CIA File Revives Wild Claim That Jesus Warned of the End of the World

A book preserved in the CIA’s archives is drawing fresh attention for its extraordinary claim that Jesus knew a global catastrophe was coming.

The book is The Adam and Eve Story, written by Chan Thomas in the 1960s. A copy released through the CIA’s reading room argues that civilizations have repeatedly been destroyed by sudden shifts of Earth’s poles. Thomas ties that theory to the biblical flood and claims Jesus understood a similar disaster could happen again. (cia.gov)

That is Thomas’s claim, not a CIA prediction. The document shows that his writing appeared in an agency file. It does not show that intelligence officials endorsed his ideas, discovered a date for the end of the world or suppressed a proven warning.

Thomas went well beyond his disaster theory. He claimed Jesus had studied in India, offered his own interpretation of Jesus’s final words on the cross and suggested that a spacecraft took him away after the crucifixion. Those assertions have no established historical or scientific support.

The pole shift claim also collapses a crucial distinction. Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed many times, but that does not mean the planet suddenly flips over or that its oceans sweep across the continents. NASA says magnetic reversals unfold over hundreds to thousands of years, and scientists have no reason to believe one is imminent. (NASA Science)

The U.S. Geological Survey says there is no evidence that magnetic pole reversals coincide with mass extinctions. That leaves no scientific basis for Thomas’s proposed cycle of civilization ending disasters every several thousand years. (U.S. Geological Survey)

The genuinely curious question is how Thomas’s book came to be kept in the CIA file. The publicly available material does not establish why the agency retained it. And while the document’s release has fueled claims that the book was “banned,” the fact that an old copy bears declassification markings does not prove the CIA prohibited the public from reading it.

For readers, the difference is simple: the CIA archive contains a striking account of what one writer believed about Jesus and the end of the world. It is not evidence that Jesus predicted a modern apocalypse or that the government knows one is on the way.