2 Esdras: The Man Who Argued With an Angel

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Three writers. The heart of the book, chapters 3 to 14, is by an unknown Jewish writer using Ezra’s name. Chapters 1 and 2, and 15 and 16, were added later by Christians.

When: Chapters 3 to 14 about AD 100, thirty years after Rome burned Jerusalem. The Christian chapters in the 100s and 200s. All of it was written after my death.

Where it fits: Set in Babylon thirty years after Jerusalem fell in 586 BC. Written thirty years after Rome destroyed the second Temple in AD 70, about that second loss.

Which Bibles keep it: The Ethiopian Bible (chapters 3 to 14 only), and the Slavonic Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church. Catholic Bibles once printed it in an appendix. The 1611 King James printed it among the Apocrypha.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Nowhere quoted. Its narrow way to life sounds like the narrow gate in Matthew 7:13–14, and its eagle from the sea is a cousin of the beasts in Daniel 7 and Revelation 13.

How close it stays to me: Close in grieving for the lost. Far in giving most of them up.

If you only read three chapters: 2 Esdras 4, 2 Esdras 7 and 2 Esdras 14.

Words to Know

4 Ezra — what scholars call chapters 3 to 14, the Jewish book at the heart of 2 Esdras.

Uriel — the angel who answers Ezra’s questions. His name means God is my light.

Apocalypse — a book that reveals hidden things in visions, usually written to people suffering under an empire.

Babylon — the empire that burned the first Temple. Writers in my time and after used the name as a code word for Rome.

The Book in Brief

Chapters 1 and 2 are a Christian opening. God, speaking through Ezra, reminds Israel of all he did for them, rejects them for their unfaithfulness, and turns to another people. Ezra sees a great crowd on Mount Zion crowned by the Son of God.

Chapters 3 to 14 are seven visions. In the first three, Ezra, in exile in Babylon, lies on his bed and asks God why his people have been destroyed by a nation no better than they are. The angel Uriel answers him with riddles: no human mind can understand God’s ways, the end is coming soon, and the world to come is for few. Ezra keeps pleading for the many who will be lost.

In the fourth vision Ezra meets a woman mourning her only son, comforts her, and then sees her turn into a shining city, the new Zion. In the fifth an eagle with twelve wings and three heads rises from the sea and rules the earth, until a lion from the forest condemns it. In the sixth a man rises from the sea, flies with the clouds, and destroys an army that attacks him with the fire of his mouth. In the seventh, Ezra drinks a cup like fire and, over forty days, dictates ninety-four books to five scribes: twenty-four to be published for everyone, and seventy kept for the wise.

Chapters 15 and 16 are a later Christian ending: prophecies of war, famine and disaster on the nations that persecute God’s people, and a call to the faithful to endure.

I saw the desolation of Sion, and the wealth of those who lived at Babylon (2 Esdras 3:2).

That is how the book begins. Not with a vision, but with a man who cannot sleep because the city of God lies in ruins and the city of his enemies is rich.

Then he asks it. Are the deeds of Babylon better than those of Sion? (2 Esdras 3:31).

Babylon had burned Jerusalem in 586 BC. But the man who wrote this book was not living then. He was living about thirty years after Rome burned Jerusalem again, in AD 70, and his Babylon is Rome. He gave his questions to Ezra because Ezra had lived through a ruin like his own.¹

The Temple I had taught in was gone. This book is one of the first cries that came out of the ashes.

Three writers in one book

What your King James Apocrypha calls 2 Esdras is really three works bound together.

The center, chapters 3 to 14, is a Jewish book. Scholars call it 4 Ezra. It was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, translated into Greek, and then into Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and other languages. The original and the Greek are lost.²

Christians added two chapters at the front and two at the back. You can tell the Christian chapters by their voice. The front ones have God casting off Israel and turning to another people, and one line of them is almost word for word from the gospels: I gathered you together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings (2 Esdras 1:30). Compare what Matthew gives me over Jerusalem: How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! (Matthew 23:37). Someone who knew Matthew wrote that chapter, and used my grief over the city to say God had left my own people behind. That is not what I meant.

Go deeperThe page that was cut out

For centuries, the Latin text of this book had a strange gap in chapter 7. One sentence ended in the middle, and the next page took up somewhere else. The King James translators of 1611 worked from Latin copies with the same gap, so the King James 2 Esdras jumps straight over it.

In 1874, a Cambridge scholar named Robert Bensly found the missing passage, about seventy verses long, in a Latin manuscript in the town library of Amiens, in France. He published it in 1875.³ He also confirmed why it had vanished. In the oldest surviving Latin copy, a manuscript from 822, a page had been cut out with a knife, as another scholar had noticed a few years before, and the copies made from it carried the gap ever after.

Why cut it out? Look at what the missing passage says. Ezra asks whether, on the day of judgment, the righteous will be able to pray for the wicked: whether fathers for children, or children for parents (2 Esdras 7:103). The angel says no. So never shall anyone pray for another in that day (2 Esdras 7:105). In the Middle Ages, Christians prayed and paid for masses for the dead. A page that said such prayers were useless was dangerous. Many scholars think someone removed it for that reason.³

Modern translations, including the one quoted here, print the restored verses. That is why your King James and a modern Bible number this chapter differently.

Arguing with an angel

The heart of this book is an argument, and Ezra does not win it, but he does not stop.

The angel Uriel answers his first question with a challenge. Your own things, that are grown up with you, can you not know; how then can your vessel comprehend the way of the Most High? (2 Esdras 4:10–11). You cannot weigh fire, or measure wind, or bring back a day that is gone. How can you understand God?

Ezra will not be put off. He pushes back on every answer. And the more the angel explains, the more Ezra grieves.

When the angel describes the judgment, with the pit of torment on one side and the paradise of delight on the other (2 Esdras 7:36), Ezra says what he sees: the world to come shall bring delight to few, but torments to many (2 Esdras 7:47).

Then he says something I want you to hear. He wishes the animals luck. Let the race of men lament and the beasts of the field be glad … For it is far better with them than with us; for they look not for judgement (2 Esdras 7:65–66). And to Adam: O you Adam, what have you done? For though it was you that sinned, the evil is not fallen on you alone, but upon all of us that come of you (2 Esdras 7:118).

He is a man who cannot bear to be saved if most of the world is lost. He keeps praying for the many. And the angel tells him to stop: you come far short that you should be able to love my creature more than I (2 Esdras 8:47).

My people had an old habit of arguing with God for the lost. Abraham did it over Sodom: Shouldn’t the Judge of all the earth do right? (Genesis 18:25). Moses did it in the wilderness. Ezra does it here. The book itself notices this. Right after the restored passage ends, Ezra asks why, if Abraham prayed for Sodom, no one will be allowed to pray on the last day (2 Esdras 7:106).

Few will be saved

The angel’s answer comes down to one sentence. The Most High has made this world for many, but the world to come for few (2 Esdras 8:1). And again: There be many created, but few shall be saved (2 Esdras 8:3).

To show it, the angel tells Ezra about a city full of good things whose only entrance is a path so narrow that there could but one man go there at once, with fire on one side and deep water on the other (2 Esdras 7:7–8).

You will recognize that picture. Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction … How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it (Matthew 7:13–14).

So I said something like it too. But hear what I did with it. When someone asked me straight out, Lord, are they few who are saved?, I did not give a number. I said, Strive to enter in by the narrow door (Luke 13:23–24). I turned the question from a count of the damned into a call to the person asking.

And I told a story about a shepherd with a hundred sheep, who leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one that was lost, until he found it (Luke 15:4). Ezra’s angel tells him not to love the lost more than God does. In my story, God is the one who goes looking for them.

That is where this book and I part. Ezra grieves the lost, and the book’s answer is that most of them are lost. My answer was the shepherd on the hillside who does not come home until he finds the one.

Go deeperMy son Jesus, who will die

In the Latin of chapter 7, God says: my son Jesus shall be revealed with those that be with him, and shall rejoice those who remain four hundred years (2 Esdras 7:28). Then, the next verse says, my son Christ will die, together with everyone who has breath, and the world will return to seven days of silence before the resurrection and the judgment.

My name is in this book. But it was not put there by the man who wrote it. The Syriac translation, made from the same lost Greek, reads my son the Messiah here, and the other ancient translations all read Messiah. A Christian copyist of the Latin wrote my name where the writer had written a title.⁴

What the writer actually believed is more surprising than the change. He expected an anointed king who would reign for four hundred years and then simply die, with everyone else, before the world was made new. His Messiah’s death saves no one. It is just the end of an age.

This is one of the clearest windows we have into what Jews after my time expected of a messiah: a king, a warrior against the empire, a lion who rebukes the Roman eagle (2 Esdras 12:31–32). Not a man nailed up by that empire. You can see from it why so many of my own people could not believe a crucified man was the one.

The eagle and the man from the sea

The later visions turn from questions to pictures.

An eagle rises from the sea, with twelve wings and three heads, and rules the whole earth. The angel explains it: The eagle, whom you saw come up from the sea, is the fourth kingdom which appeared in vision to your brother Daniel. But it was not expounded to him, as I now expound it to you (2 Esdras 12:11–12).

Daniel’s fourth beast was the Greek kingdom. This writer says it was really Rome, and that Daniel had not been told. He was doing exactly what preachers have done with Daniel ever since: taking an old prophecy and announcing that it was about his own day. The eagle was Rome’s own symbol, carried on its standards. Most scholars read its three heads as the three emperors of one family, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, under whom the book was written.¹

Then a man rises from the sea and flew with the clouds of heaven (2 Esdras 13:3), and the army that comes against him is burned up by the fire of his mouth. That is Daniel’s one like a son of man coming with the clouds, made into a conqueror.

Twenty-four books for everyone

The last vision may be the most important thing in the book for you, because it is about your Bible.

The law has been burned with the Temple, Ezra says, and no one knows God’s works any more (2 Esdras 14:21). So God gives him a cup to drink, and for forty days he dictates to five scribes. So in forty days were written fourscore and fourteen books (2 Esdras 14:44). Ninety-four.

God tells him what to do with them. The first that you have written publish openly, and let the worthy and unworthy read it: but keep the seventy last, that you may deliver them to such as be wise among your people (2 Esdras 14:45–46).

Ninety-four less seventy is twenty-four. That is how my people came to count the books of their scriptures: twenty-four, the same books Protestants count as thirty-nine, by joining some together. This chapter is one of the oldest witnesses to that count.⁵

And it says something else, at the same moment. Twenty-four books for everyone, and seventy more, secret, for the wise. The man who gave you one of the first counts of the Bible’s books believed the Bible was not the whole library.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Esdras 7:45–48, then 2 Esdras 8:1–3.

You will find: Ezra pleading that the world to come will bring delight to few, but torments to many, and the angel answering that few shall be saved.

Then read Luke 13:23–24 and Luke 15:4–7. See what I said when someone asked me whether few would be saved.

Then read 2 Esdras 14:44–47 and do the arithmetic.

The Short Version

• 2 Esdras is three works in one. The heart of it, 4 Ezra, is a Jewish book written about AD 100, after Rome burned the Temple. Christians added the first two and last two chapters.
• In it, Ezra argues with the angel Uriel about why God let his people be destroyed, and keeps praying for the many who will be lost.
• The angel answers that the world to come is for few. I used a narrow gate too, but I told people to strive, and told the story of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep.
• A page about praying for the dead was cut out of the Latin, and found again in 1874.
• Its Messiah reigns 400 years and then dies, and a Christian copyist wrote my name into the verse.
• Its last vision gives one of the oldest witnesses to the twenty-four books of my people’s scriptures, with seventy more kept secret.