Roberts’ Book Makes No Mention of Raising Dead

Contrary to a recent claim that he has raised the dead, the Rev. Oral Roberts did not mention such a feat in his 1972 autobiography and Roberts’ biographer says he never ran into such a claim when researching the faith healer’s life.

Roberts said in Tulsa on June 25 that he once had to stop his service to revive a dead person before he could continue. Roberts’ son, Richard Roberts, who played a videotape of his father’s remarks the next day on his television show, recalled that during his own boyhood his father revived a dead baby brought up by a distraught mother during a service.

But last Monday, the senior Roberts appeared on his son’s television program and seemed to modify his claim, saying that the mother who brought the baby to him thought the child was dead. “His little body was cold,” Roberts said. “The mother thought it was dead. I thought it was dead.”

It was not made clear by Oral or Richard Roberts whether they were describing the same incident. The alleged revival of the baby during Richard Roberts’ boyhood presumably would have occurred before 1969, when the younger Roberts turned 20 years old.

David Edwin Harrell Jr., author of “Oral Roberts, an American Life,” said that if the evangelist brought a dead person back to life, “it would have been in the ‘50s or the ‘60s.” That was the period when Roberts, now president of Oral Roberts University, was actively engaged in tent revivals and healing sessions, Harrell said.

“But I don’t recall that Oral ever made that claim before, though others did make such claims in the 1950s,” Harrell said.

In his autobiography, “The Call,” Roberts wrote in a chapter titled “Success and Failure” that “we’ve even had three people die during our crusades.” Since a crusade could run over many days, even weeks, it is not the same as saying that people died during one of his services. In fact, Roberts wrote that one death was reported during a crusade in Detroit after a diabetic woman, convinced that she was healed at one of Roberts’ services, gave up her insulin shots and died.

In that chapter, Roberts repeated a common disclaimer by faith healers that he simply prays for healing but that only God heals. “To me, the ultimate purpose of healing is to bring the person into a closer relationship to God and man,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, in remarks to about 5,000 charismatic ministers on June 25, Oral Roberts said “all of us in the ministry could talk about” cases of people raised from the dead. After declaring that he would not say how many have been raised under his own ministry, he told briefly of a person dying during a service. “I had to stop and go back in the crowd and raise the dead person so I could go ahead with the service,” he said without telling where or when the incident occurred.

Richard Rawe, an independent religious researcher living in Soap Lake, Wash., pointed to the chapter in Roberts’ autobiography and said, “I think that if he had raised the dead, he would have mentioned it.” Such a case would have offered a positive contrast to the deaths that occurred during his crusades, Rawe said.

In 1956, nine years after Roberts began his ministry, Rawe wrote him a letter asking if ever had “raised up dead persons by God’s power.” In a personal reply to Rawe dated March 26, 1956, Roberts wrote, “I have never felt led of God along this line. I know nothing is impossible with Him but we must leave matters of this nature entirely in His hands.”