Outrage, as Pastor claims Jesus ‘was’ HIV positive

Outrage, as Pastor claims Jesus ‘was’ HIV positive
By Staff Reporter
for ZimEye.org

Published: September 5, 2010

Comment


Capetown(ZimEye) A South African Pastor has sparked outrage from the worldwide Christian community after preaching a message titled: ‘Jesus was HIV Positive’ trying to encourage people to go and get tested for the disease.

Reverend Xola Skosana from Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, a township which has one of the highest rates of HIV in South Africa and having recently lost two of his sisters to Aids, underwent an HIV test in front of his congregation, along with more than 100 young people from the area.

Skosana’s ‘approach’ of reaching to the masses on HIV-awareness has been praised by Aids campaigners in South Africa but received a backlash from many Christians and in particular Zimbabwean Pastors who described the South African pastor as ‘devillish’, and ‘a pastor who needs a pastor’ condemning his teaching as gross heresy which seems to portrays Jesus as having been ’sexually promiscuous’.

A Zimbabwean Pastor from Britain’s Nottingham city, Ed Chibwana, however responded to the outrage with the following statement:

“Well Jesus was not HIV positive (in His lifetime) but He (later did) bear all diseases on His body for anyone who dares to believe. Testing is good, but the true medicine is the word of God,” he said.

Rev Skosana seemed to draw his ‘new teaching’ from a portion of scripture in Isaiah which states that when He went to the cross of His death Jesus ‘Himself bore our sicknesses on His body…’ and thus Skosana’s teaching should state that Jesus ‘became’ HIV positive when He went to the cross, rather than saying He in ‘was’ HIV positive.

In recent years, South Africa has attracted huge controversy on the subject of HIV Aids, with a former President Thabo Mbeki who once claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS sparking another great worldwide outrage from the medical community. (ZimEye, Zimbabwe)

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