Wonderfully written and truthful. I find it lines up exactly with what I've been shown over the past few months. There are obviously 2 spiritual forces. The vortex or storm is getting all the attention. It not only sends out chaos via spinning arms likened to the spokes of a wagon wheel in motion, but internally, the vortex is centripetal, with and an ever increasing oppressive force.
Once I understood this, I was backed off to see the 'cross' force, that precedes the vortex, flows across the storm and continues after the storm. It is steady and eternal. Afterwards I was shown it in picture format which I won't go into here and now...but imagine my surprise, when a month later, I discovered the same 'picture' described at the end of chapter 5 in the Wisdom of Solomon!!
I find it exceedingly interesting that you've described this above: just from the opposite view...how our culture is in essence cutting across the ancient flow of energy that is eternal, from the Father of Heavenly Lights! The force it is following will end in it's destruction, to all who are driven by the vortex/storm's winds.
One question. The more I read the 'lost' books, the more I desire a Strong's concordance/dictionary equivalent for these books. Is there one easily available you would recommend? I must admit to not searching overly hard for one yet, but hoping there is such an accompanying book.
There is something bracing and attractive in your insistence that modern man is not saved by novelty, that extraction is real, that human beings are being flattened into inputs and outputs, and that older wisdom speaks with a steadier voice than trending opinion. On that much, faithful Christianity can nod in agreement. The Church has been warning about disordered appetites, false freedoms, and soul-shrinking systems since long before the first server rack began humming.
But truth deserves not only passion... it deserves proportion. And your thesis, like a sword swung too widely, cuts some genuine enemies and several innocent bystanders at the same stroke.
You present “ancient wisdom” as the only weapon left, and then quietly redefine that wisdom as a particular enlarged canon plus a total explanatory framework of hierarchy, covenant, and cosmic structure — mediated through your interpretive grid. Yet faithful Christian teaching has always made a careful distinction between what is ancient and what is apostolic. Not everything old is authoritative. Not every preserved text is inspired. A ruin may be ancient; that does not make it a cathedral.
The irony is that faithful Christianity is itself the great defender of ancient wisdom, but it does not defend it as an archaeological collection. It defends it as a living inheritance. The faith is not a scroll archive but a sacramental civilization. The “permanent patterns” are not secured by multiplying texts but by preserving truth through worship, doctrine, moral teaching, and apostolic succession. A library alone cannot save a culture. A living Church sometimes can.
Your contrast between hierarchy and modern flattening also needs refinement. You are right that reality has structure. Creation is not a democratic committee. But faithful Christian teaching does not present hierarchy as cosmic control architecture; it presents it as ordered service under God. The highest in the Kingdom kneels lowest. Authority exists not to extract but to give — which is why the central image of faithful Christianity is not a throne but a Cross. When hierarchy is severed from sacrifice, it becomes tyranny whether ancient or modern.
You speak as though modernity deleted sacred order and installed the Algorithm as a rival liturgy. There is insight there, but also exaggeration. Technology can deform attention; it can also extend charity, knowledge, and connection. The faithful Christian view of tools has always been morally discriminating rather than mythically alarmed. The printing press spread both heresy and Scripture. The network spreads both confusion and truth. Babel is not silicon; it is pride.
Then there is your recurring appeal to the 81-book canon as operating manual, cosmic map, and warfare guide. Here again, the claim outruns the case. Faithful Christianity does not fear broader ancient literature; it reads much of it profitably. But it does not mistake contextual illumination for binding revelation. The canon recognized by the historic Church is not a truncated survival kit; it is a sufficient proclamation of salvation. The purpose of Scripture is not to provide a complete cosmological control panel; it is to make us wise unto salvation in Christ. When a text collection is promoted from witness to weapon system, we are already drifting from faithful Christian teaching into esoteric strategy.
You warn that without roots, people are easily programmed. That is true, and it is precisely why faithful Christianity roots believers not merely in texts but in a teaching community that spans centuries. The paradox you resist is the one you most need: authority is not the enemy of rootedness but one of its chief safeguards. A man alone with ancient books and a strong interpretive lens is not necessarily anchored; he may simply be self-authorized.
The deepest correction, though, is this: ancient wisdom is not the only weapon left. It is not even the primary one. The primary weapon of faithful Christianity is grace — carried through truth, sacrament, repentance, and sanctity. The decisive victories in Christian history were not won by those with the largest textual arsenal but by saints; they were men and women conformed to Christ. Empires have fallen to monks with nothing but prayer, doctrine, and charity rightly lived. That is not romanticism; it is record.
You are right that we should not go forward by amputating memory. But neither should we go forward by absolutizing one stream of antiquity and turning it into a master key for every modern lock. The past is a lamp, not a lever. It gives light so we may walk, not control so we may dominate.
The way forward is not nostalgia, and it is not insurgency by canon expansion. It is fidelity to the truth once delivered to the saints, faithfully taught, faithfully lived, and faithfully handed on. That path is older than any algorithm and stronger than any system of extraction, because it does not merely align with the grain of the universe. It was spoken into existence by its Maker.
You're defending the Catholic Western canon as if it represents universal Christianity. It doesn't.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in communion with Rome for centuries preserved Enoch, Jubilees, and Jasher as canonical Scripture. Not as "helpful tradition" As SCRIPTURE.
Jude quotes Enoch as authoritative prophecy. The apostolic church used these texts. Ethiopian Christianity never stopped. You call this "variation" and "historical diversity" I call it preservation vs deletion.
Your "magisterial authority" is regional not universal. Ethiopian bishops have apostolic succession too. They just didn't delete the texts that predicted their own removal. That's a choice not complexity, and it reveals whose interpretation you're actually defending.
Your reply sharpens the claim, which is good, because it lets us examine it cleanly. But once again, your conclusion depends on collapsing distinctions that history and theology keep carefully separate. If we slow the argument down and keep the categories straight, your charge of “deletion versus preservation” does not hold.
You say I am defending a “Catholic Western canon as if it represents universal Christianity.” I am not. I am defending the canon recognized by the historic, conciliar Church across Greek, Latin, and most Eastern communions — not merely the Latin West — and later dogmatically affirmed in faithful Christianity as binding. That canon was not produced by one region acting alone, nor by one bishopric trimming texts for control. It emerged through centuries of liturgical use, patristic citation, episcopal discernment, and cross-regional reception. Rome ratified what the broader Church had largely converged upon; it did not invent it ex nihilo.
Now to the Ethiopian claim, because precision matters here.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is ancient and venerable. It is not — historically — a counterexample that overturns conciliar canon recognition. It developed with relative geographic isolation, a distinct liturgical language, and a broader ecclesiastical literature set. Its wider canon reflects that ecosystem. That is not proof of conspiracy elsewhere; it is proof of regional textual culture. Diversity of canon lists in late antiquity and the early medieval period is a documented fact across multiple regions — Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian — before universal standardization matured. Variation is not vandalism.
You also state that the Ethiopian Church was “in communion with Rome for centuries” while preserving Enoch, Jubilees, and Jasher as Scripture. That is historically overstated. Ethiopia’s primary long-standing communion was with the Alexandrian (Coptic) patriarchate, not sustained full communion with Rome across the centuries. The Ethiopian Catholic Church, which is in communion with Rome, does not function as an independent canonical authority overturning conciliar determinations. So the communion premise you’re using to create a contradiction is not stable.
More importantly, even if a regional apostolic church preserves additional books as canonical, that fact alone does not logically imply that others “deleted” inspired texts. That conclusion would only follow if you first prove that those additional books meet the Church’s criteria for inspiration and universal normativity (apostolic authority, continuous catholic liturgical reception, and doctrinal consonance with the rule of faith) across the whole Church. You have asserted that. You have not demonstrated it.
Take your appeal to Jude and Enoch. Yes, Jude cites Enoch. That proves familiarity and respect, not canonicity. The New Testament also cites non-canonical sources elsewhere — Paul quotes pagan poets; Acts quotes Greek writers. No serious canon principle in faithful Christianity has ever been “if quoted, then Scripture.” The canon rule was never that thin. Otherwise half of classical literature would qualify.
You say, “They preserved what predicted their own removal.” That is a striking line, but it is rhetoric, not argument. It assumes motive without evidence and turns disagreement into proof of guilt. That is not historical reasoning; it is narrative framing. To establish deliberate suppression, you would need documentary evidence of coordinated removal campaigns targeting those books because of their content. What we actually have is widespread early uncertainty about certain texts, uneven liturgical usage, and eventual conciliar stabilization. That is complexity, not crime scene.
Now to authority, because this is the real hinge.
You argue that magisterial authority is “regional, not universal,” and therefore suspect. But here is the unavoidable logical question: by what authority do you determine which apostolic successions are normatively binding and which canonical judgments are valid? You cannot answer “by the source texts” without first settling which texts count and how they are interpreted. That immediately returns us to adjudicating authority. There is no Christianity without an authority structure somewhere — conciliar, episcopal, communal, or individual. Your model does not remove authority; it privatizes it and then treats that privatization as neutrality.
Faithful Christian teaching holds that Christ did not leave behind a book alone, but a teaching Church with sacramental and doctrinal authority, capable (however imperfectly in her members) of rendering binding judgments for the sake of unity and truth. Without that, canon cannot be settled, doctrine cannot be defined, and heresy cannot be named except as “whatever I think is wrong.” That is not liberation from monopoly; it is the multiplication of magisteria, each one-person wide.
Finally, a theological point that should not be skipped: the sufficiency of Scripture for salvation does not depend on maximal textual inclusion but on inspired content ordered to Christ. Faithful Christianity has always maintained that the recognized canon is sufficient to make us wise unto salvation. A larger library may be valuable; it is not therefore inspired. Edification is not inspiration. Antiquity is not canonicity. Usefulness is not normativity.
So the real fork in the road is this:
Either canon recognition emerged through the Spirit-guided discernment of the apostolic Church expressed in councils and continuous reception, in which case regional variation is a stage in convergence, not proof of corruption, or canon is determined by whichever preserved corpus best fits one’s warfare framework, in which case authority has simply moved from Church to interpreter, and “preservation” means “agreement with my grid.”
You are right to care about roots, warfare, and seriousness. But seriousness requires evidentiary standards as well as suspicion. Once those standards are applied, the story is not preservation versus deletion. It is discernment versus reduction.
I agree that claims should be examined. That is exactly why I’ve been pressing for clear criteria, evidence standards, and adjudication principles. Questions are healthy. They just need answers at the same level of precision. I’m content to leave the arguments on the table for readers to weigh.
Your view requires trusting that the Holy Spirit guided Roman political councils in the fourth century more than the apostolic transmission to Ethiopia in the first century. It's over bro, and I'll dig deeper and share more. Im only getting started.
That’s a false dilemma. My view does not require trusting fourth-century Roman councils over apostolic transmission anywhere. It holds that the same Spirit who guided the apostolic Church continued guiding the Church’s conciliar discernment across regions — Greek, Latin, and others — in recognizing the canon. Ethiopia represents one ancient reception stream; councils represent cross-regional adjudication. Those are not rivals but different levels of authority. In any case, I’ve stated my criteria and evidence standards clearly. Readers can weigh them. I’ll leave it there.
I’ve been looking to buy a physical copy of the Ethiopian Canon. However, I’ve hesitated because I’ve heard the versions available online are sloppy & rushed and not well translated. Do you have any recommendations? Where can I find the best version for purchase?
A complete official translation does not exist. Most of the Bibles you see online are cash grabs. I recommend the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees translated by R. H Charles, which are freely available online.
Thanks for the reply! I do like physical copies when I can get them. I’m a bit of a scribble hound, highlighting and underlining, but I will check out Charles’ online versions of Enoch & Jubilees. I have the Hermenia Translation of Enoch 1 (the version Heiser favored) on my shelf. Any rumors regarding when an official translation of the Ethiopian Canon will be available? Is a translation in progress?
Personally, I researched a bunch of possible choices, then prayed through them. 2 books I was to clearly avoid, and two books the Holy Spirit clearly indicated I was to buy. I am currently making my way through, "Apocrypha Complete: All Lost Books of the Bible including Psalms, Jasher and the Book of Enoch by Blue Nile Spiritual Texts and available on Amazon.
Wonderfully written and truthful. I find it lines up exactly with what I've been shown over the past few months. There are obviously 2 spiritual forces. The vortex or storm is getting all the attention. It not only sends out chaos via spinning arms likened to the spokes of a wagon wheel in motion, but internally, the vortex is centripetal, with and an ever increasing oppressive force.
Once I understood this, I was backed off to see the 'cross' force, that precedes the vortex, flows across the storm and continues after the storm. It is steady and eternal. Afterwards I was shown it in picture format which I won't go into here and now...but imagine my surprise, when a month later, I discovered the same 'picture' described at the end of chapter 5 in the Wisdom of Solomon!!
I find it exceedingly interesting that you've described this above: just from the opposite view...how our culture is in essence cutting across the ancient flow of energy that is eternal, from the Father of Heavenly Lights! The force it is following will end in it's destruction, to all who are driven by the vortex/storm's winds.
One question. The more I read the 'lost' books, the more I desire a Strong's concordance/dictionary equivalent for these books. Is there one easily available you would recommend? I must admit to not searching overly hard for one yet, but hoping there is such an accompanying book.
There is something bracing and attractive in your insistence that modern man is not saved by novelty, that extraction is real, that human beings are being flattened into inputs and outputs, and that older wisdom speaks with a steadier voice than trending opinion. On that much, faithful Christianity can nod in agreement. The Church has been warning about disordered appetites, false freedoms, and soul-shrinking systems since long before the first server rack began humming.
But truth deserves not only passion... it deserves proportion. And your thesis, like a sword swung too widely, cuts some genuine enemies and several innocent bystanders at the same stroke.
You present “ancient wisdom” as the only weapon left, and then quietly redefine that wisdom as a particular enlarged canon plus a total explanatory framework of hierarchy, covenant, and cosmic structure — mediated through your interpretive grid. Yet faithful Christian teaching has always made a careful distinction between what is ancient and what is apostolic. Not everything old is authoritative. Not every preserved text is inspired. A ruin may be ancient; that does not make it a cathedral.
The irony is that faithful Christianity is itself the great defender of ancient wisdom, but it does not defend it as an archaeological collection. It defends it as a living inheritance. The faith is not a scroll archive but a sacramental civilization. The “permanent patterns” are not secured by multiplying texts but by preserving truth through worship, doctrine, moral teaching, and apostolic succession. A library alone cannot save a culture. A living Church sometimes can.
Your contrast between hierarchy and modern flattening also needs refinement. You are right that reality has structure. Creation is not a democratic committee. But faithful Christian teaching does not present hierarchy as cosmic control architecture; it presents it as ordered service under God. The highest in the Kingdom kneels lowest. Authority exists not to extract but to give — which is why the central image of faithful Christianity is not a throne but a Cross. When hierarchy is severed from sacrifice, it becomes tyranny whether ancient or modern.
You speak as though modernity deleted sacred order and installed the Algorithm as a rival liturgy. There is insight there, but also exaggeration. Technology can deform attention; it can also extend charity, knowledge, and connection. The faithful Christian view of tools has always been morally discriminating rather than mythically alarmed. The printing press spread both heresy and Scripture. The network spreads both confusion and truth. Babel is not silicon; it is pride.
Then there is your recurring appeal to the 81-book canon as operating manual, cosmic map, and warfare guide. Here again, the claim outruns the case. Faithful Christianity does not fear broader ancient literature; it reads much of it profitably. But it does not mistake contextual illumination for binding revelation. The canon recognized by the historic Church is not a truncated survival kit; it is a sufficient proclamation of salvation. The purpose of Scripture is not to provide a complete cosmological control panel; it is to make us wise unto salvation in Christ. When a text collection is promoted from witness to weapon system, we are already drifting from faithful Christian teaching into esoteric strategy.
You warn that without roots, people are easily programmed. That is true, and it is precisely why faithful Christianity roots believers not merely in texts but in a teaching community that spans centuries. The paradox you resist is the one you most need: authority is not the enemy of rootedness but one of its chief safeguards. A man alone with ancient books and a strong interpretive lens is not necessarily anchored; he may simply be self-authorized.
The deepest correction, though, is this: ancient wisdom is not the only weapon left. It is not even the primary one. The primary weapon of faithful Christianity is grace — carried through truth, sacrament, repentance, and sanctity. The decisive victories in Christian history were not won by those with the largest textual arsenal but by saints; they were men and women conformed to Christ. Empires have fallen to monks with nothing but prayer, doctrine, and charity rightly lived. That is not romanticism; it is record.
You are right that we should not go forward by amputating memory. But neither should we go forward by absolutizing one stream of antiquity and turning it into a master key for every modern lock. The past is a lamp, not a lever. It gives light so we may walk, not control so we may dominate.
The way forward is not nostalgia, and it is not insurgency by canon expansion. It is fidelity to the truth once delivered to the saints, faithfully taught, faithfully lived, and faithfully handed on. That path is older than any algorithm and stronger than any system of extraction, because it does not merely align with the grain of the universe. It was spoken into existence by its Maker.
You're defending the Catholic Western canon as if it represents universal Christianity. It doesn't.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in communion with Rome for centuries preserved Enoch, Jubilees, and Jasher as canonical Scripture. Not as "helpful tradition" As SCRIPTURE.
Jude quotes Enoch as authoritative prophecy. The apostolic church used these texts. Ethiopian Christianity never stopped. You call this "variation" and "historical diversity" I call it preservation vs deletion.
Your "magisterial authority" is regional not universal. Ethiopian bishops have apostolic succession too. They just didn't delete the texts that predicted their own removal. That's a choice not complexity, and it reveals whose interpretation you're actually defending.
Your reply sharpens the claim, which is good, because it lets us examine it cleanly. But once again, your conclusion depends on collapsing distinctions that history and theology keep carefully separate. If we slow the argument down and keep the categories straight, your charge of “deletion versus preservation” does not hold.
You say I am defending a “Catholic Western canon as if it represents universal Christianity.” I am not. I am defending the canon recognized by the historic, conciliar Church across Greek, Latin, and most Eastern communions — not merely the Latin West — and later dogmatically affirmed in faithful Christianity as binding. That canon was not produced by one region acting alone, nor by one bishopric trimming texts for control. It emerged through centuries of liturgical use, patristic citation, episcopal discernment, and cross-regional reception. Rome ratified what the broader Church had largely converged upon; it did not invent it ex nihilo.
Now to the Ethiopian claim, because precision matters here.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is ancient and venerable. It is not — historically — a counterexample that overturns conciliar canon recognition. It developed with relative geographic isolation, a distinct liturgical language, and a broader ecclesiastical literature set. Its wider canon reflects that ecosystem. That is not proof of conspiracy elsewhere; it is proof of regional textual culture. Diversity of canon lists in late antiquity and the early medieval period is a documented fact across multiple regions — Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian — before universal standardization matured. Variation is not vandalism.
You also state that the Ethiopian Church was “in communion with Rome for centuries” while preserving Enoch, Jubilees, and Jasher as Scripture. That is historically overstated. Ethiopia’s primary long-standing communion was with the Alexandrian (Coptic) patriarchate, not sustained full communion with Rome across the centuries. The Ethiopian Catholic Church, which is in communion with Rome, does not function as an independent canonical authority overturning conciliar determinations. So the communion premise you’re using to create a contradiction is not stable.
More importantly, even if a regional apostolic church preserves additional books as canonical, that fact alone does not logically imply that others “deleted” inspired texts. That conclusion would only follow if you first prove that those additional books meet the Church’s criteria for inspiration and universal normativity (apostolic authority, continuous catholic liturgical reception, and doctrinal consonance with the rule of faith) across the whole Church. You have asserted that. You have not demonstrated it.
Take your appeal to Jude and Enoch. Yes, Jude cites Enoch. That proves familiarity and respect, not canonicity. The New Testament also cites non-canonical sources elsewhere — Paul quotes pagan poets; Acts quotes Greek writers. No serious canon principle in faithful Christianity has ever been “if quoted, then Scripture.” The canon rule was never that thin. Otherwise half of classical literature would qualify.
You say, “They preserved what predicted their own removal.” That is a striking line, but it is rhetoric, not argument. It assumes motive without evidence and turns disagreement into proof of guilt. That is not historical reasoning; it is narrative framing. To establish deliberate suppression, you would need documentary evidence of coordinated removal campaigns targeting those books because of their content. What we actually have is widespread early uncertainty about certain texts, uneven liturgical usage, and eventual conciliar stabilization. That is complexity, not crime scene.
Now to authority, because this is the real hinge.
You argue that magisterial authority is “regional, not universal,” and therefore suspect. But here is the unavoidable logical question: by what authority do you determine which apostolic successions are normatively binding and which canonical judgments are valid? You cannot answer “by the source texts” without first settling which texts count and how they are interpreted. That immediately returns us to adjudicating authority. There is no Christianity without an authority structure somewhere — conciliar, episcopal, communal, or individual. Your model does not remove authority; it privatizes it and then treats that privatization as neutrality.
Faithful Christian teaching holds that Christ did not leave behind a book alone, but a teaching Church with sacramental and doctrinal authority, capable (however imperfectly in her members) of rendering binding judgments for the sake of unity and truth. Without that, canon cannot be settled, doctrine cannot be defined, and heresy cannot be named except as “whatever I think is wrong.” That is not liberation from monopoly; it is the multiplication of magisteria, each one-person wide.
Finally, a theological point that should not be skipped: the sufficiency of Scripture for salvation does not depend on maximal textual inclusion but on inspired content ordered to Christ. Faithful Christianity has always maintained that the recognized canon is sufficient to make us wise unto salvation. A larger library may be valuable; it is not therefore inspired. Edification is not inspiration. Antiquity is not canonicity. Usefulness is not normativity.
So the real fork in the road is this:
Either canon recognition emerged through the Spirit-guided discernment of the apostolic Church expressed in councils and continuous reception, in which case regional variation is a stage in convergence, not proof of corruption, or canon is determined by whichever preserved corpus best fits one’s warfare framework, in which case authority has simply moved from Church to interpreter, and “preservation” means “agreement with my grid.”
You are right to care about roots, warfare, and seriousness. But seriousness requires evidentiary standards as well as suspicion. Once those standards are applied, the story is not preservation versus deletion. It is discernment versus reduction.
Systems built on unexamined claims cannot tolerate questions. We'll see who stands on sand and who stands on rock, for God is the judge.
I agree that claims should be examined. That is exactly why I’ve been pressing for clear criteria, evidence standards, and adjudication principles. Questions are healthy. They just need answers at the same level of precision. I’m content to leave the arguments on the table for readers to weigh.
Your view requires trusting that the Holy Spirit guided Roman political councils in the fourth century more than the apostolic transmission to Ethiopia in the first century. It's over bro, and I'll dig deeper and share more. Im only getting started.
That’s a false dilemma. My view does not require trusting fourth-century Roman councils over apostolic transmission anywhere. It holds that the same Spirit who guided the apostolic Church continued guiding the Church’s conciliar discernment across regions — Greek, Latin, and others — in recognizing the canon. Ethiopia represents one ancient reception stream; councils represent cross-regional adjudication. Those are not rivals but different levels of authority. In any case, I’ve stated my criteria and evidence standards clearly. Readers can weigh them. I’ll leave it there.
I’ve been looking to buy a physical copy of the Ethiopian Canon. However, I’ve hesitated because I’ve heard the versions available online are sloppy & rushed and not well translated. Do you have any recommendations? Where can I find the best version for purchase?
A complete official translation does not exist. Most of the Bibles you see online are cash grabs. I recommend the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees translated by R. H Charles, which are freely available online.
Thanks for the reply! I do like physical copies when I can get them. I’m a bit of a scribble hound, highlighting and underlining, but I will check out Charles’ online versions of Enoch & Jubilees. I have the Hermenia Translation of Enoch 1 (the version Heiser favored) on my shelf. Any rumors regarding when an official translation of the Ethiopian Canon will be available? Is a translation in progress?
You might also look up the published and valuable book translations by Dr Ann Nyland.
Personally, I researched a bunch of possible choices, then prayed through them. 2 books I was to clearly avoid, and two books the Holy Spirit clearly indicated I was to buy. I am currently making my way through, "Apocrypha Complete: All Lost Books of the Bible including Psalms, Jasher and the Book of Enoch by Blue Nile Spiritual Texts and available on Amazon.