The Collected Sermons of Jim Jones - Jeff Hood

The most complete scholarly edition of Jim Jones's recorded sermons ever assembled - 102 sermons across ten volumes, drawn directly from the Q-number archive maintained by the Jonestown Institute.

On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred people died in Jonestown, Guyana, under the command of Jim Jones. What remains of that catastrophe - beyond the grief and the headlines - is a vast archive of recordings: Jones preaching, healing, arguing, commanding, and unraveling across more than two decades of ministry. This collection gathers those recordings into a single scholarly edition for the first time.

Edited by theologian and activist Jeff Hood, each volume pairs the full sermon transcripts with editorial introductions that place the recordings in historical and theological context. Hood does not excuse Jones. He does not rehabilitate him. He reads him - carefully, unflinchingly - because the people who followed Jones deserve more than silence, and because the mechanisms of manipulation documented in these sermons are not historical curiosities. They are warnings.

The collection spans Jones's full preaching career: from the earliest undated Pentecostal recordings through the tent revival healing services, the California years of explosive growth, the deepening control and paranoia of the early 1970s, the settlement of Jonestown, and the final sermons recorded weeks before the end. Taken in sequence, these ten volumes constitute a theological autopsy - the dissection of a faith that was real, a community that was genuine, and a catastrophe that was built, sermon by sermon, over twenty years.