Talking Out Of Turn

I have previously mentioned the ministry’s beliefs in Anglo-Israelism (aka British Israelism), the idea that one can identify with some certainty some or all of the “lost ten tribes” of the Northern Kingdom of Israel as Great Britain and the United States. At first blush it might seem incredible to my readers that we would entertain ideas like this for even a minute, but consider where we have been. We had all been convinced, albeit via questionable proof, that the truth about many things had been covered up, and that history had been consistently rewritten by the winners in every generation. We believed that the majority of scholars were ignorant, stupid, and in some cases, malevolent in their will to cover up the truth. Nothing you learned in school could be trusted; nothing you read in the newspapers was true. In this rarefied atmosphere, the only people you could trust were the ones off the beaten path, the kooks, the fruits and nuts—Art Bell, the guy who claimed that the Bush family were actually evolved from lizards, and that sort of thing. Sure, there were nuts among them (the teacher never said a word about Bush being reptilian, after all), but it was sources like these that we believed. They were marginalized and ridiculed because the world wanted them silenced and the only weapons it had against the truth were derision and scorn.

Under the circumstances, maybe you can see why we had to tread carefully. We were on the trail of the biggest coverup of them all, the one that redefines the nature of the mission of Jesus Christ, the Gospel, the passages about election and predestination, the promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the One True Interpretation of prophecy. If we could see behind the veil and find the truth, then the Bible would be opened to us, like it was to the teacher; if we kept the blindfold on, then we had no hope of conquering the world’s lies. But if we opened the veil and found nothing behind it… then the entire fabric of the teacher’s prophetic understanding falls apart. Then the only thing we can trust is the fact that the teacher claimed that God confirmed everything in visions he had received, but that there was absolutely no way to objectively verify the claims.

If it were entirely a matter of believing against the evidence, we might have stayed in the group, resistant as ever to evidence and logic. But the fatal flaw was this: the evidence for Anglo-Israelism, and for all the teacher’s wild-eyed teaching, was presented as itself being born out by evidence and logic. Anybody who approached the facts with their eyes and minds open and objectively weighed the evidence would know that the teacher was right, we heard. The record of history, archaeology, and Scriptural study was clear, and it would be born out by events in the end times, in which we lived. The inevitable clash between Esau and Jacob would come to its head in the battle between the Western world and the Islamic nations, with the stage and final prize being Israel.

We were not objective; we wanted the outcome to be in the teacher’s favor. We wanted to believe it. There was nothing easy or fun or happy or even gratifying about proving him wrong; it was clear by now that if we turned away from this, we had no future in the teacher’s ministry, unless we could turn him and convince him that he was wrong. So we went into this ready to prove him right, ready to close our eyes sometimes to the most egregious errors if the basic facts still pointed in the right direction.

I know that many do not believe this assertion, but I can say with all my heart that I wanted to believe, and I never wanted to leave the ministry or prove the teacher wrong.

The main driving force behind how we spent our Christmas vacation in 2003 was the desire to align our attitudes, which were getting progressively worse, back to our beliefs. We weren’t sure he was wrong, but if he was, then we needed to stand against it, and if he was right, then we needed to be convinced, so that we stopped being divisive and mean-spirited. I was having trouble being kind about these theories, but it was sniping, not actual demonstrations of its wrongness. It was time, in other words, to put up or shut up.

In our ministry there were two primary sources of information about Anglo-Israelism: the primary source was a book written at the turn of the century called Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright, by J.H. Allen. Allen’s book was heavily plagiarized by Herbert W. Armstrong to produce his own AI/BI teaching, so if you are familiar with Armstrong’s take on this, then you will recognize some of Allen’s work. His work proceeded on two fronts: first, an attempt to exegete Scripture to demonstrate that the promises of God to Israel separated into two different tracks, one aimed at the “sceptre” which culminated in David’s kingly line, and the other the “birthright” which was composed of promises of many nations and great impact on the world, which was passed to Joseph’s children, Ephraim and Manasseh. Second, Allen attempted to find in British history (and prehistory) the story of how the sceptre and birthright came together and was established in the House of Stuart’s ascension to the throne of England, bringing the Davidic kingly line from Scotland to England, and following in a mostly unbroken succession until George VI in his day (which gives us a continuing succession to Elizabeth II and Prince Charles today).

The second major source was a modern historian and archaeologist named Raymond Capt, whose work has been to establish the identity of the Celts, or at least such waves of them as came to Britain, as the northern tribes of Israel, using twentieth-century archaeology rather than the mostly discredited work quoted from the late nineteenth century in this arena. The fact is, people like J.H. Allen and Alexander Hislop of Two Babylons fame relied heavily on archaeology that in their day was, at best, one-sided, and at worst positively eisegetical. Add to that the twentieth-century advances in reading ancient languages and a few critical finds, and the result is the need for somebody to update the scholarship angle on theories like this. Unfortunately, as we found, the bar is still too low at that point.

Tracey and I set aside most of a week to immerse ourselves completely in two books: Allen’s JS&JB and Capt’s book on the Behistun (or Bisitun) Inscription called Missing Links. We started by outlining the Biblical picture as reported by Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and a few of the minor prophets, and combining their information with that of the Biblical history genre like 2 Kings and Ezra and Nehemiah. Then we critically read and made notes on the books in question, and finally brought our conclusions together. Without knowing it we were approaching this a little bit like the cast of Mythbusters (a really entertaining and somewhat educational show on the Discovery Channel that I recommend watching): We needed to see if the “myths” were confirmed, plausible, or busted, and to do this we needed to not only test every fact and logical connection, but also see if there was a sort of broader understanding that would allow truth to come from this even if it couldn’t be confirmed. In a sense, although we didn’t know the terms at the time, we would have to find out if Biblical Theology would bear out the message of AI/BI, even if the facts themselves didn’t. But first we needed to get the facts, as answers to these questions:

1. We know that in the later monarchy period, the Northern Kingdom was usually called Israel and the Southern Kingdom was usually called Judah after its largest landholding tribe. But does this mean, as we were told by the teacher, that “Israel” should be assumed to refer to the Ten now-Lost Tribes unless otherwise indicated?
2. Could the Ten Tribes, after leaving the land of Israel, have taken another name, adopted another language and culture, and retained their identity in the eyes of God as a special people called to a specific role in prophecy?
3. Are there promises made to Israel as a whole that were separated in some historical way from the kingly line?
4. Is there a meaningful kingly line separate from the line that produced Christ, and did it continue in any fashion that could be tracked through history?
5. Is this so inextricably tied to dispensationalism that the whole significance of this theory will fall apart if every promise made to Abraham’s seed is fulfilled in Christ (Gal. 3:16)?
6. Does the Bible teach that there are three classes of people: the Jews, the Israelites (Ten Tribes), and everyone else? If so, then what are the labels used for these groups? This question deals more with the results of the quest than what we would find while we were looking.
7. This may be the most important question: what standard of proof must we uphold in our search?

You may wonder what I mean when I ask what standard of proof we require—is there more than one? But what constitutes proof in any meaningful, logical sense is not necessarily proof from a rabbinic viewpoint, and vice versa. The teacher’s most important book strung together a series of probabilities and possibilities, and claimed that because each link in a chain of events could possibly have happened, therefore the whole thing had happened (in that case, that the Garden of Eden was Jerusalem and that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus had taken place on the Mount of Olives). This, in the old ministry, was proof. But proof in the context of critical thinking means that if you have a chain of events, each one necessary to make the next one happen, then you have to demonstrate that each one is not just possible, but probable, to begin to say that your conclusions are probable. Ultimately the whole argument is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

This post is long enough to introduce the issues. In the next one I will discuss the research and its results.