The Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal Other Gods

The Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal Other Gods
0:00. What if I told you there's a version of the Bible found among the Dead Sea Scrolls where Yahweh is not the highest
0:06. God? What if a higher God divides the nations among a family of divine beings and Yahweh is just one of them that receives Israel? See, what if the Bible that most Christians grew up reading changed a key phrase from sons of God to sons of Israel? And that's not a hypothetical. That reading exists. It's ancient. It was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. [music] And it lines up with an ancient Greek tradition that also preserves heavenly beings in that verse.
0:34. See, I grew up Christian. I was taught that the Bible presents one clean, perfectly developed picture of God from page one. There's God, there are angels.
0:43. Everyone else is either a demon, an idol, or a confused pagan with way too much incense. Then you actually read the older versions of the text and heaven gets crowded fast. The Bible has gods, plural. It has sons of God. It has a divine council. It has heavenly beings assigned to nations and it has Yahweh compared with other gods. It has a psalm where God literally stands in an assembly of gods and sentences them. And once you put those pieces together with what we know about the older Canaanite high god L, the picture becomes explosive because one serious historical reconstruction says that Yahweh was not originally the one God above everything.
1:24. He was Israel's God within an older divine world. Over time, Yahweh absorbed the identity, titles, authority, and the throne of the older high God l until Yahweh became the most high himself.
1:40. That means the Bible itself may preserve fingerprints from a time before God became God with a capital G. And that raises an even more dangerous question because if these ancient texts say that Yahweh was once below a higher divine power, we're going to see that later early Christians actually said a very similar thing that the creator of this world was not the highest God. And that's going to take us to one of the most blasphemous ideas in Christian history. But first, we need the verse that cracks the whole damn thing open.
Chapter 2: The Verse That Changes Everything
2:12. See, in 1947, ancient manuscripts began turning up in caves near Kuman by the Dead Sea. But what they did to biblical studies [music] is really hard to overstate. See, before these discoveries, the Hebrew manuscripts that we had behind the traditional Hebrew Bible, meaning basically the [music] Old
2:28. Testament of the Bible, that came from the medieval period. But the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed physical copies of biblical books back roughly a thousand years earlier. Think about how important and crazy that discovery is. And when scholars compared these versions of the scriptures, one fact became impossible to ignore. Different copies often preserved different readings. And some of these differences changed the entire theological picture. One of the biggest sits in Deuteronomy 32. See, the later version that we're familiar with says that when the Most High divided humanity into nations, he fixed their boundaries according to the number of the sons of Israel. Here's exactly what it says.
3:07. When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For Yahweh's portion is his people. Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. Okay, I know, I know that sounds so religious that it wants to slide past your brain while you're thinking about lunch or the last Tik Tok that you watched. But stop and really see what's being said here because this is key. The Most High divides the nations in the distant past according to the number of the children of Israel. Now, there's already a very weird chronological problem here. Israel does not even exist yet in the scene being imagined. Now, some people try to make a symbolic argument about the traditional 70 nations and the 70 descendants of Jacob. People do that, fine, whatever. But let's see what happens when we look at a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The manuscript was of course given a very sexy name, 4Q Deuteronomy-J, 4Q37 for short. Yeah, archaeologists are not very good at branding, it turns out.
Chapter 3: “Sons of God” vs. “Sons of Israel”
4:13. But anyway, that's not important. It preserves the crucial phrase that we just read very differently. Instead of sons of Israel, it has Ben Elohim. And what does that mean? Sons of God, divine beings. So, let's read that scene again.
4:27. According to 4Q37, when Elon aortioned the nations, when he separated humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the people according to the number of the sons of God. For Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob, the allotment of his inheritance.
4:44. Change sons of God to sons of Israel. Why? Heaven looks dangerously populated.
4:53. That scene is a lot different here. Elon divides humanity and the nations are divied up according to divine sons and Yahweh gets one of them. Jacob, meaning Israel, is Yahweh's portion. Now, that does not sound like that Yahweh is the cosmic landlord handing out apartments.
5:14. It sounds more like Yahweh is one of the tenants receiving a unit, doesn't it?
5:18. Egypt, Babylon, Greece. Yahweh, you get Israel. fine, but I am flooding something.
5:28. And this is where the video stops being about ancient manuscript trivia and becomes a theological hand grenade.
5:33. Because if Elon and Yahweh are separate figures in this older layer, then the most high is above Yahweh. I mean, his
5:40. name is most high, a god above the God of the Bible. This means we have a hierarchy in the ancient divine world.
5:47. Eljan, the most high at the top, divine sons beneath him, one of them being Yahweh, who is associated with Israel.
5:55. When we look at the ancient Greek Bible, it also disagrees with the version that we're familiar with that says sons of Israel. See, most ancient Greek manuscripts instead reads angels of God.
6:07. And some even preserve wording equivalent to sons of God. So instead of sons of Israel, we have Elellion, the most high, dividing nations up to his sons, the sons of God. So think about how crazy that is. The version that we're familiar with basically says God divvied up the nations according to the children of Israel. But you look at 4Q37 in the Dead Sea Scrolls and it says that Eljon divied up the nations according to the sons of God. And then in the ancient
6:36. Greek version, it says that he divvied it up according to the angels of [music] God. Whether you're looking at the Hebrew or the Greek, it preserves a version where heavenly beings were in this verse. And one of the most important scholars of the Dead Sea
6:52. Scrolls, Emanuel Tove, argues that the divine reading is the older one and [music] that sons of Israel reflects a minuteslater attempt to remove the polytheistic picture. In other words, to remove the picture that there are many gods. That's a huge deal, don't you think? And that makes perfect sense when you think about how religious texts get cleaned up. See, if one version says there are divine sons connected to the nations, but then there's another version that makes those divine sons disappear. What direction is more likely if later Judaism is moving towards a more exclusive monotheism?
7:30. See, all it takes is the tradition becoming uncomfortable with older language. One [music] phrase gets changed and then the whole thing gets a lot smoother for the new version.
Chapter 4: Why the Dead Sea Scrolls Preserve Both Versions
7:40. Centuries pass, everyone forgets there was ever a bump to begin with. Now, to be completely fair, another Kuman manuscript, 4Q45, actually agrees with
7:49. Sons of Israel. So, the caves preserve both readings. So, I'm not saying this is evidence for one coordinated secret edit performed by the Vatican or the
7:58. Illuminati. It's evidence that multiple textual forms existed, but that doesn't weaken the important part here. The sons of God reading is genuinely ancient.
8:07. It's supported by more than one textual tradition. And it fits the next verse beautifully. See, Elellion, he divides, [music] and divine sons receive nations.
Chapter 5: The Bible’s Divine Council
8:17. What Yahweh gets is Israel. But now, let's go to Psalm 82. And Psalm 82 kicks the whole thing open because God walks into a room full of gods. Yeah. And this is in your Bible. Psalm 82:1 says, "God presides in the great assembly. He judges among the gods." Chat, this verse says, "God is literally judging other gods." User Dynamic just donated $5.
8:43. But in another verse, Yahweh says the only God. He's speedrunning monotheism like a boss. Yeah. God, assembly gods plural. Now, the Hebrew word translated gods is Elohim. The sentence gives you the scene. One divine figure stands in an assembly and judges other Elohim.
9:02. Now, there's been a lot of argument over whether these gods are actually human judges or supernatural beings. But the divine council reading fits in really well when you think about the ancient neareastern setting. It fits the language of the sons of the most high.
9:17. It fits Deuteronomy 32 and is widely defended in modern scholarship. And when you read the whole Psalm that way, it gets crazy because the gods have apparently been responsible for governing badly, as gods often do. Psalm
9:31. 82:2-4 says, "How long will you judge unjustly and show partially to the wicked? Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy. deliver them out of the hand of the wicked. [music] So basically these gods are being put on trial because they failed at justice.
9:51. Basically the charge is that these powerful beings protected the wicked and abandoned the vulnerable. Then Psalm
9:57. 82:6 drops the line that ties everything back to what we read earlier. It says, "I said you are gods. All of you are sons of the most high." There it is.
10:09. Gods, sons of the most high. In Deuteronomy 32, the Most High divides the nations according to divine sons. In Psalm 82, gods are called sons of the most high and are condemned for doing a shitty job at ruling. That is not some desperate conspiracy board connection where I've tied Leviticus to a Taco Bell receipt with red yarn. The concepts fit each other. A high god, a family or council of divine beings, authority over nations, and judgment when those powers fail. And then the psalm ends with this.
Chapter 6: When God Inherits All the Nations
10:39. Arise, God, judge the earth, for you inherit all of the nations. Think about [music] that. Inherit all of the nations. Why is that interesting?
10:48. Because if the nations had been divvied up among divine rulers, then the ending sounds like a takeover, doesn't it? The old rulers are condemned. Their authority is stripped. The victorious God inherits the whole world. And that is a story of divine supremacy being established. But really think about what's being said here. There are other Elohim. There is a divine council. There are supernatural rulers beneath a supreme god. The whole, "Oh, the Bible doesn't contain other gods" argument is already dead on the floor. The debate is now more about rank. Fine. Okay. But that's not the point. Calling lesser beings subordinate does not make the divine plurality disappear. The book of
11:28. Job talks about sons of God presenting themselves before Yahweh. First Kings has Yahweh seated on a throne with the heavenly host around him. While spirits literally pitch strategies for deceiving a king named Ahab. Psalm 89 describes an assembly of holy ones and asks who among the heavenly beings can be compared to Yahweh. Psalm 29 addresses sons of the
11:51. Almighty and tells them to give Yahweh glory. Are you starting to see what's happening here? See, this all evolved over time and it looks a lot like originally the scriptures were about many gods and Yahweh [music] was one of the sons. Then later Yahweh is described as starting to take over and become the highest god. Then eventually you get the position that we have today where Yahweh is the only god and there are no other gods. But guess what? The fingerprints are all over these things. We can see many gods mentioned many times. Now, Christianity tries to sweep that under the rug by saying that, "Oh, that's the Trinity." But come on, does that really fit here?
12:34. If you look at this thing with a straight face, heaven was crowded. As the Trinity is God using three accounts to like his own post, and the Bible says so over and over,
Chapter 7: “You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me” which brings us to something even more uncomfortable. The commandments themselves sound like they come from a world where other gods are real competitors. See, the commandments does not say other gods are fake. Okay, think about the first commandment. Number one, Exodus 20:3 says, "You shall have no other gods before me." Now, if you grew up Christian like me, your brain probably has been conditioned to auto translate that into there is only one true God and all the other gods are imaginary idols. But that's not what the sentence says. It is a command of loyalty. Don't have other gods before me. Imagine I told someone, "You shall have no other friends other than me."
13:32. Well, that would be a really weird way to communicate that no other friends even exist, right? But see, when you look at this straightforwardly, the command makes perfect sense in a religious world where there are multiple gods. But Israel owes exclusivity to
13:48. Yahweh. Now check this out. In Exodus it says, "Who is like you, Yahweh, among the gods?" Who is like you? Glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders.
14:02. Do you deny that Psalm 82 contains multiple gods? I do not recall.
14:07. Should we leave? Sir, your forgotten gods are literally in the shot.
14:12. I mean, how much more clear can you get among the gods? not among the imaginary things people mistakenly call gods among the gods. Again, later readers can try and reinterpret this. They can say that, oh well, they're talking about angels or demons or created spirits or false objects of worship or whatever label makes the system work, but the older language is still there staring at you in the face. Yahweh is praised as incomparable among other divine beings.
14:42. That's a lot different than saying no other divine beings exist. But first, I want to remind you right now, this is not just a video. You came looking for a channel, but you found a war. Not a physical war, but a war of the mind.
14:54. We're taking ideas that were buried by the church, forgotten, excluded, misrepresented, and we're putting them in front of millions of people. So, hit like, share, and subscribe because each time you do, you're sparking a new flame of transformation. [music] If you want to help out even more, you can become a member for free downloads on inner transformation and more. And get access to membersonly videos like this one called Is God Actually a Myth? Here's how to prove the shocking truth. Also, check out my books. And if you want a free way to support, follow me on Spotify. Links are in the description of this video. The basic idea is easy. Your
15:26. God is the God you worship. Your God may be the greatest God. Your God may demand exclusive loyalty. None of that requires you to deny the existence of every other god. And the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament, contains a ton of verses telling Israelites not to worship other gods. Now, ask yourself, why does that argument have to be made so often? If nobody believed those gods were real, the biblical writers had the easiest job in human history. Stop worshiping Baal.
15:56. Why? He doesn't exist. Fair point. Book over. Instead, the Bible is in a constant jealousy fight with rival divine beings and rival cults. It's not until later that things start getting a lot more absolute like in Isaiah where
16:12. Yahweh declares, "There is no God besides him." Isaiah 44:6 says, "I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God." People keep saying I sound insecure when I say there is no God beside. How often do you say it? Constantly. And are there other divine beings in your texts? That thunder is not emotional regulation.
Chapter 8: How Yahweh Became the Only God
16:31. Now that is strong monotheistic language. [music] And this is exactly the point. The language changes because the theology is not set in stone. It's something that developed over time.
16:41. Earlier material can speak comfortably about Yahweh among the gods. Later material can insist that Yahweh is the most powerful of all the gods. And then later material can come along and insist there is no god besides Yahweh. Are you seeing the developmental progression?
17:01. Yahweh is not the highest god. Yahweh is the highest god. Yahweh is the only god.
17:08. From a historical perspective that change is clear. The religion is moving.
17:12. A belief system that once contained multiple gods is being reorganized around one supreme deity. [music] And as the religion develops over time into a monotheistic religion, a religion of there being only one god, what happens to all the other gods? Well, things get twisted. They don't simply write them out. They often get demoted.
17:33. Hey guys, huge life update. I'm no longer a god. I'm an angel now. Did we lose powers? No, babe. Same crowded heaven, better branding.
17:41. Stop calling it a rebrand.
17:43. See, Yahweh becomes the god. What about all the other gods? Some start to be called angels. Some start to be called demons or idols. And eventually, the final system can look so damn different from the earlier one that believers assume that the later system had just always been there. Now, see, outside the Bible, in the same broader Canaanite world, we find a high god named L. And L looks suspiciously familiar.
18:09. I'm L. Elellion, the father of gods, creator, ancient high god. Are you wearing my entire resume?
18:16. It's called monotheism. Babe, look it up.
Chapter 9: The Older High God El
18:18. Because before Yahweh sat at the top, there was L. See, in 1928, excavations began around the ancient city of Ugarit.
18:27. That city had been destroyed around 1,200 BCE. And its texts are older than most of the biblical material in the forms we have now. And they preserve stories about Canaanite gods in a language closely related to Hebrew. And this is important because ancient Israel did not develop in some hermetically sealed spiritual containment room. It emerged in the same broader cultural world in that same region. A related language, related religious vocabulary, related divine imagery.
18:58. Let us make humanity in our image. Us. Delete that from the study notes.
19:07. And guess what? At Ugger, the senior divine figure is called L. L is the patriarch. He presides over the divine family. He sits at the top of a council.
19:17. His consort is called Avirat, related to the biblical asher. And then we have the younger gods who operate beneath that senior divine level. Now remember the language we've already seen, sons of God, sons of the most high, a divine council, nations connected to divine rulers. Suddenly those verses in the Bible, they stop looking like biblical glitches and they start looking like members of a large ancient family. And then there is the name Israel itself is Rael, not Isra Yahweh, but L is all over biblical names and titles. Daniel, Danielle, Samuel, Samuel, Bethl, Bethl, Emanuel, Emanuel L. Now, the patriarchal stories use titles like El Shadai, Elam, and Elan. And guess what? Genesis 14 even introduces Melzdc as a priest of
20:05. Ellejon, Godmost High. Genesis 14:18-20 says this. Melchazdc, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God most high. He blessed him and said, "Blessed be Abram of God most high, professor of heaven and earth.
20:23. Blessed be God most high, who has delivered your enemies into your hand." Now, look at what's going on here. The text is starting to merge Yahweh with Elon, the most high. See, a few verses later, Abraham swears to Yahweh, God, most high, professor of heaven and earth. That's very important because the
20:43. Bible we have is already merging identities. It's telling you Yahweh is Ellelon. Traditional theology will say,
20:50. "Oh, of course, same God, just different titles." But history asks a very different question. What if Yahweh and L came from different streams that eventually merged? Now remember, this is not a fringe theory invented by people who hate church camp. I mean, I was sent to church camp and I hated it, but that's besides the point. This is one of the major ways historians reconstruct
Chapter 10: When El and Yahweh Became One early Israelite religion. And Exodus contains a line that becomes extremely interesting with that in mind. Exodus says, "God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty. But by my name Yahweh, I was not known to them.
21:33. You shall have no other gods before me.
21:36. So other gods exist, Moses, thou shalt not question God. That did not sound like a no.
21:43. Now, how does religion try and fit that in? They would say that this is one God progressively revealing his name. But if you look at it historically, it looks like an old L tradition being welded to a Yahweh tradition. See, the patriarchs knew El Shadai. Moses knows Yahweh. The final text says they are the same being.
22:04. This is basically what a religious merger looks like after the merger succeeds. In other words, religions evolve through stories. Groups merge.
22:12. Titles move around. Old gods are identified with new gods. One deity takes over another deity's symbols and roles and myths and sacred places and authority. Eventually, the distinction starts to disappear. Then the descendants of the tradition look backwards and say, "Oh no, there there was never a distinction at all." But when you think back to Deuteronomy, Elon, the most high, divides the nations. [music] The divine sons receives their portion. Yahweh receives Jacob, Israel. Later, Yahweh is declared as Eljan. Now, that's not just a little tiny theological adjustment. That is a promotion from having a territory to owning the cosmos. And some of the oldest biblical texts may actually preserve another clue about where Yahweh came before that merger. So, if Yahweh is the timeless universal God who has always been the unquestioned cosmic center at Israel's religion, some of the Bible's oldest poetic imagery is weird
Chapter 11: Where Did Yahweh Come From? as hell because Yahweh actually comes in from a geographic direction. In Judges 5, it pictures Yahweh as marching from
23:18. Seier and Edom. Judges 5:4-5 says, "Yahweh, you went out of Seir. When you marched out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, the sky also dropped." Yes, the clouds dropped water. The mountains quaked at Yahweh's presence, even Si at the presence of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Now, check out what
23:39. Deuteronomy 33:2 says. Yahweh [music] came from Sinai and rose from Sier to them. He shone from Mount Pan. Now check this out. Habacook 3:3 says this. God came from Timan, the holy one from Mount
23:55. Pan. Okay, so we got Seir, Edom, Sinai, Pan, Taman. These traditions repeatedly point south or southeast of Israel. Now, this has led many scholars to think Yahweh worship may have had southern roots before Yahweh became Israel's national deity. There are even Egyptian inscriptions from the late Bronze Age that refers to Shasu nomads associated with a place written something like YHW.
24:24. Now, is that definitely Yahweh? No, it's not exactly a birth certificate, but the connection is debated. And placed inside those verses that we just read all about the south, it becomes another piece of a larger reconstruction. See, L belongs comfortably in the older Canaanite religious world. Yahweh traditions repeatedly point south. But then inside
24:45. Israel, Yahweh and L get merged into one. Yahweh takes L's high god titles.
24:52. He takes his father's role. He takes the creator role and he presides over the council. In effect, Yahweh becomes Eljan. And when seen that way, minutesDeuteronomy 32 becomes almost painfully easy to understand. Those verses preserved an older worldview where Eljan presides over divine sons and Yahweh is associated with Israel. Later religion identifies Yahweh with Eljon. The older ideas and hierarchy collapses. Yahweh is now the one at the top. So the biblical concept of God did not drop into history fully formed and unchanging. The Bible is like a library created across centuries by communities whose religious views developed and you can watch that development happen. The old language is still trapped inside the later book like fossils in a wall. Now that brings us back to the Dead Sea [music] Scrolls because Deuteronomy 32 has another
Chapter 12: The Gods Bow Before Yahweh fossil near the end and this one literally tells the gods to bow. Now near the end of Deuteronomy 32, the later Maseretic Hebrew [music] text has a shorter version of verse 43. But the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript 4Q44 preserves additional language that lines up with the ancient Greek tradition. And it says this, "Rejoice, O heavens, with him, and bow down to him, all gods, for he will avenge the blood of his sons. He will take vengeance on his adversaries.
26:17. Repay those who hate him and cleanse the land of his people. Bow down to him, all gods. There they are." Again, at the beginning of the verse, the older reading has divine sons connecting with the division of nations. And at the end, gods are ordered to bow to Yahweh. Now, really think about this here. Those verses open in a divine world where the most high Elon distributes nations among heavenly powers and Yahweh gets Israel.
26:44. But those verses end with Yahweh victorious and the other gods bowing before him. That's a supremacy story.
26:50. Yahweh begins with a part, a piece, a portion. Yahweh ends with the gods at his feet. But however way you slice it, the other gods are there. The divine sons are there. There's a hierarchy.
27:02. This is why it's frustrating when people hear biblical criticism and think that scholars are just trying to invent problems for Christianity. You don't have to invent this. The manuscript is sitting right there. The later version has less gods and then ultimately only one god. But the older stories preserve more. The history is there. It's visible. Anyone can see that. And once you see that history, the later claims of absolute monotheism start looking less like the starting point and more like the destination. See, one of the most fascinating things about the Bible is that you can almost hear the argument changing over time. Early language says, "Who is like Yahweh among the gods?" Then it becomes do not worship other gods. Then rival gods are mocked, condemned, or demonized. Then Yahweh is suddenly above all gods. Then Yahweh declares, "There is no other God.
27:51. I am God and there is no other mods." ee, that's a trajectory. And Deuteronomy 32 itself contains different kinds of language stacked together. See, verse 17 attacks Israel for sacrificing to other gods and calls them demons.
28:12. Deuteronomy says, "They sacrificed to demons, not gods, to gods that they didn't know, to new gods that came up recently, which your fathers didn't dread." Okay, so notice what's happening here. The rival gods, they're not treated neutrally. They're degraded.
28:29. They're demonized. They're illegitimate or new. This is basically religious competition with brass [music] knuckles.
28:35. You can see the category being pushed downward. Then verse 39 has Yahweh say this. See now that I myself am he. There is no God with me. I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal. There is no other who can deliver out of my hand.
28:50. There is no God beside me. There is no God beside me. Get out of frame.
28:57. This is why he never goes live without a filter. minutesNow you can see we're moving towards total supremacy. By the time you reach texts like Isaiah, Yahweh is no longer presented as Israel's God among gods.
29:08. See, the direction is really clear. The biblical tradition increasingly centralizes everything in Yahweh. And that's important to anyone who was taught that the Bible's theology is one seamless revelation. Because if God's identity is being constructed across history, then later doctrine is not explaining the earlier Bible. It's now rewriting how the earlier Bible gets remembered. You read sons of God and are told angels. You read gods and are told human judges. You read no other gods before me and are told it means no other gods exist. You read let us make man in our image and are told oh that was the trinity hiding in Genesis. Every rough edge gets sanded down until the final religion looks like it was present from the first sentence. Then someone like me points out the rough edges and half the internet reacts as though I personally edited Deuteronomy with a Sharpie. Hey, I didn't put the gods in the Bible. The Bible put the gods in the Bible. My crime is just reading the noun out loud.
30:07. According to the number of the sons of God. Sons of who?
30:11. God. Yeah, there's a whole divine family. Try not to yourself. Sunday school is going to hate us.
Chapter 13: Early Christians Asked the Same Question
30:17. See, Christianity inherited a Bible full of heavenly beings, rulers, powers, authorities, angels, demons, sons of
30:24. God, Elohim. Then early Christians began asking, "Hey, what do all those layers mean?" And guess what? A lot of the earliest Christians asked the question that would get you thrown out of a lot of churches before the worship band finished [music] the first song. Get this. Many early Christians asked, "What if the creator himself is just one of the lower powers? What if the God who says there is no other besides me is wrong? What if there is a God above God?
30:53. Now we're in Gnostic territory." [music] And this is where the story gets even more insane. Now, if you've never heard the wordnosticism, minuteshere is the in a nutshell version. The term gnostic ornostic Christianity is often used as an umbrella term for a messy family of ancient Christian and related movements. Early Christians, we call Gnostics, have beliefs that look nothing like what we were taught in Sunday school. Now, they didn't all agree with each other, but many of these movements shared a radical idea. The creator and ruler of the physical cosmos, the God of the Bible, is not the highest divine being. Above that God is a greater hidden source called the one.
31:37. And human beings contain something connected to that higher reality. And salvation involves nosis, meaning spiritual knowledge or awakening to what you really are and where you come from.
31:49. Yo, what's up guys? Today we are reviewing this bread and wine. Is this literally your body? Please stop reviewing salvation for engagement.
31:59. Now, let me be clear. I am not saying the Dead Sea Scrolls are Gnostic.
32:02. They're not. The Gnostic Christian systems came later. But here's why it's important. Because the older biblical world already contains levels of divine power. A most high God, divine sons, national powers, a council, etc., etc.
32:15. Later, some of the earliest Christians inherit that scriptural universe, and some of them radicalize the hierarchy.
Chapter 14: The Gnostic God Above the Biblical God in a gnostic book called the secret book of John. Saclas, the god of the Bible, is a lower ruler who goes by many different names. Sometimes he's called Yald Debelt. Other times he's called Saclas, which means the fool, and other times Samuel, meaning the blind god. The god of the Bible is described as powerful but ignorant of the higher divine world above him. And then he makes a declaration that should sound very familiar. He says, "I am God and there is no other God besides me." [music] And what did the Gnostics think about that? The Gnostics thought that that was crazy and that that God couldn't see above his own level. So he blindly believed that he was the ultimate reality. Imagine a landlord who owns one apartment building and therefore concludes there can be no other apartment buildings. In another
33:09. Gnostic text called the reality of the rulers, the God of the Bible makes his claim that he's the only God. There is no other gods besides him, etc. And a voice from the higher reality answers and says, "You are mistaken, Samuel," meaning god of the blind or the blind god.
33:27. There is no power above me. [screaming] You are mistaken, Samuel. [applause] This machine is biased, brother. Heaven itself just fact checked your ass. So, as we can see, there are different ideas across history saying very similar things about the creator god of the
33:44. Bible as not actually being the highest god. And when these early Christian movements came around saying that, remember they were not one tiny fringe movement that nobody cared about. And anyone that says otherwise are just lying. See, some of the Christians teaching versions of this minutesidea were huge. In other words, this was not three weirdos in a basement. For example, let's look at Marcian. Marcian was one of the most important Christian figures of the second century, even though most Christians today hear his name only if they accidentally wander into a church history class. But what did Marcian actually say? He made a huge distinction between the creator god of the Jewish scriptures and the good previously unknown god revealed by Jesus. See, for Marcian, the creator was not the ultimate god. There was a higher God. And that higher God is who Jesus comes from, not Yahweh. And then Marcian did something historically massive. He assembled the world's first Christian Bible. And he specifically did so to separate the idea that Jesus came from that vindictive creator God. Think about how crazy that is. While Christians were still fighting over what Christianity even was, a guy teaching that the God of the Old Testament was not the highest God showed up with the world's first
34:58. Christian Bible, the first Christian cannon. And guess what? His movement, the Marcianites, spread fast, so wide that church writers spent generations trying to take it down. Tertullian wrote five books against Marcian. Now, you do not write five books against a movement because Kevin and Joe are doing forbidden Bible study in the garage. You write five books because the idea will not die. Some historians say that the Marcianite movement was so popular that it was even more popular in some areas than the version of Christianity that we know today. Then there are the Valentinians. Valentinus and his followers became one of the largest and most influential Christian movements of the second and third centuries. See, they didn't look at themselves as heretics. They understood themselves as Christians. They interpreted Christian scripture. They participated in
35:47. Christian communities. But what did they have to say? They argued that the highest divine reality transcended the lower creator god and the broken structure of the material world. And then you have the sethian gnostics. The secret book of John which is a sethian gnostic text displays a vast hierarchy way above the creator. An invisible source of pure light is above everything simply called the one or the monad. The God of the Bible is described as a lower cosmic ruler who wants to enslave humanity forever. So when we start looking at early Christianity, we start seeing a common theme. There were [music] extremely popular wide reaching movements of Christianity that claimed that the God of the Bible was not the highest God. that there was a higher source above him and that Jesus came from that higher source, not the God of the Bible. And of course, that clashed with the version that we know today. But guess what? One side won.
36:50. Which of you is actually most high? I invented fire. And he still cannot handle sauce.
Chapter 15: How One Version of Christianity Won Pasted text minutesThe forms of Christianity that identified the creator, the God of Israel, and the father of Jesus as the one supreme god gained dominance.
37:09. Marcianite churches disappeared.
37:10. Valentinian texts disappeared for centuries. Books labeled heretical stopped being copied. Just they were just destroyed or left to decay. Then modern Christians inherited the winners's version of the story and assumed that that was the one true story. That's how history works. The winning version becomes Christianity.
37:30. The version that got stamped out becomes a weird heretical cult. And when you put that early Christian fight besides the older Israelite evidence, the question becomes bigger than whether one verse has one interpretation or not. We're looking at a recurring religious pattern. Yahweh says, "There is no other god but me." But an older biblical layer may remember Elan as being above him.
37:53. The Gnostic Yal Deote, who is the creator god of the Bible, says, "There is no other god." And the Gnostic book minutesanswers, "You are mistaken." And even calls him a blind god. This is why it's so important to me as an ex-Christian to get this information across. It's because the history breaks the spell of absolute authority that's controlling the world. See, I grew up in a form of
38:16. Christianity where the Bible was not presented as a bunch of ancient texts with competing traditions, edits, layers, arguments, and development. It was presented as just the answer to everything. God said it, the Bible recorded it, the church explained it.
38:30. Your job was just to obey it. And whatever you do, don't accidentally masturbate your way into eternal fire.
38:36. See, when a book is placed above being criticized, every contradiction in that book doesn't become a contradiction anymore. It becomes your failure to understand it. Every atrocity and violent act committed in the Bible becomes God works in mysterious ways.
38:52. And this is why the Dead Sea Scrolls are important far beyond just one verse.
38:56. Because they physically show you that the Bible had drafts, not metaphorical drafts, actual ancient manuscripts with different words. See, the church I grew up in did not say, "Here is one late age in a 3,000year argument about God." No, it said this is what God has always said. If you think the doctrine fell from heaven, disagreement feels like rebellion against reality itself. I mean, let's be real here. It's brainwashing. But when you start to look at things with a critical eye, that brainwashing can start to deteriorate.
39:24. And once you start seeing those contradictions and different versions, the polished version begins to crack.
39:28. And I don't care how holy an authority claims to be. If it protects predators and exploits the desperate and silences victims and becomes cruel and uses scripture and God to back it up, you can know that it's full of And that's why it's important to call it out for what it is. Just because you slap a dove on something or a cross doesn't make it holy. And we need to point that out because power must be accountable.
39:52. Even gods can be put on trial. Even the Bible contains a scene where beings called gods are told their authority can be revoked because they ruled unjustly. minutesAnd what has been more unjust than the system of mainstream Christianity and all [music] the cruelty it has supported and perpetuated throughout history? So think about this. What authority in your life have you mistaken for the most high? Is it a church, a parent, uh political affiliation, a guru, your own ego, maybe an algorithm? The response to this is not simply blind rebellion. True courage is the ability to question.
40:24. Question what's above the authority.
40:26. What evidence supports it? What happens if it's wrong? Questioning is the beginning of freedom. Your job is to wake the hell up and think. That might sound simple, but so many people are simply in a sleepwalking state. Never thinking for themselves. And by the very fact that you have had an open mind enough to watch this video to the end tells me that you are a thinker. So look at the evidence. Ask what survived. Ask what got renamed or demoted or erased.
40:54. Who told you their version was the eternal version? and question it. See if it holds up to truth. That's why we're doing this here on this [music] channel, because this knowledge belongs to everyone willing to look. So share it.
41:07. And if this cracked open your idea of the biblical God, the next question is even more insane. Watch my video on the monad, the one and the gnostic idea of the true God beyond the creator, because this is where the ancient question explodes into one of the most blasphemous spiritual rebellions in Christian history. The Dead Sea Scrolls gave us the crack and the Gnostics kicked down the wall.