Hi All,

So I just completed a long time goal of reading the bible cover to cover. And one thing that struck me is how little of the apocrypha you typically think of (heaven, angels, demons, etc) is really described. With the exception of Revelations it just isn't really discussed. Yet throughout the text they are constantly making allusions to Beelzebub or Baal etc.

I know that later texts like the Divine comedy where large contributors to the canon, but clearly there was more going on in the time between gospels. So where do those mystical stories come from? How where they spread? And without a centralized church how did people know which ones to trust?