While David Koresh is the figure most commonly associated with the Branch Davidians, the story of the group begins several decades before his ascent to leadership.
The group began as the “Davidians” (also known as “Shepherd’s Rod”), an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, a Christian religious movement that flourished in the late 19th century in America and that boasts 21 million members worldwide...
The Davidian movement was spearheaded in 1930...[the founders] believed that the Messiah prophesied in the biblical book of Isaiah was not Jesus, but was yet to come. They argued that they would help bring about the future “Davidic kingdom” — mirroring the empire of the biblical King David — during the apocalypse. That apocalypse, he taught, was imminent.
It was [the original leader] who first purchased the compound in Waco, Texas, that he called Mount Carmel, after the biblical mountain of the same name. There, he led a small Christian religious community that believed Mount Carmel would be the center of a new divine kingdom following the apocalypse...
Only in 1981 did Vernon Howell — the man who would soon change his name to David Koresh — join the Branch Davidian community. A troubled child from an unstable family background, Howell had become a born-again Christian in the 1980s. He joined the Southern Baptist Church, then switched to a Seventh-Day Adventist Church, from which he was expelled after aggressively pursuing a pastor’s daughter.
Claiming the gift of prophecy, Howell gained increasing power within the Branch Davidian community...While Koresh did, ultimately, possess an extraordinary amount of power within the Branch Davidian community, he was not its only representative. A number of Branch Davidians exist today, many of whom see Koresh as a splinter leader from their own legitimate tradition. And many of the Branch Davidians who ultimately died at Waco had been longstanding members of the community, practicing their faith long before Koresh was even born.
