THE SEMITIC ORIGIN OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE

By Ferrar Fenton

 – Forward by Pastor Jory Steven Brooks, CBIA

Ferrar Fenton (1832-1920) was the acclaimed author of “The Holy Bible In Modern English,” the product of a half century of labour, first published in 1903 after being issued in sections over eleven years. He was a confirmed  British-Israelite  who  dedicated his Bible translation to “all those nations who have sprung from the race of the British Isles.” In a letter to a correspondent, Fenton wrote, “I am a believer  in the ldentity… What we Identists need to do is to win the literary and learned world, and I applied to them as a scholar  to scholars.  The  two evidences of Language and Archaeology supply us with matchless weapons of war, and  our enemies  are the enemies of  the  Israel of God!”

 Fenton was a man of great learning and understanding, and a scholar of ancient  Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew and Latin, as well as being a distinguished member of the Royal Asiatic Society. The goal of his life was “to study the Bible absolutely in its original languages, to ascertain what its writers actually said and thought.”

The Ferrar Fenton Bible is available in both hardbound and leatherette versions from CBIA and its online bookshop at www.migrations.info.

The comments below by Ferrar Fenton are from letters he wrote in 1882 and 1885, and give additional insight into his scholarly views on the truth of British-Israel and  the  authority of Scripture:

Concerning the Semitic origin of our nation

 Of the Semitic discovery and colonization of this country, there can be no doubt in the eyes  of  the school of true philology (and, we would add, ethnology). These colonists attained a very high state of civilization previous to the Babylonian captivity and continued as a portion of the Carthaginian Empire, until the total ruin  of that state  by Scipio Africanus the Younger, about B.C. 150… No one who has at all studied ancient history doubts  the  Semitic colonization of Britain as the oldest one. This is no historic heresy, but one never doubted till the Arian craze set in during the last 40 years. That there is a large Arian element in our population is certain,  for the basis of our nation was in the East – i.e., the  race of Shem.

The ruins of monuments still existing, often in error called Druidic cult  worship, seem  to show  this; and the remains of prehistoric mining works that are often found in Wales and the west of England, corroborate this view. These ancient remains also seem clearly to prove that the early Israelite colonists were idolaters, who held Baal as the chief God, or a co-equal with Jehovah; for, indeed, the fires to Baal are still on Mid­summers-Day lighted , the feasters rush through them in honour of Baal, and the elders throw the children into them as described by the Hebrew prophets.

I can vouch for these facts from the evidence of my own eyesight, having witnessed them when an inhabitant of South Wales. Large tracts of furze bushes, in full golden flower, are also fired in honor of Baal at sunset.

That Dagon, the fish god, was also worshiped by them, is proved by the numerous gigantic masses of imperishable stone, often of quite  a  different  sort  to that of the  perishable  rocks  of  the  localities  where they were erected. These were  carved  into the  forms of the whale and  the shark,  which  I have  examined; and it is curious that none of these  monuments  are found east of the  Trent and  Ouse  rivers of Yorkshire. However, no archaeologist that I am aware of, except myself, has noted this fact; but it affords strong confirmation of the basis of accuracy wrapped  up in some of  the  oldest  Cymric  myths  that were  reduced to writing  in about  the 12th  century  of  our era.

I also deciphered an  ancient  Greek  inscription  on an Oriental formed cross in a remote village in Wales, written in letters of the age of the Apostles – not in modern Greek letters – and  so  encrusted  with  lichens as  to have  to be  shaded  in the  sun  to trace  them; and I have not the least doubt that it is the record of some apostolic  preacher,  perhaps of St. Paul  himself.

Not many miles off I came across a curious vase, used now for baptisms, of what seemed to me to be Oriental porphyry (igneous rock), and, if I am not greatly mistaken, carved with an inscription in archaic Arabic or Syriac characters; but I had  not time to get a photograph of it, or to endeavor to trace it out absolutely.

These seem to show that our British church was really apostolic in its origin; and not an offshoot in  the seventh century of the  Roman  Popish sect; and the oldest Cymric historians state that such was the case. Nay, some modern scholars hold that there still exists a series of essays, or sermons, in old Cymric, by the pen of  St.  Paul  himself; at least what a manuscript of some seven or eight centuries old claims to be such.

All these facts or deductions would, however, play “old harry” with the Darwinian Theory, as it would intimate the existence of a wealthy, commercial, and civilized population here at the time when our Darwinian lunatics are groping amid stone-ages of prehistoric development towards a human organization, and all that bosh. This would rather tend to the proof of the Scriptural statement that man was created civilized and intellectual; and that the brute savage man is the degraded result of vices, and the stultification of the intelligence that, in course of time, comes from idolatry and the rejection of reflective reason  which  it demands.

I cannot now devote myself to these researches, but, if my life is spared, I may be able some time to do it. That is, unless a riper intellect appears who has been able to give all his life to subjects worthy of it. This might turn some of the crowd away from the dementia that prevails, trying to destroy all evidence of God, His Christ, His Providence, and His design in the world and in human history. This would  also show them that there are more important things than secular mechanics and the temporal pleasures of the senses. There is a present growing out of  the  past, and a future beyond our world as well as in it; a future – as Disraeli so eloquently and consistently taught – when the house of Israel “will, in carrying out human destiny, again become the leader of the nations.”

The above is the substance of some correspondence in the years 1882 and 1885, and may be interesting to readers who will be able to bring it up to date at their own discretion. It will be seen, as from other views of our identity, the “Higher Criticism” has no standing room, and cannot be accepted as a standard by which to interpret Scripture and make it plain to the meanest intellect, so that “the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein,” which is done by accepting all of Scripture as literally true and “given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), to attain a definite and successful perfecting of the children of God.