Introduction and Dan McClellan's Background

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's August 14, 2023, and for part two of my interview with Bible scholar Dan McClellan. Hey, Dan.

Dan McClellan [00:00:11] Hey, John. How you doing?

John Dehlin [00:00:13] Good for part two. Today we're going to be talking about 10 things that everybody should know about the Holy Bible. Again, for those who didn't catch part one, you will really, I think, get a lot more out of this episode if you go back and watch Dan's story. But even if you haven't, Dan is one of the most popular Bible scholars in the world right now, in my opinion. Dan, you may laugh at that, you may disagree.

Dan McClellan [00:00:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:39] But if you just count views and notoriety and exposure, I would say, and I said this in last episode, Dan McClelland, in my opinion, rivals Bart Ehrman for just reach and impact, thanks largely in part to his amazing TikTok channel that has what, 6, 700,000 subscribers at this point?

Dan McClellan [00:01:01] Over 600,000. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:02] Yeah. But most importantly, I believe Dan McClelland is a really important and thoughtful and knowledgeable scholar of the Bible. And in part one of my series with Dan McClelland, we talked about his Mormon story. And now in part two, we're going to be talking about 10 things everybody should know about the Bible. And I'm hoping this is not just for Mormons and ex Mormons and progressive Mormons, but but for the general world. Before we dive in, for those who missed part one, can you just talk a little bit about your Bible related CV so that people know you do have a little bit of education and background in this regard?

Dan McClellan [00:01:41] Yeah. So I did my Bachelor's degree at Brigham Young University in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. My goal was to go on to graduate school, get a PhD in something related to the Bible. It took me a little while to figure out what area of the Bible I wanted to study. That was a big worry of mine the first couple of years, but I focused on Biblical Hebrew for my degree. I also did a minor in Classical Greek. Then I went away to the University of Oxford and did a Master's degree there, where I wrote my thesis on textual criticism of the Septuagint and the concept of anthropomorphism and anti anthropomorphism in the Septuagint, which is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And from there I went to an evangelical university in Canada, Trinity Western University in Langley, bc, and did another master's degree in Biblical Studies. And my master's thesis there used Cognitive linguistics to focus on the conceptualization of deity in the Hebrew Bible. When people used the word deity, when they talked about deity, what precisely did they have in mind? And then my doctoral dissertation, which was written through the University of Exeter with under the supervision of the wonderful Francesca Stavra Capoulou, my dissertation was on the conceptualization of deity and divine images. And I used cognitive linguistics again, but also added to it the cognitive science of religion to better understand what's going on in the mind. Why does it produce these representations of deity, and then how does it influence the way that people engage with deity, particularly through divine images? And that dissertation I revised and turned into a book called Adonized Divine Images is a Cognitive Approach, which is an open access volume. Nobody ever makes any money off their dissertation, and that wasn't my priority anyway, so I decided to just make it free for as many people as wanted to access it. So pretty much all of my research has been focused on the Bible and how the Bible is understood and how the Bible is used. And there's overlap with how Latter Day Saints engage with the Bible in my research. And I have published linguistic arguments for different parts of Restoration Scripture as well. But I would say my primary focus is on biblical studies in general, not limited to an LDS audience, but certainly overlapping with the concerns of Latter Day Saint audiences.

John Dehlin [00:04:17] And really quickly, before we dive in, would you mind sharing what your main social media platforms are that are your attempts to express your understanding of the Bible?

Dan McClellan [00:04:30] So the main one right now is TikTok, and across all my social media platforms I go by McClellan, spelled M A K L E L A N, and so on TikTok, that's where I produce most of my videos for that platform, but also cross post them on Instagram, on YouTube, as well as on Twitter and now Threads and Bluesky and all the other social media platforms that are popping up.

John Dehlin [00:04:57] And what are you trying to do?

Dan McClellan [00:05:00] The main goal of my social media content is twofold. One is to try to democratize access to the academic study of the Bible and religion. Just ensure that people who want to know where the field stands on issues have a place they can go rather than having to try to Google stuff and find 19th century ideas that are now in the public domain. And then I'm also out there to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion, which is phenomenally widespread. And so that's probably what I spend most of my time focusing on. And then I also have a podcast called the Data Over Dogma Podcast that I host with Dan Beecher, who has another podcast called thank God I'm Atheist and he's a great co host for me to riff back and forth with. I think we have a great time. But the goals of the podcast are exactly the same. To increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and then combat the spread of misinformation.

John Dehlin [00:05:59] Love it. Yeah. Okay, so before we dive in to the maybe 10 or so things everyone should know about the Bible, I wonder if you'd be willing to set up what the common. I don't want to say it's a straw man, but in a way it's kind of a straw man. What is. And I wonder if you could even do sort of like an evangelical Christian or a traditional Christian incorrect view of the Bible overview. And if you want to do a Mormon variant of that, that's fine, but just sort of like paint the picture of. Of kind of what the common view of the Bible is that then you're going to kind of like respond to when you provide. Does that make sense?

Mormon and Evangelical Views of the Bible

Dan McClellan [00:06:48] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:06:48] Kind of like the general misunderstanding of what the Bible is. Evangelical Christian view. And maybe if there's a Mormon variant.

Dan McClellan [00:06:55] Yeah, I think there's a close connection between the two, and there has been since probably around the middle of the 20th century. But my understanding of the evangelical view of the Bible is based on the idea of sola scriptura, that Scripture is sufficient for all things related to salvation, that everything that we need to understand about God, our relationship to God and Jesus and salvation is in the biblical text. There are concepts of infallibility and inerrancy, and there are different models of that. Sometimes the argument is that inerrancy is only there for the original autographs and that things have. There can be errors in the manuscripts and things like that. But corresponding with that belief is usually some kind of belief that God has also preserved the Scriptures to an extremely high degree so that we can have faith that the text of the Bible is more or less what God intended it to be. And then along with this idea of inerrancy, is the inspiration of the scripture. Based on second Timothy 3, 16. The idea that all scripture is the word there in Greek is theopnestos, which means God breathed literally. But the idea is that according to the traditional approach of the Bible is that that passage means all scripture is inspired. And so the Bible is co. Extensive with the concept of Scripture. They are one and the same. And therefore everything in the Bible is inspired to some degree as infallible and or inerrant. And within the covers of the Bible is every last piece of information that we need to know how to lead a successful life and return to, to be with God for eternity. That's my understanding. The Latter Day Saint one ostensibly is a little more open to the idea of corruption is a pretty heavy word, but that the text has been altered, has been changed, whether in transmission or in translation, and that's based on one of the articles of faith. We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. And I think a lot of Latter Day Saints these days, particularly those who are aware of biblical scholarship and textual criticism, would understand translated there to mean both transmitted from one language into another, but also transmitted through the manuscript. So as far as it has been preserved correctly, whether from one manuscript to another or from one language to another. And so Latter Day Saints, I think, have a little more openness, or should have a little more openness to the idea that the Bible is not inerrant, is not infallible, and everything that it teaches. However, I think, think that there are a lot of Latter Day Saints who have tried to hitch their wagon to some degree to a more evangelical approach to the Bible. And in Sunday schools, in presentations about the Bible from the institutional church, it is kind of in a de facto way treated as more, more or less inerrant or infallible. And the idea that there is something that was changed or that is not accurate usually only comes up if there is some rhetorical need for that to come up. But for the most part, members treat it as inerrant. And particularly if you have a Joseph Smith translation variant in the footnotes, they'll say, oh, well, that's what it really means, and treat that as inerrant where those footnotes come up. And I think there are issues with both of those approaches to the Bible.

Literality, Historicity, and Authorship

John Dehlin [00:10:43] And then can you address literality and historicity and authorship as sort of how the Bible is traditionally viewed? In other words, you know, is it. Well, how, how is it commonly perceived in terms of these figures existing, the history being accurate, and then the, in the authorship, just in terms of like the names on each of the books sort of thing?

Dan McClellan [00:11:12] Yeah, I think the overwhelming majority of Christians would probably suggest that they think every single text was authored by whoever's name is on the front of the book. I think the exceptions to that are probably those who are more academically, a little more critically minded, who are going to be in the overwhelming minority. And I think the Same is more or less true for Latter Day Saints. And in terms of literalness, in other

John Dehlin [00:11:37] words, that Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke wrote Luke, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Right?

Dan McClellan [00:11:44] Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think you poll anyone who identifies as Christian, particularly in the English speaking world, particularly in the United States, I think that's the position 90 to 95% of them are going to have. And the more concerned they are, the more committed they are to the Bible, I think the more likely they're going to hold that position. And the same for literalness. I think most Christians who treat the Bible as an authoritative text, as inspired are going to hold to some notion of the historicity of pretty much everything. Although I do think there's probably a larger contingent of Christians who are willing to accept evolution as a better explanation for the creation, the development of the earth, rather than the idea of young earth creationism or anything like that. I think that's something that's kind of hotly debated within Christianity today. And obviously on the more conservative side, you're going to have folks who insist that that is literal and historical and accurate. And I think you see that within the Latter Day Saint tradition as well. But I, based on my perception, I think Latter Day Saints are probably a little more open to a more scientific approach to that. I think. Yeah, that's not something I've studied heavily. I've got a friend who's writing a dissertation on the concept of evolution within Mormonism. So there will be great research on that coming out soon. But from my experience, I see a lot more Latter Day Saints who are willing to push back against the idea of a literal six day creation 6,000 years ago. But that may just be my sampling bias.

John Dehlin [00:13:33] Okay. And then I think if I had to drive home the thing that I got from my LDS education about the Bible, it's just this model that God calls prophets. God communicates to prophets what he wants us to know. Prophets write that down. And that's what the Bible is. It's God communicating to us through prophets, literally, directly.

Dan McClellan [00:14:01] Yeah. And I think the idea that texts are involved is also something that Latter Day Saints assume goes all the way back to the beginning. The idea that even Adam and Eve wrote these things down so that they could be preserved and passed on. And that's something that we see in the Book of Mormon. That's pretty important, that the text and the textual heritage of the people is passed on so that later generations can have it. And. And I would argue that's a perspective that develops in a specific point in history and has not been the rule throughout human history is, is a much more modern concept.

John Dehlin [00:14:42] So is it safe to say that the rest of today's part two, the rest of today's episode with you, you're you on this topic, you're going to be kind of debunking a lot of what we just characterized as the prevailing view?

Dan McClellan [00:14:57] Yeah, I'm going to be challenging, providing data that, yes, my goal here is to kind of contextualize, offer an academic contextualization of the Bible, which is going to challenge a lot of that. The goal is not to say, hey, I want to show that all this is wrong. The goal is to say, here are the data regarding the Bible and you know, when you hold it up against these other things, it's overwhelmingly going to challenge those things. But, but the goal is to present the data. The goal is not to just tear down.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] And for Latter Day Saints specifically, and even Christians that just drop into this episode and didn't hear our discussion about your own journey, you are an active member of the LDS Church who, who currently attends. And at least on some level, without wanting to discuss your faith, you know, you would probably self identify as a believer on some level. So I guess I'm trying to say I do not believe that your intent is to tear down faith or to lead people out of either Christianity or Mormonism. Correct?

Dan McClellan [00:16:14] Absolutely correct. When I get up in the morning and think what I'm going to do during day, at no point have I ever had the goal to try to destroy anybody's faith, to try to hurt anybody's feelings, to try to do anything like that. My goal has always been to try to share knowledge, to share data. And I think there are absolutely folks out there who are engaged in what I would call destructive and corrosive representations of the Bible and the data regarding the Bible. And I want to challenge that not because I think those are necessarily bad people or because I just want. Want to score some rhetorical points, but because I think a more objective, a more honest, a more informed perspective on the Bible could go a long way towards healing a lot of the social ills that we are experiencing today, and particularly in the United States.

Who Wrote the Bible and When

John Dehlin [00:17:06] Okay, all right, well, let's dig in. What's the first thing that people should know about the Bible or the, or a lens we want to dive into?

Dan McClellan [00:17:15] So I thought I would approach this in a way that I was taught when I was growing up. Journalists approach things and do the who, what, when, where, why, how, and so the first thing was.

John Dehlin [00:17:27] Those are the first six things.

Dan McClellan [00:17:28] Right, Those are the first six things. And then afterwards, we'll talk about some of the hot button issues that always get brought up, and particularly as Latter Day Saints and evangelicals engage in public discourse about the Bible. So the who has to do with. Excuse me, the who has to do with who is responsible for the texts. And that is something that usually gets reduced to this claim that something like 45 people wrote the Bible over the course of 1500 years. And the reality, it's more like hundreds of people wrote the Bible and edited the Bible over the course of probably a little under a thousand years.

John Dehlin [00:18:11] So that first number, what was the first number you gave?

Dan McClellan [00:18:14] I think people say there were 45 authors.

John Dehlin [00:18:16] That would be basically. Basically the names on each of the books. Yeah. Moses wrote Pentatonic between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Dan McClellan [00:18:22] David wrote the Psalms, Isaiah wrote Isaiah, Matthew wrote Matthew. It would just be a traditional attribution of authorship to them.

John Dehlin [00:18:30] And so you're saying instead of those named authors, less than 50, you're saying potentially hundreds.

Dan McClellan [00:18:37] Yes, because just the Pentateuch alone, we're talking about probably at least two sources that scholars can confidently identify kind of schools of thought, and then numerous other authors and editors who were responsible for producing these stories, writing these stories down, editing these stories. And so the Pentateuch itself is probably the product of dozens of authors and editors.

John Dehlin [00:19:05] They're probably not Moses, right?

Dan McClellan [00:19:07] Absolutely not. For one, the text nowhere claims that Moses is the author. Nothing identifies Moses as the author internally. That's a tradition that develops. And then when we get into the books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles and things like that, we're talking about the Annals of Kings that have been passed down over many centuries. And again, we have other authors writing other things and then editors stitching them all together, and then other editors working, reworking them to fit their own needs. And so there are just all kinds of different authors whose fingerprints are all over these texts and texts like Isaiah. Scholars are pretty confident, and I think they're probably right that there are at least three different main divisions of the Book of Isaiah that are the work of at least three different authors. And then there were editors who were responsible for stitching them together and reworking them to fit their own needs. So it goes far beyond 45 or whatever the exact number is of authors. However, the time period in which they were. Well, we'll get to the time period later, but. And yeah, I would say that our earliest fragments in the biblical text probably come from authors who were writing poetry, poetry about God's support of whatever tribe they were addressing. And they probably date to the very late second millennium BCE so we probably have some poetic fragments from between 1200 and 1000 BCE and these authors are writing pretty short poetry so that it can be more easily memorized and more easily passed on. And what we see in the text now are these poetic fragments being embedded within larger poetic stories that themselves are usually being embedded within larger historical narratives. So we've got several layers of authorship and editorializing going on here. And then once we get to. Around.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] Wait, can I ask about that?

Dan McClellan [00:21:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:16] So I have not studied this at all. And so I have no depth of knowledge or thought about this, but I can think about my Mormon seminary high school self thinking like, oh, there must be like a Moses scroll somewhere, and there must be like an Abraham, Isaac and Jacob scroll somewhere, and there must be an Isaiah scroll. And they're in Hebrew. And somehow over time, you can picture Jews traipsing across the desert collecting these scrolls or tablets over time and then at some point assembling them into an Old Testament. And that that became like a triple combination but for Jews pre Jesus. And then at some point the same thing happened with the New Testament. Matthew wrote a scroll, Luke. So I guess I haven't even thought about like the original source documents starting with the Old Testament. And you're saying it started as. It certainly doesn't go back to 2, 3, 4,000 years ago. And it doesn't even go back to this model of prophet writing scroll.

Dan McClellan [00:22:34] Yeah, that's again, that's this later idea of text kind of being the best transmitter of, of tradition. And we've done an awful lot of anthropological research on societies that are primarily oral or entirely oral, that their languages are not committed to text, they don't have written language. And so they transmit their stories entirely orally. And in the earliest periods of this, that's likely what was going on. Most of the stories about where we came from, about why we have this relationship that we do with these deities, about our relationships with the other tribes who have their own relationships with their other deities. Those primarily those stories were transmitted orally. And poetry was one of the easiest ways to kind of be able to lengthen the story while still making it more memorable. Because you have different ways, forms of poetry that allow things to be more memorable. And so the story, the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, you have Jacob's blessings in Genesis 49, you have the song of the sea in Exodus 15. You have a handful of these poetic fragments that scholars suggest are among the earliest literary layers of the entire Hebrew Bible. They were probably originally circulated orally. At some point they were written down and they were preserved. And at some point down the road, they were embedded within these larger narratives.

John Dehlin [00:24:05] Wow. So the oldest source text we have for what we think of the Old Testament is not the Pentateuch, you're saying?

Dan McClellan [00:24:12] Correct. The Pentateuch is actually relatively young.

John Dehlin [00:24:16] And for those who don't know what the Pentateuch is, explain that.

Dan McClellan [00:24:18] The Pentateuch would be the first five books of Moses. So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And most scholars would say that the Pentateuch as we have it today is one of the younger pieces of forms of the Hebrew Bible.

John Dehlin [00:24:36] How can that be? It's about Adam and Eve, the creation and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And when you say younger, for those who aren't used to thinking chronologically, you mean written much later in time, more recent?

Dan McClellan [00:24:47] Yeah. But we also have this problem of Genesis having some very, very old fragments, but also having some very, very recent layers as well. And so when we talk about Genesis, we can't talk about the Book of Genesis just kind of being written one day. It is something that came together over the course of many centuries. And so the authors that are first starting to write historical narrative are writing when historical narrative or narrative prose starts to show up in Biblical Hebrew, which is a Northwest Semitic language. And a lot of scholars would suggest that this wasn't even possible until the middle of the 9th century BCE, that in northwest Semitic languages, they did not start writing things out in narrative prose until around that time period. And that's where we first get monumental inscriptions, where kings are saying, hey, I'm this king, and here's what I did. And so the origins of narrative prose are probably to be found in monumental inscriptions where kings are memorializing their deeds and their accomplishments around what time period? Again, so this would be around after 850 BCE. So the Mesha inscription, the Moab stele, is one of the earliest examples we have of this. And so based on the data that we do have, scholars would say any narrative, anything that is not poetry but is narrative in the Hebrew Bible was probably written by folks who are part of some kind of state infrastructure after around 850 BCE. And so we have some early poetry that could be before that and around 850 BCE. And I'm kind of weaving the who and the when together here. But around 850 BCE, we have the development of narrative prose. And this is where it becomes possible to record lengthy narratives. And so this is where some of the earliest fragments of the book books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles and some of the stories in the Pentateuch are probably being developed. And so these are traditions that, again, probably were transmitted orally before being written down. And then probably in the 8th to 7th century, we have the composition of a lot of these more lengthy narratives from these texts.

John Dehlin [00:27:08] And when in the timeline would Samuel, and I don't even know if it makes sense to say, would have lived, but if stuff about Samuel is being written 800, when would Samuel have lived much before then?

Dan McClellan [00:27:24] Well, according to the text, Samuel is living around 1000 BCE so even that

John Dehlin [00:27:30] would have been a couple hundred years

Dan McClellan [00:27:31] after he had died. This would have been centuries after the

John Dehlin [00:27:33] fact and not written by him.

Dan McClellan [00:27:34] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:27:34] But passed down through oral tradition.

Dan McClellan [00:27:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:38] For a couple hundred years before it gets written down.

Dan McClellan [00:27:41] Yeah. And it would have been altered quite a bit when it's finally being written down. Just because anybody who's writing it down is writing it down for a purpose, and that purpose is going to serve their interest in their own time period, which means they're going to write it down in a way that makes it more likely it's going to accomplish those purposes. And so we have stories that. And everybody's familiar with this phenomenon where stories get passed down, and we tell them in context in a way that that gets the point across. So people tell stories about when they met their spouses all the time in very different ways. Like, if you're at a party and you want it to be funny, you'll tell it in a way that makes it funnier. If, you know, people get up in sacrament meetings and tell about how they met their spouse. And usually they want to emphasize either how much of an idiot they were, or they want to make it funny, or they want to make it spiritual or something like that. So you massage the story to fit the context. And so these stories that are being passed down, when they finally get committed to text, they're overwhelmingly going to address the circumstances of that time period, which is why you can look in Samuel and you can see parts where the text seems to be saying, kings are bad, monarchy is bad, only Adonai is our king. And then other parts of the text that are kind of like, hey, kings are fine. We're gonna do the king thing for a while, and God is gonna oversee things. And so these are different, different layers of the text that are addressing the particular circumstances of whoever is recording them. And that also makes it phenomenally complex to try to detangle all of the different literary layers and try to identify what texts are coming from what group of authors and what texts are coming from others. And there are still fierce debates about that, which is why it's so difficult to say much more than that. It probably comes from this 2 century window in here, and it seems to be somebody who is either pro monarchy or anti monarchy, which means they're probably siding with the prophets over here or things like that. So it gets phenomenally complex. But a lot of the narratives in the Pentateuch and in the historical books, so Samuel King's Chronicles probably originate between the 8th and 7th centuries, and then some of them are probably even later than that. But I would say that's where the majority of them, particularly those coming from the Northern Kingdom, are being composed. And they're not compiled. The Pentateuch and the historical books are not being compiled until even later than that. So they're circulating independently as different stories about different groups. And it's much later that they're being compiled. And so the first kind of attempt to formally compile some of these texts into what would become a part of the Pentateuch probably happened under the reign of King Josiah toward the end of the 7th century BCE. So this is just before the Babylonian exile. But we have this king who the Temple. All the other temples around Israel and Judah have been destroyed, except for the temple in Jerusalem. So all worship is coming to Jerusalem and they have, everything's being focused on them. And King Josiah seems to be thinking kind of like this, we want to keep it this way. And so we have this story about finding the scroll of the Law in the Temple, just they're renovating and one day it's like, hey, look at this. There's a Scroll of the Law. They bring it to the prophetess Hulda, who interprets it and tells King Josiah, we've been doing all of this all wrong. And here's the God's Law, which happens to correspond exactly to what Josiah would like to keep doing. And these are the earliest layers of the Book of Deuteronomy, most likely. And there are a bunch of different ways that all the details of this have been, have been articulated. But basically there was a core of the Book of Deuteronomy that probably started in the late 7th century BCE. And then over the next couple of centuries, you had the ideological and the ideological descendants of this group of people adding more and more onto the book of Deuteronomy. So scholars identify a few different layers of the book of Deuteronomy. But that source is what scholars refer to as D, the D source, the Deuteronomistic source, or Deuteronomy. And that's probably the earliest phase of the compilation of the Pentateuch. Now we're drawing some stories from those earlier narratives that were composed earlier, and we're even drawing from some of those poetic fragments. So Deuteronomy 32, the song of Moses, many scholars think that is a very, very old piece of poetry. So it's being put together in much later time period, drawing from much earlier sources. And then in and after the exile, we have another source that scholars have identified that we call P, or the priestly source. And this is probably being compiled from members of the priesthood, folks who are trying to give priority to the authority and the power of the members of the priesthood who are overseeing how the law is being understood and how the law is being lived. And so this is where we get Genesis 1 from, which is what we call a priestly text. And there are several other portions of the Pentateuch outside of Deuteronomy that are probably the responsibility of this school. Scholars are divided on how exactly to think about it, but basically this group of people who are concerned for priestly purity and priestly authority, and then we have a bunch of other parts of the Pentateuch that where we don't know exactly who they're, where they're coming from. There's a theory that holds there's a. What's known as a Yahwist source and an Elohist source. So these would be sources where one emphasizes the name Adonai, the Tetragrammaton, another emphasizes the name Elohim. And these days, there are more and more scholars who are suggesting that these are not actual sources. But. But we just have tiny fragments that kind of point in the direction of people who are emphasizing these names. And so most scholars today would talk about the Pentateuch in terms of D, the Deuteronomist, P, the priestly source, and then non P, everything else that is in the five books of Moses. But they also speak about D and P extending into Joshua and Judges and the historical books. That's when these were probably brought together as well, again from much earlier sources and even poetry and things like that.

John Dehlin [00:35:00] And so are there scroll, like a D scroll that, like, is sitting in a museum somewhere, or a peace scroll that's sitting in a museum somewhere?

Dan McClellan [00:35:09] We've not found anything like that these are hypothetical reconstructions of the earliest phases of these texts. The farthest back we can go from most of these texts is the Dead Sea Scrolls, which the earliest ones date to around 250 BCE. So this is still centuries after everything was likely compiled. However, there is one text that goes back earlier than that, and it is a very small text. But in the 60s, there was two little silver scrolls that were discovered in Kataphenom in the north end of the. The valley of Hinnom. In a burial, somebody was buried with two little tightly rolled silver scrolls. And they unrolled them and etched into them in very old Hebrew was a version of the priestly benediction from the Book of Numbers, which says, may Adonai's face be made to shine upon you. And it's invoking blessings from God. And this would be. This dates to around 600 BCE. And so this is a version of this passage from Numbers that may actually predate the Book of Numbers, but it seems to have been used as a little apotropaic amulet, something that would ward off evil from the possessor. And so that's the earliest thing we've ever found from any portion of the Pentateuch or any part of the body Bible at all. Being used outside of the context of the biblical text, but being used as an apotropaic amulet, which I think is fascinating.

John Dehlin [00:36:45] So the Dead Sea Scrolls were found

Dan McClellan [00:36:47] when Dead Sea Scrolls were the earliest ones were discovered, I think in 1947.

John Dehlin [00:36:53] 1947, yeah. And they're dated to have been produced around when.

Dan McClellan [00:36:58] Between around 250 BCE and about 68 CE. So for a little over 300 years, these texts were being composed and stored.

John Dehlin [00:37:09] So the earliest main source texts that we've discovered that are likely inspirations for the Old Testament that we have now are dated to around 250 BCE.

Dan McClellan [00:37:29] Those would be the earliest ones. But even those are just small fragments. These are manuscripts that were written, rolled up, stuffed in jars, buried for thousands of years. We dug them up, and many of them are incredibly fragmentary, tiny little fragments of text, and some of them are longer. And then we have the Great Isaiah scroll, which I think is dated to around the middle of the first century bce, Contains every single verse of Isaiah. Really long scroll. When you. When you unroll it all, that's when

John Dehlin [00:37:58] it would have been written.

Dan McClellan [00:38:00] That's when the manuscript would have been copied down. But the text of Isaiah comes from

Isaiah, the Israelite Story, and Borrowed Myths

John Dehlin [00:38:06] much earlier, maybe from oral tradition passed down.

Dan McClellan [00:38:12] Yeah, Isaiah, the historical Isaiah. Many scholars believe the text goes Back to an historical Isaiah probably would have been preaching orally and it would have been written down by someone else. But there are also indications that the book of Isaiah has gone through its own, own phases of transmission and compilation and things like that. So some of these texts come from some layers of Isaiah come from much later, but some of it likely comes from Isaiah's actual preaching.

John Dehlin [00:38:44] And really quickly, we talked about this briefly in part one, but there's this idea that Adam and Eve were literal people. They had kids, goes to Noah, Noah and his family were literal people. There was a global flood. They all died. All the people died except for Noah and his family. And then from Noah and his family come a literal Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who becomes Israel, who has 12 kids. And then there's 12 tribes. Like, what are the data that all those people really existed and that all that really happened? And if we want to think of the Charlton Heston version of the Israeli Jewish people and like that actually Yul Brenner and the Pharaoh and all that really happening, like, what's the first evidence we have of a Jewish people? And like, how much credence do we give to the Hollywood or even CES versions of those, the really central figures, again, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, the 12 tribes, how much of that can we have a sense of security are actually real people that really existed based on evidence.

Dan McClellan [00:40:08] So as we go back in time to those time periods, we have less and less data, so it becomes harder and harder to reconstruct that stuff, and we have to assume more based on less. And that's when we bring in our understanding of human nature and how history tends to play out, to try to fill in the gaps, the data that we have and our understanding of human nature and also where these languages come from, where these ethnicities come from, the geography of this time period, the history of the peoples around Israel, the data are not very supportive of the stories of the patriarchs and certainly not the. The primeval history. And so those would seem like legends that were created in order to do a couple of things. One of the things is provide some ideologies. So they are kind of like Aesop in the sense that they're saying, here's how we ended up with. Here's how things ended up the way they are. And so you have. It talks about, in, I think it's Genesis 4, it talks about certain members of this lineage being the ones who play the harp, and these are the ones who work in all manner of metal, and these are the ones who live in tents. And so it's kind of saying this is the origin of circumstances as we see them now. And the now is many, many centuries down the road. And. And one of the other things that they're trying to do is create what scholars refer to as a charter myth or a foundation myth. And this is basically, here's where our people come from. And those stories get told in ways that, again, serve our needs and our interests now. So when people talk about the founding of the U.S. they talk about the people who are involved in the founding as if they were 21st century evangelical Christians. You know, we have the famous painting of George Washington kneeling, hands clasped in prayer, something that would not be out of. Out of context in any 21st century home. That was not how George Washington thought about any of this. He was a deist who spoke kind of in very abstract terms about Providence. And so we tell these stories in ways that inform our experiences now and give meaning and significance to our experiences now, and in ways that allow us to feel connected to them so that we can feel like we're part of the same story, we're part of the same narrative. We share an identity. And so the same things are going on in the production of these stories about the tribes of Israel. And we have, outside of the primeval history, which is Genesis 1:11, we have three main, main cycles in Genesis. We have the Abraham cycle, the Isaac cycle, and the Jacob cycle. The Isaac cycle is tiny. The Jacob cycle is the main one. Like even Abraham is secondary to Jacob in terms of just screen time. And so scholars would suggest that that is the foundation of this story is Jacob. And the other things are being brought in secondarily to supplement and to add to the story that begins with Jacob. And that makes sense, since Jacob's name goes to Israel and that's the name of the nation. It's not Abraham. That's the name of the nation. It's not Isaac. It's Jacob's new name, Israel. And so that seems to be the focus of what's going on in the patriarchal narratives. And the other stuff is brought in to kind of create this one lineage. And part of that is about land. It's about saying, well, this guy was an ancestor of ours. And so all that land that he owned over there, turns out that's our land as well. So this is all our land. And, you know, the. The way that Americans tell stories about our founding frequently is about us being able to say, well, we own this. So it's serving those rhetorical functions In a lot of ways. And yeah, his historicity takes a backseat to how these stories are going to function for the people who are consuming them, the earliest audiences of these texts.

John Dehlin [00:44:33] And if I can just restate what I heard, and I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but what I think I just heard you say is that from Adam and Eve to Noah, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, the 12 tribes, it would, based on the data, it would be more accurate to think of all those figures more like Aesop's fables or as legend, like Paul Bunyan, not to be disrespectful, but as myth or legend than us having any reason to believe that they were actual historical figures based on the

Dan McClellan [00:45:12] data that we have available, based on our understanding of the timelines in this. Because even the Hebrew language itself probably didn't exist and certainly was not written down until probably around 1000 BCE. Now, we do have an earlier witness to the notion that there was a people named Israel around 1208 BCE. We have this stele in Egypt, the Merneptah stele, where this really, really old Pharaoh has this 10 foot tall stele or standing stone taken from an earlier pharaoh. He turns it over and he has his own story inscribed on this, telling about everything that he did. And most of this is focused on his conquests, his defeat of the Libyans to the west of Egypt, but he also mentions some conquests to the east in the land that is now known as Israel, Palestine. And he makes this reference to, to a people that in Egyptian is spelled out Israel, but they didn't have an L consonant, so they used the R to stand in for the L consonant. So scholars are in pretty much unilateral agreement. This is a reference to the name Israel, which we actually find in other, as a personal name in even earlier records in Akkadian and in Ugaritic. But here it says Israel is their seed is not. And the seed there is a reference to grain. So saying we have completely destroyed their infrastructure. And there's what's called a determinative on the name, which classifies how the name is functioning. And the determinative is a people determinative. So it's not a city state, it's not a nation, it's not a kingdom, it's a people, which some people think apologists would say this is a reference to the wandering tribes of Israel who have not yet settled in, in Israel. But scholars would say this is probably like some kind of tribal confederacy or something like that, where these are not. This is not a kingdom. This is some kind of group that has not yet identified as a, as a nation or a city state or anything like that. So around 1200 BCE, there was a group of people that went by the name Israel. We are pretty sure about that. We don't have any other records of this nation apart from what we think we can identify from the material remains, which is a complex process of uncovering a city, trying to distinguish the different layers and saying, oh, in this time period, this was Israel. That's a phenomenally complex thing to do. So once we get down into the middle of the 9th century, we have three inscriptions that pop up. One of them is that Meisha inscription that I talked about. And that's the earliest reference to the name of God, the Tetragrammaton Adonai, anywhere in history. So we can't talk about evidence for Adonai as the patron deity of Israel until around 850 BCE. We also have the, the black, excuse me, the black obelisk of Shalmaneser iii, which is something that comes from Mesopotamia, where it's talking about King Jehu, which is one of the Israelite kings. And there's actually a depiction of King Jehu bowing before Shalmaneser iii. And then we have the Tel Dan Stele, which is an inscription that mentions a couple of Israelite kings that have been defeated by this Aramean king named Hazael. But it also mentions a Judahite king who is of the House of David. And so we have this phrase, House of David in there, which it's coming from well after a historical David would have lived. But it seems to suggest that this ruler was a part of this dynasty that was known as the House of David. So that could be interpreted as evidence that there was a dynasty that was begun by a man named David. So by the time we get to around 850 BCE, we're starting to see evidence of the kings and the people that we know from Samuel, Kings and Chronicles popping up. And we have some evidence that the names of these kings, as they're preserved in those historical books is accurate, that their chronological relationship to each other and so who was the father of who was the father of who is accurate. And that some of the kind of geopolitical conflicts that they engaged in, as described in the Book of Kings, are also accurate. And so it's around that time period that we begin to be able to gain some purchase on what's going on. And we begin to say in broad strokes, the text is accurate once we get to around 850 BCE and perhaps there was a historical David. And I think most critical scholars would say there was probably a historical David who was a mercenary who tried to usurp the throne and maybe went south and started his own little dynasty in Jerusalem. So that's when things start to align with the data that we have discovered.

John Dehlin [00:50:38] In addition to a lack of data for the existence of early Old Testament prophets and peoples, is it also fair to say that there are myths and stories from other cultures and civilizations that are most likely imported and woven into, you know, those. Those early Old Testament books?

Dan McClellan [00:51:08] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:51:09] So that challenges the. Their literal historicity.

Dan McClellan [00:51:13] Yeah, there are absolutely stories like that that are a part of this. So historical data. And I mentioned this in part one. I think, for instance, the story of Goliath, this is something that is an elaboration and innovation on an earlier tradition that attributed the killing of some giant named Goliath to a man named Elhanan. But we have some even older stories being incorporated in, for instance, Isaiah 27:1. We have this kind of mythological reference to. In that day, Adonai will punish Leviathan, says the wriggling serpent. The coiling serpent who. The dragon who lives in the sea. And this is fascinating in light of the discovery of the Ugaritic texts, which started in 1929. These are Canaanite texts from a city state called Ugarit that was destroyed around 1200 BCE there's what's known as the Baal cycle. And Baal is the northwest Semitic storm deity. And in this Baal cycle, which dates to around 1300 to 1200 BCE, which is 4 to 500 years before Isaiah 27 was written, we have Baal fighting with a monster called Lotah, which is the Ugaritic cognate or equivalent to the name Leviathan. And it talks about BAAL defeating the wriggling serpent Loton, the coiling serpent, the dragon with seven heads. And so this is almost. And the. The words for wriggling serpent and coiling serpent and then the name Lotan are all the same between Ugaritic and Hebrew, which indicates Isaiah is basically quoting from a tradition that was in circulation 500 years earlier. Only the good guy is not Adonai. The good guy is baal, who's the bad guy, according to Isaiah. And we have a handful of other examples of people appropriating earlier myths that are attributed to a storm deity named Baal. For instance, Psalm 29 talks about Adonai, and it talks about seven different ways that Adonai's voice is manifested. And all of them have to do with violent weather, with thunder, with lightning, with earthquakes, things like that. And there are three places that are mentioned in the psalm, and all of those places are further north than Israel. They're actually in the area of Phoenicia. And the main storm deity there was baal. And so most scholars would say this seems like a hymn that was originally attributed to baal, where it may have been as simple as just scratching out BAAL and writing in Adonai. They may have reformulated it a little bit. But at least the place names, the cities that they're talking about are not associated with Adonai. They're associated with BAAL further north. And there are other examples of this. There are hymns to the sun from Egypt that have probably been appropriated and worked into Psalm 104. And the online class that I'm going to be doing in September, I talk about accounts of creation from the Bible. And there are. There's a good case to make that one of the earliest accounts of creation has to do with this battle between the forces of order and the forces of chaos, where this chaos monster is defeated by the main deity, and that facilitates bringing order to unformed matter and the creation of the heavens and the earth. And we see this in Babylon, in the Enuma Elish. We see hints of it in other Canaanite literature, and we see it scattered around Isaiah, around Job, around the Psalms, in these references to Leviathan and things like that. So there are a number of indications that earlier myths and epics and exploits are being borrowed and being worked into these texts to serve the interests of Israelite authorities.

John Dehlin [00:55:22] And we can't even say the creation narrative because, as you told us in the last episode, there's at least two contradictory creation narratives woven into Genesis, right?

Dan McClellan [00:55:34] Yeah, just Genesis 1, 2 and 3 constitute two very different creation accounts that

John Dehlin [00:55:40] likely borrow from previous traditions.

Dan McClellan [00:55:43] I think the.

John Dehlin [00:55:44] Or at least one would.

Dan McClellan [00:55:45] Yeah. So Genesis 2 and 3, the earlier account, at least the creation account in Genesis 2, is probably coming from an earlier account. And then Genesis 1 is actually probably a reworking of the account that we find scattered around elsewhere. This idea of order and chaos. But it's a much more kind of abstract, transcendent concept. Where in Babylon, the chaos monster's name is Tiamat, and Tiamat is the chaotic waters of the seas, which were always dangerous. Anciently, people were killed by storms and seas all the time. And so in Genesis 1, you have this word in Hebrew, tehom, which means depths or the abyss. And that is cognate with the name of this deity, Tiamat. Only it seems like it's being reworked. So rather than doing battle, God is just commanding the inert depths. And so God has complete sovereignty over the chaotic waters of the sea. Rather than this earlier version where it's a monster that has to be defeated in battle. But you still see the other version elsewhere where Adonai is going to defeat Leviathan, or the idea that Leviathan is Adonai's plaything and they come home from work and toss the ball around in the backyard with Leviathan because it's their pet. And so the. The chaos monster is being domesticated in a variety of different ways throughout the text.

John Dehlin [00:57:19] And just really quickly, the Global Flood and the Tower of Babel, aren't those also potentially borrowing myths from other prior traditions?

Dan McClellan [00:57:31] Yeah, the flood comes much earlier. Starts in Sumerian tradition. The Sumerian king lists have reference to this flood. And then in later, later Akkadian tellings of the story, the flood becomes a central event in Atrahasis and in Enuma Elish and or, excuse me, in Gilgamesh. And then so that's getting reworked. But things like the Tower of Babel, I'm not positive that that pre existed the development of the tradition by Israelite writers in probably the 7th century BCE, but it seems to be based on things that were going on in the 7th century BCE. Whether or not it's a borrowing, I don't know that we have enough data to know for sure.

John Dehlin [00:58:15] And just to kind of like connect this to Boots on the Ground, Christianity and or Mormonism, at least within the Mormon tradition, this is very significant because whether it's Mormon theology that Adam was a literal person who was named Michael and who helped God create the Earth, Earth, or Adam and Eve were literally our first parents of the human race. The Tower of Babel is important because literally Book of Mormon characters come from a literal Tower of Babel. Or the fact that Mormons do patriarchal blessings, where our lineage is declared, tying back to the literal 12 tribes of Israel. Like all of that literality that comes out of Mormon theology and doctrine and practice, including Mormon scripture, the Book of Mormon, not to mention the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham. Right. They're all assuming a literality that what I'm hearing you say is something that is highly questionable and likely not true.

Dan McClellan [00:59:30] It's certainly not supported by the data that we have. And there are obviously many ways that our reconstructions of the past based on the Available data are not going to line up with how things actually happened anciently. But the odds that it's all going to fall into place exactly as tradition dictates are phenomenally low. And so, yeah, the defaults, defaulting to assuming the literalness of every last word of the Scripture is something that serves more conservative approaches to religiosity and are things that I think as a faith matures and as a faith grapples with these things, they tend to move further away from.

John Dehlin [01:00:17] And this is why, when you began by talking about inerrancy. So like an evangelical view that the Bible is literal and perfect, or the Mormon view, which was informed by Joseph Smith, it's safe to say Joseph Smith believed in a very literal Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Like, there's a literality to both Joseph Smith, Mormon tradition and evangelical Christianity that becomes severely challenged by the work you've studied, which makes sense as to why someone like a David Wright would be excommunicated or a David Bacavoy would not be allowed to even attend. Because this understanding of the Bible, already we've just gotten to the who. We've just started to try to cover the who, not the other five that you've outlined. And already it's starting to challenge my orthodox Mormon upbringing. Right?

Dan McClellan [01:01:15] Yeah, yeah, I think we're kind of doing the who and the when at the same time. But, yeah, most of the folks who are engaging in this, are engaging it, trying to do the best they can with the data that they have. The problem is, as we get more data, we have a better understanding of the past. However, the past is sacred for a lot of folks, and passing down that sacred heritage is an important part of maintaining that sense of community and that connection and that sense of a shared identity and a shared story with the people who have come before. And so a conflict arises between our communities today and the data, because our relationship with the people of the past is so important. But at the same time, there comes a point when the data becomes inarguable. And I think that's one of the biggest conflicts within evangelical Christianity, within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints today that is creating a lot of the cognitive dissonance that's resulting in problems is how do we maintain this tradition, this heritage, and how do we maintain this sense of ideological continuity with the past in light of all of the new data that are coming up? And that's a big challenge. And I don't have easy answers to that, but I think there are a lot of examples of folks who have found ways to incorporate the data into their understanding of their past. For instance, Judaism, there are very conservative Jewish people all around the world. But at the same time, there are a lot of Jewish folks who don't look at the Bible as this inerrant verbatim history, but look at it as an invitation to grapple with ideas. And so the book of Genesis is not something you are required to believe is historical. It's something that is bringing up issues for you to contemplate so that you can become a better person and so that you can have a better understanding or a more enriching, deeper relationship with God. And so I think the idea of, you know, Latter Day Saints are familiar with this phrase, wrestle before God.

John Dehlin [01:03:41] Jacob, Right. Wrestling with the angel, metaphorically.

Dan McClellan [01:03:44] Well, yeah, Jacob wrestled with the angel in Genesis. But the Book of Enos, we have this, the wrestle before God. And I think Latter Day Saints in particular, but evangelical Christians as well, would do well to start to deploy the text as an invitation to wrestle before God rather than some kind of verbatim constitution that exists only to draw boundaries around what we're allowed to believe, which I think is a product of the Reformation and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Enlightenment. We've kind of drawn very clear lines in the sand, and the sand's starting to erode, and we don't really have anywhere to go as long as we try to maintain the. Those lines.

John Dehlin [01:04:37] Yeah, like this. This was. This became a. An interesting, impactful point in my mind when I heard it described as sort of this reality that there are faithful, committed Jewish rabbis who don't necessarily believe that Moses, the founder of their faith, was an actual historical figure. And yet they're faithful, committed Jewish rabbis, right?

Dan McClellan [01:05:06] Yeah, absolutely. In fact, there are rabbis who are atheists. I have friends who are professors, who are Jewish, who are. They light the candles and they say the prayers on Friday night. They raise their kids to bar mitzvah. The bar mitzvah. They're reading Talmud, they're teaching them the Mishnah, they're doing all that stuff. Stuff. And 100% atheist do not believe in God. And I think that's an interesting betrayal of our misunderstanding of just the concept of religion. Because of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, we tend to think of religion as a systematization or a formalization of a set of truth propositions. And that's really a reformer's position. That's a Protestant concept of religion that runs up against itself all the time. Because in the actual living of a religion, it becomes far, far more than that. And it has so much to do with identity and community and meaning and significance and all of these other things that go beyond just a set of truth propositions. And so I think there are people out there, and I think Judaism is one of those faiths that has matured to the degree that we have plenty of people who live it that way. But it is more about community and identity and meaning and less about a bag of truth propositions that are either 100% true or 100% false. I think that is a phenomenally rickety foundation to build upon. And that's one of the reasons we're seeing so many faith crises these days within evangelicalism, within. Within the Latter Day Saint tradition, within other conservative Christian traditions, is because their understanding of what religion is supposed to be, what Christianity is supposed to be, is really the product of a struggle for power. And they're still using the tools of that struggle for power to build something that is not. That goes well beyond a simple struggle for power.

John Dehlin [01:07:17] Yeah. And similarly to the Jewish tradition, if the Book of Mormon literally depends on, you know, Jews leaving Jerusalem, 600 BC, 12 Tribes of Israel discussed in depth in Jacob in the Book of Mormon, Tower of Babel, characters coming over in the early Book of Mormon peoples, the book of Abraham being written by the hand of Abraham, the book of Moses being written, I don't know, by the hand of Moses or whoever it was that wrote the like. If Mormonism is also built upon the literality of these historical figures, once you start pulling that thread, just like with Judaism, it can become very perilous to an orthodox Mormon faith, which is why I think up until 2023, the brethren have been really super nervous about biblical studies. Right, right. Which is also why you're so. Why progressive Mormons are so excited about Dan McClellan, basically. Right.

Academic Biblical Scholarship in the LDS Church

Dan McClellan [01:08:22] Well, I think there are, in my experience, there are folks in church leadership who have embraced to some degree the academic study of the Bible. But yeah, it's obviously something that challenges orthodox Mormonism in a lot of different ways. And some people think that that is the catalyst for the next big faith crisis. Church history is considered by many people to have. It's a bit cyclical, but church history has caused a lot of faith crises. And the church, it seems to me, responded to that by producing more critical historical scholarship of their own, becoming more transparent in that regard. I think the Joseph Smith papers are a wonderful example of that. And many of my friends see on the horizon a similar catalyst in the Failure to adequately engage with and to take seriously enough critical scholarship regarding the Bible and the Scriptures.

John Dehlin [01:09:29] Because there's no gospel topics essays about biblical criticism. Right.

Dan McClellan [01:09:34] I think there are ways that some of the gospel topic essays overlap with that, but there's not like who wrote

John Dehlin [01:09:39] the Old Testament gospel topics essay. Right.

Dan McClellan [01:09:42] I don't know. I don't think there is. I don't think there is.

John Dehlin [01:09:46] Who really wrote the Bible?

Dan McClellan [01:09:47] Yeah, Maybe one day there will be.

John Dehlin [01:09:50] But you're saying there probably should be, right?

Dan McClellan [01:09:53] Oh, I would love.

John Dehlin [01:09:54] There should be a gospel topics essay written by Ghost. Written by Dan McClelland. Right. Because the gospel topics essays are ghostwritten. There should be a gospel topics Mormon Church gospel topics essay Ghostwritten by Dan McClelland that basically says who really wrote the Bible.

Dan McClellan [01:10:08] I don't know. I think my. If I were tapped to write something like that, I think people would immediately know it was me because they would see things like structuring power and rhetorical prophylaxis for right wing authoritarian identity politics. And I have a lot of things that I say over and over again

John Dehlin [01:10:24] would also say somewhere in there. All right, let's see.

Dan McClellan [01:10:26] It would say that somewhere would immediately give me away.

John Dehlin [01:10:29] Yeah.

Dan McClellan [01:10:30] So they know much better than to. Than to have me do something like that.

John Dehlin [01:10:35] All right, well, we're an hour in and we covered the who and a little bit of the when.

Dan McClellan [01:10:39] Is that. Right.

John Dehlin [01:10:41] And that's probably more my fault than yours. But you also thought we'd have a freeform discussion.

Dan McClellan [01:10:46] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:47] And I do think we've covered important conceptual things.

Dan McClellan [01:10:49] Yeah. But if the what is, I think, a difficult thing to think about.

John Dehlin [01:10:56] So we're moving from who to what.

Dan McClellan [01:10:57] Right. Yeah, let's do that. If that's. Well, actually, I didn't cover any of the New Testament and that's actually an interesting issue.

Authorship of the New Testament Gospels

John Dehlin [01:11:04] The who of the New Testament.

Dan McClellan [01:11:05] The who of the New Testament. Yeah. These were so the four gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were. The data indicate they circulated anonymously for about 100 years before authorship was assigned to them.

John Dehlin [01:11:24] Sorry.

Dan McClellan [01:11:25] As scrolls, as codices. So more like books.

John Dehlin [01:11:30] Okay.

Dan McClellan [01:11:31] And the. Everything points in the direction of the authorship that was ultimately assigned to them, being traditional and serving particular interests. The. Excuse me. The four most important disciples of Jesus were Peter, James, John, and Paul. And James died before any of the gospels were written. So we can't attribute authorship to James. Peter had another gospel attributed to them, a kind of apocryphal gospel. And so rather than try to compete with that, we have Mark, who was rumored to be the interpreter for Peter. Now we have the apostle John has a gospel that was attributed to them. And then who was Paul's traveling companion? Because Paul didn't leave a gospel. Paul wrote a bunch of letters, but no gospel. Well, Luke was Paul's traveling companion. And then the Matthew kind of takes the place of James. Matthew's gospel identifies the tax collector who is called to be one of Jesus's disciples as Matthew. The other gospels call him Levi. And so it became natural to associate that gospel with Matthew. And so these are traditional assignments of authorship that. That don't seem to be based on anything other than tradition. And how they kind of conveniently tag all the bases for the four main disciples, the four main followers of Jesus.

John Dehlin [01:13:20] And just to see if I'm understanding, and this is the way that I've absorbed my superficial understanding and limited study, what I think I just heard you say, and tell me if this is a fair characterization. We have this idea that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were walking around with Jesus and that while they were watching Jesus do his thing, they were like keeping a journal. And that the scroll of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have been somehow left when they died, and that would have been how the gospels would have been assembled. And what I'm hearing you say is that, number one, and I think you said this in the previous episode, Matthew didn't write Matthew, Mark didn't write Mark, Luke didn't write Luke, John didn't write John. And is it fair to say that the stories in the Gospels were likely handed down across multiple generations as oral traditions that then two or three or more generations later finally got written down by either a single person or by multiple people. Am I getting any of that right?

Dan McClellan [01:14:24] Yeah, I think that's in broad outlines, accurate. The Gospel seemed to be transmitted anonymously initially. Our earliest references to the gospels assign no authorship. They refer to them broadly as the memoirs of the apostles or something like that. And I think it is. You bring up an interesting point that they probably initially were transmitted orally in the earliest phases of Christianity, the scriptures, the written word was limited to the Jewish scriptures, and Jesus words were superior to that because they were not written down. They were Jesus words. These were the actual words themselves spoken by Jesus. And you see this reflected in this idea. You have heard it said, moses commanded this, but I say unto you. And so the authority of the Christian gospel was to be found not in a text, excuse me, but in Jesus words. And we think today of words and text being the same thing. We've kind of made them the same thing. But anciently, a text was a different form of the message. The message was something that was distinct from the text that bore the message. And here in the Christian Gospel, the message is the most important part. The text is just kind of dead letters, so to speak. And so the earliest generations of followers of Jesus were people who heard him speak, or heard from people who heard him speak, or sat on the lap of their grandmother who heard from someone who heard him speak. Once you get beyond that, where you don't have anyone who has a plausible claim to first, second or third hand knowledge of these things, suddenly the text becomes more valuable because now we've got a way to materialize that text. And so the earliest Christians thought Jesus was coming back too soon for there to be a need to write anything down anyway. But once it becomes clear we're a couple generations removed from Jesus, he has not returned yet, it might behoove us to write some of this stuff down. That's probably the context for the original committing of the Gospels to texts. So that's probably why we don't get any Gospels until probably around 40 years after Jesus death. So we're about two generations removed.

John Dehlin [01:16:54] And do you mean oral or written?

Dan McClellan [01:16:56] Well, the Gospels are first written about 40 years afterwards. And so we've gone a generation or two and suddenly turns out we need to write some of this stuff down. And that's when we get the Gospels. At least that's when we believe they were written. And we don't really have a good idea of how much they changed between their original composition and the earliest textual witnesses to them. But there are indications that there were a lot of changes introduced. For instance, the first two chapters of Luke are written in a Greek that is very different from the entire rest of the Gospel of Luke. And the third chapter of Luke actually begins how we would expect the Gospel to begin. In this year during the reign of this person in this place, there was this dude named John. But we already have two chapters before that written in a different style of Greek. And so some scholars would argue chapters one and two of Luke were probably composed by someone else afterwards. And it was just tagged on to the beginning of Luke. And then we also have in John this weird statement at the end, right before the end of John, it says, this is the testimony, or this disciple is the one who wrote this testimony, and we know that his testimony is true. And the first time I read that, I was like, who's we?

John Dehlin [01:18:19] Who's we? Who's We.

Dan McClellan [01:18:21] Yeah. And where. Where does the we stop and the I of John begin? And then you look elsewhere in John and you've got, like, there's a. There's the. The Last Supper. Jesus is. Finishes up a discourse and says, all right, let's get up and get out of here. And then you have three more chapters of discourse. And then the text says, so they got up and got out of there. And so it seems like that's a third person narrator. Somebody took all of this other discourse and stuck it right between, okay, let's get up and get out of here. So they got up and got out of there. And then you have other places where Jesus is in Jerusalem, gives a discourse. And then the very next verse says, so then they crossed over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. It's like, wait a minute, when did we get to Galilee? Which is a day's journey north from Jerusalem. So there are a number of indications that some of these texts have gone through additional changes and alterations between their original composition and our earliest textual witnesses to them. And a lot of people really get upset with me for saying that.

John Dehlin [01:19:32] That.

Dan McClellan [01:19:34] But we do have a lot of indication of that. And there's a great book that was published last year by Robin Faith Walsh called the Origins of Early Christian Literature that talks an awful lot about the assumption that these texts were written for and by members of faith communities, when the reality is, if you analyze them from a literary perspective, they seem to be texts written by literary professionals for consumption by the Literary Guild. In other words, these were not just members of a congregation saying, okay, we're going to write down the story of Jesus as we know it so that we have it for ourselves. These are authors, professional trained authors, writing these stories for circulation within the literate elite. And so a lot of our assumptions about who's responsible for these things and how, why they were originally written don't seem to align with the data either when it comes to the New Testament. And then, yeah, the who of the New Testament could get a lot more complex. We have Paul, who, by the way, probably did not write first and second Timothy and Titus. That was probably written decades after he was dead. He definitely didn't write Hebrews, may not have written second Thessalonians or Ephesians. And then the John of Revelation was absolutely not the John who wrote the Gospel of John. The Greek is so wildly different from the Greek of the Gospel of John, and so much less sophisticated, less educated Greek. In fact, I think the attribution of. I think the tradition of the Apostle John being the author of the Book of Revelation was first stated by Justin Martyr around 150 CE because it just says I'm John and here we go. And before that, nobody thought it was John the Apostle. They just thought John the Revelator, a totally distinct John. So, yeah, there are a lot of ways that traditional approaches to the New Testament regarding whose response responsible for it are also not in alignment with the data.

Pseudepigrapha and Anonymous Authorship

John Dehlin [01:21:49] Would it be appropriate to introduce the word pseudepigrapha to this conversation? And does that word. Will you do that? And does that word or concept apply to any of the books of Scripture in the Old or New Testament?

Dan McClellan [01:22:09] I think it's could be applicable.

John Dehlin [01:22:12] Tell us what the word means.

Dan McClellan [01:22:13] It means false writing. And it's usually used to refer to texts that are attributed to famous figures from the Jewish and Christian religious traditions that were clearly not written by them. And so things like the Pastoral epistles and perhaps second Thessalonians, I think are examples of New Testament pseudepigraph. However, the titles that we give to these texts and the way they function throughout Christian history play a role. And so I think calling them pseudepigrapha would be a way to kind of to be controversial more than it would be a way to kind of correct something that's going off course. However, there are a lot of scholars who are arguing that we need to deconstruct our entire concept of biblical and non biblical. So I wouldn't be surprised to see people referring to the Pastoral epistles as pseudepigrapha in scholarship.

John Dehlin [01:23:21] I mean, and I'm not introducing that term to be controversial. It's obvious to me why that would be perceived as such, because it's taking away some of the sacred nature of how we think about the Scripture. But as soon as you're saying John didn't write John or Matthew, Mark and Luke didn't write Matthew, Mark and Luke, the first thing that comes to my mind is pseudepigraphus somebody decades or generations later who's got all this knowledge in scrolls or oral tradition. And it's like, well, let me just sort of like do a Moroni and do some editing and put down a synthesis as if I'm the attributed author. Create a synthesis of everything that I'm pulling together in some sense, consciously so. But is that totally factually wrong?

Dan McClellan [01:24:10] Well, I would say pseudepigrapher refers to texts that claim authorship, and the Gospels don't ever claim any authorship whatsoever, really. Right. So you can't find any single syllable in any of the Gospels that identify the author other than John, just. Well, somebody who identifies as. In the first person plural, we identifies the author as the beloved disciple. And so if you can identify the beloved disciple, then you have a claim to authorship. But other than that, they are internally anonymous. They don't claim any authorship at all. And so in that sense, I don't think they would qualify as pseudepigrapha. But there's also a dimension of the use of that word pseudepigrapha that has reference to non canonicity. And so because the pastoral epistles are canon, maybe it doesn't work as well. So that. Yeah, it gets complex. But I think I have referred to the pastoral epistles as pseudepigrapha before on my channel. So it's not incorrect. It would just. I don't know, we'll see where it goes in the future.

John Dehlin [01:25:19] It's not traditional and it's a controversial way to describe it.

Dan McClellan [01:25:22] Yeah, the books, although I have no compunction with letting everybody know Paul did not write the Pastoral epistles. And in fact, even in scholarship, you refer to the pastor as the author of the pastoral epistles rather than Paul.

John Dehlin [01:25:35] Yeah, okay. And obviously we don't need to dig into this and maybe we'll talk about this next episode when we talk about faith and belief. But as soon as you, as soon as you start sort of like connecting the dots or making meaning of the fact that many of the early Old Testament characters likely didn't exist as historical figures or there's no data to support it, and that many of those early stories are likely inspired by myths of other civilizations and imported. And then you start saying, well, none of the people whose names are on the books of the New Testament actually wrote them, but they were handed down by oral tradition, it starts to really have you question the value of the books at all other than sort of like children's stories or again, like you say Aesop's fables or myths. It takes something very sacred and secularizes it. It in a way that immediately starts to take away some of the mystical or even spiritual influence or power. And I think that's again, why Mormon church leaders and ultra orthodox Jewish rabbis and evangelical pastors have wanted to just reject any of this scholarship for generations, if not millennia. Right.

Dan McClellan [01:27:03] Well, I think it complicates the traditions that circulate about the text because the text in and of itself has no real value or meaning. The value and meaning is created when you situate it within some kind of tradition and say something about what it is, what it's supposed to be, and how it informs our experiences. And so for someone who has not been raised with or conditioned to think that it's supposed to be a certain way, those data don't threaten anything at all. Which is why I think folks who are brought up within some of those traditions that don't impose the notion that, oh, Moses had to have written the Pentateuch, that's not a threat at all. It's just, okay, well, that makes sense. And then you move on with your day. So I think a lot of it has to do less with the texts themselves as with the tradition that is within which those. Those texts are circulating and what those traditions demand you understand about those texts, which is something that changes even within Mormonism. Our understanding of what is true and false and what is important and what is not has changed over time because it's a constant renegotiation. As our circumstances change, as our understanding, understandings of ourselves change, as our understandings of the world around us change, our understanding of what's important and what's meaningful and what's true and what's not change. And so it's always been negotiable, will always be negotiable.

John Dehlin [01:28:42] Okay, well, now we've covered one of the 10, which is who and a little bit of wind.

Dan McClellan [01:28:47] Yeah. So I think the what we can probably hopefully get through a little more quickly. The. Yeah, the text. And by what. I want to talk about the genre of the text and what purpose there. Well, that'll be the why. But the genre of the text, what kinds of texts they are.

John Dehlin [01:29:08] Okay.

Dan McClellan [01:29:09] And I've mentioned, and I briefly mentioned that these are in many cases are charter myths or foundation myths. They're supposed to be. This is where we came from. And they have etiologies to try to say, this is why things are the way they are. And even Genesis 3:16, where God curses Eve and says, your desire will be to your husband, and the word there probably means that you will want to dominate your husband. Your desire will be to control, but he will rule over you. Even that is an etiology for the patriarchy. That saying the patriarchy, the fact that men are in charge, is a curse that Eve brought upon herself and all of her descendants as a result of eating the fruit. And so even when it comes to how they account for gender politics, we have ideologies in these texts. So that's one of the main ways the Pentateuch is functioning. The Historical books very similarly. They're trying to account for the way that the state got to be the way it is when the texts were written. I think the prophetic books are interesting because we have some prophetic books that are kind of challenging the state and other prophetic books that are working for the state. But these are. These are innovations on the genre of prophecy. Anciently, prophecy was really about. Was primarily about the ability to discern strategic information based on the nature of the world around people. So you had prophecy, you had divinization or divination by observing the flight paths of birds, by cutting the. You had ecstaspacy, which was cutting the liver out of a sheep deep and then examining its texture and color and contours and things like that. You had all different kinds of ways to divine the future. And in the Mesopotamian literature, you have just tons and tons of textbooks and reference works saying, if this happens after this, that's unfavorable. If this happens after this, that's favorable. If the king does this, that means this is going to happen. And so prophets were really just people who are educated enough on all of those resources to be able to look at the world around them and say, ah, that means this.

John Dehlin [01:31:44] Now, not to be disparaging, but what comes to my mind is folk magic when I hear you talking about divination.

Dan McClellan [01:31:49] Yeah, there's absolutely overlap between the idea of magic, sympathetic magic, folk magic, and divination. The difference, if you want to try to paint a difference and try to compartmentalize the two, it's just which one is making use of an agency that is approved and which one is not? So really, magic is just prophecy that I don't like or priesthood that I don't like.

John Dehlin [01:32:19] It's a pejorative.

Dan McClellan [01:32:21] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:22] So, like, I mean, I'm reminded of, like, the. I guess somehow historical Mormons are okay with the Urimum Thummim thing, but a Stone of the Hat is weird folk magic. The truth is, what's the difference between. However, the spectacles in Urim and Thummim would have been used in the Stone of the Hat.

Dan McClellan [01:32:42] Well, and there's even, I think, the. I don't remember if this is in. This might be in one of the institute manuals. But I remember there's an LDS source that points out that there is an ancient Jewish tradition that the Urim and the Thummim and the stones that were on the brass breastplate of the high priest would be put inside a dark container and they would glow with messages. So kind of as a way to say, hey, here's what's going on. There's connections to what's going on with the stone in the hat. But yeah, absolutely. It's right when we do it and it's wrong when anybody else does it.

John Dehlin [01:33:20] Or it's okay if it was done a long time ago in whatever way they did it 2,000 years ago, but if you do it in a way done in the 1800s, that's somehow weird and. And occultish. Right.

Dan McClellan [01:33:33] Well. And I imagine a lot of Latter Day Saints, and particularly non Latter Day Saints, would have a field day if they found out that new apostles were chosen by rolling dice, which is exactly how the new apostle was chosen in the Book of Acts.

John Dehlin [01:33:48] Really?

Dan McClellan [01:33:48] Well, yeah, you have the Judas is gone. We need to replace Judas. So we're going to. Going to look at everybody who walked around with Jesus. We're going to pick two, and then we're going to. And it says they cast lots, which is. They rolled dice to see which one of them.

John Dehlin [01:34:07] I think of it as like drawing straws or something.

Dan McClellan [01:34:09] Yeah, yeah. It's basically a way to take some kind of randomizing event and attribute divine agency to the outcome. That's all it is. And the only difference between apostles doing that to choose the next apostle and somebody doing that to decide what horse to bet on is that one is us doing it and the other is somebody else doing it.

John Dehlin [01:34:34] And a cause we're okay with versus a cause that we may have stigmatized and said.

Dan McClellan [01:34:39] Right. It's totally arbitrary.

John Dehlin [01:34:41] Okay, yeah, interesting. Okay.

Dan McClellan [01:34:46] And so, yeah, the prophetic literature is a fascinating innovation on a broader world of divination and prophecy and things like that. And most of it was ecstatic prophecy. You went into a trance whether that was induced by ingestion of something. In the Greco Roman world, you had places where you would go. Some people believe that there were hallucinogenic gases and substances that were used to induce those states. But you even see that in the story of Saul when they say, oh, is Saul among the prophets? It's because he's writhing around naked on the ground in an ecstatic trance, which is what the prophets were into, evidently. We have some other interesting literature that's referred to as wisdom literature. And this is kind of contemplation meditation on the problem of evil and what makes a good life. And so things like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or Qohelet, the Book of Job, these are texts that are meditating on the problem of evil and on what makes a person a good person? So that's another genre of literature that we have. And I think it's important to understand the genre of a text, because genre is a way for an author to give the hearer or the reader or the viewer clues as to what they should be getting out of the text. And an easy example I always use when I'm trying to help people understand genre is I say, if you're walking in a parking lot and you find a little scrap of paper on the ground and it says on it, ground beef, cereal, garbage bags, what are you looking at? Very clearly, you're looking at a shopping list. Just by looking at the text and knowing that that's a genre, you can import a lot of information about what the text is supposed to be used for. And if you found that same scrap of paper, but it said, pound of ground beef, two eggs, teaspoon of salt, now you've got a recipe. Yeah. And so because we have kind of internalized these genres, we can import so much information just by knowing what genre that the text belongs to. So much information that is not there in the text itself. And the same is true, not to a so explicit degree, but the same is true of the text of the Bible. And so I find the book of Jonah fascinating because it is taking the prophetic genre. And the prophetic genre has specific conventions, conventions that are as clear anciently as is once upon a time is as clear to us today what kind of genre this is introducing. You had a prophet and you have the call of the prophet, and the prophet is usually reluctant, but they do it anyway. And then they are supposed to go preach some message from God to a people, whether it's their own people or another people. And Jonah is fascinating because he's the anti prophet. Every everything is turned on its head. He has the call come to him and is not just reluctant, but runs the other way. And you have a bunch of features of the text that show that Jonah is doing the opposite of what prophets are supposed to do. Isaiah goes up to the temple. You always go up to the temple because you are ascending physically and spiritually. Jonah, it says, goes down to Joppa, goes down to a ship, goes down into the side of the ship. So everything Jonah is doing is trying to put distance between himself and God. And then he jumps overboard because the storm is there and it's his fault. And he's in the belly of a fish and he gets vomited out. And the reader at this, someone who is contemporaneous with the composition of this story is going to be baffled because the charge that Jonah was given was to go preach destruction to the Ninevites. Not to say repent or else, but just to say, 40 days and y' all are done. And this was written centuries after it's supposed to have happened. It's being written after the Assyrians have decimated Israel and destroyed the people and the sacred places and the cities and everything. And they just brutalized. The Assyrians are famous, famous in history for their scorched earth campaigns where they just destroyed everything and everybody. And then whoever they didn't destroy, they took back with them. And so the Assyrians, the Ninevites in particular, were just supremely hated. So to be told to go preach destruction to the Ninevites would be a prophet's wet dream in that time period. But for some reason, Jonah is. Has absolutely no interest in doing this. And it's not until closer to the end of the story where Jonah says, fine, I'll do it. And he goes and preaches destruction. And the Ninevites know that this is not a conditional prophecy. They know that it's not do this or else. It's just this is happening. They say, well, let's repent anyway. And who knows? Maybe God will be merciful. And so they repent, and then God spares them. And that's the great reveal where Jonah says, I knew you would do this, that you would allow them to live, and I would rather die than watch them receive forgiveness. And so that's the kind of reveal of the whole story where Jonah is upset the whole time because he knows God would forgive the Ninevites, even though that was not a condition of the prophecy. But the story is told by flipping the prophetic genre entirely on its head and have Jonah doing everything, the opposite of what he's supposed to do. And there's. There's even some parody in it, too. It's a bit of a comedy because at the end, God's like, what about all this nice cattle? I can't destroy this nice cattle. So that's. I like to use that story as an illustration of how important understanding genre is to understanding what's going on in the text. Because when Latter Day Saints look at the book of Jonah, they just look at the sign of Jonah. The three days in the fish. Oh, that's a type of Jesus. Okay, close your books. Let's move on. And they overlook a phenomenally powerful lesson on forgiveness and humility. I think that really bubbles to the surface if you can understand the genre and understand what's going on with the manipulations of the genre.

Genres of the Bible and How to Read Them

John Dehlin [01:41:23] And there's multiple genres in the Bible,

Dan McClellan [01:41:25] many genres in the Bible.

John Dehlin [01:41:27] Like what I was taught as a Mormon, what I was taught to view the Bible as is literary history books. Book.

Dan McClellan [01:41:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:41:32] Right. Written by the people whose names are on the books.

Dan McClellan [01:41:35] Right.

John Dehlin [01:41:36] But when you look at like, Song of Solomon, that's clearly what poetry or even erotic erotica, some would say. Right. Or if you look at like, the. The story of Job, that guy and Satan is like, hanging out with God and they're like, making bets about. About Job's future. Yeah, that's weird, that. But something. There's something. If that's literal, God's a jerk. Right? Oh, yeah. So then what is it? Maybe it's myth or maybe it's a story. Yeah. And that even goes to this question of like. And tell me, tell me how this might relate to the. What question of the Bible. At least I've heard it said that the people that put together the Bible never ever thought of it as a history book. Thought of it as a history book last and maybe thought of it as a vehicle for moral or spiritual instruction and reflection first. Does that make sense? They would have never thought of it. I've heard it said that whoever put the Bible together would have never thought of it as first a history book.

Dan McClellan [01:42:48] So for the most part, I think that's accurate. And that's kind of how I wanted to tie up the. What question? Question was that it was overwhelmingly intended to serve purposes unrelated to just telling history. Although the historical books, Samuel, Kings and things like that, that's trying to transmit a history that helps people think about their history in a certain way. So it's intended to be understood historical. But things like Job would have sounded. They would have begun more or less once upon a time, anciently. That's how that story would have come across to ancient Israelites or in a galaxy far, far away. Because you can't really situate Job historically or geographically because they've intentionally kind of decontextualized Job to make it more of a once upon a time kind of story. And this is. This gives some people an excuse for interpreting Job as one of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible. And it's really one of the younger. It was almost certainly written during the Persian period. It's dealing with a lot of the same questions and concerns and frameworks that are being dealt with in other Persian period literature, that is wisdom literature, that is contemplating the problem of evil. So Those are invitations to wrestle with the problem of evil. Those are not attempts to narrate a verbatim history. And so, yeah, there's a saying, you don't want to interpret figuratively what they meant literally, but at the same time, you don't want to interpret literally what they meant figuratively. And it's a complex combination of the two. And some of them kind of work on both levels to some degree and reception. History is also interesting. There were some texts that were probably written originally mythologically, but very quickly became adopted as history. And then maybe other texts have incorporated the historical interpretation into them. But things like. And Psalm 82 is a good example of this. Psalm 82 begins as an attempt on the part of the author to try to, to appeal to God to resolve the problem of the exile. And it's also a way to kind of depose the divine council and universalize God's rule and say the other gods of the nations are now, you lost your jobs and God is called on to inherit all nations and basically take over the rule of all nations. Because we are in exile, we don't have access to the God who is in Israel. And this is a way to say, okay, now God can be accessed in any nation because God has now taken over rule of all the earth, has inherited all nations. In John 10, you have Jesus quoting Psalm 82. The author of John, on the other side of the Greco Roman period is not understanding Psalm 82 as it was originally written. They're understanding, they're historicizing it by understanding it as a, a reflection of the Israelites at Sinai receiving the law. The idea being upon reception of the law at Sinai, the Israelites were freed from the power of death, from the angel of destruction, therefore they are immortal, therefore they are gods. But then they sinned with the golden calf. And then you get to verses 6 and 7 of Psalm 82. I have said, you are gods, but you shall die like men, you shall fall like any prince. And so that's kind of the, the consequence of their sinning with the golden calf. So according to the Author of John 10, Psalm 82, an originally mythological text that is supposed to be asserting a reality moving forward, has now been historicized and has become a reference to the Israelites at Sinai. So it's being read in a completely different way.

John Dehlin [01:46:43] So even the authors, whoever they are, of the Bible, are misunderstanding different genres of within the text.

Dan McClellan [01:46:52] Yeah, I would say these texts, as they're in circulation over the centuries, are being used in a lot of different ways. And so sometimes you have one author referring to a text a certain way and another author referring to a text another way. And you see a similar thing with. There's a passage in Exodus 22, it's verses 29 and 30, where it talks. There's a commandment to sacrifice your firstborn child. And we have reference in Jeremiah that tries to kind of, in an effort to try to obscure that, Jeremiah talks about how on the day that I, or God within, Jeremiah says, in the day that I brought you out, I did not give you commandments concerning sacrifices and offerings, and says, I did not command you to sacrifice your children. But then you go to Ezekiel and you have Ezekiel saying, having God say, I gave you commandments that are not good in order to desolate you and show you who's boss, basically. And I made you to pass your children across the fire, which is a way to refer to child sacrifice. So we, we have two different authors interpreting this problematic passage from much earlier than both of them. And they're interpreting it in entire, entirely different ways to try to serve their own particular rhetorical goals.

John Dehlin [01:48:12] As you're describing the what of the Bible and this idea of genres and the in some sense undermining some of our understandings or perceptions or in the historicity of the Bible, a double edged sword really comes to mind. If I'm thinking about Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce Armaconki, kind of historically orthodox, literalistic Mormon church leaders, they're nervous about this discussion because they're worried that it takes away the sacred nature of the Bible and even the literality of the Bible that would then erode faith. And that's one side of the sword that I think has predominated and potentially cheapened Mormon scriptural interaction. I believe there's a second side of the sword, though, which is once you're freed up from reading the Bible as literal history and you're able to engage it as different genres of literature that allows you to engage the Bible in a more rich and potentially inspiring way that could make the Bible more impactful to your life. And so there's a double edged sword, isn't it?

Dan McClellan [01:49:40] Yeah, no, I agree entirely with you, I think.

John Dehlin [01:49:43] And it's not all downside to faith.

Dan McClellan [01:49:45] Right, right, right. And in fact, this is something I hear every now and then when I make videos where I'm talking about this kind of stuff. People will comment that the Bible is so much more interesting when you understand it that way. And not just interesting, but is so much more rich theologically and so much more relevant Socially and theologically, once you understand it on its own terms. And I think one of the problems with a lot of more conservative, traditional approaches to the text is the main concern is clear and sharp boundary lines. Because they imagine that those are going to keep people in more securely and they put the boundaries, and they put the. Keeping people in ahead of understanding the text better. Because I think if you understand the text better, the people who are in are going to be there because of how enriching and how valuable it is rather than because they feel forced into, in or because they are afraid of moving outside the boundaries. So it fuzzies up the boundaries, it makes the boundaries weaker. But I think it also makes the faith stronger for those who stay in. And you know, there will be those who go out beyond the boundaries once they loosen up. But I think that raises the question of what the priority is. Is it to enrich faith or is it to have stronger boundaries? And I would argue that, I don't know, I prefer a richer faith. I mean, I think it has enriched my own life in that way. But yeah, it's a risk reward. But I think that when you prioritize, what's this going to do for those who, who do approach it as inspired literature? I think it's going to enrich their lives and their faith. But yeah, it will cost some, some folks.

John Dehlin [01:52:00] Yeah, but the, but the risk is creating a brittle, fragile faith that isn't based on data, right?

Dan McClellan [01:52:06] Yeah. I think the folks that I see, the folks who are the quickest to abandon faith are the folks who have the most brittle foundations and the ricketiest foundations. But those people will sometimes get entrenched in their faith. But that's when their faith is not about improving their lives. Their faith is about feeling better than other people or their faith is about being the one who is engaged in the boundaries boundary maintenance. And that's one of the things I see a lot on Desnet is these are not folks who are in love with God or whose lives are enriched by faith. These are folks who are on a power trip, feel like it's their responsibility to police the boundaries of the faith. And the meaning and the fulfillment that they find is in that boundary maintenance and is in putting themselves over and above others others and acting as the faith police.

John Dehlin [01:53:07] Yeah. And that's a great modern example. And I'm not asking you to disparage past Mormon prophets, sees and revelators because I know that's dangerous and I don't even know if you do that. But when you Read Doctrines of Salvation by Joseph Fielding Smith or like Bruce R. McConkie's Seven Deadly Heresies talk, you see very much the same type of boundary maintenance happening there.

Dan McClellan [01:53:32] Yeah, I think that's something that is kind of inherent in those kinds of institutional positions. I think it takes an awful lot of discipline to try to overcome the tendency to slip into prioritizing the boundaries over and against what's going on with the folks who are in. And I would love to see us engage more in enriching the lives of those who are in, rather than in worrying so much about the boundaries.

John Dehlin [01:54:07] Beautiful. Beautiful. Is that the what Basically the genre of this question.

When the Biblical Texts Were Written

Dan McClellan [01:54:13] Yeah, so I think we did who. What. We talked a bit about when. Yeah, we talked about the when of the New Testament is the point of

John Dehlin [01:54:24] the win is just that is that pretty much everything was written way after way after we thought.

Dan McClellan [01:54:31] For the most part. I think understanding.

John Dehlin [01:54:33] And I guess that's. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but that's kind of important because a basic tenet of professional history is the closer the thing is written to the time it happened, the likely more accurate or more reliable it is from a historicity perspective. Is that one of the main points or.

Dan McClellan [01:54:53] No, I think there's a tendency towards that. But at the same time, fiction can be written contemporaneous with the things that are being claimed.

John Dehlin [01:55:01] And I've heard it said that autobiography can be the highest form of fiction.

Dan McClellan [01:55:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:08] Which is why I hope I never write an autobiography.

Dan McClellan [01:55:12] But where is an interesting one? Just because. Because this is something that a lot of us who are approaching the Bible don't take the time to try to reorient ourselves to the perspectives and the worldviews of the people who live in the places where these texts come from. Because these are texts written in ancient Southwest Asia and they have many different worldviews and conventions and things like that. There's a wonderful book called Reading Shoot. I hope that's what it's called, Reading Scripture through Western eyes. I think it may be, but it comes from a couple of evangelical scholars and it is a devotional book. But the idea is we get a lot more out of the text and we get closer to understanding what the authors are trying to say. If we can understand some ideas about that part of the world. For instance, they didn't so much prioritize individualism. It was more about communalism. And it was, you know, the honor shame. Frameworks and pressures play a large role in the kind of rhetoric that we find in the Text. And so we, when we approach the text as 21st century, late stage capitalists, English speakers, we import so many assumptions about the text that are going to distort wildly what we're seeing in the text and we're going to miss a lot of what was intended by that. And you know, there's not a pill that you can take that suddenly allows you to see through the lenses of an ancient Southwest Asian individual. But I think contemplating that and trying to understand a little better from scholars what's how that colors how we approach the text is helpful for folks. So the better people can, or the more people can be aware as they approach the text that this is something, this is a foreign text, this is foreign territory. If they can be aware of that, I think that will help them hopefully be a little more cautious of it.

John Dehlin [01:57:23] What I'm hearing you say is be aware that our own modern understanding and context deeply colors what we are taking from the text we read. And that really biases and skews our ability to understand it.

Dan McClellan [01:57:43] Absolutely.

Violence and Genocide in the Old Testament

John Dehlin [01:57:44] Okay. And then also is there a flip side to that? And I'll just tell you how I think of it. When I saw, when I read all that genocide that was apparently happening in the Old Testament, where like God is commanding his chosen prophets to tell his chosen people to kill every man, woman, child and animal that they find, and I'm speaking very loosely here, that makes the God of the Old Testament a monster. But then if you look at that which was written back then, not as what God literally said to his prophets and asked his chosen people to do, which is to commit genocide, and if you were able to look at it as whoever was writing that down, that was the way that they were making sense of the divine at the time they wrote it, or the ways that they were trying to justify their behavior to themselves and their posterity, that time based context for when it was written maybe then helps you understand that it wasn't necessarily God's will for his chosen people, but instead how these people saw themselves as chosen and how they understood their interactions with the divine, but also maybe their psychological justifications for maybe some really horrible things they were doing. Does any of that make sense?

Dan McClellan [01:59:18] Yeah, that makes sense and I think it's accurate in terms of the when this is a different world, they had different ideals. But at the same time, the when in terms of the relationship of the writing of these things to the stories they're telling. Because these, if you look at numbers, you look in Joshua where it's saying kill everyone Everything that breathes. Those texts were being written centuries after the fact. And so they are looking back on a history and trying to paint themselves as the victors and the champions. And those things never happen. So what do you mean they did not commit genocide?

John Dehlin [01:59:58] Wait, the genocide that we attribute to the Old Testament, you're saying didn't happen, is not historical.

Dan McClellan [02:00:03] Not historical.

John Dehlin [02:00:04] Wait, explain that. Because that's actually good for people. That's good for anyone who wants people to still find value in the Old Testament. Finding out that the genocide that is described in the Old Testament didn't actually happen is a good thing.

Dan McClellan [02:00:18] These are propagandistic fantasies from much later generations who are under the boot of larger states, fantasizing about a golden age when they were the ones who had the boots on. And you can see the contradictions in the text themselves. In the book of Joshua, you've got these statements. So these are all the cities where they killed every man, woman, child, every last thing that breathed, breathed. Nothing was left alive. And then three chapters later, it mentions some of those very cities and says, so there were these Canaanite cities that were still around, and they were full of Canaanites. And so even when you look at the text itself, it is entirely inconsistent, because the ones that are talking about this genocide are these propagandistic fantasies that reflect things that never happened. Oh, absolutely. There was warfare back then, and there were people doing awful, awful things. And the text is prescribing taking captives of sex slaves and things like that. And no doubt there's a degree to which that kind of stuff really happened. But the notion that the Israelites came into the territory and committed genocide to the Canaanite peoples that were there, that's total fiction. The Israelites developed from Canaanite populations, so they were there to some degree all along. But they formed into a group, probably from groups that banded together temporarily, different parts of the year, different. In response to different events, if they needed to protect their property from. For instance, maybe Phoenicians were starting to encroach on their land. And so they get all their neighbors together, and they banded together and fought them off. And at some point, this temporary confederation became a permanent confederation. And that grows into a people that call themselves Israel, which grows into the nation of Israel. And so there was no. The idea of the invasion of the land is a fiction. There are no data that support that reconstruction of Israel's conquest of the land. There are just no data that support that ever happening.

John Dehlin [02:02:45] Well, that's good news for me.

Dan McClellan [02:02:46] Yeah, I think so. I think it makes the text a lot less harmful, I think. But yeah, it's certainly propaganda that is kind of lionizing the idea of genocide, but in a way that is ahistorical and that. That is intended to just make them feel better about being dominated and probably oppressed and abused by larger groups. And this is something that happens a lot in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation in particular. The social ills that they face are never a problem of systemic structures. It's always a problem of we should be the guys on the other side. And so whether it's genocide or oppression or slavery or wealth and inequality and all these things, it's never. We need to deconstruct the systems that cause this. It is always fantasizing about being the ones who are doing the oppressing, being the ones who are doing the enslaving, being the ones who are doing the other thing. And so this, this is one of the indications that the text does not transcend society. It's not so transcendent as to say these frameworks that you. Social structures that you have in place are the cause of these problems. And so dismantle the structures and the problems will go away. It is always shaking your fist at the bad guy and fantasizing about being on the other side of the equation in some sense.

John Dehlin [02:04:20] Sometimes scriptures reflect. Reflect the worst of our human nature attributed to God's commandments or will. Right?

Dan McClellan [02:04:31] Yeah. I think there's a significant degree to which we project onto God the things our own hopes and desires, and frequently the problems with our perspectives and hopes and desires go with it. And so we see problematic features being attributed to God, being projected onto God. And I want to also make clear that I don't accept the dichotomy of the evil God of the Old Testament and the good God of the New Testament. That dichotomy is not only profoundly anti Semitic, but it's also false because you don't have a single depiction of God in any individual book of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. You, you have numerous different depictions of God. And so you have a violent God alongside a merciful and loving God in the Hebrew Bible. And you have a merciful and loving God alongside a profoundly violent God in the New Testament. You have a God who bathes their blood or bathes their sword in the blood of their victims. And you have in the Book of Revelation, these fantasies about the birds being called to feast upon the corpses of God's enemies. And so that Dichotomy is a false and a harmful one that unfortunately I see as far too pervasive within Christianity and within Mormonism today.

John Dehlin [02:05:55] When my kids had the second coming Revelations lesson in primary or Sunday school and they came back with like a little worksheet on all the ways that people are going to die in violent ways when Jesus came comes back, like I thought, the New Testament God isn't quite the lovey God that we want to say. Yeah.

Dan McClellan [02:06:20] I think if people ask if there's any text I wish wasn't in the canon, and I would say of all the canonical texts, the one that I think has caused the most harm by far is the Book of Revelation, which was included in the canon because it helped Athanasians, Ignatius of Alexandria, structure power in his favor and in the favor of the institutional church. And so yeah, that was a big mistake.

John Dehlin [02:06:50] But it never occurred to me that that dichotomy is anti Semitic. To say that the Jews had the violent God, but we Christians have the kind loving God. It isn't until now you mention it that that does strike me as being quite anti Semitic and insulting.

Dan McClellan [02:07:09] Yeah. And it's been responsible for an awful lot of oppression and violence against Jewish folks going all the way back to the beginning of Christianity. The idea that, and you see this developing within the Gnostic tradition, the idea that the God of the Old Testament is yelt about this kind of stupid second tier deity who's like, I'm going to go create man to do all

John Dehlin [02:07:33] this stuff, who's jealous and who's vain and narcissistic.

Dan McClellan [02:07:38] Right, right. And then according to this Gnostic take on Christianity, Jesus has come to show you the way to transcend this deity and return to the pleroma, the fullness of deity, this kind of Middle Platonic idea that the flesh is corrupt and we have to overcome it. And so some of the early Gnostics wanted to just throw out the entire Hebrew Bible and only have New Testament literature. And so that's a debate that's going on in the second century. And this results in inevitably the idea that the Jewish people who follow this text that is corrupt and wicked are themselves corrupt and wicked. And so I think some of the origins of Christian anti Semitism are rooted in this idea that the Old Testament is the realm of the vindictive God. So that's highly problematic.

John Dehlin [02:08:41] Okay, so is that the where?

Dan McClellan [02:08:43] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're kind of all over the place. But who, what, when, where, why is. We talked a little bit about that, but I think the rhetorical function of these texts is important to cover because we talked about genre, which can help us understand what authors are trying to achieve. But also I think it's important to note that all the texts of the Bible were written to achieve particular rhetorical ends. And most of them have to do with structuring power, with ensuring that power is authorized by the right people and that that power is being exercised appropriately. Whether it's about trying to attribute power to priestly classes, which is something that some texts do quite explicitly. For instance, when you look at Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, these are texts that differ wildly in a lot of details. And a lot of those details come down to things like Levitical priests having more power. And so a lot of it has to do with structuring power and values in the service of whoever is wanting to be in authority or whoever is wanting to protect whoever is in authority.

John Dehlin [02:09:51] So what I'm hearing you say is that some of the motivation of the biblical writings are for a power grab.

Dan McClellan [02:09:58] I would say a lot of them are. Yeah.

Asherah, Polytheism, and the Chosen People

John Dehlin [02:10:01] Can you give us one or two examples that would be most memorable?

Dan McClellan [02:10:09] I'm trying to think of specific stories in the text. So, yeah, we have the story of the contest of Elijah with the prophets of BAAL is an interesting one because there are actually two different layers to it. And this is the story where Elijah goes out and says, challenges the prophets of Baal, I forget how. 400 prophets of Baal and has them create a sacrificial altar and sacrifice bulls. And the idea is who can call down fire from heaven, which is basically a contest about whose God is the storm deity in this region. Because BAAL is the one who is the earlier storm deity in this region. And Adonai is kind of the Jonny come lately who wants to take over as storm deity. And so the contest is who is the actual storm deity. And the prophets of BAAL are cutting themselves and chanting and jumping up and down and they're not able to do anything. And then Elijah has, you know, Adonai send down fire from heaven, lightning to light the. The sacrifice and do all of this stuff. And this is a way to say BAAL and Baal's priesthood are not wanted here, are not legitimate. You are not the. The storm deity in this region, Adonai. And therefore Adonai's priesthood has authority here.

John Dehlin [02:11:31] But it started to sound like Thor a little bit.

Dan McClellan [02:11:35] Yeah, yeah. There are some ways that you see a lot of capriciousness and jealousy and pride and things like that.

John Dehlin [02:11:45] Who's the heir to Odin. You know what I mean? Let me pull down some lightning.

Dan McClellan [02:11:51] And an interesting thing in this story is at the beginning, Elijah calls the 400 or 450. I forget exactly how many prophets of Baal, but he also calls the prophets of Asherah who then disappear from the narrative. They're mentioned in this verse.

John Dehlin [02:12:08] Is that a woman?

Dan McClellan [02:12:09] Asherah is. Yes, a goddess. And so the prophets, I don't think it uses the feminine form of prophets, but I could be wrong there. But they're mentioned as one of the groups that Elijah is challenging, but they are nowhere mentioned ever again. And I think one of the things that this is, one of the reasons for this is because this story is being retold in a period when suddenly the worship of Asherah has now become vilified and has now become outlawed. And so the editor is adding them in there to kind of represent them as another group whose legitimacy is being rejected by this story. But they can't really. They don't have the space to kind of add a whole second event where he challenges the prophets of Asherah and has them all killed as well. So it's just kind of a quick little edit that is made to this text in an effort to try to lump Asherah worship in with BAAL worship and say these two are both now illegitimate. And so there was a period when the worship of Asherah was not. Not seen as problematic. And then with Jo, around the time of Josiah, as I and other scholars argue, it now became problematic. And so the texts are. Some of the texts are being edited so that now Asherah gets lumped in and demonized and vilified alongside baal. So there. Those are some of the ways that. Or that's at least one example of a story that was written specifically to try to say these people bad, us good, we're in charge and structure power. And then we also have that secondary edition of Asherah as a way to say, oh, yeah, throw her into the mix too. She's also bad. Asherah priesthood bad. And there are just numerous different ways that this happens. And some of it's a lot more complex. Some of it's. That's one of the clearer examples from the Hebrew Bible.

John Dehlin [02:14:11] I mean, just kind of from a meta perspective, and again, very uneducated, uninformed perspective. There just seems to be this narrative in the Old Testament of monotheism, good Jehovah or whatever, good. Any other beliefs that existed prior, pagan and bad. And that is, in a sense, a power grab. It's basically saying we have the one true faith, and everybody else out there that doesn't worship our God, who happens to be singular, is literally potentially evil. Right?

Dan McClellan [02:14:47] Yeah. It's a process of trying to. There's the dawn of everything in this book that came out a little bit ago. This is anthropological discussion about inequality in society. But I don't know if they've coined the term, but they used a term that I thought was weird at first, but makes more sense the more I'm hearing it. Schismo Genesis, which is the introduction of difference. And the argument is that difference is a way to create boundaries and to curate identities. And so once a difference creeps in, that allows people to distinguish themselves from other people, that can become centered as an identity marker, and you can have a lot more focus and a lot more tension put on that difference, and that becomes the distinguishing marker of that people. And so a lot of what's going on in the Hebrew Bible is trying to identify differences and trying to distinguish themselves from others and elevate themselves above others, not necessarily just because they want to dominate and everybody else sucks, but because they're in a world where they're occupying a world where everyone is constantly fighting over resources and over power. And so you have no choice but to engage in that fight. And so the Bible is one way to engage in that fight. Even though some of the things that they are asserting is their unique idiosyncratic identity marker are things that they have simply taken from. From some of the societies that came before or some of the societies around them, even while simultaneously they say don't do the things that the societies around us do. And so it's curating those boundaries so that the people who are part of Israel can feel special about being part of Israel and so remain a part of Israel, and also so that they can protect themselves against. Against pressures from outside groups. So I don't think it's. I wouldn't say it's something that they've done maliciously or out of a lust for power so much as a need to survive. It's a way to stay alive. And particularly once you get into the Babylonian exile, once you get into the Hellenistic period, when the Ptolemies and the Seleucids are putting an awful lot of pressure on them, that's the only reason that they can survive is because they have created these boundaries and this identity. And, yeah, it's an interesting study in contrast, how some of it is the only way that they're able to survive. And other aspects of it are just Horrific ways. They're fantasizing about being the oppressors. And particularly in some of the apocalyptic literature that didn't make it into the Bible. Bible or the Book of Revelation and things like that.

John Dehlin [02:17:46] Yeah. And I also just want to shine a little bit of light in this context on the idea of a chosen people. And I'll just set it up a little bit. I heard it once said, never in the history of humankind has a people received the revelation that some other people are God's chosen. It's always the people receiving the revelation who just coincidentally, it's them that are God's chosen. But if you fast forward to modern times, if America or white people or Arabs or Iranians or Persians or whoever, if any single group were to claim in 2023 that they're God's chosen people, what's the immediate word that comes to mind as a way to describe that belief as harmful and offensive?

Dan McClellan [02:18:40] Well, ethnocentrism is, I think, the most.

John Dehlin [02:18:42] That's an academic way. What's the more common way to describe it?

Dan McClellan [02:18:46] Racist.

John Dehlin [02:18:47] Racist, right. Sexist.

Dan McClellan [02:18:48] Yeah. There are a lot of different ways the kind of compartmentalization of one group can harm others. And yeah, there's an interesting problem that is presented because. And this is really about inheriting from the past. When you start off, YHWH is the God only of Israel, and every other nation has their own God. And so the competition there is natural and inevitable. Well, Adonai is the patron deity of Israel, the only people YHWH cares about. And so we're going to go do battle with the Moabites and their deity Chemosh, or the Ammonites and their deity Milk, or the Phoenicians in their deity baal. And then you have this period where, oh, no, we've been exiled. Our God is still over there in that land that we can barely see. We have to pray in the direction of the land because we don't have any other access to God. And we come up with this solution, we are going to depose all the other gods of the nations. Adonai is going to take over rule of all the Earth. And now God is the ruler as the patron deity of all nations. And so that solved the problem of how do we sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land? How do we access our deity when we're outside of our land? But it creates a new problem. Now God is the patron deity of all the Earth. How do we maintain our position of privilege? And so now we have the problem of claiming to be God's chosen people. And that results in different ways of trying to rationalize why we should remain the chosen people. And one of the ways that most people have gone about it is by saying God's chosen people are whoever behaves the way he wants them to behave, behave the way that God has demanded. And this functions as kind of a proxy for those more racist ethnocentric ideals like, like folks who think America is the chosen land. Well, how do you rationalize that without just saying, oh, it's totally arbitrary. You've got to come up with some way, some reason for why our land is chosen and Canada is not, or Denmark is not. And yeah, once people get in the weeds of trying to rationalize that, they run into all kinds of problems and they either commit to wildly racist ideologies or they just tie themselves in rhetorical knots trying to make it sound okay.

John Dehlin [02:21:25] Yeah, but. But if you think about, like, how much the Book of Mormon loves Israelites and the Jews and like God's blood, you know, the, the Israelite Jewish blood lineage. Right to the point of, you know, Joseph Smith's, some people claiming that Joseph Smith was a descendant of Jesus who was Jewish. And not to mention the whole Lamanite narrative of Native Americans having the blood of Israelites. And again, all of it being around this context of God's chosen people. If you think about all the civilizations that existed, you mentioned ones just surrounding the Israelites, but there are Chinese and there were Africans and that existed long before. Not to mention the actual, you know, Native American tribes that really weren't descendants of Israelites that developed their own languages. Like a lot of really awesome groups of people that if you take the Old Testament narrative to be literal and the Book of Mormon narrative to be literal, it's this super racist narrative of just this little tribe of Jews and Israelites are God's chosen and everybody else is inferior and not chosen in God's eyes. It's actually a really heinous narrative if you take it literally, in my view.

Dan McClellan [02:22:47] Yeah. And I think the Book of Mormon is actually trying to resolve it, even though they're adopting this racist position associated with 19th century ideas about skin color. You also have this idea that the Lamanites can become the more righteous and that the Nephites can become the less righteous. And so in a way, it's kind of appealing to this rationalization of the ones who follow God are the chosen ones, even while they're using this idea that God has cursed or the mark of the curse is the skin of blackness. And so I think the Book of Mormon is trying to figure out how to do that in a better way. And then in the New Testament, you have the idea that with Peter's vision in Acts, call thou not unclean what I have rendered clean or made clean. The idea that the Gospel is for all nations, not just the lost of the house of Israel, as it says in Matthew. And a lot of scholars would say

John Dehlin [02:23:57] the

Dan McClellan [02:23:59] ministering to the Jewish people was not really that successful. And so they had to rationalize a way that it can be okay to take the gospel to non Jewish people. And that kind of democratizes things as well. So I think communities have had to find different ways to rationalize this. But, yeah, we still have the vestiges of this kind of ethnocentric, racist idea that still rears its ugly head in lots of different ways, unfortunately. So, yeah, that's a big problem.

John Dehlin [02:24:34] I think, speaking of people in the 21st century specifically questioning Mormons and ex Mormons, I guess just to summarize, they're very quick to jump to the racism of the. The priesthood and temple ban on black Mormons in the 20th and 20. The 20th century, basically, I guess, 19th and 20th century. So there's. There's that racist thing that they highlight, and then there's just the. The notion of a one true church narrative being really exclusivist.

Dan McClellan [02:25:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:25:15] And elitist. And I guess all I'm saying is there are strains of both racism and elitism that far, far, far predate modern Mormon instantiations, that go back to the New and Old Testament as two strains of thought that are harmful and elitist and racist that go back to the very beginning and in some sense more characterize human nature than they do any particular problem with Mormonism or Christianity. Right.

Dan McClellan [02:25:50] And I think that's the tyranny of our heritage. That's the idea that we owe something to the past, even though a lot of what we inherit from the past is phenomenally harmful, but it's to just abandon it, to acknowledge its harm, to acknowledge that it was wrong, and to move past it is. I think some people, People think that causes more problems than it solves. And I would disagree. I think there are lots of things we've been. Again, everything's always going to be negotiable. And there are lots of things that we have abandoned in the past, and there will be lots more that we abandon in the future because it is. Yeah, the tyranny of our heritage. And the tyranny of tradition can only go so far.

John Dehlin [02:26:36] Yeah, we tend to only talk about tradition and heritage in positive ways. Right.

Dan McClellan [02:26:41] Yeah, unfortunately, tradition, Tradition.

John Dehlin [02:26:46] Right, yeah, yeah,

Dan McClellan [02:26:49] yeah. It's an issue and it's one we don't acknowledge an awful lot. It tends to be a kind of unspoken rule that the older things are, the better they are. And frequently it's the opposite.

John Dehlin [02:27:00] Yeah, yeah.

Dan McClellan [02:27:02] So that's. Who, what, when, where, why, the how is probably the most complex of all of these. But. But yeah, I think maybe just kind of what would be a good way to address the how,

John Dehlin [02:27:18] I mean, around how the Scriptures were put together. Is that.

How the Biblical Canon Was Formed

Dan McClellan [02:27:22] Yeah. How the Bible came together. Well, I can talk about canonization. I think that would be a good story because Dan Brown does not know what he's talking about. So the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE convened by the emperor Constantine had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the biblical canon. The closest anything ever got to even addressing the biblical canon, much less actually developing it was just a reference to a book as Scripture that was contested. And I'm trying to think if it was. Was. I think it was the Book of Esther. No, it was an apocryphal book. There was a reference to an apocryphal book. It might have been Judith. I don't. I don't remember which one. That was referred to as Scripture. And like, that was the closest anything at the Council of Nicaea ever came to the biblical canon.

John Dehlin [02:28:18] Let me ask you to do this.

Dan McClellan [02:28:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:28:20] Can you lay out really quickly the commonly taught narrative of how the Bible was put together? That's wrong. That would either be from an evangelical perspective or Catholic perspective or a Mormon perspective. Set up the straw man so that then you can knock it down. Does that make sense?

Dan McClellan [02:28:38] Yeah, I think most people probably imagine that there was just kind of the leadership of these nations and the priesthoods and the churches and everything that oversaw the composition of these texts or that these individuals who had that authority composed these texts and that these texts were kind of always seen as authoritative and inspired and they just accumulated over time. And so everything that we have was everything that we were always supposed to have and was everything that was always seen as authoritative. And one group just kind of collected it all. And as new things were added, that just lengthened the. The corpus of authoritative literature. And everything as soon as it was published was just kind of seen as inspired and authoritative literature as Scripture all the way into the New Testament, where the texts of the New Testament were being referred to as Scripture as soon as they came off the pens of the writers. And it was basically just this authoritative body of literature to which new texts were occasionally added. And then at the end of it all, there was. I don't know if people think there was the stroke of a pen or the clapping of a gavel or what, but suddenly we had our Bible and that was that. And could not be much further from the truth. Some of the texts in the Bible are arguing directly against other texts in the Bible. Some of them were kept by some communities, others were kept by other communities. Some circulated on a higher socioeconomic level, some circulated on a lower socioeconomic level. There were disputes. There were a lot of texts that were considered authoritative throughout the entire history of the composition of the Bible, only to be rejected afterwards. For instance, the Book of Enoch is heavily influential on the New Testament, and it's even quoted in the New Testament, but was rejected by early church fathers soon afterwards. And the process of canonization was not a single decision made at one point. And everybody agreed, and that was that. It was a process of trying to figure out what texts were being used by the congregations that were out there, which were considered authoritative, which were not. And it was kind of something that slowly crystallized into an understanding that we need to delineate our corpus of authoritative literature. We can't keep just going on with an unclear understanding of what these texts are. And it's in the 4th century that this crystallization starts to happen. And it's after the Council of Nicaea. And we have Eusebius of Caesarea, who is Constantine's right hand man, who is collecting.

John Dehlin [02:31:38] This is a Roman emperor, right? Constantine.

Dan McClellan [02:31:40] Constantine's the emperor of Rome, right? So he legalizes Christianity early in his reign and then is the one who convenes the Council of Nicaea. But Eusebius of Caesarea writes this church history, this grand volume of church history that's an important, important text for historians of early Christianity. But he lists some canon lists which are basically people saying, these are the texts that I'm seeing people read in in church, and these are the texts that I'm seeing people quote as authoritative. And we get to Athanasius of Alexandria, who's at the end of the 4th century, who is the first to write a canon list that is more or less how it is today. And he actually signs off on his canon list by saying the same thing that we see in Deuteronomy and Revelation. Cursed is anyone who adds anything or takes anything away from this list. And the goal Here is really to challenge the authority of. At the time, monasteries were not directly under the authority of the Catholic Church. Monasteries were kind of their own thing. And these were the hippies who were out in the desert who were reading these Gnostic texts and who were probably getting high on who knows what, but they were having a great time. And they just as Gordon B. Hinckley said about the LDS Church, they looked at the authority and waved and just did not care what was going on with the Catholic Church. And Athanasius was trying to bring them under the purview of the Catholic Church. And there were a few different ways he went about that, but one of the ways was to. To condemn the Gnostic literature as heretical and as non canonical, even though that wasn't really a concept yet. And he's the one who brings in the Book of Revelation to do it. Because the Book of Revelation is in this time period being interpreted not to condemn Rome and to condemn non Christians who are oppressing Christians. He understood it to condemn Christians who were the wrong kinds of Christians who were heretics. And so he deployed the book.

John Dehlin [02:33:53] Getting back to the boundary maintenance stuff, right?

Dan McClellan [02:33:55] Yeah. So he deployed the Book of Revelation as a way to say all y' all heretics are worshiping the beast and you're the ones who are going to find yourselves locked out when the bridegroom comes. And the Book of Revelation also represents kind of a convenient tying off to the Bible. That conclusion kind of sounds like a conclusion to the whole Bible. And so he's the first to actually include the Book of Revelation in his canon list. Everyone before him considered it either disputed or spurious, didn't have it in their canon. He changes that because it is useful for his structuring of power. And it stayed there. And it was. So his list kind of is the beginning of the formalization of the canon of the Bible as we have it today. And again, it's all about structuring power. But we have later councils that kind of vote on this and can, you know, formalize this list as the biblical canon. But initially the Apocrypha was included. And that was something that the first edition of the King James Bible included, the Apocrypha, it was part of the Protestant Bible for a long time. But Martin Luther, what he does, and that's weird.

John Dehlin [02:35:14] Cause Mormons like to think of the King James Version as the inspired version of the Bible. And yet if that's true, then the original King James Version of the Bible would be the most inspired. And yet stuff was Taken out after. Right. So it's more about which version of the King James Bible did Joseph Smith have than it is the King James Bible itself being the most inspired version of the Bible.

Dan McClellan [02:35:41] Yeah. And the version of the Bible that, that Joseph Smith used for his inspired version of the Bible, he had an 1828 edition of the Bible. And I want to say Isaac, I forget Isaac's last name, but it was an edition of the King James version published in 1828. It was based on not a British King James version, but based on an American version that was published in the 1790s. So it was slightly different from the authoritative King James Version. Now, most King James versions today aren't even a 1611. They're based on the 1769 Benjamin Blaney Oxford edition of the King James Version. And so the version that Joseph Smith had actually had updates to the text. So for instance, in the British version, when you have the indefinite article A before a word that begins with h, they add an end to it because they didn't pronounce the H in Great Britain. So help meet the word from the Garden of eden in the 1611 and then the 1769. And in our King James Version today in the the church, it says an help meet.

John Dehlin [02:36:58] Right.

Dan McClellan [02:36:59] Joseph Smith's Bible says a help meet. So his version was actually more up to date English than the version that was authoritative in Great Britain. And then the version that we use today in the church, we took a step backwards in how close to contemporary English our King James version is in 1980 when we formalized the specific Cambridge edition of the King James Version that we have now. But Martin Luther, when he translated the Bible for the first time from the original text, at least as far back as they could go with the original text in the early 16th century, he actually separated a bunch of books out. Before that time, the apocrypha was just interspersed within the Old Testament. He collected them all in their own little segment. And so it went Old Testament, Apocrypha, and then New Testament. And he took a bunch of other books and put them in an appendix and said, these aren't inspired. I don't look like these. Which included Hebrews, James, Book of Revelation and a couple of others.

John Dehlin [02:38:08] Stuff that's canonized, except that it's canonized now.

Dan McClellan [02:38:10] Oh, yeah, yeah. And so his. If you go back to the first edition of Luther's Bible, he had all that stuff in the back that didn't stay popular. He kind of was like, fine and put everything back. But initially he wanted to get rid of those books. What stuck was his compartmentalization of the Apocrypha. It became a third book. It was Old Testament Apocrypha, New Testament. And so the English translations of the Bible that followed after Martin Luther's tradition included the Apocrypha in a separate section. And so the 1611, the 1769 Joseph Smith, 1828, they had the Apocrypha in a separate section. In the 19th century, the. The British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society were publishing Bibles to try to distribute them. The American Bible Society had a goal of a Bible on every. I forget exactly how it was phrased, but basically in every home in America. And I think the most they ever distributed in a single year was like 500,000 copies of the Bible, which is huge. And their preferred translation was the King James Version. And that became the version of the Bible that was used to teach children English in public schools as well. So that's what kind of embedded King James English in the Americas. However, in an effort to reduce printing costs and because of debates that were going on about the Apocrypha, at one point they started publishing Bibles with or without the Apocrypha. And the Bibles without the Apocrypha became far more popular. And so Protestant presses just stopped publishing the Apocrypha. I think by the end of the 19th century, it was more common for Protestant Bibles to omit the Apocrypha than to include it. And so just kind of arbitrarily, the Apocrypha just got removed from the Protestant Bible. And so today, and you know, we have the Revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants where Joseph Smith says, ask God if he should translate the Apocrypha. And it says there are many good things, but there are also many changes to the text. So it's not necessary to translate the Apocrypha. So that is not a part of Latter Day Saints scripture today, even though in Joseph Smith's day it was.

The Apocrypha and the King James Bible

John Dehlin [02:40:22] And in your view, are there good things in the Apocrypha that you're kind of bummed, got removed? You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan [02:40:31] Actually, Latter Day Saints have an interesting. I think would enjoy the Apocrypha for a number of reasons. I think first and second Maccabees are just fascinating from a historical perspective. Some of the Apocrypha is kind of goofy, but in second Maccabees, there's a story of Judas Maccabeus during the war with the Greeks. Well, I think the Seleucids they come upon some of their men who've been killed in battle, and they discover that there are divine images, there's contraband on their persons. And so they gather up, they pass the hat, so to speak, and make a collection. And Judas sends the money to the temple in Jerusalem so that a sacrifice can be offered in the name of these fallen men, so that they might receive a better resurrection. Which some people think is one of the reasons that Martin Luther really didn't like the Apocrypha. Because this could be interpreted as support for purgatory, but it could also be interpreted as support for the idea of proxy temple ordinances. Is really what Judas Maccabeus is doing, is saying, we're going to offer sacrifices on behalf of these people who have died to influence their fate after their death. And that was something that was anathema for a lot of Protestants in Martin Luther's day. But I think Latter Day Saints would be interested to know that, that they are not the originators of the idea of proxy temple ordinances. It is something that goes back a couple thousand years.

John Dehlin [02:42:07] And we may get to this in a bit. But aren't there also parts of the Apocrypha that seem to affirm either a mother in heaven or more the participation of women in prophetic or apostolic positions that possibly would be great for feminists to see in the Bible, but instead are not there? Or am I getting that wrong?

Dan McClellan [02:42:36] I don't know that the Apocrypha is going to do that. But we do see things in the New Testament, actually. For instance, Romans 16:7, we have a reference to a woman who is identified as an apostle named Unya. And there's, you know, people have tried for a long time to try to argue that this either, no, that's a dude's name, or no, it's not actually identifying them as an apostle. But there are archaeological data and particularly things that have been unearthed within the last several years that have suggested that women maintained positions of leadership within the Christian Church for centuries after the composition of the New Testament, before the patriarchy. He kind of crowded them out. But there are texts in the New Testament itself and to some degree in the Apocrypha, But I don't think anything that. That stands out as particularly of particular, particular note regarding that. But I am not a scholar of the Apocrypha, so I could very well be wrong about that.

John Dehlin [02:43:39] Okay, so just generally speaking, I think it's kind of the Mormon teaching that, like, somehow God in his wisdom inspired all the people who produced The King James Bible. And that's the version of the Bible that is the best and is the most inspired and is the one that God wanted us all to have. I guess there's three parts to that question. And you answered this in part one of my interview with you. In your view, is it obvious that the King James Version is the best Bible we could have? And then secondly, are there important things left out of the King James Bible that we could really benefit from, in your view? And are there things included in it like revelations that you actually wish weren't included in it? It's just a way to sort of summarize this idea of how, how obviously inspired do we. Should we view the version of the Bible that we use today?

Dan McClellan [02:44:43] The King James Version, there's nothing that special about was a conservative revision of a conservative revision of a conservative revision going back to William Tyndale's New Testament and portions of his translation of the Old Testament and then Miles Coverdale's full English Bible that was based on Tyndale's work. And the, the KJV was not even particularly well received when it was initially published. It has become embedded in the foundations of our heritage because of historical accident. And so, and, and there's even scholarship that points out that a lot of words in the English language had fallen out of favor. And it wasn't till one of the Great Awakenings renewed interest in, in antiquarianism and they went to the King James Version because that was the one that happened to be there, thanks to the American Bible Society and the British Foreign Bible Society. And so words like warfare and things like that had fallen out of the English language. And then people picked the King James Version back up again and suddenly warfare made it back into the English language. So it's really historical accident that is responsible for the place of prominence of the King James Version. It's not a particularly great translation. It was not influential in its early life. It is in its resurrection in later centuries that it became more influential. And I think there's. It does include pretty much everything that was in circulation at the time. I would highly recommend that people go read the Apocrypha, which was included in the King James Version in its first and most prominent later editions. But there are also other texts from early Christianity that very easily could have made it into the canon. So the Epistle of Barnabas, the shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, these are all texts from the late first or more likely early second century CE that were considered authoritative for generations, but kind of fell out of favor by the time it came to delineate the canon of the Bible. And so there are scholars who have published early Christian literature that was considered authoritative for a while. There's New Testament apocrypha, there's New Testament pseudepigrapha, there's Old Testament apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha. I think anyone who's interested in understanding, understanding the history of these communities of faith and their scriptural heritage, including what is quoted and referred to in the New Testament, needs to read the apocrypha and whatever pseudepigrapha they can get their hands on.

John Dehlin [02:47:25] Okay, so to summarize, maybe this whole section for the orthodox Mormon or for the questioning Mormon that was taught that the King James Version of the Bible is the best and most inspired version of the Bible to ever have existed or that will ever exist, what would you say in response to that? That might be more helpful to them.

Dan McClellan [02:47:50] There are so many Bible translations from the last century that are far easier to understand, are based on better manuscripts, are based on better understandings of the language, and just get us a lot closer to trying to understand what, what the original authors were trying to communicate. Preservation of the King James Version and prioritization of the King James Version, I think serves more the interests of those folks who would like to, who benefit from that tyranny of tradition and who would like to keep things the way they always have been. And unfortunately, the tyranny of tradition still has plays a large role in how our communities curate their, their engagement with Scripture. So there are better Bibles out there.

John Dehlin [02:48:35] And also borrowing from maybe my memory of our discussion last week in terms of the LDS Church, are feelings of sacredness around early Mormon Church History, James 1:5 Other Scriptural Passages and ways that the King James Bible appears both in the Book of Mormon and in the Doctrine and Covenants and in prophetic Mormon discourse from the beginning for a century or more, you start changing the Bible that we use and the translations of the passages. Then all of a sudden that starts maybe undoing or changing prophetic utterances and historical perceptions and feelings. That starts to again mess with our sense of tradition and sacredness around how we view our past. As Mormons, am I at all capturing some of the thoughts?

Dan McClellan [02:49:43] I think that's the way we structured our understanding of the past. That is a risk. However, that is not how they viewed it in the past. Throughout most of the 19th century, they didn't really care what translation of the Bible you used, meaning LDS Church Leaders. The King James Version was not a formal, the approved translation of the Bible until the 20th century. And, you know, we have stories about Joseph Smith saying, oh, I was reading in the German, which is a lot more accurate, and things like that. So church leaders talked about, like, the article of faith that says, we believe the Bible is the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly, doesn't endorse the King James Version. It's just saying, get a good translation. And the early church leaders didn't particularly care if it was the King James Version or another version. And like I said, the version that Joseph Smith used for the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible was not the King James Version we use today. It was a more updated version of the King James Version. So it was really in the late 19th century, You have mainline Protestants moving towards the revised Version and you have scholarship going back to earlier manuscripts. And here Mormonism kind of begins to solidify its preference for the King James Version as a means of distinction, distinguishing itself from more progressive mainline Protestants and things like that. And then in the 20th century, they kind of flipped the script. And now we maintain the King James Version as a means of trying to kind of hitch our wagon to traditional evangelical ideas about conservatism. So when the Revised Standard Version came out in the 40s and the 50s, we have our leadership writing books like why the King James Version, and as far as it is translated correctly, to argue that the King James Version is inspired and that new translations of the Bible are basically communist plots. And so we don't have this idea that the King James Version was particularly inspired or important really until the middle of the 20th century, where the argument that it is, is reflected in the Book of Mormon and in the Joseph Smith translation that is for the first time appealed to as evidence of the inspiration of the King James Version. I think Mark E. Peterson actually made the case that we know the King James Version is inspired and is what was on the bronze plates, because more or less, because the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible and the Book of Mormon used that language and because that's precisely what was on. On the bronze plates or that's precisely what was on the plates that Joseph Smith translated. That means the King James Version was, you know, is a. Is a faithful reproduction of the most ancient version of the Bible. And so it's, it's a. It's an interesting argument. But yeah, we, we went from not really. It was kind of the de facto translation, but nobody really cared if it was the King James Version or another Version, version all the way to. It has to be the King James Version. And then only a couple of years ago, the handbook, the general handbook, has shifted in the guidance a little bit on scripture translations and has said that for personal or academic study, you don't have to use the King James Version, but within classrooms and the institutional church, it should still be the King James Version, at least for those members who speak English.

John Dehlin [02:53:26] And really quickly, two final questions around this point. You just made me think of the one, there's a story in the Book of Mormon, early Book of Mormon, that some dude named Laban would have had brass plates that represented all of the Old Testament written up until the point that Laban was living, which was 600 B.C.

Dan McClellan [02:53:47] i think I said bronze, but yeah, brass plates.

John Dehlin [02:53:51] Does that make sense to you, that your understanding of ancient history that around 600 BC in Jerusalem some dude named Laban would have had in his possession brass plates which would have represented the Old Testament up until 600 BC time? Does that make sense to you?

Dan McClellan [02:54:12] No, for a couple of different reasons. One is that that would represent a codex and codices were not really used for the sacred texts of Judaism until Christianity until around the first century ce. There are examples of codices that go back centuries before that, but they are largely written in other languages and parts of other societies.

John Dehlin [02:54:37] And are they written on plates in Hebrew?

Dan McClellan [02:54:40] Not Hebrew, but they're. We have like Etruscan and we have Latin and we have some other texts written on gold plates. But they would also only be a handful of pages long, and those would be show pieces. Those would be ways to. They would be prestige items and artifacts. They would not be for the purpose of record keeping. If somebody did have access to all the texts that were written back then, it would be in a collection of scrolls. And a lot of these texts were only in circulation among these elites and within the institution, the state institutions, and so private citizens would have been phenomenally unlikely to have even known about the existence of some of these texts, much less have direct access to them. It was not the kind of thing you go down to the corner store and pick up a pile of scrolls that represent everything that was known at the time. That was not how things were published back then. So no, it doesn't really fit with the way the. Those texts would have been in circulation in the end of the 7th century BCE.

John Dehlin [02:55:56] So Deutero Isaiah is often highlighted as a significant challenge to the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Just the idea of a dude named Laban in Jerusalem having brass Plates would be a similar problem, in your view?

Dan McClellan [02:56:10] Yeah, it doesn't really fit the data as. As we have it now.

John Dehlin [02:56:14] Okay, then, the final thing I just wanted to talk about to close out this portion around the King James Bible. You talked about this briefly in part one, but I want to give you a chance to mention it during the episode about the Bible, your time at LDS Church headquarters, parts of it was around translation dealings with translations of the Bible. And I got the sense that if like, like Russell M. Nelson pulled Dan McClellan into his office and said, what's a change I could make that might really help members have a better scriptural experience? I got the sense that you might give him some feedback around what Bible might be most beneficial for members to read and that maybe there wasn't support for that type of change within the church. Do you want to give any summary about your views around what might be most beneficial to member Scripture study as it relates to the Bible?

Dan McClellan [02:57:20] Yeah, I don't think I can comment too much institutionally. I know what I feel personally would behoove most members, I think, getting a good study Bible. And. And I almost always recommend the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which contains the New Revised Standard Version, which is the grandchild of the King James Version, or great grandchild of the King James Version.

John Dehlin [02:57:45] What's it called again?

Dan McClellan [02:57:46] The New Revised standard version, the NRSV. And there's an updated edition, which is NRSVue, which they're gonna have to kind of do something with that abbreviation soon. But there's also a new translation of the Hebrew Bible that came out between 2019 and 2020 by a scholar named Robert Alter that is wonderful and is full of a lot of great explanatory notes. The Jewish Publication Society has the Jewish Study Bible, which is in a second edition, which is also wonderful. And they also have a commentary series, the JPS Torah Commentary with the first five books, books of Moses, I think is some of the best scholarship that's ever been done on the five books of Moses. And I think the church could revise the King James Version without doing too much damage to those intertextual links between restoration Scripture and the Bible. I think it could be updated significantly. I think the. I don't know that the church would be well served by adopting an existing translation, but I think they could also start the ball rolling on producing our own translation. This is something that Brigham Young said a while ago. If somebody can do a translation of the Bible better than the one that we have, then they are under an obligation to do so. And so there are a lot of different ways that, that the institution could go, and I have absolutely no say whatsoever in that. So I would just say in the meantime, I would recommend getting a good study Bible and using that alongside the King James Version so you have a little better context for what's going on.

John Dehlin [02:59:34] It'll improve your understanding.

Dan McClellan [02:59:36] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:59:37] Maybe point you in less wrong directions in terms of theology and doctrines.

Dan McClellan [02:59:43] Yeah. And I think it makes the experience richer to be able to see the different sides of what's going on here, because sometimes that might help you understand why the King James Version did something a certain way, and that might help you better understand the way you want to go in terms of which translation to trust. But really the only way to ensure you're understanding the text as best you can is to learn the ancient languages, which is a commitment that the overwhelming majority of people can't do because they don't have the resources or the time or even the inclination.

What the Bible Says About Sexuality

John Dehlin [03:00:28] Okay, so we're about three hours in. We have discussed the who, what, when, where, how, and why. That's six. We promised ten things that everyone should know about the Bible. I think we've covered a lot more than six. But there's four sort of really big misconceptions and, or harmful interpretations of the Bible that I think maybe we both agree have caused a lot of harm over the centuries. And so what are the four remaining things that we're going to cover in today's episode about the Bible?

Dan McClellan [03:01:09] So we're going to talk about homosexuality in the Bible, talk about women in the Bible, the concept of hell, and then the book of Revelation and end times prophecy. And what is going on with all of that?

John Dehlin [03:01:24] All right, so four very small, easy,

Dan McClellan [03:01:27] quick breeze right through them.

John Dehlin [03:01:29] All right, so this is the big one, homosexuality, everybody. Mormons and evangelical Christians specifically, want to say the Bible condemns homosexuality in the Old and New Testament. Closed story. It's evil, bad behavior, don't do it.

Dan McClellan [03:01:47] And that's wrong for a number of different reasons. And the first one is a kind of semantic issue. People say homosexuality, but the Bible technically does not address homosexuality anywhere. There's not a single syllable of the Bible that addresses homosexuality as we use the word today, which is a reference to a sexual orientation. So that is to say, when we talk about homosexuality, we're talking about the notion that someone can be oriented towards attraction, sexual attraction to members of. Of their same sex. That concept is totally alien to the Bible because that idea of sexual orientation began developing in the 19th century, anciently, they did not have the concept of someone being oriented towards sexual attraction to their own sex as a kind of immutable internal aspect of their psychology.

John Dehlin [03:02:47] Yeah, not to interrupt, but I'm reading just through Google that Carl Maria Kurtbenny coined the word homosexual in an 1868 letter. So, I mean, before some, I don't know, German psychologists came up with the term. Society didn't even have a word to describe what people want to say. The Bible forbade two to four millennia before that word even existed.

Dan McClellan [03:03:15] Right, right. And that's describing something that's a lot broader and a lot more generic than what's being addressed in the Bible. Because once you talk about homosexuality, you're talking about just that, sexual orientation, which means someone who may never once engage in same sex intercourse would be condemned. If we talk about the Bible addressing homosexuality, but the Bible never addresses just the notion of someone who is oriented towards sexual attraction to the same sex. Totally absent from the Bible. So that is inaccurate to talk about the Bible addressing homosexuality. The Bible does address acts of same sex intercourse and overwhelming when it does bring them up, it is condemnatory of acts of same sex intercourse. However, the way the Bible addresses that, where it does needs to be properly contextualized because the references are quite limited. And also they're motivated by rationales that are totally irrelevant, completely outdated, have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the way the world works today.

John Dehlin [03:04:22] And kind of they're kind of modern ideas imposed on the ancient text.

Dan McClellan [03:04:26] Is that right? Yeah, because they thought and talked about sex in completely different ways. Anciently. For instance, one of the ways is they did not think of sex as something that two equal parties engaged in mutually and consensually. Sex was something that one person did to another and specifically what a man did to a woman. The man was the main agent. The woman's agency was less important, if it was relevant at all. She was the object of the sexual act, she was not the subject of the sexual act. And so there was a socially conventionalized hierarchy of domination and of penetration that kind of arranged the way people thought and talked about sex.

John Dehlin [03:05:15] And I just have to say this makes. If you've ever watched two birds copulate, you get a sense for probably where this ancient notion comes from. Because it's not like a. I'll just say a boy bird and a girl bird, like get to know each other and then lie down together. It's like the rooster's just going like this and all of a sudden he just grabs the hand with his beak, shoves her head down into the dirt, jumps on top, does the deed, and then hops off and kind of shakes off his feathers. Like, that's how, in the end, animal kingdom copulation happens. And so if ancient early humans thought of sex as something the male does to the female, that would make perfect sense to me.

Dan McClellan [03:06:01] Yeah. And when you look in the Bible, you see references to men taking women, and they use a variety of different verbs to refer to that, but the agency of the woman is almost never a concern. Now we have.

John Dehlin [03:06:16] Women are probably op. They're property, right?

Dan McClellan [03:06:18] For the most part, yeah. They're treated as. As property. It's. It's not 100% property, I would say there's a spectrum. And they're. They're operating between personhood and property somewhere. And so we have, like, David's son Amnon, once his sister, and his sister is like, please don't. And he does anyway. And so sex was about a role that people played within society, and men were higher up on that hierarchy of domination and penetration. And so for a man to take a submissive role in sexual intercourse was considered to be debasing. And so anciently, and we see this going from 1000 BCE all the way down to about 1000 CE, we see examples of this idea that it was inappropriate for a man to be on the bottom during sex, even with his own wife, because that was taking a submissive role in a sexual act. And to do so was inappropriate for someone who occupied the pinnacle of that hierarchy of domination. And so we have ancient Mesopotamian, what are called sex omens that talk about how if a man is on the bottom during sex with his wife, he will, the text says, lose his personal God. Basically, she robs him of his vitality. And for a month, he is vitalityless. He basically has lost his vigor. We see something similar in. There's a Talmudic text that says if a man is on the bottom during sex with his wife, he will be stricken with diarrhea. And we have the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which is this famous text that's riffing on the Garden of Eden, which is where we get the idea that Lilith was Adam's first wife. Where Lilith abandons the Garden of Eden because the text says she wanted to be on top. And Adam says, you are not fit to be on top. Only I am fit to be on top.

John Dehlin [03:08:19] And this is referring to sexual position.

Dan McClellan [03:08:21] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:08:22] Not like metaphorical power structure.

Dan McClellan [03:08:25] Ultimately, that's what it's pointing in the direction of, that the sexual position is a Reflection of, of social roles. And then so she storms out and goes off and God sends three angels after her and she doesn't want to come back. And I've talked about that in a number of other places in the past, but ultimately for the course of 2,000 years, and we've seen it in other places as well, for a man to be on the bottom was a violation of his social status. And so similarly, for a man to take a submissive position in a sexual act with another man was even more debasing. Because now not only was he taking a submissive position, but was actually taking the receptive role rather than the insertive role. And so in, it's kind of doubling up the debasing and the, the lowering of himself on that hierarchy of domination and penetration. So when we see.

John Dehlin [03:09:24] In other words, homosexuality would be wrong because the man that was on the bottom would be lowering himself to be the status of a woman.

Dan McClellan [03:09:32] Right.

John Dehlin [03:09:33] Did I get that right?

Dan McClellan [03:09:35] Yeah, more or less.

John Dehlin [03:09:36] Which is super sexist.

Dan McClellan [03:09:38] Yeah. And there were a handful of ways that this is addressed in the laws of other nations. For the most part it was kind of, it was there and they didn't have too much of an issue with it. But when it is addressed, it seems what we see is this idea that it would be natural for a man to want to take the insertive role with pretty much anything. Like if you're walking around with a hammer, you're looking for nails, basically. So it is understandable that a man would want to take the insertive role with someone who may not be a woman. Woman. So there were ways that they rationalized why men might engage in same sex intercourse taking the insertive role. A man seeking out the receptive role, however, was not easily rationalized. That didn't make any sense to them. And so that was something that was pathologized. Someone who sought out the receptive role had something seriously wrong with them.

John Dehlin [03:10:42] It's like, why would you give up power and status? Is that right?

Dan McClellan [03:10:45] Yeah. And so it indicates there's something wrong with this person. So when, if. And they weren't asked the question, but if you ask them, why do you think people seek out the receptive role in an act of male same sex intercourse? They probably wouldn't have a good answer for you. Just say something's wrong with them. And when we get into Greco Roman period Judaism, they refer to that. They refer to it at least Philo does, as the feminizing disease. So this is a completely different explanation for why someone might seek out that role. They didn't really have a concept of the versatile role. So there was not an understanding that two men of the same social status, of roughly the same age could engage in mutual versatile same sex intercourse. That just did not compute for them. So when we have Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 addressing male same sex intercourse, they're one limited to male same sex intercourse. They don't mention female same sex intercourse at all. And that is conspicuous because immediately after those verses in both chapters, they go on to say, oh yeah, you can't have sex with animals. And also women can't either. So they make sure to include the women in the very next verse. They totally ignore the women when they're talking about same sex intercourse. So this has something to do with the fact that a male plays a specific role in sexual acts.

John Dehlin [03:12:16] In other words, Old Testament isn't prohibiting lesbianism at all.

Dan McClellan [03:12:21] There's no reference to it anywhere in the Old Testament.

John Dehlin [03:12:23] So Christians who want to denounce homosexuality, that's a problem.

Dan McClellan [03:12:27] Well, that at least all from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible, there's no reference to it whatsoever. There's one reference to it in the New Testament.

John Dehlin [03:12:34] Okay, we'll get there.

Dan McClellan [03:12:35] Yeah, we'll get there. So Leviticus 18:22 prohibits a man from engaging in an act of same sex intercourse with another man, but it seems to only be prohibiting the man taking the insertive role. In Leviticus 20:13, it talks about a man taking the insertive role, but then it says that they both, both are subjected to the death penalty. They both have to die. And Leviticus 20 is repeating pretty much everything that's mentioned in Leviticus 18, but is imposing penalties, whereas Leviticus 18 is only prohibiting it. Leviticus 20 is saying, you got to die, you got to die, you got to die, you got to die. But it expands the responsible parties. And Most of Leviticus 18 is talking about prohibited sex between men and relatives. Relatives. And when you get to Leviticus 20, they both die. And the woman's agency is not a concern in either of these chapters. So it's not saying both parties are equally responsible for engaging mutually and consensually in this sinful act. The idea here is that this sinful act produces kind of a metaphysical contaminant that pollutes the land. And the land is going to literally vomit you out if it reaches a critical mass of contamination. And so the only way to purge the land of this metaphysical contaminant is to kill both parties in this sinful. Act. And so you see this where it's talking about men engaging in intercourse with relatives with specific in laws. And you also see it in the prohibition on bestiality where the animal and the human die. And so it's very clearly not saying both parties are equally guilty of choosing to engage in this sin. It's referencing something else. So Exodus 20:13 is the only place where the receptive partner seems to be condemned. But that condemnation is just part of this formula of both parties have to die. In other words, when we look at Leviticus 18 and 20, if we are trying to very as clearly as possible delineate what is being prohibited and why, the biggest problem is the insertive partner in an act of male same sex intercourse. And it seems to be because it generates a metaphysical contamination that pollutes the land based on the fact that they are violating this social hierarchy of domination and penetration. So when we understand what Leviticus is saying that way, which I think is a more or less accurate representation of where the scholarship stands, and there is some disagreement, but I think I'm representing the consensus view. This is not some idea that God has unilaterally prohibited all homosexual activity, much less homosexuality in general. It is reflecting a specific idea about the harm of these sinful acts. And it is prohibiting it for members of the House of Israel who are in the land of Israel. And even Jewish scholars have said this does not apply to anyone who is not a member of the House of Israel. This does not apply to anyone who is not residing in the land of Israel. And so Christians who would appeal to these passages from the Hebrew Bible, as in America. Yeah. As a means of, of deploying these clobber passages are completely misrepresenting what the text is saying, why it's saying it, who it's saying it, and who it's saying it to. Yeah. And so I don't think those passages get the job done for folks who want to use them to try to suggest that God hates homosexuals or that God prohibits unilaterally all homosexual activity doesn't do that. It prohibits a specific act for a specific reason that is not relevant to any Christian today in the 21st century.

John Dehlin [03:16:40] And as far as the Old Testament goes, you have at least two other problems. Tell me if I'm right. One is if you're going to interpret the Old Testament to saying that homosexuality is evil, if you're going to take that interpretation, it's like if you have to pick up one side of the stick, you pick up the other. It says the consequence needs to be death penalty. So any modern Christian that's going to take away from the Old Testament that homosexuality is evil, wouldn't they need to take away also the interpretation that God wants all gay people killed?

Dan McClellan [03:17:15] Well, and that's where we get into the fact that everybody's negotiating with the Bible.

John Dehlin [03:17:20] Bible.

Dan McClellan [03:17:21] And you have lots of different ways that Christians try to figure out a way to maintain the prohibitions they want from the Hebrew Bible without maintaining the punishments that are prescribed, because what else

John Dehlin [03:17:34] is forbidden in the Old Testament?

Dan McClellan [03:17:36] All kinds of things. You've got to stone your disobedient son to death. Women can't wear pants. That is an abomination as well. Shellfish. There are all kinds.

John Dehlin [03:17:48] Something about menstruating.

Dan McClellan [03:17:49] Yeah, can't have sex with your menstruating wife. That's an abomination. There are all kinds of different things that have been abandoned, and there are all kinds of rationalizations for why it's okay to abandon certain things, but other things we still need to maintain. And there are a couple of different ways that is achieved by Christians. One way is this idea that the laws of the Hebrew Bible can be divided into moral, ceremonial, or moral ceremonial and civil laws. And only the moral laws remain relevant to Christians. According to that argument. However, the Hebrew Bible never identifies any such divisions of the law. The Hebrew Bible treats them all equally. It's not until the 2nd and 3rd century CE that we begin to see Christians who are. We've just gotten over the argument about whether or not we're going to keep the Hebrew Bible. Now that we've decided we're going to keep it, we have to figure out what's still relevant and what isn't. And so that's when you begin to see this idea bubble to the surface of, oh, well, let's divide them up into moral and ceremonial laws and let's get rid of the ceremonial. And then later on you have the addition of a civil division. So that's one way Christians rationalize why some laws are still in force and some are not, although that is not consistently applied. Because if you look at the Ten Commandments, some of those are ceremonial laws, and we still consider those to be in effect. And if you look in the only part of the New Testament that says, these are the laws we're going to keep, that's the Book of Acts following the Jerusalem Council, they say, okay, we're going to let the Gospel go to all the Gentiles, and there are four rules that we all have to keep and this is basically, here's what we're going to do from the Old Testament. No fornication, no idolatry, no eating meat that has been strangled or meat that has been offered to other gods. Is that accurate? I'm pretty sure that's accurate. In one place, there are four of them. In one place, there are three of them. But those are two moral laws and two ceremonial laws. So even in the New Testament's own explicit explanation of what we're going to keep, it doesn't follow that division of the laws. And also, Paul doesn't care about what other foods you eat. So Paul would say, well, it's only the two of them. So we have inconsistent ways of negotiating with the texts. And another way is to say any law that Jesus repeated in the New Testament is still in force. But that way you also have problems with the fact that there are a lot of things that Jesus didn't repeat that a lot of Christians consider to be in force. So there are problems with the ways that Christians negotiate what from the Hebrew Bible they consider relevant. But. But there's not. None of them would agree that we have to still impose the same. Well, not none of them. Certainly there are people who would say that, but for the overwhelming majority, the death penalty is not realistic. And so we're already negotiating with it, even if we want to hold onto it.

John Dehlin [03:21:06] Okay, so that kind of covers the main passages people cite in the Old Testament.

Dan McClellan [03:21:12] Is that right in the Hebrew Bible yet? Well, no, there's one other, and that's Genesis 19, which is about Sodom and Gomorrah. But the problem there is not homosexuality. The problem there is sexual assault and inhospitality. Basically, you mentioned earlier, if you take the submissive position, you are having power taken from you. And this is what the men of Sodom want to do to the angels that are in Lot's house. They want to sexually assault them as a means of. Of demeaning them, debasing them, robbing them of their power. So that is considered the most heinously inhospitable thing you could do for guests who are not from your area. And that's what the condemnation is about, the inhospitality. And we have a parallel story in Judges 19 where a Levite is traveling, stays over in a town because he knows there are Israelites there, comes into a house, has his concubine, and the men of. Of the city surround the house and demand that he be led out so he can be sexually assaulted. And the story there is more explicitly Kind of exposing the inhospitality of these people. And that's what the Levite is ultimately so upset about. But just like Job, the Levite offers the woman he has at his disposal and basically shoves his concubine out the door and they sexually assault her, which results in her dying later. And so in Genesis 19, Job offers his daughters, and this is a way of saying he, Lot offers his daughters. And this is a way of saying lot is so hospitable to strangers that he's willing to sacrifice members of his own family to protect the power, the honor, the social position of his guests. So this is a story about inhospitality. That is how it is reflected, referred to in Ezekiel, who actually says, the sin of Sodom is an overabundance of bread, prosperous ease, and she did not strengthen the hand of the orphan and the widow, or the oppressed and the downtrodden and all the other passages from the New Testament. So that's everything from the Hebrew Bible that I can recall.

John Dehlin [03:23:22] So the sin of sodomy, with a more informed understanding of the Hebrew Bible, is rape or assault or inhospitality. It's not gay sex.

Dan McClellan [03:23:36] Correct. And even there are parts of the world still to this day where sodomy, sexual assaulting a man is a means of punishment, of demeaning power. Power. In fact, I have a friend who mentioned while he was serving in the army that he heard stories about people where if somebody committed a crime in a village, the punishment would be the other person's family would send men over to sexually assault him. And this was not because they were sexually attracted to men. It was because that was a tool of punishment and of taking power. And so that was a way to rectify the situation. And so what's going on in Genesis 19 has nothing to do with homosexuality as a sexual orientation. These men were not trying to sexually assault Lot's guests because they were sexually attracted to men. This is about inhospitality and the use of sexual assault as a heinous example of inhospitality.

John Dehlin [03:24:41] Got it.

Dan McClellan [03:24:43] Then we get into the New Testament and really there's only one author who has anything at all to say about same sex intercourse. And that's Paul.

John Dehlin [03:24:50] It's worth saying Jesus said nada. Right?

Dan McClellan [03:24:52] Nada.

John Dehlin [03:24:53] The think if Jesus were the guy, right? If Jesus were the man, the ultimate authority, and he really cared, he would have had something to say about it. Right? What about the apocrypha? Surely Jesus condemns gay people in the apocrypha, Right?

Dan McClellan [03:25:10] I Don't think there's anything, any reference to it by Jesus in the, the apocrypha. There are some pseudepigraphical texts that talk about it, but they're not related to Jesus and they're coming from Greco Roman period Judaism. But yeah, in Paul we have First Corinthians 6, 9, which refers, it uses two different terms in Greek, Malachi and arsinokete. And malachi basically is kind of a derisive term that it means something like softies. It's referring to people who are soft. And this is a pejorative reference to men who take the receptive role in an act of same sex intercourse. So already we're distinguishing the two roles. There's not just one generic anybody who engages in same sex intercourse or even anybody who is attracted to members of the same sex. It's men who take one role. And then arsenokete is a neologism that Paul comes up with based on the Greek translation of Leviticus 18 and 20, which means men betters, something like that. And so that would be the one who takes the insertive role. And so we have those two roles are, are mentioned as, as people who will not inherit the kingdom of God. And then Paul goes into a tiny bit more detail in Romans 1 where he's describing the depravity of the Greco Roman world where he says they have, they're worshiping animals and the works of their own hands, they're worshiping the created rather than the Creator. And he suggests that natural theology or the idea that nature itself testifies of God. Therefore anyone who can perceive nature has no excuse for not worshiping God appropriately because they have rejected the testimony of nature and have worshiped the works of their own hands and the created over and against the Creator. God has given them over to their passions. Basically the idea is that God has kind of a governor or a restraint on the extent to which passions can bubble up. And these people were not deserving of that. And so God removed that governor or that restraint and allowed passions to run wild. And the result of this, according to, to Paul in verses 26 and 27, is that the women gave up their natural utility and this means their usefulness. And the men gave up the usefulness of their women to engage in something that most scholars identify as a euphemism for same sex intercourse. And so it's not directly saying, hey, this is wrong, it's saying these people are worshiping the wrong thing and therefore God has allowed them to run wild with their degeneracy which has resulted in female and male same sex intercourse. And with Paul, we're still dealing with somebody who is embedded within a specific social and historical set of circumstances. And Paul understands same sex intercourse to be raised wrong for more or less the same reasons. But there are some expansions on this. Male same sex intercourse for a long time was wrong because it was demeaning the men who are at the top of that hierarchy. Female same sex intercourse was not so easily accommodated into this sexual ethic because they weren't at the top of that so hierarchy. And so there wasn't really the same rationalization for why it's wrong, but they were still pretty sure it was wrong because it just didn't seem right. And so there was a term in Greek that they used that basically that was kind of a pejorative term that basically, well, it came from a root that meant to rub. And so they were kind of dismissed as kind of just, just these weirdos who were pretending to be men. They were false insertive partners. And so they were, they were pathologized in an entirely different way. And what Paul is, is getting at is that this is all wrong because this violet goes against nature. And by nature he's referring to the fact that women seem designed to be, be the receptive partners of an insertive partner. And so at its foundation, the argument here is that this seems to go against nature. Now we know that's false. We know one that same sex attraction is not the product of degeneracy running wild. It is something that is innate and immutable in the overwhelming majority of the people who experience it. So it is natural. So Paul's notion that it is against nature is also flatly false.

John Dehlin [03:30:17] It also exists in the animal kingdom across.

Dan McClellan [03:30:19] It also exists in the animal kingdom

John Dehlin [03:30:20] over a hundred species. Right?

Dan McClellan [03:30:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:30:23] Which by definition is nature. Right?

Dan McClellan [03:30:24] Yeah. So it is not something that is the product of human degeneracy gone wild. It is perfectly natural. And so Paul's, the framework on which Paul is basing this rejection is false, just empirically false. It is not how nature works. And you know, elsewhere Paul says that nature testifies that long hair on men is disgraceful. I am unaware of any such testimony offered by nature anywhere. So what Paul is doing is taking social mores and trying to rationalize them. And I think for this, this is kind of a difficult one. And so he just takes the lowest hanging frame fruit. Oh, that's unnatural. Turns out it's not. So just like people today who would say, oh, it's unnatural. It's not unnatural, it's something that's perfectly natural. And so that criticism is wrong.

John Dehlin [03:31:20] And by the way, if a Mormon or an evangelical Christian wants to interpret Paul's discussion around same sex sexuality as a condemnation, then they would have to also apply Paul's concerns about long haired men to the way that both evangelical Christians and LDS church leaders depict Jesus as a long haired man. Right. That would be equally problematic. Am I wrong?

Dan McClellan [03:31:53] Well, if we were going to be consistent with the text. But again this is a situation where everybody's already negotiation with the text. And even when it comes to Paul's sexual ethic, we're already negotiating away most of what Paul cares about because Paul was celibate. Paul wanted everybody else to be celibate. And the allowances that were offered for sexual intercourse had absolutely nothing to do with procreation. So people who say today, well, same sex intercourse is wrong because it doesn't lead to procreation, totally irrelevant to Paul, could not have cared less about that. In fact, Paul treats, and this is still debated among scholars the degree to which this is the case. But Paul treats sex as something that is only appropriate for married couples. And Paul seems to suggest that you should only get married if you can't hack celibacy. And I would argue that within the marriage sex because procreation isn't an issue and because within Paul's worldview it should not be primarily about pleasure. In Greco Roman period Judaism you have a number of folks who are adopting the same philosophical frameworks as Paul, arguing that sex that is engaged in primarily or solely for pleasure is entirely inappropriate. They're arguing it should be for procreation alone. It's okay if you enjoy it, but it can't be because it's enjoyable. It is supposed to be because you're procreating. Paul says Jesus is coming back too soon for procreation to be a concern. So procreation isn't even on the table. And so what is the only other reason you could be having sex? And for Paul the idea seems to be that to relieve your natural urges. And so if you can't hack celibacy, get married. That becomes your release vow. However, that doesn't mean you just run wild. It's still something that should be, he says, holy and honorable and not with the passion of desire like the Gentiles who don't know God. In other words, you're not just going nuts. Don't be too happy about this. This is just something that should happen when it is necessary to keep the urges kind of at a minimum. And so Paul's whole sexual ethic is something that we have abandoned long ago. Obviously, Jesus did not come back so quickly. And so today, folks who want to appeal to Paul are appealing to a sexual ethic that is based on the notion that the world was going to be ending too soon to have any kids anyway, and is based on the idea that celibacy is the higher law and the idea that sex should only be engaged in on those occasions where somebody's passion was bubbling a little too violently. And so there are a lot of people who want to point to Paul and say, that's God's word, God said it. No, this is a man embedded within a specifical. Specifical. This is a man embedded within a specific social and historical circumstance, trying to make sense of the received traditions using the social and historical frameworks at his disposal. And those social and historical frameworks are either empirically false or no longer relevant. And so the argument can't really be made from the Bible at all that God condemns homosexuality or that God condemns same sex intercourse if, if any negotiating with the Bible is allowed, and if any contextualizing of these concerns is allowed. And I don't think I've ever met anyone who will argue that this transcends historical and social settings and that there's no other part of the Bible that should be okay. I think I've talked myself in circles. What I'm trying to say is that, that everyone who argues we should not historically contextualize this part of the Bible is going to historically contextualize some other part of the Bible. In other words, nobody is consistent in that regard. Everybody's already negotiating with the text. And so the question for me becomes, why maintain this prohibition? Why ignore all of the context? Why ignore what Paul was really getting at and why, if we're going to do it for other texts? And what I can come up with based on my research in the cognitive science of religion and what's going on here is that opposition to same sex intercourse has become a central identity marker of certain conservative religious groups. And that identity marker is too important for them to give up. And unfortunately, they wield that identity marker in a way that hurts people and communities and leads to people taking their own lives, leads to people taking other people's lives, leads to all kinds of abuse, all kinds of depression, and all kinds of loss of life. And so I think we need to get over using that identity marker as a lever for structuring power and values in ways that serve our identity politics. And just like it happened with slavery, just like it has somewhat happened with misogyny, this is something that we will abandon at some point in the future. The consensus will be it's time to let this go, and it's just a matter of getting enough people to decide that the lives of these LGBTQ people and communities is worth more than the value of homophobia as an identity marker.

John Dehlin [03:37:59] And show your watch wristband really quick. Is that partly why you have a rainbow wristband to your watch?

Dan McClellan [03:38:06] Like I said in the first interview, this was a gift that I got from my wife. I appreciate colorful things, but yes, I always also want to find a way to show my support. And I've become more committed to it as that, as I have seen that it means a lot to people who are close to me, and also that it infuriates people whose opinions I don't really value.

John Dehlin [03:38:35] And as you mentioned, the negative side effects or externalities of anti LGBTQ theology and doctrine and rhetoric. What I didn't hear you mention is it's also eviscerating the ranks of LDS Church membership and of broader evangelical Christian membership as generations appear to be leaving in droves over these completely false and erroneous biblical interpretations.

Dan McClellan [03:39:08] Yeah, and I think Latter Day Saints would say their position is not based entirely on biblical interpretation. I'm addressing biblical interpretation, but yeah, this is. I forget what the saying is. Cutting off the nose despite the face. In a lot of ways it is. We are causing harm, we are causing people to leave because we're committed to the value of this stance as an identity marker. And there are issues in the past that have been presented by leadership as doctrine that can't be questioned and will never change, that have been questioned and have changed. And so I don't see anything in LDS ideology or theology anywhere that indicates that this is not something that can ever possibly change. I. I hope that it can change.

John Dehlin [03:40:13] And I One of the things that I realized 10 or 15 years ago as I was digging deep into this issue of LGBTQ concerns and Mormonism is a faithful Latter Day Saint, should reflect deeply on the reality that the Book of Mormon is, in addition to Jesus himself being completely silent on the issue of same sex sexuality, the Book of Mormon, which we're told is written for our times and is the most correct book, as I understand it, remains 100% silent on the issue of same sex sexuality.

Dan McClellan [03:40:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:40:49] Is that right?

Dan McClellan [03:40:49] I'd agree with that.

John Dehlin [03:40:50] And the Doctrine and Covenants, again, as I understand it 100% silent on the issue of same sex sexuality. And I don't even believe you can find Joseph, also the book of Abraham, also the book of Moses. And also I don't believe you can find a quote from Joseph Smith that condemns same sex sexuality. And what you really find is that, like, you know, the word of wisdom becomes a Commandment in the 20th century as other cultural dynamics start to swell. Right. You also find that the Mormon Church's anti LGBTQ rhetoric starts to swell in the 1950s and 1960s in parallel with other Protestant Christian social dynamics. Yeah, almost in parallel.

Dan McClellan [03:41:41] Right, absolutely.

John Dehlin [03:41:42] As if it's not from God.

Dan McClellan [03:41:43] Well, and I would say I don't think its absence from restoration scripture as an indication that it is endorsed by the sources of restoration scripture, but I think it is an indication that if this is intended for our day, either that was not considered to be an issue worth addressing in our day, or perhaps this was intended for an earlier day, a day that has long since passed, a day that was more within the scope of the vision of the producers of the text. So however way you slice it, I think that observation complicates the notion that this opposition is something that God has demanded or that God will never depart from

John Dehlin [03:42:40] perfect. Okay, well, that's one of the four. We got the Bible on homosexuality and LGBTQ issues in Mormonism. We kind of got that as its own thing. Three to go. What's next?

Women's Roles and Status in the Bible

Dan McClellan [03:42:54] We're talking about women in the Bible, which we've talked about a little bit already, that women are frequently treated as something that occupies a space between personhood and property. Marriage was very transactional, anciently. Basically, a daughter was a part of a man's household that was more or less sold off to another man's household. There was a bride price that was paid to the father, and so the father was the one who profited from the daughter getting married.

John Dehlin [03:43:28] Is that the dowry idea?

Dan McClellan [03:43:30] The dowry, yeah. And we also have the references, particularly in Exodus, to men selling their daughters into debt slavery, which is almost certainly about sex slavery and particularly in Exodus, because in Exodus it talks about a man being sold into debt slavery or he goes free in the seventh year. Women who are sold into debt slavery by their fathers do not go free in the seventh year. And I think the best scholarship on debt this the only reason they can come up with for why that might be the case is because a woman who is sold into debt slavery is going to basically be used to breed more slaves or is going to become the wife of the master. And so going free, they would basically be a, for lack of a better word, tainted goods. They're no longer a virgin, they're no longer eligible for proper Israelite marriage. And so most likely that idea of a woman being sold into debt slavery is about sex slavery. And there are regulations placed on what that master is allowed to do with that woman who there, I believe the text actually explicitly says he's marrying her, for instance, he can't divorce her without certain things. I think he's got to pay for her and stuff like that. That in Deuteronomy it actually says that men and women both sold into debt slavery go free in the seventh year. So either the Deuteronomist doesn't really care about that concern about being set adrift in a world where they're not considered, they're not considered an eligible bachelorette anymore, or they, we don't consider that to be sex slavery. And I think a third option may be that Deuteronomy is also saying that when that debt slave goes free in the seventh year, you have to give them provisions and money. They don't go free empty handed. They must be provided for. And so maybe the authors think she's already being provided for. So that should be good enough for her to go free as a woman who's no longer a virtue. However, any kids that she bore during that period would remain the property of the master. So there's. Yeah, being a woman in that time period, particularly one whose dad was not well off, would be a pretty terrifying prospect. And we've talked about the ways that in sex, the agency of the woman was not really a concern. We have the story of Abraham and Hagar where Abraham is unable to conceive with Sarah. And so Sarah gives Abraham her handmaid so that she can bear Ishmael. And this is an example of sex slavery. The agency of Hagar is not addressed at all would not have been an issue. She was Sarah's property. She was given to Abraham and she ended up bearing a son to him and then being kicked out because Sarah got jealous of her. So there are many ways that women are devalued in the Hebrew Bible. There are exceptions to every rule. However, we do have women who are presented as kind of overcoming or at least exploiting or manipulating the conventions of the time. Deborah, for instance, is one of the judges in Israel in the Book of Judges who successfully defends the land against the Canaanite general Sisera. And we have the Song of Deborah and we have the story of that Battle in judges four and five, you have interesting examples in. Excuse me, in the conquest of Israel with Jericho, we have Rahab, who is a sex worker. The spies go in and they make a deal with Rahab and she ties the ribbon around the outside the window and so she is delivered. And this is an instance of the treatment of a sex worker as someone who is spared but also championed because of her specific actions. So an act of righteousness, which is another way that we see an exception to the normal rule about the position of a sex worker in society. And we see a similar thing with Tamar. So she's married to a man who dies. The brother is Onan, the brother, because of levirate marriage, he has the responsibility to go in and marry his dead brother's wife because they didn't have any children. And then his responsibility is to have the wife bear children who will then take on the deceased brother's name. And this is not good for Onan because basically a bunch of his property is leaving his house, household, he's not keeping it with him. This is all going into his brother's name and into his brother's household. And so this is not a bit of a raw deal for him. So we have him engaging in coitus interruptus for which he is stricken dead. But then Tamar decides I've got to go figure out a way to have a child. And the father in law has not yet given to me the other brother. And for some reason I'm blanking on, I'm almost positive this is Jacob. I don't know why I'm confused about that. But basically Jacob does not want the same thing to happen to his next youngest son that happened to Onan, doesn't want him to die, so has withheld the demand that the other brother engage in that levirate marriage again. And so what Tamar does is she goes and disguises herself as a sex worker and posts up where she knows Jacob is going to pass by after a business trip where he is exhausted and stressed. And so he patronizes her and impregnates her. And she takes as collateral for his lack of payment possessions of his. And then later on when she confronts him about this, in order to prove that it was her the whole time, she produces the collateral that he handed over. And so she literally played the harlot. But Jacob has to acknowledge that she was more righteous than he because she found a way to produce offspring so that she could be a part of a household that carried on. And he acknowledged that he didn't give her his next oldest son because he was scared. And so we have another example of someone engaging in sex work as a means of achieving something righteous, at least in the eyes of the authors of the biblical text, which, if they are any indication, are, or at least if someone insists on the inspiration of the entire biblical text as an indication that. That there are shades of gray to the role of women in society as well as the role of sex work in society. So this is one of the things I find baffling about some Christians or some conservative readers of the Bible is they will insist on situating certain moral frameworks in their historical context as a way to say they don't matter anymore. Whereas others who can be situated in their appropriate historical context, they insist, must transcend that historical context. So the role of women is something that is, for the most part, the patriarchy is asserted and is unilateral. And the most righteous and the most intelligent and successful women are the women who do don't try to dismantle the patriarchy, but try to use it to serve their own interests and game the system rather than challenge the system itself, which is another indication that whoever is pulling the strings there may not be the person who has control over the system, but may be the perspectives of folks who are working underneath and within the system system.

John Dehlin [03:52:27] And so when you think about, like, I think the LDS sensibility regarding the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament is just sort of like whatever the modern 21st century American Mormon family is, that's what, you know, Isaiah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Adam and Eve would have all been practicing that God, in his interaction with prophets and his church in the ancient times, God would have made sure that women were equal, that women were respected, that the family structure would reflect love and respect for all. There's kind of just this assumption that that's how families were in the Old Testament. And then also when even LGBT issues or feminism are condemned in modern Christianity, it's this idea that the justification that's often used is God's always wanted marriage to be between one man and one woman, and God's always supported the traditional family. For six or seven thousand years, God's always supported the traditional family and loves men and women equally. And I guess what I'm hearing you say is, is the Hebrew Bible does not reflect a respect for women that we would respect, that we would value, or that would warm our hearts. How would you summarize?

Dan McClellan [03:54:00] I think I would say that the social frameworks that are in place that are reflected within the Hebrew Bible place a lower value on women. As much as some of the folks responsible for writing the text of the Hebrew Bible find ways to try to elevate women over the system that they've inherited without actually doing the work to dismantle the system that they've inherited. And there are other examples of that. Esther, for instance, is a very cherished text within the Jewish tradition. Never once mentions God in any way, shape or form in the text. It's all about how this woman is.

John Dehlin [03:54:38] Is

Dan McClellan [03:54:41] basically using the resources at her disposal to try to save the Jewish people from genocide at the hands of an empire that has control over them by being beautiful, by being intelligent, by being not a crafty person who can manipulate the Persian, Persian overlord. And once we get into the New Testament, we actually have, I and many scholars, other scholars have argued women in positions of leadership, ecclesiastical leadership within the church. Now, they are not among the 12 apostles that are mentioned in the Gospels or in the Book of Acts. In fact, the Book of Acts, when it talks about replacing Jewish Judas, it talks about replacing him with someone from the pool of specifically men who walked around with Jesus. And so the Book of Acts seems to insist on apostles being men. If we can extrapolate from that insistence that Judas replacement be a man man, which is kind of peculiar if Acts was written by the author of Luke, because Luke's Jesus is one of the most sensitive to the downtrodden and the outcast and the socially minoritized. But once we get into Paul, we see discussion of, for instance, Unia, the woman apostle who's mentioned in Romans 16:7. We see references to deaconesses, which deacon is a Greek word that just means servant or minister or something like that, but has taken on a status as kind of an office or a position that is held by someone within the church hierarchy. And so in some of the later epistles, we see references to women as deacons. And then we see within some of the remains of early Christian chapels, references to women who are donors to Christian congregations. They help build buildings for Christian congregations. And we also see leadership titles that are attributed to women. And I think within the last few years, we've discovered some mosaics or some inscriptions that indicate there were women who were referred to by titles that reflected ecclesiastical leadership as late as the 5th or even the 6th century cell CE. So there were probably women in leadership positions for some time after the completion of the New Testament, which at some

John Dehlin [03:57:25] point the modern Christian church, broadly speaking, seemed to want to weed out.

Dan McClellan [03:57:29] Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, male headship is the phrase that I hear bandied about within particularly evangelical Christianity that is based on a specific reading of the biblical text that overlooks things like union and Phoebe and others, and centers and gives priority to things like Genesis 3, 16, which says that your desire will be to rule over him, but he will rule over you. Which also, it needs to be pointed out, is a product of the fallen world. This is post fall, according to Genesis. And so folks who insist that this be maintained are in insisting that we not try to overcome the products of the fall, whereas in other instances they insist that we try to overcome the products of the fall. So it's an inconsistent way to negotiate the power structures that serve the interests of men today. But unfortunately, it's fairly common in a lot of conservative engagements with the Bible.

John Dehlin [03:58:36] Really, really quickly, two more things about women. Number one is, you know, one point of view that let's just say conservative Christians and or orthodox Mormons would want to sort of do or maintain is to say that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament reflect God's approval at women being subservient to men and or approve a patriarchal structure. An alternative interpretation of the Bible might be what? Instead, in terms of how women are discussed or treated in the Bible, an alternative might be what? That it's not God's will, that it's what?

Dan McClellan [03:59:24] Well, if we look at the book of Galatians, we have Paul saying there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, there is neither Jew nor gender gentile, but all are one in Christ, which would seem to suggest that these social distinctions are irrelevant in the eyes of God. But then we've got, particularly in Timothy and in one passage in 1 Corinthians that many scholars would suggest is a late interpolation or an addition to the text, we have the notion that women are to keep silent in church and are not supposed to rule in church. And. And this is one of the reasons, I think it's important to acknowledge that the overwhelming academic consensus is that the Pastoral epistles were not written by Paul, but were written by later authors writing in Paul's name. Pseudepigraphically, and this is the opinion of many scholars regarding the statement, and the similar statement in 1 Corinthians 11, which interrupts the flow of the discussion, kind of comes out of nowhere and, and sounds an awful lot like the author of 1 Timothy, whoever they were. So I think there's a way to negotiate with the text as it has been preserved down to us to demonstrate that there are different positions, and the positions that would lower women and subjugate them to the authority of men are usually, if not entirely, the products of later interpolation.

John Dehlin [04:00:57] And is it fair to say, just broadly speaking, reflect the treatment of women and the sentiments about women and the social dynamics of the time period?

Dan McClellan [04:01:10] It does add as well. Absolutely. The Greco Roman household was. There was a specific way that it was understood, and there was a specific way that it was supposed to be addressed, administered, and women were supposed to, as we have Paul saying, rule over their household. So there are ways that it reflects the social mores of that time period both positively and negatively when it comes to the treatment of women. But I think it is absolutely important to note that women were absolutely not given a fair shake anciently. And what we see in the text is, is something that is contingent upon those social frameworks. And again, the texts are not trying to dismantle or reject or set aside those social frameworks. They're trying to work within them. So whether we see them denigrating or trying to elevate the position of women, they are doing so from a contingent position within. Within those ancient societies.

John Dehlin [04:02:18] Yeah, yeah. Because sometimes, sometimes the way we interpret scripture makes us hate God because God can come off as a racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic deity. And who wants to believe in that? God. Right. But that's what I hear you saying, is that don't blame God for the prevailing social dynamics of the day that are most likely influencing and informing the scriptural texts that are written. Don't blame that on God. Blame that on the frailties of men. Right. Who are writing the scripture.

Dan McClellan [04:03:01] Well, I would say two things. Don't blame that on God and also don't try to apologize for them that don't try to excuse it as well. Wherever you think it comes from, there are a lot of folks who try to make this okay. And I think that does phenomenal harm as well. We have places where, for instance, in the Book of Revelation, God threatens. Somebody who is a leader in a church somewhere the text refers to as Jezebel. And then God threatens to throw her on a bed and then murder her children because she's a sex worker. And this is metaphor for idolatry. However, the imagery of God and some translations have a, you know, cast her on a sick bed, I'm going to afflict her with illness, which is not what the text says. It's throw her on the bed in the sense of she's going to be sexually assaulted, rape her Right. And then murder her children. This is a. When we apologize for this and when we try to make this okay, it's just trying to sanitize what is ultimately sexual violence and even murder. And that's something that needs to be recognized and called out and should be something that is rejected. And this is one of the problems with the idea that every, every word is inerrant and inspired and we have to accept, literally, because it puts us in a position of having to accept or defend the unacceptable and the indefensible.

John Dehlin [04:04:40] Yeah. Again and again, it's just occurring to me that insistences on literality and inerrancy ultimately are destructive to faith in so many instances.

Dan McClellan [04:04:51] Yeah, I think so. I think they become the most helpful when the texts are being used not to increase faith or enrich lives or improve situations. They become most helpful when they're being used to structure power. And so I think that is the bad side of deploying the Bible.

John Dehlin [04:05:12] Yeah. Really quickly, as we're leaving this topic of women and misogyny in the Bible, there's this idea that when Joseph Smith was studying the Bible, he was influenced by a broader restorationist movement which seemed to be suggesting that before Jesus comes again, we've got to restore all the biblical things into the modern church in preparation for Jesus coming. And some like to justify Joseph Smith's polygamy based on his desire to restore biblical polygamy as particularly found, you know, amongst, I don't know, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Solomon. And I just wanted to ask you, I've heard it said that God condoned polygamy or polyandry does not exist in the Old Testament. That you won't find. You may find polygamy or concubines in the Old Testament, but you're not going to find God sort of saying, hey, prophet of mine, you need to do polygamy or polyandry and you need to teach fellow members of your church that polygamy is an important, important part of the new and everlasting covenant. Can you speak to God's role or lack of role in biblical polygamy and concubinage?

Dan McClellan [04:06:50] Well, polygamy was just the norm back then for those who could afford it. And so expecting God to say, hey, by the way, you need to do this would be like expecting God to say, by the way, you need to wear short sleeve shirts when it's hot, drink water. Yeah, it's just that was how the world operated back then. And it was.

John Dehlin [04:07:11] This is a Christian and Muslim and otherwise. Right.

Dan McClellan [04:07:15] Yeah. Early Christianity. There's.

John Dehlin [04:07:17] I'm sorry, Jewish and Muslim and Christian. Sorry.

Dan McClellan [04:07:21] Yeah, I think there's. Once we get into Greco Roman period Judaism, there are groups that pop up that seem to be less accepting towards polygamy. I don't know the degree to which that. How far that pervaded early Christianity, but we have no. As far as I can tell, we have no clear rejection of it in the New Testament. Oh, excuse me. The closest we come is a text that says the requirement for a bishop is that he be a husband of one wife. And while some people think this is a reference to monogamy, I would suggest that the context makes this more clearly about a man who has not remarried after getting divorced or after having a wife die because there's so much concern for remarriage. Remarriage was a huge controversy at the time. And so I think that makes better sense as a reference to remarriage rather than to monogamy. And so I would say there's nothing single syllable of the Bible that in any way, shape or form complicates polygamy. But we do have texts or.

John Dehlin [04:08:26] That necessitates monogamy. Is that what you're saying?

Dan McClellan [04:08:28] Right.

John Dehlin [04:08:29] Wow. I had never thought of that before.

Dan McClellan [04:08:31] But we do have literature from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seems to suggest there was opposition to polygamy among the more conservative groups. And so it would not surprise me at all if there were groups within early Christianity or if even the majority of early Christians were opposed to polygamy. But we don't see it in the Bible at all. So, yeah, there is one place where we do have an endorsement of polygamy, though, a divine endorsement of polygamy. And that's in. Shoot, I forget the chapter. But God is talking to David and says, I gave you your master's wives into your bosom or into your embrace, which is basically saying, I made you king. You took over Saul's harem wives, so I gave you your wives, which would indicate that God endorses or endorsed in that instance, polygamy. And so there are attempts to try to reread that passage to mean something else, but none of them hold any water. So, yeah, it's just something that was the norm. And we would not have any reason to have anybody defending it on God's behalf in the Bible.

John Dehlin [04:09:49] In Old Testament civilizations, polygamy was just the norm in and out of Judaism, you're saying just for the time. Okay, so to claim it was God's new and everlasting Covenant or expectation for his most righteous prophets and. Or children?

Dan McClellan [04:10:09] No, I don't see any indication that that's the case.

John Dehlin [04:10:15] So not a religious thing needed to be restored? Basically,

Dan McClellan [04:10:20] No, I don't think there are much data that would point in the direction of any of these things being required to be restored. But. But I would suggest that for the most part, the biblical text is representing the ebbs and flows of society and that the folks who are asserting certain norms and standards are doing so in relation to societal norms and standards. And so, yeah, I don't see any indication there's anything supra social or supernatural taking place in the practice of polygamy or its abandonment whenever that does happen.

John Dehlin [04:10:59] For those who want to make Jesus as heavy means someone who is married. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dan McClellan [04:11:06] There's an argument to make that it would be a little conspicuous and odd for him to be teaching the way he did without being married. And we never see anybody bringing that up. So that is a consideration. But at the same time, there is no mention whatsoever of Jesus being married. And so I would suspend judgment and say, I don't know. And I don't know that anybody has enough data to say one way or another. We can speculate about it, but I think that's all we're doing.

How the Concept of Hell Developed

John Dehlin [04:11:35] Okay. All right, we got two left.

Dan McClellan [04:11:39] Yeah. So the next hell is hell. The next day hell is the next one. Yeah. So this is a question that comes up a lot on social media is how the concept of hell developed. Because there are a couple of claims that I see floating around out there.

John Dehlin [04:11:53] One is that what's the modern idea of hell? First, that we're going to.

Dan McClellan [04:11:57] Oh, that this is this underground world of fire. And for whatever reason there's red all over the place. And you've got the devil ruling over people who are going to be tormented consciously for eternity.

John Dehlin [04:12:14] That's traditional Christian hell.

Dan McClellan [04:12:17] Yeah. And depending on how much detail you want to go into, people are probably going to draw a lot of imagery from a lot of medieval and later literature that tries to explore what's going on in hell. But there's the big claim that I see floating around is the idea that eternal conscious torment, the idea that the unrighteous are going to be punished forever and consciously so by God, is something that is not found anywhere in the Bible. And a lot of people make that point, particularly people who are atheists or are deconstructionists, make that point as a way to try to kind of alleviate the trauma and the harm of being raised under the constant threat of going to hell. And so I can appreciate and support the rhetorical goals of the folks who are doing that, but I don't think that it stands up to scrutiny.

John Dehlin [04:13:18] So wait, Jesus didn't talk about burning in eternal darkness, or Paul didn't say, if you're gay, you're going to burn in the eternal flames of hell. Hell, you know, supervised by Luz for himself.

Dan McClellan [04:13:32] So that's, that's the claim that I, I see people making on social media. And I don't think it's entirely accurate.

John Dehlin [04:13:40] Is it just made up or is there some basis.

Dan McClellan [04:13:42] There is some basis for it. So we have a development of the concept of hell and what we now understand as, as hell with the, the devil and the pitchforks and the fight fire and everything like that. A lot of that imagery comes from after the Bible was completed. In the Hebrew Bible, we don't really have a concept of divine punishment until the very last layers and maybe even the very last verses that were ever composed for the Hebrew Bible. I think Daniel 12 and Isaiah 66 have what seemed like the clearest gestures in the direction of a concept of eternal conscious torment. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we have the concept of Sheol, which is just the abode of the dead, period. Whether you're good, bad, or whatever, you go to Sheol. And this is an afterlife that is kind of murky, it's not clearly defined. There is a sense in which people are conscious of an afterlife in which they have some kind of access, access to strategic information, in which they can be referred to as deities. The story of the witch of Endor would suggest that Samuel was a deity in Samuel's afterlife. But Samuel is kind of upset about being bothered. So we have some kind of murky afterlife where people continue to exist, where they can influence the living, where they can exchange strategic information. And we know most of the this from material remains, mortuary remains, where people are provisioning the dead with protection, with light, with food, and are petitioning them and are invoking their name. And so there, there was likely a kind of Coco esque concept where your afterlife continued on as long as your name was remembered and invoked. And so we have something of an afterlife throughout the Hebrew Bible. I would argue that once we get into the exilic period, and once we get into periods where you have large empires oppressing Israel or Judah, and you have people inflicting all kinds of violence on this small, insular community, you begin to have people wondering about the fate of the world's truly wicked people, they don't seem to experience any hardships, any of God's punishment on earth. And so I think you begin to have speculation about the possibility of divine punishment in the afterlife. And I think this corresponds to the development of concepts of reward in the afterlife. And so people who are suffering under the oppression of violent empires are doing both, hoping that maybe in the afterlife I will experience some good, and hoping that maybe in the afterlife the wicked people who are responsible for all this oppression will experience some consequences. And so I think you have the concept of the divine punishment starting to take shape around the Persian, into the Greco Roman period. And so it's within Greco Roman Roman period Jewish literature, like the Book of Enoch, like some of the apocryphal literature, like some other texts, that you start to see three different perspectives on postmortem divine punishment developing. You have the notion of annihilationism, that divine punishment means once you die, you cease to exist. You have temporary torment followed by annihilationism, which means you are punished for a little bit, and then you cease to exist. And then you have eternal conscious torment, which is the idea that you are punished forever. And the very last verse of Isaiah talks about the fire not being quenched and the worm not dying. And this is something that pops up in some of the Greco Roman period literature and in the New Testament in a way that seems to move it in the direction of an eternal conscious torment. So in the New Testament, you seem to have all three of these perspectives represent. So what we've got is an inconsistent idea of what divine punishment in the afterlife will be like. And you have Jesus represented articulating all three of these ideas. Paul doesn't say anything about them. At most, Paul speaks about annihilationism, but certainly no eternal conscious torment. And in the book of Revelation, you get kind of the clearest idea of a hell as we might know it. However, the book of Revelation also says that death and hell will also experience a second death. In other words, hell itself will cease to exist, which would kind of complicate the notion that hell constitutes eternal conscious torment. And it's not until after the New Testament that early Christianity begins to whittle this down to something systematic and formalized. And it seems that the concept of eternal conscious torment bubbles to the surface as the concept that wins out in medieval Christianity. And that's the concept that gets represented in the literature from that time period and later. And so that's the concept that makes its way down to us today. And so there is Absolutely. A developmental trajectory towards hell as we know know it today that did not always include eternal conscious torment. But I think we do see it in the New Testament. And I think most scholars would say that among the different conceptualizations of divine punishment in the afterlife, we do see eternal conscious torment, and particularly in some of the Gospels.

John Dehlin [04:19:34] So two quick questions.

Dan McClellan [04:19:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:19:36] If you talk to a, a, a modern Jew, my understanding is they don't really believe in an afterlife. Is, is that right?

Dan McClellan [04:19:45] Yeah, I think Christianity and Judaism are an interesting, there's an interesting dynamic there because they part ways at a certain point and when exactly you can talk about the parting of the ways is still up for debate. But both of them are coming out of roots in Greco Roman period Judaism. And in a lot of ways Greek Christianity preserves some of those aspects of Greco Roman period Judaism while Rabbinic Judaism leaves them behind. And so things like the devil and hell and concepts like that are developing in Greco Roman period Judaism and are being preserved in Christianity, not so much within Rabbinic Judaism. And so contemporary Jewish tradition does not have a lot of these ideas. And I think some people assume that they are inventions of Christianity. And really what it is, is Christianity has preserved something that they inherited from a specific period within Judaism that Rabbinic Judaism negotiated away.

John Dehlin [04:20:49] Yeah. So again, am I wrong in saying that your average modern observant Jew doesn't have much belief in eternal life or heaven or the afterlife? Hell, Hell or heaven? Heaven. Or am I wrong?

Dan McClellan [04:21:00] At least not hell? I, I, I don't, I think there are certainly concepts of an afterlife, I would say among many if not all Jewish streams of tradition. Although I'm not a specialist in, in modern Judaism, so I wouldn't be the one to ask about that.

John Dehlin [04:21:17] Okay, two more cool questions regarding New Testament Christianity and how hell. I remember this American Life episode that I listened to a long, long time ago that talked about kind of a more well known Protestant minister that started studying hell and basically lost his faith in Christianity once he learned the real deal about the evidence or the lack of evidence for these teachings about hell. So what is it about the actual text of the New Testament and or of just the entire Holy Bible that causes traditional Christians to have a faith crisis as it relates to what they believed about heaven and hell versus what the Bible actually says? Do you know what I'm saying? What's the kind of path that leads some Christians to lose their faith regarding the issue of hell?

Dan McClellan [04:22:17] Well, I think in, and in those instances I wonder the degree to which the faith crisis is caused. Not Necessarily by better understanding the Bible, but by the realization that the tradition that has been inherited has misrepresented the text. And so I wonder if it's that the tradition itself falls to pieces. And as the tradition goes, the faith goes. Because for a lot of people, the tradition stands between the Bible and the individual. And it's the tradition that's the most important part. The Bible is frequently just a proof text. And the people who most strongly assert that it's all about the Bible are the people who are most strongly committed to the tradition. And so I think that a lot of people rest their faiths on the tradition. And as the tradition goes, so goes the faith.

John Dehlin [04:23:17] So they absorb this story that the Bible supports a hell governed by Satan with eternal flames that lead to eternal torment. That's the tradition they absorb, passed down as theology or doctrine from generation to generation. Then they say, wait a minute, does the Bible support this? And they don't find the evidence to support that tradition, which then sends them down a more a Christian rabbit hole. Is that what you're saying?

Dan McClellan [04:23:45] Yeah, I think so. Because I think what most people understand about the Bible is what has been mediated to them by their tradition. And deconstructing all of that can result in leaving the tradition behind or some kind of reconstruction of things. But in my experience, the folks that I've known who have gone through that process, the Bible is without the tradition there, mediating the Bible, I don't think they see much value left in. Excuse me, in trying to salvage the Bible in the absence of the tradition. Okay, but I'm sure there are many exceptions to that.

John Dehlin [04:24:33] Okay, last question. To what extent does the New Testament or the Bible overall support the opposite? This idea of spirits living on after death, of a literal resurrection, and of inheriting some sort of heaven where you live forever in some sort of euphoric bliss. Is that stuff Jesus taught? Is that stuff people who listen to Jesus came to believe and understand? Or is that also a narrative or a social teaching that got passed on that wasn't particularly biblical?

Dan McClellan [04:25:14] I think that's a separate developmental trajectory. And I think that in the New Testament Testament, we have a few different ideas. And I just interviewed a friend of mine, David Burnett, for an episode of our podcast that was just released today. And he's doing his doctoral dissertation on resurrection and deification. In Paul in particular, he would be able to go off on a much more interesting tangent than me. But I think some of what you have in the New Testament is the idea that that God's kingdom is an earthly kingdom that this is not about flying up to some kingdom in the sky like the old Mickey Mouse Jack and the Beanstalk cartoon, but about God's kingdom being established here on earth and living in that kingdom here on earth.

John Dehlin [04:26:05] While alive.

Dan McClellan [04:26:07] While alive, yeah. And there's an argument that Paul's idea

John Dehlin [04:26:12] is

Dan McClellan [04:26:15] that the resurrection is not a corporeal, material resurrection, but a resurrection in the sense of a spiritual ascent to a spiritual heaven.

John Dehlin [04:26:26] While alive in your mortal existence.

Dan McClellan [04:26:28] Yeah, for those who are alive at the second coming, but the dead would also have this resurrection as well. So I don't think the idea that we have today is unilaterally expressed by the authors of the New Testament. I think there are different ideas being expressed about what the kingdom of God is and what its relationship to heaven is. And so what we have today is kind of the product of looking back on all of these perspectives and trying to harmonize them and turn them into one single framework, and that results in the concept that is pretty widespread among Christians today. But, yeah, I don't think that is overwhelmingly the perspective that we find across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

John Dehlin [04:27:15] And just to sort of like really laser in, is it your understanding that Jesus was teaching basically a Mormon plan of salvation, that you were all spirits before you came here? Your spirits inhabited a mortal body. When you die, your spirit's going to go somewhere, and then someday your spirit's going to reside, resurrect with your body, and you'll live in some sort of heaven, either as an angel playing harps, or you'll become a God someday. Like, how much of that? Is it your understanding that Jesus himself was teaching in the New Testament?

Dan McClellan [04:27:47] I don't know that we see any of that really in the historical Jesus. I think we're a little closer to it with what's going on in the New Testament, particular, particularly in John. But certainly the idea of preexistence is something that if it's in there, it's under the surface. Preexistence is something that early Christians like Origen talk a little bit about, but I don't know how widespread it was outside of the writings of philosophically minded Christians like that. But yeah, the LDS plan of salvation is not something that we see clearly anywhere in the New Testament or within early Christianity.

John Dehlin [04:28:29] And was Jesus teaching, when you die, your spirit will live on and it'll ultimately be resurrected with your body and you'll live forever in heaven. Was Jesus teaching that?

Dan McClellan [04:28:40] I don't think we have any indication that historical Jesus was teaching that. But I think that that is something you can read in the New Testament, but it is also inconsistent. It's not a consensus view by all the writers in the New Testament.

John Dehlin [04:28:57] Okay, okay. And I guess that really quickly pulls the question of you just asserting your view on whether a Jesus, a historical Jesus, ever actually existed. What's your view? And the prevailing scholarly consensus on whether a dude named Jesus actually ever even lived.

Dan McClellan [04:29:17] I think I agree with the overwhelming scholarly consensus that there was a man named Jesus who was probably an itinerant apocalyptic preacher who brought upon himself the ire of the Roman state and was executed for probably for claiming to be instituting God's kingdom on earth. And shortly afterwards, stories started circulating about his is coming back to life and then the, you know, story goes on from there for early Christianity. But I, I think there's, there's probably a historical Jesus underlying the text of the New Testament.

Revelation, Apocalypse, and End Times Prophecy

John Dehlin [04:30:00] Okay, all right, we're, we're down to our last point for this session. Which is what? Revelations, Apocalypse.

Dan McClellan [04:30:08] Yeah, yeah, End times, Prophets. And we could make this one very short by just saying there are no prophecies about anything post dating the first century ce.

John Dehlin [04:30:19] Wait a minute. What about Gog and Magog and the two prophets being killed in the streets of Jerusalem and the Armageddon and Jesus coming again and coming up over the hill in the east? That's all about to drive 20, 30, 20, 50, right?

Dan McClellan [04:30:39] Well, hopefully not 3,000 or 4,000 CE, but no, the book of Revelation, which as we've already discussed, probably has no business being in the Bible. It presents a very problematic view of Jesus and of God. But it was written to exhort Christians to remain faithful in the face of persecution. And the degree to which early Christians were persecuted by the Roman state, at least organized persecution, is probably significantly overblown. But the idea is basically, hey guys, you need to stay faithful. You know, don't keep your eye on the prize. You're not supposed to engage in commerce with the Romans. Like the Mark of the beast idea seems to be kind of conflating the notion of kind of a counterfeit phylactery, something faithful Jewish people might have been using in the day with Roman monetary units, coins that had the depiction of Nero Caesar and had Nero Caesar's name on it, which through Gematria could be reduced to the number 666. And so the idea was basically, basically don't intermingle with the Romans. We talk about having one foot in Babylon and one foot in Jerusalem. Sometimes in the contemporary LDS Church, their idea was no foots in Babylon. You have to be 100% with us or you don't make the cut. And basically trying to exhort Christianity to faithfulness and to an insularity from the. The Roman Empire so that the Christian people. And at this time, Christianity was still a pretty hazy concept that had not solidified yet, but so that followers of Jesus would survive. And so there is a lot of apocalyptic imagery and symbolism going on in the text. And one. One of the reasons that apocalyptic imagery and symbolism has such durability is because it is ambiguous and vague and lends itself to all different kinds of interpretations. And so every generation can find ways to make it applicable to themselves. And so you actually have some Christians like Augustine, interpreting the prophecy of Revelation as having having already come to pass. In his time period, Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire and ruled the Roman world. And so this was, in Augustine's view, at least, a partial fulfillment of the idea of the millennial reign that, hey, look, we're in charge now. Everything has come to pass. And so there are ways that early Christians understood the prophecies of Revelation to have already come to pass. And other Christians, it was useful to them while they were under the boot of empire because they were the victims. And Revelation was a fantasy about overturning their victimhood. Once Christianity did take over the Roman Empire, a lot of people were like, well, what do we do with this now we're no longer the victims. It doesn't seem like this has a resolution. And so it probably dipped in popularity until it was saved by Athanasius of Alexandria and then later reinterpreted by Augustine to say, oh, this part's already fulfilled. And so every generation since then, since it had become embedded in our scriptural heritage, had to try to find ways to make sense of it. And so today we try to make sense of it by trying to. Trying to interpret these signs as indications that the Second Coming is here and that the end of the world is nigh. And so we have these. And now with the Internet and with AI and with all the different ways that people can manipulate imagery and sound and stuff like that, we're having all these ridiculous claims about having recorded the audio of angels bound under the Euphrates river mountain. And, you know, once the Euphrates river is dry, they're going to be released and they're going to go kill one third of humanity. And this terrifies people. And people who were raised with the idea of the Rapture and the notion that one day everybody's just going to be taken. That can really traumatize people, particularly people who struggle with living up to the mores and the expectations of conservative Christians. And the reality is these prophecies were intended to compel and motivate a group of followers of Jesus who were living less than a century from Jesus death. And I think we need to put behind us the harm that can be and continues to be caused by trying to find ways to understand the prophecies of revelation to always be just around the corner. I think it terrifies a lot of people. I was not raised with that view. So it's not a trauma that I have experienced that I can necessarily sympathize with, but I can certainly empathize with it. And I have certainly seen how other people have been harmed by it. And particularly with all the conspiracy theories online about how different governments, one world governments and different events around the world associated with the progress of science or progressive social causes and things like that, the notion that these are harbingers of the, of some kind of great destruction or of the second coming are just asinine.

John Dehlin [04:36:45] And just to kind of drill this point home a little bit further, let me reflect to you a few of the things I've learned over time in a question. Did Jesus himself teach that after he died he would come back in a literal sense and rule and reign and set up a 1000 year millennium, etc. Was that something Jesus taught?

Dan McClellan [04:37:13] I don't think there's any indication the historical Jesus Jesus taught that. I think most scholars would say that what is represented in the Gospels is an attempt to read knowledge of Jesus's death into Jesus's ministry. So whereas the historical Jesus probably was not anticipating being executed and so would not have been talking about, oh, I'm going to die soon and then I'm going to come back back, he was probably saying, I'm going to bring God's kingdom onto earth. But once he was killed, and you have the later development of traditions about resurrection and everything, as you tell the story of Jesus, you want Jesus to have known what was going on. And so you read these prophecies about his death and his second coming into his ministry. And so I would say the data indicate that that was something that was developed by the earliest revisers of Jesus's ministry following his death and the tradition of his resurrection. But in the Gospels, yes, we have Jesus talking about returning, but in the Gospels that return is supposed to take place within the very same generation that saw him die.

John Dehlin [04:38:38] Okay, that was going to be my next question. But so I have to write down that generation point because that was my next question. But I just want to note something I just heard you say. I just heard you say that there's no evidence that the historical Jesus taught anything about a resurrection because he wouldn't have expected himself to be resurrected. That's a very different, that's a catastrophic position as it relates to Mormon Christology or theology. Because if Mormonism, if there were two or three doctrines that Mormonism was going to be distilled to be about, it would be about Jesus overcoming sin and Jesus overcoming death. And what I just heard you say is the struggle of Jesus did, didn't even teach about overcoming death through resurrection. It wasn't even in his menu of teachings.

Dan McClellan [04:39:37] Well, I would say that at the time period the idea of resurrection was in circulation and Jesus probably believed that there would be a resurrection in the future. But I don't think there are any data that indicate, and I don't think the majority of scholars who address the question of the historical Jesus would suggest that the historical Jesus was conscious of his impending execution. And so when I say was not anticipating being resurrected, I mean to say he would not have been teaching during his ministry. I'm going to die, but I'm going to come back. But I think he probably would have believed in the resurrection. That would have been an ideology that that was in widespread circulation.

John Dehlin [04:40:24] But not that he would have been the first resurrected and the architect of resurrection.

Dan McClellan [04:40:29] Not that his execution and three day later resurrection was on the doorstep. I don't think the data indicate that we can read that into or reconstruct that within the historical Jesus.

John Dehlin [04:40:46] You understand that's pretty mind blowing that we're basically saying resurrection and Jesus being the starting point of the restoration of mankind, that that wasn't a core teaching of the historical Jesus. That's for a Mormon, for an orthodox Mormon, that's heretical. I mean that's devastating to Mormon theology.

Dan McClellan [04:41:12] Isn't. Certainly does not align with Mormon theology. But I think at the same time Latter Day Saints would suggest that the, well, at least the New Testament is not necessarily the core or the foundation of their faith and that they would probably disagree with the findings of historical Jesus research and that their faith does not necessarily have to have proof. And so yeah, it is something that disagrees entirely with Latter Day Saint ideologies.

John Dehlin [04:41:52] Okay, okay. The second point I think you just made, but I just want to reiterate it. I have been taught for a long time that like the apostles that survived Jesus's murder were expecting Jesus to come and in their lifetime to return. And that pretty much Every generation from what 0 CE to the present has expected or predicted that Jesus would come, including Joseph Smith's time. Right. Like every generation of Christians expects Jesus to come in their lifetime.

Dan McClellan [04:42:29] Fair. Yeah, yeah. I think there have been Christians who have tried to calculate it and have said, oh, it'll be in a thousand years or something like that. But overwhelmingly the preference is predicting it to come within a generation. And I think what is Joseph Smith quoted as having said about 80 years should wind up the scene or something like that when he was, he was at an age where he was not going to live to see 80 years. So it's overwhelmingly within the lifetime of the person making the prediction, but not exclusively. We do have people saying it's going to be beyond my lifetime.

John Dehlin [04:43:15] Yeah. So even Joseph Smith likely believed that Jesus would come either in his lifetime or shortly thereafter.

Dan McClellan [04:43:21] Sure, yeah. Yeah. I think that's what the, the evidence suggests.

John Dehlin [04:43:24] Because my Mormon, Mormonism was so defined by like signs of the times, reading revelations, and like my seminary teacher telling me that likely Jesus was going to come during his lifetime, but then also knowing that so many generations of Mormons previously who had passed away taught and believed the same thing.

Dan McClellan [04:43:48] Right, yeah, yeah. I think that's everybody's experience. And for the most part people are just hopeful that it's in the post to one degree or another. Even if it's not in my lifetime, hopefully it will be soon because that means it is not all for naught.

John Dehlin [04:44:08] Yeah. So again, a core part of Mormon doctrine in my upbringing was that there were the seven seals of revelations represents seven disc dispensations, and each dispensation is a thousand years. And that the second coming was going to come around 2008 CE. 2000 CE I called it AD but now it's called CE because each thousand years was a seal and a dispensation. And that by the close of the sixth seal would be the return of Jesus. Where then for the seventh seal or the seventh dimension, thousand years. And I think Cleon Skousen taught about this too, that Jesus would preside over a millennium for a thousand years. And the seventh seal, the 7,000 years, that the Earth was 6,000 years old, it would end up being 7,000 years old. And then the final judgment would wrap up a 7,000 year existence of the earth. That was Mormon doctrine to me. Is there any biblical foundation for any of that?

Dan McClellan [04:45:11] Not really. I mean, there is.

John Dehlin [04:45:16] I'm not making that up. Right. You've heard that before too.

Dan McClellan [04:45:18] A little bit. But I was baptized in the year 2000, so I was already at the part where people are like, well, it hasn't come yet. And, you know, now we're 23 years down the road, a quarter of the century almost. It's starting to seem like those are pretty fuzzy lines that people might have been drawing.

John Dehlin [04:45:40] So I will say there's been a marked decrease in end of times discussions between 1980 and today in Mormonism.

Dan McClellan [04:45:48] Yeah. Even since I joined the church, there's been a drop off in the.

John Dehlin [04:45:54] At least in official discourse. Right? Yeah.

Dan McClellan [04:45:58] Oh, yeah, there's. Yeah. There are a bunch of different ways to try to calculate timelines from the Bible. And I think in. According to the Jewish calendar, I think we're around the year 5800 something. Anyway, so we're not even to the year 6000 according to the Jewish calendar. So that might be. That might be the next day.

John Dehlin [04:46:25] There's still a shift, but the millennium's around the corner.

Dan McClellan [04:46:28] If they're going to retreat to something that might be where they retreat to,

John Dehlin [04:46:33] how many years does that give us? Are you going to predict the end of times?

Dan McClellan [04:46:35] I'm not.

John Dehlin [04:46:36] What number did you just give us?

Dan McClellan [04:46:38] 5,000, 5,800 something. I don't remember exactly.

John Dehlin [04:46:41] So basically 200 years from now, you're saying somewhere between 100. So Dan McClelland says Jesus is coming in approximately year 2,220. 23. Is that what you're saying?

Dan McClellan [04:46:54] Something like that.

John Dehlin [04:46:55] 2223. Dan McClellan said a hero of Mormon Stories podcast. No, you didn't just say that?

Dan McClellan [04:47:01] Not that I. Not to my recollection.

John Dehlin [04:47:03] Okay.

Dan McClellan [04:47:05] But yeah, there have been. Since the Bible was written, there have been attempts to try to align these calculations. And even like the Book of Daniel talks about years that are going to pass between stuff. And you had people trying to align that in early Christianity and in every century since then. And even today, you have people saying, no, each one of these is actually 100 years or a thousand years. And so if you do it right, it comes out to. And I think somebody made a video where they suggested that if you look at the prophecies and Daniel and work it out according to his calculation, the day that Israel became a state was supposed to be the day of the or. That's when everything came to pass. But he was like, but it all happened secretly and invisibly. And so we haven't seen the impact of it all yet. So There are people much smarter than me who have, have suggested that any attempt to try to calculate any of this stuff is just hokum, pure and simple. And I tend to think they are drawing a tighter bead on reality.

John Dehlin [04:48:25] So having said all this, there's Lori Valo and Chad Dabel and the whole prepper movement. How would you convince a modern Mormon, Mormon prepper, or a modern Christian prepper that Revelations isn't about signs of the times for modern America?

Dan McClellan [04:48:45] Basically, I don't know if folks in traditions like that are open to being convinced, but let's say they were open.

John Dehlin [04:48:55] How would you say Revelations is about the 50 years following Jesus death and not about 2023?

Dan McClellan [04:49:05] Well, I would try to lay out how the symbolism functioned in its time and try to show that the more we try to work some of those predictions into the contemporary world, the more we have to overlook. Like I saw somebody who was trying to suggest that the angels being released and they're going to kill one third of humanity and they're going to be alien by a 200 million horsemen strong army where the horses have lions heads and they breathe fire and their tails are serpents and they have multicolored breath plates on and all this, this is

John Dehlin [04:49:43] the worksheet my kids got in primary,

Dan McClellan [04:49:45] you know, and somebody was. And you know, and there were a bunch of different ways that people are like, that's exactly how I would describe tanks or traps, cranes or all this other kind of stuff. And it's like, no, if you were in the first century, you would use a siege engine to describe a tank because that would look an awful lot more like a tank than a rider on a horse. And some people are like, well, if China and Russia got together, they could have a 200 million man army. And it's like, no, they would have about a 7 million man army and, and not nearly enough horses. You have to squint at these prophecies so that the details all blur so that you can isolate one corner of them and say, this reminds me of something going on right now. And that's just wishful thinking and Texas sharpshooter fallacies. And so I, I've never run into people like that who are open to being convinced. But I would try to show this is how this is functioning in its first century context. This is what these symbols mean. And you can't find a way to make those symbols function in a 21st century context without deciding. We'll just ignore all the rest of this stuff. And even the timeline, the, the seals that are being broken. So the seventh seal is broken and then you get the seven trumpets. And then with the seventh trumpet you get the seven bowls. Like they're all embedded like Russian nesting dolls in each other. And they're all kind of cyclical because you have events where like what is Babylon is destroyed and then a couple of whatever is later, Babylon's still around. And so it is not all consecutive. It is not chronological anyway. And so there are just so many complications to attempts to try to read contemporary history into these things. But folks who are committed to it, I found are. They don't, to quote a movie that I grew up with, they just don't listen to research reason.

John Dehlin [04:52:08] Well, I'll end this topic and maybe this whole episode with this final point, which I'm sure has been lost on you. These preppers, these millennialistic Mormons come by the beliefs honestly in the sense that the church bears the name the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Saints and Joseph Smith himself was millennialistic and believed that Jesus was probably going to return in his lifetime, if not soon later. And then you've got prophets from Joseph Smith until relatively recently, especially Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie that were super amping up signs of the times and this whole any day now millennialistic type of thing. It's almost as if if the modern LDS Church is built on the foundation of Christian millennialism and end of times, the church bears that name other than Jesus Christ. The most prominent aspect of our name is the millennialistic eminent nature of Jesus return. And so in some sense, just like I was highlighting the problem with questioning the historical Jesus teaching of a literal resurrection for everyone and for himself. Once we start questioning the literality of the imminent nature of Jesus millennialistic return, we're striking at the foundations of fundamental LDS Church truth claims, aren't we? Or are we not?

Dan McClellan [04:53:48] Well, I think history has been doing that since the death of Joseph Smith. So if it's problematic for us to question how soon this is coming, then was it problematic for the generations that have gone before since they would have been right to doubt that it was at the doorstep and we can go back 2000 years, all the way to the life of Jesus. It's just what history has borne out. And so I think with 2000 years of experience, we ought to be to the point where God is not expecting us to become celibate monks. And that's the way you prepare for Jesus Second Coming. At this point, I think the expectation is that people try to live their best lives and try to help improve living circumstances for everyone around them. And I think that's about as prepared as God expects anybody to be at this point. Because if we all go live in caves and swear off sex and bathing and expect that God's going to be back and he's only going to take the most extremist, most preparest from among us, that's a pretty ridiculous expectation after 2000 years of none of that working. So. So, yeah, again, I was not raised with these anxieties with any of these teachings. None of these were distilled in me as a child. And so I have not been.

John Dehlin [04:55:26] Or as a youth or as a teenager. Right.

Dan McClellan [04:55:28] Or as a teenager. Right, right. So as I'm transitioning into adulthood, I'm not having any of this woven into the foundation of my consciousness. Consciousness. So it's not something that I have ever. It's not something that has ever.

John Dehlin [04:55:46] It didn't shape you like it did me and many others like me in my generation.

Dan McClellan [04:55:50] Yeah. And this is one of the reasons that when folks come to me with asking for help with faith crises, I'm the last person in the world, I think, who's going to actually be able to help because I can't relate to a lot of the perspectives that are informing these faith crises.

John Dehlin [04:56:14] But you can around the social justice, the marginalized groups. I think you're very good at empathizing with people who have concerns about marginalized groups. It's more about the doctrinal and theological and historical teachings that have caused people to trip up.

Dan McClellan [04:56:31] Right? Yeah. Yeah. These are not things that cause me great anxiety. They don't keep me up at night. They don't make me feel inadequate or less than. And so those are anxieties that I've never had to wrestle with. And so I think I'm able to treat them a lot more abstractly, which makes them a lot easier. A lot easier to treat as ideologies that have developed as people have tried to make sense of all of this rather than things that have come down on high and that have been driven deep into my brain and my psyche.

Closing Reflections and Where to Follow Dan McClellan

John Dehlin [04:57:11] Well, I love these five hours that we just spent and I appreciate everyone. I hope those of you who have viewed or listened have found this valuable. Dan, I'm super grateful that you would. Would be so generous with your time and share your infinite knowledge, your endless knowledge and experience and wisdom with us if you had to summarize how we should view the Bible. I don't think you would like the characterization that Says, you know, some people might want to take from all this, the Bible's a hodgepodge, it's just men. There's no inspiration to it. It's not historical, it's racist and sexist and homophobic. You know, it's just a bad book that should be thrown away. I think you would object to that sort of characterization, although some would want to take the things you say and try to project on you or project on the world that that's the way we should view the Bible. Let's just say that's the worst faith interpretation of what you're trying to say about the Bible. What would be the best faith interpretation about what you're trying to say about the Bible? Bible and how we might be better served, all of us, believers and non believers, in and out of the church, in and out of Christianity. What would be a better faith interpretation of a summary of what you're trying to say about how we might view the Bible?

Dan McClellan [04:58:38] I think the Bible, like all texts, is absent of inherent meaning. And so I, I think when we talk about the death of the author, the Bible is the Bible's experience. Probably the most repeated, most public. That author has died numerous times over, and those authors have died numerous times over. But the Bible is what we make of it. And so my concern is more about how people deploy the Bible than with the Bible as an artifact. Because there are people who have done wonderful things with the Bible, there are people who have done awful things with the Bible. And I think the Bible itself is the product of a lot of different motivations, a lot of different people operating under a lot of different influences. And so there are many different theories about how inspiration can work. And I don't think from a database perspective we need to appeal to any of them to recognize that the Bible becomes what becomes in the hands of whoever is wielding it, what they are wielding it to be. And that makes the more important consideration who is wielding it and for what reasons. And that's why most of the time what I'm critiquing, if I'm critiquing, is how it is being deployed rather than the things that the original authors were trying to do. Obviously, there are many features of the Bible that are values that I vehemently disagree with and reject and condemn in many cases. And there are other aspects of the Bible that I think are incredibly valuable and that we would do well to implement today. But ultimately what it comes down to is who's deploying it and why. And that's going to remain the my main concern when I engage in trying to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible. So I think one of the pieces of misinformation that I'm frequently trying to combat is precisely the notion that there is something inherently good or evil or inspired or not inspired about the Bible, because there is nothing inherent in the Bible.

John Dehlin [05:01:02] Beautiful. And for someone who has probably learned more about and come to understand the Bible better than any of the rest of us ever will, can you say that you, knowing all this about the Bible, can still find deep spiritual and moral value from a personal study perspective?

Dan McClellan [05:01:29] Absolutely. I find that kind of thing all the time. It doesn't really make its way into my public social media content. But because the Bible can become what people need it to be, I generally try to seek out of it more constructive, more productive, more progressive things. And those things are there to be found. But you also have to recognize that the other stuff is in there, too. I don't think it's helpful to try to sanitize the whole thing and say the Bible is unilaterally one or the other. But if you go in there looking for lessons, you can learn those lessons, whether it's because the Bible has something good to be generated within it, or if it's because the Bible has something bad to be generated from it that we can then learn from by saying, well, today we need to do the opposite. So there are, there are many different ways, I think, to try to find the good in the text, but never in the absence of acknowledging the bad. And that is, again, primarily the way it is wielded, whether historically or today. That's the primary manifestation of the bad had.

John Dehlin [05:02:51] Beautiful. All right, well, that ends part two of my. My series with Dan McLellan. I still hope, whether it's today or another day, to do part three, which will be Dan's attempt to summarize his perspective on ways that an educated, intelligent, informed Mormon can still believe in Mormonism in a healthy and constructive way. And to be honest, the reason why I really want to do that episode is because these episodes with people like Patrick Mason or Richard Bushman or Terrell Givens or Fiona Givens that I've shared historically, have been some of the most valuable episodes of all, particularly for questioning Mormons that still want to maintain belief or affiliation with the church, but simply don't know how to do it in the face of difficult history, science, historical criticism, et cetera. And so I hope that you will still be willing, in spite of your generosity or my Endless. I don't know, just affection for length and duration of episode. I hope you'll still be willing to come back for that part three, because I am very certain that for many will be the most important part of this entire series. Because, you know, many want to see the church die and disappear, or religion dire disappear. I'm not one of those people that believes that the end of religion means the fulfillment of humanity in the most positive sense. I am one who still believes that religion and even Mormonism contribute a lot of positive things to society and culture separate from the truth claims. And so if there's a way for people to be healthy, happy, constructive Mormons, I want there to be a way for them to be that. And if the church is gonna. If the church is almost as rich as God, and at this point, and it's going to exist like the Catholic Church for centuries to come, why not have it be as healthy as possible, which means people finding ways to believe and to engage in healthy manners. And I think you would be able to provide people with some pathways to do that. And that's why I wanted to do part three.

Dan McClellan [05:05:23] Okay, can we do it? Absolutely.

John Dehlin [05:05:26] Okay. But first we have to have a potty break and maybe a lunch break and decide if today works or not.

Dan McClellan [05:05:31] I don't think today is going to

John Dehlin [05:05:32] work, so we'll have to have you come back for part three.

Dan McClellan [05:05:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [05:05:35] All right. But before we end, can you please plug all the things that you plugged at the beginning so that we can also help you get the financial and, well, to get eyeballs and ears on your amazing content and also to help the work that you do continue to be financially sustainable for you and your partners.

Dan McClellan [05:05:55] Well, I appreciate that. I think the I go byclellan M A K L E L A n on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter, as well as on YouTube. And so that's where I produce most of my content. I've also got a patreon@patreon.com M A K L E L A N where I offer some incentives for folks who subscribe there and do live streams and things, things like that. And then we've also got our podcast, the Data Over Dogma podcast, which you can find on YouTube at YouTube.com @DataOverDogma. Wherever you get your podcasts, it's available. If you want to go straight to the website, it's dataoverdogmapod.com and then there's also a Data Over Dogma Patreon as well. And then I also teach online course courses. Now, I've teamed up with a couple of other professors of New Testament and Early Christianity, Professor Candido Moss and Professor Robin Walsh. And our group is called didaskaloy.com, which is D I-a S K a L O I dot com, which is a Greek word that means teachers. And I've got a class upcoming September 20th. I'm going to be teaching about the three different, different main biblical accounts of creation. So the two at the beginning of Genesis and the other one that I think I briefly mentioned today, that's kind of scattered around in a few different places. And yeah, I'm generally just around. I'm habitually online, so I'm presenting at a conference in November. I'm working on a book. Well, shortly we'll be working on a book. So there are going to be many ways to find and engage with my content in the future.

John Dehlin [05:07:48] And some of the past courses that are available online right now include the

Dan McClellan [05:07:52] first one I did was on the Israelite goddess Asherah. I did one on Adonai and El as two originally distinct deities. Done one on the Book of Revelation. I think that was the last one that I did done one on homosexuality in the Bible. I've done one on the development of the concept of the devil, and then I've done one on the biblical canon. And I think that's all the ones that I personally have done.

John Dehlin [05:08:17] And these are all accessible now. Right. You can watch those.

Dan McClellan [05:08:20] Those are recordings that are available for

John Dehlin [05:08:22] purchase on that website you just told us.

Dan McClellan [05:08:24] Well, that website is the one we'll be using going forward, but you can go to mcclellan.org M A K L E L A N dot org and I have all my the whole back catalog.

John Dehlin [05:08:34] Beautiful.

Dan McClellan [05:08:34] You can find those. Those there. Yeah.

John Dehlin [05:08:37] Well, on behalf of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of viewers and listeners, Dan McClellan, we wish you a life of a long and prosperous healthy life. Because I think one of the things that's most unique or interesting about you is your fandom spans believing Mormonism and ex Mormonism. Pretty much everybody is really happy with the work you're doing. And I'm sure that also I'm sure that within the Christian world, I mean, you're always going to have you can't do anything worthwhile in this world without having enemies or opposition. But I imagine within the broader Christian world, there's a broad span of types of believers or Christians and ex Christians that are also very grateful for what you're doing.

Dan McClellan [05:09:33] That's been my experience so far which has been wonderful and I appreciate that very much.

John Dehlin [05:09:38] So keep it up.

Dan McClellan [05:09:39] Thank you. I will.

John Dehlin [05:09:40] And thanks for coming on Mormon stories, Dan McClelland and finally support Dan, give him money, give him support, share this episode, share his work with everyone, all the good things to Dan and all the work he does in the future and in the past. Also, if you value this type of content on Mormon Stories, if you if you appreciated last episode, this episode and if you want to see the episode to come, you could also support the Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories and me and my staff by going to MormonStories.org clicking on the Donate button, becoming a monthly donor and that's how you keep Mormon Stories alive in addition to supporting Dan. So thanks everybody. Thanks to everyone who makes this possible. Thanks again Dan and we'll see you all again soon for part three of my series with Dan McClellan. Thanks everybody. Take care.

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