Multipals 01: Dr. Dan McClellan (transcript)

[MUSIC: Deep Fried Frenz by MF Doom]

Chris Sims: Hello friends and neighbors, and welcome to Apocrypals. Normally, this is the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible and try not to be jerks about it. That's not what we're doing today though, although we are still the two of us. We remain constant and unchanging as the stars. My name is Chris Sims with me as always, Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you?

Benito Cereno: I'm good, Chris, because we have a great guest today. My number one pick for guest. We got him - first round draft pick and we're talking to him today at length.

C: That's right, everybody. He has risen.

B:That's right. The Pillsbury Doughboy himself is here popping fresh. Ready to talk about that Easter season. No, we have Dr. Dan McClellan, the main dude of biblical studies, TikTok. He is here to talk to us about biblical studies and TikTok and his new podcast, Data Over Dogma, among many other things, including some questions from you, the listener that were given to us on our Discord. That's right.

C: This is the -- I guess it's technically the second episode where we had a guest, but we're going to be wanting to do some more of these. So this is the first in a series, a sub-series, a podcast within a podcast that we are calling "Multipals."

B: That's right.

C: Because we're going to be talking to multiple pals.

B: That's right. If this is your first time listening to the show, typically our regular format is that we read a text from within or without the biblical canon, and we discuss it, it's historical and literary.

C: That's literally all text.

B: That's all text.

C:The way you just said that describes all texts.

B: That's right, because any text, including, for example, the filmic adaptation of the Da Vinci Code on the table, as something we might discuss on the show.

C: Okay, actually, actually true. Calling some of the things that we've talked about texts is itself pushing it, I think.

B: It's very generous to some of the things that we've covered, right? But normally, we discuss these things, we do some goofs. But I will say the subtext of some reactions to this show that we have recently garnered, I would say I have inferred that people are tired of hearing only from us. And so I thought, why don't we have some other voices, some other perspectives? And so, yeah, Multipals. We're going to have some guests on the show for a little while, in this, apparently season three of Apocrypals, I guess.

C: That's how you know that this was Benito's idea. I would never assume that anyone wanted to hear from me less.

B: Right. Correct. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. If you have been waiting for a new episode for a while. Sorry, a thing happened. And also there was an Adderall shortage. All of these things combined. If you want to know more about...

C: Look, when we started this show, I didn't have a real job.

B: Yeah.

C: I mean, I was I had a real job. I was a freelance writer. I had more time. I could adjust my schedule more freely.

B: Right. But yes, anyway, but also a thing happened. And if you want to know about that, feel free to hit us up on Discord. But so some of you know, some of you heard episode 109, and some of you will have to find out about it when a lost media YouTuber covers it. If you're curious, feel free to hit us up on Discord.

But yeah, here we are. We're going to do a series of interviews with people that I think are interesting, that I think will provide a number of different perspectives on the Bible, on religion, on saints, whatever. I'm yes, very happy with our first guest, Dan McClellan. We've got an excellent interview coming up for you that I think you guys are going to like a great deal.

C: And you might be thinking, "Hey, this seems pretty scholarly. I don't know if they're going to talk about Wolverine at all in this episode of Apocrypals, marking the first in 110 where that would not happen." Don't worry. Don't worry. We do cover James "Lucky Jim" Logan Wolverine Howlett.

B: Yes. And do stick around to the end to find a possible controversial Wolverine opinion. So you'll have to listen all the way through to find out what Dr. Dan McClellan thinks about Wolverine and what are his real clothes. So.

C: Let's get into it.

[Music]

B: All right, Chris, here we are. We've got a guest, Chris. We did it.

C: You did it. I am happy to be here, happy to learn. One of us is a scholar and one is a clown, apparently. That continues to be the case.

B: No, no, no. Neither, impossible to know. And also people, I think, despite the meme, I think people understand that this show's been clowns all the way down, because here today, we have--

C: An actual scholar, yeah.

B: We have an actual scholar, an actual expert, a person who actually has read Bible, and here he is today to join us. We are so proud to have the main dude of Biblical Studies TikTok, Dr. Dan McClellan.

Dan McClellan: Hey everybody. How's it going?

B: There it is. He said it. That's one of his catchphrases. "Hey everybody." Yes, Thank you for joining us, Dan.

D: Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.

B: I have to say you know, it's a huge honor to have you on the show because especially since, you know, as far as I know, and to be clear, I didn't do any research on this, but it feels right, you know, like, gut-wise that this is your first ever appearance on a podcast, I assume. So thank you. I'm joking. Of course, you just, first of all, you just launched your own podcast.

D: We did, which was pretty stressful, but yeah, now it's underway. We had our first episode drop on Saturday. We're going to wait until Monday for the next one. And that's going to be the schedule from here on out.

B: That's awesome. I did listen to the first episode of podcasts. I think it's great. We'll talk more specifically about it later on. But you also just appeared on Bible for Normal like last week or so relative to this recording. That's another show by people who are smarter than us. I haven't listened to that episode, but I assume it's very good.

C: I don't like this direction of how you're evaluating our show, Benito, the show that you've been on 110 episodes of.

B: I'm just saying. I'm just saying. But anyway, here at the top, for the benefit of listeners who might be unfamiliar with your work, Dan, can you give us just like a brief rundown of who you are and what you do?

D: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Dan McClellan. I am a public-facing scholar of the Bible and religion. I have a PhD in theology and religion from the University of Exeter, where I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the conceptualization of deity and divine images in the Hebrew Bible through the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion. Up until January, I had spent just over a decade working as a scripture translation supervisor for at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which I am also an active member.

But since the TikTok and social media and online courses thing has blown up, I've decided to pivot to doing that full time. So I am engaged day in and day out in trying to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion, and also try to make the academic study of the Bible and religion a little more accessible to the general public.

B: Excellent. Thank you. And so actually, let me ask here, can we officially end the speculation and get the answer? Does the end of your work with the LDS church actually correlate directly with you growing a beard?

D: There is definitely correlation and I'll leave causation up to you all. But yes, I've always had a beard and except when employment or something like that has prohibited me from having a beard. So, that would be when I was serving as a missionary for the LDS Church, when I was a student at BYU, and then as a full-time employee for the church. So, that was the majority of the last 20 years of my life. So, it is good to be back.

B: Yeah. I will say, officially, for the record, I am pro-beard. I think it looks great.

D: I appreciate that.

C: This is not something I'm familiar with. Is that a rule?

D: So, yeah. It's not a rule that members of the LDS Church can't have beards, but students at BYU, unless they have medical conditions and they have gone through the process of getting what is colloquially referred to as a beard card, they're not allowed to have beards, they can have a mustache that does not go past the corner of the lip. Missionaries, male missionaries are not allowed to have facial hair at all, and then as a full-time employee of the church, it was basically the same standards as at BYU.

C: Why?

D: It is a vestigial remnant of wanting to not appear like hippies from the 60s and 70s. So basically, we wanted to look conservative and Republican and nice and not like hippies in the 60s and 70s. And so, you know, in the 80s, it was still there and in the 90s and the 2000s, beards started to become less socially aberrant. But, the church is still a few decades behind the times in that regard. So, we just got caffeine at BYU within like the last six or seven years. So, it takes us a while to catch up.

B: Wow, caffeine at BYU. Wow.

D: Yeah, can you imagine?

B: The times, they are a changin'.

D: Yeah. Well, they didn't change up at church headquarters. The cafeteria up there still won't give me caffeine. So, now that's not the only reason I left church employment, but I will not say that it was not relevant.

B: All right. Interesting. This is tangent time, but it's making me think... I feel like Peter the Great had restrictions on who was and wasn't allowed to have beards in the Russian Empire because it wasn't European fashionable. I think there was even a badge or something for people who were allowed to have beards. I can't remember though. It's just ringing a bell with me.

Anyway, I don't want to beat around the bush with these questions. I want to come out the gate hot.

D: Yeah.

B: Got a Barnburner kind of gotcha question, really set the tenor for the rest of the episode. And I'm sorry to be so confrontational like this up at the top. But what are your favorite comics and comic creators?

D: Oh, gosh. So I really got into comics. There are two things that got me into comics. One was in 1993, I was living in a little place called Gaithersburg. At some point while I was living there, it changed to North Potomac in Maryland. I used to every now and then go up and see the Orioles play. And one year, 1993, they had the All-Star game there in Baltimore. And so a neighbor, a friend of mine, my best friend growing up, his name was Sarab Mathur, he was from New Delhi. We went up to the All-Star Fan Fest. And one of the things that they had, there was a huge comic book display. And for some reason I was captivated by the cover of the new X-Men number one series, so that's Jim Lee, and I picked up that copy of that comic book and brought it home and just fell in love with the art.

I had been an artist growing up, my family on my mother's side is all artists. And I took to it quite early in life, went and saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the theaters. And I remember the, like a day or two later on the school bus, some kid was like, here's how you draw the weasels and showed me how to do it. And I was like, that's the coolest thing in the world. So I started drawing cartoons and comics and stuff. So I fell in love with Jim Lee's artwork and his run on that X-Men series. And then right around that same time, we had the death of Superman. And that one I started getting into. And that was one where I was like, okay, I got to get all the back issues. I got to fill in all the gaps. I got to cover all the tangential, all the other series that are in any way, shape or form crossing paths with this story. And so those two series really got me deep into comics.

And then I found Image Comics. I started following Spawn was one of my favorites. I started following like Witchblade and Gen 13 and Savage Dragon and stuff like that. I really like Todd McFarlane. I really like Greg Capullo. I loved Joe Madureira's run with the X-Men. He's one of my favorite comic book artists out there. And those were really the ones that were formative for me as a teenager.

When it comes to... I dabbled in like the Fantastic Four and Batman and Daredevil and a handful of other comics, but those are really the formative ones from me. To this day, probably my favorite comic book character is Wolverine. I'll read just about anything with Wolverine in it, and I'm so excited to see that Greg Capullo is now penciling Wolverine for Marvel.

B: I hadn't even seen that news. Wow, that's wild.

D: You gotta follow him on Twitter.

B: Okay. All right.

D: He posts little teasers, so I don't even know if any of those have come out yet, but he's on Wolverine now, so I'm excited for that. And then I also, when my kids got a little older. My oldest is 14 now, but I tried to get them interested in comics. And the one that seemed to take the most was Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. That one just turned into a series...

B: On Disney+.

D: On Disney+. It's different from the comics a bit, but I really like the vibe. I really enjoy the vibe of the series.

B: Nice. I haven't watched the show at all.

D: They've got a lot of great guest stars. It's a fun show. And so that's kind of my... When I think of comics, I generally think of stuff I was consuming in the 90s and in the early 2000s. I haven't been catching up with a lot of stuff since then, but that was what kind of got me back into it, was trying to get my daughters interested.

B: Nice. Part of the reason I asked, again, for people who are listening or not familiar with your videos, which are primarily on TikTok, but you also cross post to YouTube and you have stuff on Twitter as well. I don't know if you post to Instagram, but in a lot of your videos you are wearing in comic book shirts that really reveal a fondness for early-mid-90s, I would say, with your Venom shirts, Lobo. Lobo is the funniest to me.

D: Yeah. Oh, that's one of my favorite covers because it doesn't show it on the shirt, but the full cover, he's got no pants on. It's a pretty cheeky little piece of artwork. But yeah, so I got into Lobo a bit when particularly because Lobo cross paths with Superman and then Venom, there were some Venom Punisher crossovers that I really enjoyed. Whenever I see a cool comic shirt, I've gotta get it wherever I see 'em. And I thought that was pretty fun that people started picking up on the comic book shirts. Initially it was just, this is what I wear when I don't have to wear a shirt and a tie. Yeah, now I kinda go out of my way to look for cool comic book shirts.

C: I would say that like on this podcast recording right now are the three people in the world who have spent the most time talking about Bible while wearing shirts with Wolverine on them.

B: Probably true.

C: It's very funny to me to hear all this, Dan, and find out that you are the perfect guest for this show.

B: Yeah, I'm telling you, Chris, this is why Dan was number one on my list.

C: You nailed it, Benito. you nailed it.

B: Okay, so now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get into the... Like I was saying, your TikTok is very popular. You've got like half a million followers on TikTok.

D: Almost, yeah.

C: I feel it is fully fair for me to say that you are the main dude of biblical studies on TikTok. I don't know how you feel about that. I don't know if you would self-term yourself that, but I will say I get quite a bit of biblical studies TikTok on my For You page. And if I see a video and I look in the comments, even if the video is claiming something just like objectively true and like non-controversial, someone says like "Matthew is the only gospel where the Magi appear", someone will respond to that video "@Maklelan is this true?"

D: Yeah.

B: Like no matter - you just - how many videos do you get tagged on a day? Thousands?

D: Oh, it's not in the thousands, but most days it's in the hundreds.

B: Wow. And I mean, how many of them are just like completely non-controversial statements?

D: Majority, the majority of them are a conspiracy theory type thing. But I do, usually a couple times a week, there's some video that captures a bunch of people's attention and I get tagged hundreds of times just in one video. Over the course of like a week. And so that happens a lot. And sometimes there are folks who are mutuals of mine and I'll just ignore it. Whether or not I agree with them, just because I'm trying to kind of curate the kind of stuff I respond to.

One of the things that I'm getting a little annoyed by is that probably the majority of the folks I get tagged in, and particularly if they're mutuals of mine, are creators who are women or from minoritized groups or something like that. And I've noticed that pattern. And I know that the folks who are being tagged, some of them are more expert than me on whatever issue they're talking about. And it doesn't feel great for them to have somebody, you know, have dozens and dozens, if not over 100 tags of me on a video of theirs, where they may be a lot more of an expert on that topic than me.

And so I've been trying to figure out a way to kind of address that topic publicly. But for the most part, when it's a friend of mine, particularly somebody who knows a lot more than me on that topic, I will either just repost it or maybe do a stitch where I just say, hey, this person knows more than me about this, or ignore it, and try to focus on those that are either big ticket issues that a lot of people are talking about or from folks who have enormous followings and are doing a lot of spreading of misinformation. I'm trying to get the kind of the juiciest bites off of what's going on on social media.

But yeah, I think the majority of them are things that are usually pretty problematic.

B: Yeah, I feel like your channel, it really feels like you're following like the waves of like what's being spread around, you know? And so, you know, again, for the listeners to clarify, so a lot of real estate on your TikTok channel is spent or devoted to debunking, clarifying biblical and religious myths and misconceptions and a lot of conspiracy theories, but especially ones that have gained traction on social media, including TikTok. And I know, so, you know, here we're recording just after Easter, just after Holy Week. So of course.

C: I'm so ready to hear about how eggs are Ishtar and eggs are druids.

B: Right.

C: ...and all the other stuff that we've talked about on the show.

B: So I wanted to start by, what are some of these most tenacious, not just Easter, but holiday myths? Because there are three specific ones I'm thinking of that Chris and I are constantly trying to combat that I know people like you and like Andrew, Mark Henry and other people are constantly trying to debunk because they've gained a popularity. So, but what are some of the like holiday related ones, Easter included, but myths that you find that you're having to combat again and again?

D: Yeah, the two most common ones have to do with Easter and Christmas. And sometimes the two are linked. Like one of the craziest ones that I hear about is that Easter was stolen from a pagan holiday that was celebrated with orgies that resulted in pregnancies that then resulted in babies being born nine months later around Christmas. And so Christmas was the pagan celebration of those births that then followed with child sacrifice. And so that was where Christianity stole these celebrations from, which is just laughably wrong, but for some reason has just gained so much traction and just pops up year after year after year. That will probably be a a never-ending issue that I'll have to be responding to.

And related to the Christmas one is the idea that the entire story of Jesus has been appropriated from earlier sun worship. And so all of the aspects of the Jesus tradition from a virgin birth to, you know, on December 25th to death and resurrection and the symbols associated with it, there's this idea that all of this was just ripped off wholesale from existing sun worship. And usually folks like Osiris or Horus or others are identified as the origins of these ideas. And there is virtually no truth to any of that.

There is truth to the idea that some of the iconography, some of the imagery from early Christianity, starting in like the fourth and fifth centuries CE, are borrowing from iconography that is primarily associated with, for instance, Isis and things like that. But that's taking place on the level of artistic representation, not the origins of these traditions themselves.

And there's an argument to make that classical literature and some of the classical mythology aided in the articulation of these traditions within the Gospels and things like that. But the idea that these people just sat around and were like, "What are we going to come up with?" "Well, let's just take this idea here." "Okay, great. Let's put that down. Where are we going to go from there?" "Oh, let's steal this other idea."

The idea that it was just cobbled together from existing myths just has no truth to it. And that's something that again comes up every Easter, every Christmas, because I think it's meaningful for a lot of people to try to see Christianity as something that was stolen and corrupt that makes it a little easier to dismiss Christianity as an institution and particularly as an institution that wields an awful lot of power and can be, in many iterations, quite oppressive and quite destructive.

And so for a lot of folks, that helps give grist to that mill of arguing that Christianity is problematic.

B: For sure. And one thing that you preface some of your videos with is you talk about how there's a creator, you support their rhetorical goals, without agreeing with the substance of their presentation. And I can fully understand that, because it feels like there's a pendulum swing where we've gone from centuries of pure Christian cultural hegemony to now a point where there's pushback against that. And part of what they do is, yeah, they try to present that Christianity is not, it doesn't exist in a vacuum or a void, right? Which is true, of course. But the pendulum, it feels like has gone too far because now you get those viral images of like, this is Ishtar, pronounced Easter or whatever. We've all seen it.

The one actually that cracked me up from your video the other day was the Diana of Ephesus that was like, "Look at her shirt covered in eggs." And I'm like, "My guy, those are not eggs."

But yeah, It feels like the pendulum has swung too hard. And so now there's pushback from scholars who explain that the date of Christmas on December 25th and to dates any evidence of the Sol Invictus celebration on December 25th. And then now with Easter, we can point to the rabbit/hare symbology being connected to the virginity of Mary. Eggs have to do with Lenten celebrations and this and that. I don't know what the likelihood of... this is definitely a bias on my part because I'm seeking out the kind of people who are debunking these ideas. And so I can't know for sure what the actual overall perception of these things are, but is there a risk of the pendulum going back too far? Because I feel like, again, it's not Christianity in a vacuum. Could the pendulum go too far to where we're saying these are all purely Christian symbols? Because it seems to me like even if the rabbit and the egg have Christian origins, there's still a semiotic resonance with just spring, right?

D: Yeah.

B: ...that I think gives metaphorical weight to these symbols. I don't know. It's impossible to say that there's, for me, to imagine that there's no, and I don't even want to say pagan, but just naturalistic resonance in these. I don't know. Do you have a thought about that?

D: Yeah, I think absolutely. These are things that help a lot of these symbols persevere. For instance, one of the reasons that Christmas became popular is likely because of its proximity to the celebration of the winter solstice. And so it became kind of a convenient stand in for a lot of folks who were used to that kind of thing. And I think there's a difference between saying, this is one of the reasons that it persevered and saying, this is a reason that it was created. This is the impetus. This is the inspiration for it. I think those are two different claims.

And yeah, I think everybody needs to be able to acknowledge that there are reasons that these things became popular, feel comfortable for a lot of people that go beyond just their association with Jesus. I mean, if you, you know, rabbits and eggs and things like that are very popular today as a part of Easter, almost nobody can tell you what connection to Jesus there is. But there are things that make it fun to celebrate, make it enjoyable for children, make it enjoyable for parents who have young children.

And so there's absolutely proximity, there's absolutely resonance that I think makes it persevere a lot and, you know, more deeply embeds it in our societies. I don't know about the pendulum just because there are all like right now at this very moment, there are people across the entire spectrum who are trying to be heard, whether they're arguing this is 100% "pagan" versus this is 0% "pagan". I think there's always going to be that. I think the scholarship on the whole right now is fairly sensitive to a lot of the different influences, but is comfortable pointing out we have zero indication whatsoever that there is any relationship between, for instance, and hares and Eostre or any Ostara celebration. There's just zero data. I think the scholarship is pretty comfortable there while also acknowledging absolutely Christmas has accreted aspects of its celebration that were taken over from pre-Christian Germanic and British and other celebrations and traditions and things like that.

I'm certainly not saying "no this is 100% Christian, and there is no influence whatsoever from the outside." I think I get misunderstood as saying that from time to time by folks who are kind of in their heads. What's going on here is a zero sum game, where it's either all one way or all the other. And so I am perceived as saying, no, it's none that way. It's all the other. When the reality is I'm just saying, no, these claims are not supported by the data. But when people ask me, I'm happy to point out, there's obviously influence coming into the way Christians celebrate these holidays.

B: Yeah.

C: Benito and I are both as non-believers and also big fans of Christmas in general, we're both big proponents of secular Christmas because I live in Minnesota now and buddy, it gets real dark here in the middle of winter. It is dark at about 3.30 PM. And sometimes it's nice to have a plant inside with some lights on it.

D: Yeah.

C: And I think it's fine to acknowledge that and not go the absolute bonkers, Kirk Cameron route of saying that the presence of your a tree are the skyline of a new Jerusalem.

D: Oh gosh.

C: Yeah. Oh gosh indeed.

B: You telling me you haven't seen that movie, Dan? You haven't seen that one?

D: A Kirk Cameron movie? I haven't seen Kirk Cameron in anything since probably before I had a driver's license.

B: Yeah, that's the wise move.

C: Yeah, that's a better move than I've made in my life, honestly.

D: I have this thing called self-care. And that means I don't watch Kirk Cameron stuff.

C: Bud, you got a podcast now, so...

D: Yeah, well, and the stuff I engage with on social media, that is about as deep as I am willing to dip my toe because I can watch a three minute video shoot. I can watch a nine minute video if I have to, but a series or a movie that's asking an awful lot of me.

C: That's eminently fair. The one that I always like, because it sounds very plausible is Snakes or Druids.

D: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: And that the snakes are a metaphor for druids.

D: Yeah, yeah.

C: And then you read about St. Patrick like we did on the show. One of our, I think Benito, I know it's one of your favorites. I think it's one of our best episodes when we read The Life of St. Patrick. And it's like, no, there are plenty of druids in that story. There is no need for metaphor.

D: Yeah.

B: There's literally multiple passages where St. Patrick uses the Holy Ghost power to telekinetically lift a druid up in the air and then smash his head on the rocks. Like our guy Muirchu, not being subtle about that. And also it doesn't even have the snake stuff that comes like centuries later. But that was -- when I said that there were three holiday related myths we frequently had to debunk. That's the third one is the St. Patrick and the snakes.

D: Yeah, that's such a weird one because there's that similar thing where I had a video on that saying, you know, this is just an etiology for the absence of snakes from Ireland. And I like fully 25% of the comments on that post were, "Well, then what do the snakes represent?" Like, they're snakes.

B: They're snakes, yeah.

C: Harold, they're cats.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. The snakes are just snakes. It's an etiology.

D: Yeah.

B: How many religious stories are? A ton. In the Bible and out of the Bible, so many. We try to place symbolic or metaphorical weight on them, and they're just meant to be etiologies, right? Like Lot's wife, that story is probably an etiology for a weird rock, right?

D: Yeah. And this is something that I find myself constantly having to explain to folks. I try to to make it as clear as possible, but maybe it's just because my audience is constantly growing. One of the reasons that people are always looking out for that stuff is because we want it to be meaningful to us. And, oh, it's just an ideology for why there aren't snakes, isn't really meaningful to people. And so, part of their brain is like, that can't be it. Let's keep seeking for something that's going to make this meaningful. And the Bible even more so, everybody wants it to mean something and we can say, you know, this only really made any sense in that time period, because people cared about that. Nobody has cared about that for 2000 years. So the real meaning is really not that interesting. And people are like, well, that's unacceptable. I need to find something interesting about this. It's because we want the text to be meaningful or useful to us on a subconscious level and frequently on a conscious level as well. We don't really like the explanation to not be meaningful to us, which is why the more meaningful ones gain a lot more traction, even if they happen to be false.

B: Yeah, that's a great point. And one of the things about this show, for Chris and me, and for many of our listeners, I think sometimes the only meaning we need is that this story makes St. Patrick look cool or makes Judah Maccabee look cool.

D: Which is frequently the whole reason for it.

B: Yeah.

D: Whatever the story happens to be.

B: Yeah.

C: A lot of interpretation stuff, we call those Barry Allen's bow ties. Where Barry Allen does not need a reason to wear a bow tie, he can just be a nerd.

D: Yeah.

C: It doesn't have to have significance.

B: It doesn't have to have a tragic backstory. Yeah.

D: Yeah.

C: Correct.

B: All right. So we talked about some of the holiday ones. What are some of the other common topics that you've been dealing with lately? Like what's the new hotness and being wrong about Bible on internet?

D: Ah, there are so many of them. So I kind of split my time between two different things. One thing is the research that I'm working on. So I'm working on two books right now. One is a more academically oriented book that's going to discuss early Christology and is going to be a pushing back against scholars who have referred to themselves as members of the early high Christology club, the idea being that they have this idea that Jesus was conceptualized as God almost immediately after the resurrection. And I'm working on a book that will push back against that. And it incorporates some of the insights from my first book, Adonai's Divine Images.

And another book I'm working on is how the Bible changes God, how different writers are altering their representation of God in order to serve their own rhetorical goals. And so, some of the videos I do are on that. So, one of the sore spots I like to poke at is Jesus being identified as God. So, I always get a lot of hate mail when I do those videos, and I just love it. It's so much fun.

B: I'm very here for these videos. The one where you just are like, "Hey everybody, Jesus never calls himself God. Okay, peace."

D: Yeah. I just run and throw a bomb and take off. So that always causes controversy when I do that. And then the other kind of on the other end of the spectrum are videos where I'm kind of wading into conversations that are ongoing already in social media. And a lot of those have to do with some of the controversies that we've talked about associated with holidays, have to do with Jesus' mythicism, whether or not Jesus really existed, different things about Satan, different things about the biblical canon, different things associated with the concept of hell, when hell became eternal conscious torment, and things like that.

Those are some of the issues that I think are big deals right now because those were some of the biggest contributors to a lot of trauma that a lot of people experience growing up within conservative Christian households. And so, the deconstruction community is trying to grapple with what is the accurate take on a lot of these issues. And also, homosexuality in the Bible, abortion in the Bible, stuff like that, those are also hot button issues that also have a lot to do with trauma that people experienced either growing up within conservative households or even today, the structuring of power within society relative to Christian nationalism and things like that. Those are the things that I'm also happy to heave some grenades into and either scamper away or stick around and trade punches with folks about.

B: Yeah, definitely.

C: Yeah, and those things we've talked about a lot on the show, like particularly with regards to the devil.

[Music: Runnin' with the Devil]

C: And hell and how little those things are a factor in the actual Bible that we have.

D: Yeah.

B: We have recurring segments on the show called Satan Watch and Hell Watch, where whenever we encounter a text that contributes to the evolving conception of those two ideas, there's like a music drop where we draw attention to it. But we're trying to point out that within canonical scriptures, first of all, there is an evolution and some very marked changes chronologically. But even still, if we were to read the entirety of canon, we still wouldn't arrive at the modern conceptions of either Satan or hell. You have a lecture on your website, maklelan.org, that people can go and they can download.

C: Not spelled like your last name. Spelled differently.

D: Correct. That is a phonetic spelling of my last name that I used when I was a missionary in Uruguay so that people could pronounce it because they were not fond of last names that began with four consonants in a row. So I got home from my mission and I was like, "Nobody has this as a username. This is awesome." Very easy for me to create accounts with that username.

B: m-a-k-l-e-l-a-n dot org. And so you've got a number of lectures up there, one on the evolving nature of Satan from a member of the divine council up till Christian conceptions and so on, Satan and the Bible. You've also got ones on how do we get the biblical canon? That is a question we've, I mean, obviously considering the amount of time we devote to apocryphal literature, obviously that is a question that comes up here. And that's another, I would say, probably one of the most common misunderstandings. So many people think that biblical canon was decreed by Constantine at the Nicene Council, which didn't happen. And so I feel like people would be interested in that one. Homosexuality in the Bible, another common topic that I think our listeners should be listening to would be interested in. And then you've got a couple here on kind of the development of, I guess, Yahwism versus native Canaanite religions, right?

D: Yeah, the early distinction between Adonai and El and how they probably came together.

B: Yeah, again, really interesting topics that I know some of our listeners would be into. So, everyone, please check out Dan's website where you can download these. They're all like 90 plus minutes here, 100 minutes or so.

D: I tried to do an hour presentation in about 30 minutes of a Q&A, and then one of the ones I really enjoyed, the very first one that I did was on the Israelite goddess Asherah, which is also a topic that comes up a lot, the divine feminine and the role of women within Judaism, within Christianity. That's another topic that tends to contribute to some pretty heated discussion.

B: Yeah. People don't like it when you talk about God's wife.

C: Yeah. Asherah was a new one for me.

D: Yeah. Well, it's funny that so many people are so adamant that God is male, but then also so adamant that God does not have any of the features of being male. Certainly, has no sexuality and no wife, but sure as heck is a dude.

B: Yeah. And also, well, might as well, while we're plugging some of your things, your podcast that just launched, Data Over Dogma, which is another one of your kind of catch phrases. I don't – catch phrase is reductive. I'm sorry, but...

D: No, that's yeah, that's exactly what I think it is. I don't I don't remember exactly how I -- I think I started using that as kind of... Look, this is what I'm here to put data over dogma. It was how I described my methodology my approach and then people started asking for that on shirts and stuff. So yeah, you want merch, I'll make merch and so yeah that since become a motto or a catchphrase.

B: As the name of your podcast there's one episode out as of this recording in which you cover the first three chapters of Genesis and you look at the stitching together of the two creation accounts from well our listeners know about documentary hypothesis, so, the J source versus the P source and you talk about the - well actually, I guess what I'm thinking of is in the second segment where you're talking about the divine name the divine name Yeah, and there you talk about the eventual conflation over time of El and... You're more polite on your channel because you always say, Ad and I, on this show, we're just like... I actually had a Jewish friend reply to me one time and say, "I listened to your new episode and I don't think I have ever heard the word Yahweh said so many times in one hour." And I was like, "Well, we're just trying to be clear about what we're doing."

D: Yeah, well, they should go to an annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. They will hear it a lot more.

B: Oh yeah, I bet. But yeah, you talk about how there's a conflation over time of Yahweh with El, which is something that we talk about on this show. We've tried to cover a lot of those topics, and we'll get to that in a little bit more detail. But my point is, listeners to this show should check out your online lectures and check out your podcasts. I think they would really get a lot out of them. And again, from someone who actually has degrees in this topic and not from a couple of dilletents. All right, so great questions, great answers. Sorry, the questions are fine.

C: Great questions, Benito. great questions.

B: Great questions. Great answers to those questions. But I have a couple of things here. A couple of topics I just want to get your thoughts or opinions on. So these are things that we've discussed on the show, sometimes claims that we ourselves have made that have sometimes been met with skepticism or even pushback from listeners. And so I want to get a perspective of an actual expert on – we'll call it the lightning round, but you can answer as briefly or as robustly as you would like. So here's one I suspect I know your answer to this because I watched your videos, but in our episode on Isaiah, we talk about how there is no evidence of monotheism within Judaism prior to the later layers of Isaiah until at least the period of the Babylonian captivity. What are your thoughts on that?

D: So, that has long been the academic consensus that Deutero-Isaiah or Second Isaiah, so Isaiah 40 and on, represents the threshold of monotheism based primarily on some of the rhetoric that is in there regarding the significance of the other gods. But I and many and a growing number of scholars reject that idea and would argue that even Deutero-Isaiah is not monotheistic, acknowledges the existence of other gods, and is using this rhetoric the same way I will talk about the Las Vegas Raiders as not being a real football team. Basically, that this is just rhetoric intended to say, "Hey, for us, they don't matter. It's not that they don't exist, it's just that that they don't matter.

And there is a growing chorus of scholars. I would say that that is, if it has not become the consensus, it is rapidly becoming the consensus that there is no monotheism as we understand it today, even within Deuteronomy Isaiah. And in May of 2024, I will actually be participating in a conference that I helped organize on why we need to stop using the concept of monotheism to talk about the ideologies of the Bible, Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament and even well into early Christianity.

B: Yeah, okay. That was the point I was hoping you would get. There's no monotheism in the Bible.

D: Correct.

B: Hebrew or Christian.

D: Yeah.

B: So, I mean, we can argue monolatry, we can argue henotheism, but you say monotheism as a solidified concept is post-biblical.

D: Yeah. And I think the people who want to argue that it is in the Bible, they want to find it in the Bible because that means there is some ideological continuity between the communities they are a part of today and the communities responsible for the Bible. And that's an important part of the identity politics of biblical religions is these are our compatriots, these people agree with us, we agree with them, we identify as monotheists today so they have to identify as monotheists anciently. And that's more of an issue with conservative Christians than with most other groups. And so they're the ones who are going to be like, look, we can give you up to Deutero-Isaiah, but from then on it has to be monotheism. It's more about those identity politics than it is about actually wanting to know if there is something useful about applying that category to the Bible.

B: I really love that this is a topic on which we got pushback and it turns out that the modern scholarly consensus actually goes further than the claim we made on the show. But as a follow-up to that then, how do you then understand the Shema, the statement, the Lord your God is one? How do we understand that?

D: Well, to say that Adonai is one, I don't understand how it would immediately follow that there are no other gods. Because the statement is not God is one, the statement is Adonai is one, there's only one Adonai. And there is a lot of scholarship that would argue this is rooted in a late pre-exilic attempt at cultic centralization. In other words, this is the rulers in Jerusalem saying, "Hey, you can't go to those other cult sites where there are manifestations of Adonai there. You can only come to the one in Jerusalem." And so, Adonai is one, according to many scholars, is what they would call mono-Yahwism. You're only allowed to worship one manifestation of Adonai, and that is the one that is manifested in the temple in Jerusalem.

And there's a larger story about where this comes from and why this is happening when it is, but we have inscriptions from a hundred years prior where it talks about Adonai of Shomron or Samaria and Adonai of Teman, and this would be the manifestation of that deity at that specific cult site. So very similar to the Virgin of Guadalupe or whatever, it's the manifestation of the Virgin at that given site. And so people will go there and worship that manifestation at that site in idiosyncratic ways. Similarly, Adonai was probably manifested at different cult sites. And this is an attempt to say, "No, you're only allowed to worship one manifestation."

And later, because it's a part of the scriptural heritage that is inherited by later generations of Jewish folks, it turns into this idea of the only real meaningful deity. I would say that it's not until approaching medieval Judaism that we have this philosophical rejection of the existence of other gods. Even within rabbinic literature, we have talks of other entities, divine entities that are labeled gods. And so the philosophical rejection of all other gods is something that I would argue comes later. And part of the conference that I'm going to be participating in is going to address late antique Judaism and Christianity and how to think about those groups in relation to the concept of monotheism.

B: Great.

C: Or as we said on the show, Adonai is Ichiban.

B: Adonai is Ichiban. The two interpretations we pitched on the show for the meaning of the Shema was one, Adonai is Ichiban, and two, that it was possibly a statement of official conflation between Adonai and El, right? Adonai and El are one. I don't know. Is that even feasible or plausible to you or do you think that's a stretch?

D: So, I personally think that the conflation of Adonai and El is something that probably took place a few centuries earlier, somewhere around 1000 BCE. I would suggest that the rise of, near the rise of kingship within Israel. There are folks who would make the case that it is something that took place later, maybe somewhere around the exile. And so, the Shema is something that is rooted in a text that probably began to be compiled within a century before the exile, and so - or even less than that. And so, I think that's a little bit late, but there are other scholars who would say maybe it happened around that time period.

B: Mm, okay. All right, all right. Great. Next, and we've already touched on this a little bit, you've kind of gotten into it, but evolving ideas of Jesus across the first century from one gospel to another, looking at an almost adoptionist Jesus in Mark to the more cosmic and eternal Jesus of John. One way that you'll understand, the way that we frame the four gospels on this show is that Mark presents the Golden Age Jesus, Matthew the Silver Age Jesus, Luke is Bronze Age Jesus, and John is the 90s Vertigo Jesus.

C: The eras of comics not to be confused with actual history.

D: Yeah, right.

B: Or the ages of Hesiod or whatever, but you know, the 90s vertigo age of Hesiod in the... So yeah, you've already touched on the idea that Jesus within the latest gospel does not fully claim to be God and arguably... I mean would you say Paul claims that Jesus is God or not? Obviously, Paul's letters predating the Gospels, but do you think the New Testament claims that Jesus is God or is he merely, as you present him, often a bearer of the divine name?

D: I would argue that that is kind of the conceptual framework, the conceptual template that is being adopted by the authors of the New Testament, starting with Paul. I do think Paul treats Jesus as the bearer of the divine name, and I'm not alone in that. The recent Hermeneia commentary on the letter to the Philippians by Paul Holloway makes exactly that case, says in the hymn, the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. This is Paul treating Jesus as the name-bearing angel. He's given the name and that is what exalts him and that is what allows him to identify with God.

And so in my book, Adonai's Divine Images, I make the case that the angel of the Lord and some other divine images in the Hebrew Bible are adopting the logic of divine images. But when the angel adopts that logic, that creates this conceptual template that is picked up within Greco-Roman period Judaism. And we have these other figures. Yahawel is an angel, the son of man is some kind of divine figure, Metatron seems to be an angel as well, but they are all divinized. They have some kind of murky relationship with God based on the possession of this divine name based on their pre-existence.

And so when we get into the New Testament, we have different takes on Jesus as the name bearer. And some of them are a little more, like, I don't think, I wouldn't say that they're treating Jesus as an angel. I would say they're taking that concept of the name bearing angel and then saying, we're going to take that template and we're going to fill it with Jesus contents. So it's no longer an angel, it's this figure known as Jesus. But the idea is still that we've got this logic of divine images that somehow Jesus is exercising God's power and even manifesting God's presence, and divine images, idols, was the main way that that happened anciently. And we did not have this philosophical framework of consubstantiality and all this kind of stuff until it's developed between the second and the fifth centuries CE.

And so I would say that there's a degree to which Jesus is manifesting God's power and even God's presence, and there's a degree to which Jesus can identify with God that is more closely related to the angel of the Lord from the Hebrew Bible than it is to the Trinity of later Christianity. There's a degree to which some of the texts kind of seem to indicate that Jesus is at least a god, and we have Thomas saying "my Lord and my God", and I would say there's some overlap with this idea, but it's not leaning into the Trinity. It's actually leaning away from the Trinity.

We have a far more explicit identification as God, and like Exodus 3, you have the messenger, the angel of the Lord appearing to Moses, who says in verse 6, "I am the God of your father". That is is far more explicit than anything we see in the New Testament. Because it's not just saying I am God, it's saying I am this specific God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. I am Adonai. You don't have that in the New Testament. But it is a kind of take on this angel who, because they bear the divine name, they're able to forgive sins, they're able to exercise divine prerogatives, they're able to play a role in the creation of the universe, they're able to do all of these things.

And you kind of see a progression from Mark, who has nothing to say about Jesus before his ministry at adulthood. And then you go back to Matthew and Luke, who are now talking about these, you know, kind of prophetic births, where Jesus is special even before birth. And then you move forward to John is like, no, it doesn't even go back as far as birth, it goes all the way back to the creation of the earth. And these are more fully adopting some of those Greco-Roman period Jewish ideologies that pre-existed the tradition of Jesus, where the Son of Man is named with the name at the creation of the earth.

And then later on in the Enochic literature, it says that everyone on earth will kneel down and worship the Son of Man. And so all this stuff is there, and it's kind of accreting to the Jesus tradition. And at first, it's kind of basic. We're doing this adoptionistically. We're doing this starting with Jesus's ministry and then it goes back further. And then finally with John, we have it's fully adopted. Jesus is this son of man who was there at the beginning, was the instrument of creation and all that stuff.

So that's the more academic book that I'm writing is going to try to trace that development and show that it is an incremental adoption of ideologies related to this mediatory figure from Greco-Roman period Judaism. And that it's only later rationalized as this consubstantial relationship, two persons in one being and all that kind of stuff.

B: Right. And just anticipating some pushback you might get on that. I already know from your videos that you respond to John 1, the bit where the word was God. You contend that the lack of the definite article, it's not "ho theos" but just "theos," leads us to understand that it's not the word was God, but rather the word was a god. The word was divine. The word was deity, which is not the same as saying the word is "ho theos, the god.

D: Yeah, very god of very god. Yeah, this argument does not originate with me. This is what I think is the consensus view of evangelical scholars. Daniel Wallace very forcefully argued that Theos there is qualitative because it is anarthrous, because it lacks the definite article. It is qualitative. It is not saying Jesus is the God, it is saying Jesus is deity. And what I further argue is that Daniel Wallace and most others presuppose that God exhausts the category of deity. Therefore, to be deity is to be God.

And I would argue that that is not the case. Even within John, we have references to Jesus quotes Psalm 82 and seems to be talking about the Israelites at Sinai and says the scriptures call them gods and you know the scripture cannot be broken. So even Jesus is appealing to references to other individuals as gods and John 10:30-33 gets brought up a lot in response to me. People are like well John 10:33 says you you make yourself God. That's also anarthrous. There's no definite article there. If we take that prose seriously, because it says you are human making yourself deity, making yourself divine. Anthropos and Theos, they both lack the definite article. They're both qualitative. You are human and yet are making yourself divine.

So it's not identifying Jesus as, or it's not saying Jesus is claiming to be God. It's saying Jesus is making himself divine, which is a category that includes more beings than just the God of Israel.

And so people are like, "Well, what about John 10:30? It says, 'I and the Father are one.'" Great. What does it mean to be one? That could be understood any one of a number of different ways. And we can look at John 17, the intercessory prayer, where Jesus first in verse three talks about, "This is life eternal to know you, the only true God." Now, he didn't say, "Know us, the only true God." He said, "Know you, the only true God." And then we have three times in verse 11, then verse 21 through 24, we have Jesus praying that his followers become one with him just as he is one with God. And so the oneness that is being prayed for there obviously extends beyond the Trinity. This is not a oneness of essence or substance. This is not consubstantiality. That oneness probably has more to do with purpose and perfection and stuff like that. And so when Jesus says in John 10:30, "I and my Father are one," the idea is not, we are one being divided across two persons. It is saying, you know, we are united in purpose, in mission, in perfection, however you wanna understand that.

I think John is kind of applying the philosophical frameworks to this question to try to understand it better and try to make it more meaningful to folks, but John is not promoting the Trinity. That is something that would not happen until the late second century at the earliest.

B: Great. Thank you. Yeah, I think if you stop trying to like retrofit Trinitarian ideas onto the Gospels and see it as part of an ongoing patrimony of these kind of divine figures like, yeah, Metatron, we're big fans of the Enochic literature on this show. Metatron, or as we call him, Adonai Jr.

D: Right. The Adonai-Kotun.

B: Yeah, the Angel of the Lord, which, I mean, you've also recently discussed how, in many places, the Angel of the Lord is a redactor's interpolation to move away from a more anthropomorphic God. But also, yeah, Yahawel from the apocalypse of Abraham, right? Which we actually haven't covered on this show yet.

D: It's a good one.

B: But even like, I think, post-Christian figures, like, you could argue that the Besht fits in this, right? As a bearer of the divine name and is therefore able to — someone told me one we're not, it's rude to call him the Besht. I don't know if that's true. The Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, we'll say. But certainly there are traditions about him and the idea is he's the master of the good name and is therefore able to perform all sorts of miracles, including raising people from the dead.

D: There's an interesting Talmudic story where somebody they call a heretic says, "Hey, there's this text where God says to Moses, 'Come up to Adonai,' and the heretic says, "Why doesn't that say come up to me?" And then the rabbi says, "Oh, well, that's Metatron." See? And then they quote the scripture that I quote frequently, Exodus 23:20-21. Metatron has the same name because why? My name is in him, as God says about the angel in Exodus 23, 20 and 21.

And so, that's basically the rabbi saying, "There's more than one divine being named Adonai, or at least Metatron also bears the divine name and therefore can be referred to as Adonai within the scriptures.

B: Nice. All right, next topic. This was one we haven't gotten pushback on. This is actually one of the more popular claims we've made on this show. And I'm not going to say we've invented it, but we arrived at it independently of any other person.

D: Yeah, that happens.

B: I'm sure other people have had this theory and it may even be common, but we came up with it live while recording an episode, which is that the behavior of Jesus's disciples makes more sense if you understand them as being like 13 to 15 years old.

C: Especially Peter.

B: Yeah.

D: I think Peter is represented as pretty capricious. There is this idea that the disciples were teenagers, and I've not been convinced by the arguments for that. This was something that I kind of engaged a little bit about a year ago. I don't remember what all the arguments are. I think that is an interesting theory. I am not convinced by it, but I would be open to hearing the argument. I'll just put it that way.

I think the arguments that I have seen, this is something that has been argued by a handful of folks, have not been convincing to me. But if the basis is basically that the behavior is better accounted for, that's one I haven't heard before.

B: They don't understand what metaphors are, Dan.

D: Yeah.

B: They're very confused.

D: Well, a lot of people would say, and I think from a more critical perspective, the argument would be that the telling of the story, the gospel telling of the story is retconning traditions that were in circulation before Jesus died. And that we're trying to say, hey, if Jesus knew he was gonna die, if he knew all this stuff, why didn't he tell anybody? And so then you have the messianic secret, you have the gospels being framed as, well, he did tell them, they were just too stupid to figure it out. Or in Mark, there's a story of the two-stage healing of the blind man, which is a symbol for the blindness of the disciples, who know Jesus is special, but don't see clearly yet. And they would not see clearly until after the resurrection.

So, from a critical point of view, the argument is the disciples are being represented as kind of people who really are thick-skulled. And that's not because, I would argue, that's probably not because they're youths. It's probably because there are stories from before Jesus's death that are being retrofitted to account for Jesus dying and then resurrecting. They have to make them like, "Oh, we don't get it."

B: And it's also a way that you can then present the information to the reader, to the audience.

D: Yeah, the audience is in on it. And so, every now and then the narrator has to let them know, you know, "Jesus told them openly, but they didn't get it." And so, I think that's what a more critical perspective would find more likely.

B: Yeah, for sure.

C: Listen, we're less about data and more about vibes.

B: More about vibes.

D: Which is fair.

B: This one, if you so choose, you can just give a simple yes or no. United monarchy, real or propaganda? Did it exist? How do you feel compelled?

D: Propaganda.

B: Propaganda. Okay. We got big pushback on that one.

D: Yeah. That's not a surprise.

B: Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a lot of contemporary politics tied up in that one.

D: Yeah.

B: Okay. What about, where do you stand? What's the critical consensus on documentary hypothesis? Obviously, there's no mainstream scholar pushing that there's a univocality of the Torah. But, like, how many sources are we looking at? Is it - I feel like it's not J-E-P-D anymore, right? J-E, they're considered one now or I don't know. What's - how many sources are we looking at?

D: So, the documentary hypothesis is not the only source critical hypothesis that sees multiple sources. It was the most popular one, but you also have fragmentary hypothesis, you have supplementary hypothesis. So there's this misunderstanding that as the documentary hypothesis goes so goes multiple authorship. That's just not true.

So the documentary hypothesis has been criticized on a number of grounds and a lot of European scholars and some American scholars have made the case that J and E don't really qualify as full documentary sources. D and P you've got portions of most of the Pentateuchal kind of narrative arc, but with J and E, you seem to have just fragments of the beginning, basically. Genesis and Exodus, that seems to be where it's primarily represented. And so, there was a book that was published a while ago called "Farewell to the Yahwist?" And that raised a bunch of concerns with the existence of the J source as a full documentary source.

And so, I would say that if not the majority, definitely a representative portion and probably be moving towards the majority will speak of D, P, and non-P. And so non-P can be pre-P, it can be post-P, but it is basically these sources other than P that are also not D that are too fragmentary to be unified, to be identified with a specific author. And so that's the approach that I when I am writing a book. So, for my book, Adonai's Divine Images, I explained in the beginning, that's the approach that I'm going to take. I'm going to talk about D, I'm going to talk about P, I'm going to talk about non-P.

B: Okay.

D: Now, you also have folks like Joel Baden and others who are making a defense of the documentary hypothesis that think J and E are still full documentary sources. So, that hasn't gone away, but it has been problematized by a lot of scholars.

B: Interesting. So, like, then in this case, the idea would be that the redactor or redactors assembling these larger, yeah, your priestly document, your bits from the Deuteronomistic history, and then they're adding in, say, fragments of regional legends and things to kind of stitch together the narrative. That's cool. Also a shame because we're Big J fans on this show. We're big fans of the anthropomorphic god who wants to come and many gallons of bread at your house.

D: And that's not to say that there was not, the texts don't indicate that that's how God was conceptualized very, very early on. That's absolutely how God was conceptualized very, very early on. It's just to say that you can't lash together all these different fragments where God is presented that way and say, this is one single source. It's probably just scattered fragments of sources that were not unified, but that do present a related conceptualization of deity.

B: Okay, cool. That's good to know. I'll get the update because I had a sense that the four document was not like the new thing anymore.

D: No.

B: Okay. On a similar topic then, where do you stand on the synoptic problem? Are you a two source guy, three source, four source, Farrer or Goodacre guy?

D: I'd lean in the direction of Mark and Farrer. Although I would say that I'm not a specialist in that regard and so I kind of suspend judgment to some degree. I don't have incredibly strong feelings and I could not articulate why I feel one way over another. I can't engage with all the arguments. But from what I have seen, I think Mark's position resonates a little more with me.

B: Okay. Including his argument that the reason why the story of the Magi is not in Luke is because Luke hates wizards. How do you feel about - do you feel compelled by that argument?

D: I don't know that I feel compelled by that argument in and of itself, no.

B: Okay. All right.

D: I don't think that it's also to be rejected out of hand.

B: Sure.

D: Because the Magi are kind of saying, "Hey, these other people kind of, you know, they were able to see the writing on the wall in the natural world." And so maybe that's giving a little too much credit to folks who are a part of an empire that has historically been the other and an enemy. But at the same time, Luke is a little bit more of a universalist than Matthew. So.

B: Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

D: I don't think it's determinative.

B: Sure. Okay. All right. Cool. Here's one that got us pushed back from Professor Tony Burke of York University, the main dude of Christian Apocryphal literature. Are you familiar with the text of Secret Mark?

D: I am.

B: I assume you are. Okay. Is Secret Mark, is it gay?

[MUSIC: Gay Bar by Electric Six]

B: Or is it not gay?

D: Is it gay?

B: Jesus hanging out all night with a naked guy, is that gay or not gay?

D: So I'm going to say the same thing that I say about David. It's certainly plausible, but I wouldn't say that we have enough data to feel comfortable giving either position priority over the other. This is another one where I would say I suspend judgment. I'm going to leave it there and say I can see it either way.

B: Okay. All right. Because Tony said if you see gay here, you're going to see it in a lot of places. And I said, just get ready. Get ready, because that was like episode five of this show or something. So I was like, yeah, bud, just wait.

C: Yeah, but we're going to be seeing it. Don't worry.

B: I was like, John is way gayer than this. So yeah, anyway, love you, Tony. All right. How do you feel about Secret Mark? Is it a hoax? You think it's real? Do you have an opinion?

D: I tend to lean in the direction of it being more likely that it is a hoax.

B: Okay, fair enough.

D: But I tend to be pretty skeptical...

B: Yeah.

D: ...regarding stuff. So whenever something new comes out, my first position is I'm going to take a position of skepticism on this until I'm convinced otherwise.

B: That is fair and can't really argue with that. Just a couple more of these lightning round ones. Okay, plausibility of the idea of, like, so to speak, celebrity authors or redactors of biblical documents. I'm not talking about, like, Moses writing the Torah, but like the idea that the Deuteronomist or the group of Deuteronomists were led by Jeremiah or Baruch or that the priestly source was assembled by Ezra or something like that. Does that feel plausible or does that feel like people reaching?

D: I think that's people reaching. I think that's people looking for something that will make it more meaningful. And so we reach into the repertoire of known quantities and see which one makes the most sense when the reality is we know. I'm trying to remember who said it and I don't remember who said it. Somebody out there knows, but there's a statement that we probably only have like 5% of the texts that were in circulation or 5% of the people who were players at that time. And so, the idea that all of the significant stuff had to have been written by somebody we know about, I think is problematic. And so, when people say, "Oh, well, this makes the most sense as them," it's like, "Well, if we only have 5% of the potential authors and we need to come up with somebody as a plausible author, going to be able to come up with somebody, but the odds that that's the most likely author is vanishingly small. So I tend to be skeptical of that as well.

B: Yeah, sure. To what degree do you think the longer books are even the work of a single author rather than a community? We're talking about even the gospels versus the...

D: Those are all cobbled together. Everything has gone through layers and layers of editing and redaction. I mean, even the Gospel of John, you've got parts where Jesus is like, you know, he gets up and says, "All right, let's get out of here." And then you've got three chapters of sermonizing. And then the text says, "So they got up and got out of there." You know, or "He's in Jerusalem." And then the next passage says, "So they went from one side of the Sea of Galilee to the other." And it's very clear that things have been moved around, things have been added, things have been taken away.

A lot of people think that Luke, well, I don't know about a lot of people, but scholars I trust think that Luke one and two were probably later additions to the Gospel of Luke, which which has a perfectly fine beginning at Luke 3:1. So yeah, I think I would begin from the assumption that any but the shortest of texts are composite texts.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense to me. All right. One last lightning round question. This one comes from Discord member Kivitar, who asks, "How do you feel about the historicity of the Exodus narrative?" On our show, we said that there's no archaeological evidence that that happened.

D: I would say the same. The data do not support the historicity of the Exodus tradition, at least not in anything remotely approximating the way it is told in the book of Exodus. I have heard theories about maybe a small-scale escape from Egypt into the northern hill country by a group that brought this tradition with them. That's possible, maybe even bordering on plausible, but I don't think we have enough data to move it firmly into the realm of plausibility.

The one piece of - and I pointed this out a handful of times on my channel - the one piece of data that I would say kind of suggests that maybe there's something historical to this is the fact that I think it makes more sense that Moses is a corruption of an Egyptian name that has removed the theophoric element because it was a non-Yahwistic theophoric element. I would say that that is the one piece of data that keeps me from saying, "No chance." But if there is something historical underlying that, it looked nothing like what we have now. It's a completely different story.

B: Excellent. I think that's an excellent answer. All right. But I do want to hit this one first. It's a special request from Kelly to ask, "What is your interpretation? What is your take or your understanding on 1 Peter 3:18-20?" And for those who don't have Bible memorized. This is talking about Christ suffering for sins. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the spirit. And being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits, those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah when the ark was being built. What is your interpretation of these imprisoned spirits? What is your understanding of this passage?

D: This is a difficult one. I think this is referring to traditions that were in circulation around this time period that are related to things like the Book of Enoch and others that I don't know that they're talking about angels that are being imprisoned, but we do have some reference in the Enochic literature to these angels who were a part of this group that's descended and as we read in Genesis 6, the children of God had children with the daughters of humanity. That's one possibility.

Angelic interpretation is not outside the realm of possibility, but there were debates about whether or not angelic beings could disobey. And so there was another reading that became salient around this time period as well, that reinterpreted Genesis 6 and the Enochic tale as a reference to humans. The line of Seth, for instance, I think is the most popular one of those interpretations. But that understands these entities as humans who are disobedient.

And so these would be figures who were imprisoned, awaiting judgment, awaiting whatever is coming, who are having the gospel preached to them. And there are some hints in some of the early Christian literature, as well as in some of the apocryphal Jewish literature, that there was an opportunity. There were ways that dead folks could repent, could have salvation given to them. You see in 2 Maccabees chapter 12, where Judas Maccabeus comes upon some soldiers who have been killed, and they have contraband, they have idols on their persons. And so Judas sends around the hat, and collects a bunch of money to send it off to Jerusalem for offerings to be made on their behalf, which suggests something akin to proxy temple ordinances that in some way, shape, or form are going to help them to achieve a better resurrection or something like that, which some people think that this is why Luther and the Protestants were not happy with the Apocrypha because it seemed to support the idea of the purgatory. I don't know if it does that.

But you also have the idea that baptism for the dead was something that was operative within early Christianity. You have that reference in Corinthians. You have also some references in early Christian literature to Jesus preaching to the dead and having the seal put upon them and the seal being a reference to baptism. And so there's stuff going on in early Christianity about which we do not have a lot of information and I think about which we would be very surprised if we were updated on. And so, I think this passage is probably referring to one tradition among those, something having to do with the way Genesis 6 was being interpreted in that time period.

B: Yeah, yeah. Certainly, I remember growing up in Southern Baptist Church, it being taught that if you were a person, even, you know, today, if somehow... We joke often on this show when we talk about like, Chick tracts and things where the premise is the person isn't a Christian simply because they've never heard of Jesus and the idea that you've heard of Star Wars but never Jesus is a ridiculous supposition. But let's say you're someone who lives in a remote tribe or island or something and have not encountered the gospel message. It was taught to me that those people when they perish, yeah, were preached to in a kind of prison for souls and given the opportunity to accept the message of Jesus. And so that would be kind of a reading of this, and I don't know how common that would be.

C: I'm sorry, you gotta go to summer school?

B: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Definitely, I've seen a lot of evangelicals who interpret this as the Nephilim or whatever. Okay, well, on the topic of the Nephilim, we have a question here from Tricorn King in the Discord, Bernhard. "Is he aware of any extant works that explain why throughout the Hebrew Bible there were descendants of the Nephilim/the children of the Watchers and humans like the Rephaim or Goliath when we know that at least in 1 Enoch, Noah's flood was explicitly used as a way to wipe out the earth-destroying Nephilim.

D: So the traditions that saw the Nephilim before the flood, as well as after, probably predated the introduction of the flood tradition. There are - critical scholars see the flood tradition as something that was inserted into this story of Noah that probably initially was about viticulture. Like, it's likely that Noah was known more for introducing wine and grape growing and and things like that then for the flood. But the flood becomes the main part of the story and is inserted later.

For instance, right before the flood, you've got these individuals who are mentioned, so-and-so, who's the ancestor of those who dwell in tents, and so-and-so is the ancestor of those who work with, you know, iron instruments or something like that. And it's like, none of these are the ancestors of anybody if the flood happened.

B: Right, yeah.

D: But it makes sense if the flood is unknown to these authors and it's a later insertion into the text.

B: Sure, for sure.

D: But then when you have the Enochic story, that is being written much later when the flood is there, and so now it's being interpreted with the flood in place.

B: Right. And you've done at least one video really interesting about looking at the seams in the Noah story and specifically the curse of Ham and that kind of stuff. I think that's really interesting. But also to the listener, Bernhard, I know you're... I don't know that you're listening actually, but is there an excellent work that explains it? Yeah, it's called the Talmud, my guy. There's a podcast you should check out. it's called Apocrypals. We talk about things like how the giant Og, the Amorite, survives the flood because he was too tall or else he rode on top of the ark or else he rode the Re'em behind the ark and survived the flood and thus the Rephaim descend from him. Come on, Bernhard. Listen to the show. All right.

Anyway. Okay. Here's a good one from Madison, actually.

C: You think that's the first time the phrase, "Yeah, my guy, it's called the Talmud."

B: Do you think that's the first time anyone's ever said that? I doubt it. Surely our friend David Wolken has said it.

C: Probably.

B: All right. So this is a question for Madison. This is a good one. Getting at one of your other catchphrases. "One of the things I like that he talks about is how a lot of people engage with their religion and that of others and how it's based on their act of negotiating with the text, which kind of boils down to theology. I'm curious if he's seen recent trends in theology that are particularly exciting or interesting."

D: I don't have my figure on the pulse of the practice of theology.

B: Right.

D: I am far more versed in the study of other people's theology.

B: Sure.

D: But I think that people need to take a lot more seriously some of the new and different interpretive lenses that are being imposed upon the Bible. Liberation theology has gotten a bad rap for a long time, but I think people would be surprised how informative liberation theology is and how insightful it is regarding what's going on in the world today. There

There are also womanist theologies that I think are fascinating. So not just feminist theologies, but womanist theologies, which have to do with the intersection of Black and feminist interpretive frameworks. I think those are fascinating.

And queer theology is also something that I think people could learn a lot from.

This is now what I'm not saying here is they're right and everybody else is wrong. I'm saying these bring new interpretive lenses and help us to think about and look at these stories in new and different ways, and that can help people arrive at insights and change their thinking about the text because it gives them a new way of looking at it.

Because none of us are identifying the essence, the very core, the full reality of the text. We're all just applying different lenses to it to see what we can learn. And those are some neglected theological approaches that I think a lot of people would benefit immensely from. So I would say liberationists, some of the black theologians are doing wonderful work in association with liberationist theology as well. Womanist theology and queer theology, I think, are fascinating. And people are going to be intimidated by them. Some people are going to be made uncomfortable by them. But I think that is what will help people learn more about the text, learn more about themselves, better understand how other people are looking at the text, and better understand how scholars are going to be engaging the text in the future.

So, I think if people can familiarize themselves with those approaches, I think they'll be much better off.

B: Awesome. Thank you. All right. One last question because this is one that multiple listeners on our Discord asked. Do you have a favorite piece of Apocrypha? Or we'll extend that to Pseudepigrapha as well.

D: I've always had a soft spot for 2 Maccabees.

B: Yes.

D: That's the book that got me interested in understanding the history of that period, that got me into biblical scholarship. The first thing I ever published, it was in a student journal, it's not a great piece of scholarship, but the first thing I ever published was on 2 Maccabees 9, or excuse me, 2 Maccabees 7, the mother and her seven sons. That story has always fascinated me, as well as where it stands within the development of that related tradition. So, I still have a lot of questions about 2 Maccabees that I hope to be able to investigate in the future. So I'm going to say that one is my favorite.

B: That's a great answer. We are big fans of Second Mac. We're big fans of Judah Mac. And that's definitely-

C: Is that the drunk Elephants and the guy's guts getting ripped out.

B: That's the third one.

C: Okay.

D: That one, the third one is elaborating on the story in chapter eight, I think it is where the guy runs under the elephant in order to try to frustrate Antiochus' troops.

B: Eleazar.

D: Eleazar. Eleazar. Yeah. And then and the third Mac kind of elaborates on expands on that story.

B: We're big fans of second Maccabees. We're big fans of Judah Maccabee because it's another one where we're like, I understand that there are political understandings of this, but we just like that the Maccabee brothers are cool and they do cool things. And we love Judah Maccabee, but we like that the author of second Maccabee said first Maccabees is pretty good, but it needs more ghost armies and guys exploding from diarrhea. And so let's add some of that stuff in. So yeah, second Maccabee is an excellent choice. Very clutch. Chris, did you have any additional questions?

C: Yeah. Do you agree that if you don't like Uncanny X-Men #268, which is the one with Captain America and Black Widow and Wolverine and the flashback to World War II in Madripoor by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee, that if you don't like that, you just don't like Marvel comics?

D: I think it gets close to that. I'm not into binaries, I'm into continua. So, I'm not going to draw that hard a line, but if you don't like that issue, yeah, I have concerns.

B: Great answer.

D: I don't know how popular it is among you guys or among your audience, but the brown and tan Wolverine is the better Wolverine.

C: Now, see, that, that you might get some pushback from, from our audience.

D: Yeah, well.

B: Not from the host, I don't think, but.

C: I don't know, I like the yellow costume.

D: I have heard the theory that because it's more conspicuous, the intent is to draw attention away from the younger, less experienced X-Men. So it is an effort on the part of Logan to try to protect his proteges.

B: He's the rodeo clown of the X-Men.

D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that theory, but I still think the the brown and tan is better.

B: Yeah.

C: I mean it is a good suit. That's a Byrne suit? Or Cochrane?

B: That's a John Byrne. No, he was still in the yellow and blue one when Cochrane came on.

C: John Byrne designed some good costumes man.

B: Great. This was excellent. I had a good time.

D: Me too.

B: Thank you so much for being on our show. Would you please take this opportunity to let everyone know where they can find you online promote whatever you want to promote the stage is yours to say what you want to say.

D: I appreciate that. So I am on social media @maklelan on Tiktok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter. My website maklelan.org has the online courses that I teach the next one which will be coming up Thursday May 11th, from 7 to 8 30 p.m. Mountain time will be on the Divine Council. So we'll talk about some of the stuff that talked about in this episode.

Yeah, we've also got our new podcast that just launched last Saturday at the time of recording Data Over Dogma podcast. You can find us on YouTube as well, as well as on all of your favorite podcast hosting platforms. So please check us out. If you like what you see there, please subscribe. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you prefer seeing the video. I'm not as big a fan of seeing myself on video, which makes it really weird that I record videos of myself every day.

But yeah, you can find me in those places. I hope you will let me know if there's any content that you would like to see or any questions, any topics that you would like to see me address in social media videos in some of my future classes or on the podcast.

B: Excellent. Thank you so, so much for your time. Maybe you can rejoin us someday.

D: Yeah, I'd love to.

B: If you'd be up for that. That would be great. All right.

D: I appreciate that. Thank you for your time.

B: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

[Music]

C: Thanks once again to Dan McClennan for joining us. That was a very fun and very informative interview. And if you don't like that issue of X-Men, you don't like Marvel Comics, I subscribe to that binary. Don't subscribe to a lot of them. Yeah. But I do say Uncanny X-Men #268 is about the most Marvel comic there is.

B: Hard to argue. Together again for the first time, Chris.

C: Yeah, it's a great comic. Anyway, thanks to Dan. Definitely, I'm sure you have been convinced by that interview, but do check out his TikTok. His recent video debunking someone who says that they found the Ark of the Covenant with the blurry photographic evidence of literally the action figure version from the Indiana Jones toy line is extremely good. He does not point that out. I noticed that on my own. Do that and maybe get in touch if you have someone that you would like us to talk to here on the show. If you know that nice young person who talks about what Moses's Pokémon team would be.

B: Yeah.

C: Then let us know.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. If you have people you'd like to see as guests on the show, we all know you want the RADR. We're trying to get the RADR, but...

C: Don't bother anybody, but do mention it if it comes up.

B: Mention it to us and if you think they seem amenable and you want to say so and so go on Oppo That's the new cool way to say it. Oppo...

C: I... that turns to ashes in my mouth.

B: ...so and so go on Oppo crypals. Don't be weird about it

C: Just be cool.

B: Be cool. Don't embarrass us if you're gonna put our names in your mouth. Don't embarrass us That's what I'm that's what I'm saying. We love you. All right, we're back baby We're here and where can the people find us they can find us on Twitter for now at Apocrypals. Find us there. We're also on Tumblr, apocrypals.tumblr.com.

C: Tumblr's back, baby.

B: Tumblr, it's back. Like the QR code, it's having its moment. Discord, we talked about the Discord. You can feel free to join the Discord by going to apocrypals.com/discord or apocrypals.chat, or just Google Apocrypals Discord and you'll find the link, the invite link. Please join us. And, you know, we've got a pretty nice community there. Even if Bernhard doesn't listen to the show very closely. Still, we love you all for the most part.

And we have merch. And you can find merchandise to help support this show by going to our teepublic store, use the link in the pinned tweet on our Twitter account, please. Additionally, if you want to help us out, the best thing you can do is go to Ko-fi.com/apocrapals. That's K-O-F-I dot com slash apocrapals. the name of the site/the name of the show, and you can leave us donations in any amount that you would like. Appreciate everyone who does that, and we appreciate all of our recurring donations. It is how we can afford to keep making this show. It is how we pay editorial deacon Lucas Brown.

C: And I do want to give a special thank you to everybody who kept their donations coming in, kept their recurring donations going. During our little slightly unexpected hiatus, a lot of stuff happened.

B: Some stuff happened.

C: Some stuff happened. Shortages of certain medications have happened.

B: Some people got extremely yelled at. Some stuff happened. So yes, thank you to those who did that. if you want to find me specifically, me, Benito, your friend, find me on twitter and instagram @benito_cereno.

And most importantly, you can help support me and my work and my continuing endeavors to be an alive, freelancing human being at patreon.com/benitocerino, all one word. I'm approaching the end of my King Arthur project, and also I have recently introduced free trials. You can now subscribe to my Patreon for free for two weeks and get access to a huge archive of work and get updates multiple times a week for $0 and with no commitment. So please feel free to check out the stuff I'm doing there on Patreon, on patreon.com/benitocerino. All right, Chris, what about you?

C: Everybody can find all my stuff by going to the-isb.com. That is my website, and it has links to everything that I write and record that you can enjoy. I'm doing a little more writing over on the War Rocket Ajax Patreon, but we can talk about that elsewhere. Hit up your boy on his website, like I used to say in 1998.

All right, that does it for the first episode of Multipals. We are going to be back with a regular episode of Apocrypals pretty soon, once I do the actual reading. Benito, what are we doing?

B: The next time we talk about a text, we will be covering the Didache, which is one of those almost made it to the New Testament kind of texts. It's kind of an instructional text on how to be a Christian. It's a Christian text for Christians.

C: I know this one.

B: You know the Didache?

C: Yeah. He's like Donkey Key's son.

B: That's right. That's right.

C: He's got a little baseball cap.

B: That's right. Yeah, he's not as big, but he's more agile.

C: Yeah.

B: And he can fly a little plane.

C: I had to get that joke out of the way now. No guarantee I would remember it whenever we come back to record that.

B: Yeah. Nice.

C: Join us for that. Join us for the next installment of Multipals as well. We hope you enjoyed this one. If you did, let us know. Leave a rating or review and help us out. Until next time, everybody, do not forget Black Lives Matter.

B: And trans rights are under attack. So call your representatives in your states. You know who you are you know who you need to call tell them you support trans people's rights to live.

C: And remember cops are not your friends.

B: And drag is not a crime.

C: And until next time for Benito Cereno I've been Chris Sims. Benito, peace be with you.

B: And also with you.

[MUSIC]

[BEEP]

D: Um, I'll read just about any-

[SIRI]

D: Quiet, Siri! Um, I'll read...