Banned From The Bible & The Masada Tablet

Prof. Ken Hanson discussed “banned from the Bible” stories that were too explosive to make the cut into the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and a recently discovered ancient tablet that contains text similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls. In contrast to the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the tablet’s text appears as ink on stone, and is said to date back to just before Jesus’ birth. “It’s a message delivered by the angel Gabriel” about a messianic character who will rise from the dead,” and is written in the apocalyptic style of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he reported. But it is possible that the stone is a forgery, he added.

One interesting ancient text found at the ancient site of Masada, “Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” refers to a airborne craft and “non-terrestrial beings.” It describes a procession of angels ascending to a heavenly temple, as they soar in a Merkabah or chariot-like throne, Hanson detailed.

Encounters with such “non-terrestrial” beings may be one reason a number of ancient texts were excluded from the Bible, he said. A whole race of beings were spawned by the Nephilim, according to some of the banned books of the Bible, like the Book of First Enoch. Fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a number of these excluded books and are like “the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle,” said Hanson. “We’re more than what we know; I think these banned books are shouting this at us…that our consciousness is something more than just the body,” he shared.

Biography:

Dr. Ken Hanson is a dynamic author, lecturer, and founder of “Treasures in Time,” an organization devoted to disseminating knowledge of the Biblical and classical world. He has dug on archaeological sites in the Middle East, lived in a politically volatile region of northern Galilee, and taught Hebrew on an Israeli agricultural settlement. He has also worked with a television news-gathering operation in a war zone in southern Lebanon, at the height of the civil war that left the jewel of the Mediterranean in ruins.

The Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia “the books”) is a canonical collection of texts considered sacred in Judaism or Christianity. Different religious groups include different books within their canons, in different orders, and sometimes divide or combine books, or incorporate additional material into canonical books. Christian Bibles range from the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon to the eighty-one books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon.

The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, contains twenty-four books divided into three parts; the five books of the Torah (“teaching” or “law”), the Nevi’im (“prophets”), and the Ketuvim (“writings”). The first part of Christian Bibles is the Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible divided into thirty-nine books and ordered differently than the Hebrew Bible. The Catholic Church and Eastern Christian churches also hold certain deuterocanonical books and passages to be part of the Old Testament canon. The second part is the New Testament, containing twenty-seven books; the four Canonical gospels, Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one Epistles or letters and the Book of Revelation.

By the second century BCE Jewish groups had called the Bible books “holy,” and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible “The Holy Bible” (τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια). Many Christians consider the whole canonical text of the Bible to be divinely inspired. The oldest surviving complete Christian Bibles are Greek manuscripts from the fourth century. The oldest Tanakh manuscript in Hebrew and Aramaic dates to the tenth century CE, but an early fourth-century Septuagint translation is found in the Codex Vaticanus.

The Bible was divided into chapters in the thirteenth century by Stephen Langton and into verses in the sixteenth century by French printer Robert Estienne and is now usually cited by book, chapter, and verse. The Bible has estimated annual sales of 25 million copies, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West where it was the first mass printed book.

The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the same word in Medieval Latin and Late Latin and ultimately from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia “the books” (singular βιβλίον biblion).

Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra “holy book”, while biblia in Greek and Late Latin is neuter plural (gen. bibliorum). It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (biblia, gen. bibliae) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. Latin biblia sacra “holy books” translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, “the holy books”.