UsefulCharts Confuses a Disputed Council With a Settled Canon—and a Translation With an Original
Matt Baker’s Who Wrote the Apocrypha? explains how Jewish and Christian communities came to recognize different collections of sacred books. But when the episode reaches some of its most consequential historical claims, it replaces uncertainty with certainty. It presents a disputed fourth-century canon list as a decisive historical event, misidentifies the original language of an important Jewish apocalypse, and turns a contested theory about religious influence into a settled explanation.
These are not merely technical mistakes. They distort the very process the episode claims to explain: how historians determine what ancient communities believed, which texts they accepted, and how those texts reached us.
1. The Council of Rome did not demonstrably settle the Catholic canon in 382
Baker says the Book of Enoch failed to make the final cut at the Council of Rome in 382 CE, “when the contents of the catholic bible were finally set in stone.”
That statement goes further than the surviving evidence permits.
The Council of Rome under Pope Damasus was a real historical gathering. The problem is the provenance of the biblical book list attributed to it. The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature describes the Gelasian Decree as a document that purports to combine material associated with Damasus and a later decree associated with Gelasius. Its attribution varies across manuscripts, with some assigning it to Damasus, others to Gelasius, and still others to Hormisdas.
NASSCAL
The historical problem is more serious than a disagreement over names. H. A. G. Houghton’s Oxford Academic study, “Competing Texts: The Fifth to the Seventh Centuries”, notes that neither the attribution to Damasus nor the attribution to Gelasius holds up under historical scrutiny, and that the work may derive from the sixth century. Some scholars defend the possibility that its earlier sections preserve authentic fourth-century material. The attribution is contested, not conclusively disproved.
OUP Academic
That distinction matters. A document attributed to a council is not automatically a surviving record of what that council actually decided. If the document’s date and provenance remain disputed, it cannot establish that the Catholic canon was definitively settled in 382.
There is a much firmer documentary reference point: the Council of Trent’s 1546 decree on the canonical Scriptures, which explicitly enumerated the books received by the Catholic Church. This does not mean Catholics had no established biblical tradition before Trent. It means the episode should distinguish earlier traditions and disputed canon lists from a formal decree whose text survives.
Ad Fontes
Baker begins by warning viewers that biblical collections developed gradually, without one universal decision by all religious authorities. Yet his account of Enoch’s exclusion supplies precisely the kind of decisive endpoint his opening cautions against. The problem is not that 382 is irrelevant. It is that a disputed historical reconstruction is presented as settled fact.
2. Second Esdras was not originally written in Latin
Baker describes Second Esdras as a different kind of work from First Esdras, then states that “it was written in latin after the rise of christianity.”
The language claim is wrong.
The United Bible Societies’ introduction to Second Esdras explains that the book is a composite work assembled from three writings. Its central section, chapters 3–14, is known to scholars as 4 Ezra. This Jewish apocalypse probably dates to the late first century CE and was originally written in Hebrew, perhaps Aramaic, before being translated into Greek.
The surrounding sections have a different history. Chapters 1–2 and 15–16 are later Christian additions, generally understood to have been written in Greek during the second and third centuries CE. The complete composite is known largely through its Latin version, alongside surviving versions in other ancient languages.
TIPs
The distinction is fundamental. The language in which a text survives is not necessarily the language in which it was composed. Nor does the presence of Christian additions make the original work a Christian composition.
The core of 4 Ezra belongs to Jewish reflection on the catastrophe that followed the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. Its author wrestles with the apparent conflict between God’s justice and the suffering of the Jewish people. Later Christian writers added material to that existing work.
By describing the entire book as written in Latin, Baker collapses these separate stages into a single event. He loses the distinction between the original Jewish author, subsequent Christian editors, and the translators through whom the text survived.
For a series explicitly concerned with who wrote biblical books, that is not a peripheral omission. It is a failure to distinguish authorship from textual transmission.
3. Zoroastrian influence is presented as a demonstrated cause
Discussing Tobit and Daniel, Baker argues that Judaism had been strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, the principal religion of ancient Persia, and says this explains why later Jewish literature contains a more detailed supernatural world of angels and demons.
Persian influence on Jewish religious thought is a legitimate scholarly question. The problem is the certainty with which Baker presents the causal connection.
In his essay “Iranian Influence on Judaism”, Jason M. Silverman of Trinity College Dublin explains that attempts to establish Iranian influence on Jewish thought have faced significant methodological difficulties. The closest parallels often come from Zoroastrian religious texts preserved in much later sources, making it difficult to establish precisely which ideas existed during the earlier Persian period and how they were transmitted.
Bible Interp
This does not establish that Persian influence was absent. It establishes that similarities between religious traditions do not, by themselves, prove the direction, timing, or mechanism of influence.
Baker supplies no comparable evidence in the episode to demonstrate that Zoroastrianism caused the developments he describes in Jewish angelology and demonology. He moves from historical contact to a specific explanation without showing the intermediate steps.
A more defensible account would distinguish the established historical setting from the proposed explanation: Jewish communities lived under Persian rule, and scholars investigate how intercultural contact may have shaped later religious ideas. Whether a particular concept was borrowed, adapted, or developed within Judaism requires evidence beyond chronological coincidence.
The distinction matters because an attractive explanation can become misleading when its uncertainty disappears from the presentation.
4. Enoch’s exclusion was a process, not simply a decision
Baker explains the absence of Enoch from the Jewish Tanakh partly through the rabbis’ different interpretation of Genesis 6. In Enoch, the “sons of God” are fallen angels who father the Nephilim; in rabbinic interpretation, Baker says, they represented a corrupt human lineage.
He then connects the different Jewish and Christian receptions of Enoch to the formation of their respective biblical collections, culminating in the disputed Council of Rome episode.
The interpretation of Genesis 6 is relevant, but it does not adequately explain the whole history of Enoch’s reception.
Historian Annette Yoshiko Reed’s Cambridge University Press study, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, traces Enochic traditions across different Jewish and Christian communities. These traditions influenced pre-rabbinic Jewish interpretation and parts of the early Jesus movement. Rabbinic Judaism gradually abandoned Enochic writings, while Christian leaders in the third and fourth centuries also increasingly rejected them as the Western biblical canon developed. Reed describes a historical process extending across centuries, not one decision with one cause.
Cambridge University Press
The Christian evidence is particularly revealing. Nicholas J. Moore’s study in the Journal of Theological Studies, “Is Enoch Also among the Prophets?”, notes that Jerome, writing at the end of the fourth century, reported that many Christians rejected the Epistle of Jude because it quoted the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Jerome himself accepted Jude as Scripture. The reception of Enoch was therefore entangled with disagreements about the authority of other texts, not simply a question of whether one book had been approved.
Oxford Academic
Baker acknowledges that early Christian writers such as Tertullian and Origen regarded Enoch as divinely inspired. That is important evidence of the book’s standing, but it also demonstrates why the later history requires more than a neat sequence from Jewish rejection to Christian exclusion.
The episode’s account is not wholly wrong to connect differing interpretations of Genesis with differing attitudes toward Enoch. Its weakness is that it gives those differences too much explanatory power while presenting a disputed council attribution as a decisive endpoint. The surviving evidence supports a more gradual and uneven history of religious authority.
Verdict
The central weakness of this episode is not its choice of subject. It is its treatment of uncertain historical evidence.
The disputed attribution of a canon list to the Council of Rome becomes a definitive event in 382. A Jewish apocalypse originally composed in a Semitic language becomes a Latin composition. A contested theory of Persian influence becomes the explanation for changes in Jewish supernatural literature.
Each error simplifies a complicated history in the same direction: it makes reconstruction look like certainty.
AngryPages should not mistake confidence for accuracy. A historical explainer earns authority by showing readers not only what scholars believe happened, but also how they know it, where the evidence ends, and which conclusions remain disputed. When those distinctions disappear, a clear narrative can leave readers with a false understanding of the past.
References
1. Original work: Who Wrote the Apocrypha? (Deuterocanon), UsefulCharts. The primary source for the claims examined in this critique, including the Council of Rome chronology, the language of Second Esdras, and the proposed influence of Zoroastrianism.
2. “Gelasian Decree” — Brandon W. Hawk, North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature, created February 2023; updated through January 2024. Documents the decree’s variable manuscript attributions and its relationship to purported decisions of Damasus and Gelasius.
3. “Competing Texts: The Fifth to the Seventh Centuries” — H. A. G. Houghton, Oxford Academic, February 2016. Explains why the Gelasian Decree’s attribution to fourth- and fifth-century popes is disputed and why a sixth-century origin is considered possible.
4. “Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures” — Council of Trent, Session IV, 8 April 1546; transcription published by Ad Fontes Library. Provides the surviving formal decree enumerating the books received by the Catholic Church.
5. “Translation Introduction to 2 Esdras” — United Bible Societies, publication date not stated. Distinguishes the Jewish core of 4 Ezra from later Christian additions and explains the difference between the work’s original languages and its surviving translations.
6. “Epilogue,” Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity — Annette Yoshiko Reed, Cambridge University Press, published online 17 August 2009. Traces the changing reception of Enochic literature across Jewish and Christian communities over several centuries.
7. “Is Enoch Also among the Prophets?” — Nicholas J. Moore, Journal of Theological Studies, published 3 September 2013. Examines early Christian disputes about Enoch and the related question of whether Jude should be accepted as Scripture.
8. “Iranian Influence on Judaism” — Jason M. Silverman, Trinity College Dublin, Bible Interp, October 2011. Explains the methodological challenges involved in proving cultural and religious influence between ancient Iranian and Jewish traditions.