Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 42

Jason Colavito’s Review of “Sekret Machines: Gods” by Tom DeLonge with Peter Levenda

Another solid review by Jason Colavito. If you’ve ever read one of Jason’s lengthy reviews you know it’s not just an essay informing his readers about what’s in a particular book or a simplistic “liked it … hated it” exercise. You’ll learn something.

As Jason points out, Sekret Machines: Gods, is “the first in a nonfiction trilogy covering what DeLonge believes to be the true history of space aliens’ involvement with earthlings.”

Jason’s review is in three parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

 

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 151: Ezekiel 37

Apologies – I forgot to post this episode!

Ezekiel 37 is one of the most familiar in the entire book, but that familiarity really extends only to the first fourteen verses. The chapter actually contains two oracles which telegraph the same ideas and work in tandem. This episode discusses the vision of the dry bones, particularly the debate over whether it provides information on a theology of individual bodily resurrection, and the prophecy of the two sticks representing the rejoining of the two halves of Israel. Both parts of the chapter relate to the restoration of the entire nation and return to the land. The question of fulfillment for these prophecies is also taken up in this episode.

The episode is live.

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 152: Ezekiel 38-39, Part 1: Who or What is Gog?

As was the case with Ezekiel 37, these chapters are among the most familiar in the entire book of Ezekiel. This first of two episodes on these chapters focuses on the terminology: Gog, Magog, Meshech, Tubal, and Togarmah. It also addresses the fallacies of translating Hebrew nesiʾ roʾsh as “prince of Rosh” and interpreting the phrase as modern-day Russia, and the difficulties ancient translators had with the term. An alternative understanding of Gog is offered, one that is consistent with the supernaturalistic worldview of the “foe from the north” motif in Old Testament thought.

The episode is now live.

Peeranormal Podcast Episode 08: Do Transplant Recipients Take on the Personality of their Donor?

There have been dozens of documented cases where the recipient of a transplant, often involving the heart, apparently take on the personalities of the organ donor. Recipients also report memories of the donor, and memories that belong to the donor, despite never having met the donor. These cases range from very young children to adults. How can memories and behaviors be transmitted from one person to the next when brain and neural tissue is not involved? Does this phenomenon relate to the question of consciousness?

For the episode’s source articles and to listen, click here:

This is What Encourages “Truth by Anomaly and Outlier” Thinking

I’ve blogged about the problem of how the peer review process in the sciences has been compromised by laziness and money. Here we go again: “Sting Operation Reveals Science’s Insane Fake News Problem.” As the article’s author notes by way of explaining his title:

This sting operation was the first systematic analysis on editorial roles in science publishing, adding concrete evidence to a problem past stings have shed light on. There are a whole lot of “predatory” scientific journals out there, journals that take advantage of scientists’ need to produce articles by publishing anything for a fee, without checking to make sure the paper is actually new research, worth publishing, and not completely inaccurate. But the problem is more than a juiced-up email scam (despite some probably-predatory journals looking essentially the same), and highlights many issues in today’s scientific publishing industry. Those issues can result in important science not being published in real journals, or worse, bad, un-vetted science being published, scientists bolstering their resumes with crap, and an eroding public trust in science as an institution.

This is yet another indication that peer review is failing in the sciences. That’s a problem for precisely the reason that the excerpt indicates. But lest ancient astronaut enthusiasts and other paleobabblers get too excited. let’s think about conclusions that cannot be drawn from this:

The current problem doesn’t mean there was a past problem. That is, we know the earth isn’t flat not because of research today, but because of research of many years ago, validated through the centuries long before we ever ran into predatory journals, the publish-or-perish mentality, brought on by a marriage of a glut of PhDs vying for big dollars.
The current problem hasn’t really shown up in the humanities, save for the loony sorts of dissertations that are driven by agenda-based academic departments. For a funny expose of silly dissertation titles, I recommend the hilarious chapter in Charles Sykes’ Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Compared to the hard sciences, humanities research is a path to poverty. You don’t have either the federal government, the military, or private industry pouring anywhere near the same amount of money into humanities research. The world of biblical studies is, of course. a very small subset of the humanities. That area of study is so small that basically everyone knows everyone  on editorial boards, and it’s easy to check if a submitter has a legitimate PhD and a legitimate adviser, or is in a legitimate doctoral program. It’s far more manageable. And there are very FEW open access journals in this discipline. I can count them on one hand.
This last item — the open access problem in the sciences that is contributing to the demise of peer review — is also why I have suggested on this blog that research done in such journals doesn’t represent a rigorous peer review process. Research that appears in these journals that seemingly contradicts everything everyone else has seen in a lab ought to be viewed with some suspicion.

Hopefully articles like this one will scare the hard sciences community into a crackdown on the laziness and graft.

The (Pseudo) “Doctrine” of Fallen Angel Salvation: Research Sources

Just a brief follow-up on the subject of whether fallen angels can be redeemed.

One of the curious points to me in this matter has been how some refer to the idea of angelic salvation as a “doctrine.” That word conveys the impression (intentionally, I presume) that the idea that fallen angels can be saved is something that someone who mattered, somewhere in the early historic Church, taught the idea. That isn’t true. There is no “Christian doctrine” of angelic salvation. That said, the idea was indeed discussed in the early church — specifically in response to Gnosticism (and to be more particular here, Valentinian Gnosticism). These Gnostics tried to defend the idea using gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism and the epistles of Paul by playing, in modern parlance, “word games” with the vocabulary — instead of doing exegesis, they gave new, esoteric meanings to certain terms and then ran with the result.

This, for me, has explanatory power. The teaching that angels can be redeemed comes right out of Gnosticism. No surprise. Gnosticism has infected the modern evangelical and Pentecostal church in several ways, most likely unbeknownst to the vast majority of people in those groups. Consequently, I don’t think that those who espouse this idea are “real” Gnostics (though they may be), the idea nevertheless has deep Gnostic roots and has always been outside the stream of orthodoxy.

There have, fortunately, been several dissertations written on the interaction between certain church fathers and the Gnostics where “angelic redemption” is mentioned. Valentinian Gnostics thought the idea important not only for “the redemption and the restoration [of angelic beings] to the Pleroma,” but also their own salvation. From the Kovacs dissertation listed below (pp. 86, 88):

[Baptism] in Jesus’ life is paralleled by a sacrament of redemption in the life of the Valentinians. This sacrament is called “angelic redemption” or “angelic baptism” (22.5) because it relates the pneumatics [the Valentinians] to their angelic syzygies, who have already been baptized in the same manner. Like the Marcosians in Against Heresies I 21.2, Theodotus claims that both Jesus (22.7) and the pneumatics (22.1*) need redemption in order to enter the pleroma. . . . Perfect salvation is reserved for the Valentinians; they alone receive gnosis and ascend to the heights of the pleroma. This salvation is mediated not through catholic baptism but through the Valentlnian ritual of redemption.”

If the concept of the Pleroma is new to you, see my video overview of Gnostic cosmology.

Story, in his dissertation (below) adds some explanatory thoughts (p. 78):

Each person is thought to have an angel who was already baptised in the beginning ( en arxe) therefore each person is baptised “in the same Name in which his angel had been baptised before him.” Even though the Valentinian can describe himself here as “deadened by this existence,” he is at the same time “the person who has received redemption” because of his relationship to the Pleroma through his angel.

I have added the following dissertations that touch on this subject to the divine council bibliography. I found them on a better source than the internet — the ProQuest dissertation database. They popped up in a search for “angelic redemption” (interestingly enough, “angelic salvation” yielded no dissertations that actually had to do with religious texts). One note – the dissertation by Ahuvia is (mostly) about how the rabbis objected to the idea, not any endorsement of it.

Geoffrey Story, “The Valentinian (Gnostic) Use of the Letters of Paul,” Northwestern University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1968.
Eunice Villaneda, “The Valentinian dynamic of holiness: Re-imagining Valentinian perceptions of the ‘spiritual’, ‘psychic’, and ‘material’ bodies.” California State University, Long Beach, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014
Mika Ahuvia, “Israel among the angels: A study of angels in Jewish texts from the fourth to eighth century CE,” Princeton University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2o14
Judith Lee Kovacs, “Clement of Alexandria and the Valentinian Gnostics,” Columbia University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1978
David Robert Ruppe, “God, spirit, and human being: The reconfiguration of PNEUMA’s semantic field in the exchange between Irenaeus of Lyons and the Valentinian Gnosis,” Columbia University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1988
Patrick Theodore Hall,  “Jesus of Nazareth in Second Century Gnosticism,” The University of Chicago, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1969

NOTE: The above work has now been superseded by the published book by Majella Franzmann, Jesus in the Nag Hammadi Writings, though I haven’t searched her book to see if she comments on angel baptism or angel salvation.


Michael D. Harris, “Christological name theology in three second century communities,” Marquette University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013
Arkadi Choufrine, “Gnosis, theophany, theosis: Studies in Clement of Alexandria’s appropriation of his background,”  Princeton Theological Seminary, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2001
Everett Lee Proctor, “The influence of Basilides, Valentinus, and their followers on Clement of Alexandria,” University of California, Santa Barbara, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1992.

Tom De Longe: Hoaxer, Disinformation Patsy, or Just Incompetent?

I don’t know which answer is the correct one, but those are your options.

Click here for a short-but-telling proof-positive indictment of De Longe’s “insider access to UFO truth” by Lorin Cutts (hat tip to Jack Brewer at the UFO Trail for this item). The essay features a picture posted by De Longe as proof of a secret UFO program / craft. Too bad it comes from Taken, a Spielberg TV show circa 2002.

Reversing Hermon: “A Fantastic Follow-Up to Unseen Realm”

That’s the opinion of early reviewers. Reversing Hermon isn’t my planned sequel to The Unseen Realm, but it does continue the conversation.
I’ll take it!
Hope you’ll read it!

Mike’s World

A bit of a personal aside for this post. Most readers know I’m busy (that word actually doesn’t begin to describe the situation). But I sometimes get asked why I don’t do certain things. For example …  Mike, why don’t you / won’t you:

answer my email?
spend time on Facebook …  the Faithlife Groups … Google Hangouts?
answer comments on your YouTube Channels?
respond to that thing someone said about you (or that video someone made about you)?
review that book or video I sent you?
review my book manuscript?
read that article I sent you?
etc.

I used to have a disclaimer on my email address that explained why I likely won’t answer email, but I had to remove that for reasons I won’t bore you all with. I haven’t had my email disclaimer active for over a year. Consequently, I get these questions. They are all understandable and appropriate. So in lieu of the defunct disclaimer, I decided to post an explanation.

On my recent Unseen Realm trip to Arkansas someone asked this question during the Q & A: “What is your life like — what does it look like for you on a daily or weekly basis to manage your time?” My answer was that my life (in that respect) is an act of desperation (I had to laugh, but that’s what it is).  Though I enjoy almost everything I do (caveat: no prof enjoys grading), I’m doing so many things that, while lots of things get done and every day has successes, every day also feels like failure. But I don’t take it hard. There’s always tomorrow. That works since I’m in the wonderful situation of being able to do what I know I was born to do by the providence of God. I’m truly blessed. The only thing I really don’t like about my situation is that I’m not able to “do what I do” full-time and feel guilty about what falls through the cracks.

Let me try and give you an idea of the logistics. I’m not a Methodist (and Methodists will catch this reference), but I can account for every half hour of every day since that’s how I work my schedule. I know it sounds mechanical, but it isn’t. It just allows me to knock things off and shift things to other days efficiently. Like most of you, I have a FT day job that requires me to be working on employer-related tasks. What follows are the rest of the things I am supposed to be doing on a weekly basis (a couple of these items may be familiar only to newsletter subscribers):

spend a little time at home with my wife and kids (and yes, the pug) detached from everything else (this one and email are the most guilt-inducing)
grade papers and do professor stuff for two schools (distance ed, online)
writing a book (next non-fiction one is in process and due by the end of August; novel #3 comes after that)
blogging
answering email
answering comments on my blog
spending some time on Facebook
prepping for the podcast(s)
recording the podcast(s)
reading
re-writing content for NakedBible.org
putting the notes and links together for the Miqlat newsletter
writing scripts for Fringepop episodes
management tasks for my business (exists for my online presence and Amazon publishing)
management tasks for Miqlat
reviewing my languages (keeping up with grammar and vocab).

each week I spend a little time on Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Egyptian, Akkadian, NW Semitic dialects, and Ugaritic
I’ve decided to start Latin and Ethiopic this year (the latter because I want to work in Ethiopic 1 Enoch down the road)


scholarly research for journal articles or (way down the road) “Unseen Realm 2”
teaching at church (a few four-week modules each year; in one module now)
interviews (not weekly right now, but that will change now that Reversing Hermon is shipping)

Evenings after work give me 3-4 hours to work on the items in this list. Weekends are full tilt. I rarely watch TV, though I love having a ball game playing in the background. So every night I pick at the stuff that needs doing. About half the items on the list really do take substantial time and have deadlines (like writing, scripting, and research).

I’m thrilled to say that the following have been taken off my plate because of the generosity of donors to Miqlat (some tasks below are paid) and volunteers (named):

record, edit, and post Naked Bible podcast and Peeranormal podcast (without Trey, they both die)
edit written material for Kindle (Peter, Spencer)
transcribe the podcast episodes (at first, “Mr. Tudor” and now Brenda)
Facebook posting, bookkeeping for my business, creating the newsletter (my wife, Drenna)
editing podcast episodes for radio (Charles)
videos for the website (Shaun)
bookkeeping for Miqlat (Rich, now Michael)

I hope this helps shed light on why I do (or don’t do) certain things. My time is so limited I have to triage every day. For that reason I won’t watch videos sent to me, won’t vet anyone’s manuscript, don’t read anything outside peer-reviewed material, can’t engage in running conversations for days or weeks (!), and can’t chase down a research question for you (and some of those take thesis-level work). I hope you all understand.

Faithlife Study Bible Published in Hard Copy with NIV

Many of you know about the digital version of the Faithlife Study Bible. I contributed a good bit of content to it. A trimmed (for space, naturally) version of that study Bible is now available from Zondervan, editorially tailored to the NIV, the translation used in that publication.

I’m thrilled to have played a part in the creation of the NIV Faithlife Study Bible. I’m happy to help Zondervan alert this audience to its existence. My reasons are, to be honest, personal. A study Bible was one of the two items I bought early in my own journey as a new Christian (the other was a Strong’s Concordance). Both were crucial in helping me understand God’s Word as I grew as a believer.

Nearly forty years have passed since I came to the Lord. Providence led me to become a biblical scholar and gave me the blessing of being a biblical studies professor in the classroom and online. I’ve learned that there’s a lot about the Bible that people should know. My own journey in Bible knowledge has convinced me there’s one fundamental insight that, if faithfully observed, will help tremendously. It’s the best piece of advice I can give you—and an orienting point for many of the notes in the NIV Faithlife Study Bible:

Let the Bible be what it is.

That bit of advice may sound odd. But let’s unpack it a bit.

When I recommend letting the Bible be what it is, I’m suggesting that the path to real biblical understanding requires that we don’t make the Bible conform to denominational preferences. Our task as Bible students is not to filter the Bible through our traditions. That’s doing Bible study in an echo chamber and engaging Scripture from a deeply flawed assumption about its context. None of the biblical writers were members of our denominations!

Our task as Bible students is not to turn the Bible into something it isn’t. Just let it be what it is. Let me illustrate with an example (one familiar to many readers here).

Genesis 10 is known to Bible scholars as the “Table of Nations.” The chapter is a biblical explanation of what happened in the centuries after Noah and his family disembarked the ark, having survived the flood. The Table of Nations describes how the descendants of Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—repopulated the earth, forming the nations known in the rest of the Old Testament story. In terms of the unfolding narrative of Genesis, the chapter is a precursor to the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1-9), where the nations were divided and dispersed by God.

There’s an obvious problem with the Table of Nations—or, for those who simply let the Bible be what it is, an obvious disconnect between the world of the biblical writers and the world we know in modern times. The Table of Nations shows no knowledge whatsoever of the geography belonging to North America, South American, Australia, China, India, and Scandinavia. The same is true of the knowledge of earth’s geography in the New Testament (cp. Acts 2). The known world in biblical times was a fraction of what it actually is.

This is no surprise if we let the Bible be what it is, and let the biblical writers be who they were. The biblical “world” is composed of seventy nations that are situated in what we now call the ancient Near East (or modern Middle East) and which are found on the land masses that surround the Mediterranean Sea. There is no hint in the Scriptures of any land mass beyond this region.

Attempts to make the Bible be something that it isn’t with respect to the true size of the world produced very unfortunate results that ought to be a lesson to us. Once Europeans achieved the ability to cross the Atlantic and circumnavigate the world, people immediately questioned where these other countries and the people who populated them came from. Most Europeans, well familiar with the Bible, presumed these peoples must have come from Adam—but how did the descendants of Noah produce these peoples?

All sorts of strange proposals were offered in answer to these questions from the 16th century onward. Those efforts in turn produced theories of race, including that non-European (non-White) races came from sub-humans or humans separate from, and inferior to, Adam. The rest is, sadly, history. Europeans believed that embracing these explanations, which are inherently flawed and racist, was necessary to preserving biblical authority. Despite their absence in the Table of Nations, the Bible had to speak to the discovery of these new lands and peoples. Such interpretive gymnastics institutionalized racial ideas that the Bible never actually endorses.

The lesson here is that it really does matter whether we are serious about interpreting the Bible in context or not. We can get into serious interpretive trouble if we don’t. If we want to pay more than lip service to the idea of interpretation in context, we must let the Bible be what it is. As one of the academic editors of the NIV Faithlife Study Bible, I can say that our editorial team kept this fundamental principle of context in mind throughout our work. My hope is that Lord will use this tool—and this orienting point of interpretation—to make your Bible study all it can be.

Have a look at the NIV Faithlife Study Bible for yourself!