Bible Secrets Revealed: Mysterious Prophecies (S1, E5) | Full Episode

NARRATOR: This program explores the mysteries of the Bible from a variety of historical and theological perspectives, which have been debated for centuries. They are the recorded visions of men and women who have been chosen by God to witness the future. This vision of God-- he sees fire.

He sees a storm. There's a chariot. JEFFREY GEOGHEGAN: There are dragons.

There are great wars. There are prostitutes. CANDIDA MOSS: The idea that the end of the world is coming, and you might be thrown into hell.

NARRATOR: Biblical prophecies have been preserved in the pages of the Bible for thousands of years. But are they warnings from God about things that will happen or secret messages meant only for the faithful? JENNIFER WRIGHT-KNUST: It's telling you a secret, but you have to be able to get the secret.

NARRATOR: It is one of the most important books ever written. Its contents have been studied, debated, and fought over for thousands of years. But does the Bible also contain secrets?

Secret prophecies? Secret characters? Secret texts?

Now for the first time, an extraordinary series will challenge everything we think, everything we know, and everything we believe about the Bible. To many who read both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, it is a book of faith and a spiritual guide which defines their lives. There are books that purport to convey history and others that provide moral guidelines and laws for society.

But also in the Bible are stories of prophets and their prophecies. These include the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and the Book of Revelation. But were these books really meant to foretell the future, or are they something else?

When we think of a prophet, a biblical prophet today, we tend to think of somebody who's predicting what's going to happen in 2,000 years. These are people who are proclaiming what they understood to be God's word to their situation. These are probably our first writings of the Hebrew Bible.

ALVIN KASS: The word in Hebrew for "prophet" is navi. And navi doesn't mean to predict or to foretell the future. Navi means "to speak," "to affirm," "to declare.

" If we go according to the Jewish tradition, the Biblical Jewish tradition, then a prophet is somebody who is literally the mouthpiece of God. So when God wants to deliver messages to people, God does it through this person. The purpose of prophecy was to find a way to communicate God's ideas to the people.

They were a direct line from God to the people. JOEL HOFFMAN: I think the prophets had different goals. Some of the prophets were primarily focused on social goals.

Some of them were primarily focused on religious aims. Whether they had a religious epiphany or whether they spoke with God, I think the fact that we still quote their works more than 2,000 years later is a sign of how important it is. NARRATOR: But of all the Biblical prophets and their prophecies, perhaps the most important are those in the Old Testament that predict the coming of a Messiah, a divine leader who will free the Jews from persecution.

REZA ASLAN: Some people thought that the Messiah would be a kingly figure. Others thought of the Messiah as a priestly figure. BART EHRMAN: There was one common feature, which is for Jews, the Messiah would be a great and powerful figure who would overthrow his enemies and be the ruler of the future kingdom.

NARRATOR: For Jews living in the time of Jesus, life under Roman occupation was particularly hard. When Jesus lived and preached, people were paying high taxes. There were famines, and the Jews didn't like being a conquered people.

So there was a lot of discontent in the Jewish people. And as a result, a lot of Jews started to focus on this idea of the Messiah, this God-sent figure who would free them from the Romans. NARRATOR: To the followers of Jesus living during his lifetime, it was thought that perhaps he was the one, the deliverer predicted in their sacred scrolls.

They scrutinized every move he made, looking for evidence that he was the Messiah. But was he? BART EHRMAN: In the gospels of the New Testament, Jesus is called a prophet, and he certainly saw himself as a prophet.

One of the questions is, did Jesus think of himself as more than a prophet? JAMES TABOR: It's very difficult to determine given this whole range of possibilities, what Jesus himself thought. My own studies have led me to conclude that he saw himself as the King of Israel, as the Messiah, as the Promised One, that he read these prophecies, and he basically said, that's me.

I think that's the only version of the story that makes sense in terms of what he finally did, that he's sincerely convicted that he is the one that's been spoken of. When we look at the other Messiahs, the other people who claimed that they were the Messiah, that they were going to liberate the people from Roman rule, their movements died out pretty much as soon as they did. Once the Romans killed them, their followers ran away.

The history of Messianism in Judaism is the history of failure and disappointment. As far as Jews are concerned, the Messiah has never come, but will one day come, which means that everybody up to now who has claimed to be the Messiah has been either themselves under an illusion, or they're frauds, or they're just failures. CANDIDA MOSS: So there must have been something in the Jesus message.

Jesus must have predicted that his crucifixion, his suffering would be an important part of his movement. He must have said this is going to happen. Otherwise, after he died, his followers just would have gone home.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the most dramatic and most controversial of the Biblical prophecies concerns those describing Jesus's eventual demise. According to the gospels of the New Testament, the Roman authorities arrested Jesus, charged him with sedition, and sentenced him to death by crucifixion. CHRIS KEITH: His followers would have concluded from the crucifixion that Jesus was not the Messiah, because there was no messianic figure in Judaism of Jesus's day who had a career trajectory that ended on a Roman cross.

CANDIDA MOSS: Jesus ends up dying in this humiliating way. And we might wonder, what makes Jesus so special? Why would anyone want to follow Jesus, especially after he's died?

NARRATOR: In Jesus's time, many Jews believe the Messiah would come as a conqueror, one who would defeat the Romans militarily and re-establish a powerful Jewish kingdom on Earth. To them, Jesus's crucifixion was not a fate befitting that of a Messiah. But according to some scholars, Jesus's followers scoured the pages of the Old Testament in an effort to prove that their Savior's death was in fact a fulfillment of the Bible prophecies.

This is actually very hard work to find stuff in the Old Testament that says that the Messiah will come and suffer and die. And the early Christians therefore had to work quite hard to interpret what they had seen as happening in their midst from the Old Testament scriptures that they loved. They started trying to find Jesus everywhere they could in the Hebrew scriptures.

And so they went to a range of passages that seemed to be talking about someone like Jesus. And they said, these are messianic prophecies. They could find a stray line and use that text as evidence that Jesus is the true Messiah, the promised Messiah.

Then it was an especially credible argument to the first Christians who were in fact Jews. In Isaiah 53, it describes the suffering of the servant of God who will be pierced through for the transgressions of the people and that he will die. And the Christians saw this prophecy as a clear indication of the death of Jesus Christ.

They started finding passages that describe a righteous person suffering but being vindicated by God. And the disciples said, that's referring to Jesus, who suffered and was vindicated by God. "By his wounds, we are healed.

" That's referring to the Messiah, Isaiah 53. NARRATOR: By interpreting Jesus's suffering and death as an act of divine sacrifice and spiritual if not political liberation, early Christians were able to make the case that Jesus was in every way the fulfillment of the Old Testament depiction of a Messiah. Jesus was a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament, predicting a coming judgment, but he was a different kind of prophet, because he was an apocalyptic prophet, one who believed that God had revealed to him the secrets that were going to make sense of what's going on here and now.

JONATHAN KIRSCH: There's no question that the proof text for the early Christian writers was the Hebrew Bibles. The first Christians were trying to convince their fellow Jews that this new figure deserved their reverence that they would cite chapter and verse from the text that the Jewish community did accept. BART EHRMAN: Christians today think that Jesus fulfilled all the messianic prophets of the Old Testament.

The way they get there is by reading what the New Testament says about Jesus. Jesus suffered for sins, and the Old Testament says, the Messiah will suffer for sins. And so it sounds like Jesus is fulfilling all of these prophecies.

NARRATOR: But perhaps even more profound than the prophecies that foretold of a Messiah are those that suggested something much more radical, the existence of a life after death. According to the book of the Bible that bears his name, the prophet Daniel was a young Israelite living in exile in Babylon in approximately 600 BC. Well known for his ability to interpret dreams, Daniel was commanded by the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II, to join the royal court as a key advisor.

But Daniel fell out of favor with Nebuchadnezzar and other Babylonian kings when he refused to worship their foreign gods. He later rejoined his fellow Israelites in exile and began to share with them a number of vivid dreams-- dreams that contained apocalyptic visions. JOEL HOFFMAN: Daniel is a book about what happened at the end of time.

Is the Earth going to stay this way forever? Is it going to be destroyed? Are some of us going to go to heaven, some of us going to go to hell?

Is there going to be final reward and punishment? 1,000 years of Jewish tradition was coming to an end. There was political infighting.

Rome was taking over. Herod was ruling Jerusalem. People were terrified of what was going to happen.

JODI MAGNESS: This is a kind of literature which assures its readers that the bad times are going to end, and the good times are coming. So naturally, that kind of literature is going to appeal to people who have it hard, whose lives are not good. And it's going to be very popular in turbulent times.

JORDAN SMITH: When you look at yourself and you see that you are following all these rules and regulations, but you're miserable, you're poor. So you need to find a motivation for why you should continue to be miserable. And so the idea is to convince you that you can suffer, but you will get an eternal reward later.

NARRATOR: Daniel predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and foresaw a great deal of suffering for the Israelites in Babylon. He also offered a radical new view on the concept of death and the notion of an afterlife. One of the greatest secrets of the Hebrew Bible is that an afterlife in the sense that we consider today where we will go to heaven or to some better place does not exist in the Hebrew Bible.

There is a dark, miserable, underground dwelling that we're all going to go. It doesn't matter if you are good, if you are bad. Daniel is one of the first places in the Hebrew Bible where we see a resurrection of the dead mentioned.

What Daniel talks about is that one day, the righteous will awaken. And that idea was later obviously taken over by Christianity. But you see it very clearly in the book of Daniel.

JONATHAN KIRSCH: When you move forward into the Christian Bible, this becomes much more formalized. It becomes part of the theology, the idea of being rewarded in the afterlife in heaven or punished in hell. NARRATOR: Until Daniel had this vision, as described in chapter 12 of his book, the Jewish people had no recorded notion of an afterlife.

This controversial idea shook the basic beliefs of many ancient Jews and presented serious and profound questions for the faithful. How could there be a god if this world is such an unfair and miserable place unless everything is made right in the future? JORDAN SMITH: The moment that you die, your soul is freed from your body.

But the trick is, an immortal soul doesn't eat. It doesn't drink. It doesn't get to have sex.

And so we see a tension as to whether we have a bodily resurrection or whether we have an immortal soul. JAMES TABOR: This is like letting a genie out of a bottle. Once you begin to say there's eternal life, there's resurrection of the dead, that the world to come is more important than this world, that this world is just a vestibule really of the real life, then how do you stop that?

NARRATOR: The book of Daniel also mentions a character who will decide just who is worthy of eternal life in heaven. And he even gives this character a name-- the Son of Man. BART EHRMAN: In the book of Daniel chapter 7 verses 13 and 14, at the end of time, a person called one like a Son of Man comes and is given dominion over the Earth.

The Son of Man would come and bring in a perfect kingdom here on Earth where there'd be no more pain, misery, or suffering. This kingdom of God would be a perfect Utopian place. JOEL HOFFMAN: And that notion ends up being formalized in the notion of a Messiah.

So both Jews and Christians 2,000 years ago thought that there would be an actual person who would be a Messiah, and that person would come from God and make everything better. GARY BURGE: Jesus's favorite expression for himself inside the gospels is Son of Man. It isn't son of God.

It is Son of Man. It's an enigmatic expression. So Jesus is doing something really very curious in his own self-descriptions.

He uses commonplace language, but then provokes his audience to think more deeply about what that language might mean. And he suggests that he is actually the Son of Man described in Jewish literature. Those who followed him would think, oh, see he is this apocalyptic figure.

He is the Messiah. CANDIDA MOSS: And then when you factor in the idea that the end of the world is coming, suddenly you've got to be part of this movement, or the end of the world will come, and you might be thrown into hell. NARRATOR: But if Jesus of Nazareth really believed he was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, the Messiah who would liberate the Jews from their persecution by the Romans, did he also see himself as presiding over the so-called end of days, ruling heaven and Earth not only in this life, but in the next?

Jesus himself had this kind of apocalyptic vision when he talked about the Son of Man who is going to come from heaven in destruction to wipe out his enemies and set up the kingdom. NARRATOR: Did the book of Daniel actually predict that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would be born and later reveal himself to be the Messiah? And if so, is this prophecy completed in one of the New Testament's most bizarre and controversial texts, the Book of Revelation?

The New Testament of the Bible contains stories of Jesus's life and teachings, the acts of his apostles after his death, and letters that outline early Christian beliefs. But the New Testament also contains one book that stands apart. It describes a world where a satanic figure has arise to rule.

A terrible beast called the Whore of Babylon terrorizes all. And four horsemen leave mountains of corpses in their wake. It is the Book of Revelation.

ELAINE PAGELS: The Book of Revelation is a very strange book. It's full of visions of beasts and monsters and horrible armies of insects and creatures with lion's faces. I mean, they seem like something out of science fiction.

The Book of Revelation is notoriously difficult to interpret because of the symbolism and figures that you find in that book. There are dragons. There are great wars.

There are prostitutes. NARRATOR: The Book of Revelation is possibly one of the best known yet least understood books of the Christian Bible. But is it a grim vision of mankind's future on the Day of Judgment, or is it something very different?

One of the great misconceptions of prophecy is that they're fortune tellers. Prophets in antiquity were more like professors. And specifically, what they professed was to speak on behalf of God.

NARRATOR: For centuries, many Bible scholars and theologians believed the Book of Revelation to have been authored by the same John who was one of Jesus's best-loved apostles, the same John who was credited with having written one of the four gospels of the New Testament. But in recent years, there has been a growing belief that the author was a different John, an early Christian who cited the Mediterranean island of Patmos as one of the places where he lived. Some scholars suggest this John, also known as John of Patmos, had been banished to the remote island by a Roman emperor for his belief in Jesus as the Messiah, a claim that carried political implications.

But he was lucky. Many early Christians faced a far worse punishment for their faith. Many were burned, tortured, or even crucified.

The Roman occupation of Jerusalem created a profound sense of trauma among the Jews, who were living under the boot of an imperial pagan power. There was a feeling that God was about to involve himself. NARRATOR: For some, a sign that God might intervene and liberate the Christians from bloody persecution came in 79 AD, four decades after Jesus was crucified by the Romans.

Suddenly and without warning, Mount Vesuvius erupted and rained down a deadly cloud of cinders and stone on the nearby Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Thousands tried to flee, but in vain, as they were quickly choked to death by the thick black ash that darkened the sky across the Mediterranean. For early Christians, the message seemed clear.

This was God's punishment levied upon the Romans for their ruthless treatment of the Christians. The end wasn't near. It was now.

John writes in these sort of wild images of beasts and monsters and huge catastrophes, but we can identify very specific events that he had in mind. For example, the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, he describes how a great mountain just suddenly explodes and pollutes the sea and destroys the fish. It's the beginning of the end time.

NARRATOR: But is it also possible, as many Bible scholars now believe, that this catastrophic event may have also served as the inspiration for the Book of Revelation? Could John of Patmos have used it to assure early Christians that God was on their side? BART EHRMAN: The Book of Revelation is typically read as a blueprint for what's going to happen in our future John is writing to people who are persecuted in his own day by the Roman emperor, and he's telling them, you don't have to wait very long.

God is soon going to intervene and destroy the Roman Empire. And you will be exalted. Just hold on for a while.

JORDAN SMITH: The purpose of the Book of Revelation is to inspire hope among Christians who are watching their world crumble around them. It's trying to tell Christians, I know this looks really bad, but trust me, we're going to win. In fact, we've already won.

NARRATOR: But if John of Patmos was sending a message to his fellow Christians that their faith would soon be rewarded, then why was the Book of Revelation so densely written and hard to understand? You can't talk about political activities openly. You can't talk about revolt against Rome, because Rome will have you executed like Jesus was executed.

So you code it. You hide things. You know, you don't say things directly.

You use metaphorical language. JONATHAN KIRSCH: There's a whole tradition of apocalyptic writing in both Judaism and Christianity where truths appear to be encoded. Secret messages are buried in the text.

It's not plain writing. It's secret writing. GARY BURGE: The oppressors, the empires, those who are the evil kings, those are always described in indirect terms.

The story is hidden, as it were, because this is a manuscript that if it fell into the wrong hands might lead to significant persecution. A lot of what Revelation says can be decoded as references that everybody, every Jew and follower of Jesus worth his or her salt in the first century would have gotten all of those symbols. It's telling you a secret, but you have to be able to get the secret.

(LAUGHING) Yeah? So the people who were reading Revelation could get it. JEFFREY GEOGHEGAN: The Whore of Babylon sits on a beast with seven heads and drinks a cup filled with blood.

This great whore seems to be a reference to the Roman Empire itself, because seven hills was a very common way to refer to Rome itself, which sat in the midst of seven hills. The blood that she's drinking, according to the author of Revelation, is the blood of the martyrs, the many Christians who had suffered persecution under the Roman Empire. NARRATOR: But if John of Patmos was really writing an elaborate allegory about the evils of the Roman Empire, then what was he referring to when he wrote about the end of days when the world as we know it will be destroyed?

If you read it historically in its own time, it fails. I mean, Rome goes on for hundreds of years. Others said it's actually talking about a later time in which these same factors will be operating, and the people living in that later time will understand it.

NARRATOR: Is the Book of Revelation simply a parable that was meant to condemn the Roman Empire, or is it a prediction of what many religious leaders and the faithful believe, that Jesus will return following an epic battle of good versus evil, one where millions of souls will perish and spend an eternity in the fires of hell? Perhaps the answer will be revealed by examining another book of prophecies, one considered so outrageous it was almost banned from the sacred text. Unlike the New Testament, stories of prophets and prophecies play a very large part in the Old Testament.

JAMES TABOR: I think the ultimate model for the prophet is Moses. People don't normally think of Moses as the prophet, but very early on he's the one who actually gets the revelation. And that's the key to the prophet.

The prophet becomes a kind of spokesperson for God. But to really be a prophet, you need to do more than just hear from God. You need to take a message and then deliver it.

NARRATOR: But of all the Old Testament prophets, the one whose prophecies are thought by many to be the most controversial is the prophet Ezekiel. In the opening chapter of Ezekiel, we have this amazing vision that Ezekiel has that modern interpreters have described like a UFO, because it's described as spinning wheels with eyes all around, and it's a flying object that Ezekiel notices. NARRATOR: A young Judean priest and prophet, Ezekiel was exiled by the Babylonians along with approximately 3,000 fellow Israelites in the 6th century BC.

While in captivity in Babylon, within what is modern-day Iraq, he experienced dramatic visions that responded to the destruction of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Modern archaeological discoveries have confirmed that the temple was in fact destroyed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC. But were Ezekiel's so-called prophecies really based on visions from God?

JONATHAN KIRSCH: The first prophet of ancient Israel who indulged this idea of letting his imagination run wild is the prophet Ezekiel, who doesn't just issue parables and doesn't just issue moral sermons, but in fact conjures up fantastic other-worldly visions of creatures and phenomenon that are outside the ordinary. Ezekiel had wild visions of angels and chariots and what we would today consider almost psychedelic visions of what God's greatness and glory in this world were all about. ALVIN KASS: Ezekiel, it's an extraordinarily fascinating document.

He sees fire. He sees a storm, a chariot. There's a throne.

And he describes in detail so many of these phenomenon. ELAINE PAGELS: He said the word of the Lord came to me, and you know what I saw? I saw the Lord at his throne.

But his throne isn't the way you used to think of it in the temple in Jerusalem. His throne had wheels on it, and it could go anywhere. It could go like lightning fast all over the world.

God will tell you very plainly how you worship the devil. I often equate Ezekiel to one of the street preachers you'd find in a big city. They're flailing their arms.

They're screaming. They're preaching. Right?

He cut off part of his hair and burned it and throw it to the wind. NARRATOR: The meaning of Ezekiel's extraordinary visions has been widely debated by Biblical scholars. Some believe them to be the ramblings of a religious fanatic, but others insist that Ezekiel's visions are not only inspired by God, but are truly prophetic and contain insights on everything from the meaning of life to the true nature of the relationship between mankind and God.

And it is this belief that forms the basis for the mystical interpretation of Judaism known as Kabbalah. JONATHAN KIRSCH: There was a mystic tradition in Judaism. Its first text is the book of Ezekiel, who described his own amazing, wondrous journeys into the heavens as encounters with strange creatures and strange sights, all done without going into the synagogue or the temple, without making a sacrifice or saying a prayer.

Now, somewhere along the history of these texts, these mystical ideas in Judaism began to coalesce into a movement that we call Kabbalah. NARRATOR: Derived from a Hebrew word meaning "to receive or accept," Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings that attempt to understand the nature and purpose of God and the existence of mankind. Through fasting and prayer, some followers of Kabbalah believe they can have their own incredible visions of the divine.

ELAINE PAGELS: Much of what we call Kabbalah come from the prophet Ezekiel. And this text suggests that the image of God can be described as light, not ordinary light, but it's a kind of spiritual energy that you have within you. And that's how you can discover God, because there's a sort of link between what's deeply hidden within each one of us and the divine source from which we come.

ALVIN KASS: It's really a collection of symbolic texts which, if explored in their deepest meaning, will yield an understanding of the secrets of coming to a grasp of the infinite, which lies at the root of the universe. So that's what the Kabbalah was all about. And there were many attractions to trying to understand this.

NARRATOR: While Kabbalah is fairly well known today, 2,000 years ago, this mystical interpretation of Judaism was considered so radical and dangerous that it was forbidden for most Jews to practice or even learn about. The rabbis ordained that one should study the Kabbalah only if you're married and you've reached the age of 40. What is that saying to us?

That you can study Kabbalah and explore these important mysteries only if you're a mature individual, only if you're grounded, if you're stable. Then you're in a position to be able to explore some of these rules and regulations and not go astray as a result of cultivating them. JONATHAN KIRSCH: Everything you read in the Old Testament is designed to promote law and order.

You should be a good citizen. You should work. You should defer to authority.

Ezekiel offered a completely different experience, the experience of oneness with God. That was a threat to this spiritual law and order that the Bible otherwise is trying to impose. The priests, who were the custodians of the holy texts, tried to dampen down the idea that you and you and you could each have your own separate experience of God.

DAVID WOLPE: People read Ezekiel with the hope of getting a direct, powerful experience of God as Ezekiel did. And so some early mystics used Ezekiel as a sort of foundation or a platform from which to have their own deep experience of the divine. JONATHAN KIRSCH: That's what's so dangerous about religious mysticism.

People feel empowered. They feel like they're hearing the word of God in secret words, secret phrases, secret numbers, colors, images of beasts, images of God, images of the heavens much the same way you might enter a fantasy world in a video game or a science fiction movie. NARRATOR: Were the strange prophecies described by Ezekiel really communicated to him directly from God?

If so, what do his incredible visions tell us about the nature of God and mankind's ultimate fate? For many Bible scholars, the answer can be sought in another equally shocking book found in the New Testament, one that describes an event simply known as the rapture. For many, the so-called end of days is graphically predicted in the Book of Revelation.

But there is another prophetic text in the New Testament, one that predicts the dead will literally rise from their graves on the Day of Judgment during an event known as the rapture. When people get their timetable for the end of the world, they tend to think it's all in Revelation. But then they start talking about a rapture.

It comes from 1 Thessalonians. When Christ returns with clouds and in glory, that the graves will open, and the dead will rise first. They'll be caught up in the clouds with Christ.

NARRATOR: The book known as 1 Thessalonians was actually a letter sent by the apostle Paul to the people of Thessaloniki in Greece. According to scholars, it was written around 52 AD, making it one of the earliest New Testament books to be written. He's writing it to this community that had thought Christ would come back before anyone would die.

So the point of this whole rapture story is to reassure them that don't worry, when Christ returns, that the dead will also rise. It says, those of us who are alive and remain here and aren't dead yet when he comes, they'll be taken up into heaven just like that. That's a tradition that Paul describes.

But John of Patmos is saying something very different. He never talks about what Christians now call the rapture. He talks instead about the heavenly Jerusalem descending to Earth.

So it's a very different picture. Many conservative Christians today think that when the end comes, Jesus will come from heaven, and there will be a rapture where people be taken out of this world. What readers of the Bible have done is they've taken Paul's teaching of a kind of a rapture event and the Revelation's teaching of some kind of tribulation event and smashed them together as if they're talking about the same thing.

But in fact, they're talking about different things. GARY BURGE: Jesus believed that there was going to be a crashing halt very soon, that God was going to intervene to destroy the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom. He doesn't give specifics when that is going to happen.

He has left his church, his followers in a kind of suspended anticipation of when that might be. ELAINE PAGELS: Of course, it's been 2,000 years. Well, it hasn't happened yet, but it's amazing that these texts still speak to people.

NARRATOR: Could this be the ultimate secret of the Bible's mysterious prophecies? Were they intended to motivate the faithful to believe in something more lasting and eternal than life on Earth? And could that help to explain the Bible's enduring power and popularity thousands of years after it was written?

The Bible, without a doubt, is the most important book in the history of Western civilization. People read it. People revere it.

People think of it as God's word to humankind. And God had revealed the secrets that could make sense of the real meaning of life and the history of the world. One of the reasons that I think people just keep going back to the Bible over and over again is that it's just so full of these fascinating mysteries, these fascinating enigmas.

JOEL HOFFMAN: It was meant to convey a meaning. It was meant to convey sort of a sense of where we belong. It's something that gives people a little more insight into their day-to-day life.

CANDIDA MOSS: The Bible continues to speak to people because it has prophecies in it that are seen as unfulfilled. So there are places where the Bible is sort of vibrant and alive and still open to sort of fulfillment and expectation. DAVID WOLPE: I'm struck by the way that it gives me access in my own life to whatever it is that God is.

And so I read it not only because it captivates my mind, but it elevates my spirit. And I know from the fact that it has been read all over the world for thousands of years that in that feeling, I am not alone. NARRATOR: For thousands of years, the Bible has inspired and motivated billions of men and women.

Yet for all of its stories, its moral lessons, and its universal truths, perhaps the secret to its greatness is its testament that there is something in the universe greater than ourselves and a future beyond our lifetime.