A few months ago, we posted a video of David Barton claiming that he had been part of Oral Roberts University’s record-setting men’s college basketball team back in the early 1970s, a claim for which we and others have been unable to find any proof. At the same time, we have also been unable to definitively disprove it, so we really have no way of knowing whether or not any of it is true.
Today, Barton made another extraordinary claim on his “WallBuilders Live” radio program, which we once again can neither verify nor disprove, but that we find genuinely astonishing. Barton told listeners that he was fluent in Russian when he was younger and even served as an interpreter when the Russian national gymnastics team visited the United States in 1976. On top of that, Barton also claimed that he was actively involved in smuggling Bibles into the former Soviet Union.
Following an interview with a missionary who discussed efforts to introduce the Bible to eastern European countries, Barton chimed in that he too used to be involved in smuggling Bibles into the former Soviet Union.
“That’s really where I got started with the Soviet bloc back when the Iron Curtain was up,” Barton said. “I was fluent in Russian and when the Russian gymnastic team came to America in 1976, I got to be translator for them and do translating, and just the accounts of what happened when we went to the store was a blast.”
This revelation obviously came as an utter surprise to Barton’s co-host, Rick Green, who was shocked to discover that Barton speaks Russian … or rather did speak Russian, as Barton said that “I don’t now but I was, at one time, fluent in Russian and again translated for the Russian gymnastic team when they came to America.”
“At the same time, we were working our tails off to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union and had several trips that went there smuggling Bibles in,” he continued.
Green was completely flabbergasted by the revelations, as Barton recounted “all that smuggling time and how dangerous it was, you know, the Soviet bloc and the guards at the borders and all the stuff that went on there. It was pretty amazing”:
