In this article, AGR explores a few questions such as; did the ‘official’ Bible have books pulled out of it, and/or was it ‘censored’?
If the ‘official’ Bible was censored, what Books were pulled out and why?
Which versions of the 900 different Bibles are or will be marketed in a specific denomination or Christian branch of religion?
Let’s dive into just some of the various versions of the Bible. Let’s explore why these versions existed or still exist today..
The Bible contains the truth of God, but how much of that truth is ‘allowed’ to be consumed or read by the masses, and how much is censored, filtered, or not allowed to be in churches, or the ‘official’ Bible?
Who gets to decide what Christians read and study, when it comes to Gods’ truth?
Which version of the 900 published different versions of the Bible are ‘official’ and which are not? https://bibleproject.com/articles/does-a-most-accurate-bible-translation-exist
BOOK OF GIANTS AND BOOK OF JUBILEES IS NO LONGER IN ‘OFFICIAL’ BIBLE; WHY NOT?
THE BOOK OF GIANTS USED TO BE IN THE BIBLE, BUT GOT PULLED OUT; WHY?
THE ANCIENT SYSTEM OF DEMONOLOGY IS EXPLAINED IN GREAT DETAIL
KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS, AND WISDOM IS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS
There are more than 100 verses in the ‘official’ Bible around giants. Why are pastors and religious leaders not talking about this, and why are there no explanations for these ‘brief’ references in the existing ‘official’ Bible. Why are books that used to be in the Bible which explain these brief references to giants no longer read, studied, or allowed in the ‘official’ Bible?
Numbers 13:33 And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
THE BOOK OF GIANTS
Wikipedia; “The Book of Giants is an apocryphal book which expands upon the Genesis narrative of the Hebrew Bible, in a similar manner to the Book of Enoch. Together with this latter work, the Book of Giants “stands as an attempt to explain how it was that wickedness had become so widespread and muscular before the flood; in so doing, it also supplies the reason why God was more than justified in sending that flood.”[1] The text’s composition has been dated to before the 2nd century BC.[2]
| The Book of Giants | |
|---|---|
| An illustration of the War in Heaven for Milton‘s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré |
The Book of Giants is an antediluvian (pre-Flood) narrative that was received primarily in Manichaean literature and known at Turfan.[3] However, the earliest known traditions for the book originate in Aramaic copies of a Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls.[4]
References to the Giants mythology are found in: Genesis 6:1-4, the books of Enoch (Ethiopic, Slavonic, Hebrew, Greek), Jubilees, Genesis Apocryphon, 2 and 3 Baruch (Slavonic), the Damascus Document, and visions in Daniel 7:9-14.[5] This book tells of the background and fate of these ante-diluvial giants and their fathers, the Watchers (called grigori in the Slavonic 2 Enoch),[6][7] the sons of God or holy ones (Daniel 4:13, 17) who rebelled against heaven when — in violation of the strict “boundaries of creation”[8] — they commingled, in their lust, with the “daughters of men.”[9]
Their even more corrupt offspring, the giants, were variously called thereafter nephilim, gibborim, or rephaim, being the earthly half-breed races that fought against God and his righteous followers whose numbers diminished as the world was overwhelmed with corruption and evil; the Manichaean fragments give these wicked ones the general name demons (Greek Enoch calls them bastards).[8] Though the terms for the Watchers and their offspring are often confused in their various translations and iterations, collectively these rebellious races are referred to as the fallen angels in the apocryphal sources, as also in the biblical narratives that reference them.[4]
Origins in ancient tradition
Since before the latter half of the twentieth century, the Book of Giants had long been known as a Middle Iranian work (which some scholars now believe was written originally in Eastern Aramaic) that circulated among the Manichaeans as a composition attributed to Mani (c. AD 216 – 274)—a Parthian citizen of southern Mesopotamia who appears to have been a follower of Elkesai, a Jewish-Christian prophet and visionary who lived in the early years of the second century.[8] Some scholars, concordant with supporting evidence for the ancient sect’s geographical distribution, have posited both genetic and ritual-custom similarities between the Elcesaites and the earlier Second Temple Jewish sect of the Essenes (Essaioi “Saints”).[8][10]
During the twentieth century a number of finds shed considerable light on the literary evidence for the Book of Giants.[2] The 1943 publication by W. B. Henning of the Manichaean fragments from the Book of Giants discovered at Turfan in Western China (in what is now Xinjiang Province)[3] have substantiated the many references to its circulation among, and use by, the Manichaeans.[3][8] Further identification of the Manichaean Book of Giants was revealed in 1971 when Jósef T. Milik discovered several additional Aramaic fragments of Enochic works among the Dead Sea Scrolls; finding that the fragments bore close resemblance to Mani’s Book of Giants, he concluded that Giants was originally an integral part of 1 Enoch itself.[8]
These fragmentary scrolls in Aramaic, which represented an Enochic tradition that was likely introduced to Mani in his sojourn with the Elcesaites, appeared to have been the primary source utilized by Mani in the compilation of his book, in which he made the legend of the Watchers and the giants “a cornerstone of his theological speculations.”[8] For many scholars, the Qumran fragments confirmed the Book of Giants to originally have been an independent composition from the Second Temple period.[4]
Among the fragments discovered at Qumran, ten manuscripts of the Book of Giants are identified by Loren Stuckenbruck. These fragments (1Q23, 1Q24, 2Q26, 4Q203, 4Q530, 4Q531, 4Q532, 4Q556, 4Q206, and 6Q8) were found in caves 1, 2, 4, and 6 at the site.[4] These discoveries led to further classification of the Enochic works. In the third group of classification, ten Aramaic manuscripts contain parts of the Book of Giants which were only known through the Manichaean sources until the recognition of them at Qumran.[11]
There has been much speculation regarding the original language of the Book of Giants. It was generally believed to have had a Semitic origin. Indeed, the discovery of this text at Qumran led scholars, such as C. P. van Andel and Rudolf Otto, to believe that while these ancient Aramaic compositions of the book were the earliest known, the work probably had even earlier Hebrew antecedents.[11][12]
It was R. H. Charles, translator and publisher in 1906 of The Book of Enoch, who asserted that Enoch was “built upon the debris of” an older Noah saga than that in Genesis which only cryptically refers to the Enoch myth.[13] But Milik himself offered his own hypothesis that Enoch’s ‘creation story‘ and law of God account naturally predate the Mosaic Sinai accounts in Genesis: He saw Genesis 6:1-4—long a puzzling passage to biblical scholars—as a quotation from what he believed ultimately to have been the earlier Enoch source.[14]
More recent scholarship, such as that of Klaus Beyer, indicates that the Book of Giants (parts of which have been found in Hebrew at Qumran) was “originally composed in Hebrew during the 3rd century BCE, while the names of the giants Gilgamesh and Hobabish betray a Babylonian provenance”—which Babylonian-origins claim based on the name appearances, however, is refuted by Martínez.[15]
Contents
Dead Sea Scrolls version
The text unearthed at Qumran in 1948 was composed of fragments in Aramaic. Because of the book’s fragmentation, it was difficult for the documents’ linguistic researchers and specialists to know, in its subsequently varied permutations, the exact order of the content. The Giants work is closely related to the 1 Enoch analogue, which also tells a story of the giants, but one which is far more elaborate. The Qumran Book of Giants also bears resemblance to the Manichaean Book of Giants that came after it. Scholars, beyond their many questions of the Enochic tradition’s oral or written transmission,[2][10] still don’t know why the Qumran community considered the Enochic texts so important that they possessed and retained so many copies in comparison to other textual traditions found there.[5][16]
The Book of Giants[17] is an expansive narrative of the biblical story of the birth of “giants” in Genesis 6.1-4. In this story, the giants came into being when the Watcher “sons of God” (who, per the story’s corroborative Jubilees[18] account [Jub 4:15; 5:6],[5][19] God originally dispatched to earth for the purpose of instructing and nurturing humanity “in proper ritual and ethical conduct,” “to do what is just and upright upon the earth”) had sexual intercourse with human women, who then birthed a hybrid race of giants.[8]
These Watchers (grigori) and giants (nephilim) engaged in destructive and grossly immoral actions which devastated humanity, including the revealing of heaven’s holy “secrets” or “mysteries to their wives and children” and to mankind generally.[6][8][11]
When Enoch heard of this, he was distressed and petitioned God, who in his longsuffering and by divine revelation and counsel called Enoch to preach repentance unto them, that the earthly races might avoid God’s wrath and destruction.[8][11] In his mercy, God chose also to give the fallen Watchers an additional chance to repent by transmitting dreams to several of their giant-sons, including two brothers named Ohyah and Hahyah who relayed the dreams to an assembly of their grigori and nephilim companions.[5]
This assembly of Watcher-giant associates were perplexed by the dreams,[20] so they sent a giant named Mahway to Enoch’s abode and to the places of his preaching (for Mahway had been instructed that he must first “hear” the prophet speak before petitioning him for the “oracle”).
Enoch, in his attempt to intercede on their behalf, provided not only the oracle that the Watchers and giants had requested, but also twin “tablets” that revealed the full meaning of their dreams and God’s future judgment against them.[8]
When the Watchers and giants had at last heard heaven’s response, many chose, in their transcendent pride and arrogance,[8] rather than to turn from their evil ways, to act in defiance against God. The Qumran fragments are incomplete at this point.[8]
The Qumran Book of Giants, like its Manichaean counterpart, affiliates the names of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and the monster Humbaba with the Watchers and giants.[4][8]
Manichaean version
The Manichaean version is similar to the one found in Qumran, only adapted to Mani‘s story of the cosmos. The fallen angels are here archontic demons escaped from their prisons in the sky, where they were placed when the world was constructed. They would have caused a brief revolt, and in the process, two hundred of them escaped to the Earth.[21] While most given names are simply transliterated into Iranian language, Ohyah and Hahyah are renamed Sam and Nariman.[22] This version also contains a complete ending, telling how the forces of the Light, led by four angels identified with Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Istrael, subdue the demons and their offspring in battle.[8]
Other texts
Much of the content in the Book of Giants is similar, and most closely relates, to 1 Enoch 7:3-6, a passage which sheds light on the characterizing features of the giants. It reveals that the giants were born of the Watcher “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.”
The giants, as their “prostituted” half-breed offspring, began to devour the works of what they perceived to be a titan or giant (mankind) and went on to kill and to viciously exploit them in slavery and sexual debauchery.[6] They also had sexual intercourse with animals, and raped one another. They murdered on a massive scale, and also aborted their own children.[8]
Interpretive issues between Qumran and Turfan
The authorship of the Qumran Book of Giants is still a question among scholars.[10] Some initially believed that the manuscript (despite so many extant copies from Qumran of the overall Enochic work) to have been little used among the desert sectaries; but more recent scholarship declares: “We know that the Qumran Essenes copied, studied, and valued the writings and teachings ascribed to Enoch”.[23] The Qumran discoveries decidedly ruled out any possibility that the Manicheans were the composers of the Book of Giants, for their work followed later.[3]
As far as comparisons that might be made with canonical texts, the books of Daniel and 1 Enoch both have similarities; for example in their visionary elements. Stuckenbruck suggests that “these similarities … allow for the possibility that the author of Daniel 7 knew the early Enochic traditions well enough to draw on and then adapt them for his own purposes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the throne-theophany itself”.[24]
All of these Enochic writings would have held significance from the beginning of the first century. Indeed, the early Christian church treasured Enoch and held it canonical.[13] However, due in no small part to the influence of the Alexandrian philosophers who ill-favored it — its contents thought by many of the Hellenistic era to be foolish or strange — the overall Enochic work rapidly ran afoul of ideas held by the Christian and Jewish doctors, who considered it a tainted product of the Essenes of Qumran.[2]
[10] Milik has speculated the reason why the book was censored by Christian authors was its popular usage by Manichaeans.[25] The book was soon banned by such orthodox authorities as Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth century and it gradually passed out of circulation,[5] finally becoming lost to the knowledge of Western Christendom — only sundry fragments remained.[26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Giants
WHY DID THE BOOKS OF ENOCH ALSO GET PULLED OUT OF THE BIBLE?
ENOCH IS A BIBLICAL FIGURE THAT IS WELL DOCUMENTED IN THE BIBLE, SO WHY WERE HIS BOOKS DELETED FROM THE BIBLE?
THE BOOK OF ADAM AND EVE HAS BEEN CENSORED, NOT ALLOWED IN THE ‘OFFICIAL’ BIBLE; WHY NOT?
THE GIANT NEPHILIM ESTABLISHED CIVILIZATIONS THAT INCLUDED WORSHIPPING THEMSELVES AS ‘GOD’
Why would God deliver a judgement of destruction via a great flood that destroyed all of humanity, possibly more than once? Maybe God decided to destroy all of the various Nephilim led civilizations due to their extremely corrupt actions, beliefs and idol worshipping?
Is there an actual real life example of just one of many civilizations that got destroyed by a Great Flood?
Wikipedia; “Enlil,[a] later known as Elil and Ellil, is an ancient Mesopotamian god associated with wind, air, earth, and storms.[4] He is first attested as the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon,[5] but he was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hurrians. Enlil’s primary center of worship was the Ekur temple in the city of Nippur, which was believed to have been built by Enlil himself and was regarded as the “mooring-rope” of heaven and earth. He is also sometimes referred to in Sumerian texts as Nunamnir.
According to one Sumerian hymn, Enlil himself was so holy that not even the other gods could look upon him. Enlil rose to prominence during the twenty-fourth century BC with the rise of Nippur. His cult fell into decline after Nippur was sacked by the Elamites in 1230 BC and he was eventually supplanted as the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon by the Babylonian national god Marduk.
Enlil plays a vital role in the Eridu Genesis; he separates An (heaven) from Ki (earth), thus making the world habitable for humans. In the Sumerian flood myth, Enlil rewards Ziusudra with immortality for having survived the flood and, in the Babylonian flood myth, Enlil is the cause of the flood himself, having sent the flood to exterminate the human race, who made too much noise and prevented him from sleeping.
The myth of Enlil and Ninlil is about Enlil’s serial seduction of the goddess Ninlil in various guises, resulting in the conception of the moon-god Nanna and the Underworld deities Nergal, Ninazu, and Enbilulu. Enlil was regarded as the inventor of the mattock and the patron of agriculture. Enlil also features prominently in several myths involving his son Ninurta, including Anzû and the Tablet of Destinies and Lugale.
Enlil was the patron god of the Sumerian city-state of Nippur[14] and his main center of worship was the Ekur temple located there.[15] The name of the temple literally means “Mountain House” in ancient Sumerian.[16] The Ekur was believed to have been built and established by Enlil himself.[16] It was believed to be the “mooring-rope” of heaven and earth,[16] meaning that it was seen as “a channel of communication between earth and heaven”.[17]
A hymn written during the reign of Ur-Nammu, the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, describes the E-kur in great detail, stating that its gates were carved with scenes of Imdugud, a lesser deity sometimes shown as a giant bird, slaying a lion and an eagle snatching up a sinner.[16]
The Sumerians believed that the sole purpose of humanity’s existence was to serve the gods.[18][19] They thought that a god’s statue was a physical embodiment of the god himself.[20][21] As such, cult statues were given constant care and attention[22][20] and a set of priests were assigned to tend to them.[23] People worshipped Enlil by offering food and other human necessities to him.[18]
The food, which was ritually laid out before the god’s cult statue in the form of a feast,[22][20] was believed to be Enlil’s daily meal,[18] but, after the ritual, it would be distributed among his priests.[18] These priests were also responsible for changing the cult statue’s clothing.[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil
WHAT YOU CAN DO
“In the old days, before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God provided the people with a way to attempt to atone for their sins. There were elaborate rules for when and how to make sacrifices that could allow for the people to properly apologize and repent for their mistakes. But the people kept going astray. And none of those sacrifices lasted forever.
However, when God sent his son Jesus into the world, it changed everything.
As the disciples explain in Acts 13:38, “Therefore, my friends, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.”
The word here for forgiveness is the Greek aphesis, which means forgiveness in the sense of a pardon, release, freedom, or cancellation of a debt.
Even though the penalty for sin is death, Jesus pays that penalty for all of us — all — who believe in him.
What Did Jesus Say about Forgiveness?
One of the most beloved verses in the Bible is found in the Gospel of John. Jesus, talking with the pharisee Nicodemus, explains the core of Christianity in a simple and clear way, stating, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17). https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/how-can-we-be-certain-that-our-sins-are-forgiven.html?
AGR Daily News 
Pingback: THE CREATION STORY, AND THE REBELLION AGAINST GOD AND AGAINST NATURE WITH ALL KINDS OF ‘IDOLS’ | AGR Daily News