Jones told members he was God in a body.
The claim arrived late and by degrees. In Indianapolis he was a preacher who healed; by the mid-1970s he was throwing a Bible on the floor in front of the congregation and asking why they needed it when he was standing there. Some members accepted it, some tolerated it as the price of the work, and some had already left.
Jones did not begin by claiming divinity, and members joined at different points on that curve. The healings started in Indianapolis and were, in significant part, staged — assistants planted in the congregation, animal tissue produced as tumours. Some members knew this and reasoned that a false healing that brought a poor family into a church that then fed them was a fair trade; that reasoning is on the tapes in members' own voices. By the mid-1970s Jones was telling the congregation that he was God in a body and that the Bible was a slave book. The claim is filed here as contested because the Temple never held it uniformly and because a great many people in the pews had not signed up to it.
The same ground, other faiths
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