#39 UNDERSTANDING REVELATION THROUGH ENOCH + Dr. James Sedlacek

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Hello, hello! Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host.

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In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

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God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Now I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the

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Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our Creator, better. Hello, hello!

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Welcome everybody to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. And today's topic is going to be, does the book of Enoch and other

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Jewish texts explain revelation? This is one of those books that as a child I was terrified of, and I've honestly never really gotten a clear answer of what all of the bowls and the lamps and the angels,

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I don't understand it. So today we have Dr. James Sedlicek back. I'm so happy that you came back on the show.

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I'm so excited to discuss this. I feel like you are so well -equipped to handle this discussion. Everybody buckle up.

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This is going to be a huge discussion. I think you're going to give us more than we even asked for. So welcome back to the show.

01:36

It's so great to have you back, Dr. Sedlicek. It's good to be back, and it's good to see you again.

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It's been a little while since Yes, it's been a while. And I have been just, you know, everybody loved the episodes with the misinterpreted biblical texts.

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Everybody loved the bleeding woman. Everybody loved how did Judaism become Christianity. Those are my top episodes.

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So I'm so excited to create more content with you and just continue learning from you. With Revelation, before we got on, you were talking about how you've been now teaching it at your university eight times, but you were reluctant to do so.

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And now it's your best topic. You love talking about it. Do you mind just kind of overviewing how you got into this?

02:15

Sure, sure. Yes. Well, we were chatting and I was saying that my head of school asked me to teach

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Revelation this year. And my first feeling was, I don't know if I want to teach the book of Revelation.

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And I'm sitting here thinking all of the books of the Bible, whether we're looking at the Tanakh or the

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New Testament, it's like, that's my favorite book. Just because it's so complicated?

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Well, I think for me, it's all of the wide range of interpretations that everybody has as their favorite interpretation.

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And they're adamant about that interpretation. And they're thinking what the possibilities are.

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And I think, for me, the level of certainty that people put on the interpretation that was given to them is the thing that makes it so hard to communicate about this book.

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Some of these interpretations are pretty far from certain. And when we start thinking about it, the people who read

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Revelation in the first century wouldn't know about such things as often have been cited to be the interpretation of Revelation.

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For example, I've heard people say United Nations is in there. The European community is in there, or the

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Union, or there's the League of Nations in there. If you read the text sideways on the wrong day of the week, you can find it.

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And when I was growing up, there would be these little things on the wall that said the

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Pope was the Antichrist and the Catholic Church was in the book of Revelation. I thought to myself, this is insane.

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And so where does this stuff come from? And the other thing that I didn't like when

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I was asked was nearly every few months, three, four months, a new book rolls out, usually from a garage publication or a self -publication racket, and I say that word carefully, trying to promote some fear -mongering from the book of Revelation or similar books.

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And it isn't trying to explain the book. That's the thing that is hard for people to sort the difference.

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They read what they read, they get terrified, and then why? They don't even know.

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They can't even verbalize why they're afraid. Because they're just estimating what they think it's about, but they can't actually explain it because it's written in such a different language than the rest of the

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Bible. Well, the recent books that come out that are producing fear and fear responses,

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I would say, because a lot of these are ran, I would say, I don't want to call them ministries, but sort of ministries that focus on this kind of new book every few months on something prophetic.

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And it's like they generate fear and they don't really tell you what to do with your fear.

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So what do you do? You buy the next book, and you buy the next book, and you buy the next book. Great sales. It's sales.

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It's marketing. It's not explaining Revelation. So I thought, this is my least favorite book, but I got the materials, and I started going through the materials.

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They always like to give you a few, a couple of months to read over the materials.

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And I probably got the materials around the time that we last had a connection, a

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Zoom meeting. A while ago, yeah. And so I was going over it, just still weighing it, not sure what

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I wanted to do. And then I got through the materials and I said, yeah, I want to teach this.

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Why? Because as I'm digging through the materials, they kept re -emphasizing

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Jewish information that has gotten lost in the shuffle that nobody's talking about on television.

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No one is talking about that. When you mentioned this on our phone call, that like, I think

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Jewish materials will help us understand Revelation, that was like, my mind was blown. And these first readers, whoever got the book of Revelation first, the people who it was written to, had to interpret this book.

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And they would not have known about the League of Nations, United Nations, European Union, or the

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Pope for that matter. None of this stuff would have been part of their reality. And so sometimes

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I think there's been a tendency to say, nobody's really solved the meaning of the book yet.

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So let me look in my area and interpret the book as if it fits my circumstances.

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Yes. Yes. Whatever they are. And sometimes they're perceptive circumstances, not the real circumstances.

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It's how people are perceiving their world. I don't think people are meaning to mislead. I think that they're just using what they got.

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I think so. Here's what I think's happened. Once the Jewish understandings of different phrases and different pieces get lost, and I want to say this happens right around the third century, third or fourth century, when the

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Jewish leadership of the church begins to minimize and the Gentile leadership begins to be the majority in church leadership, somewhere along this trajectory, key things got lost.

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And now people are interpreting all of these code phrases as if they meant something to my way of sorting code phrases into my world.

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Do you think that like something lost was just the translation or like the lack of communication between two groups?

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Once groups start disfellowshipping each other, then you already cut the cord, if you will, for communication to take place.

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And that was well on its way in about the third and fourth centuries. And once you do that, you can't interpret a

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Jewish text like a native Jew if you're not a Jew.

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And when you say they interpret, it would be like the scribes that were studying the Septuagint versus the original

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Hebrew. That's an interesting question, and some people make that claim. However, I'm reading

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Revelation in Greek, and it doesn't read like other Greek books. When I pull out Paul's letters and read those in Greek, that sounds like Greek composition.

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It's flowing just like somebody composed this in Greek. I start reading through the

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Greek of Revelation, and I'm saying, that's not a typical way to put that in Greek. What's going on here?

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That is a very good way to organize the information in Hebrew, though. So you're saying that a

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Hebrew that originally understood it maybe did the translation in Greek? Something like this.

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And I think John's original isn't in Greek. And this is the shocker because we don't read about that in the early

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Church Fathers. We do for the Gospel of Matthew. They all said, the earliest ones all said that it was not in Greek, that everybody was translating it to the best of their ability.

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Somehow one of those ended up as our Greek Matthew, one of those translations.

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And that's what we have. Nobody mentions this for Revelation, but Revelation was one of those books up in the air for a few centuries before the churches were agreeing that it was a good book and belonged in the canon.

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It was one of those that took a while, so to speak. I think Jude took a while, one of the

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Peter epistles took a while, Revelation took a while. And because of that, by the time this book is recognized,

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I think Greek copies have already circulated. But I don't think it was written in Greek originally.

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And one of the reasons for that is the way and the frequency that John uses future tenses.

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There are several places where John, if he was composing this in Greek, would have chosen something else called an aorist subjunctive.

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These are technical Greek grammar terms, but he would have used that instead. And there's been enough scholars, there's a

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Romanian scholar that I run into quite a few times at STL, who's always showing us something new in the future tenses of Revelation that doesn't quite fit.

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And I'm sitting back there and saying, I know why it doesn't fit. It wasn't originally a

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Greek document. And somebody translated those into future tenses when they had some other options they could have translated them to.

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The other option is an alternative. There's one Hebrew verb, it's called a yictl in the way we teach

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Hebrew grammar at Israel Institute, but it can be a future tense. It also can be a modal verb expressing something that should, could, or ought to be done.

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And that's the difference. Greek does not use the same form for both of these, but the

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Hebrew yictl can translate into both of those directly. Those are the natural options.

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So a translator's going to see the yictl in a Hebrew text and say, I don't know what else to do with it, so I'm going to go with future unless I see a reason to go with the other option.

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Well, wouldn't they want to do future because these are prophetic passages, kind of like, like what would be the difference between these tenses for the future in Revelation versus what was used in Daniel?

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Daniel's, even in the Septuagint of Daniel, it, it alternates the forms and uses a bit more variety.

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You don't see quite as many future tenses always in Daniel, like consecutively, just future, future, future, future, the same way that you do in the reading of Revelation.

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And I think because the Septuagint translators, they're aware that, yeah, some of this is future predictive, but the way that rabbis thought about prophecy on some cases is the same as Deuteronomy.

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This will come to pass if you don't do this, and this other thing will come to pass if you do do this.

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So there's always two paths, and you don't always use future tenses to describe that.

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You use modal verbs. You say, this could happen if you do this, this could happen if you do that.

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Could happen is different than will happen. And Revelation is saying this will happen. Typically.

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In the Greek, that's what's there, but there's been, there's been enough debate over the meaning of some of those future tenses.

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A lot of scholars have questioned whether John even is handling

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Greek the way it's supposed to work, over these future tenses. And I'm, I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, but translation

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Greek, as opposed to composition Greek, might use a future tense where they see a

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Hebrew yiddle without ever thinking that they have the other options. Really interesting.

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Which the scholars were arguing for, the same option. So there's clues in Revelation that it might, at least in its original form, might not have been

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Greek Hebrew. Now there are existing Hebrew manuscripts of it. So, you know, we, we found a few of them.

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And do those make sense? Or is there still confusion over the sentence structure? The Hebrew yiddle would be used where you see future tenses in Revelation.

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The Hebrew yiddle would also be used for places where you see habitual present tenses.

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The Greek future or the Hebrew yiddle would also be used for things that someone could, should, or ought to do.

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That's helpful. And so when you see the text in Hebrew with yiddle, yiddle, yiddle, yiddle, and you're thinking in a

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Hebrew mind, this can translate this way, that way, or the other way. Suddenly some options emerged from the page that don't emerge when you're seeing

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Greek future, future, future, future. Yeah. And English future, future, future, so anyway, that's, that's just something that makes me wonder.

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Yeah. Maybe something has been lost in terms of how to understand what

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John's trying to say. And that kind of explains why people struggle today if they don't consider

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Jewish texts or Jewish writings because they read these confusing sentence structures and they're like, are these promises?

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Are these just visions? Would you say that would kind of lead people to these discussions that are just so off point when it comes to understanding

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Revelation today? Yeah, there's a number of places to get tripped up because how much faith do we put in someone's vision?

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That's one question. That's a separate question, but it's, I, one of my classes I taught, I've got this one guy that's always got his hand up and saying, yeah, but this was his vision.

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Anybody can have a dream about something. Why should we interpret it literally? It's a vision.

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Solid point. And he keeps saying that. And so it's like, yeah, I know it's, it's possible that this is all a metaphor for something in the sense of the vision.

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But Daniel, on the other hand, had visions which were meant to do three things.

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To tell the king that something big was about to happen. Secondly, what

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God's plan was for the restoration of his people. If the king was obstructing that, doom was coming to the king.

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If the king was helping the restoration of God's people at the time, then the king was part of the story over here.

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So like the difference between Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, in Daniel.

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Nebuchadnezzar often found himself in a bad position in Daniel's vision. So it's actually

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Nebuchadnezzar's own visions that Daniel interprets. It's like, it's like this is at the end.

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But there would be elements in there that pointed to the restoration of the Jews.

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The Judeans going back to rebuild. Same thing with Darius. And then later, Cyrus has the decree to go back and rebuild.

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And a lot of times we forget that there's a goal in the prophetic utterance.

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That God is doing something related to salvation or restoration. Either salvation like atonement, forgiveness of sins, or he's doing something to restore the damage that's been done to humanity because of sin, like Adam's fall and everything that's happened since then.

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But restoring back to Genesis 1, the created goodness that everything was.

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And it's interesting because both of these themes, salvation and restoration, are all in Revelation.

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In key places like intro, conclusion, culmination, climax. So the restoration, not of Israel per se, it's there, but it's like the restoration of humanity, restoration of animals, restoration of the waters and the firmament and the heavens.

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And it's more, it's more than just a restoration of one people. Yeah. Okay.

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Well, I think that you've proposed a very organized approach to this discussion.

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I think that it would be the best way is essentially to review it in four segments that essentially takes a scripture from Revelation, looks at how it shows up in other

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Jewish texts, like the book of Enoch that wasn't in the biblical canon, and then other

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Jewish texts beyond that, that were also not included in the biblical canon. And then based on our understanding of those, extract the meaning within Revelation.

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So I appreciate you sending everything ahead of time. The first segment that we're going to jump into is going to be, and do you want to give any background as far as like the

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Jewish texts that were chosen? Sure, sure. So when we think about apocalyptic literature, these are the literatures, everybody hears the word apocalypse, they think, you know, destruction.

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Well, that's not the meaning of the word. It's about revealing the hidden. I didn't know that.

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The word comes from... I thought it was like Armageddon. Right, right, right. Yeah, the story of Armageddon is in the book, but that's not the apocalypse.

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The apocalypse is the Son of Man appearing on the clouds. The revealing of the hidden?

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The revealing of the hidden. Yeah. What? Oh my gosh. So this word comes from a kitchen word in the

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Greek household. You're cooking something in a pot, right? And it comes time to show the family what's cooking for supper, you take the lid off.

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That's the apocalypse. There's no way. Yeah, the American movie industry has really gotten that word wrong, but I'll tell you why they got it wrong.

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They were paying attention to some of these pseudo -prophecy end times books too much.

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They missed key meanings of things and they started putting meanings on things that aren't really there. And so pop culture in English has really got the wrong idea of what an apocalypse is.

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Is that... Apocalypse is still a Greek word that's used today? To lift off the lid.

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That's hilarious. Reveal what's cooking. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. The endings change because ancient

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Greek and modern Greek use different endings on the words, but the root is still the same. Yeah. Yeah.

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Kalut is to cover and apokalut is to uncover. Got it.

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Got it. Okay. Hey guys, Cass here. Are you feeling like your faith life is on buffering mode, waiting for that next level, but stuck in spiritual dial -up?

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20:28

Biblically heard. So what are the apocalyptic texts that you pulled for today that are also included in your curriculum?

20:36

Yes. So when we think about the whole range, Daniel is like the first one.

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Revelation is like the last one and the rest are in between. So you've got

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Daniel, pieces of Ezekiel. You've got some chapters in Isaiah that are like this, but Isaiah as a book has not really got a lot of that in there.

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Zechariah's got a little bit in there. So you've got a few of the Hebrew prophets in the Hebrew Bible that have this feature.

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Then you have a period of literature where the Jews are coming back to rebuild in the land and they're facing some extreme persecution under the

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Greeks. And they write a lot more of this kind of literature. And then you come to the New Testament and only one book in the

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New Testament has this flavor in its revelation. And a lot of people interpret

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Revelation in isolation because it's a one -of -a -kind in the New Testament. And because they do that, they miss how it's interacting with the history of Jewish apocalyptic literature.

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The best class I ever had on Revelation was from a professor who said,

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I will teach the class, but I won't do it unless you let me throw in Ezekiel and Daniel in Revelation together.

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And for me, that was eye -opening because he connected the stuff from Daniel and Ezekiel constantly to Revelation.

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And so it was across both testaments, if you will. It was between the

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Tanakh and the New Testament. And it helped to see the Jewish themes of Revelation.

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But this material that I'm teaching now goes one step further because it shows in -between material and how

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John is really connected to that whole stream of literature as he writes. Now, this raises a question.

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Why did these books not get in the canon? Right. Like the Book of Enoch, for once. Yeah, the

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Book of Enoch is kind of like one of the pinnacle books that I'll refer to a lot. But there's others, 4th

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Ezra, 4th Barak, Jubilees. We'll see some other sections of the

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Talmud that have similar things in it that ended up in the Jewish oral Torah and stuff like that.

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In the first century, Jewish groups were using a lot of these books regularly.

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Just to deepen their understanding of old prophecies? Or is it historical? Like what were the purposes?

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I think some of it was historical, but some of it is they thought this was more like from the prophets, and this was something to be paid attention to when it gave more details than what's in the older books.

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The problem is that once the Orthodox, what became the

23:23

Orthodox Jewish group, somewhere along the way they had to make a which books to include and which books to not include.

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And so when they made that decision, they decided to go with the organized list of Ezra, and nothing since then.

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So that excluded most of these books that are in between. Ezra wasn't a book, it was like a list of books?

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Ezra was an important person who sort of helped inaugurate the

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Second Temple worship and established the religious schools and probably helped with the early formations of what we now know as the synagogue.

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So Ezra is an important figure in that time period. And so the list of books that he collected included from Genesis to Chronicles, and that's the full

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Old Testament in Jewish order. We think of in Christian Bible, we think of Genesis to Malachi.

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Right. But Chronicles is actually the last book in the Jewish canon.

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But that was the list, and so to add something more to that list was like too much fussing, fighting over what should go in, what should not go in.

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So they said, well, we're going to cut it here. And this would not be the first time that somebody said, well, we're not including those books.

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Earlier, a century earlier, the Sanhedrin wouldn't include anything but the five books of Moses. I mean, the

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Sadducees in the Sanhedrin. It was like, well, the Torah is it, the rest is okay, somebody's opinion, but the five books are it.

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And even at that time, we still had the Book of Enoch and Jubilee to choose from. That was there, and so was

25:11

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms, and those weren't included by the Sadducees.

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The Pharisees included them. Oh, I see. The different groups had different ideas of what should be included and what should be not included.

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So what we have today in the Bible was determined by Ezra. The one that we have in the

25:31

Hebrew Bible and also the Christian, typical Christian Bible, is the canonical book of Ezra, the person who helped reform, formulate what is

25:45

Second Temple Judaism. Because he's at a pivotal moment. They just get back from Babylon, they start to rebuild, start to organize, and there are some things that he cleans up, basically, as he's instituting how this is going to go forward.

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And so he's kind of at a pivotal moment, and so it's like, okay, if you're going to pick a place to just say, we're stopping here, he's a good spot to stop.

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With revelation. With the Hebrew canon. Got it.

26:18

So that's why they picked him. I think some groups like books like Barak, Jubilees, Enoch, and so forth, but it was contentious.

26:29

So they sealed the Jewish Bible canon, if you will, with the same books that we see in the

26:37

Christian Old Testament, most groups. Now, within Christian traditions, there have been a few groups who kept a book like Enoch in their

26:47

Bible. The Catholic Church did not, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not, the

26:53

Egyptian Orthodox Church did, and the Armenian Orthodox Church did.

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So you have groups that did. You have groups that did not. Some of the other books weren't included in, like, for example, there were some

27:08

Bibles that said Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament, and some of these books were in the

27:15

Apocrypha, but Enoch was never in that section. So if they didn't have two extra sections in the middle, they didn't have

27:25

Enoch. So for the Bibles that had Old Testament, Deuterocanon, New Testament, then the books that were in the

27:35

Apocrypha on the first model I gave you, those are in the Deuterocanon on these

27:40

Bibles. If these Bibles had another section called Apocrypha, Enoch would be there. Interesting.

27:46

So it's not, they didn't exclude it because they were hiding certain things within that book. That book was well -circulated at the time, and then in the final draft of what came to be the

27:57

Bible that we know today, it just wasn't included, but it wasn't explicitly hid. It wasn't excluded in the first century.

28:04

Oh, okay. It was a book that certain groups just didn't feel a use for and never canonized, and there's a difference between never canonizing it and rejecting it.

28:17

Those are two different things. And so because the council in 397 that settled on the

28:25

New Testament books didn't include it doesn't mean that they didn't exclude it. It was before the

28:31

New Testament. So were they using it? Were they not using it? That's still an open question.

28:37

But then once people started to put together whole Bibles in the West, and by West, Roman -centered churches would be the

28:45

West, then that book doesn't show up. And then in the

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Eastern Orthodox traditions, it varied, because the Armenian group kept it while the

28:56

Greek group did not. I see. But the Greek group did keep some of the books that we would call

29:02

Second Temple Jewish, like books like Maccabees, for example. That's in the middle section on Greek Orthodox and on Roman Catholic Bibles, but not many

29:13

Protestant Bibles. Interesting. Okay. So we've had these things over the years, and then one of the things that's happened is that people will get a sense, well, my

29:24

Bible doesn't have that book, so that book was forbidden. Yes. Yes. I've heard that many times.

29:31

That couldn't be further from the truth. There may be periods of time in history where somebody stood up and said, those are forbidden books, but they're doing so at a time when there was a lot of fighting about the books.

29:47

And the reason that they're not in the Bibles that many people carry are a lot of times related to economy, not theology.

29:57

What is necessary, they didn't think it was necessary, so they didn't put it in there. But a number of traditions have had the idea, this is the

30:07

Old Testament, this is the New Testament, and these are useful books. Read them.

30:13

Study them. Know them. Just don't preach from them on Sunday. That's kind of like the way that it is.

30:22

Now, it varies. I know that there have been, for example, Roman Catholic sermons from the deuterocanon.

30:29

It's possible, but usually it's not something deeply theological. It's like, well, this is an example of a person.

30:37

Let's look at his example and see what we can do with our lives, because the

30:42

Book of Tobit is one of these. It's really about how to live a pious life, even when everything around us has given way, like all the social structures gone, because he was in a conquered northern

30:56

Israel. How was he supposed to be pious and do what was right with all this damage and destruction going on?

31:03

That's what it's about. So you can pull a lot of moral examples from his life and his family's lives.

31:09

It's useful on Sunday. I'm trying to think of...

31:14

I might take this out because I'm just thinking out loud, but I'm trying to think of a modern -day equivalent of this, of what are we doing today that these

31:22

Israelites were doing back in the day with all of these Jewish writings? Maybe it's music that we listen to, that we know all of the songs, but in 100 years from now, you're only going to remember the best hits of that artist, like what we do with Elvis.

31:37

We know all of his songs, let's say we're in the 50s, and now we only know Jailhouse Rock, because that was the top one.

31:44

Whereas, sure, we're just not going to talk about all of his music. Do you feel like that's a good comparison? I like that, because I'm fond of a music writer named

31:53

Charles Wesley. He wrote, it's either 1 ,200 or 12 ,000. I know it's one, two, and at least two zeros.

32:02

He wrote that many songs, but today's hymn books have maybe a dozen. It just happens.

32:08

And you're not hiding those hundreds of others. No. It's because as a people, we culturally change from one generation to the next, and then the kind of music we like, the kind of songs that really hit us here, change.

32:25

And when they do, we want to sing those songs and not the songs that we wonder, what are they talking about? So that's the reason we change.

32:34

And I suppose if nobody has stood up and explained the

32:40

Bible using these books in any recent memory of somebody, then they think those books are not important.

32:48

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how could you? Because some things that I've heard, I haven't read Book of Enoch, but people are like, oh, well, they're hiding

32:55

Enoch because it's got aliens and giants and demons, and they don't want us to know about that because that'll take it.

33:00

It's like, I can't speak to that, but based off what you just said, it just simply wasn't relevant to the conversation.

33:07

It wasn't a type of hiding. I think if they wanted to hide a book, they could have by now. I'm sure there's tons of books we don't know about.

33:13

The other thing to remember, there's been so many church fights in history that the leaders of the fights, they don't want to deal with the things they can't defend.

33:24

Because then they look bad. They gotta look good defending the thing that they're gonna defend. How do they defend an opinion on Enoch chapter 6?

33:33

They can't, because they don't know what's going on in Enoch chapter 6. And so they're not going to deal with it.

33:40

They don't want people talking about it because they can't come to a conclusion and defend what they're saying on it.

33:46

Your honest opinion, how many people can defend Enoch chapter 6? Yourself included, like 1%, like five people?

33:54

It's small. Truly, truly. And how grateful am

34:01

I that I get to talk to one of those people? Because it's like, where else? You can't Google this. I can't go to church and I'd probably be unlucky to get a pastor to sit down and talk to me about it.

34:11

If you use an AI supported research tool, you can ask it to pull things from books and connect dots for you and spit out,

34:22

I don't know what you would call it. You can do that sort of thing. But there is a problem.

34:29

Most of these things get really wacky when it goes to actually connecting to original sources, because they'll click on opinions and pull those in.

34:39

And there's been a lot of people who've had opinions. And so you've got to be very careful with that kind of stuff.

34:45

But just to get an overview of some ways people are doing this, that would be a place to start.

34:52

Yeah. Some way that you could only pull from those original texts and not pull from any modern opinions.

34:59

That's a great idea. If you want to pull from the ancient texts only, you've got to learn original languages and you've got to get the texts in front of you and see if what your

35:10

AI generated thing is saying is actually true in that text. Would you trust AI to translate original languages?

35:17

Possibly. But I'm the kind of guy that if I'm using any electronic anything to help translate anything,

35:25

I'm going to look and see if it got it right. Yeah. That's just how I am.

35:32

So I wanted to say that about the different books, where they're situated. Daniel's kind of at the front,

35:38

Revelation is kind of at the end. We don't see much of this in the 100s. 95

35:43

CE is about the tail end of this kind of literature. There might be like one that's after Revelation if we're carefully looking at dates on some things found in the

35:54

Dead Sea Scrolls. But the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves have been the major find for seeing some of this stuff.

36:01

Like we had church traditions that said, you know what, people shouldn't have ignored this book. And then everybody says, well, we can't read your book.

36:10

So what good is it to us? Nobody translated it from Coptic to English or whatever,

36:20

Ge 'ez to English. And so it's been unavailable to many, many readers and people.

36:28

But with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the finds in Greek and Hebrew Aramaic versions of Enoch and others has kind of really fueled investigation into this.

36:42

And there's a group called the Enoch Seminar. I may have mentioned them last time we spoke.

36:48

I don't remember. But they have sort of a mission to see Enochian ideas in all the later books, especially

36:55

New Testament books. Because I want to say this part carefully, Enoch is quoted in the

37:03

New Testament. Enoch as a writer from the 300s is mentioned in the New Testament.

37:09

The logic of Enoch is dependent upon and at least one argument Jesus had with somebody and another one

37:16

Paul had with somebody. The contents in the book of Enoch are cited by John in Revelation in such detail and at length that isn't found anywhere else.

37:29

If you try to find it somewhere else, you don't find it. So if this is John's vision and he's connected 13 dots in a row, and Enoch has a similar vision connecting the same 13 dots in a row,

37:42

I want to know more about Enoch. Because John is using known language from Enoch to talk about this vision.

37:53

Why is he doing that? Unless he knows his readers are reading Enoch and they need

37:59

Enoch to interpret Revelation. So my concern here is, so what if it's not canonized?

38:06

If I needed to understand Revelation, shouldn't I read it? And if John has laid out clues that kind of point me there.

38:16

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38:23

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38:29

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38:35

Now back to the episode. Yeah. And I feel like that's exactly what we're here to do today.

38:42

The first segment is Revelation as an Apocalyptic Literature, and it goes over Revelation 1, 1 and 2,

38:48

Enoch 1, 1 and 2, and 3 Bruch 1, 1 and 8. How does the opening of Revelation with Daniel's vision, it starts with, let's see if I can pull it up, as a revelation of Jesus Christ, which

39:04

God gave to him to show his bond servants of things that must soon take place. And he signified and communicated it, uh, communicated it by his angel to his bond servant,

39:12

John, who testified to the word. So it's introducing that this was a vision given to John. And then we also see it in Enoch and then 3

39:19

Bruch. How does this compare to what we just read in Revelation to Enoch and Bruch?

39:26

Am I saying that right? Is it Bruch? Beruch. Beruch. It's a, it's a guttural in the

39:33

Beruch. Beruch. Yeah. And it's, it means blessing or bless it in Hebrew.

39:40

So like if somebody wants to put a blessing to somebody, they say Beruch Hata, blessing, blessing to you, or I bless you.

39:49

Um, and, and so that's Beruch. Beruch is blessing. Okay. So it's, it's about how do you introduce a book?

39:57

Revelation is the only book in the New Testament that starts off like this. This is a revealing moment, an apocalypse of Jesus Christ.

40:08

We have it translated as revelation, and that's why people don't realize that's the word apocalypse right there, but an apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which

40:17

God gave him to show to his bondservants. So God gave him a revelation.

40:26

God gave John. Jesus. God gave Jesus a revelation to show his bondservants such as John.

40:33

Such as John. So John is saying, I'm just the messenger guys. This was something God gave, but he gave it to or for Jesus so that Jesus can show this to his bondservants.

40:46

Got it. It's like when a king is sitting on the throne and wants to show off the son who's going to reign in his place, there's a big reveal of the heir apparent at some point and say, this person is the glorified one to sit on the throne.

41:10

And that's a gift from the king to the heir apparent when this happens.

41:15

It's the heir apparent that's shown off, but it's a gift from the king to the heir apparent because this secures the heir apparent's position in the eyes of those who wonder who the king is going to put on the throne someday.

41:29

So that's kind of the language that's used here. But it's given to John, which it must soon take place, but it was signified, which is another word for signed off on, and communicated by his angel or messenger.

41:48

So it's like God gives this wonderful, revealing moment to Jesus Christ.

41:55

Jesus Christ then gives it to his bondservants, but an angel has to carry it from this throne room to John so John can know something about it.

42:06

Got it. John is the first bondservant to get the message and he's supposed to pass it along so other bondservants can also know this thing.

42:14

So his mission is to testify to whatever he saw. All he is is a testator. He's like a witness.

42:21

I saw it. I was there. Here it is. That's his position in this court analogy.

42:28

Well, he has a mission to tell this stuff to those in the world to reject the wicked and the ungodly.

42:37

So there's an appeal to look out for those that are ungodly.

42:43

John's also going to have this theme throughout the book of Revelation. Things like stay away from the

42:49

Nicolaitans, which I also hate. This kind of language is there.

42:55

There's some ungodly individuals who you need to stay away from. Well, Enoch just starts off with that, right?

43:02

And then Enoch was a righteous man who was with God, answered and spoke while his eyes were open, and he saw in a holy vision in the heavens.

43:10

So Enoch's got his eyes open, but he sees something that's going on in the heavenly places. Why the eyes open?

43:18

This isn't a bad dream after a rich red sauce pizza. Okay, his eyes are open.

43:26

He's not technically asleep, but he's seeing things that are up in the heavenly places.

43:32

This the angels showed me. So both John and Enoch are saying, hey,

43:38

I'm seeing something. It's kind of weird how I'm seeing it, but an angel is showing it to me. It's almost kind of like this medium we're using to communicate.

43:47

A lot of times I use Zoom with my school. This is something different at Riverside Studio, but the effect is similar to Zoom, and there's several others.

43:58

But we would say we are not in each other's presence, but our presence with each other is being mediated by this internet connection.

44:07

Whoa. So this angel is mediating a connection between John and God's throne room.

44:15

Whoa. And then Enoch is also seeing what John's going through or a completely separate situation just using the same language?

44:23

It seems like it's a separate thing, but he's going to see a lot of the same things. This is what keeps me thinking

44:30

John and Enoch on this end of things, 21st century, either Enoch and John both saw the same heaven in their visions or John highly imitated the style of Enoch in presenting his vision to his readers for some reason.

44:48

Very interesting. So when I'm trying to weigh things on the balance, what is Enoch? It's something

44:55

John interacted with whether we think he should have or not. I see.

45:01

So it's hard for me to hold a value judgment on Enoch. Now there's another problem with Enoch.

45:08

Enoch as a book purports to be written by the same Enoch that lived before Noah's flood.

45:14

And when you say Enoch, is Enoch a person? Is it a type of person? Like an Enoch is like a eunuch or is like Enoch the name of somebody?

45:22

It's his personal name. Okay. So he's one person named Enoch. Enoch existed before the flood and after.

45:32

So there's an Enoch before the flood that's mentioned in the genealogies from Adam. The seventh generation from Adam is a guy named

45:39

Enoch. So the book itself purports to be related to that Enoch.

45:46

Anyone studying Enoch today would say it's a collection of several people's visions, not one person's visions because the style is different from one book to the next.

45:56

The other problem is the book doesn't emerge as far as we can tell until about the third century

46:02

BCE. That's a long time away from Enoch's time. And it's like, how do you go from Enoch through the flood out on the other side with this book staying intact all the way to the third century without people discovering it until then?

46:18

You would have to create what I would call a far -fetched narrative to make that one work.

46:24

So a lot of scholars have kind of rejected Enoch because they said it's false authorship.

46:30

Because they don't believe that it's the same person. That Enoch could not have written this book and someone else wrote this book and put that Enoch's name on it.

46:39

That's the problem that a lot of religious authorities have had with the book.

46:45

But you're saying if it is the same Enoch, how did he survive the flood? That's one way of analyzing it.

46:51

I don't have a way to solve how this book would have... I mean, I suppose Noah carries the book of Enoch on the ark.

47:00

It survives. It goes into the Egyptian libraries. Eventually Moses carries it out.

47:06

We're all concocting a story here that we don't have any historical trace of. Right. And we have to be honest.

47:13

We don't have a way that says we can theorize a potential path. But that means scholars would have to be copying it for fresh generations.

47:23

They also need a reason to do so, which would mean other sources would be citing Enoch all along, which we don't see.

47:31

Okay. So it's almost as if this Enoch appears out of a vacuum in the third century

47:36

BCE. Just out of nowhere, I mean. Just like suddenly it blossoms and becomes a thing.

47:43

So I've tried to create some other plausible thoughts as to why did the people of the third century put

47:51

Enoch's name on the book? Because I think it's third century. I think...

47:57

You don't think, though, it was written by Enoch? It's hard for me to go there. I can theorize a way that a book could possibly have survived all of that, eons of history, and just really been discovered in the third century.

48:14

But it's so unlikely. You're looking at less than one chance in a trillion that this could have been the path.

48:20

Because Enoch would have existed with Moses, and we're anticipating that it would have existed, been found in the third century, 300 years before Christ.

48:30

Yeah. So why does a book written... I don't know what date to put on Noah's flood, but let's say for lack of better knowledge, let's say it was 15 ,000 years ago.

48:42

I don't know if that's right. The Younger Dryas period might have been

48:47

Noah's flood. There's evidence that we had a planetary rising of the water level 400 feet in that time period.

48:55

Maybe that's the Noah's flood and the results of it, the great ice age melting. I mean, you name a bunch of things, it's possible.

49:03

Anyway, let's put Noah's flood there. I don't know if it fits there. I'm not... Right. We're not saying that it's true.

49:10

We're just saying it. So then Enoch is coming from not 15 ,000 years ago, but 16 ,000 years ago.

49:19

You've got to go back before that event to say there's Enoch. Now he writes his book. Noah somehow likes his book, puts it on the ark, takes it to Western, Eastern Turkey.

49:32

Somehow this book is revered and passed on to generations. And we know it was before Moses because of the lineage stated in Genesis.

49:39

Yeah. The only Enoch anybody cites as a historical Enoch is the one before Noah's flood.

49:46

And then we find the book itself 300 years before Christ. Right. Long time, many thousands of years with no sign of the book showing up and then suddenly it's here.

49:58

And where was it found? Don't know. It just starts to appear, get copy translated five or six different languages.

50:06

It has a best seller day. It really does. Somewhere in the two, three hundreds, it becomes besides the

50:16

Hebrew Bible, the most translated piece of Jewish literature. Wow. Okay. It's going here, there and yonder.

50:24

Yes. And so just wanted to say one thing about Enoch. It is hard for us to say anything definitive about Enoch's origins as a book.

50:34

It emerges third century, but we have to explain that phenomenon somehow. And so what

50:39

I have kind of been leaning into is there's a prophecy in the

50:45

Tanakh that in the latter days, your young men will see visions and your old men will have dreams.

50:53

And these things are related to the Messiah somehow. Which days are these and who were these plural entities that had all these dreams?

51:03

We don't know. I wonder if a community of people living in the third century thought they were the people who were fulfilling

51:11

Joel's prophecy and they collected their collective visions, put them in a bar and put

51:17

Enoch's name on it for some unknown reason. And I thought one added possibility, maybe they thought they were communicating with Enoch in heaven and that's why they put his name on it.

51:29

They don't state that. That's just a guest trying to say maybe there's a good reason why they did that.

51:36

Because a lot of people will come up with bad reasons why they did that. They're just grabbing a popular name from history and trying to profiteer off of it.

51:43

We don't know if anybody actually profiteered off of these books. And do you think maybe that's a reason why it wasn't included in the final biblical canon?

51:54

Because they just simply couldn't explain it. Yeah, that is a great explanation for that. I think all of these issues concerned people that were deciding on this book.

52:04

And one thing they did not do was do internal analysis of the book and how many

52:11

New Testament books related with the things in Enoch or even depend on its logic. They didn't do an internal evidence test.

52:20

They were basing this on external evidence only. What is the, who's the author?

52:26

Oh, we got a problem there. What's the date? What's the purpose? We've got problems all over the place.

52:33

We're just going to skip the internal evidence test. But internal evidence says some other things to us.

52:39

It says, hi, I'm an important book and I'm related to Daniel and Revelation. Don't ignore me.

52:47

Don't ignore me, but don't include me either. Because I can't explain it. Yeah. So it's a weird place to think about a book because we're so used to thinking this is scripture, but something we don't have a problem with is going for a biblical commentary on Romans and saying that's the second most important thing than the

53:08

Bible is a good biblical commentary. I've heard that most of my life. That is less important than something like Enoch.

53:15

Yeah. Because it is a Western, modern interpretation of biblical material that isn't the same thing as a source material for things showing up in the

53:29

New Testament. So the narrative, the beginning of Barak starts off very similar. It has to do with Barak's concern over the destruction of Jerusalem.

53:40

So it's a narrative and a revelation of Barak concerning those things which he saw by the command of God.

53:46

So it's God that ordered it. Otherwise he wouldn't have seen a thing. He doesn't have an innate ability himself to see things.

53:55

So God showed it to him and that's how he knows about it. Prophecy has this underlying theme of restoration of God's city,

54:30

God's temple, God's people, God's salvation, and sometimes the restoration of nature, which

54:39

Revelation does some of that one. For thus says the Lord God the Almighty, for he sent me before you to make known and show you these things.

54:46

And the angel of the forces said to me, so Barak's got a specific angel, some angel that's in the command position of some other angels, come and I will show you these mysteries of God.

55:00

So all three of these use the same vehicle to introduce their material. They're not an important person who has an important skill themselves, but because God allowed this to take place, they are seeing things no one else can see.

55:15

But an angel is mediating this process, much like our internet connection is mediating our conversation.

55:23

I love the way that you've broken this down because I think a lot of pieces of the Bible are so hard to understand because it seems like a one -off, and it seems like for this one person

55:33

God has showed up in a very specific way. But I think with comparison of Enoch and Baruch, that it's really nice to say like either this is,

55:41

I mean, would you say this could potentially be the same event? Or is it just three recordings of a very similar event happening to three separate people,

55:47

Enoch, John, and Baruch? And it's like, oh, actually this type of event has happened more than once.

55:54

It's not just a one -off that us 21st century people read and we're like, wow, that revelation, how believable is that?

56:00

That never happens. But now these texts are saying, no, this has happened. God has met people in this way at least three times.

56:07

Yeah. I like how you said that. We often think this is an isolated text and it's not. It's in a stream of texts and we've lost the stream.

56:16

Yes. So we've got to go back and rebuild the stream so we can understand the text.

56:22

If we don't do that, the meaning of that text will go right over our heads. Truly, truly.

56:28

It's almost like seeing a strange movie like Interstellar, let's say, or just like a movie that really reshaped film.

56:34

And we see it once and we're like, that was a little weird. I don't like that. But when you see other copies of the same film type, we're like, oh, that's a whole genre.

56:43

And we were able to group it and say, I'm familiar and I'm comfortable and I know what to expect. Whereas when you see these texts, you can say like, oh, this is a

56:50

God that does do something like this. And this is believable now, because for some reason, now that it's recurring, we can see that it's replicable.

56:59

And I was thinking too, like, go read Harry Potter book seven. Only. Don't ever read one through six and then try to understand it.

57:11

That's a great example. Or any other long, multi -volume thing.

57:18

Star Wars, one of the later things. Just that one. Don't look at the earlier canon. Yes. You'll miss so much.

57:25

You'll not know why there's a fuss. You won't know what these forces are or what these alliances and allegiances are, or even what these main characters make reference to.

57:36

That's such a good example. So in the later stuff, if somebody says Princess Leia or Han Solo, you'll be like, who's that?

57:44

Such a good example. I'm definitely going to use that because that you're right. That explains so much of the confusion you'd experienced today that we're experiencing right now.

57:53

So when we open Revelation, we're looking at a book that came on a long end of approximately 600 years of apocalyptic literature.

58:04

And yeah, connecting it to Ezekiel and Daniel is a good first step because those are at the beginning of that 600 year span.

58:12

But if you don't connect it to the ones in the middle, there's still things that are missing. Our next theme does this because it's not mentioned in Ezekiel or Daniel the same way.

58:23

Great lead in. Great. Thanks for listening. That wraps up part one of understanding the book of Revelation through Enoch.

58:31

Be sure to tune in next week for the second half. If you're enjoying Dr. James Sedlicek's insights, don't forget to follow me on Instagram.

58:39

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