So, wait, someone did as presentation where they had the Ethiopian Bible reproduced on 15-foot-high pages and displayed not-quite-upright for an audience? Or is it just a li’l tiny guy?
It’s been almost six years since I posted an article refuting a breathless, terrified post insisting that the Bible was being corrupted by modern interests. Satanism and the Gay Agenda made their way into the fearmongering. Rupert Murdoch even makes an appearance. It’s a good time.
But what if the conspiracy goes back even further? What if it’s not just Zondervan and HarperCollins and the gay agenda? What if it goes all the way back to 1611 and King James I of England and Ireland? What if it goes back even further, to the Church Fathers of the fifth century themselves?! That’s what a person (?) on Facebook calling himself “Pastor Micah Wells” alleges. This was posted on March 27, 2026.
Every commentary I bought said “meaning uncertain” next to the same verse until I found out the explanation wasn’t missing, it was removed.
How much did you pay for those commentaries? Because Matthew Henry’s commentary (completed by friends of Henry after his death in 1714 and in the public domain now) says enough about this to essentially form the thesis statement for my entire response:
“Of the prophecy of Enoch, (v. 14, 15) we have no mention made in any other part or place of scripture; yet now it is scripture that there was such prophecy. One plain text of scripture is proof enough of any one point that we are required to believe, especially when relating to a matter of fact; but in matters of faith, necessary saving faith, God has not seen fit (blessed be his holy name he has not) to try us so far. There is no fundamental article of the Christian religion, truly so called, which is not inculcated over and over in the New Testament, by which we may know on what the Holy Ghost does, and consequently on what we ought, to lay the greatest stress. Some say that this prophecy of Enoch was preserved by tradition in the Jewish church; others that the apostle Jude was immediately inspired with the notice of it: be this as it may, it is certain that there was such a prophecy of ancient date, of long standing, and universally received in the Old-Testament church; and it is a main point of our New-Testament creed.”
I was in a men’s Bible study group. Tuesday nights. We’d been meeting for three years. Going through the New Testament verse by verse.
We got to Jude. Fourteen verses into this tiny book, someone read verse 14 out loud.|
“Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men: ‘See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones.'”
The guy leading the study paused. Looked up from his Bible.
“Wait. Which book is that from?”
We all flipped to the table of contents. Genesis. Exodus. All the way through Malachi. No Enoch.
I pulled out my phone. Googled it right there at the table.
“The Book of Enoch. It’s not in the Protestant Bible.”
Silence.
I just want to stop at this point and say that I’m not the boy who cried AI, but this whole thing sounds very of-the-moment and formulaic; it seems to be written in that stilted single-paragraph-at-a-time flow that seems so common these days, and feels artificial even if the story is true. Plus, there’s that weird, errant vertical pipe (“|”) at the end of the third paragraph; that’s not a transcription error on my part, it’s in the original post. So I went to find out more about “Pastor Micah Wells.”
His Facebook page is devoid of any actual information about this person, aside from a photo of a man who appears to be in his 40s or 50s wearing a suit and clerical collar, standing in a building with large stained-glass windows; as well as a note that he’s affiliated with the Church of God.
A Church of God pastor doesn’t usually wear a clerical collar, and Church of God buildings tend to be smaller and more understated. If this were an actual pastor in the Church of God, we’d probably be able to find his church’s website, but Google results for his name with “Church of God” return literally nothing except shares of this post and an unrelated obituary.
This is all circumstantial, but it is telling. The smoking gun, though, is the Gemini watermark in the bottom-right of the image. And it’s enough for me to treat the rest of this like it wasn’t actually written by a human.
Then someone said, “Well, if it’s not in the Bible, why is the Bible quoting it?”
Good question.
Not really. There are tons of non-canonical books referenced in the Bible.
Some of them, like the Book of Jasher or the works of the Greek writers Epimenides and Aratus, are books that would’ve been recognized by the original audience as culturally-important at the time; kind of like a pastor in 2026 referencing Project Hail Mary in a sermon. Some of them are letters from New Testament authors to New Testament churches that we just don’t have anymore, like the “last letter” that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians (call it 0 Corinthians, I guess). Some are ancient Hebrew history books. One in particular, referenced in Esther and Nehemiah, was a log of everything that went on in the throne room of the Persian king. Some are about Zeus, which wouldn’t make much sense to include in a Bible about the Judeo-Christian God. One is just…kind of a joke at the expense of Cretans (and the origin of the Epimenides Paradox: “‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the Cretan”).
Not all of them are worth being in the Bible because not all of them are about God and His story. Not all of them are divinely inspired (though the Biblical inclusion of those words is). Including them would make the Bible huge. They don’t have attributes that Bible books have.
And really, referencing books that were popular and weren’t in the Bible, in my opinion, makes it seem more believable, not less. It means that the people writing it were real, and they interacted with the world and other writing the way we do.
The leader smiled. Moved on. “Let’s not get sidetracked. The point of the passage is about false teachers.”
It’s not impossible for the pastor of a church to be a member (not a leader) of a Bible Study, but it is uncommon. Even more uncommon would be a Bible Study led by someone other than the pastor where the leader feels confident enough to rebuke the pastor for getting sidetracked. Maybe this is a story from before “Micah” was ordained, but that would likely have happened before cell phones, so he wouldn’t have been looking it up at the table. This could be a transcript of someone else’s experience, but it’s not described as such anywhere. I think this is more evidence that the post is AI.
But I couldn’t let it go.
If Jude—an apostle, the brother of James, writing under divine inspiration—quoted this book by name and called it prophecy, how is it not scripture?
Because it doesn’t meet the criteria to be canon: divine qualities, corporate reception, and apostolic origins. Anything else might be helpful, or at least illuminating, but not Scripture.
I went home that night and started digging.
Turns out Jude isn’t the only one. Peter references it. Paul alludes to it. Jesus Himself used language that echoes Enoch when He talked about the “Son of Man.”
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t concerning, coming from someone who calls themselves a pastor. Jesus wasn’t “echoing” Enoch, he was quoting Daniel 7. This is very basic Christology. And I must also point out that the fact that several authors in the Bible reference this “Book of Enoch” doesn’t mean that it suddenly has the qualities required for canonicity. Every bad high school essay starts with “Webster’s Dictionary says…” but that doesn’t mean that Webster’s Dictionary belongs in the canon of bad high school essays.
The early church fathers quoted it constantly. Tertullian called it scripture. Irenaeus referenced it. Clement of Alexandria cited it in his writings.
For the first 400 years of Christianity, the Book of Enoch was considered authoritative.
Questionable. The Jewish Septuagint (finished by the 3rd century BC and a common source of much of the Old Testament citations in the New Testament) and the Tanakh (finished by the 1st Century BC) excluded the Book of Enoch, so the early Jewish Christians likely didn’t consider it canon. Early Church fathers did reference it and even call it canonical, but none of them derived any major theology or doctrine from it. And while Micah here says that it was considered part of canon for 400 years, the furthest estimates for when canon was agreed upon happens more like 330 years after Jesus’ death, and some estimates are closer to 200 years after the Crucifixion, implying that even at that early time, most Christian leaders regarded Enoch as apocryphal.
Further, the Book of Enoch that the Ethiopian church uses today has some pretty wild divergences from orthodox Scriptural positions about the origin of sin, for example. If it had existed in that form in the time of the early Church, it seems unlikely that it would’ve been quoted by even the early Fathers, to say nothing of Paul.
Then it disappeared from Western Bibles. Not because scholars proved it was false. Not because new evidence emerged. It just… stopped being included.
It stopped being included because the Canon was coalescing around the 66 books we know today. The Canon was decided in a way that was much more about weeding out what didn’t belong, rather than intentionally choosing what did. And once that wisdom was handed down, it was affirmed by all major Christian groups, including several who were at odds with one another in other ways.
I found out that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church never removed it. They’ve had the same 88-book Bible for over 1,500 years. Same collection. No edits. No deletions.
While Europe was fighting over which books belonged and which didn’t, Ethiopia just kept reading the Bible they’d always had.
The same Bible that predates the Council of Nicaea. The same Bible that the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 would have known when Philip baptized him.
“Micah” is playing a little bit fast and loose with history here. First, while it’s true that the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church can trace for itself a very impressive 1,696-year history, the First Council of Nicaea likely predates it by a decade or so. And the Bible they use was officially defined in AD 1240, about a millennium after the Protestant Bible.
Second, the Book of Enoch as the Ethiopian church has it now wasn’t even completed until around or after the Council of Nicaea, so it’s tough to say that they were “reading the Bible they’d always had” if it wasn’t even done yet.
And they didn’t just keep the extra books. They kept God’s true name — Yahweh — on every page. The same name that was stripped out of the King James Bible over 6,800 times and replaced with “Lord.”
This is false. Well, the tetragrammaton (“YHWH,” most often transliterated as “Yahweh”) was translated as “the Lord” in Protestant Bibles. That much is true. But the reason is a bit more complicated than Micah suggests here; it wasn’t just an edict or fiat by King James.
Actually, due to years and years of Jewish believers avoiding using the name, the tetragrammaton’s etymology and even its very vowels became unclear. The Latin Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (300 BC) translates “YHWH” to “Adonai,” which means “Lord;” that was the continuation of a tradition that Jewish believers had been adhering to for millennia by that point. King James’ interpreters simply continued in that vein.
That hit me differently than the Dead Sea Scrolls revelation hit some people.
Because Ethiopia didn’t just preserve Enoch. They preserved Jubilees, which explains the entire Genesis timeline. They preserved the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul quoted in Romans. They preserved 1 Maccabees, which explains where the Pharisees came from and why the Jewish world looked the way it did when Jesus arrived.
Jubilees was a rewriting of Genesis and Exodus that was written in the 2nd or 3rd century BC, ages after Genesis or Exodus; and around the time when a discussion was heating up within Judaism as to whether they should use a solar calendar or a lunar calendar. In it, God seems to be far more concerned with that calendar than He appears to be throughout the rest of the Bible, leaving some to wonder if the book was written in an attempt to convince Jews to adopt a solar calendar. It also whitewashes the sins of the Patriarchs and even claims that Jacob decided he really loved Leah the most (which kind of wrecks the entire story of Joseph).
The Wisdom of Solomon was likely written in the century right before Jesus was born, and it includes (oddly for something claiming to be a Jewish text) a great deal of Hellenistic Greek philosophy. Some of it has some decidedly gnostic ideas. I can’t find any evidence that it was quoted in Romans, but it seems like some scholars think it might’ve been alluded to in Matthew 27:43 and in Hebrews 1:3. I’ve read the passages in question, and I don’t find them very compelling.
The book of 1 Maccabees seems to be more or less historical, but it exists in an interesting middle ground: too recent to be considered a part of the Old Testament, but not about Jesus (and thus ineligible for the New Testament). The earliest Christians didn’t consider it canon, so during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther said that protestants shouldn’t either.
None of these books contain any major theological or doctrinal issues, and many of them in fact contradict Scripture in key ways.
These aren’t random religious texts. They’re the books the apostles read. The books Jesus studied. The books that make the gaps in the Old Testament finally make sense.
Apostles? Jesus? Probably not, since few of these were ever added to the Jewish canon.
And when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found didn’t match the western Protestant Bible.
They matched Ethiopia’s.
Actually, they matched both. The Dead Sea Scrolls are remarkably close to the modern Western Bible, showing a clear chain of God’s provenance throughout the ages.
For 2,000 years, the world read 66 books while Ethiopia quietly protected all 88. Not because they were heretics. Because they were never conquered. The only Christian nation never colonized by a foreign power. The only nation that claims to guard the Ark of the Covenant to this day.
Ethiopia is really cool. They were briefly invaded by Italy, but it’s true that they were never colonized during Europe’s race to occupy Africa. They’re a symbol of African solidarity to this day as a result. And the Ethiopian church does have a pretty solid case for a very long history of faith, tracing their founding back to a specific person whose conversion was mentioned in the Bible; the Ethiopian Eunuch who was baptized by Philip in Acts 8.
The claim about the Ark of the Covenant is a bit more dubious, though; there’s no evidence at all about the Ark’s current location, and there’s contemporary documentation for everything from its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar all the way down to its preservation in Mount Nebo.
The post goes on from here to talk about the “true name of God” and other such mystical and fantastical ideas that seem to pop up every time something like this makes the rounds; stuff that has no basis or grounding anywhere else in Scripture, and truly reads like “Bible fan-fiction.”
I think you get the picture. “Micah’s” post is very long (more evidence of AI influence, in my opinion), and while it’s full of assertions that “Micah” wasn’t paid, it reads like marketing copy (in fairness, if he’s an AI, I suppose he wasn’t paid). I’m all for decolonizing your faith, but this isn’t how you do it.
In discussions about the canonicity of Scripture, I look to people like Michael Kruger. He’s a scholar of canonicity and the early Church at Reformed Theological Seminary, and speaks really wisely and charitably about the Bible in the ancient Church. I don’t know of anything he’s written about the Book of Enoch in particular or the Ethiopian Bible in general, but I do know that he’s talked about how the Canon of Scripture was settled. For more information, I’d recommend going to him.
The long and short of it is, as I said before, your Bible is remarkably reliable and trustworthy. God has preserved it for generations. And so I say with the Matthew Henry commentary, blessed be God’s holy name that he has not seen fit to test us in matters of saving faith by leaving out anything necessary. “There is no fundamental article of the Christian religion, truly so called, which is not inculcated over and over in the New Testament, by which we may know on what the Holy Ghost does, and consequently on what we ought, to lay the greatest stress.”
Side note: while finishing up this post, I found this at the bottom of the shop page for the book:
“Perfect your toast with this advanced bread toaster.”
Plus, there’s an assertion that they’re the only company that’s authorized to publish this Bible which, if what they’re saying is true, has been in the Public Domain for almost 2,000 years.
And the website was registered in early February (only a month and a half before “Pastor Micah’s” post)—that’s not nearly enough time for 15,000 people to have ordered it, then for Micah to order it, then for him to receive it and read it and recommend it to others, and then for another person to borrow it and read it and order it themselves, and then for a month to pass, and then for Micah to write this post, as he claims in the full version of it.
“Pastor Micah” aside, I would stay far, far, far away from this company.
