- Jamie Coots, the snake-handling Pentecostal preacher who starred in the National Geographic reality TV series Snake Salvation, has died at the age of 41. Yes, of a snake bite. Here’s a more detailed report from the Huffington Post.
Coots was a pastor at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky.
Last year he told National Public Radio that he handles snakes based on a verse in the book of Mark (the NPR report incorrectly names Matthew).
Coots felt that if he stopped taking up serpents he “would die and go to hell.”
The vast majority of Christians do not believe that.
Here’s what motivates snake handlers. You may also want to take a look at the Bible’s baffling one-liners (such as the one about picking up serpents). For a more serious approach, Thomas Burton’s Serpent Handling Believers provides a balanced, scholarly overview.
- Bob Jones, the most controversial of the so-called Kansas City Prophets (and thus not the Bob Jones of the university by the same name), has died. Again.
Jones used to tell his followers he died in 1975, but that God “sent him back to minister to church leadership and reach the multitudes with His love, truth and equipping the saints with understanding of the spiritual gifts.”
Yet what Bob Jones produced was a plethora of occult visions, unbiblical teachings and false prophecies.
Though followed by countless Christians who have bought into the teachings and practices of the New Apostolic Reformation, a heterodox movement, Jones was known to discerning Christians as a false prophet.
- Church leaders are reportedly buying blocks of theater tickets for screenings of the movie, Son of God. The Hollywood Reporter says that “churches and organizations, ranging in size from 10,000 to 4 million, are distributing tickets for a ‘Theater Take-Over.'”
The movie is said to be based on the TV series The Bible (though one would hope that it was based on, well, The Bible itself).
Anyway, the magazine says Son of God is one of several Bible-based films to be released this year.
- A 19-year-old woman who claims to be a Satanist, has told investigators that she has killed more than 20 people over the past six years.
Miranda Barbour and her husband Ylette Barbour, 22, are already jailed in Pennsylvania after being charged with the murder of a man.
Claiming that she only killed “bad people,” she told The Daily Item that she wanted to come clean and stop living a lie. She also told the paper that she she was sexually molested at age 4 and was introduced to murder at 13, literally in the hands of a man who led her to Satanism.
A law enforcement source close to the investigation said Miranda Barbour’s new claims could be “the real deal.”
But the DA involved in the case is skeptical, noting that his office has not received any information verifying Barbour’s claims.
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