Otis Q. Sellers in New York, 1978

Bill Scotti, Frank Marrone, Otis Q. Sellers. Spring 1978 Conference, Holiday Inn New York City.

Last night I received from my friend Sam Marrone a snapshot of Otis Q. Sellers speaking with his father, Frank, as his uncle Bill Scotti looks on, and I thought I’d share it here. It was taken at the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

The event was the Word of Truth Ministry‘s 1978 New York spring conference.  That year Gabe Monheim put Sellers’s writings in my hands. (See my recollection.) Gabe’s urgent invitation to me to attend the 1978 sessions did not prevail, but my reading and thinking continued. My personal introduction to the man happened the following year. Due to a falling-out between Sellers and Monheim, under circumstances not favorable to the latter’s memory, the spring and fall 1979 conferences would be his last in my city. To Sam I owe my recent awareness of some of the details of that estrangement, wholly unknown to me at the time. I’ll probably reserve the telling of that story for my prospective book’s last chapter.

Otis Q. Sellers in his study

Sam’s history with Sellers is a bit longer. His parents began taking him to the semi-annual conferences in Philadelphia, hosted in a private home, in 1953. Sam was raised a Christian Individualist and, 66 years later, remains one. Along with the photo, Sam gifted to me a complete run of Sellers’s magazine, Word of Truth, 1936-1965. It is invaluable for my research into his life and thought. I can’t imagine how, if ever, I would have acquired it apart from his generosity.  Thanks, Sam.

The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads”

In a recent post I challenged readers

to point to evidence that explains how in four score years first-century ekklesiai, made up mainly by the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16), organically devolved into an anti-Semitic racket with whose “wrong division” of the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15) Christians are still coming to terms.

I had quoted from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1861 Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. From it one gathers that there was much greater discontinuity between the Christian communities of the first century and those of the second than is commonly assumed.

Such discontinuity would partly explain the anti-Jewish aspects of the theology that emerged in the centuries after the events recorded in the New Testament, according which theology the promises God had made to Seed of Abraham were interpreted “spiritually” (i.e., figuratively) and to be redeemed by non-Jewish, often rather anti-Jewish Christians and their churches.

What has been unearthed in the century and a half since Stanley wrote?

Today I ordered a 2018 book (should arrive tomorrow) that, if it doesn’t answer my question, will almost certainly shed scholarly light on the matter. The book is Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church by Michael J. Kruger.

I usually call attention to books I’ve read, but here I’m willing to go out on a limb on the strength of Professor Kruger’s earlier work, especially his 2012 Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books, but also The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (2013) and (with Andreas J. Köstenberger ) The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (2010).

What has occasioned this post was my receipt today of one of Kruger’s. In it he notes with satisfaction the most recent of many positive reviews of Christianity at the Crossroads, this one by Walter Wagner, author of After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (1994). (Kruger lists other reviews here.) Continue reading “The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads””

Kingdom economics? A speculation.

Like earthquakes, there will be wars and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6) during the seven-year rebellion that follows the Holy Spirit’s lifting of His restraints on His subjects after centuries of government. Today, they continue to occur as they have for centuries. They therefore cannot serve as prophetic signs today. The occurrence of earthquakes will,  however, be significant after centuries of their nonoccurrence.

But what about buying and selling? Any room for that in the Kingdom?

Image result for buying and selling

I recently chanced upon Otis Q. Sellers’s concatenation of Biblical verses that lists some blessings of God’s prophesied global government (Psalm 67:4), that is, during the future manifest Kingdom of God. It will be a centuries-long period of time . . .

. . . when the whole earth is filled with His glory (Psalm 72:19); when the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory (Psalm 97:6); when God opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16; my emphasis); when God’s judgments are in the earth and the inhabitants of the world are learning righteousness (Isaiah 26:9); when no inhabitant of the earth shall say that he is sick (Isaiah 33:24); when God opens rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of valleys (Isaiah 41:18); when the desert shall blossom as the rose bush blossoms (Isaiah 35:1) . . .

Otis Q. Sellers, “Inheriting the Earth,” Seed & Bread, No. 73

Image result for the kingdom of godThe italicized passage implies global abundance, the opposite of scarcity. We normally don’t pay for air, and that’s because it’s abundant in the economic sense: we can all breathe as much of it as we want without depriving anyone else of breathing as much as they want.

Scarce goods can be traded on markets for other scarce goods. One does not have to trade, however, for what’s not scarce. And scarcity is impossible when God is satisfying the everyone’s desires.

Jesus’ many miracles, such as when He fed multitudes with a few biscuits and fishes (e.g., Matthew 14:13-21, 15: 32-39) were “foretastes” of the Kingdom; indeed, they were the Kingdom in its blade and ear stages; Mark 4:26-29.

Sellers’s distinctive claim is that God suspended His Kingdom purposes at the close of the Acts period, which purposes He will resume when He assumes sovereignty.

Now, if there’s no scarcity, there’s no use for money prices. (No occasion, therefore, for the root of all evil, the “love of money,” to grow in the human heart.) And, therefore, no buying and selling. Yet we are told that during the revolt (apostasia, ἀποστασία, 2 Thessalonians 2:3) against the Kingdom (before the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night; 2 Peter 3:10) . . .

. . . no man might buy or sell, save he that has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:7 (my emphasis).

So what we have, by hypothesis, is the return (from the bad, ol’ pre-Kingdom days) of buying and selling. Along with earthquakes and wars, trading in scarce goods will signal the dictatorship of the Antichrist, who seats himself in the (restored) temple of God and gets away with murder and mayhem for seven years. He’s the leader of the conspiracy against the Lord’s rule to which Psalm 2 refers:

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,  Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. Psalm 2:2-3

Before He so breaks them, however, the conspiracy and its eventual suppression must play out along the lines Jesus outlined for His disciples. They had asked Him about the sign of His “coming” (that is, His personal presence, παρουσίας, parousias) and of the “end of the world” (that is, the consummation of the eon, συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος, synteleias tou aionos, the aion (or “eon”) in question being the pre-Millennial (pre-Parousia) Kingdom. (See Matthew 24:3ff).

This sequence of events presupposes a centuries-earlier return of the prophet Elijah who will restore all things (Malachi 4:5-6), including the Temple. By the time that future Temple is desecrated, the Spirit will have already lifted the restraints of God’s government.

Jesus’s prophecy of the “abomination of desolation” (τὸβδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως, to bdelygma tēs erēmōseōs, Matthew 24:15) highlights Daniel’s הַשִּׁקּוּץ מְשׁוֹמֵֽם, ha-shikkuts meshomem, Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11.

I conjecture that the lifting of those restraints, which gives free rein to the rebels, comes with a diminution of Kingdom blessings, including abundance (and safety, and perfect health). That will entail the return of scarcity and, with that, money prices.

The Kingdom’s faithful subjects will have need of suddenly scarce goods. Without the “mark of the beast,” however, they won’t be allowed to buy them. This is the time of Jacob’s trouble (Jeremiah 30:7), of great pressure (θλῖψις, thlipsis, commonly translated “tribulation”).

From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

Rooted in κυριακόν (kyriakon), the English word “church” is the traditional translation of the Greek ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia). We may be practically stuck with it, but it’s a mistranslation, one that reinforces a misnomer at least as unhappy as Columbus’s tagging as “Indians” the aboriginal peoples who got to the Americas before he did.

The word κύριος (kyrios) means “lord”; κυριακόν (kyriakon) is the possessive. How one derives a form of kyriakon from ekklēsia is not only beyond my ken, but also that of many scholars who have noted this lexical curiosity. But we can learn from this misadventure: the discontinuity between the Christian individuals designated in the New Testament as ἐκκλησίαί (ekklēsiai, plural of ekklesia) and the historically identifiable societies we call “churches” is considerable.

The ekklēsiai of the apostolic age (roughly A.D. 33 to 70) were predominantly Jews who believed that Jesus was their prophesied Messiah. During that age believers who not of the seed of Abraham (i.e., “gentiles”) were “grafted in” to Israel on a case-by-case basis (Romans 11:17), sometimes to provoke Jews to jealousy (Romans 11:14). “Gentiles,” those who belonged to other nations (ἔθνη, ethnē, thus our word “ethnic”) were exceptions to a rule. In the New Testament we only have the names of three such exceptions: Cornelius (Acts 10), Titus (Galatians 2:3), and Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:25-30).

By What Authority?

Christ Himself was commissioned with authority (apostellō) only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15 :24). He restricted His disciples’ commission to them as well (Matthew 10:5-6). During the period of the Book of Acts is the history, the Gospel was preached to the Jew first, including the Greek-speaking (Ἕλληνι, Hellēni) Jews of the diaspora, such as Rome’s Jewish community (Romans 1:16).

God-fearing gentiles who stood in the rear of the synagogue as Paul preached were guests. His message was not intended for them. They would be, however, welcomed into fellowship with Jewish Christians if they believed that message and adhered to a few moral and dietary rules so as not to offend their Jewish brethren in Christ (e.g., Acts 15:20).

These non-Jews “besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath”—for which “almost the whole city” of Pisidian Antioch turned out the following week (Acts 13:44). When some synagogue leaders took offense at Paul and Barnabas’s outreach, they answered:

It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles (ἔθνη, ethnē, Acts 13:46).

But that decision was restricted to Pisidian Antioch: in the very next chapter we read that they traveled to Iconium “into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed” (Acts 14:1).

That was the only way Jews, Greeks or anyone else were going to hear the Good News in the Acts period: hearing required a preacher, and the preacher had to be commissioned:

. . . how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent (ἀποσταλῶσιν,  apostolōsin)? (Romans 10:14b-15a)

Continue reading “From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.”

God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.

On his Gravatar profile this blog’s most recent (and welcome!) subscriber cites a few Bible verses: Titus 2:13, Isaiah 40:5, and 2 Timothy 4:1, 8. He adds this caption: “Awaiting Anxiously God’s Next Move, Having That Blessed Hope: His Appearing, Blazing Forth (Epiphaneia) . . . . The Next Event (God’s Prophetic Clock ).”

That Greek word, epiphaneia, is in each of those New Testament verses. (Our word “epiphany” descends from it.) The Greek root, phaino, means “to shine,” and the prefix epi- intensifies it. Otis Q. Sellers suggested that “blazing forth” does justice to it.

A verse containing epiphaneia that the subscriber tellingly does not cite is 2 Thesslonians 2:8:

And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.

Tellingly, I say, because this violent action of the Lord’s is what most students of Bible prophecy believe is what will happen next (or at least right after the so-called “Rapture”). The “brightness of His coming” translates “the epiphaneia of His parousia.

That last Greek word refers to Christ’s presence, but not an ordinary presence. It certainly does not mean “coming” (as it’s sometimes mistranslated), although for Christ to be present on earth again he must first arrive. His parousia presupposes His “second coming.” When He gets here, He’ll be present on earth because of Who He is and What He does. It does not mean merely “being here,” as does pareimi. (“Present!” is how  modern Greek students answer their teacher when their names are called; the phrase they use is είμαι παρών [eimai paron].)

The epiphaneia in the cited verses refers to a different event.

. . . while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing [epiphaneia] of the glory of our great God and [kai] Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13).

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing [epiphaneia] and [kai] his kingdom [basileia]. . . . Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day . . . also to all who have loved His appearing [epiphaneia] (2 Timothy 4:1, 8).

The Greek word epiphaneia does not, of course, appear in the Hebrew of Isaiah 40:5:

And the glory (כָּבוֹד, kavod) of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 4o:5).

“Glory” translates the Hebrew kavod (doxa in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures). The day is coming when all will see God’s glory at the same time. That revelation will coincide with God’s assumption of sovereignty over the earth. Continue reading “God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.”

Getting to know Otis Q. Sellers, subversive heir to the Bible conference movement

Otis Q Sellers (1901-1992) in study/recording studio.

Otis Q. Sellers typically introduced his radio messages with the following script. (This one’s from forty years ago, September 16, 1979):

 

 

I greet you in the faith and fellowship of our great God and savior the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose we are, Whom we love, and Whom we serve.

May I introduce myself. I am Otis Q. Sellers, a personal and individual believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and my business in life is the study of the Word of God and proclamation of God’s Word. I do this by means of radio broadcasts such as this; I write and freely distribute Bible study literature; I have a tape-recorded ministry, a cassette ministry; I teach Bible classes.

As a personal student of the written Word, I come to my own conclusions after carefully considering all the Biblical material available. As a rule, I seek to study each word in order to bring forth its exact historical and grammatical meaning. I have been doing this for well over fifty years, and I believe I can fill with the Word of God the spiritual vacuum that now exists in the lives of many people.

He never founded a seminary or wrote a systematic theology. Five-hundred seventy tape-recorded messages and 196 four-page leaflets comprise his legacy to the world of Bible study. They bear the marks of his reverence for the Word, an expression of his love for his Savior, Jesus Christ, Whom he received at the age of 18. His journey lasted seven-and-a-half decades until a stroke incapacitated him in 1987. He led small Bible conferences in every state but Alaska. He wrote and recorded in his home office, depending for spiritual, material, and emotional support on wife Mildred, daughter Jane, five grandsons, and scores of friends. He never ceased to thanking God for them.

Throughout his life he’d be warned time and again, “You’ll never get anywhere teaching that!” “That” could refer to his deconstruction of what the churches teach about “the soul,” “heaven,” “hell,” “baptism,” “apostle,” and, most significantly, “church.” But he never wanted to “get anywhere” as the world regards destinations. He only wanted to know what God said so he could believe it. He knew that the work of God was believing on the One Whom God had sent. “My business is believing,” he’d tell his listeners at every opportunity. “Many people go to the Bible to find something to do; I go to the Bible to find something to believe.” Continue reading “Getting to know Otis Q. Sellers, subversive heir to the Bible conference movement”

God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings

Rather than let another week go by without posting, I’ll give the text of a leaflet by Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life and thought form the subject of a book I’m working on (my ready excuse for neglecting this blog). It’s Seed and Bread No. 49, one in a series of almost 200 tracts he published from 1971 to 1978. He didn’t date the first hundred, but my guess is that this one came out around 1973.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

I selected “A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67” as an introduction to Sellers’s interpretation of Scripture, highlighting as it does what he believed to be the Bible’s theme: the future, but also pre-Parousia (i.e., pre-Millennium), manifest government of God on earth.

Sellers’s affirmation of a future Kingdom that precedes Jesus’ return to Earth set him apart from every other interpreter of Scripture, Protestant and Catholic alike. That’s what attracted me to his thinking over forty years ago. The opportunity to explore it critically is my motivation for undertaking the book project. (Nearly everything Sellers wrote and recorded is freely available on Seed&Bread.org, the website of The Word of Truth Ministry.) Your comments and questions are welcome.

Last March I posted Sellers’s distinctive interpretation of Romans 13:-17, the text of Seed & Bread No. 50, which follows numerically the one I now present:

A Psalm of Divine Government: Psalm 67

The foundation for all that is said in the New Testament concerning the Kingdom of God was laid down in the Old Testament. When John  the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, and the twelve apostles went forth to herald that the Kingdom of God was at hand, they did not need to explain what was meant by this term. If any did not understand, it was because they did not know the Scriptures that God had entrusted to Israel. This is also true of men today; for since the New Testament truth follows the pattern of the Old, it is important that we become completely familiar with those Old Testament passages that declare the coming of divine government upon the earth. One of these passages is a short psalm which, if I were forced to make a choice, I would memorize rather than Psalm 23. We need to know and believe Psalm 67.

Psalm 67 Shviti (in the form of a menorah)

     “God be merciful unto us”  This is, I believe, a Psalm of David, the shepherd king of Israel.  This Psalm is a prayer; almost every statement in it is a petition. And I interpret it on the basis of this principle: every prayer in the Bible is a prophecy, and every prayer will be answered just as every prophecy will be fulfilled. David’s own nation is upon his heart here, laid there by the Spirit of God Who inspired this prayer; and Israel is the subject of this expression of his desire. The Hebrew for “be merciful” here means “be gracious,” that is, show us a love and favor that we do not deserve.

     “And bless us” The desire for God to “be gracious” means to be passively gracious. David knows of the sins of which his nation was guilty and realizes that if the Lord should mark iniquities, none would be able to stand before Him (Psalm 130:3). However, “bless us” is positive and is a plea for active grace. The blessing he desires for his nation is not wealth, grandeur, or territorial expansion. He seeks something far better that will be more enduring. Continue reading “God’s Prophesied Global Government and Its Blessings”

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

 

 

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)

We deny the non-Christian the standing of “objective, disinterested observer,” which standing is generally assumed as in effect in academia.

“We will hear again of this matter” (Acts 17:32) was the nonresponsive utterance of the Areopagite misosopher, one of Paul’s interlocuters. It lamely expresses the stance that the misosopher believes he may integrally assume.

Christian philosophy, however, claims that the attitude of neutrality and autonomy is not licit and is, in fact, impossible. If the denial of neutrality is ruled out, then Christianity is ruled out, and the misosopher who summarily rules a challenger out of court without a hearing only fails one of his own professed tests of rationality.

The mask of neutrality is ripped away as soon as the Christian is denied the right to argue as a Christian. Non-Christians may claim to be neutral as they consider the claim of Christ, and they may think that they make good on that claim if they merely refrain from ridicule. The Christian, however, may not take this self-representation as the last word. The non-Christian is not hostile to Christ only when he or she claims to be hostile, and should not charitably be presumed to be neutral if he or she does not make such a claim.

What God says is what matters, and He denies the possibility of neutrality. “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). Proverbs 8 signifies that Wisdom is a person who was with God at Creation, an outline that John 1 fills in. The Wisdom of God is the Word of God. It ends on a promise with both positive and negative charges:

For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death. He who hates me loves death. (Proverbs 8:35-36)

It’s safe to assume that if one loves death, one does not love wisdom, which is ordered toward the right conduct of life. God says that such a person hates wisdom. The Greek for that would be misosopher.

Christian philosophers may challenge traditional nomenclature. They challenge the use of “philosophy” to describe discourse that is ordered to the production of foolishness. He doesn’t expect common usage to reflect his insight, but he does expect to affect Christian discourse about “philosophy.”

Christians, including Christian philosophers, are as resistant as anyone else to linguistic change. Discounting the threat of violence or other nonrational pressure, only strong reasons can overcome the conservatism of established usage. The value of conformism, however, is not unlimited. That value that our proposed revision honors may justify the breaking of linguistic habit.

While Christian philosophers and non-Christian misosophers may be doing the same thing formally, they are not doing the same thing materially. Misosophers produce something analogous to what Marxists call “ideology,” which is to be taken critically, not at face value. In this sense, of course, Marxism is as ideological as any of its rivals.

Our point of departure is the distinction the Apostle Paul made between two types of philosophy. On the one hand, according to Paul, there is “philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after rudiments of this world” against whose seduction he warns his audience; on the other, “philosophy after Christ.” (I assume Paul didn’t think there was such a thing as “vain deceit after Christ.”)

Continue reading “Philosophy after Christ. (No, not chronologically after.)”

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

Hugh Murray

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

Henry Steele Commager, 1902-1998

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”