Michael Heiser - The Parables of Enoch

it's time for another episode of the sean tabit show a podcast where i connect you with thought leaders from across the globe digging into some of my favorite topics like personal development marketing spirituality and pretty much any other shiny object that happens to catch my attention today my special guest is dr michael heiser and we're going to be discussing his new book a companion to the book of enoch a reader's commentary volume 2 the parables of enoch first enoch 37-71 i think that's the best title subtitle and additional word combination i've encountered since the last time we talked about the first volume in this series mike it is always an honor to spend time with you my friend welcome back to the show yeah thanks for having me it's kind of like one of those 17th century titles that were 40 words long yeah or or the other favorite academic titles that have german words combined together to make up things that no sane person would ever say uh in reality but uh uh you know i i what's fun about conversations with you mike is so much of my audience you know they they come to the show to hear about books that aren't necessarily academic or uh books to help them with the problems they're facing in their life and so what's fun about bringing you on is i get i get them to encounter a whole new world that they've probably not spent a ton of time exploring research some problems is that well well we'll see by the if if mike gives you problems by the end of the interview please send us letters we'd like to hear about the problems he's causing in your life but because of that often when we talk i like to cover a little bit of the same ground at the beginning and and that is like for you why did you even get into this field of study obviously you're a bible scholar uh you've done a lot in the book of genesis ancient near eastern cultures and uh it's a very special niche and not everybody spends a lot of time there so for you why did you choose to immerse yourself in this world and really make it your life's work well i think the you know what i'd like to say is i'd like to qualify this by saying i'm i'm not really insane when you go into old testament semitics you know you get your phd you got to take courses and lots of dead languages and i i enjoyed that you know i had you know egyptian hieroglyphs and all this stuff all this weird you know funky you know linguistic stuff but the the real answer is providence because you know i i didn't come from a christian background but i was always interested in anything old and strange and so i liked you know the in search of tv show i'd like you know all the ancient history stuff i remember sitting in junior high history class when he's talking about ancient egypt thinking i want to be a crusty old professor and do this stuff so i was that kid and then when i became a believer it's like the bible was like the sweet spot there's just you know it's antiquity there's just lots of strange things in there we had a we had a church where that really took content seriously and so i'm i'm still i still feel like i'm living off the capital of my original church context in many ways but that got me started toward a love for biblical theology and you know the biblical text and i i was good at languages and i enjoyed it and so eventually again just through a series of circumstances i wound up picking old testament because i thought that was where the most problems were you know i i had a high view of scripture and i i was naive enough to believe and i'd love to say i had this deep spiritual insight but it was more naivete i was naive enough to believe that you know i bet there's nothing new under the sun here and all this stuff that people criticize the bible about and a lot of it lands on the old testament i'll bet these thoughts have been thought before and i'll bet people have looked at them you know scholars very carefully and i just need to to learn where to look and and how to frame subjects and how to think well and ask good questions and get exposed to scholarship and at the end of the day the bible will still be there i'll i'll bet it'll still be there and so i just dove into the old testament in seminary and wound up going you know that way in grad school with hebrew bible and semitic languages and taught for 20 years green campus distance ed i worked for logos bible software i was the one of the ancient language people they they gave me the title academic editor because we just were making up titles in those days i never edited anything but it was better than language geek you know even though i would have i would have lived with that um and enjoyed that for almost 15 years and now i'm here in jacksonville where i essentially get my own school to teach a two-year certificate program that focuses on you know my content and what that is is i what floats my boat is i i i sincerely want to convince christians i feel like i'm a missionary to the church but i want to convince christians to read scripture in its own original context not any particular modern context or denominational context and if you do that you have the israelite living in your head when you read the old testament first century jew living in your head when you read the new testament you will be able to understand the connectivity across the testament so much better and if you're willing to read it as someone predisposed to [Music] supernatural characters and events and you know just a supernatural worldview you will get so much more out of your bible and i didn't arrive at that academically i had to be provoked um into jumping in there while i was a i was a doctoral student but that's kind of what i'm known for now and i'm i'm unrepentant you know it's you know you lose friends you lose job opportunities you lose ministry opportunities but it's a real simple formula the bible wasn't written to us it was written for us but its writers and its original readers just didn't think like us so what can we do to try to think like them and explore scripture so that that's really what what floats the boat here trying to get good content to anybody who cares i mean i'm not doing stuff for the guild yes i'm published you know in academic journals and all that stuff but where the rubber meets the road is is anybody who cares anybody who takes scripture seriously we are we are here to produce content for you and hopefully it'll you know it'll open up scripture to you in new ways well i think a lot of people probably know you at least in a lot of the circles i run in from your book the unseen realm obviously that was a labor of love a project that took you many years to complete but i feel like from when that book hit the market to now like the trajectory of your life shifted or it puts you on on the map in a different way i'd love to hear so i don't think i've ever quite asked you this question before how did that book finally going on the market like how did that shift some things for you well i i get asked a lot you know how would tell us about how unseen realm was born you know like what motivated you and it's a one-word answer and that is guilt and i i mean it you know i can remember in grad school you know once i was provoked to go down this road and i tell readers in the first chapter what provoked me you know the psalm 82 thing but i can remember sitting you know working on my dissertation because my again psalm 82 became a focus point just here i am a doctoral student i am not a newbie i've taught 20 courses i have two master's degrees i'm in a phd program in hebrew bible and i am rediscovering my bible again you know like reading it for the first time again and i remember thinking you know the average christian in church you know and i included myself in that because here i am you know experiencing this but the average christian will never get to have this experience you know and and you shouldn't have to go to grad school or have you know some things provoke you to that and so that was actually the guilt that i felt was where unseen realm was born i thought you know i can do that i can take you know peer-reviewed scholarship on this stuff and i can make it decipherable to normal humans because a lot of it's just technical jargon to just oh you know mind-numbing stuff you know um but i i can do that and so you know 15 years later you know is when the book was actually born but during the process it was a putter project it took me over 10 years i remember thinking nobody's ever going to publish this you know like why am i doing this no because it was too different i mean everybody says their book is different i actually meant it and it's real you know i thought nobody's ever going to publish this so i i when i finished the first draft i posted it on the internet on my website i remember that you know and eventually you know through a set of circumstances my my boss you know finds out that i have this book and we were going to go into print publishing and we're about two years old and he's like i heard you have a book you know why aren't we doing that and i said his name's bob i said okay bob let me see if i understand this correctly we're going to publish mike's book and then fire him [Music] he's like why would we do that we like you i said you haven't read it yet have you he said no and you know so i provoked into reading it two weeks later he comes into my office and shuts the door which is never a good sign and he looks at me and he says what have you done i'm never going to read my bible the same way again what have you done i said you understand you know don't you i said he said yeah i said now so are you ready if we do this to get the email and the phone call why is heiser working here you know are you ready for that and he's like bring it on [Laughter] so you know it i don't want your listeners to be misled like i'm not publishing heresy or anything like that but it is so different i i it's not marketing shtick for me to say that if you read unseen realm or the lighter version supernatural if you don't like books with footnotes read supernatural instead but you will read your bible again for the first time it again that's not a a slogan earring it just it's real and i lived it myself and so here we are a couple hundred thousand copies later and you know nobody thought that that was going to do that and it spawned a bunch of other things and you know but but it's really been nice because what it what it tells you is there a lot of people who out there who are hungry right you know we have this impression that people in church don't want to be challenged they don't mind being bored they don't mind you know having church be you know the same old sunday school lessons but with adult illustrations and i'm here to tell you you know in every church there are people who do mind and they know when they're not being asked to think and they have this intuition that there's more to their bible than what they've been getting and you know what they're correct and so they you know somebody needs to to scratch that itch and and i think unseen realm has been part of that and has encouraged other people you know writing other things to do the same thing and you know the podcast i've had a podcast for seven years and i i look for scholars trying to do intentional things for for the late church and there there's a lot out there it's just it's hard for people to find you know they don't necessarily know where to look so it has spawned a number of things you know just through the reach of it is is dramatic and it it i mean i look the only thing i look at every week or you know a few times a week so not quite every day but a few times a week i'll look at the amazon number the sales number where it ranks and and for for it's almost six years now it has been at the like 4 000 4500 level or less that's impressive six years okay people are finding it i don't i'd love to again i'd love to say it's because of my intelligent marketing plan no actually not there's there's really nothing intelligent about it it's just word of mouth and again i i think it's just people find it helpful they find it stimulating and helpful even if it's different even if it makes them nervous you know in places especially at the beginning but yeah it's been a wonderful thing you know to see and and i still learn something every week you know it just i can't wait you know to do more you know stuff like that because scripture is just this it's a thing of wonder you know and if you again really try to intentionally think about it the way an ancient person would and there there are resources to help you do that i worked for a company that digitized them you get so much more out of scripture and and for me it has it has made sort of the intelligence and the reality of the plan in god's plan feels so much more intelligent and and uh sort of all embracing comprehensive than i ever realized before you know that just the connection between spiritual warfare and the great commission which i write mostly about in the demons book that that alone you know has been just really spiritually stimulating it's given me direction you know now it's like what can i produce that i can give away just to be a pain in satan's butt you know that that's what we're looking for you know stamp one thing out you know three heads are gonna pop up over here so we're gonna game on here we go yes you never never have a lack of follow-up items and you know i can vouch for a lot of what mike's saying in terms of i don't have a month that goes by that somebody somehow doesn't discover one of our earlier podcast episodes or when i'm traveling people be like like it's usually in a green room in a corner and they're like have you heard of this guy michael heiser yes i i know who mike is i love his books they're like it's you know the first thing they'll say is is he legit and usually i say you're pretty legit uh but uh you know it is interesting once they read your book they can't unsee what they've seen or what they've discovered and they uh i've had so many people like it's like the light went on and they see the bible in a whole new way um and that that is like a real phenomenon when people experience that and for some of you who aren't book people you know mic throughout an amazon ranking um you know we get excited when a book hits the market if we can get below 10 000 and if you can get below 5 000 of all books on amazon and keep going lower that's fantastic to sustain a ranking sub 5000 for an extended period of time even years that that means there's there's a movement some something's gone viral or just the nature of how a message is getting transmitted it just keeps going and going and going so that that level of amazing staying power is quite phenomenal i'm really impressed by that um did you see uh extra attraction once you guys converted over to paperback i think last time we talked you guys had just moved that into paperback yeah i i have not you know when when we converted over to paperback you know for a while they were they were the hard copy and the paperback were hardcover and paperback were neck and neck and now it's it's shifted you know in the paperback's favor for obvious reasons so um that was real helpful i mean i didn't i'd have done that sooner but i'm sure the publisher had reasons or metrics or something like do it here not there well i would i would say from my vantage point if i can keep selling a hardcover at a sustainable level i'll do that all day long until uh until the the demand drops you know low enough that it makes sense to convert to paperback um the average hardcover is only in uh publication for about a year and a half in the trade space and then typically you're you're converting 12 to 18 months out very normally to so have a hardcover run for uh more than a year and a half two years is is out of the norm so yeah excellent traction uh well let's transit since we're not here to talk about the unseen realm let's transition to you know on behalf of our friends at defender publishing we should talk about the book they sent me to talk to you about uh but in terms of uh enoch like what as as modern-day christians why should we care like why is studying i guess on the one hand why is studying that important and in terms of literature how does it relate and differentiate itself from the bible because uh you know i feel like unless you maybe lean a little bit more into either the areas that you study or some of our friends who spend time in that that magical place we call christian middle earth some people never even heard of enoch other than references in the bible so they they don't even know what we're talking about yet yeah i mean the the the quick answer to why it matters is that enoch the book of enoch scholars refer to it as firstina there's there's actually more than one but the first one is the one that counts because it it dates before the new testament it is a a piece of literature written by very theologically faithful conservative jews a jewish writer and there are a number of things in it that pre-sage uh not only you know presage new testament theology even messianism for instance this second volume the the parables of enoch chapters 37 through 71 that's actually an emphasis in that section of the book so you will have you know how many of us have been treated to the tv show it's always around easter or christmas you know the tv show the magazine on the impels shelf at the grocery store you know where it says you know the christ of faith versus the jesus of history you know trying to drive a wedge between these two things and how the new testament writers you know that all this theology about the deity of christ and pre-existence and messiahship and this is all invented by the church later and thrown back into the new testament well yeah except for books like enoch that have all that stuff in it a couple hundred years before jesus showed up you know so it's a really good example of how jews were thinking about messiah prior to jesus now there's a lot of other stuff in the book that bleeds into the new testament or that comments and shows you how jews can serious people they think the hebrew bible is the word of god like we do okay but how they're thinking about the old testament but also again you you get this these streams of interpretation that when you get to the new testament it's like okay you know if i had read the book of enoch i would think i've seen this before so it really cuts off at the knees a lot of these these notions that new testament writers are just making stuff up uh they're not they they are firmly within one strand of what we would call inter-testamental judaism and it's very interesting to see how they were handling old testament passages and how that compares with what the new testament writers are doing so it contextualizes what new testament content is you know about messiah and about other things the book of life these heavenly books there's a lot of stuff like that in enoch lake of fire final judgment just the general you know apocalyptic stuff you know that you read in the book of revelation guess what enoch was there first you know so there's there are these threads that just run through from the old testament through the jewish the serious jewish community in between the testaments on into the new testament and so it just helps us be better readers of the new testament we kind of know and and can get at what they're you know we can pick up what they're laying down a little more because we have some of this other literature to help us show how they were thinking what they were basing these interpretations on in certain passages you know the old testament or just you know commentary within the their own community about look at all this stuff in the hebrew bible i wonder what it means you know like how do we connect the dots so they're busy in the in between the testaments doing that and the new testament writers you know are will often repurpose and utilize you know that sort of content so it just it helps us be more intelligent readers you know of the stuff that is inspired i don't think enoch is inspired i i understand the question because there were few you know early church figures that that thought could argue that enoch should be included in the canon which was a a debate that was you know overwhelmingly lost and and those guys owned up to it you know it's like okay we lose you know we assume the holy spirit has guided the masses of the church one direction and it ain't ours we're okay with that um so i know why the question is asked but a book doesn't have to be canonical or inspired to be useful you know peter quotes from enoch jude quotes for me and i there's stuff in the gospels that again are directly traceable to to things in enoch you know it has its its fingerprints on the new testament in a lot of places even if it's not a direct quotation so it's it's useful to know what in the world the book's about and that's why i'm doing the reader's commentary it's not a verse by verse technical commentary it's hey if mike was in the room while you're reading enoch okay you know i could look over your shoulder and say okay this phrase over here that's what they're talking about or this section i don't say anything about it just ignore it just keep going you know the juicy stuff's coming up in a few pages you know that that sort of thing so it's kind of like intended to be a guide on what in the world you know he's saying and then how it how it attaches to either the old or the new testament well this particular section is called the parables of enoch i think for a lot of our listeners and viewers their only context for parables comes out of the new testament so yeah uh how how does this relate how is it different like why do we refer to this as parables yeah if we look at you know enoch let's just say that the first two volumes of the commentary the first 36 chapters are known as the book of the watchers and it basically does two things it introduces the impending apocalypse first enoch is an apocalyptic book so it's kind of like the book of revelation but three times as long you know that sort of thing so it's like judgment's coming you know the wicked are doomed and here's why okay so the first 36 chapters trace a lot of the proliferation of human depravity back to the genesis six one through four the sons of god daughters of that episode and and some related you know things as well and so it's you know again the the end is coming the judgment's gonna gonna come we all you know humanity deserves what we're gonna get you know we're depraved and here was a big contributing factor and then the next you know the parables 37 through 71 enoch you know the book goes into three parables it basically illustrates who the wicked are who the righteous are the messiah figure is a big deal because the messiah is going to play the role of judge you know who he is his relationship to god and again this is how the judgment of humanity is going to unfold so it tells you know three extended stories you know parables that try to get that point across in different ways try to answer those questions so that's really the guts of the second section and the central figure is is obviously the the messianic figure it uses all the the terminology we're used to mashiach anointed one yeah that's an enoch you know chosen one a servant son of man you know son of man which is actually a really important one it so it gives you this sort of jewish consciousness of what's the messiah going to be like you know what what is he going to do one of the things he's going to do is judge the wicked and that that's a big theme in in the book you know later on it you're going to have these glimpses of positivity for the for the righteous but it has that feel of those latter chapters of of revelation uh that we're used to and some of the same images and all that sort of stuff in a book like that and in terms of uh are there any specific people um kind of characters or themes that are gonna feel a little bit familiar as they're working through this section of enoch yeah the heavenly books thing will be familiar you know book of life there is going to be some edenic imagery again the messianic titles are kind of obvious uh in this you know i think one of the one of the more important ones like in first enoch 46 there's this notion that that god named the messiah named the son of man um before creation so it's a very clear allusion to the messiah's pre-existence which makes him more than a man um so it taps into daniel 7 a lot which is a very familiar passage to to christian readers and of course revelation repurposes daniel 7 really daniel 7 8 really daniel 7 through 12 all over the place so a lot of that language is going to be familiar too but apologetically in terms of a defense of of what's going on in the new testament there's there are just things again that the new testament writers are accused of just fabricating that sorry it just doesn't work so if the if the atheist online or in your facebook group or whatever you know has given you this argument you you need to throw a few of these passages at him and say well we're lo and behold guess who else fabricated that somebody with him 200 years earlier you know it it just doesn't make much sense but all that stuff is going to be familiar now there's a big difference too there there's no sense any in in the parables of enoch that the wicked are going to go to the lake of fire because they've rejected the messiah see there is no jesus yet so the wicked are there because they're just generally unjust you know they don't keep the torah they don't keep the law it's very jewish you know what you would expect so it even the contrast is interesting too because when you get to the new testament it's like well there's a different reason why again we this is going to happen you know to some people and it focuses on the the sacrificial you know ministry of the messiah you know on the cross but they don't see that yet they they see they see the judgment they see even the gentile redemption they they see all that kind of stuff the mercy for the gentiles but there's no there's no atoning work for the messiah here but but the the rest of the profile you know you'll see there so it's very interesting again for somebody who you know wants to try to look at the new testament and understand some of the things that are in it but also to discern by some of the ways it's different why that's so important you know how it how it actually plays out you know in the person of jesus and in terms of the messiah as it's laid out in for seanac are they looking for a political messiah a religious messiah like from from that world view frame of mind what would they have been have been expecting from the messiah they're looking for somebody who's going to be the the linchpin figure for the day of the lord and that's a nice way of saying they're looking for somebody to take revenge on their oppressors and we usually cast that as a military you know deliverer so yeah there there's a strong current of that but it's not really aimed exclusively at rome okay or you know some historical oppressor you know while you're being oppressed god wants to know if you're still faithful there's your torah element so so you know the wicked he casts a wider net than that but interestingly enough for our times a lot of the the characterization of the wicked is what we would call social injustice basically that that translates into just treating people like garbage you know treating those who are weaker or lesser social status than you with contempt and if we were talking about unseen realm the way i would say that is we're we're all imagers of god and we're supposed to treat each other like we're fellow imagers because lo and behold that's what we are okay our our status is equal and it's it's fascinating to me that in psalm 82 the gods of the nations are condemned for explicitly the same things that the wicked are condemned in first enoch again just injustice abusing people you know sowing chaos poverty just all this stuff and and scripture and enoch actually links that behavior to cosmic darkness so you'll even get a little flavor of that you know in the book of enoch that behind all the all of these abuses and the terrible condition of the world uh in in these terms behind that there's a supernatural intelligence that's just putting the foot to the to the pedal and flooring it they had a sense of that in the ancient world that we've sort of lost in the modern world and so again it's useful to remember hey that the world view of the biblical writers was this stuff it wasn't you know post enlightenment you know modern technological society stuff there was a spiritual backdrop to this that it's nice to to sort of get reminded of even in something like an enoch commentary it's there and this section of first enoch wraps up with additions to the parables what is that um maybe relate that a little bit to how you would maybe get some afterwards or some bonus material ancient writers would throw extra things in there some commentary what is it yeah the last the last two chapters you know of the parables there there are a number of scholars who think they were appended because there's something really odd going on from chapter 37 all the way up into chapter 70 the son of man is is the messiah figure that enoch you know in his vision is seeing and you know it essentially gets explained to him by his angel guides or whoever you know happens to be guiding him at the time so it's very clear that there's a distinction between enoch and this son of man figure in chapter 71 that changes where enoch all of a sudden it sees himself transformed into the son of man and scholars have said this is probably the weirdest thing that happens in the book and so there's lots of efforts to explain it i think the best one is where uh scholars try to relate this to you know if you're sometimes when you have a dream you're seeing things in a dream and then in other parts of the dream you will sort of become one of the characters in the dream you just saw and so that's the analogy they use you know for this and and so enoch essentially becomes one of the characters in this case the son of man and that's going to go away it just happens in this one particular chapter so since it is sort of an outlier people think it's an addition but it may not be it may just be a feature of how you relate a visionary dream experience from two different angles um so i think that's probably you know the best way to look at it but it's odd for sure and there's obviously still a ways to go uh so are there other read your commentary or readers commentaries planned for this year yeah i'll do one more volume it's you know chapter 72 through the end there are 108 chapters in enoch but a number of them are pretty small so it'll it'll be one more volume perfect who doesn't like a trilogy right box set look right on your shelf hopefully you take it down uh and read it as well uh any up other upcoming books that that we should know about you always seem to have lots of things in the hopper yeah i'm actually in in three or four you know writing projects now um is there anything that that's actually near completion um not really um i no i hope to get the the first full draft of my third novel done by the end of the year so that that is sort of my own pet priority um the other ones are sort of linked to publishers and and so those are their priorities but you know if if i could pick what my what my favorite thing to work on is that would be it so yeah well if i remember correctly for your original novels you were trying to avoid doing your phd work to write those so it feels like the same principles being applied here i i burned the first year on the first novel the facade because i was i was just burned out i mean i'll be honest i just i didn't want to i didn't want to think about my dissertation i needed a break you know some guys like remodeled their house or you know built a car from scratch it's like no i'm going to sit here and do a novel because i had a security job it's like i've got long stretches of time and i listen to coast to coast a.m so i i like literally everything i was interested in that all this weird paranormal stuff and biblical text and i just threw it all in the blender and hit the button you know like what's going to come out but the the angle was that everything in the novel is real and it is i mean i i found it through research somewhere the other fiction is of course the characters and how i connect the dots and the second one was the same so and the third will be a little bit more so what which rabbit hole do we want to go down you know in this one so it's just fun you know it's fun deciding who lives and dies this phenomenal cosmic power that you know novelists have to create their own little universe and it's my place to speculate on things and just sort of play with ideas so i like it and in terms of the school obviously you moved on from faith life to your your new role running your school how is that been going like what's on the horizon if people want to find out more about future classes how do they get into that i i think we are still in again i don't i don't make up the parameters here but i think we're still in early bird enrollment let's see we're we're still a neighbor i think it'll get extended into may or something like that but if you go to school of theology.com we are we're about a thousand students from a little over a thousand almost everybody's online we still have from the original pre-covered days a cohort of 30 or 40 you know uh people who are meeting physically and you know depending on how the the covet stuff works out we'll we'll do that you know each year with different classes but the first year is we spend 30 weeks going through the content of unseen realm you know 15 weeks of semester and then the second year they told me anything i care about well the way i i broke that down was it's dangerous well in my case it's especially dangerous um but i i wanted to do a year of what i called post-modern apologetics and so we have these contemporary post-modern apologetics old testament new testament what that means is i want to tackle subjects that get thrown at christians or that christians run into online facebook tv you know popular media you know hey genesis one is all that stuff copied from babylonian sources you know just stuff like that you know what what about you know the the idea that well the presentation of jesus is messiah that just doesn't conform to old testament messianic expectations really you know so it's all this kind of stuff you know that people just run into and they get they're you know beat over the head with by militant atheists and whatnot and i'll i'll be honest with you by internet amateurs okay that that that's who's float you know you're floating that boat there your friendly neighborhood troll ready to stop yeah it's it's these trolls and these militant atheist types and whatnot and and they are they themselves are dramatically underexposed to the topic that they are wielding as a weapon against people's faith and so that we we want to unpack one of those each week 15 weeks old 15 weeks new testament and just give people a better way not not to win an argument but a better way to frame the discussion and have the discussion because what you what you want to do is you don't want to you don't want to get a bigger club and then drive that person away what you want is to get the person to examine the basis of their own argument and see how it doesn't work and then maybe they'll they'll start examining well why why would i have thought that in the first place you know if if it's so flimsy if it's you know if if it doesn't work for very discernible reasons and i usually have people apply things to real life i'll give you if i give you a real quick one this notion that old testament you know stories about the moses you know patriarchs whatever they're that they can't be historical because we don't have parallel sources and all this stuff so here's a good test for you you know mr skeptic i want you to describe in writing your wedding how about the birth of your first child or maybe just your life story because when you hand that to me i'm going to apply the methods of critical scholarship to that do you have external sources for all the facts you're presenting oh you don't i'm throwing that out did you interview all the people you could have interviewed that were present at that event that you described oh you didn't too bad you know all basically these these criteria don't conform to real life see i think you could write the story of your wedding and it would be completely reliable even though it doesn't conform to modern historical methods at all okay and that's only two credits i mean there's five or six criteria that i could just run through the account of your wedding and destroy it as a historical source i guess you didn't get married i can draw no other conclusion again this is the kind of thing that we try to do in the apologetics class but let's just think about what you're being asked to believe and if this is true what else must be true or what can't be true you know it's just applying you know good critical thinking to a topic and showing that you know a lot of this stuff really just doesn't work in real life and not only that but the people using it don't try to apply it anywhere else it's it's trendy academia stuff is what it is so that's what we're doing at the school you know we're at the end of this calendar year we'll be we'll be through completely the two-year certificate program so it's going well and you know i'm sure we'll come up with some other things to do beyond the two years but that's where we're at right now well one comment i'll just make in terms of you know what mike was sharing related to the apologetics content people trying to corner you with just impossible questions or the aha i got you um you know for leaders pastors you know people are going to ask you weird questions strange questions likely people will try to get you on things you never encountered in seminary so it's never a bad thing to challenge yourself to get into other sources resources that are going to take you beyond the stuff that you learned as you were uh coming up pre pre-ministry days but just if you spend some time in in uh with what i would describe as some some of the fringe church spaces and you see the questions people have the things they're wrestling with to these folks these are some of these things are big problems that they're they're stuck they they're struggling to move forward in their faith or it's really challenging their belief and if you're equipped with solid answers and solid resources to connect with them they can move forward in their journey and they're not necessarily going to be stuck but um people have a whole wide range of weird questions there's strange stuff out in the internet that they're encountering and um you know you can turn them away and not answer their questions uh but they're gonna go somewhere else and find an answer so be great if you could give them a solid answer i know mike you do stuff like with is it fringe pop321 you get into some of the uh some of the stranger things that people can encounter on the internet but in terms of podcasts other content stuff that you're doing outside of the school and you're writing what are some of those other resources that you're putting out yeah the you mentioned fringe pop we have a youtube channel fringe pop321 we've got i don't know 120 episodes now but it is just what it sounds like you know fringy topics and pop culture you know you know ancient alien ancient aliens atlantis all this kind of stuff where we just try to you know get people to think more critically about primary sources about logical coherence asking questions that they never thought to ask and of course the show will never tell them to ask resources that are available to evaluate the topic so each episode you know we try to make it you know between 10 and 15 minutes or you know i guess 15 minutes is probably the you know the round number and we do it you know on video so it's a little bit more entertaining you know i've got an alien on my set he's my my favorite prop we put him in underwear most of the time so it's kind of funny um there's that pg that's good yeah yeah yeah my favorite thing is is the giorgio ancient aliens t-shirt for him but you know you can't wear that every week um we have of course the podcast naked bible podcast that's where we do biblical studies stuff uh pure a normal which you know putty was on your pastor was on we're gonna we've scheduled three episodes for this we haven't done one for a while but that's still up and the niche there is we discuss paranormal topics from the perspective of peer-reviewed scientific or academic literature because a lot of people don't realize that it's not just you know guys sleeping in haunted houses like you actually have you know serious people interested in these topics and they try to do stuff with experiments and whatnot so just discussing you know literature like that so that that's probably enough for for people to know that that mike is still into anything kind of old and weird but again the goal is that none of this stuff should threaten your your you know even a general theistic worldview but in particular a christian you know biblical worldview um there there is a way to think clearly and coherently about these things and the bible actually does you know comment on things that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to again if you're reading it like an ancient person so we we try to you know float around in that space and just try to do something useful whether a person is a christian or not fringe pop paranormal you know we're we hope that people who are not christians you know watch those shows that they're not overtly or christian by nature because you never know where what somebody's entry point is going to be into thinking better about jesus or the bible or something like that or just you know ancient sources in general you know the bible is just one of those and so we need to think well about that stuff and mike in terms of people connecting with you finding out more about your resources all the media you're doing what is your home base on the web yeah the nerve center is dr as in doctor msh.com drmsh.com that'll that'll take you to anything that i'm into um you know you have the fringe pop channel nakedbiblepodcast.com and purenormal.com all these things have their own domain name that match the titles we should mention my non-profit mclaugh that's miqlat.org i i own the rights the translation rights to two books supernatural and then the little one what does god want which is for seekers that helps you know people sort of graduate to supernatural if they want to but we pay for translations so supernatural's in like 35 languages now they're just free to take and repurpose in any way anybody wants and what does god wants in 20 or so so yeah because you can get to everything through drmsh.com and i do want to make mention if you have suffered through this whole interview i hope you learned something i always have fun talking to mike uh but if you want more on enoch uh the folks over at skywatch tv and defender publishing have a package they've put together it's got volume one and volume two of the readers commentary it's got a printed book of enoch and then also the book of enoch fallen angels and ancient aliens dvd so i'll be sure to include a link in the show notes for that so if you want to head over to their website you can pick that up they offer it for a very fantastic price like we do with every episode we'll have links where you can buy the book that we talked about i'll have links to all the places mike mentioned where you can connect with his content but sadly it is time to bring this episode to the sean david show to a close many thanks for being a part of my conversation with dr michael heiser once again our book today and this is the longest title and subtitle in history but i'm going to read the whole thing because i can't it's my show a companion to the book of enoch a reader's commentary volume 2 the parables of enoch first enoch 37 to 71 and again if you want to find out more about mike all of his resources a great place to start is his website you can find that at drmsh.com and mike it's always a joy to spend time with you my friend looking forward to having you back on the show when you have another book for us to talk about yeah you bet thank you

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Keywords: dr. michael heiser, michael heiser, sons of god, bible, bible prophecy, book of enoch, nephilim, fallen angels, genesis 6, bible study, supernatural, metaphysics, news, prophecy, reversing hermon, mount hermon, divine council, dr. mike heiser, ufo, antichrist, watchers, nephilim giants, giants, jesus christ, christianity, christian scholar, gods, demons, angels, ghosts, paranormal, mystery, yahweh, church, apologetics, titans, god, gilgamesh, annunaki, aliens, spiritual, truth, unseen realm

Id: d7JD5POJi9Y

Length: 48min 19sec (2899 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021