SIO381: The Bible Is Not Monotheistic

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:15 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 381, I'm your host Thomas Smith, and today's episode is very fascinating. Some of you may recall, may know, that I used to have a Bible related show, so I got my start, please don't go listen to it, it's old, it sucks, it's when I first started, you know, in 2010, I did not, didn't even think anyone was listening, I wasn't very funny back then, arguably not now, but I mean inarguably not now, funnier now than then, I think.

Point of all that is, I, I'm something of a Bible podcaster myself, when I heard my friend Dan Beetcher had started a new Bible show, but like, you know, a smart people one with an actual expert, called Data Over Dogma, figured I definitely needed to check it out, that out, and not only did I check it out, I also wanted to have them on the show and have a conversation about the Bible from a more scholarly perspective because there's so much there.

One thing to read it as a person, which, again, I argue you should be able to just do if, if it were, you know, the word of God, but I'll set that aside. It's another to really have an understanding, which I definitely don't, of where it comes from, you know, what, what it's made out of, what things went into it, what decisions, what different people, different times, it's, it's a massive document.

It's not one thing that like a guy wrote or a God wrote, like it's, it's a complicated thing. So I wanted to have the Dance of Data Over Dogma on for a cool conversation about that. And without further ado, let's get to that interview.

As always, if you would like to not hear this little ad break here before the, before the actual interview, go to patreon.com/seriouspod and get ad free episodes, each and every episode, and the bonus stuff, some early stuff, the Seriously Awful Movies, go check it out, please support the show, and thanks to everyone who has. And now let's get to the interview, I'm joined by the Dans, the biblical Dans, Dan's.

0:02:15 Thomas: My friend Dan Beecher. And a new Dan. You're a new Dan in my life, Dr. Dan McClellan. Congrats on that distinction. How are you guys doing?

0:02:14 Dan Beecher: Biblical dance, I like that.

0:02:24 Dan Mcclellan: Well I uh I need to put it on my cv I'm doing well Oh, thank you. How are you?

0:02:26 Thomas: Oh, doing great. I am, so many questions. I can't wait to get into this. I have some experience with the Bible, but not in any like smart person way. I just read the Bible in a dumb person way, but you guys guys are doing like smart people stuff.

0:02:40 Dan Beecher: Well, that's pretty I common. Liked the way that you read the Bible, Thomas, but I gotta say, like, one of the reasons that I wanted to start our show, Data Over Dogma, little plug, I'll just keep saying it over and over until like some, until all of your list, I know, but, I mean, you know, eventually we're gonna get all of you listeners to tune in. No, I, it was funny because I have had to read the Bible sort of in the dummy way too, and I just kept getting so confused by what was in it. Like, I didn't know what it was saying to me. I didn't know what I was supposed to take literally and what was supposed to be a metaphor. Like, and you know, pastors are worthless. It, you know, and helping you figure that stuff out, so

0:02:52 Thomas: Sure. I already said it in the intro, but yeah, no, it's fine.

0:03:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:20 Thomas: Yeah, they're still mad that we know how to read and they have to explain it. You know,

0:03:25 Dan Beecher: Right.

0:03:26 Thomas: Like, God, I miss the days when we were the only ones who knew what the fuck this said at all.

0:03:31 Dan Beecher: So I got me another Dan, uh, who has a doctor in front of his name and we, uh, you

0:03:33 Thomas: Yeah see that was that was a mistake I made. I didn't find a dent. I should know.

0:03:38 Dan Beecher: Got to find you a doctor, Dan.

0:03:39 Thomas: No, but I'll tell you, I shouldn't actually, I shouldn't have had to do that because a number one, if you know, the God of the fucking universe is going to give us a book, we should just be able to like read. Well, actually, no, we shouldn't even have to read. It should just be like you touch it and your whole brain just downloads it. And you're like, Oh, okay. I'll go back. Why is there even a book? Why do we need that?

0:04:02 Dan Beecher: Listen.

0:04:03 Thomas: Nevermind. You ask a single question about the whole thing falls apart. It doesn't make any sense.

0:04:05 Dan Beecher: It's You know, it's one of those, uh, one of those situations where, they you know, the the person needing rescue was like, "Why didn't you rescue me, God?" And he's like, "I sent a boat." Well, God sent me a Dan, so I've got a Dan, uh, to save me from, from book.

0:04:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Don't you give a little of your backgrounds? I know Dan Beecher, of course. People know you from, uh, Codenames, I think, is the main way people know you, your ability to Yeah. Famously

0:04:27 Dan Beecher: From Yes, games that we've played together at late, late night sessions at atheist conferences.

0:04:31 Thomas: Yeah. Sneaky good, this guy, at Codenanes, by the way, just sneaky good, you won't even notice him and then he's won every game

0:04:35 Dan Beecher: I like fly to under, fly the radar as much as possible. So I've done other shows like Thank God I'm Atheist and The How-To Heretic. And I TikTok, I'm a teenager, so I watched the TikTok, talk, um, you, this guy kept popping up on my TikToks and religious stuff because I'm interested in it both from this perspective of like what's actually happening, and also what are the crazies saying about stuff.

And, uh, guy just kept popping, popping up, clearly knew everything and was smart as all get out, and also, like, straight down the barrel willing to say, you know, his content was beyond literate with the Bible, to the point of, you know, high scholarship, but all but all, well, maybe I don't know, I can't speak to that, but also, also completely unflinching in his willingness to talk about things. I was certain he was a fellow atheist, and when I found out he wasn't, that he was, uh, uh, member of the LDS, the Mormon church, and lived here in Salt Lake City where I live, I, like, reached out to him and said, "You and I have to have lunch, I have to know you." And,

0:05:23 Thomas: Yeah, divinely inspired, no, I'm just kidding, sure, yeah, that must have been a creepy message to get, so did you call the police, other Dan, or, I must know you, in the biblical sense, or the normal,

0:05:54 Dan Beecher: Uh, and right? Right?

0:05:55 Dan Mcclellan: Know, it's on the spectrum creepy messages that I get. This was pretty far down there, but not even remotely the creepiest. So no but I'm and I'm I'm a cheap date I'm I'm happy to get uh a free lunch so oh

0:06:06 Dan Beecher: Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:03 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well. I I mean there's got to be a tremendous amount of money in Bible scholarship, right? I mean, you're rolling in it. All the top, like, you 500 companies, I think, hire a high up Bible consultant.

0:06:17 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah

0:06:23 Dan Beecher: You need, You need data scientists and biblical scholars. That's, those are, the two main things.

0:06:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:26 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah. No, there's when You go, if you try to major in biblical studies in virtually any non uh university, like the first day of class, it's literally standard for them to get up and say, get out of this major, there are no jobs, don't ruin your life. Yeah.

0:06:41 Thomas: This was a prank, Frank, this class doesn't exist. You fell for the trap. Yeah, totally. Well, so interesting. So you're practicing believing LDS and Dan, you are ex -Mormon, right?

0:06:45 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah.

0:06:49 Dan Beecher: I am.

0:06:55 Thomas: Or, okay.

0:06:55 Dan Beecher: I, I, I grew up LDS, which ironically, Dan didn't grow up LDS, but I grew up LDS, Dan converted to it. We traded play. I don't know if we passed in the night on my way out and his way in. But yeah, I, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting about our show is that we can both be on it and have yet to have any like the interest of our show is just getting at what the Bible is actually telling us and has nothing to do with being devotional. I think, you know, we have, we do have like very much believing listeners and we also have very much atheist listeners and uh I

0:06:59 Thomas: Oh, wow. What? How the hell did... Yeah,

0:07:02 Dan Mcclellan: I

0:07:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:34 Thomas: That's pretty cool.

0:07:35 Dan Beecher: Would say it's a strong split like it's not a small uh either way, yeah.

0:07:37 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I doubt there are that many any shows that are like that, that's in the world, that's pretty cool, um, yeah.

0:07:45 Dan Beecher: We found, we found a niche.

0:07:46 Thomas: And I know uh like times past when I've talked to you know biblical scholars or whatever religious scholars, it is amazing how much more willing to admit the book's faults than normal, like your everyday religious people are, you know, they're like everyday religious people like this is the perfect fucking inerrant, where it's no, it's there's no, not an error in it, no errors. And then biblical scholars, even ones who are believers, are like, well, no, I mean, a lot of this is kind of crap. Like Like there's some stuff here that's not, it's interesting. It's a really, I think it's a cool, like intellectually honest position to take, you know, like taking it with all its warts and all, or is Dr. Dan going to tell me? No, it's actually perfect.

0:07:58 Dan Beecher: Or

0:08:22 Thomas: You're full of shit. A hundred percent.

0:08:22 Dan Beecher: They're

0:08:22 Dan Mcclellan: No, I mean, there's, yeah, you, you have different schools of thought across the the the spectrum of biblical studies. There are people who try to defend and preserve some sense of the the Bible's inerrancy, infallibility, or inspiration. But really, you can't, you can familiarize yourself with these data and become competent in the languages and in the cognate literature and in cultures, and really maintain that sense of inerrancy and infallibility. That's really something that you have to have a pretty shallow grasp of the data to like you've got it right in that regard.

And so biblical scholars, even the ones who may be publishing stuff that is affirming of inerrancy frequently, it's a professional commitment that they have, not even a personal commitment. And so it's, and you know, there, I think if you went and asked people who study the Bible, hey, if you want to go on social media and gain a following regarding biblical studies, how should you approach it? And I think many people think there's a larger audience out there for a faith-promoting kind of inerrancy-promoting position, and I was not out here to gain a following, I was out here just to respond to misinformation and try

0:08:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:43 Dan Mcclellan: To combat it, and lo and behold, it turns out there are an awful lot of people across the entire spectrum of belief and non-belief who really want to know just the data, who are like, I will do with it what I need to, but I just want to hear the raw facts. Like Dan was saying, we have people from across the spectrum of belief and non-belief who just can't get enough of hearing the data, because it's not what they're used to hearing. They're used to hearing people who are placating them, people who are speaking to a devotional mindset and are trying not to offend, trying not to hurt feelings, try not to uh drive people away from faith, but uh I think yeah, yeah, that's a big part of it as well. Yeah.

0:10:23 Dan Beecher: Trying to converge power around a certain interpretation, or they are trying, to, he,

0:10:31 Thomas: Um, I got a question to open things out then I, this is the first question that occurred to me and I was like, well, well, that's a stupid stupid question, except not. What is the Bible? Like, what, what is it? There's, it's like 17 different things. Yeah. It's like, I don't don'T think your average person who's like vaguely religious or, you know, whatever. I DON'T know if they even know what the Bible is. Like it, it, yeah.

0:10:42 Dan Mcclellan: A dumb question um yeah

0:10:54 Thomas: I mean, it'S a combination of a lot of things, right? I mean, what can you tell me about that?

0:10:54 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah well the the word Bible uh from a Greek word vivia, which means books. So it's actually a collection of text, it's a library of text, and we treat it as a single volume or a single corpus. And that's the problem with how we think about the Bible, because it is a collection of a variety of different texts written by a variety different authors, edited by a different variety of editors over the course of many centuries, and it frequently conflicts with itself. And it's saying different things to different people for different reasons, but there is political propaganda, there is what we call wisdom literature that is meditating on the problem of evil, there is liturgy, there is poetry, there's even erotic poetry in the Bible, uh a lot of the historical historical book

0:11:41 Thomas: Yeah. I heard that and I got to the section that was was allegedly that, not horny at all. I got to tell you, it wasn't, it was nothing.

0:11:49 Dan Beecher: He didn't say, it was good erotic poetry he just,

0:11:50 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:11:49 Dan Mcclellan: Well, fifth century BCE uh there was a different vibe so

0:11:57 Thomas: I mean, we know they were, we knew they were active. No, I won't go there. So it's not like they'd never done it. No. No I think the average person is like, well, this book was written to like tell me in my daily life what to do or how to think about things. But yeah, yeah, there are those times where it's like really parochial, right? I mean, can you think of an example of like, I want to know what's, what comes to mind is the most like this part of the Bible, this, whether it's a book or the section or whatever you want to say, I don't know how, how do you want divide it? This thing is like very specifically for these people written for this purpose, you know, that political propaganda. Can you give us any like good examples of that.

0:12:05 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah actually I just made a video earlier today responding to Charlie Kirk saying the Book of Deuteronomy is political and it talks about an independent judiciary and and I don't know what on earth he has been reading. But the Book of Deuteronomy is a good example. The earliest phases of the book of Deuteronomy, it came together over the course of a couple of centuries. But the earliest phases were the product of a king named Josiah, who was a ruler in Judah, in Judea, over Jerusalem. And at the time, all of the other temples and cult sites and everything around around Judah and Israel had been destroyed a century before by an Assyrian king named Sennacherib.

All of the worship that was going on of Adonai, the god of Israel, as well as of other deities, was kind of put on hold. And there was this what we call de facto cult centralization where suddenly everybody had to come to Jerusalem. And some of the kings in between that invasion and Josiah were trying to restore that earlier worship. And Josiah was like, like, I kind of like having everybody come here, so we're going to put a stop to this.

And basically, you have in the Book of Kings, you had this story where Josiah's, somebody is like, hey, guess what? We were renovating the temple. We found the Book of the Law, and it turns out we've been doing everything wrong.

0:12:46 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

0:13:55 Dan Mcclellan: And then they go and read the book of the law, Josiah rends his clothes and goes out and kind lets everybody know, hey everybody, it turns out we've been wrong all along. God wants us to do everything that is really convenient for me. And weird so, I've yeah, never

0:14:14 Thomas: Yeah, that's got to be a common theme in the book. I feel like that's gonna, yeah, yeah

0:14:14 Dan Beecher: Heard that before nobody in power has ever pulled that one

0:14:15 Dan Mcclellan: And yeah. So it's basically this, you can only worship the one God and only the manifestation of that single God in the temple in Jerusalem, no other places you can worship. And everything is structured to basically take this de facto cult centralization that serves Josiah's interests and the interests of his priesthood, and it's making it a de jure cult centralization. Now it is embedded in our religion. This is what God wants. And so this is really just a king structuring power in his own favor. And then over time, you have scholars refer to this idea of a Deuteronomistic history, where you have his ideological descendants kind of adding more to this, to further their interests. And what comes out the other end is this notion that God always wanted only one temple in Jerusalem and only the Levitical priesthood and only this king and all that kind of stuff. And really that's Josiah kind of sitting in his palace like, I need to make this all about me. How am I going to do that? And what you get is the book of of Deuteronomy?

0:15:31 Thomas: Did the Bible, if it's that, look like to different people at different times, you know, like when, yeah I know that's gotta be a massive question but if you, you give us some, I don't know, some tidbits about that, like Like, what that mean when that book was written at that time? Was it just, like, a standalone thing that then later was coalesced with stuff? Go

0:15:36 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah. Yeah.

0:15:52 Dan Beecher: When jesus was walking around with a king james bible in his hand

0:15:56 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:58 Dan Mcclellan: Well, you can't really talk about the Bible until the end of the 4th century CE, 5th century, CE, around there. So, after Constantine. Before that, you have the scriptures. And that's idea that really only arises within the Greco-Roman period, so Hellenistic Judaism, so around 300 BCE into the Christian era. Before Christianity, everything was on scrolls. Christianity innovated the use of codices, which allowed for multiple different books to be kind of compiled together in the same little artifact. Prior to that, everything was in scrolls, and so the scriptures were really just your pile of scrolls and we don't really have good evidence that things like the Pentateuch, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, things like that, or other texts, we really don't have any good evidence, that they were in very widespread circulation, widely known, much less enforced, until around the 2nd century BCE.

0:16:04 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

0:17:04 Dan Mcclellan: Prior to that, it seems that these were documents that primarily functioned on the level of the literati or the authorities, so this was stuff that was going on, yeah.

0:17:15 Thomas: So that's, like. The Twitterati, but back then. Okay.

0:17:18 Dan Mcclellan: This is stuff going on above everybody's head, and it was an, every text was on a separate scroll for the most part. We have some indication that some of the smaller books would have been consolidated within individual scrolls, but we also have indication that there were a lot of other texts circulating, initially as scrolls, but later on these codices, that fell out of favor between their initial circulation and that fourth or fifth century kind of crystallization of what we now know as the Bible. And so you can't really speak of the Bible before then, and what you're looking at before you can really speak of the Bible is a of different things that are not really delineated or not understood in anything remotely approximating the way we understand it now. In fact, even the Apocrypha is something that many Protestants don't accept as scripture today, and that's something that really has taken hold since the 19th century, but even those texts were considered authoritative

0:17:18 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:18:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:16 Dan Mcclellan: By the earliest Jews and Christians. Lot of scholars, for instance, Eva Mroczek is a wonderful scholar who published a book a few years ago called The Imagination in Early Judaism about how it's problematic to even speak of the Bible at all, and

0:18:32 Thomas: Go ahead and go ahead and yeah. Yeah.

0:18:33 Dan Mcclellan: Scholars should probably not be using that category to govern how they talk about the texts, the authoritative texts that were in circulation prior to the development of the the Bible, yeah.

0:18:43 Thomas: What can you tell me about like how reliable, I don't know if reliable is the right word, but, uh, what's, what'S that word? Fidelity? You know, like the, you know, like what can you talk to me about that? I mean, how many, you talk about scrolls. What if somebody got some like tomato sauce on them or something? Like what's the, cause I would have, I would have been the guy, Oh, it's my night to guard the Holy scrolls and then I spill something on it. Fuck. The one day I had a delicious spaghetti or something. I don'T know.

0:18:58 Dan Mcclellan: Right. Well, The these were, uh, circulating among, uh, groups. They were the kinds of things that, you know, you didn't just have on your bookshelf at home. There were usually, um, repositories, or you know, maybe they were kept in the synagogue, or maybe a prominent person's home or something like that, and you had different kinds of different, different copies that were being made of them. And yeah, when we go further back in time, in the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the best evidence we have for this.

But as you go further back in time, and primarily before the 2nd century CE, you see a lot more variability. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, we find multiple copies of the same book, and where we have the same verse attested across multiple different copies, we see quite a bit of variability. And what scholars suggest is that this is a period when the text was really not understood as the location of the ideas or the location of the authority. And this is kind of complex for some people to think about, but they thought of the ideas orthe words or the stories as where the authority was, was the text was just one manifestation of it, and so as long as the story was the same or the story got the same point across, the words on the page were not really that critical.

And it was as we move into the second century CE and, uh, we get a more literate group of people that are taking the text more seriously, and there's more concern for accurately representing the words that the the the authority kind of moves onto the text where the text itself is the authority. So within early Christianity, the Grafi, the scriptures, that was what the Jewish people had. We had the words of Jesus. And so the first couple of generations, they were circulating these orally. And it wasn't until a couple of centuries later when they're like, "Hey, Jesus didn't come back yet. I heard my grandmother sharing the

0:20:09 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:21:12 Dan Mcclellan: Wordsof Jesus, but I don't know that my kids are getting the words of Jesus straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. And so maybe it will behoove us to write some of these things down. So

0:21:21 Thomas: Yeah. He's coming any minute. He'll be here any minute, but just in case, like just in case, I'm going to write it down. 2,000 years later.

0:21:24 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah. And we start to see, yeah, we start to see concern as we get into the later texts of the New Testament for explaining why Jesus hasn't come yet and writing things down because, uh -oh, turns out we needed to record this stuff. Because we could have had Gospels as early as Paul. The only reason we have Paul's stuff is because he was writing letters to the church. He was trying to communicate to the Church. The Gospeles are kind of a memorialization of the words of Jesus when it got to the point when they were like, uh, maybe we should write this stuff down.

0:21:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:02 Dan Beecher: What years were the gospels written like

0:22:04 Dan Mcclellan: The academic consensus is that Mark was probably written written between 68 and around 72 CE, so right around the destruction of the temple at the hands of the Romans. Is probably written within 5 to 15 years after that. Luke -Acts may be a bit after Matthew, maybe a lot after Matthew. John is probably around 90 -95 CE. There are some scholars who think Luke Acts may be early 2nd century CE, so 100, 110 CE. So, the earliest gospel is probably around 40 years after Jesus' death. So, that's where we're getting a generation away, and suddenly it's like, I don't remember all this stuff very well.

0:22:49 Thomas: Well, forget about a generation, man. Like, I can't remember what I read in the newspaper yesterday. I don't Know. You know, like that's, I think that's a point that a lot of atheists bring up, which like, how the world could you have much faith that this is perfectly reliable apart apart from some preexisting belief that it must be because it's, you know, holy or something.

0:22:55 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah.

0:23:10 Dan Beecher: Don't worry thomas all of the uh all All of the accounts in the Gospels agree with each other, so we're fine.

0:23:16 Thomas: Yeah, that's true. That is a good way. No, I did want to ask, though, can you tell us a little bit, you mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I'm sure, you now, we will have all pretty much heard of those, but what is that exactly? I think that's an interesting story, right, that kind of allows us to really kind of compare different of a lot of this.

0:23:16 Dan Mcclellan: Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it helps us understand the state of the textual transmission at a much earlier period than we had access earlier. But in 1947, there was a discovery of a handful of scrolls that were stored in clay jars and in some caves on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, yeah, pretty

0:23:53 Thomas: Forgetting it was that recent. I was like, oh, it must have been like the 1500s. No, it was like super duper recent.

0:23:59 Dan Mcclellan: Recent. In fact, you can still see, if you Google this, you can find somebody put in the New York Times an ad for these texts for sale. And they wanted like $100,000 for Oh, these wow. Text. But yeah, there's a lot of controversy regarding how the story initially unfolded and how scholars initially got involved. But basically, we have close to a different manuscripts, and many of them representing text from the Bible, many of them representing texts that are apocryphal, pseudepigraphical, and then some of them are what we have called sectarian literature. The community that most scholars think was responsible for gathering and kind of storing these texts was a sect of Essenes, which was a Jewish faction that was around that time. They were kind of a separatist faction. They went and lived by themselves in the desert at this place called Qumran.

0:24:11 Thomas: Wow. Yeah.

0:24:57 Dan Beecher: That the people's front of Judea? Or is it?

0:24:59 Dan Mcclellan: It's the Judean People's Front,

0:25:01 Dan Beecher: Oh, okay. I

0:25:01 Dan Mcclellan: Not

0:24:58 Thomas: Yeah well, I know, is someone's grandmother was involved to have that many jars available? You know, they're like, "Well, I was going to make a bunch of a bunch of jam, but yeah, okay, you can put your squirrels in here just for, I can take them out in the winter, right?" Or whatever, huh.

0:25:15 Dan Mcclellan: Scholars think that these scrolls were not copied within this community, but were kind of brought from all around the area around Judea and just stored here. So we have manuscripts that scholars believe were as early as around 250 BCE, and we have manuscript that are much later. The site was probably destroyed by Romans around 68 CE. So we just a hair over 300 years of collecting these manuscripts, manuscripts, uh, and they're, they're weighted toward the later period of that, so the majority of the manuscripts are from the first century BC in the first entry CE, but uh, they, they attest, we have at least something, at least a verse or two or some kind of fragment of every single book of the Hebrew Bible except for the Book of Esther and

0:25:27 Thomas: Ah.

0:26:07 Thomas: That's my favorite one too. Damn, no. I'm just kidding.

0:26:09 Dan Mcclellan: Uh, and Some, some scholars think that may, maybe because this separatist faction didn't look very favorably upon this book that never mentions God once. It's a more kind of social, cultural tale than it is about the God of Israel. And so some people think, well, maybe it just wasn't preserved, and other people say, no, they probably just didn't like it because we have lots of other books there.

0:26:35 Thomas: Yeah, well, did that create, I'm curious, you said there's apocryphal books, I mean, did this create any controversy as to like, well, maybe you should have had this one in the Bible the whole time?

0:26:44 Dan Mcclellan: Uh, well, the Book of Enoch, there were more copies of the Book of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls than, uh, but four books from the Hebrew Bible, so I want to say Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Psalms, I think, were the four books where there, there were more copies than there were of the Book of Enoch, but 1 Enoch was number five.

0:27:05 Thomas: Is, and is that an apocryphal one, or idiot?

0:27:07 Dan Mcclellan: That is, it wasn't a part of most apocryphas. It's actually a part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church. But there's a whole story behind that. It's a very famous text that was known in early Christianity. It's actually quoted in the Book of Jude. In the Book of Jude in the New Testament, they quote directly.

0:27:27 Thomas: We were gonna correct him. But like he Good thing he caught it himself, yeah.

0:27:28 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah, I know. We'll just edit that

0:27:32 Thomas: And

0:27:32 Dan Mcclellan: In post. It's directly quoted in the Book of Jude. So it was considered authoritative for quite some time. A pretty wild book. It's basically a retelling of Genesis 6 and a lot of other stories from Genesis where you have these wicked angels come down and they impregnate human women and they give birth to these giants. And they father the

0:27:54 Thomas: That's Why we got to build a wall And keep them out, they Are coming in. Angels build a sky wall, yeah.

0:27:56 Dan Mcclellan: Nephilim.

0:27:58 Dan Beecher: Yeah,

0:28:03 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah, it's an ice wall is what's needed in the north. So, yeah, the Book of Enoch is, there are an awful lot of people today, if you go onto Conspiracy TikTok and YouTube, you'll hear a lot about giants, you'll heard a lot of the Book of Enoch, you'll here a lot Nephilem. And a fair

0:28:07 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:21 Thomas: YouTube is just YouTube, I think, I don't think you have to, no.

0:28:25 Dan Mcclellan: That's fair, um, and and so yeah, what this, what this indicates is that this book was, uh, lot more popular, uh, probably considered more authoritative than we now accept, so it really revolutionized the discussion around the development of canon, the development of the idea of scripture, and it complicates a lot of the more simplistic kind of devotional positions on how all of this stuff came together.

0:28:54 Thomas: Kidding, hey, Dan Beecher, uh, Don't you, uh, introduce the the, yeah.

0:28:57 Dan Beecher: What up? Stopped listening a While ago, so sorry. Sorry.

0:29:02 Thomas: This guy's boring. I should get a new podcast.

0:29:05 Dan Mcclellan: David.

0:29:05 Thomas: Don't you introduce the topic that you, you know, kind of pitched me that I found really fucking fascinating and I

0:29:10 Dan Beecher: You Know, one the things that I have found interesting in our conversations, uh, that is my conversations with Dan and, uh, just this week we, we a an episode with uh one of Dan's colleagues, uh, Burnett. One of things that that came out in that, and uh, and it's something that Dan, that and David have, have focused on, and they're actually doing a conference about later on, uh, kind, none of the Bible, at least according to the, the believers of the time, is monotheistic, and I just thought that like if If I had, if I had learned that as a kid, I, my mind would have been Blown, so

0:29:43 Thomas: None. Yeah. don'T, I don't understand how that could possibly be reconciled with like anything. I DON'T understand. Den.

0:29:54 Dan Beecher: Yeah, damn, maybe you should talk a little bit about just like sort of what, I, what is meant by that, and like, like the heck is going on there. And

0:30:03 Dan Mcclellan: And this research has to do with, I'm coming from it from a Hebrew Bible perspective. David and other scholars are coming at it from an early Christianity perspective. But basically, there's been this idea for quite some time that initially it was that Abraham introduced monotheism, that everybody was running around worshiping all these different gods, and then Abraham showed up, and there was this revolution where now we're just doing one God.

0:30:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:30 Dan Mcclellan: But the problem is we have lots of places in the Hebrew Bible where it talks about other gods. You even have in book of Exodus, in the commandments in Exodus, there's a statement, do the gods.

0:30:26 Dan Beecher: Fixed it

0:30:40 Thomas: Oh man. Of my favorite ones. I don't know the ordering of all this. It's lost my memory. So sorry if I say a dumb thing, but one of my favourite moments of the Bible, I think it's just when Moses, he goes up or something to get the 10 commandments and he comes back to, he's like, okay, everybody don't fucking don't get in the liquor cabinet while I'm gone. Like just stay there. Be cool. Everybody be gone a minute. And he comes back down. And the the way I remember it described is like five minutes go by and they're worshiping 17 different gods. They're like, how did you do all that? Like, I just left. I just Left. They made like a, like an idol. Right. Like, and they just, they really just wanted something to worship, I guess. I don't know. Different times.

0:31:11 Dan Beecher: Yeah we

0:31:12 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah, an interesting story. They make a golden calf. And the interesting thing about this is that the archaeological data and even some textual data indicates that Adonai would have been worshipped with the of a bull. And so this likely was considered appropriate worship at a time, and later on we get to this "don't worship God the same way that the nations around you are worshipping God," and so it becomes a no-no. And so this story is kind of retconning this "only worship Adonai in a specific way" ideology that develops later back into their earlier history. And I talk about that at pretty extensive length in a book that I published last year called Adonai's Divine Images, where I talk about the use of divine images in the Hebrew Bible.

0:31:25 Thomas: Right? I

0:32:13 Dan Beecher: Just going, going to jump in real quick and just, uh, mention that you use the word Adonai in place, of the tetragrammaton, the the of the Hebrew God, uh, sort of in in deference to any Jewish listeners that might be, that might not want to hear the name so

0:32:17 Dan Mcclellan: Yes, yes. Yes, that's, yeah,

0:32:28 Thomas: Have almost no idea what any of that was. Yeah. Please feel free to explain what you're talking about.

0:32:31 Dan Mcclellan: So the name of God in the Hebrew Bible is referred to as the Tetragrammaton, it's Yod -Heh -Vav -He, or in English transliteration it's YHWH, and there Is a pronunciation that has become conventionalized among scholars and others, but I have a insignificant contingent of Jewish folks in my audience, and out of respect for folks who have asked me if I wouldn't mind avoiding pronouncing the name of God, I use the substitution Adonai, which is the Hebrew word for Lord, which is a substitution that goes back to before Jesus in place of pronouncing The Divine Name.

So that's, that's something that I offered to do because I had a handful of Jewish folks asked if, if I wouldn't mind doing that, and um, and that, you know, doesn't cost me anything and it's actually uh, of conventional in some parts of the scholarly world, so it's something that I'm used to already. So, so when I say Adonai, that, that means YHWH, the tetragrammaton, um, yeah, uh, yeah, Well, we have in the King James version, you have the word Lord, but it's spelled in either all caps or small caps as a way of kind of indicating this is different, this is a substitution for the divine name.

0:32:42 Thomas: Right, yeah.

0:33:39 Thomas: Okay. There's a lot of names for that, right? I I mean, I remember that something about the King James was didn't they didn't somebody substitute a lot of those at some point, if I'm remembering correctly?

0:34:02 Dan Beecher: It's, small caps is like little wink. Oh

0:34:05 Dan Mcclellan: So yes, it's, it's a way to say, hey, there's something underneath here. And you have different conventions that different translations of the Bible will use. Like, like in French and Italian, they use l'Eternel, which is the eternal one. And that's a different substitution that's used.

0:34:20 Thomas: Yeah, it's a terrible Marvel movie. I agree. I wouldn't I wouldn'T use that one. And no, I'm yeah, I've known nothing.

0:34:32 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah,

0:34:25 Dan Beecher: Don't Yeah. Do not get into the uh into the comic book world with dan he that's that is that is as much of a thing as the bible so

0:34:36 Thomas: I know, give me an indication. I know less about comic books than I do about the Bible. Like, that's how bad it is. Um, and uh, but but I guess the important point is it's good to clarify that, because I thought you were talking about like some other god, but it's not. So it sounds like it's not like they started worshiping a different god per se, they just were like, well, we should probably, you know, make this big giant gold calf in order to worship the correct god, according to whoever was in charge at the time. No?

0:35:03 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah, yeah. So this would have been how they would have worshipped Adonai, the God of Israel, the deity that's on the top of the mountain that Moses uh gone off to visit. And so this, this would not have been out of place if this actually happened historically. It is probably later authors kind of uh taking what went on earlier and um making it sound like it's inappropriate as a way to uh advance The the new idea, the new way we're doing things.

0:35:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:30 Dan Beecher: If I could just jump in, since we're on Exodus, like one of the first things that clued me in, before, you know, long before I met Dan, one ofthe first things that clewed me into the fact that at least the Hebrew Bible, meaning the Old testament Testament, is not a monotheistic book, was that I was reading Exodus and there's this unmistakable moment where, you know, Moses is having his god do a bunch of tricks. He's throwing the Stick on the ground and it turns into a snake, and then the other guys throw their sticks on the the ground and their god, yeah, does the same trick. And I was like, well, now wait a minute."

0:35:30 Dan Mcclellan: Um, "Yeah,

0:35:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I love that part, right? Yeah. I was always was like, are they doing the equivalent of the like the the thumb coming off magic trick or whatever, like they're, how do they put, they got some pyrotechnics or something. I did wonder how they uh how they accomplished that. Yeah.

0:36:20 Dan Mcclellan: And in the story, it's basically a of saying, our God's better than your God. It's not saying...

0:36:24 Thomas: But they want to make it a close fight, like, oh, we don't want them to go down the first round, like let's let's have them last a few, we

0:36:31 Dan Mcclellan: Later discussions of the Exodus, it refers to that as God judging the gods of Egypt.

0:36:36 Thomas: Interesting.

0:36:37 Dan Mcclellan: And then you have in the Ten Commandments, you shall have no other gods before me. It's like, well, if no other gods exist, then how is this a possibility? And um, if if you look throughout the Hebrew Bible, just over and over again, there are other gods that exist and they are a threat of some kind. And you have what's called the rhetoric of incomparability, which is basically this idea that our god's the best, our god's biggest, our god is the first, our god basically created all the other gods anyway. And I like to compare this to how I talked about the Denver Broncos in the late 90s. It's like, like, our team's the only real football team. The Raiders aren't even a real football team. Nobody else counts. Ours is the best. And, you know, I could get away with that in 1997 and 1998. I have not been able to get away with that since then.

0:36:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:37:27 Thomas: And furthermore, to use the analogy, it would be weird if, like, and now most NFL fans are like, yeah, there literally aren't other teams like there's only one there weren't it's not that the Broncos are better It's like there'S not even another football team, right? I mean, that's what most people think

0:37:42 Dan Mcclellan: That's the kind of rhetoric that we are seeing. It's not actually saying, it's not a philosophical assertion that no other gods exist. It is, and they say it about other peoples. Peoples. Like, there's a part in Isaiah where it says the worship idols are nothing, and they are less than nothing. And it's the same kind of rhetoric. It's just denigrating them, it's just debasing them and demeaning them, it's not actually saying they don't exist.

But once you have kind of a concern to philosophically rationalize, specifically the Christian gospel, but later with Judaism as well. Once philosophy takes over and you have to make it make sense philosophically, that's when you have to start renegotiating what's going on here.

And so when we get into the medieval period, and then particularly in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, you have this philosophical view that is borrowing largely from Platonism and from some other early philosophical traditions, that there can be only one God, and everything else must be contingent, subordinate, and subjugated to the one God. And that's how Judaism and Christianity kind of remain relevant and remain in the center, have priority in these cultures in which these philosophical traditions traditions have salience and authority.

And so the word monotheism doesn't even get coined until 1660. And this is a Cambridge Platonist. So this is an Christian who is a professor at Cambridge, who is an defender of Platonism, who comes up with this idea of monotheismus. And it's not really about how many gods you worship, it's really about, do you worship the correct type of God?

And so the whole concept of monotheism is really a product of a modern age, and what we do is we are looking back at the Bible through the lens of monothelism that was only created uh less than 400 years ago, and we're saying, oh, well, we believe the same thing that the people in the Bible believe, so they're monotheistic as well. And we misunderstand that rhetoric that they're using as a the same philosophical idea that we have, that only one god exists.

But scholarship, is since the early 20th century, scholarship has been steadily moving in the direction of acknowledging less and less of the Bible as monotheistic. And this conference that that Dan mentioned is taking place next May, and this is where um colleagues of mine, and of David, and and some others are going to get together, and we're basically going to be arguing that that monotheism isn't an accurate way to describe any part of the Bible at all.

0:40:34 Dan Beecher: I don't want to do a greatest, too many of the greatest hits thing, but I do want you to tell the story uh in Second Kings uh, the the attack on Moab, just, because it, because the evidence has been there the whole time, all, mm-hmm, you have to do is read the book to really understand that, like, there are not only are there other gods, but they are powerful, and, uh, and that was the belief, so so yeah, if you'll tell that story, I think that would, that it's such a great illustration of of that fact.

0:40:41 Dan Mcclellan: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, prior to the Babylonian exile, the idea was that every god ruled over their nation. So Adonai was the god of Israel. So when you have Naaman the Syrian coming down to bathe seven times in the Jordan to be cleansed of his of his skin disease, he says, "Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except within Israel." It's not saying there's only one God, it's saying only the God that exists inside Israel counts.

But we have the story in 2nd Kings 3, which is a reflection of this idea, and Moab is a vassal to Israel, meaning Israel beat up Moab and then said, "Hey, pay us money, send Send us soldiers every year, and we'll protect you." Then Moab gets a new king, and they throw off vassalage. They refuse to pay the tribute. And so Israel puts together a coalition of Israel, Judah, and Edom, and they march into Moab to attack.

And the idea here is basically, "We're either going to return you to vassallage, or we're just going to utterly destroy you, and so your nation just ceases to exist." And they have a promise from a prophet uh of Adonai who says uh, "Has God saying to them, I will deliver Moab into your hands." And they're going along just fine, they're they're just destroying these cities, and they're um, you know, destroying

0:42:25 Dan Mcclellan: Their crops and as you know, as you do, and they get to the last city, and they're gonna take the city, and the king of Moab offers his son, the heir to the throne, as a burnt offering, as a sacrifice upon the city wall. And then the text, yeah, Yeah. Tell me about it. Dynamics there were tricky, but the text then immediately says there was great fury against Israel and they got up and they left. And so they are not successful. They have not returned Moab to vassalage. The king's still alive, the nation survives, and actually have historical data showing Moab boasting about getting away from Israel. However, the important part is this statement, "there was great fury against Israel." What on earth is that about? The phrase in Hebrew is ketzef gadol, which is a kind of technical term that pretty much every time it's used refers to divine fury. Theory, and it's, a lot of people are made very uncomfortable by by this, but the idea is basically inescapable that the sacrifice that the king did of his heir to the throne somehow secured the intervention of another deity that routed

0:42:25 Thomas: Sure, sure. Yeah Jeez, thanks dad. Holy shit.

0:43:40 Thomas: Hmm, another deity,

0:43:42 Dan Mcclellan: Israel and drove them off another deity kidding.

0:43:42 Thomas: I was gonna say that because the, because the, the Israelite one is pretty, fan, big fan of just giving your son, right, isn't that a thing you accidentally like find the right powers to stop them well

0:43:49 Dan Beecher: I just

0:43:50 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah. Yeah, in this instance, and lot of people have tried to make the argument that this is the God of Israel that is suddenly upset with Israel, but there's no rational way to make that case. The only explanation of what's going on here that does not require we just fabricate a bunch of scenarios that don't exist is to understand that the sacrifice of the king's son successfully catalyzed the intervention of the patron deity of Moab, Chemosh, and that Chemosh drove out the invading forces, because Adonai was out of pocket. Adonais was not in Adonis' territory. Adinai was in the territory of another patron deity, and because of that, Adonai got beaten, and so Israel and the rest of the coalition, Judah and Edom, has to retreat, uh.

0:44:44 Thomas: Okay, so that's the paranormal version, what would be like the, eighth, the historian version of like, does that just mean they got their asses kicked and they're trying to, so

0:44:49 Dan Mcclellan: The historian version is yeah Yeah, basically Israel attack Moab, threw off vassalage, Israel tried to attack and they were unsuccessful, Moab uh them in battle, and Israel had to go back empty-handed, and we actually have a text called the Masha inscription that has Moab, the king of Moab, Masha, boasting about throwing off vasilage and boasting that that their deity Chemosh drove Israel away.

0:45:15 Thomas: Did the sun thing never happened then, that's just, also them trying to, yeah

0:45:18 Dan Mcclellan: That's probably the author of 2 Kings trying to come up with an excuse for why Israel lost. Because if God is with us and we were supposed to go destroy Moab, we have to comeup with some kind of explanation that accounts for how we lost, but that also maintains God's sovereignty over Israel. And normally what you do is you say, say, oh, our God was angry with us. But in this story, there's not really a way to make God angry with their own forces. And so the other way to makes sense of this that made sense in that time, well, you had a

0:45:35 Thomas: Yeah yeah it's just surprising I mean aren't there a lot of possible abilities, you know, like couldn't a woman been on her period or something, and they're like, ah, they're, they're fucking god's mad at us for that

0:46:00 Dan Mcclellan: Short list of conventional ways to account for this. One of those was to say God was mad at us, uh, way was to say that, uh, God was, uh, home court advantage and so lost the game, and, and that's really what the author

0:46:15 Thomas: I just imagine the divine referee coming in, all right, uh, God, we got Israel God, the other Moab God, all right, I want, want a clean game here, uh, I'm gonna flip this coin and the

0:46:20 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah

0:46:25 Dan Beecher: Well,

0:46:31 Dan Mcclellan: But, and that is really what author of Second Kings three is trying to do, is trying to give an explanation for how Moab got away that kind of fits their theology and their worldview view, and, and for whatever reason yeah

0:46:44 Thomas: Point being, utilizing another god in a serious way to do that worked for them because they weren't, you, monotheistic as we thought they were, is that what you're saying? Gotcha.

0:46:47 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah exactly And then the, there's a parallel story to this later on in Second Kings, you have Sennacherib the Assyrian, uh, who does the exact same thing to Israel, or Judah, at least Judah throws off vassalage to Assyria, Assybia invades Judah, it destroys all the the territory around the main city, gets to the main city, is gonna defeat the main city, and then in the, in Second Kings 18 and 19, we have this story about the angel of destruction killing a hundred eighty thousand Assyrian troops overnight, and the next day, using the same two verbs that it uses in the end of Second Kings three, it says the Assyrians troops got up and left, and so it's the same thing, there was an invading force that was in another deities territory, and that deity that had home corn advantage defeated and drove them off, only Second Kings three is kind of telling it from the other end, saying yeah, we, we kind of got beat, so yeah

0:47:33 Thomas: Yeah I like the, I love the, "got up and left," you know, way of phrasing it, you see, 180,000 people or whatever you said, just spontaneously, spontaneously combust or something, and you're like, well, about time to hit the old dusty trail everybody, oh, oh, is it lunchtime? Shit, uh, my wife was making lunch, I'll be, let's uh, next time, next we'll do this again, sometime, couple years, yeah.

0:47:52 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah It's, and the, and the verbs are pretty kind of standard verbs for just getting up and leaving, it's not like they ran in terror, and that's one of the reasons that some people are like, oh, that, that passage in Second kings Kings three isn't saying they retreated, it said they won, and so, that it was just time to go home. And it's like, well, it uses that exact same language when, uh, Sennacherib has to retreat after getting decimated by, uh, an angel, so, so it's, the it's basically the same story, um, my opinion is that the authors of Second King three saw the other story and was like, hey, let's use

0:48:44 Dan Beecher: That only just reverse it. I do think it's fascinating. The reason I wanted you to tell that story is just because I, it is fascinating that in their book these people actually put a moment where their god lost to another god, it, if nothing else it's

0:49:01 Thomas: Well But it had home court advantage, Dan it's come on, what do you want yeah

0:49:03 Dan Mcclellan: I

0:49:02 Dan Beecher: Right I'm just I'm just saying, like, obviously people of that time didn't have a problem with that idea, like it was, it it was not as big a deal as it is now, like that's a most

0:49:12 Thomas: Exactly the equivalent of like, "why your buddy at the bar was totally going to win the fight, but then like I slipped" someone sit out their chair and it got me, like just when the fight was going down, I totally would have kicked his ass.

0:49:22 Dan Beecher: My girlfriend friend had just broken up with me, it wasn't fair, we

0:49:32 Thomas: Yeah. Well, okay. I guess kind of coming to a close, even though it feels like we could do this literally forever. It's so fascinating, but like, I am wondering, you guys should, I am wandering, I I get left with this sort of like, I don't know what the right word is, like this fatalistic or feeling of like well, there's no point in anyone that's not Dr. Dan here reading the Bible. Am I wrong? Like you read the Bible, well that word doesn't mean what you think it means and this thing is different than you think and it just feels like, is there anything that just a guy could like read and understand or is it all so, it just feel like it's so technical historically that to really understand what's happening requires all this scholarship that I don't think it's reasonable to expect me to do.

0:49:39 Dan Beecher: Could start a whole podcast just about this I With that, uh, think if, if you don't have Dan's level of education, none of us do. Um, I I think the way that you read the Bible is out of interest in, you know, just stories. Yeah, I mean, when I read the Bible, when I don't have a Dan around, I have no idea what to take as history and what to dismiss as never having happened. I have no idea what to take as metaphor or what is meant to be interpreted as literal.

So yeah, I mean, I don't think that the approach for the rest of us should be, I can read this and understand what it means. I think we can approach it as, I can read this, and you know, I could read the Bhagavad Gita, I couldn read the Quran, and there are moments where I can get something out of it, where I could be like, oh, that's actually a really interesting metaphor, for, or that's a beautiful turn of phrase, or that's really interesting concept.

And I can let that inform my worldview, go out and start, you know, worshipping or any of the Hindu gods or anything like that. But I can see it as interesting and as poetic frequently. And it's also just fun to sort of know what's going on in, know, at least know what everybody else is up to.

But yeah, I think that when people say, oh, I've read the Bible and feel like they then understand their own religion or whatever, I feel like that is a mistake almost all, almost every single time. Calm.

0:51:59 Dan Mcclellan: There are a lot of different ways that people make meaning with the Bible, and on a level that satisfies an awful lot of people. But there is so much depth to it, and there's no real end to our, to try to uncover both what it may have meant to the original authors and editors and audiences, as well as what it can mean to people today, because a lot of what the Bible is going to—a lot of the meaning that is going be made with the Bible is going to depend on what questions are being brought to it, what perspectives are being brought to. And so people who approach it devotionally, normally I think they understand that there's more to it than just the plain linguistic sense, that on some level it's guiding them or is some kind of medium for divine guidance of some kind. And so if can approach it that way and make meaning that is productive and meaning, meaning that is edifying and helps them find more meaning, find more fulfillment, find more community than más bien, as they say in Spanish.

0:53:10 Thomas: If their meaning is like, I think trans people shouldn't be able to go to the bathroom. I feel like that's, yeah.

0:53:14 Dan Mcclellan: That's the problem. When the text gets deployed as a means of structuring power, and there's a degree to which that's inevitable, at least for engaging in public discourse. Course. If it is being leveraged to structure power over and against minoritized or oppressed or communities that are less privileged and less powerful, I would say that's inappropriate. I would Say that's problematic. And that's what I'm going to be combating.

0:53:43 Dan Mcclellan: When people talk about, people accuse me of being dogmatic all the time, primarily because I came up with this with the silly data over dogma tagline, but I would say if, if I have a dogma, my dogma is that all other things being equal, I'm going to give the less powerful or the less privileged community the benefit of the doubt. And so my content is going to combat the spread of misinformation, particularly to the degree that it is aiding in the structuring of power and values over against the interests of minoritized, oppressed in communities. And so if you're not doing that,

0:54:17 Thomas: But you're still a member of the Mormon church. Church?

0:54:21 Dan Mcclellan: I am still

0:54:21 Dan Beecher: Down calm down thomas stand down sir

0:54:24 Thomas: Just asking. Yeah, sure.

0:54:24 Dan Beecher: No

0:54:24 Dan Mcclellan: An active member of that church, and I do an awful lot, particularly with other members of the church who are members of minoritized and oppressed and marginalized communities, to try to get other members members of the church to better understand the harm that they're causing by. And some of that is on the individual level. A lot of it is onthe institutional level. There's a lot of work to be done. So I think there are constructive, productive, helpful ways to make meaning with the text. Unfortunately, right now, particularly in America, it is the destructive ways of making making meaning with the texts that are taking priority for a lot of communities. And so I that's the main thing that we're trying to battle with our podcast.

0:54:51 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I could ask you a thousand more questions, but I feel like we should call it there. Data Over Dogma. I don't think anyone said the name of the show yet. Data Over Dagma. Go check it out.

0:55:23 Dan Beecher: No. We've Managed to avoid it the whole time.

0:55:26 Dan Mcclellan: We're

0:55:26 Thomas: Fascinating stuff. Anything else you want to tell us about it or any Any other, you know, plugs or things you want to tell my audience before we call it here?

0:55:33 Dan Beecher: On YouTube, as well as all the pod places. I'm sure that your listeners are very are very pod centric, but we're also we also have video, uh, indeed, um, you know, we're available there and we our our ugly faces are uh slathered all over this stuff so

0:55:36 Thomas: Oh, yeah, yeah, we're pod people. You do actual. It's not just like, oh, the audio is on YouTube. It's like you do video of the episodes. Oh, wow.

0:55:55 Dan Mcclellan: We were going to just do audio and then have video of people sticking stuff into holes and then melting metal over top of them and then grinding it down, and um we couldn't find out how to get those videos so we decided we might as well just yeah

0:56:09 Dan Beecher: Videos do so well you'd think we could

0:56:11 Dan Mcclellan: Yeah

0:56:10 Thomas: Yeah, just like the oddly satisfying type stuff that that's our stuff. Yeah, exactly. You got to team up with an ASMR person or whatever, you know? Yeah, that's the future, I guess.

0:56:11 Dan Beecher: Yeah exactly machining various things yeah

0:56:12 Dan Mcclellan: So we were like all right so yeah, I when I first got on TikTok, I was surprised by how often I was being shown these videos of people like putting shaving cream on microphones and stuff. And I was like, what the hell is going on? But it

0:56:30 Dan Beecher: You know dan the algorithm only shows you what you want to see my friend so I think you've just

0:56:35 Thomas: It's true the

0:56:37 Dan Mcclellan: Show me that stuff anymore. It was just sheer morbid curiosity at first. And that thanks was my mistake.

0:56:38 Dan Beecher: Okay okay

0:56:38 Thomas: Algorithm is infallible, yeah, all We'll check out Date Over Dogma on all those places you just mentioned, and thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

0:56:51 Dan Mcclellan: Thank you. Appreciate your time.

0:56:52 Dan Beecher: Having us all