, there were those that claimed to be healed, and there were those people that thought they saw healings, or thought they saw miracles. But, when you were on the inside, you saw that some of those things that were supposed to be miracles, were not miracles at all. From the outside, you would think that something had really happened; but having been right close to Branham, and working right with him, I discovered that a lot of those supposed healings or miracles were really not miracles after all.
O Timothy: Okay. As you took him through the dorm, he prayed for different individuals. What did he say during those encounters with the individuals?
Pohl: Well, one of the things he did was to take the hand of the person, and quite
often I heard him say that the angel that gave him this gift told him that to identify
certain diseases-
Then he'd say something like this, "We're going to pray for you, that the Lord will heal you." And he proceeded to do this. Then he went on, and when he was through praying, he would take that hand again or else he would hold the hand throughout the prayer, and he would say, "The vibrations are gone. The cancer is dead. You are healed."
And the person would rejoice, of course; so would I. I thoroughly believed in Branham, I thought he was God's man and so forth, and we wanted to see people healed. So [supposedly] the cancer was dead, and we were happy about this.
But then he had a little added statement there, and that was something like this, "Now, just keep on trusting the Lord. You're healed. Don't loose your faith in the Lord. Just keep your faith and trust the Lord, and you're healed." He said, "You're going to be sick for a while. You're going to be quite sick for a few days." Quite often he referred to three days. "You're going to be very sick for three days."
The people often asked, "Well, what do you mean, Brother Branham? If I'm healed, why should I be sick?"
He said, "The cancer, the cancerous growth which is now dead inside your body has to be carried out by the blood stream. And it's waste material; it has to be carried out; it's poison material, and so you'll be sick for quite awhile until that is carried away."
But what happened then was this: that in the meantime the people wouldn't worry about it.
They'd say, "Well, that's what Branham said would happen. I'm healed."
But this went on, till some of these people got sicker and sicker and died.
So he had an out. By this time he was gone [from that place].
O Timothy: Right. So there were many that he proclaimed healed?
Pohl: Yes, yes. Practically every one as I recall, standing beside these various
bedsides-
He also said, "Don't let your faith fail." In other words he emphasized that point. "Don't let your faith fail." And his out was this, I'm sure, that when they died, well, "Their faith failed."
It wasn't his faith, it was their faith. In other words, it was the patient's faith, which I don't see that in Scripture. When the Lord healed people, they were healed. And there wasn't such a thing as "You'll be sick for five days, or three days," and so, "don't lose your faith." I don't see that in Scripture.
O Timothy: There was a newspaper that tried to investigate the healings. Can you tell me something about that? What were they able to confirm as far as healings?
Pohl: Yes, in Winnipeg. Branham came to Canada at that time and he preached at a number of Apostolic churches in Canada. The first church was the church of our moderator in Winnipeg, who brought him into Canada. And Mr. Branham had his campaign there. Then he came later on to Saskatoon.
When the campaign was in progress in Winnipeg, the newspaper (one of the large city newspapers) was giving considerable coverage to the meetings, and they indicated that there were a lot of people healed. They were favorable to this church, and advertised it and gave news reports that quite a few people were healed. But later on that same editor sent out some reporters to check on some of these people that they had written up in the paper weeks before. [The reporters were] to check up and see whether these people who were supposedly healed at that time, were still healed, were still alive, or whatever.
And when these reporters went back, they discovered that these people had died, or
were in the same state or in a worse state than they were before. So, the editor
then put it in the paper that these cases had turned out to be phonies, and that
these people weren't healed after all. And there was something wrong with these so-
But when the pastor of the church saw these reports in the paper, he went to the editor rather disturbed and not very happy about the situation, and he confronted the editor: "Why do you do this to our church? You're hurting the reputation of our church, and you shouldn't do that to us."
And the editor said words something to this effect, "Well, pastor, if the healings are genuine, you don't have to worry, do you?"
And I thought to myself later on when I heard this, well, that editor certainly had
a lot of common sense, because if they're genuine, why worry? If they're not, well
then they should be exposed-
And the editor said, "Pastor, we gave you good coverage when Mr. Branham was here." The pastor had to admit they did. "Now," he said, "we owe it to our people to give them the rest of the story." And he said, "That's what we found." He said to the pastor, "I'll tell you what I'll do, if you can bring me one genuine case of a genuine healing, I'll give you the front page."
And I was told right in that pastor's home that they couldn't find one.
O Timothy: Not one?
Pohl: Not one.
O Timothy: I understand there was a radio pastor whose wife supposedly was healed, and also a man with four students in the college. Could you tell me about those two?
Pohl: Oh, yes. Yes. The first one I would relate to is a man from a little place
near Regina, Saskatchewan. He and his wife were staunch Christians in our denomination.
Very fine family. They had four children, and they were all attending our Bible school
at that time, in which I was on staff. We knew these children very well-
One day during the healing campaign, the phone rang in our dorm and I answered it in our office there, and here was this man phoning from the airport. He'd flown his wife in from near Regina, and he said, "We're here. We want Branham to pray for my wife. She's dying of cancer. What shall we do?"
Well, I said, "Bring her down to the Bible school dorm." And he knew very well where that was. I said, "I'll meet you at the south door, and we'll put her in a room, and I'll see that Branham prays for her."
Which he did, and after the meeting that night we proceeded to take Branham from room to room, and of course we had her in mind very much. And we brought him into her room, and the husband was there, too. Branham prayed for her and pronounced her healed.
Well, there was great rejoicing on the part of all of us. We really were rejoicing that the Lord had healed this woman. [We were rejoicing] for the sake of the whole family. He had given them this story, of course, that "she's still going to be sick, though she's healed; she's going to feel pretty bad." So, they flew back as soon as they could. They wouldn't stay around. We didn't have the facilities to take care of sick people there. There was just a dormitory, and so they went back as soon as they could.
About 10 to 14 days later, in that time frame, I was sitting in the office in the Bible school. Branham was gone; the meetings were over. The door opened to the main building, and I could hear footsteps, then a knock on the office door. In came this gentleman. Of course I recognized him immediately, but I saw that his face was very downcast; he was really under pressure and a heavy burden. So I invited him to sit down, and I said, "Brother," I said, "what's on your heart?" And he said, "Brother Pohl, you were standing beside my wife when she was sick in one of the rooms in the dorm. Mr. Branham prayed for her, and he pronounced her healed."
I said, "Yes, I was right there." He said, "Tell me, how is it that my wife who was healed ten days ago (somewhere in that time frame), is now in the grave?" He said, "Tell me, how that can be?"
Well, it really hit him hard, and it hit me hard too, because that's the first I heard that she had died. We hadn't heard that she had died. So here he was all broken up and he wanted an explanation. What could I tell him? I think that's one of the hardest questions I've ever had to answer in my life. Why is she dead, if she was healed? And I was witness. He couldn't figure this out, a very fine Christian, and I felt for him.
To this day I don't know what I said, but I know we wept together and we prayed together. I could have said this: "Brother, your faith failed, or your wife's faith failed."
What help would I have been to him? I mean, that's a terrible thing to do. I wouldn't dare say that to him, to anyone. He was broken. He had enough to burden him down at this stage without saying, "Your faith failed you." That was the wrong thing to say, so I didn't say it.
I could have said that, because that's the feeling behind a lot of these cases. The healer will say, well "Your faith failed, and it's not my fault."
But, I don't see that that is the case in Scripture either-
Anyway, he left then, and of course we prayed for him, and so on. But it really was a difficult blow to this man and his family.
Then the other party was-
This man was a Pentecostal pastor, had a radio broadcast and, I understand, quite
a sizable church. He flew his wife in and the nurse to Saskatoon which was quite
a trip-
Well, there was great rejoicing. Let me tell you, we rejoiced together, because I
thoroughly believed in Branham all this time, I thought he was just ... just it.
He was God's man. We rejoiced together, and then Branham left. And the husband (the
pastor) said to me, "Now, Brother Pohl," he said, "I've spent thousands of dollars
to try to get help for my wife, on doctors, and this and that and the other, medicines."
He said, "I really can't afford it, but here"-
He took Branham at his word. See, it wasn't anything else; he just believed Branham. And here was this sizable check. He said, "Give it to Branham." Which I did, the next day.
Later on, about three, four weeks later, I left for Ontario. I was missionary secretary of our denomination, and I visited some of our churches in Ontario. And in the process of visiting our churches, I came to Port Arthur, Port William. We had a church in Port William, and one of the first things I did when I got to Port William was to ask the pastors, "What about pastor so and so in Port Arthur?" I named him. I said, "How's his wife doing?" I said, "She was healed in the meetings in Saskatoon."
And I saw a strange look that came over their faces as I asked that question. And I thought in my heart, "Oh, no, not another one." Just like the family I was telling you about in Saskatoon, from Regina. And I said in my heart, "No, not another one."
And they said, "Haven't you heard, haven't you heard? She's dead. She passed away."
Well that was another blow to me, because I began to realize that something was wrong with this kind of healing. This was counterfeit; something was drastically wrong. Of all people, here was a pastor who loved the Lord and served the Lord, and, you know, why did this happen? Did his faith fail? Did his wife's faith fail? He had a whole church behind him. But no, she passed away.
I was told that the worst thing was that this man (the pastor) had a very good radio broadcast in the area. He went on the air as soon as he got home, and he announced that they had been to Saskatoon to the Branham meetings and had wonderful meetings there, and there were many healings, and amongst them his wife was gloriously healed in those meetings.
I'm sure that many people rejoiced, were happy to hear that. But, it wasn't very
long after that, a few days later, he had to get on the same radio station and mention
the fact that his wife had passed away. And I was told this gave his radio program
a severe blow and setback, because the world at large-
We had more of those cases-
Getting to the Bottom of Branham’s Claims
As with many other alleged "healing evangelists" who will be profiled on this Field
Guide website, William Branham was either what he claimed to be-
Web Documentation
The following websites have useful profiles and documentation regarding William Branham and the movements in which he and his teachings have played a significant part. Some have a number of relevant articles. Most such websites have a search function that you may use to pinpoint articles on the site related to the topic or person for which you are seeking information.
William Branham and His Message
This site is the most comprehensive source of detailed information on Branham available on the Web.
Examining the Message of William Branham
This is an online discussion group provided for current and former "believers" of Branham's teachings.
The Apologetics Index : William Branham
Religious Movements Homepage: William Branham
Bibliography
The following books contain significant sections about William Branham and/or the movements of which he was an active part.
Charismatic Chaos
John F. MacArthur, Jr.
Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids
MI
1992
A Different Gospel (Updated Edition)
McConnell, D.R.
Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody
MA
1988, 1995
"A bold and revealing look at the biblical and historical basis of the Word of Faith movement"
The New Charismatics
Moriarty, Michael G.
Zondervan Publishing House, Gr. Rapids
MI
1992
Unless otherwise noted, all original material on this Field Guide website
is © 2001-
Careful effort has been made to give credit as clearly as possible to any specific material quoted or ideas extensively adapted from any one resource. Corrections and clarifications regarding citations for any source material are welcome, and will be promptly added to any sections which are found to be inadequately documented as to source.
Overview of the ministry of
William Branham