Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 38

Reversing Hermon Logos Bible Software Edition Now Available for Pre-Order

Well, it was just a few days ago that my latest book, Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ,[image error] became available on Kindle. Now the book is available for pre-order for Logos Bible Software users. Make it part of your biblical studies data mine!

Enjoy!

Naked Bible Podcast Episode: Translating Genesis 1-11

In this episode Dr. Heiser talks to the men behind a new translation project, John Hobbins and Samuel Bray. The first volume of their effort is entitled Genesis 1-11: A New Old Translation for Readers, Scholars, and Translators. Our discussion focuses on the translation enterprise – what translators need to think about as they do their work. The strength of this new project is its thorough documentation by the translators of what and how they were thinking during the process of producing their translation. Over 130 pages of notes about the Hebrew text and its translation issues accompany the translation.

The work comes highly recommended, and Naked Bible Podcast listeners can purchase the resource at a discount.

Pre-order HERE and use the code: GETNAKED to receive a discount.

The episode is now live.

Reversing Hermon Now Available on Kindle!

The wait is over!

My latest book, Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus is now on Kindle! Just follow the link for the Kindle version.

Mike’s Sunday Morning Sermon of April 23, 2017 – While We Were Yet Sinners

This was the second time I’ve filled a pulpit since 2004. The Loch Ness monster is seen more often than I show up in a pulpit. But I am getting requests to post this and, more importantly, I keep getting questions that tell me that many Christians really don’t understand the simplicity of the gospel. I hope this helps. it seems to be positively affecting a lot of people in our church and our area, so here it is. Just click on the image to go to where the sermon can be either watched or listened to. I think it’s around thirty minutes.

Index of New Testament Allusions to Books of the Pseudepigrapha

Readers of Reversing Hermon know that this information is in an appendix to that book. But in the book these allusions are given in full and are listed by Pseudepigraphical source. That’s one reason that appendix is so long!

We should all thank Warren Hart for something much more compact and readable. Warren has produced an index in chart form. Here it is as a PDF:

Index of New Testament Allusions to Books of the Pseudepigrapha – Sorted

It’s arranged by books of the NT. It also includes page number references in Reversing Hermon for Scripture references that correspond to the allusions to books among the Pseudepigrapha. Here’s a screenshot:

Mike On Freedom Friday with Carl Gallups

I was on Carl Gallups’ show this past Friday. It’s short (half hour), but the show has a large audience in the Gulf area. Enjoy!

Evangelical Textual Criticism Blog Discusses Inerrancy and Textual Criticism

Good discussion, and some equally good thoughts scattered through the comments.

Inerrancy and Textual Criticism

Gobekli Tepe: Stop the Madness, Please

Boy, am I tired of hearing about Gobekli Tepe. Pardon the pun, but it’s become a monument to those who cannot distinguish speculation from data.

The truth is that no one really knows what the site was for, who built, or why it was built. No one knows the meaning of the iconography. This is getting to be the new Atlantis — take a few lines from Plato and erect a multi-volume “history” of Atlantis, complete with dissertation-length treatises on its culture, religion, architecture, science, etc. Absolute fabrication passed off as “ancient knowledge.” Enough already.

Here’s some reading material written by people who understand that having an idea in one’s head doesn’t make that idea reality:

Jason Colavito, Robert Schoch’s Wacky Easter Island-Gobekli Tepe Theory: The Hypocrisy of Alternative Dating

This one illustrates how, when Christians get on the bandwagon of awful research (and dishonesty) it destroys good will and credibility (see the second-to-last paragraph):

Pseudoarchaeology site: Gobekli Tepe

 

More Giant Skeleton Hoaxing

I received an email recently asking me whether the following story was real or not:

Smithsonian Admits to Destruction of Thousands of Giant Human Skeletons in Early 1900’s

This is actually an old hoax. It apparently originated via the World News Daily Report, a satirical, tabloid site. You can read the unraveling of the hoax here. And please pay special attention to this familiar picture of an alleged giant human femur:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The picture is from the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. As the True Free Thinker article linked above notes, Joe Taylor, the museum’s curator, has explained the femur as follows:

“I sculpted a femur 47-1/2 (120 cm) based on a report in a newsletter where it was reported on by the construction engineer who found it and other skeletons the same height. I was commissioned to sculpt the femur so a college professor could show his students how large it was…In every instance, I have told others that it is JUST A SCULPTURE. The real bone was not available … All museums have casts of specimens as well as real bones. Some have sculptures based on reports only, as this one.”

The real bone was not available. Of course. Nothing to validate the claim. Nothing. Again.

Paul’s Use of Genesis 15:5 in Romans 4:18 in Light of Early Jewish Deification Traditions: Part 6: Origen’s Commentary on Romans 4 and the Reception of the Qualitative Interpretation

This is the final installment of David Burnett’s guest series.

 

This reading of Genesis 15:5 may appear novel yet it has an ancient antecedent in one of the earliest commentaries on Romans. Origen believed that in Romans 4, Paul did in fact understand the Abrahamic promise of Genesis 15:5 to become as the stars qualitatively. In his Commentary on Romans 4.6.4, he states: “Thus Abraham ‘against hope believed in hope that he would become the father of many nations,’ (Rom 4:18) which in the future would be like the stars of heaven, not only in terms of the greatness of number but also in splendor.”1 Here Origen reads the quotation of Gen 15:5 in Rom 4:18 explicitly as qualitative. In 4.6.7, he speaks further on the nature of the Abrahamic promise, as he understands Paul’s recounting of it. Discussing the content of Abraham and Sarah’s hope, he states:

 

“On the contrary when they hear of a such a hope of posterity and that the glory of their own offspring would be equal to heaven and its stars, when they hear these things, they do not think about their own goods, about the grace of continence, about the mortification of their members, but instead they regard all these things which contributed to their own gain as loss in order that they might gain Christ.” (Orig. Comm Rom, 4.6.7)

 

Origen assumes that the promise to Abraham and Sarah of an offspring would be “equal to heaven and its stars” in their “glory” is actually understood as the promise to “gain Christ,” drawing on the language of Phil 3:8. Significant here is the immediate context of Phil 3:8 in which Paul is discussing becoming like Christ (3:10) and attaining the resurrection from the dead (3:11).2 Fee rightly points out that Paul’s language regarding them, “children (τέκνα) of God without blemish, though you live in a crooked and perverse generation (γενεᾶς σκολιᾶς καὶ διεστραμμένης)” echoes Deut 32:5 (ἡμάρτοσαν οὐκ αὐτῷ τέκνα μωμητά, γενεὰ σκολιὰ καὶ διεστραμμένη), unsurprisingly where the immediately following verses (Deut 32:6-9) narrate Israel’s election in terms of the Deuteronomic vision as described above. Paul then turns to the language of Dan 12:1-4 to describe the children of God as those who “shine as lights (φωστῆρες, cf. Dan 12:3) in the world (κόσμῳ, cf. note 28),” reflecting the eschatological hope in Daniel as they are “holding on to the word of life (λόγον ζωῆς ἐπέχοντες, Phil 2:16),” echoing the language of Dan 12:3, “those who hold strong to my words (καὶ οἱ κατισχύοντες τοὺς λόγους μου),” as they approach the seemingly immanent eschaton and the full realization of their hope.3 Again, in the context of discussing the fruit of the spirit and dying to lust and vices Origen states: “Your seed and your works can ascend to heaven and become works of light and be compared to the splendor and brilliance of the stars, so that when the day of resurrection arrives, you will stand out in brightness as one star differs from another star” (4.6.9). Origen here relates the Abrahamic promise of star-like seed in Romans 4 to the discussion of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15, also echoing the language of Daniel 12:3. It seems apparent that Origen takes for granted in his Commentary on Romans that Paul understands the promise to Abraham in Gen 15:5 qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is necessary to restate the initial problem this paper sought to answer. Esler noticed the deficiency in the quantitative only interpretation of Paul’s use of Genesis 15:5, seeming far too unlikely that having numerous descendants would somehow be the equivalent of inheriting of the cosmos, becoming the father of nations, and the expectation of being resurrected from the dead. This paper proposes a possible answer to this problem. Reading Paul’s use of Gen 15:5 in light of early Jewish deification traditions stemming from a qualitative as well as quantitative interpretation of the Abrahamic Promise provides fruitful results. This proposal is supported by widely attested interpretive traditions from Paul’s early Jewish historical context, whether Palestinian or Hellenistic (or diasporic), and is further received into the Patristic tradition, as seen in Origen, through Paul.

 

 

Translations of Origen here are taken from Thomas P. Scheck, Origen: Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Books 1-5 (Washington D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2001). ↩
See Phil 3:8-11. Also important to note here previously in Philippians in the context of a moral admonition in light of the coming “day of Christ (ἡμέραν Χριστοῦ), which Paul seems to articulate here as an eschatological conflation Deut 32:5-9 with Dan 12:1-3, he describes the holy ones as “children of God (τέκνα θεοῦ)” who “shine as lights in the world (φαίνεσθε ὡς φωστῆρες ἐν κόσμῳ)” (Phil 2:15). ↩
See Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 244-48. In the eschatological expectation of Romans 8 the holy ones are also called “children of God (τέκνα θεοῦ, 8:16-17, 21),” most likely part of the same complex of language, see above. ↩