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Reversing Hermon, by Michael Heiser explains the importance of Enoch to early Christianity. Enoch 1 was excluded from the biblical canon because it was already so well known to second temple period Jews that it simply didn’t need to be repeated again in the Bible. This is why Genisis only references Enoch, the “giants” and nephilim in passing and with little detail - it was just referencing the older works of Enoch that everybody knew already.
Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998142638/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_ZS4QP2PK670VP8W95EV6
It might happen in the future. Some say in the near future. It is a Catholic phenomenon called the "Illumination of Conscience". Everyone will be shown all their sins. If you're curious read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Warning-Testimonies-Prophecies-Illumination-Conscience/dp/1947701096
Jesus and Paul, undoubtedly the two most important men of early Christianity, both preached an apocalyptic message, that the kingdom of God was near and that the current age of evil would be destroyed. See Jesus's first saying in our earliest gospel, Mark, for an example
> “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)
I can't give a full overview of this, so if you have time read Bart Ehrman's excellent work on the subject of Jesus's apocalypticism.
As for Paul, his undisputed epistles are infused with apocalypticism as well. See, for example, 1 Thessalonians, where he describes the 'rapture':
>According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thess 4:15-17)
Both Paul and Jesus believed that the end of days was almost here, and that people must make themselves ready. The fascinating difference between Paul and Jesus is in how they believed they should do this. Jesus told people to be more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees, the models of lawful Jewish obedience; Paul emphatically stated that those who adopted the Jewish law were cursed.
Not just covid but all the conspiracies
Here’s his book
https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Rising-updated-expanded-First/dp/1492170097/ref=nodl_
I believe his most relevant quote on his YouTube channel was “vaccines are the mark of the beast)”. He has 200k subscribers
All great stuff! Michael Gorman’s little book (Reading Revelation Responsibly) is a great help to unpack Revelation soberly and in context.
That sounds like a good strategy.
Just keep in mind, the people who have the most certainty are probably the least credible.
Even better, you might go to some experts, rather than treat this as an opinion issue.
I haven't read it, but this book seems credible:
Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Views-Millennium-Beyond-Darrell/dp/0310201438
Stanley Gundry is one of the editors and he's highly regarded, in my evangelical circles.
Leading NT scholar Michael J. Gorman’s <em>Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation</em> came out in 2010.
This book is a good primer on eschatology.
Well all private revelation is subject to the individual's free will to accept or deny but some are approved by the church as worthy of belief which gives some validity to their content.
I recently read The Warning that my sister sent me, I was expecting it to be full of the 3 days of darkness nonsense and conspiracy theories. Instead I was surprised at the number of confirmation testimonials from various saints predicting an illumination of conscience for the world.
I am not sure what is in the podcast that would convince me so many saint's visions / messages that talked of this same event could be misinterpreted or in error.
The thing is this book did nothing to scare me or damage my faith, in fact such a warning would be a massive saving grace for so many souls in mortal sin. The thought of the whole world getting a spiritual 'shake up' is a beautiful one if it leads so many back to the faith.
I'm not sure what the podcast talks about but the book, The Warning, just talks about a global examination of conscience followed by a 7 day miraculous sign in the sky in the form of a cross of light. Certainly nothing to be scared of and no 'end times' horror story.
>If we must have two separate words to define two separate domains, at least make them harmonious (positive/negative) based on their relationship to the base (the real world). Non-Fiction should have been titled Factual, and Fictional should have been titled Non-Factual.
Right now fiction and non-fiction don't refer to factual and non-factual books. They refer to fiction and non-fiction books.
For example, the library (in the US) puts Garfield collections in the non-fiction section because they are not fiction books but collections of comic art.
Poetry is also under non-fiction because it is not fiction.
Non-fiction is separated into a bunch of categories.
Those categories are much more useful than just fiction or non-fiction.
I think the benefit of fiction and non-fiction is simply that a ton of books are fiction.
If you have most books in your library or store as fiction books, then the catchall term for the other books is non-fiction.
Factual and non-factual doesn't really help because of the reasons you are reading a book.
I'm not reading a fiction book because it doesn't have facts, I'm reading it because I want to read fiction.
If I read a non-fiction book, it's not necessarily because it has facts. Not all non-fiction books are factual (The Bible Code is non-fiction but it isn't factual).
Fiction and non-fiction are there simply for categorizing books and the categories currently make sense to most people.
Those categories aren't even the main categories we would use. I don't go into the store and think "I want a fiction book." I think "I want a sci-fi book" or "I want a mystery book."
I think there is no reason that we should change how we use these names unless there are better names that are more easily understood. Since these names are already understood, that's a big hill to climb and I don't think Factual vs Non-Factual works.
That transfiguration of Jesus was His way of poking Ba' al in the eye and telling him, even in Ba'al's very own household, I own you. Jesus challenged the forces of evil into setting up the greatest victory Christ would ever get.
Mt Hermon, where that transfiguration happened was the very spot where Ba'al center of power was. Christ told us that he would make it his own "upon this rock I will build my church" referring to knowledge of his divinity.
I would HIGHLY recommend a Woman Rides the Beast book. It highlights the corruption of the Catholic Church and why the author believes this is the woman explained in The Revelation. It goes through the history of the popes as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Rides-Beast-Catholic-Church/dp/1565071999
Thanks, I like that :)
Bart Ehrman wrote a good book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium which explains the mainstream view of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet among Bible scholars.
When it became clear that Jesus wasn't actually going to come back soon, the Christian depiction of him changed. So the Gospel of John, which was written later than the others, tones down the apocalyptic message.
The view of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet is the mainstream view among Bible scholars. The earliest Gospel, Mark, is the one where Jesus talked in the most apocalyptic terms.
The Jews were traumatized by the Roman occupation, they wanted rescue. So they hoped that God would swoop in and change everything, perhaps with Jesus as the new leader in the "Kingdom of God".
But after awhile it became clear this wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So the later Gospels toned down Jesus' apocalyptic statements, and Christianity evolved from its early apocalyptic expectations, into a religion that saw Jesus' message as a moral prescription for living in this world.
Bart Ehrman wrote a good book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium about this.
The Native Americans similarly had a Ghost Dance religion
>The messianic religion promised an apocalypse that would destroy the earth and the white man. The earth then would be restored to the Native Americans. Salvation of individuals was to be achieved by purging oneself of the evil ways learned from the whites. The religion required frequent ceremonial cleansing, meditation, prayer, chanting and of course dancing the Ghost Dance. Each ceremony lasted for five successive days. The participants danced each night, on the last night the dance continued until morning. The ceremony was to be repeated every six weeks.
Very sad, you can see the same thing as early Christianity happening in a modern context.
My grandmother used to pass this book around to her friends and was convinced that it was the catholic church who was going to welcome satan to the world.
https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Rides-Beast-Catholic-Church/dp/1565071999
One fairly decent series is the Counterpoint series from Zondervan. It has a number of books where different authors make the case for their beliefs and then interact with the other authors with opposing beliefs. I have the one on miraculous gifts and find it useful. They do have one on the millenium/end times: the book. Or this one on different view of Revelation
You're absolutely correct. As such, things like the sermon on the mount, feeding the multitudes, etc are probably highly exaggerated.
If you're interested, I highly recommend this book. It was the first book I read on what mainstream historians think about Jesus, and why. http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Apocalyptic-Prophet-New-Millennium/dp/019512474X
The other flared users on here covered most of the bases, but I thought I'd add in one more piece of information since I plan on teaching as well.
You're correct that high schools want you to have a broad understanding of history. Yet, keep in mind that if you plan on going to graduate school soon thereafter, you will be expected to pick a particular part of history and then narrow down to a specific topic for your thesis. But, at this point in your academic career, I recommend doing something that had been suggested to me right when I started college (I myself had a bit of a late start because I joined the Army and served for four years before going to get my bachelor's degree). That piece of advise is reading entry level books into various periods of history that you may find interesting. This can best be done by doing as /r/TenMinuteHistory suggested and talking to a faculty advisor.
I myself had a feeling I wanted to study something in Antiquity, so I read books on Ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom, Classical Greece, Hellenistic Period of Rome, and even some cultural anthropology books to put things into perspective. That was when I first read Bart Ehrman's Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. It's an entry level graduate book that is often on the reading list at colleges who study Early Christianity around the country, and I was captivated by it. It made me want to start studying books by other authors in the field, and really helped me see what path I wanted to follow.
Tl;Dr: Talk to professors about getting books in a wide range of the field you may find interesting -- it could change your life. It did for me.
His Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium is very well written, and quite entertaining. The basic ideas described there are shared by many other scholars across the theological spectrum.
A good add-on is Kris Komarnitsky's "Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?. He's not a biblical scholar, but this enables him to add psychological theories why Jesus' early followers began to think, he died for their sins. The text is a bit academic, though.
Hope this helps.
Bart Ehrman wrote a book specifically about this called <em>Jesus: Apocalyptic Preacher of the New Millenium</em>. He's one of the most established Biblical Scholars in the academic community and his textbooks are used at many major institutions, including Yale.
yes you could. To increase your chances of getting an image you could employ a 'word wrap' function to the random binary and increase/decrease width until an image is seen. Michael Drosnin explains how that works in The Bible Code
Richard Carrier isn't really 'esteemed' when it comes to New Testament scholarship. Some of his ideas are pretty fringe and not widely accepted (or even talked about) in academia.
Personally? I really like him. But that is just my statistics background (academically speaking) and anti-theism bias. You might want to take a stroll on over to /r/academicbiblical to see what academia really thinks of the New Testament.
If you want to here what the consensus is within academia in relation to the historicity of the Bible a really good source to start with is Bart Ehrman.
Here is a good critique of Carrier's thesis...
...again, I am a huge fan of Carrier's thesis, I have no idea if its a better explanation than the current consensus. As an amateur who likes history and reads the bible I will simply side with the academic consensus. Authors like Carrier or Price will simply be my guilty pleasure.
Here is a good book that you might want to consume if you are interested in a more mainstream academic approach to the New Testament (but still want something a layman can get through).
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Apocalyptic-Prophet-New-Millennium/dp/019512474X
Academic consensus can change over time, and maybe we will look back on Carrier as a revolutionary 40 years from now, but there is no reason to think that is the case right now. But thats not going to stop me from hoping it happens, how cool would that be?!
Computers are a huge game changer when it comes to literary analysis and I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years we have computers that can simply tell us the date of origin (within a year or two) for every verse in the bible and describe to us who the author of that verse, or chapter was.
It might not be exactly what you are looking for, but I recommend Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond. Three authors take turns giving a defense of pre/post/a millennialism and then the other two authors respond. Ken Gentry is the Postmill guy.
I have. I saw some others mention it as well, but reading the bible won't give you much more understanding of Christianity. To get a better idea of it's relationship to the modern world, take a look at the book: Don't Know Much About the Bible.
Please consider purchasing a copy of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019512474X
If you don't want to spend the money, but are willing to read it, I would be glad to buy the copy for you.
If you would like to recommend any materials in turn from a reputable scholar, please do so. (seriously)
Thank you for the debate, it's been fun, Peace! :)
Just FYI, the "Christ Myth" stuff is not taken seriously by any New Testament historian. It is essentially the creationism of atheism.
If you want a good intro to the historical Jesus, check out this book.