Listen, I need to tell you something that might be uncomfortable: almost everything you think you know about biblical angels, demons, prophets, and even God himself has been filtered through two thousand years of translation choices, theological agendas, and cultural domestication. I’ve spent twenty-five years working with actual ancient manuscripts—texts in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic that most people never see—and I can tell you that the Bible you have is separated from the original by countless small decisions made by scribes, translators, and theologians who had their own concerns, pressures, and biases.
But here’s the beautiful part: when you go back to these texts in their original languages, when you understand the sectarian diversity of the Second Temple period (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a dozen other groups all arguing about what Scripture meant), when you see how early Christian communities splintered into wildly different interpretations, when you read Quranic passages that preserve ancient biblical traditions differently than our Bibles do—suddenly Scripture becomes alive again. Strange. Dangerous. Magnificent.
Through my writing, you’ll learn to read biblical texts the way ancient audiences encountered them: with all their multilingual wordplay intact, with sectarian debates raging in the background, with prophetic imagery that actually terrified people, with apocalyptic visions that make contemporary “end times” theology look tame. You’ll discover what Pharisees actually believed (hint: not what you think), why Gnostics weren’t just heretics but serious readers asking important questions, how Sufi mystics and Orthodox hesychasts preserved biblical contemplative practices that Western Christianity largely forgot.
I’ll teach you enough Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic to be dangerous—to catch puns your English Bible misses, to see where translations made choices that shaped theology, to recognize when cognates across Semitic languages reveal deeper meanings. You’ll meet the Bible as a living, contested, multilingual, multicultural phenomenon rather than a settled, sanitized text.
Most importantly, you’ll discover that the strangeness of Scripture—the parts that don’t fit our categories, the images that disturb us, the theological tensions that refuse easy resolution—these aren’t problems to solve. They’re invitations to encounter a God who is more terrifying, more mysterious, and more wonderful than any of our traditions, mine included, have fully captured.I promise you’ll never read Scripture the same way again. And I promise that’s exactly what your faith needs.