The Books Jesus Read That Never Made the Bible with Dr. Matthias Henze
The Dig In Podcast w/Johnny OvaShow Notes
Everyone talks about the four hundred silent years between the Old and New Testaments. Dr. Matthias Henze of Rice University came on the Dig In Podcast to say something that changes the way you read your Bible. Those years were never silent. In the gap between Malachi and Matthew, Jewish writers produced an entire library, and Jesus and his first followers knew it well.
In this conversation we open that lost world. Henze walks through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and shows why the New Testament is filled with things the Old Testament never prepared you for. Synagogues, rabbis, Pharisees, a densely populated world of angels and demons, a coming Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead. None of it appears in the Hebrew Bible the way it does in the Gospels. Henze traces where these ideas actually came from, and lands on a single verse in Luke 4 that stops the whole synagogue cold once you know what the audience already believed.
Dr. Matthias Henze is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at Rice University, where he founded the Program in Jewish Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and is one of the few scholars equally at home in Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament. He is the author of Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why the "silent years" between the Testaments were actually a time of explosive Jewish creativity - What the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls really are and how they differ from one another - Why these books were left out of the Bible, and who narrowed the field after the Temple fell in 70 AD - Where the expectation of a coming Messiah came from, and the Hebrew texts that were later read messianically - How angels, demons, and Satan developed from near silence in the Old Testament into the crowded spiritual world of the Gospels - How the resurrection of the dead grew from a metaphor for exile in Ezekiel into a belief Jesus and Paul could simply assume - What books like 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra reveal about how Judaism wrestled with the destruction of the Temple - The verse in Luke 4 that carries far more weight than most readers ever notice
Guest:
Dr. Matthias Henze
Book: Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus- https://a.co/d/0bMM077j
Website: matthiashenze.net
Rice University, Program in Jewish Studies
Stay Connected: Website- Johnnyova.com Youtube- https://www.youtube.com/@thejohnnyova The Revelation Reset: https://a.co/d/hiUkW8H
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