by Professor Revilo P. Oliver

December 1984

I have been sent a very interesting booklet, The 5th Kingdom, written and published by Elmer Arthur (4902 N.E. Thirtieth Avenue, Portland, Oregon). Properly considered, it is more significant than most of the books that are today spewed in such horrendous quantity from the presses of the great publishing houses in New Jerusalem-on-the-Hudson. Mr. Arthur is a student of the Bible, in the commonly accepted meaning of that term. He has read it many times in English, knows its contents thoroughly, and accepts without doubt the stories in it as veracious. Innumerable individuals have done that. Mr. Arthur, however, has done much more. He not only read and believed the texts: he understood them and thought about them. That is indeed remarkable. In addition to his Bible in the form in which it is now commonly circulated in English, Mr. Arthur has read and studied one small collection of writings of comparable age and authority in translations that were made in the Nineteenth Century, republished at various times, and are now issued by Crown Publishers under the title, "The Forgotten Books of Eden: Lost Books of the Old Testament." This, so far as I can determine from the booklet, is the extent of Mr. Arthur's studies. He may never even have heard of Marcion, Manichaeus, and the leaders of quite a few other early Christian sects that had numerous adherents and flourishing congregations in many parts of the Roman Empire until the gang called The Fathers of the Church got control of the government and could use its military power to suppress competition in the salvation-business. It was characteristic of those early sects that they, like all men of sound judgement and unperverted instincts, were revolted by the "Old Testament" and its record of foul crimes perpetrated by Yahweh on behalf of his Chosen People of brigands and marauders. They accordingly concluded, as did Marcion, that Yahweh was an inferior and renegade god, a mere demiurge, or forthrightly identified the Jews' god with Satan, the supreme god of pure evil. They, however, had their own "New Testaments" and believed Jesus to be an emanation of a far different and superior god, a good and righteous god, who would eventually destroy the author of evil and all his army of superhuman and human devils. They were thus Christians and properly so called themselves, since they, like many followers of the religion after them, believed that the personal name of the protagonist of the "New Testament" stories had been Jesus Christ, much as a man might today be named Jim Jones. Mr. Arthur has been more consistent and logical than those early Christians and, on the basis of the texts he had before him, thought the problem through and reached the necessary conclusion that Yahweh, Jesus & Co., Inc. are a single and indivisible corporation. Believing in the veracity of predictions made in the scriptures, he believes that the three gods of incorporated evil, with their Chosen earthlings, will inflict on civilized mankind all the sadistic horrors described in the Apocalypse and that thereafter Jesus and his band of Jew boys will reign over the devastated earth for a thousand years. But Mr. Arthur has had visions and offers us a message of hope. After "God Almighty, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost," together with "all their followers that will number into the millions," have had their thousand years of depraved fun, the "True Divine White Holy Spirit" will arise and destroy the whole shebang. He will purify the earth with celestial fire at a temperature of 1,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing God Almighty & Co., and their millions of evil spirits to "ashes that will be carried away by the winds." And, needless to say, "there will be left not one Jew or Jewess, not one nigger, male or female, nor any of the Mud Races," and the planet will be cleansed of that pollution. A "remnant of the Great White Race" will survive, however, and inherit an earth now purged of its vermin and made fit for civilized life at last. Such is the glorious future promised us by a man who has understood the Bible in which he believes.