The Photograph That Proves Too Much

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In 2012, we turned the Believethesign website from a site that promoted William Branham into one that examined him honestly. Barry Coffey responded that year from the pulpit at Hickory Bible Tabernacle with a six-part series called The Present Truth.

If you want to listen to all or part of the entire series, please click here. All of the timestamps in our article refer to the part of the series being examined. You are currently in the part of the series that is highlighted:

• Part 1 - The Test That Fails Its Maker
• Part 2 - The Photograph That Proves Too Much
• Part 3 - The Absolute He Would Not Apply
• Part 4 - What Heresy Actually Means
• Part 5 - The Dress Code He Condemned
• Part 6 - The Defense That Says "Stop Looking"

The Photograph That Proves Too Much

A Response to Barry Coffey's "The Present Truth," Part 2

In my response to Part 1 of this series, I took Barry Coffey at his word. He said that if there is a flaw in the message, we are obligated to tell him. So I applied the test he himself gave us, that God will not back a lie, to the stories he preached, and the test undid the very claims it was meant to defend.

Part 2 does the same thing again. Only this time, the whole sermon rests on a single piece of evidence Coffey believes is unanswerable: a photograph.

He preached this on the evening of June 24, 2012, at Hickory Bible Tabernacle, two days after Part 1 and from the same text in 2 Peter 1. He named the reason again, plainly: we are in a season, he said, of "increase in contests or disputes about the accuracy of the message... the accuracy of Brother Bram's message." The website was still the occasion. This is my answer to the second sermon, and like the first, it is meant for the people in those pews, not against them.

Let's look at the evidence. All of it.

What Barry Coffey Argued

The sermon has three parts, and the first two set up the third.

Your responsibility

First, Coffey divides our responsibility in two. There is a vertical duty, your own salvation, which is between you and God alone, and a horizontal duty, defending the message to people who ask. For the horizontal, he returns to the word he used in Part 1, apologia, "the verbal defense... a reasoned statement or argument" (1 Peter 3:15).

I'm not in exact agreement in that his statement is not in accord with all of scripture. It is true that we do have a responsibility to provide a defense to EVERYONE who asks. Sadly, those in the Message almost never do this. We produce a video on this failing in our article on 1 Peter 3:15. This lack is also demonstrated in Barry Coffey's repeated failure to return my emails.

Our second primary responsibility to God is to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is based on numerous passages in scripture:

“Teacher,” he asked, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus answered, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the most important commandment. 39The second most important commandment is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ 40The whole Law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

Be under obligation to no one—the only obligation you have is to love one another. Whoever does this has obeyed the Law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery; do not commit murder; do not steal; do not desire what belongs to someone else”—all these, and any others besides, are summed up in the one command, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.” If you love someone, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.

For the whole Law is summed up in one commandment: “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”

Again, this is lacking in the Message. When I was asked by our pastor to leave our Message church, where we gathered with people we had fellowshipped with for decades, only one person came to see us after we quietly left. That's not obedience to scripture. That's not going after the one and leaving the ninety-nine behind. That's the behaviour of a cult.

The method

Second, he gives his method for that defense: don't say "Brother Branham said." Point to scripture. He uses John the Baptist as the model. When the priests asked John who he was, John did not produce a credential; he pointed to the prophecy of a forerunner. So, Coffey says, we point to Malachi 4 and Revelation 10 and say we are following the scriptures that promised an end-time messenger, "just like John the Baptist... to forerun the second coming of Christ."

The proof

Third, and this is the heart of the sermon, he offers the proof. He spends the final third of the message on the 1950 Houston photograph, the famous "pillar of fire" over Branham's head, and he frames it as external, scientific, hostile-witness verification. His words carry the weight: "the mechanical eye of that camera won't take psychology." It was, he says, "the first time that a supernatural being was ever scientifically photographed," authenticated by "George Lacy, the head of the FBI in fingerprinting," a man who was "one of my critics," and it hangs today in a national collection in Washington. His conclusion: "It isn't just a group of people following a man blindly... a greater than William Branham is here."

I want to be fair to how powerful that is. If an independent FBI expert really did certify that a camera captured a supernatural being, that would be extraordinary. It would be exactly the kind of checkable, public, non-insider evidence that the website keeps asking for.

So let's check it.

The Debate, Briefly

To set the scene, Coffey retells the story of the debate that produced the photograph. It is worth getting the outline right before we get to the picture.

In 1950, during a Houston campaign, a local Baptist minister named W. E. Best challenged Branham's healing ministry. Branham declined to debate personally. His elderly associate, F. F. Bosworth, took it up instead, and by the movement's own account acquitted himself well, pressing Best on whether the redemptive names of Jehovah, including Jehovah-Rapha, "the Lord who heals," applied to Jesus. During the exchange, Best reportedly had a photographer take pictures of him shaking his fist toward Bosworth. Branham, sitting in the audience, felt led to come forward. Photographs were taken. When they were developed, the story goes, every shot of Best was blank except one frame that showed a halo of light above Branham's head.

That is the story. Coffey tells it well, and much of the color is Branham's own. I am not going to quarrel with the atmosphere. The debate happened, Bosworth was there, a photograph exists. My concern is narrower and more important: the specific factual claims Coffey builds on top of that photograph. Because that is where the sermon asks us to place our trust, and that is where it fails.

Four Claims, and What Is Actually True

Coffey makes four factual assertions about the photograph. Each one can be checked. None of them holds.

The FBI claim

Coffey says the negative was examined and certified by "George Lacy, the head of the FBI in fingerprinting," presented as a hostile expert whose authority settles the matter.

This is false, and it is the load-bearing claim, so I want to be exact. George J. Lacy was a private document examiner in Houston. He was not "the head of the FBI in fingerprinting." He did not work for the FBI at all. In 1974, the FBI stated plainly that it had no knowledge of the Houston photograph and had never employed Lacy. There was no FBI verification. There was no federal expert. The single most impressive word in Coffey's presentation, "FBI," is not attached to anything real.

I do not say this to wound anyone. I say it because Coffey's whole argument is that a neutral, indepentdent authority certified a miracle. Remove the FBI, and what remains is a private examiner, who was paid by Branham's own team, to look at a negative. That is not nothing, but it is a universe away from what the sermon claims.

The "all the other pictures were blank" claim

Coffey says every photograph the studio took that night came out blank except the one showing the light. In Branham's telling, God blotted out the frames of Best shaking his fist.

This is also false, and it is easy to check, because you can see the other pictures. The rest of the roll was developed, and those photographs survive. We host them on believethesign.com. Other people are visible in them. Nothing was miraculously blotted out. Only one frame showed the halo, and there is a plain reason it stood out, which brings us to the light itself.

The light itself

Coffey presents the light as a photographed supernatural being. The far simpler and better-supported explanation is an out-of-focus, over-exposed light source behind the podium. Similar halo pictures exist from the same Houston coliseum and from other venues where Branham spoke. A bright lamp, over-exposed on mid-century film, produces exactly this bloom of light. When the same effect shows up in multiple buildings on multiple nights, "supernatural being" is not the explanation that survives scrutiny.

The "national collection in Washington" claim

Coffey tells the congregation the photograph hangs in a national archive in Washington, retrievable on request, as the first photograph of a supernatural being. Branham himself named the "Religious Hall of Art" in Washington. There is no such standing exhibit, and no national institution holds this picture as the first photograph of a supernatural being. This claim has grown in the retelling. Notice the direction it grows: always toward more official, more unimpeachable authority. That direction is itself worth noticing.

Apply the Test He Gave Us

Now put Coffey's own Part 1 test back on the table. "God's not going to back a lie."

Here is a chain of claims, the FBI certified it, every other photo was blank, it hangs in a national collection as the first of its kind, offered as proof that God authenticated the prophet. And the chain is not true. The FBI disowns it. The other photos exist. No national collection displays it as claimed.

So the same fork we reached in Part 1 opens again, and there is no third path. Either God backs a story built on false claims, which Coffey rightly denies, or these claims did not come from God. I did not choose this test. Barry Coffey did. I am only applying it to the evidence he chose to stake the sermon on.

And notice what has happened to the argument for "reasoned defense." In Part 1, I showed that Coffey defines apologia correctly and then tells people to stop reasoning and "break into the spirit." Here he does defense by evidence, exactly the right instinct, and the evidence turns out to be fabricated in its particulars. The problem was never that the message lacks evidence to point to. The problem is that the evidence does not survive being checked. That is the opposite of what a reasoned defense is supposed to do.

Two Moments Coffey Did Not See

Twice in this sermon, Coffey makes an argument that turns around and points at him. Neither is a cheap shot. Both go to the heart of what this series is about, whether the message can survive honest examination.

The first is about cutting. Coffey is rightly troubled by Message ministers who keep the Branham quotes they like and quietly discard the ones they don't. He describes a twice-married pastor who set aside Branham's teaching on marriage and divorce by deciding Branham "wasn't inspired when he said that." Coffey's response is exactly right: "You'd have to sit there and wonder what else can we cut out?" It is the right question. I only ask that he turn it toward the factual claims in this very sermon. When the FBI detail turns out to be false, when the blank photographs turn out to exist, does the movement examine the claim, or quietly keep preaching it? "What else can we cut out" and "what else must we quietly keep" are the same question asked from opposite ends. An honest movement has to face both.

The second is about reading the other side. Coffey tells, with some relish, of Jehovah's Witnesses who came to his door. He offered them a fair deal: I will read your literature if you will read mine. They refused. They could only hand him theirs; they could not take his. He saw the closed-mindedness in that instantly, and he was right to.

But look at what this sermon asks of the people in the pews. It asks them not to read the website's evidence, to treat the internet as "garbage," to keep their "heart open" only to what confirms the message, and to send the skeptic away rather than sit down with the material. Coffey at the door was the open one; he would read anything. The sermon asks his congregation to be the ones in the car who could not. I would rather we all be like the Coffey at the door: willing to read the other side, confident that the truth can survive the reading. If the message is true, examining it will only confirm it. If examining it makes us afraid, that fear is telling us something.

Scripture, and a Word About Method

Because Coffey builds again on 2 Peter 1 and 1 Peter 3:15, and uses them exactly as he did in Part 1, I will not repeat the full exegesis here. I worked through it in my response to the first sermon: Peter's "present truth" is the apostolic gospel his readers already had, not a future prophet's message, and Peter grounds assurance in verifiable eyewitness testimony and "a more sure word of prophecy," not in "break into the spirit." The apologia Peter commands is a reasoned defense, which is precisely what fails when the reasons turn out to be false. Please see that article for the details.

One thing this sermon adds is worth naming. Coffey says, "God is not liable for what's on Google. God is not subject to a search engine." He is right that God is not obligated to answer every question on the internet. But that is not what is happening here. It is not the internet making these claims. It is the pulpit. The false FBI credential did not come from Google. It came from the sermon. When a claim preached as proof turns out to be untrue, "God is not subject to a search engine" is no answer, because God was never the one on trial. The accuracy of the claim was.

An Honest Invitation

I want to end where Part 1 ended, because the invitation has not changed.

The people who believe this photograph story are not fools, and they are not my enemies. Many of them are sincere believers who have simply never been handed the other frames from that roll of film, or told what the FBI actually said in 1974. That is not their failing. It is what happens when a story is only ever told from one side. I was there once too.

Barry Coffey said we should point people to evidence rather than just repeat "Brother Branham said." I agree completely. So here is the evidence, laid out to be checked: the FBI's own 1974 statement, the surviving photographs from that night, the ordinary optics of an over-exposed lamp. Check every piece of it. I am not asking you to break into the spirit. I am asking you to do what the Bereans did, and search out whether these things are so.

A photograph was supposed to prove that a greater than William Branham is here. And there is a greater than William Branham. His name is Jesus Christ, and He did not need a camera in a Houston coliseum to prove it. He proved it by rising from the dead in front of witnesses who touched Him, and by a word that invites your questions instead of fearing them.

Come and reason. The next four responses are waiting.

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