D
David Koresh.
Born Vernon Howell in 1959, a poor reader who had memorised most of the New Testament by his twenties. He took the property in 1987, brought in firearms — legally traded, and part of the community's income — and by 1993 had fathered children with several women in the group, some of them minors.
Meet them — context →
The shared center — held across the tradition
The Bible is a sealed book, and the seals are opening now.
Davidian study is not devotional reading. It is the assembly of a sequence — Daniel, Revelation, the prophets — into a timeline, on the assumption that the timeline is running and that the reader is standing somewhere on it.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Koresh said he was the Lamb who could open the seals.
He argued it from Revelation 5: someone has to be found worthy to open the scroll, and he claimed to be that person — a sinful man, not a divine one, which is the distinction members repeated to reporters and to negotiators. The claim also underwrote his taking other men's wives, including girls under the age of consent.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
Scriptural and imminent. History is a sequence written in Daniel and Revelation, currently running, and the point of study is to work out where in it you are standing.
After death
Conditional immortality in the Adventist pattern: the dead sleep until resurrection, the saved receive eternal life, and there is no eternal torment.