Cho Nam-chul
Cho Namchul (November 30, 1923 - July 2, 2006, alternately Cho Namcheol) was a professional Go player (Baduk in Korean). He died of natural causes in Seoul at the age of 83.
Victory Altar
Because of his criticism of Jesus Christ and his own messianic claims, Cho encountered the hostility of Korean Christian churches, which promoted media campaigns against the Victory Altar and accused its founder of various wrongdoings. In 1994, Cho was arrested and spent in jail seven of the last ten years of his life. He was accused both of fraud and of having instigated the murder of six ex-members turned militant opponents of the Victory Altar. Cho was convicted for fraud, found not guilty in a first case about the murders in 1996, then found guilty in a second trial in 2004, and sentenced to death, but again found not guilty on appeal. South Korea has three degrees of judgement: the prosecutor appealed the decision favorable to Cho before the Supreme Court, but Cho died just before the trial, on June 19, 2004. The prosecution of Cho and above all his death, since many followers believed him to be physically immortal, were serious blows for the movement, which started a phase of decline, although by 2017 it still maintained 40 Victory Altars in Korea with some 100,000 followers.
According to the Victory Altar, all the great sacred scriptures of humanity, including the Bible, the classics of Buddhism, and the ancient prophetic books of Korea announce the “original promise” of God, i.e. that humans may achieve physical immortality. This is the only real immortality, and the notion that a soul separated from the body will live eternally in Heaven is a false interpretation of the holy scriptures. It was also part of the message of Jesus Christ, thus evidencing that he was a false prophet, and in fact was “the only son of Satan.” Additional evidence that Jesus Christ was not a divine incarnation comes, according to the Victory Altar, from the fact that he was the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera, who might have raped his mother Mary, and that he married Mary Magdalene, widely regarded as a fallen woman. The sources for these accusations are the Roman anti-Christian philosopher Celsus and the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which also influenced the phenomenally successful 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Jesus Christ is not part of the succession of divine incarnations and prophets proposed by the Victory Altar. This starts with Adam and Eve, who were divine and immortal and formed the original Trinity with God. Not being omnipotent, however, God could not prevent Satan from capturing Adam and Eve and depriving them of their immortality. 6,000 years, and a succession of divine prophets, were needed before God could overcome Satan and offer again physical immortality to humans. A first set of prophets includes Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Dan. The latter was the legitimate successor of Jacob (as proved, the Victory Altar maintains, by the Biblical Book of Genesis, 49:16) and eventually his tribe, the Danites, migrated to Korea, whose mythical first king was called Dangun, or King Dan. Korea hosted the second set of prophets, including the founder of the Olive Tree, Park Tae-Seon, the woman who initiated Cho, Hong Eup-Bi, and Cho himself, as well as the founders of two other Korean new religions, Choe Je-u of Donghak and Gang Il-Sun of Jeungsanism.