Hi, I’m Yvon Prehn, and this is an incredibly important podcast, infographic, and video that I discovered I had not loaded up to the Bible805 podcast channel. It started out as added material to the podcast on Life After Death in the Old Testament. In addition to the podcast, I realized I also hadn’t posted this very important infographic that illustrates the critique that follows.

There following it the infographic, the podcast, video, and below them a little longer introduction before the notes of the podcast.

Click on the image to see it larger and the following link to download a PDF of it: HANDOUT of Critique of some scholar’s view of Life After Death in the OT

More introductory comments and why this was late in getting posted

In addition to an illustration of this lesson, I realized that the timeline I was putting together to show that faulty beliefs about the views of life after death in the Old Testament applied to much more than that one lesson. I felt at the time it was incredibly important for you to understand this as you study the Bible, but somehow in the last few crazy months with my undergoing major surgery 2 days before Thanksgiving, the usual holiday challenges, and Covid hovering over everything, the podcast and associated materials got lost.

As I was organizing the new year of lessons with added videos, notes, and questions for all, plus the new Resource Shop, I discovered it and found I had not posted it.

I also realized the importance of it in that this podcast not only shows the false conclusions of the scholars who say that people in the Old Testament did not believe in life after death, but it illustrates the bigger picture of why anti-supernaturalist scholars are incorrect in their commentary about the Bible in many areas.

Their mistakes have nothing to do with a belief or not in God or in the supernatural origin of scripture. They are simply about the dating of resources. They will use a source, for example from 70 AD to cite as a reason for a belief that scholars (secular and biblical) universally date hundreds of years earlier. I cannot ascribe motive, I do not know why they do this, but it is sloppy scholarship and misleading.

In my infographics which I discuss in the podcast, you will see the use of 4 Ezra (dated 70 AD) as the source of Old Testament beliefs (dated by even the most secular scholars)that were written almost five hundred years earlier, which obviously did not happen.

The faith of many people has been damaged by quotes from so-called scholars who call into question the supernatural aspects of the Bible based on quoting writers from times that have nothing to do with what they claim. Fortunately, our God can be trusted and if we take the time to simply look up universally agreed-upon dates for writings and then the messages he communicated them through his prophets.

I will mention more examples of the importance of dating various writings as we go through the Bible.

Below are the notes from the lesson.

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