FBI Agents re-examine the JFK Assassination. A detailed investigation into the evidence arising from the event, and the story of the man, who confessed to firing the fatal shot from the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza, Dallas Texas, on November 22nd, 1963, that killed President John F. Kennedy.
The first prison interview of 1994 with former soldier and mob associate James E. Files, who confessed to being the man on the grassy knoll, who shot President John F. Kennedy, with details of his involvement in clandestine activities involving the mob and the CIA. Compare this first 1994 interview with the second 2003 interview and see how consistent the story remains after nine years.
PART I
1994 INTERVIEW
PART II
2003 INTERVIEW
PART III
INTERVIEW
RELEASED 2/25/ 2025
INTERVIEW WITH
JFK'S ASSASSIN FROM
THE GRASSY KNOLL
JAMES FILES 9/25/25
IN VIDEO BELOW
Interviewed just days before his death, CIA contract agent and underworld figure Chauncey Marvin Holt chronicles his career in the twilight world of bootlegging, bookmaking, gunrunning, money laundering, espionage, and assassinations.
How should Christians stand up for their faith in such an anti-Christian world?
As Christians, the two things we can do to stand up for Christ are to live according to His Word and grow our own knowledge of Him. Christ said, “Let your light shine before men…” (Matthew 5:16). This means that we should live and act in a way that supports the gospel. We should also arm ourselves with knowledge, both of the gospel (Ephesians 6:10-17) and of the world around us. First Peter 3:15 says, “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” All we can do is live and teach as Christ would and let Him take care of the rest.
Critics of Christianity have become more vocal recently. This is partly because there are many people who do not believe in God or understand the truth about Him at all. Yet the apparent increase of anti-Christians is also due to perception. As with many topics, those who truly despise Christianity are the loudest and most vocal of the non-believers. The vast majority of those who do not believe don’t care enough to bother believers. The few angry, vocal, bitter unbelievers make enough noise to seem more numerous than they are.
The typical insult from the non-religious crowd is to refer to believers as “ignorant,” “stupid,” “brainwashed,” or to otherwise suggest that those who have faith are less intelligent than those who do not. When a Christian stands up intelligently for his faith, the terms change to “bigot,” “extremist,” or “zealot.” When people who know that the believer is kind and loving hear this, the atheist starts to look like the fool that he or she is (Psalm 53:1). Most non-believers have no personal reason to see Christians negatively, but they sometimes hear so much from the loud anti-Christians that they just assume it is so. They need examples of Christ-like living to see the truth.
Of course, when someone claiming to be a Christian says or does something that is not Christ-like, the angry, loud crowd is there to identify him as a typical religious hypocrite. This is something we have been warned to expect (Romans 1:28-30; Matthew 5:11). The best thing to do is to cite a passage of the Bible that speaks against what the person did, and remind the atheists that just because a person says he is a Christian, and even if he thinks he is a Christian, that does not mean that he is. Matthew 7:16,20 tell us that true Christians will be known by their actions, not merely by their profession. And remind critics that absolutely no one lives without sinning at all (Romans 3:23).
An important thing to remember is that no one, no matter how persuasive, can force anyone to believe anything he doesn’t want to believe. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the argument, people will believe what they want to believe (Luke 12:54-56). Conviction is not a Christian’s job. The Holy Spirit convicts people (John 14:16-17), and they choose whether or not to believe. What we can do is present ourselves in a way that is as Christ-like as possible. It is sad that there are many atheists who have read the entire Bible looking for ammunition against Christians, and that there are many Christians who have hardly read the Bible at all.
It’s hard for the angry crowd to accuse a Christian of being a hateful, cruel bigot when that person demonstrates a life of kindness, humility, and compassion. When a Christian can discuss, debate, or debunk secular arguments accurately, the label of “ignorant” no longer fits. A Christian who has read the secular arguments and can politely expose their flaws helps to deflate the stereotypes advanced by atheists. Knowledge is the weapon, and it is invincible when we let Christ direct us in how to use it.
The Shack has become a publishing phenomenon, a bestseller by a first-time author that has rocketed up the sales charts and was made into a movie—not bad for a book that was self-published by the author, William P. Young, and started out being sold out of a garage.
The glowing reviews for The Shack hail it as everything from the new Pilgrim’s Progress (theologian Eugene Peterson, translator of the Bible paraphrase The Message) to "the best novel of 2007" and "one of the rare fiction books that could change your life" (various Amazon.com five-star reviewers). According to the book jacket, Young was raised by missionary parents living among a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea. He wrote the novel for his six children to explain his own journey through pain and misery to "light, love and transformation," according to a profile in USA Today. The "shack" of the story was the ugly place inside him where everything awful was hidden away, a result of his history as a victim of sexual abuse, his own adultery and the ensuing shame and pain, all stuffed deep in his psyche, as Young explained.
This background is important because Young’s past appears to greatly color his view of both God and Christianity, resulting in a severely flawed view of both. The story begins with Mackenzie "Mack" Phillips, a father suffering great pain—a "Great Sadness," according to the story—because of the death of his young daughter at the hands of a serial killer. Mack receives a note from "Papa" to meet him at the rundown shack in the woods where police had found evidence of his daughter’s murder six years earlier. Mack, who was raised by a hypocritical, vicious and abusive father who was also a pastor, already understands from previous experience that "Papa" is God. Mack approaches The Shack with rising anger, wanting to lash out at God for allowing his young girl to be killed. Instead of the old man with a long white beard, as Mack expects, he’s suddenly embraced by "a large beaming African-American woman" who introduces herself as Papa.
Mack is then introduced to the rest of the Trinity: Jesus, a Middle Eastern man dressed as a laborer, and the Holy Spirit, a woman of "maybe northern Chinese or Nepalese or even Mongolian ethnicity" named Sarayu. The rest of the story is a conversation among the three members of the Trinity and Mack as they work through issues of creation, fall and redemption.
Subtle and not-so-subtle heresies Young’s intentions are good. He wants to introduce readers to a loving God who was willing to sacrifice his own Son to save us from our sins. But all heresies begin with misconstruing the nature of God. From Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormonism to even Islam, they all get it wrong when it comes to understanding the God of Scripture. Young joins their company. Part of the problem arises because his story is confused and inconsistent. He doesn’t set out to mislead, but he himself is misled, either by himself or others.
He wants desperately to show us the God of love as found in Scripture (1 John 4:8), but he ignores the other side, the God of utter holiness (Isaiah 6:1-5) and, ultimately, the final Judge (Revelation 20:11-15). Any presentation of God that shows only one side of His nature is wrong. In an effort to counter a false view of God as only the judging avenger of wrath, we must not go the opposite direction and present Him only as a loving, indulgent parent who never judges sin. Both extremes are false in that they present an incomplete picture of God as He shows Himself to us in Scripture.
By emphasizing only one part of God’s nature, The Shack actually leads readers astray with regard to God’s attitude towards sin. Papa tells Mack, “I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring from the inside. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it.”
To be sure, sin often carries within itself its own punishment (Romans 1:27). But sometimes the wicked prosper in this life (Jeremiah 12:1). More importantly, Scripture is full of references to God’s impending wrath against sin and unbelief (John 3:36, Romans 1:18, Romans 2:5-8, Colossians 3:6, and many others.) For The Shack to give the impression that it is not God’s purpose to punish sin is the height of bad theology and irresponsibility.
We anthropomorphize (attribute human qualities to) God the Father at our peril. He is spirit (John 4:24), and when He refers to Himself in anthropomorphic terms, it is always as a father. This is important because any attempt to make God a female inevitably leads to goddess religion and God’s becoming some sort of fertility figure, a worship of the creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1:25).
And for some reason Papa changes form later in the book to become a gray-haired, pony-tailed male. No, God does not change Himself to accommodate our flawed understanding of Him. He changes us so we can see Him as He truly is (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Papa acknowledges that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, but she adds,
“[H]e has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything. He has only lived out of his relationship with me, living in the very same manner that I desire to be in relationship with every human being. He is just to do it to the uttermost—the first to absolutely trust my life within him, the first to believe in my love and my appearance without regard for appearance or consequence.”
But that’s not what Scripture says. Jesus in fact was before all things and through Him all things were created and hold together (Colossians 1:16-17). The words Papa speaks are a form of the ancient heresy of subordinationism, which puts Jesus in a lower rank within the Trinity. Scripture teaches that all three persons of the Trinity are equal in essence.
Scripture also teaches that there is a hierarchy of authority and submission within the Trinity. Papa tells Mack that authority and submission are a result of sin, and the Trinity is a perfect circle of communion.
"Mackenzie, we have no concept of final authority among us, only unity. We are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command or 'great chain of being' as your ancestors termed it. What you’re seeing here is relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over the other because we are always looking out for the best. Hierarchy would make no sense among us."
But Scripture teaches that authority and submission are inherent to the Godhead and have existed from the beginning. Jesus was sent by the Father (John 6:57), and Jesus says it is His intention to obey the Father’s will (Luke 22:42). The Holy Spirit obeys both the Father and the Son (John 14:26, John 15:26). These are not the result of sin; they are the very nature of the Godhead in which all three persons are equal in essence but exist within a hierarchy of authority and submission.
The Shack also teaches a form of patripassionism, another ancient heresy that teaches that God the Father suffered on the cross. At one point, Mack notices "scars in [Papa’s] wrists, like those he now assumed Jesus also had on his," and later Papa says, "When we three spoke ourselves into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human. We also chose to embrace all the limitations that this entailed. Even though we have always been present in this created universe, we now became flesh and blood."
God the Father and God the Holy Spirit did not speak themselves into human existence; only the Son became human (John 1:14).
A low view of Scripture The Shack wants to make God accessible to a hurting world, but its author also has a very low view of Scripture; in fact, he mocks anyone who holds that there is such a thing as correct doctrine:
“In seminary Mack had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners' access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?”
If one is to teach error, it is important to do away with Scripture, either by adding to it (Mormonism), mistranslating it (Jehovah’s Witnesses) or simply mocking it (The Shack and some others in the ”emergent church”). But if you are going to claim to teach about God, you must stick to what He has declared to be His revelation about Himself and His will to us. In other words, doctrine must be correct, a point stressed numerous times in Scripture (1 Timothy 4:16, 2 Timothy 4:3, Titus 1:9, Titus 2:1). Yes, we are not just to be hearers (and readers) of the Word; we are to live it. But we can’t live it unless we know it, believe it, and trust it. Otherwise, the God you present is merely a creation of your own imagination and not the God that everyone must stand before on that final day, either as friend or condemned sinner.
But it’s only fiction Some defend The Shack by saying it’s only a work of fiction. But if you’re going to have God as a character in your fiction, then you must deal with God as He has revealed Himself in Scripture. By using the Trinity as characters, The Shack is clearly indicating that it’s talking about the God of Christianity. But God has said certain things about Himself in Scripture, and much of what’s in this novel contradicts that.
More importantly, why does the author feel the need to change the character of God in this story? In a way, he’s saying that the God who reveals Himself to us in the Bible is insufficient. The author needs to "improve" the image to make it more palatable. But God never changes Himself so that we can understand Him better. He changes us so that we can see Him as he truly is. If God changed His nature, He would cease to be God.
If a friend had a cold, abusive father, don’t make the God of your story into a warm, loving female to compensate. Show your friend what a true father is like, using the example from Scripture. If your friend is hurting, don’t comfort him with soothing lies, such as The Shack’s assertion that God does not judge sin. Show him the God of all comfort found in Scripture, the God who was willing to save him from that judgment by sending His Son.
The claim that "Jesus was Black" usually stems from two distinct viewpoints:
Theological and Cultural Expression: Many theologians and Christian communities—particularly within Black Liberation Theology—use the phrase "Jesus is Black" metaphorically. Because Western European art historically "whitewashed" Jesus by depicting him with pale skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair, reclaiming Jesus as Black serves as a symbolic rejection of white supremacy. It emphasizes that Jesus identifies with the oppressed and marginalized. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Alternative Biblical Interpretations: Some groups, such as the Black Hebrew Israelites, interpret specific prophetic or apocalyptic scriptures literally to argue for a Black Jesus. For example, they point to Revelation 1:14-15, which describes a vision of Christ with hair "like wool" and feet like "burnished bronze". Mainstream biblical scholars view this text as highly symbolic imagery representing purity and divine judgment, rather than a literal anthropological description of his earthly body. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The Egypt Argument: Another common argument notes that Mary and Joseph hid Jesus in Egypt to escape King Herod. Proponents argue he must have been Black to blend into Africa. However, historians point out that ancient Egyptians were ethnically distinct from sub-Saharan Africans and shared similar Mediterranean/Middle Eastern complexions with Judeans. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Universal Depictions
Ultimately, the Christian faith has a long history of inculturation, where different societies portray Jesus to look like themselves. You can find historical icons of an Asian Jesus in China, a Black Jesus in Ethiopia, and a white Jesus in Europe. While the literal, historical Jesus was more than likely a light to medium olive skinned Middle Eastern man, different groups continue to adapt his image to reflect their own cultural identities. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
I have had, numerous times, conversations with individuals who insist
that Jesus was black/African. While I find the idea extremely unlikely, I
honestly do not care how much melanin was present in Jesus’ skin. What
bothers me is the adamant and often hostile insistence of those who hold
this view.
The Bible does not say anything about the color of Jesus’ skin. Jesus
was a Jew/Israelite/Hebrew. He was of Semitic descent. His skin color
was likely somewhere in between light olive and medium-dark brown. Jesus
very likely looked like a typical Middle Easterner, with dark hair and
dark eyes. People from Israel, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq are
likely the best current examples of what Jesus would have looked like.
Those who believe Jesus was black typically have two main arguments. The first is based on the description of Jesus in Revelation 1:14-16,
particularly the reference to His feet being “burnished bronze.”
However, bronze is a medium-dark brown color. It is not the same color
as the skin of black people. More importantly, though, Revelation 1:14-16
is clearly symbolic. It is a description of Jesus appearing in a
glorious form in a vision. It is not a description of Jesus’ human
appearance.
Are we to believe that Jesus literally had eyes of fire (Revelation 1:14),
a voice of raging waters (verse 15), seven stars in His right hand
(verse 16), a sword in His mouth (verse 16), and a face as bright as the
sun (verse 16)? Of course not. Neither are we to believe that Jesus’
feet were literally the color of burnished bronze.
The second argument is that since Joseph and Mary took Jesus to Egypt to hide Him from Herod in Matthew 2:13-14,
they must have looked similar to Egyptians. And, since Egypt is in
Africa, that means Egyptians are black. Therefore, Joseph, Mary, and
Jesus were black. There are numerous errors in this line of reasoning.
Joseph and Mary did not need to be able to “blend in” in Egypt. They
simply needed to be outside of the territory Herod controlled. Herod
would have no authority to order the slaughter of children in Egypt even
if he somehow discovered that Jesus was in Egypt. Yes, Egypt is in
Africa, and so Egyptians are Africans. But, Egyptians are not black.
Ethnically, Egyptians were, and still are, Middle Eastern, with similar
skin tones to the people of Israel.
While these two are the most frequent, I have heard a few other “Jesus
was black” arguments. All of them are weak, at best. Simply put, the
Bible does not teach that Jesus was black. Biblically, historically, and
anthropologically speaking, it is extremely unlikely that Jesus was
black/African in ethnicity.
But, lack of biblical evidence does not dissuade those who are convinced
that Jesus was black. This argument is a primary feature of the Black
Hebrew/Black Israelite movement, but it is not limited to that movement.
The question arises: Why is it so important to many people of
black/African descent that Jesus was black? The answer, in my opinion,
is the same reason that Europeans/Caucasians have for millennia
portrayed Jesus as having light skin: we all want Jesus to look like us.
Picturing Jesus looking like our own ethnicity seems to help us to
connect with Him.
While Jesus is rarely portrayed as blond-haired and blue-eyed anymore,
that was, for a time, the predominant portrait, at least in the USA.
While most American Christians understand that Jesus was very likely
Middle Eastern in appearance, they don’t truly picture Him that way in
their minds. The idea that Jesus likely looked much more like the
members of ISIS we see in the news than the Caucasian actors who
typically portray Him in American movies is, well, difficult to accept
for many.
I think I understand why some black people desperately want Jesus to be
black. For many, it is an overreaction to the completely inaccurate
portrayals of a white Jesus. But, whatever the case, the precise hue of
Jesus’ skin is completely irrelevant. That is likely why the Bible
nowhere gives a physical description of Jesus, other than essentially
saying He was ordinary (Isaiah 53:2).
God became flesh (John 1:1, 14) so He could bear our sins in His body (1 Peter 2:24), thereby saving for Himself a multitude of people from every nation, tribe, and tongue (Revelation 7:9).
Jesus was not white. Jesus was not black. Jesus was, very likely, in
the middle in terms of skin color. But, ultimately, it does not matter.
Jesus is the Savior for all of humanity (1 John 2:2). Jesus died for blacks and whites and everything in between. God’s sacrificial love is for the entire world (John 3:16). Divisive arguments over the color of His skin are antithetical to what He accomplished.
