What is the Ruckmanite Cult?
by James Jacob Prasch
Ruckmanites are a neo gnostic cult following the beliefs of Peter Ruckman. Ruckman (a three times divorced and remarried white supremacist who refers to Blacks as “niggers”), like his followers and as with most cult leaders has no formal training or expertise in the matters he pontificates about. Ruckman and his followers hold the 1611 edition of The King James Bible as authoratative and infallible instead of the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and maintain that KJV additions are “further revelation”.
Not all KJV advocates are Ruckmanites, Many, if not most, KJV advocates accept that God gave His Word infallibly in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek autographs, and the KJV is a translation. Some Ruckmanites claim to be only following his teaching and not following him. It is not an institutional cult with a formal organization, but a network of mini cults sharing common heretical beliefs and paranoidesque delusions. Ruckmanites are essentially ‘conspiracy theorists’ who seek to mix secular conspiracy theories (complete with an unbalanced and nearly paranoid style of speculation and conjecture they treat as factual) with Christianity. Ruckmanites combine their heretical view of the KJV as the directly inspired bible instead of being a translation, with racist ideologies often including white supremacy and more commonly, anti semitism, frequently borrowing their views from British Israelism, The Identity Movement, and in some cases Neo Nazism, neo facist Patriot militia groups, and The Ku Klux Klan. They draw their textual arguments from the debunked home economics lecturer Gail Riplinger (discredited by the Christian Research Institute as being illiterate in Greek, and whose outlandishness is rejected by more scholarly defenders of the KJV such as The Trinitarian Bible Society).
The British Israelite (Armstrongism)influences of Ruckmanism are found in the belief in the purity of the English language in scripture as opposed to Hebrew or Greek languages, because of their anthropologically and theologically abject assertion that the Anglo-Celtic nations are the lost tribes of ancient Israel in accordance with the teachings of the late Herbert W. Armstrong and his ‘World Wide Church of God’ cult. While drawing on the influence, some Ruckmanites would deny being British Israelite.
Like all gnostics , Ruckmanites claim a special revelation only the initiated can comprehend; others are viewed as in deception. Like the followers of Origen in ancient Alexandrian gnostic heresy, Ruckmanites claim a special gnostic revelation about scripture and try to represent this by a convoluted system of manuscript comparison as Origen did with his hexalpa, except that Ruckmanites usually can’t even read the original texts. This gnosticism is evidenced in Riplinger’s kabbalistic style textual jigsaw ‘revelations'(very similar to the ‘bible codes’ arguments of Michael Drosnin, Paul & Jan Crouch, and Yacvov Ramsel) which she claims to have arrived at by means almost identical to what New Age ascended masters call ‘spirit guides’. Another example is Ruckman’s own doctrine that further additions to the 1611 KJV not found in original Greek or Hebrew manuscripts are new inspired revelation which only Ruckmanites have.
