Joe Rogan said something on his podcast that made my blood run cold.
“The Book of Enoch is nuts! These Watchers came down and mated with human beings and created a race of giants called the Nephilim.”
He said it casually, like it was common knowledge.
But I didn't know.
I'm a Sunday school teacher. I lead a Men’s Bible study group. I've read the King James Version cover to cover more times than I can count. I considered myself a serious student of scripture.
And I had no idea about the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim, or the Watchers. So I looked more up about the Book of Enoch.
That’s when I found a documentary about the Qumran caves and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"The Dead Sea Scrolls contained books that aren't in your Bible."
"What do you mean?" I said out loud to an empty room.
I had no idea that the oldest biblical manuscripts ever discovered contained entire books that aren't in my Bible. Entire books. It wasn’t only the Book of Enoch.
Dr. James Tabor, a biblical historian, said something that stopped me in my tracks.
"The people who waited for the Messiah, the community that preserved these scrolls, considered these texts sacred scripture. They read Enoch. They read Jubilees. They studied them alongside Genesis and Isaiah. These weren't fringe documents. They were part of the library of Second Temple Judaism."
“How is this possible?” I thought to myself. My mind was racing.
"The books your modern Bible is missing," he continued, "were the books Jesus and the Apostles grew up reading."
What he revealed next explained why the earliest Christians read 88 books - while modern Protestants have been limited to 66 for barely 200 years.
And why the "complete Bible" I'd trusted my entire life was actually the most heavily edited version in Christian history.
If you've ever felt like something was missing from your Bible study...
If you've ever wondered why Jude quotes a book you can't find in your table of contents...
If you've ever asked why there's a 400-year gap between the Old and New Testaments that nobody explains...
Then what I discovered could save you from the spiritual stagnation I barely escaped.