Self-Styled “Prophecy Experts” Headed For Colorado Springs

From the website of magazine and TV show Prophecy in the News:

On July 26-28, 2013 Prophecy in the News will sponsor our 2nd Annual Prophecy Summit. We’ve chosen the spectacular summer weather of Colorado Springs for this annual event and in hindsight, we chose wisely—our event was a complete sell-out in less than 3 weeks! More than 1,100 people will pack out the Marriott Hotel near the US Air Force Academy, but we expect thousands more to join us via a Live Streaming feed, delivered in spectacular HD video. It’s the next best thing to being there in person and whole lot more cost effective!

For $50.00 you can watch all of the presentations in the main auditorium over the 3-day conference period, listening to men like Gary Stearman, Tom Horn, Chuck Missler, LA Marzulli, Mark Biltz, Bob Cornuke, Jonathan Cahn, Bill Koenig, Joseph Farah, Lennart Moller and many others bring you the latest and greatest messages from the world of Bible prophecy, science and archaeology.

In the evangelical “prophecy expert” subculture, fame and success come from the ability to combine strict Biblical literalism with an imaginative and original pet theory. It seems very unlikely that the various “latest and greatest messages” on offer can be synthesized with any coherence; yet the overall effect (here and at other such events) apparently is to reinforce the impression that the Bible is full of supernatural information, rather than to provoke scepticism at the whole industry.

Some names on that list are well-known: Joseph Farah, of course, runs the birther news website WorldNetDaily, and he’s a significant link between conservative evangelicals and the wider conservative movement; Jonathan Cahn’s book The Harbinger has achieved best-selling status, with its claim that significant developments in the USA in recent years – including 9/11 – can be explained by making comparisons with ancient Israel. Other speakers on the list I’ve noted previously include Mark Biltz (Evidence from NASA, combined with a study of the Jewish calendar, suggest that Jesus may return in 2015), Bob Cornuke (found Noah’s Ark in Iran), and (from the full list) Bill Salus (“the world stage is set for the Russian Iranian led coalition of nations”).

However, other speakers on the line-up are more extravagantly speculative and idiosyncratic: in the case of Tom Horn, for instance, the very title of one of his books indicates a somewhat bizarre perspective:  Exo-Vaticana: Petrus Romanus, Project L.U.C.I.F.E.R. and the Vatican’s Astonishing Plan for the Arrival of an Alien Savior (taglines include “The Role of Petrus Romanus for the coming Alien Serpent-Savior”). LA Marzulli, meanwhile (previously discussed here), claims that the famous elongated skulls found in Peru are evidence of the ancient Nephillim.

Prophecy in the News itself promotes some unconventional ideas: its founder, who died in 2011, was a certain JR Church, whose own theory, as expounded in Hidden Prophecies in the Psalms, was that an event in each year of the twentieth century was predicted by a Psalm of the corresponding number (Psalm 1 for 1901, Psalm 2 for 1902, etc). Church’s last book has the title Daniel Reveals the Bloodline of the Antichrist, and it apparently takes in subjects that include: the mountain “where the Nephilim descended to Earth”; “the secrets of Nimrod’s leopard priesthood”; and “one of the greatest cover-ups in Jewish history”, which was when “the rabbis altered the Jewish calendar and eliminated 243 years with the stroke of a pen.”

The organisation is now headed by his former associate, Gary Stearman. Stearman is the author of Time Travelers of the Bible: How Hebrew Prophets Shattered the Barriers of TimeSpace.

(Incidentally, for those who missed it: Chuck Missler recently came to wider attention after he was referenced by Robert Downey Jr in conversation with John Stewart on the Daily Show)