Long before the information highway existed and people had almost instant access to information — both supportive and critical — dishonest men took advantage of the general public who had no means to verify or reject false claims. These men convinced large numbers of people to willingly give them money, sometimes receiving nothing in return, and even more dishonest men tried to recreate their schemes with their own twist. The one thing that they all have in common are false claims that could not, at the time, be verified.

John Alexander Dowie, faith healer and founder of Zion, Illinois, traveled into cities and towns claiming to have healed large numbers of people … in other cities and towns. He would then travel to those cities and claim to have healed many people in the places that he had just left. Unfortunately for his victims, he traveled faster than the news, and by the time the public had figured out his scheme, he had moved on to other victims. In 1902, Charles Fox Parham, founder of the Pentecostal faith, was named in a lawsuit against the Chemical Gold Company — a business that claimed to have produced a liquid that would allow customers to produce “gold from God”. Parham was named as a confidant and advisor, but apparently fled town when the news broke. He later sued the company, and then tried to seize control of Zion after the death of Dowie.

William Branham, who used Dowie as a prototype for his own stage persona, used the same strategies. Branham traveled into cities claiming to have collected enough testimonies of his healing power to fill “boxes of testimonies”. When people asked to see them, however, Branham told them that it would be illegal for him to publish them. It shoudl come as no surprise that these “boxes of testimonies” are not found at the headquarters of his cult of personality today.

Branham did, however, fill boxes of money. According to investigative reporters in St. Louis, Branham’s campaign team included “two huksy men” to carry “boxes of offerings from the kind people of Vandalia the night before.”

You can learn this and more on william-branham.org.

Boxes of offerings (4th column at the bottom of the page):
https://william-branham.org/site/resource?key=0258d28f-0d1b-4e0e-a78f-509a6daf000c

John Alexander Dowie:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/john_alexander_dowie

Charles Fox Parham:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/charles_fox_parham