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The Bible Project Intro to Spiritual Beings
Bible

Unseen Realm Video Series — Introduction to Spiritual Beings

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By TheBibleProject

This is the first of a video series by The Bible Project illustrating material from biblical scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s Unseen Realm.

In the first pages of the Bible, we’re introduced to God and humans as the main characters. But there’s also a whole cast of spiritual beings who play an important role throughout the Bible, though they’re often in the background. In this video, we begin to explore these beings and how they fit into the unified storyline of the Bible.

Spiritual Beings

If you’ve ever been puzzled about angels, demons, and other spiritual beings in the Bible, you’re not alone! Our modern depictions of these creatures are mostly based on misunderstandings of who they are and how they fit into the overall storyline of the Bible. In this first installment of our Spiritual Beings video series, we’ll introduce the biblical concept of spiritual beings and rediscover their role in the biblical story that leads to Jesus.

Here’s the link to the series Exploring Spiritual Beings.

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Apologetics

Textual Criticism and the Authority of Scripture

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Textual criticism is an often misunderstood practice. If the Bible is supposed to be the inspired Word of God, how could discrepancies in the text exist? This excerpt from Textual Criticism of the Bible tackles this concern head-on. A properly aligned doctrine of Scripture recognizes the authority of the Bible while also acknowledging the human imperfections introduced over thousands of years of transmission.

A longtime Christian and student of the Bible posted the following comment about Romans 8:1:

“View the difference in versions here! You may want to add this to your NIV. I have an NIV Bible, but when I study, I always compare it to the KJV:

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1 NIV).

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit” (Rom 8:1 KJV).

Big difference, huh?”

This comment concerns an issue that surfaces throughout the Bible: differences in Bible versions that may affect the meaning. While some Bibles include footnotes to indicate when such differences exist, these notes are not always helpful for readers with no background knowledge of the preservation and transmission of the Bible from its original authors to the current day.

What should we think when we find disagreement between English versions? Which translations are right? Why would translators “change” the biblical text? How can readers make good decisions about these discrepancies between versions?

These questions are important for every student of the Bible, and textual criticism contributes part of the answer.

Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that discrepancies exist in the biblical text. Why wouldn’t God have preserved his Word with greater care? How can we really know what God has said when there are variations in the wording? These are important questions for people who believe the Bible to be God’s inspired, authoritative Word. To answer them, we must consider what Christians believe and have believed about the nature of the Bible—our doctrine of Scripture.

The doctrine of Scripture has developed over time, as have all theological doctrines. Early on, the church fathers recognized variants among their biblical manuscripts. However, they did not seem to view these variants as damaging to Scripture’s authority. Differences in texts became more problematic after the advent of the printing press. For the first time, Christians were able to have a fixed text—but which text should be fixed? Later, as European scholars in the eighteenth century sifted through a plethora of newly discovered biblical manuscripts, they began to understand how the biblical text had developed over time.

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Scripture and Cosomology
Ancient Near East

Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science

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by Nate Claiborne

One of the more paradigm shifting experiences I had in seminary was finding out about other ancient Near Eastern literature. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, was written in a very different place and time than our own. By studying other writings from that place and time we may be better equipped to understand what the authors of Scripture originally meant.

Now, I say “may be better equipped” because reading that other ancient Near Eastern literature takes just as much of an interpretive effort as reading the Bible, and maybe even more so in some cases. One might even say that the other literature is even harder to interpret because we haven’t been exposed to it as much as we’ve been exposed to Scripture.

This is where finding good resources on the ancient Near East can prove helpful. So, I want to highlight a couple before moving back to books on Genesis proper.

Scripture and Cosmology

Kyle Greenwood’s Scripture and Cosmology focuses on one main aspect of understanding the ancient Near East. Thanks to IVP Academic, I was able to give it a read a while back. On the whole, I think it’s a helpful primer on the intersection of ancient Near Eastern literature and Scripture. While there are different aspects of this intersection, cosmology is perhaps the most relevant to making sense of Genesis in light of modern science. This book will introduce that touchy subject well without being the definitive last word (which it doesn’t aim to be).

In case you’re still wondering, the ancient Near East is what we would now call the Middle East. In relation to Europe, it is the Near East as opposed to the Far East. And it is ancient, meaning up until either the Persian Empire, or Alexander the Great (depending on who you ask). We can potentially understand the Bible better by understanding the literature of Israel’s neighbors from that time period.

The opening chapter highlights the importance of context for interpretation and also differentiates the different types of context (cultural, geographic, historical, literary). This leads to a discussion of worldview in general, and then the particular part of a worldview called cosmology.

The next three chapter are the first part of the book and focus on Scripture and the cosmos in its ancient cultural context. The first of these chapters is a general introduction to ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, or understandings of the world and how it worked. The next chapter then looks at how cosmology is represented in Scripture. The remaining chapter in this first part then takes a closer look at cosmogony, which is the more technically term for a creation account. Greenwood starts with Genesis 1-2, but then looks at the other places in Scripture that talk about God creating the world.

The second part of the book has two chapters and focuses on cosmology in historical context. The first chapter compares Scripture and Aristotelian cosmology. The second does the same but with Copernican cosmology, which at the big picture level is more or less our current understanding.

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Bible

The Difference Between Textual Criticism and Translation

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In an analogy from the world of education, teachers are translators. Using textbooks and other resources, they try to find the best possible way to translate the information to their students. The teachers’ primary concern is not verifying the validity of the material in their resources; their concern is presenting the material in a clear way. On the other hand, scientists, linguists, mathematicians, and historians are continually adjusting and updating the information in textbooks as better information becomes available: Their primary concern is the text. This analogy breaks down quickly since such scholars are dealing with broad fields of research and not one sacred preserved book. However, by way of general comparison, teachers are translators, and scholars are text critics.*

*This excerpt is adapted from Textual Criticism of the Bible by Amy Anderson and Wendy Widder.

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Lust does not equal love
Apologetics

10 Reasons Why the Argument ‘Jesus Never Mentioned Homosexuality’ Doesn’t Matter

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by David Kyle Foster

If you’ve ever engaged with an activist, a liberal Christian or just the average person on the street on the subject of homosexuality, you’ve probably encountered this platitude: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality!” Among those who make such a claim, that statement is one of the quickest, easiest and most common excuses for approving homosexual practice because it gives the appearance of being a biblical argument while being just the opposite.

Does such a claim hold any weight biblically? And if it is true that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, does that really justify homosexual behavior?

The “Jesus never mentioned it” argument has numerous and serious flaws, so let’s go through them one by one.

  1. The most obvious point to make is that Jesus didn’t mention any number of sins. For example, He never mentioned child sexual abuse or wife beating. Does that mean that they are no longer sins? He never mentioned transvestism (Deut. 22:5). Does that make it okay now?
  2. It defies simple logic to claim that the absence of any mention of certain sins by Jesus in the New Testament indicates that He now approves of them. Homosexual practices were condemned in the Old Testament in the strongest of terms (Lev. 18:22; 20:13) and Jesus affirmed those prohibitions (Matt. 5:17-20).
  3. Additionally, the claim that He must mention a sin for it to be wrong assumes that the purpose of the New Testament was to re-state or to create a new list of forbidden practices. Such an argument unmasks complete ignorance of Scripture on the part of those who make it. These would-be scholars are no scholars at all. They are apologists for those who seek to jettison God’s moral standards (see Rom. 1:28, 32). Until the modern era, no biblical scholar of the past 2,000 years has ever proposed such a ridiculous hermeneutic. Thus, such would-be scholars presume to know better than all of the biblical scholars (Christian or secular) of the past two millennia. They echo Satan’s original deception, “Did God really say”? (Gen. 3:1, NIV).

What Jesus did do was to point out that the religious leaders of His day were inventing laws in an effort to establish their righteousness before God and to show themselves pious before men (Matt. 23:1-7, 27-28).

He also pointed out that their standards and practices for obeying the Mosaic Law fell short of its full meaning. For example, when He pointed out that the sin of adultery could be committed at the heart level, not just physically (Matt. 5:27-28), Jesus was revealing the deeper meaning, scope and intent of the law. He was also establishing the fact that no man could keep the Law in all of its aspects (see also Rom. 3:20, 27-28; James 2:8-11).

4. Most of what Jesus said wasn’t even recorded in the Bible (John 20:30, 21:25; Rev. 22:18-19). So the incompleteness of the biblical accounts of what He said mitigates the claim that Jesus never mentioned homosexual practices.

5. Jesus reaffirmed all of the moral law (Matt. 5:17-20), and chided those who broke the commandments and taught others to do the same (Rom. 1:32).

Here, it’s important to understand that there were different kinds of Old Testament law. The Old Testament contained ritual (ceremonial), sacrificial, civil and moral law. Jesus affirmed its entirety, yet brought to an end the ritual and sacrificial law by fulfilling them.

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Angels in Prison
Divine Council

When Angels Do Time

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by Michael S. Heiser

Most Bible study resources describe fallen angels as demons who joined Lucifer in his rebellion against God. But what if I told you that the only place in the New Testament that describes angels sinning does not call them demons, has no connection to Lucifer, and has them in jail? Welcome to the world of 2 Peter and Jude.

For . . . God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. (2 Peter 2:4)

And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. (Jude 6)

Second Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 are nearly identical in their description of angels doing time, but there are differences that help us figure out “what in the spiritual world is going on.”

Jude 6 defines what 2 Peter 2:4 means by the angelic sin. These sinning angels “left their proper dwelling.” Second Peter doesn’t say they were in cahoots with Satan, or that they did anything in Eden. It tells us they left their designated realm of existence and did something in another realm. But what did they do?

Both 2 Peter and Jude compare the sin of these angels with the Sodom and Gomorrah incident, where the sin involved sexual immorality (2 Pet 2:7; Jude 7). Second Peter also connects it to the time of Noah. There is only one sin involving a group of angelic beings in the entire Bible, and it coincides with Noah and is sexual in nature. That incident is Genesis 6:1–4, where the “sons of God” leave heaven, their normal abode, and come to earth and father children (the Nephilim giants) by human women.

Who are the “sons of God” who sinned?

Two features in these passages in 2 Peter and Jude point to Genesis 6:1–4.

First, “sons of God” is a specific phrase used elsewhere in the Old Testament of angelic beings (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Psa 89:6; Deut 32:8).*

Second, both 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 explicitly tell us that these angels are imprisoned in chains of gloomy darkness—in “hell” until judgment day.

*The ESV and NRSV properly adopt the manuscript reading in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint.

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Bible
Bible

Does the Lack of Original Autographs Make Biblical Inerrancy Irrelevant?

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By Aaron Brake

Biblical inerrancy may be defined as follows:

[W]hen all the facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.1

One important element of this definition is that inerrancy only applies to the original autographs. But since we no longer have possession of the original autographs, the question is often raised, “Of what use or importance is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy? Is biblical inerrancy even relevant?” Some conclude that inerrancy is altogether ir_relevant. In his book _Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman states,

I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies….”2

This objection, left unanswered, may undermine our confidence and trust in Scripture, leading some to reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and others to conclude it is wholly irrelevant.

Let’s Get Metaphysical

But I believe our confidence in Scripture is not misplaced and biblical inerrancy is relevant. To help explain why this is so, let us consider the distinction commonly made by metaphysicians between word tokens and word types.3 Consider the following words:

RED BLUE RED

Now ask yourself this question: “How many words are there?” The question is ambiguous because there is a sense in which it looks like there are two words (RED and BLUE), and another sense in which it looks like there are three words (RED, BLUE, and RED).  The question receives clarification when we distinguish between word tokens and word types and specify which of the two we are interested in.

If we are asking how many word tokens _there are, then we have three: two tokens of the word RED and one token of the word BLUE. A _token is an individual, particular kind of thing. It is a specific thing that can only exist in one place at one time. If, on the other hand, we are asking how many word types there are, then we have two: the word type RED and the word type BLUE. A type in this case is a universal. It is repeatable and can be in more than one place at one time. It is the same word, which carries with it the _same_meaning.

Back to Biblical Inerrancy

What does this have to do with biblical inerrancy? When it is asserted that biblical inerrancy is irrelevant because we do not possess the original autographs, there is a failure to distinguish between the text tokens and the text type. We do have the original text type, even though we may not possess the original text tokens.

To help think about this further, consider that it is the word as a type that conveys meaning, not the word as a token. When we think of the word as a token we are thinking of it as a material object (i.e., black ink scribbled on a parchment). But when we think of the word as a type, we are thinking of it as a bearer of meaning. It becomes a shareable thing that we can have, for example, both in our mind and in a book in front of us at the same time.

Now, this is where textual criticism comes into play. When it comes to the text of the New Testament, even though we do not have the original text tokens(the original autographs as material scribbling on parchment), we are able to reconstruct with great confidence the original text type. Without going into a full-length treatment on the topic of textual criticism, Daniel Wallace notes the following concerning the New Testament text:

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  1.  Paul D. Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 294. ↩
  2.  Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 7, emphasis his. ↩
  3.  I am indebted to J.P. Moreland for much of the following insight and commentary (used with his permission), with some additions of my own. Any mistakes are mine. ↩

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Naked Bible Blog Logo
Divine Council

Elohim, Divine Council, Psalm 82, OT Monotheism Archive

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by Dr. Michael Heiser

I get a lot of email about my views on Yahweh and divine plurality. You’d think people would find my material via Google or my divine council website, but I guess not. I’m making this page for you all, of course, but also to provide myself a convenient one-stop link to send people.

Mike’s “lay level” work on the divine council and the nature of Israelite monotheism (the basic essays)

Mike’s relevant scholarly publications

  • Some of these live on my divine council site as well. Others cannot be posted here due to the wishes of the academic journal that published the content (if you subscribe to my newsletter you can access articles not linked here via a protected folder). These articles tend to be technical, save for the one critiquing Mormonism’s use of Psalm 82.

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The Prophets
Art

How to Read the Prophets

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A transcript of “How te Read the Prophets” by The Bible Project.

Ezekiel, Obadiah, Habakkuk What do these names have in common? Well, they are three of the 15 prophets that have their own books in the Bible.

And if you have tried to read these books, odds are you got lost in their dense poetry and strange imagery. But these books are super important for understanding the overall biblical story.

So, let’s talk about “How to Read the Prophets“.

When I hear the word “prophet”, I think of a fortune teller, someone who predicts the future.

That is what being a prophet means in many cultures, but not in the Bible.

While the biblical prophets sometimes speak about the future, they are way more than fortune tellers.

How should I think about them?

Well, they were Israelites who had a radical encounter with God’s presence and then were commissioned to go and speak on God’s behalf.

Like a representative.

Right! And the thing that they cared about the most. It is the mutual partnership that existed between God and the Israelites.

Right! the partnership. God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt and invited them to become a nation of justice and generosity, that would represent his character to the nations.

So, this partnership required all Israelites to give their trust and allegiance to their God alone. In the Bible, this partnership is called the “Covenant”.

But the leaders — the priests, the kings — led Israel astray and they broke the covenant.

So, this is where the prophets came in, to remind Israel of their role in the partnership. They did this in 3 ways.

First, they were constantly accusing Israel for violating the terms of the covenant. The charges usually include idolatry, alliances with other nations and their gods and allowing injustice towards the poor.

So, they are like covenant lawyers.

Right. So, second, the prophets called the Israelites to repent, which means simply, “to turn around”. They spoke of God’s mercy to forgive them if they would just confess and change their ways.

But, Israel and its leaders didn’t change. Things went from bad to worse.

And so that brings us to the third way that prophets emphasized the covenant. They announced the consequences for breaking it which they called, “The Day of the Lord”.

Oh, yeah! The apocalypse. Visions of the end of the world.

Well, sort of. The prophets were mostly interested in how God would bring his justice on Israel’s corruption and on the violent nations around them. And while explaining these local events, they often used cosmic imagery.

Cosmic imagery?

Yeah! like Jeremiah. He described the exile of the Israelites to Babylon as the undoing of creation itself. The land dissolves into chaos and disorder, no light, no animals or people. Or Isaiah described the downfall of Babylon as the disintegration of the cosmos. Stars falling from the sky, the sun going dark. For the prophets, when God acts in human history to bring justice, it is a “Day of the Lord”.

So, the prophets aren’t talking about the end of the world?

Well, hold on. They are doing many things at once. The cosmic imagery shows how these important events of their day fit into the bigger story of God’s mission to bring down every corrupt and violent nation once and for all. The prophets cared about the present and the future. And the cosmic imagery allowed them to talk about both at the same time.

Got it. So, no matter when you live, the Day of the Lord is bad news if you are part of Babylon.

But, it is good news if you are waiting for God’s kingdom. The Day of the Lord pointed to the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. And once again, the prophets use cosmic poetry to describe it. They see a New Jerusalem, like a new Garden of Eden, with all humanity living at peace with each other and with the animals. And, there is a new Messianic King who restores God’s kingdom in a renewed creation.

Beautiful! So, those are the three themes in the prophets. These prophets must have been very powerful, persuasive speakers.

Well, some were. But others lived on the margins. They would often perform strange, symbolic stunts in public to communicate their message. Like when Ezekiel lay in the dirt and built a model of Jerusalem being attacked by Babylon. Or when Isaiah walked around naked for 3 years as a symbol of the humiliation of exile.

So, did people pay attention to them?

Not really. The stories in these books show how the prophets were a minority group mostly shunned by Israel’s leaders. And their writings were a kind of resistance literature. Most people ignored them. That is, until their warnings came true in the Babylonian exile.

And after that, people began to take their word seriously.

Yes! The works of these earlier prophets were inherited later by unnamed prophets who studied these texts intensely. They’re the ones who arranged the Hebrew scriptures as we know them, including the books of the prophets.

Okay. And there are 15 books of the prophets. The big 3 are Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Then, there is a collection of 12 smaller prophetic works unified on a single scroll. And in each of these books, you will read stories about the prophets and their poems and visions, all arranged to show the cosmic meaning of Israel’s history. How God will turn their tragic story of failure and exile…

…into a story of hope and restoration for all nations.

And it’s that twin message of prophetic warning and of hope that the prophets cared about so much. And, it is a message that we still need to hear today.

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Son of Man Coming on the Clouds
Unseen Realm

Explaining “Son of Man” and the Story of Redemption in 5 Minutes!

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“Son of Man” has been a confusing term for a long time. Now here comes this 5-minute video from The Bible Project to explain the term and tell a fairly complete story of redemption at the same time!

What is the relationship of the Son of Man to the divine council?

The Son of Man is distinct from the Ancient of Days, who is Yahweh, yet of the same divine essence, as he is described as coming upon/with the clouds, a description used only of Yahweh elsewhere in the Old Testament, and is given everlasting rule over all nations, a description used of the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity,c who rules from God’s right hand, exalted above all powers, visible and invisible.1

Unseen Realm Question and Answer Companion

  1. Douglas Van Dorn, The Unseen Realm: A Question & Answer Companion (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015). ↩

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