Walter Veith

In May 2020 the head office of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Southern Africa, the Southern Africa Union Conference, issued a statement repudiating claims that Veith made that Jesus would come around or by 2027.

In a lecture in Nürnberg-Marienberg in October 2012 Walter Veith claimed that the Holocaust was used to "herd together" the Jews from all over Europe, so that they could be resettled in Palestine.

The leadership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany, Austria and Switzerland decided on 9 November 2012 that these statements were anti-Semitic and discriminatory. The church leaders took the view that they were "very close to criminal trivialization of the Nazi reign of terror". In December 2012, the Church leaders banned Veith from speaking in community centers and described his lectures as "conspiracy theories" and "spiritual abuse".

Veith holds that some of the new versions of the Bible coming out came from manuscripts with corruptions introduced by the Alexandrian text and varies and is less reliable than the Majority Text. The Adventist church does not hold a KJV only view, although a number of Adventists continue to prefer the King James Version. Because of his 2004 lecture War of the Bibles Veith was denied access to SDA churches in Germany for a time but was reinstated in 2010.

After conflicts at the University of the Western Cape due to their unorthodox views, Walter Veith and Quincy Johnson left the department of zoology. Johnson joined the Department of Microbiology, while Veith joined the Department of Physiology, where he worked until 2003. With this change, their right to teach zoology was withdrawn. Since his retirement from teaching physiology, Veith has devoted his time to pastoring.

The following year Veith received a one-year contract at the University of Cape Town. His creationist lectures meant that his contract was not renewed, but he was hired in a research-only position at the University of the Western Cape. At this time, Veith began to hold lectures outside university. Initially, his talks were mainly to Adventist congregations in the United States, then in Canada, Australia and Europe. In his lectures on nutrition he promoted Adventist values such as vegetarianism and fasting. His first book was published in 1998 under the title of Diet and Health.

In 1995 he became a full professor with tenure and the head of the Department of Zoology, the content also dealt with the theory of evolution after five years. He used his position among other things to promote his belief in creationism and to deny the theory of evolution, finding a fellow believer in these views in his colleague Quincy Johnson. In 1997 he published his results in The Genesis Conflict.

After graduation, Veith became an adjunct professor at the University of Stellenbosch, and until 1987 gave lectures in zoology.

Early in the 1980s, after his young son fell seriously ill (believing it was demonic possession) and recovered, allegedly with the help of a Catholic priest, he and his wife returned to the Catholic faith. But a few years later he developed doubts about Catholicism and, through the influence of a craftsman who renovated his kitchen, he and his wife joined the Adventist faith.

In 1971 Walter Veith began studying zoology at the University of Stellenbosch, where he graduated with a Master of Science in zoology. His thesis dealt with the propagation of dwarf chameleons. A two-year postgraduate course at the University of Cape Town followed in 1979. His thesis was an Autoradiographic and Electron Microscopic study of embryonic nutrition in the teleost Clinus superciliosus. He also attended lectures on zoology at the universities of Durban-Westville and Stellenbosch. Veith's research field is nutritional physiology, concentrating on the effect of modern animal husbandry on the incidence of disease transferral to humans. His research concentrates on degenerative diseases caused by incorrect nutrition and particularly on diseases such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases, and also on fertility.

Walter Julius Veith (born 1949) is a South African zoologist and a Seventh-day Adventist author and speaker known for his work in nutrition, creationism and Biblical exegesis.

Walter Veith was born in 1949 and grew up in a strict Catholic home. His mother, a Protestant, died early from cancer. Veith was told by his religion teacher that because of his mother's non-Catholic beliefs, she would "languish forever and ever" in hell. This prompted Veith to become an atheist at the age of ten.