Despite Failure After Failure, Bethel's Bill Johnson Continues to Sell Faux Healing

In the ancient world, the sick and dying would embark on desperate pilgrimages to the sanctuaries of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. These were not hospitals. These were temples—shrines of mysticism where hope and illusion walked hand in hand. Scattered across Greece, with major centers in Epidaurus, Kos, and Pergamon, these sites lured the suffering with empty promises of divine intervention, wrapped in elaborate rituals and sacred theater.

Here, the desperate underwent a practice called incubation—sleeping in the temple, waiting for Asclepius to visit them in a dream, whispering their cure or, if they were particularly lucky, performing the miracle himself. Priests—acting as intermediaries—administered sacred baths, dictated diet restrictions, and dispensed medicinal plants with the same confidence as a faith healer commanding a wheelchair-bound man to “rise in Jesus’ name.”

But perhaps the strangest element of these sanctuaries was the serpents. Real, live snakes, that were believed to be emissaries of Asclepius himself, slithered freely through the temple grounds. Their ability to shed their skin, they believed, symbolized renewal, transformation, and divine healing—until, of course, one of them bit you and sent you to an early grave.

Asclepius’ power, according to legend, extended beyond mere healing. He grew so skilled in the art of restoration that he learned how to raise the dead (sound familiar?), disrupting the natural order of life and death itself. Zeus, unwilling to tolerate such an abomination, struck him down with a single thunderbolt, obliterating his influence and restoring balance to the cosmos.

A fitting end for a fraud who overstepped his bounds.

Yet this, perhaps, is the best analogy to describe Bethel Church.

Enter Bill Johnson, grinning like a televangelist who just cashed a tithe check, proudly brandishing a book by faux faith healer, Chad Gonzales, titled Never Be Sick Again. The irony is thick enough to choke on—if it weren’t so grotesquely irresponsible.

Here stands a man whose own eyes betray him—forced to wear glasses because his faith isn’t strong enough to restore his failing vision. A man whose wife, despite the grandiose proclamations of healing, succumbed to cancer just over a year or so ago. A man whose church once engaged in what could only be described as a seance, an unhinged display of misplaced faith in an attempt to resurrect a dead toddler.

And yet, here he is, still selling the same snake oil, still convincing the gullible that divine healing is just one more Bethel conference away.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Bethel’s fraudulent healing theology is found in the story of Nabeel Qureshi, a former Muslim turned Christian apologist. Diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer, Qureshi made his own pilgrimage—not to the temples of Asclepius, but to the faith healers of Bethel. He sat through their services, endured their prophecies, allowed their self-proclaimed miracle workers to lay hands on him. Bethel’s leadership declared health over him, proclaimed victory over his body, waged supernatural war against the cancer.

And yet, despite all their showmanship, despite the roaring declarations and the fevered prayers, the cancer did not retreat. Their magic words carried no power. Unlike the collection plates they pass around like sacred relics, their promises were empty.

In September 2017, Nabeel Qureshi died.

Not healed. Not miraculously restored. Just another casualty of Bethel’s cruel fantasy.