The life of Michael Heiser
Remembering an era-defining Bible scholar
In 2015, a startling book claimed Christianity had badly misread the Bible. Vast subplots about “gods” and spirits had somehow been overlooked?
By now, Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm is a phenomenon and even a Pop Culture reference. On January 21, 2023, he announced his cancer was terminal and that he was in his last days. On February 20th, he died.
I stop to reflect on his momentous life.
He wasn’t one for autobiography.
“My life has been spectacularly mundane,” he writes in a draft of The Unseen Realm, then titled The Myth That Is True. At the same time, all his work is an autobiography, and the story is hardly mundane.
Born as Michael Steven Heiser on February 14, 1963, he grew up in the small town of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. He lived, he’d note, in “an alcoholic home” with no religion or direction. At age 16, he had a salvation experience. (He would always be Baptist.)
His whole life took on a new focus. He was deeply driven to learn about the Bible, down to the most arcane details.
He writes in The Unseen Realm:
“When I became a Christian in high school I felt like I’d been born for Bible study. I know — that level of interest in the Bible wasn’t normal for a teenager. It was a bit of an obsession. I spent hours studying the Bible, as well as theology books. I took commentaries to study hall.”
Graduating high school, he didn’t know what to do.
His pastor suggested he go to Bible college. In a 2022 video, he recalls: “I didn’t realize that you could go to school to study the Bible.”
This is key point about Evangelicalism. There is no concept of a ‘Bible scholar’. The Bible was seen to be understood through clerical channels, as tied to ‘special’ interpreters (Luther, Calvin, etc.)—always male.
A ‘scholar’ as an independent evaluator of sources about the Bible was completely unknown.
He went to get a B.A. at Bob Jones University.
This was an ultra-Evangelical school where actual scholarship would be all but forbidden. He graduated in 1986, and married the next year. His wife Drenna is also a BJU graduate.
An online bio mentions he “attended Bible college for three years,” but it’s unclear to me which school is referenced. He’s listed as enrolling in Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, but then also Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Owatonna, Minnesota.
He’d sought biblical knowledge at many Evangelical schools. They only taught religion. To learn about the Bible, he had to go to state secular schools.
He enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, to get an M.A. in Ancient History. Then he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to pursue an MA (and then a PhD) in the Hebrew Bible and Semitic Languages, with a minor in Classical studies.
He always worked full-time jobs to keep going.
His task was to do the work of two men: the ordinary husband and father of a growing family, and also the world-class scholar he was becoming. “I’m grateful that I did because it kept me in touch with the real world,” he says. “But it was so hard.”
Two experiences in church were catalyzing to his sensibility.
When visiting a church in Madison, a pastor spoke on 1 Peter 3:14–22. It’s an experience Heiser would often recall. He was excited, he writes in The Unseen Realm, since the passage was ‘strange’, and he liked those.
Did Jesus really go to Hell?—or “made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits,” as he then returned to Heaven, “with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.”
Is that even Christianity?
Heiser recalls the pastor saying: “We’re going to skip this section of 1 Peter since it’s just too strange.” Heiser was startled—not by a pastor evading the text, but in being so open about it. He writes:
“Pastors don’t typically tell their people to skip part of the Bible. The more common strategy for ‘handling’ strange passages is more subtle: Strip the bizarre passage of anything that makes it bizarre. The goal is to provide the most ordinary, comfortable interpretation possible.”
At another church one Sunday, he was talking to a fellow Ph.D student.
This fellow student pointed to Psalm 82:1 in Hebrew—a passage that seemed deeply eerie. As Heiser translates:
“God [elohim] stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgment in the midst of the gods [elohim].”
Again, is this even ‘Christian’? A Christian doesn’t imagine God ‘standing’ in a divine assembly, with other ‘gods’ looking on.
Heiser felt such references leading away from any Christianity he’d ever known. Two paths were before him. He writes:
“Was my loyalty to the text or to Christian tradition? Did I really have to choose between the two? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that what I was reading in Psalm 82, taken at face value, simply didn’t fit the theological patterns I had always been taught.”
His work, he decided, would be to look at the “bizarre” in the Bible.
But maybe that was a lot of the Bible? As he thought over Christianity, it was hardly unexpected they’d get a lot wrong. The chief formulators of the religion had little knowledge of the world beyond their own milieu.
He writes in The Unseen Realm:
“The proper context for interpreting the Bible is not Augustine or any other church father. It is not the Catholic Church. It is not the rabbinic movements of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is not the Reformation or the Puritans. It is not evangelicalism in any of its flavors.”
The context for the Bible is the ancient world. And major archaeological discoveries throughout the 20th century had appeared. From Ugaric texts discovered in 1929 to the Dead Sea Scrolls, windows were opening into the remote past—that Christianity had ignored.
He was studying biblical material that didn’t always read as ‘Christian’.
As Heiser continued to identify as Christian personally, there was friction. He writes in The Unseen Realm:
“Friends, pastors, and colleagues at times misunderstood my questions and my rebuttals of their proposed answers. Conversations didn’t always end well. That sort of thing happens when you demand that creeds and traditions get in line behind the biblical text.”
On this difficult road, he felt a divine hand upon him. He adds:
“…even though I believe I was providentially prepared for the academic task I faced, there were times in the process when the best description I can give is that I was led to answers.”
He thought he would be teaching in classroom settings.
But on graduating he realized his true interest and calling would be to communicate with ‘common’ people.
His career coincided with the technology that would make it possible. He became an Internet star. He presided at Logos and a range of other platforms. He did personal appearances. I attended two of his conferences, and we had several exchanges.
But the more regular engagement he offered was his books and personal website, his Naked Bible podcast, and YouTube videos.
This was his ‘ministry’, his church.
He kept reinventing himself as a writer, as The Myth That Is Real became The Unseen Realm, and a scholar became a world-class explainer. His touchstone was not Luther or Calvin, but C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and his regular interest in Sci-Fi novels.
He wrote two himself—The Façade and The Portent—that seemed like an effort to dream his biblical ideas.
He became respected in the Evangelical world.
This is eerie, as typically only clerics are seen as authorized commentators on the Bible. But Heiser rejected clerical status. He was once booked on The Jim Bakker Show, to find he was being promoted as a “prophet.”
He canceled the appearance, saying: “I’m not above anyone and have no special status in what God is doing.”
He presented as the figure of a Bible scholar—trained by secular schools. He downplayed his seminary education. He held out scholarship as more informed about the Bible than any Christian source. And Christians quietly accepted that this was possible.
It should’ve been a bitter pill. As he puts it: “The Bible is mysterious, surprising — and often deeply misunderstood.”
You could go to church all your life and never know it.
Michael Heiser content is acceptable to Evangelicals, even an enthusiasm.
But it came across as Bible trivia. His practice of the religion didn’t seem to wander much from, as he’d put it: “read our Bibles, pray, support the church financially, and be nice to other people.”
He was ambivalent on female clerics, but otherwise wouldn’t go near Evangelicalism’s obsessive interest in sex rules. I asked him if Romans 1 could concern, not the dreaded ‘homosexuality’, but the Enochian narrative of ‘Watchers’.
He suspected it was possible, and wasn’t interested in pursuing it.
And yet, he was revolutionary—while calmly moderate in tone. He was accessible to seekers and searchers at any level.
But the quality about him I loved most was his refusing specialization. He wanted to know the whole Christian story, and hold it in his head and heart.
In September 2021 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Having days or weeks to live, he wrote in his Facebook announcement:
“I desired nothing more than to empower all of you to study Scripture more deeply, to unlock the Bible for you in ways inaccessible to all but scholars. This brought me a special joy.”
I take that as Heiser’s own Christianity—the sacraments of studying, unlocking, and following your joy. 🔶
