Jordan says, “Did you know there were no Christians on the day of Pentecost? I say that on the radio (WYLL 1160) every now and then. The manager of the station called me in one day and said, ‘Brother Jordan. I had a guy call and complain, saying, [You know what that guy said on your station? He said there weren’t any Christians at Pentecost. I’m a Pentecostal!].’ ”
Hearing this, Jordan told the manager to take out his Bible and read Acts 11:26. “He read it and said, ‘I’m gonna write him back with that verse because you’re right!’ ” recalls Jordan.
“We bill ourselves on the radio and TV in Chicago as ‘we represent the only non-Pentecostal message in Chicagoland.’ No wonder people throw rocks at us.”
*****
“After Titian you get Clement of Alexandria. Clement is a student is Origen and here you get down to the roots of real Bible corruption because Clement is the one who founded this allegorical school of interpreting the Bible at Alexandria. Along with Filo, Clement is the father of the allegorical study of the Bible, which is the opposite of dispensational study.
“A dispensationalist says, ‘Well, when he talks about Adam and Eve, it means there was a real couple by that name.’ The allegorist says, ‘Well, it don’t make any difference if there’s a real Adam or Eve or not; it’s the spiritual story behind it that’s the issue.’
“What these guys (Clement, Origen, etc.) do is they become the fount of intermingling the Word of God with Greek philosophy and the corruption of the text that results from it.
“In 313 A.D. there was the Edict of Milan with Constantine. Christianity was persecuted and the statement, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seedbed of the church,’ comes from the era with Titian. Constantine came along and said he had a vision, the sign of the Cross, and the message was that ‘in this sign conquer’ and he did what every good Roman Catholic does; he just said, ‘You’re all Christians now.’ And through the Edict of Milan he declared the Roman Empire to be Christian. Is that how you become a Christian? You know that but lost people don’t know that.
“You go out here on the corner and you talk to a lost guy, if he’s my age, and you say, ‘Are you a Christian; you’ve got to trust Jesus Christ,’ and he’ll snap, ‘You say I’m not a Christian?!’
"I got a brother-in-law who has NO interest in God and spiritual things—anything of that nature. Last year, though, he was telling me how he was a Christian. And I said, ‘Well, when did that come about?’ and he answered, ‘I was born that way.’ It was like, ‘What do think I am?! I’m not a Muslim, a Hindu, a pagan.’ Well, see, you know better than that but for lost people . . .
“Rome is Christianized and what that did was take the persecution away but it also established . . . If your church is in the capital city of the empire, who do you think eventually is going to win out? So by 500, you’ve got the first pope; a dude named Leo. And they declare the Roman church and the hierarchy of the Roman system and the established church becomes the Roman-dominated church and that’s how all of that came about.
“Now in the meantime, you got all these people up in Antioch who are preaching and carrying the word out. In 380, a guy by the name of Jerome produced what’s called the Latin vulgate. That became the official Bible of the Roman Empire. That’s the Roman bible.
“Nine hundred years later, in the 1200s, there is in southern France what was called the Council of Toulouse, which gathered together a persecution of the Aldengians and the Albigensians who were using bibles from Antioch. And the Council was a crusade in southern France and northern Italy to destroy these bibles and replace them with the Roman bible.
“The Dark Ages are the dark ages because . . . you remember the Vandals and the Visgoths? They sweep down into Europe, destroy the Roman Empire and the feudal system developed. One of the things that happened when these pagans came down and overthrew and wiped out Rome, they were arrested, overawed by the pomp and the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church and the succumbed and submitted themselves to the Roman system of religion.
“They were barbarians, basically, who gave themselves over to the splendor and the ‘jazz’ of the theater and took back with them Romanism, run by Catholicism, and Jerome’s Alexandrian bible became their bible. And so it prevailed as the standard bible of the church in feudal Europe all through the Dark Ages.
“In that period of time you had ancestors—the Waldensians, the Vaudois’, those names come mainly from the places they lived. They were the mountain people in the Swiss Alps, for one example. These people fled there basically to live in peace. They were back there because they wanted to be able to live and raise their families, believing what they wanted to believe and preach, living in the light they had. They’re preserving God’s Word sort of behind the scenes.
“And when you get over into the times of the Crusades, a lot of the crusades are focused on these folks. The Council of Toulouse was a crusade, not to go liberate Palestine, but to destroy people in southern France and northern Italy who are these people.”
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