404 - Fr. Stephen De Young - How to Read Extra-Biblical Texts Like Jubilees (and Why It Matters)

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fr. Stephen De Young returns to the channel to explore how we should approach extra-Biblical literature—looking especially at the Book of Jubilees in anticipation of his upcoming Symbolic World course: Jubilees and the Nephilim. We discuss a different, more ancient way of doing theology—through story, ritual, poetry, and image rather than flat modern academic argument. If you’ve ever wondered how texts like Jubilees, Enoch, or the Lives of Adam and Eve connect to Christian theology, this conversation is for you.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/poAELqTQTo0

NEW COURSE: Jubilees and the Nephilim, by Fr. Stephen De Young
- Catch the early bird special of 15% off with code: EARLYJUBILEES, valid until 11:59 pm EST (midnight) of August 8th.
- Price: 180 USD (Discounted to 158 USD)
- Register now: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/jubilees-and-the-nephilim
- Course Length: 6 Weeks, 12 Hours
- Dates: Live classes are on Tuesday at 7 - 9 pm Central Time, starting August 19th through September 23rd, 2025
- Participants will be given access to lesson recordings.
- The course is hosted on the Symbolic World Circle Community platform. Sign up as a free member before making your purchase.

Step into the strange and revelatory world of the Book of Jubilees, an ancient retelling of Genesis that shaped ancient Jewish thought and still echoes through Christian tradition. In this course, Fr. Stephen De Young guides students through the book’s expansion of biblical history, unveiling the significance of the fall of the angels, the rise of the Nephilim, and the heavenly origins of the feasts of the Old and New Testaments. Along the way, he'll explore how Jubilees reinterprets creation, demonology, and the prophetic structure of time, and why these themes mattered not only to Second Temple Judaism, but to later Christian understandings of the unseen world.

Timestamps
00:00 - Coming up
00:55 - Intro music
01:20 - Introduction
02:11 - Jubilees
05:08 - A different way of doing theology
15:23 - Why do we have peripheral stories?
22:34 - The twelfth apostle
24:16 - Blood libel
27:09 - Adam's skull
31:19 - Sacred geography
34:09 - The sacramental reality
39:01 - The modern trade
41:52 - UFOs, psychedelics, and materialism
44:43 - Reading extra-biblical texts and Jubilees
47:53 - What can extra-biblical traditions offer us?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	These sort of elaborations are essentially a way of doing commentary.
0:04.9	Yeah.
0:05.8	Of fleshing out the story to sort of interpret and apply it.
0:10.7	And they weren't worried about this.
0:12.0	You'll find what are basically anachronisms.
0:14.7	Uh-huh.
0:15.7	Right.
0:15.9	So we're talking about a story about Abraham that happened in, you know, circa 2000 BC. And the added details
0:25.3	are clearly stuff from, say, the third or fourth century BC, which is when around the time
0:32.0	the text is written. And scholars treat this like, oh, they let slip when this was written. See, they're trying to convince us that Moses wrote this, but look here, they messed up, right?
0:44.1	Not at all.
0:45.2	That was not only not a mistake or not a problem.
0:48.6	That was kind of deliberate.
0:50.3	Yeah.
0:50.8	They were taking that story and bringing it into their own time. Yeah. They were taking that story and bringing it into their own time.
1:05.4	This is Jonathan Pejot. Welcome to the symbolic world.
1:11.6	Yeah. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello, everyone.
1:20.6	Hello, everyone. I'm here with a character that is quite known to all of us.
1:23.6	Father Stephen DeYoung is with us again today.
1:26.6	This is great. We are offering a new
1:30.0	class for symbolic world. It's the first time that Father Stephen will be giving a class for
1:33.8	symbolic world. It is going to be on the Nephilim and Jubilee. But today what we want to do
	...

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