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Dan McClellan is an award-winning scholar of the Bible. Today, we talk about his fascinating personal journey from academia to TikTok. And why he’s chosen to attend to questions about the Bible, and challenge people who want to translate it, or negotiate with it, to the benefit of their own dogma. We also talk about how Dan squares this with his own faith—interestingly, he became a Mormon at the age of 20.

As you’ll hear Dan say, he thinks there is room for people to have faith and think critically. And he himself does not build his faith on a set of truth claims that are unquestionable.

Dan is my favorite kind of nerd. He shares so many stories and tidbits from the Bible and ancient history that kind of blow my mind. We talked about how there was a time when God actually having a wife was very important to people. And then what happened when people in positions of power decided they didn’t like that. We also talk about how sex was understood in ancient times. And how these different ideas continue to play out and impact culture today.

 I agree with Dan that it's a shame that we lose so much history and we silence so many voices when we just try to flatten the whole Bible, and edit history. But I love how his perspective is an antidote to that—and how his work serves as a map for how we can approach these bigger questions and debates in our own lives.

I hope you find it equally helpful.

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture

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ELISE:

It's really nice to meet you. Congrats on the book.

DAN:

Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

ELISE:

I have been following you. I think I found you on TikTok even though I literally have spent five minutes on TikTok in the course of my life, but you were there. I'm honored. I was like, what is this stitching and this enterprise? But I love, and I follow you on Instagram as well, and I love watching you nerd out on people in a way that's totally unexpected.

DAN:

I love it too. That's why I managed to turn it into a career and it's worked out so far.

ELISE:

I know. Well, let's talk about your career. You're a fascinating figure to me. You seem to be a person of faith as well, but you bread and butter is attending to these questions about the Bible and challenging people who would want to translate it or negotiate with it to use your words to the benefit of their own dogma, right?

DAN:

Yeah.

ELISE:

How did this happen?

DAN:

Well, my concern for trying to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible goes back long before TikTok, and it's kind of ever since I started in my undergraduate and then in my different graduate programs studying the Bible, I realized I was being made aware of positions and perspectives and data and resources that not everybody had access to, and there was a big gap between what I was learning and what I knew. The discussions going on in the pews and in the street and online were, and so it's kind of a perennial discussion going on within the academy of how do we make this accessible to the person on the street and not just how do we open the doors and let them in, but also how do we digest it so that you don't have to have a background in all these academic debates and all this literature from the 19th century and all that kind of stuff.

And that's a discussion that has been going on for a long, long time. On Facebook, I got together with some friends and we occasionally would address claims that were coming up about new artifacts that had been discovered that were forgeries and all that kind of stuff, but it never really got an awful lot of traction. Our reach was pretty limited. And then during the pandemic, I started to see people sharing TikTok videos on Facebook and on Instagram and on Twitter that were addressing issues that were right in my wheelhouse, issues that were being addressed within biblical scholarship. And I thought TikTok was just for disrupting Republican presidential campaigns from Korea and dancing, and that was about it. So I started lurking on TikTok to see if there was an appetite for these kinds of discussions. And it turned out there was a pretty robust community of folks.

Some of them identified as deconstructionists. There were an awful lot of atheists, there were an awful lot of apologists. There were an awful lot of just religious folks looking for discussions about all this stuff. And so I created an account and thought I would just continue to lurk for a while and see if this was something I might want to wade into. And then somebody posted a video about the Jordan led codices, which is an example of one of these hoaxes where somebody released a press release saying that all these modern forgeries were from the first century CE and they were Christian literature and all that kind of stuff. And I had 10 years before been involved in the groups that were trying to push back against those claims while they were being made. So I was intimately involved in that whole affair. And so I thought if I'm ever going to get involved, it's going to be now.

So my first video that I ever posted on TikTok was four years ago, I think was almost to the day was my first video addressing the Jordan led codices, and it got more attention than I expected it to. So I started making more videos and seeking out more of these claims about the Bible. And I wanted to try to position myself as just trying to be an umpire, kind of calling balls and strikes. I wasn't playing for any team, I was just there to try to share the data. And that has never been very popular because usually what people are interested in is the things that validate their worldviews, their identity politics, and I was trying to skirt around all of that to some degree, and to my surprise, there was a lot more interest than I anticipated. So it's just gone downhill from there.

ELISE:

And here you are.

DAN:

And here I am.

ELISE:

The most delightful type of nerdiness. I mean, I just geek out on your stuff and it's interesting. So for context, just for you, I think most people listen to this podcast know my father's Jewish, my mother, she calls herself a recovering Catholic. I went to an Episcopalian high school and I consider myself a person of faith. It's more of an experiential thing for me, and I'm very interested in the Gnostic gospels and through Mary Magdalene have become very interested in Jesus as both the cultural figure and trying to understand what he was trying to say. So I love this, but I also have no skin in the game except similar to you. I don't want to see the Bible. I recognize that it's an artifact that comes from a specific time and place and culture that doesn't necessarily align with where we are or would like to be or profess to now.

But I recognize the Bible was written at a time of ethnographic and tribalistic worldviews and that it's hard to take that or reconcile the two or re-litigate it. And then I've just become over time increasingly interested. I think the first person for me was Bart Irman and misquoting Jesus and reading a bunch of his books. That was a door opening for me into, oh, what are we doing here? This is clearly this ongoing act of translation, and this is something that we've argued with and debated in a Jewish tradition, certainly over time. So how are we at this place of intimacy or where people believe are holding fast as something as it was and not as it needs to be negotiated. Now you have, I mean, I think Bart became an atheist right after being someone who believed in the interim word of God as a child, but have you had a crisis of faith or is that just completely separate from your day job?

DAN:

That's just completely separate from my day job, but I would say, no, not really. I actually became a member of the LDS church when I was 20 years old.

ELISE:

Oh, interesting.

DAN:

I came into the church with a lot of my own ideas about science, about how the world around me functioned about all kinds of different things. And what I tell people is that I was never disabused of any of that. No one ever sat me down and said, you seem to think all this and we need to correct you on that. I'm sure there were folks who just counted on the system, maybe conditioning it out of me or something like that. But there were also an awful lot of people who shared my worldviews. And so the groups within which I have run as a member of the LDS Church have not really challenged many of those things. And so for me, studying the Bible was always about trying to understand it on the terms of the authors and editors. And I've never really had particularly strong feelings about the Bible's in Errancy or even its inspiration.

And so a lot of this is not overturning much for me. It's primarily just enriching and deepening my understanding of the literary, the rhetorical, the ideological backgrounds for the community that I've become a part of. And so you talk about how it's more experiential for you. And within the cognitive science of religion, there are a bunch of dimensions of religiosity that can be looked at. There's the experiential, there's a communalism to religion that is something that makes it important and meaningful for an awful lot of people. There is the ideological and the dogmatic, but a lot of that is an outgrowth of the way Protestant Christianity has developed since the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. It has more to do with some of those ideas about authoritative knowledge. And so a lot of people tend to think of religion as just a set of truth claims, and that's really Protestant Christianity that has tried to make religion into that.

But when people engage in what we label religion, there are a lot of different things that are intersecting there beyond just truth claims about deity and things like that. And so there are a lot of things that keep people in religions beyond those things, and the new atheists come in and say, oh, well, the fundamentalists are the more pious ones, and they're doing everything the way they're supposed to. And I don't think that's a really good argument either. I think there's room for folks to have faith and think critically as well. But for the folks who are at the levers of power, the folks who are concerned for gatekeeping that power, the folks who are engaging in the boundary maintenance for these groups, they have much larger concerns. And so they for the most part, try to reduce religion down to, and particularly Christianity, down to the identity markers that serve their interests or that they're in control of. So all of that is a rambling way to say that religion is a lot about a lot more than truth claims. So because for me, I never had this foundation of this set of truth claims that are inviable and unquestionable, it has not really challenged.

ELISE:

You became a Mormon at age 20. That feels like it might be an unusual path.

DAN:

Definitely an outlier.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm from Montana, so I grew up with many, many, many Mormon friends and spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City on airport delays.

DAN:

You got a new airport now. My brother flew in last night and was like, the airport's different. And yeah, they completely tore it down and rebuilt it.

ELISE:

It's very far, just very far between gates. Yeah, I spent a lot of nights in Salt Lake. There's a weather delay and you're spending the night. It's just how it works in that part of the country. The thing too, I mean, reading your book was fascinating. I learned so much. And again, I'm not a theologian, nor am I a Bible scholar. And yet even this idea as a Jew, I know that the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament is full of loss, but this idea too, that morality and law that maybe these weren't even actually practiced, they were more just a collection or revisioning of Hammurabi's code and other legal codes from across the area. I'd never made that connection.

DAN:

Yeah, that's something that surprises a lot of people. They think of the Bible as if they think of it literally, they think of Moses having written down these laws on these tablets, and that then became the law of the land. Whatever they were using before got thrown out the door and the commandments were established. And even folks who try to engage the academic side of it still think that, okay, we had the covenant code, we had the Holiness code, we had the priestly code, we had the Deuteronomy code. They still tend to assume that these were operative laws, that these were things that were in force as soon as they were written, whether that was in the 12th century, BCE or in the sixth century, B, c, E. And we have very close parallels with Mesopotamian literature where we see these monumental inscriptions that have the law codes on them like Hammurabi, like the many others that are out there.

But we also have a bunch of texts from court cases and from lawsuits and things like that. And in addition to the fact that a lot of the things that are being determined in the courts don't align with what's in those law codes, never once does any court actually say, this is based on Hammurabi's code, this is based on the laws of lipid ra. This is based on, or namo. It seems that there is a complete distinction between the law codes that were public and then what was actually going on in the courts. And likely that's the exact same is true of the biblical literature. And a lot of people like, well, that doesn't make any sense. That just doesn't compute for them today. And I think there's a wonderful analog, and that's the 10 Commandments that gets posted outside of courtrooms and things like that.

We've got all over the country, we've got examples of the 10 commandments that are posted somewhere, and yet you go into the courtroom and never once will anyone say, well, this is based on the sixth commandment. Well, this is based on the third commandment. And those commandments have absolutely no authority within the courtroom. They're out there for propaganda, they're out there to be symbols of things. And so I think it's very similar to what was going on. This was propaganda. This was something that was intended to one. A lot of the scribal schools were probably using these things for as scribal exercises. You get into school and it was like, all right, copy the Covenant code and code, and they copied it down. That's probably why it was transmitted. And we don't see any evidence that there was widespread knowledge of these laws until around the middle of the second century, BCE, with the Hasian kingdom and the Maccabees and all that kind of stuff.

And it's likely that once the Judeans had the semi-independent kingdom all over again, they use those laws to establish an identity. And that's what those laws were doing for Hammurabi and others as well. Establish authority, establish identity. And that's why one of the earliest things that we see in Jewish literature is halachic literature is attempts to interpret and supplement the laws because they're inconsistent and there are a ton of gaps. And so they wouldn't actually work as formal legislation to govern the jurisprudence on the ground. And so as soon as that starts happening, everybody goes, oh, this isn't going to be enough. This is not going to work. In addition to the fact that we've got all these contradictions, it's not addressing an awful lot of the stuff that we run into on a day-to-day basis. And so on every point, it just fails as actual jurisprudence. It probably was never enforced until, like I said, we get to the middle of the second century, B, CE.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I know people think about this, but I don't know that it actually connects if you don't take a second to think about it deeply, but that these books, this scripture, the Old Testament, certainly the New Testament, these were iterative, edited, translated, mistranslated, moved from language to language. And that when we think about the New Testament, Jesus didn't write, he spoke then he was sort of recounted decades, centuries later. And yet we think of these things as these sort of baked artifacts rather than these texts that have shifted and moved throughout time and or been edited. I thought that was, I didn't know about as I'm probably mispronouncing everything, but this idea that God in the earliest tradition had a wife potentially asra. This was totally news to me, and then that it was negotiated in and out. Was it Josiah?

DAN:

Josiah is the one that I think is probably mainly responsible for demonizing and vilifying worship of Astra. But yeah, that's another thing that I think it really comes to a head in the sixties and seventies. That's when there are a bunch of archeological discoveries that take place around the land of Israel and Palestine that demonstrate beyond a doubt that, yeah, this was going on. This was pretty widespread in the earliest periods of Israel's history. And a lot of scholars looking back at the Bible because when you point that out, the response that I immediately get from conservative Bible believers is, yeah, well, the Bible said there were apostates. The Bible said that was going on. And when you look closely at the Bible, you see there's a lot of negative stuff about Asra. But when you look at how the critical scholarship arranges the development of the Bible, none of that stuff comes before Josiah.

It's all Josiah and after. And we know that Josiah implemented this cult reform, this attempt to alter the cult the way that deity was worshiped. And yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense that this is what happened. And people, when they look at the Bible, they look back at the Bible, they're not thinking of this as a collection of texts that span 1100 years or so, and they're not thinking about how much things change over the course of just months and years, much less centuries in millennia. And so they kind of flatten it and they look at it all on the same chronological level and they think, oh, well, this passage over here, I can correlate to this passage over here to this passage down here and this passage up here. And they kind of play connect the dots. But things were constantly changing in response to constantly changing circumstances and needs and things like that.

And there was a time when God, having a wife was very important to an awful lot of people. And then there came a point at which people in positions of power decided they didn't like it. They wanted to get rid of it, and they did. And I think Josiah's campaign of cult centralization became one of a couple of the most significant and influential rhetorical campaigns in human history because it was picked up by later Judaism and became the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in different ways. And so they went from worshiping ancestors, worshiping a wife of God, worshiping God in a variety of different temples down to just one God and one temple with one priesthood. That's how everybody has imagined it was supposed to be ever since. I think it's a shame that we lose so much of that history and we silence so many of those voices when we just try to flatten the whole Bible and say, it all comes from one source and we can treat it as if it all came at the same time. I think that does incredible violence to the texts and to the authors who were responsible for those texts

ELISE:

And the erasure of women. Obviously that's a whole nother discussion, but that was also fascinating, this idea that this pantheon of gods had been replaced by there's just one God, and that actually the Bible doesn't even say that either,

DAN:

Right? There's one God who's in charge, but there are numerous gods. And that's another thing that I'm in the midst of some debates right now with other folks on social media about this, which is another not incredibly controversial position among scholars. If I go to an academic conference where I publish a journal article or something like that, and I say, there's no monotheism in the Bible, most everybody just goes, okay, what else you got? And it's not a big deal, but when you put it on social media, people just become incensed because that's such a strong dogma that has had 2000 years to get further and further entrenched. And people don't like seeing those dogmas torn up at the roots. So I think it challenges their worldview, and that's going to make anybody uncomfortable. They've got to fight back.

ELISE:

Well, and it's fascinating to watch you do your thing in the book, in the way that you translate the text and point out what is actually quite obvious if you read carefully, which is that there's a lot of us, there's talk of this collective divine body or entity, and that it's less, this is the only God and more this is the God that matters. And it's really interesting too, the way that you explain how was it 70 gods that there was this idea that every state had its own God, so as you were warring, your God was also warring, and that that's present in the Hebrew Bible.

DAN:

Yeah, and I think one of the most fascinating stories is based on this idea that every nation has its own patron deity, and they only have sovereignty within their own purview. A lot of people, it does not compute the idea that the God of Israel did not have power outside of the nation of Israel. They think of the story of the exodus. It's like, well, this is a story that developed later. But in earlier periods, you have folks like Naiman, the Syrian general comes down, he's healed in the Jordan River, and then he says, I want to worship Adonai the God of Israel when I'm back in Syria in my master's temple. And what does he do to be able to worship the God that can only be worshiped on Israelite soil? He takes two carloads of Israelite soil with him so that he can put that in the temple and now pretend he's done Israelite soil.

And we even see in two Kings three this fascinating story where Adonai promises via a prophet, a victory to a coalition, an mite Israelite Judah height coalition that wants to go punish Moab for throwing off vasic promises victory, and then they all take off and they're about to succeed. And then the king of Moab sacrifices his son up upon the city wall, and suddenly there's some kind of great fury that forces the Israelite and Judah height might coalition to retreat. And the word that you used for fury there in almost every other occurrence to that word in the Hebrew Bible, it refers to divine fury overwhelmingly to the fury of the God of Israel against Israel. But here most scholars are in agreement. Again, this is something that's not incredibly controversial among scholars, but the general public frequently hates to hear it. The text seems to be kind of reluctantly admitting that the sacrifice of the king's son successfully catalyzed the intervention of the Moabite patron deity because Adam and I was outside of their purview, Adam and I was in the purview of another deity.

And when the mobi king sacrificed his son that got the other deity involved, and that other deity who had home court advantage chased off God's coalition that had been promised victory and the prophecy was not fulfilled. And so I think it's a fascinating, we have in the Hebrew Bible a place where God lost in battle with another deity. And I think that being able to look at this critically and not bring these dogmas to the text and say, I refuse to believe that because I would never believe in a God that could lose in battle without those dogmas. I think the stories become so much more fascinating and so much more interesting and so much more exciting fun. I think some of these stories are very fun once you divest them of all these dogmas about what the text is allowed to say.

ELISE:

I agree. And as mentioned, my own faith is not tethered to books. I don't know scripture, I'm not quoting scripture, and I'm not looking to understand the world from a place of scripture. I know we're nerding out, but we're going to talk about what this has to do with current culture too, in terms of what's happening with the rise of Christian nationalism and fundamentalism that use these texts as a bludgeoning tool against women and marginalized people and the L-G-B-T-Q-I-A community, et cetera. So we're going to go there, but what is it, why are people so attached? What is it about this idea that this is a single voiced text, that this is the word of God, that this was inspired directly by God?

DAN:

What

ELISE:

Is that mentally in terms of the way that people experience religion? Is that religion or is that something else?

DAN:

Well, I think it is a feature of human cognition that falls within the boundaries that we've drawn around the intersection of a bunch of features of cognition and behavior that we've labeled religion. Now, these features go beyond those boundaries. You find the things that constitute religion outside of what we label religion. So religion is discursively, reified to use some $2 words. It is something that is created in and by discourse and does not exist outside of discourse. And this complicates some anti-religion rhetoric about how religion does this, that and the other thing. And the reality is that religion doesn't really exist on its own. It's just a label that we've slapped on some patterns that we have noticed. I think the idea that the Bible is inspired as inherent is historical, is univocal and all these things, these ideas developed slowly over time as people were figuring out how to engage with these authoritative texts that were being passed down and how to make them serve their interests as authoritative texts because kings have an authority to which they can appeal.

And usually that's enforced by violence. And that's true of a lot of people will say that the state is just basically a body that is authorized to use violence, but if you can appeal to a higher authority, then maybe you can leverage authority over and against a king or the state or something like that. And so as the scriptures came together, the idea that they were inspired probably came first, but as they came together, the implications of inspiration began to be debated. And people started wondering about, well, one, how do we delineate this group of texts? What's going to be in? What's going to be out? What's considered inspired? What doesn't? We need rules for that. We need to come up with something. But then once you have that final collection of texts and you believe that it has all come from a single source and it's all pointed in one and the same direction, then the implications of that begin to be debated.

And you have ideas about, well, that means if this text is inspired, then this text is entirely true and everything is in errand, and that means we have to follow it. And that means whatever moral claims it makes, we have to agree with. But there's a lot that disagrees with itself in the text. And so you have to find ways to smooth over those disagreements if you want the text to be this authority. And I think what happened is through these historical accidents, the text became this authority and this identity marker this way to determine who's a good member of our group and who's not. Are you going to sign on the dotted line regarding this understanding of what the Bible is? Are you going to subordinate yourself to the Bible? Are you going to subordinate yourself to the people who have authority over the Bible, the ecclesiastical leaders and things like that?

I really think it's the outcome of a long process of trying to structure power and trying to understand the relationship of these texts to, and so it became more of a rhetorical tool or a rhetorical instrument than anything else. So I don't think that it fell out of the sky x ni, hello in its complete and final form, and everybody immediately had a full and complete understanding of its nature and its function and its authority. I think those were things that came together over a long period of time as the implications of all these ideas were being fleshed out, and it turned into the thing that people now appeal to as the Trump card over any and all other claims or any and all other authority you can say, the Bible says so and that can't be challenged. That is inviable, that is above reproach for an awful lot of people, and that makes for a convenient Trump card.

But as I try to explain in the book, much better than I'm explaining now, I hope because it's a text that has no inherent meaning, that only gains meaning as it is interpreted. It's a Trump card for whatever people need it to be a Trump card for. It's a blank check basically for folks to read their ideologies and their identity politics into it and then turn around and say, the Bible says, so I get my way. And we're seeing that kind of thing right now. And unfortunately, there were a bunch of features of the biblical texts that have become cemented in a lot of people's identity politics and particularly right-wing authoritarian identity politics. And the question of L-G-B-T-Q-I-A identities and groups and things like that has long been one of those central identity markers. And the only reason that continues to be salient in our contemporary societies is because it functions as an identity marker, because it's a great way to decide where the boundaries are and who's in or who's out.

Are you going to do the costly signaling to show that you are going to subordinate yourself to what we say? And so not supporting the rights of trans people these days has become a very salient identity marker for an awful lot of folks where they can call you out in public and say, are you going to say a lot of politicians, they get out in public and they say Christ is king. And I'm sure you've seen people saying that on social media. And this was something that somebody started popularizing in an effort to try to root out people who were defending Jewish folks, and it was explicitly circulated as a way of finding out who's going to be on our side and who's not, so that we can then get together and attack or be against the other folks. And politicians have picked up on it, and I think of it as a means of showing that you're a real Christian. And the reality is that it's a means of drawing lines around who's a human, who's going to be dehumanized, who is worth our mercy and our love and our respect, and who's not, and it's phenomenally harmful. And now we even have people talking about this sin of empathy and how empathy is this poison that's going to destroy western civilization, which is another means of just trying to tighten the boundaries around the ingroup so that the outgroup can be more authoritatively and more effectively dehumanized and othered. Sorry for rambling.

ELISE:

No, no. You're in it. You see it. I don't see all these corners of the internet, but it's also one of those things where, well, Jesus was a Jew, whether he was the prophet or not is obviously a point of contention murdered by the Romans. And was this an agnostic gospel where he talks about having a feminine soul and a masculine body?

DAN:

Yeah, so the gnostic gospels talk a bit about that, and there are two sides of that. You have some of the stuff that sounds more progressive, but then you have the other idea that, oh, once everybody transcends the fleshly states, everybody's souls will become male.

ELISE:

Well, I like the interpretation that he is gender fluid and non-binary, and let's go with that.

First, let's talk a bit about abortion because that's one of those historical events, and I've spent a fair amount of time within trying to understand Phyllis Schlaffley's movement into a position of power taking on the ERA, even though she didn't really care about the ERA, but saw it as a vehicle for her own political growth. But the way that that gathered steam and that they chose abortion as this fundamental issue because they didn't want men to be able to escape the responsibilities of being a patriarch and essentially paying for the upkeep of women and children. And so to them, abortion, it wasn't a moral issue. It was a financial concern that if men had the availability of abortion or could require abortion, then they wouldn't be on the hook for staying with a woman and providing financially. So it was interesting to read about abortion, what you were saying at the beginning, and you don't go into it at great depth, but can you talk a little bit about how abortion is not really actually in the Bible at all?

DAN:

Yeah, there's no direct address of the practice of abortion anywhere in the Bible at best. There are some references to constituent elements of the debate. People talk about how life begins at conception, but that wasn't really the question until the last, probably since I was born. Prior to that, it was primarily when does a fetus become a person? When does its soul enter its body? Was the debate ever since even before Christianity arose, and in the Hebrew Bible, there are multiple indications that they didn't think a fetus became a person until it was born, including a passage where you have two different penalties that are assessed where a man accidentally injures a pregnant woman, and the two outcomes are, one, it causes her to miscarry, and then the other outcome is that it causes permanent injury or death to the woman. And if it causes death to the woman, it's what's called Tian justice.

It is a life for life eye for not tooth, for a tooth, which basically indicates that the pregnant woman is considered a full legal and moral person, which means you take the life of the perpetrator, but in the other outcome where it just causes her to miscarry, it's not onic justice. It's a fine, and it's not even a fine of a standardized penalty as it is with causing the death of somebody's enslaved person that's 30 shekels across the board. But when it comes to a fetus, the husband just determines what the fine is. They even talk about how it has to be approved by arbitration, basically, legal arbitration has to determine that it's not too exorbitant. And so what this I think clearly indicates is that they did not think of a fetus as a full legal and moral person. It was something less than that, something closer to property than to a person.

And we see this in the emphasis on the association of life with breath, even two of the Hebrew words that are frequently used to refer to human life, ach, which means spirit or nefesh, which can mean soul. Both of them fundamentally refer to breathing the neck area or to breath. And so there's very clearly breath breathing is constitutive or constitutive of human life. And this is why within Judaism, the life is thought to begin at birth. A fetus is considered water for 40 days, then it's considered a part of her thigh until birth, at which point it does not become a sole until either the head departs from the birth canal or if it's born in breach, the majority of the body departs from the birth canal. But when you get into Christianity, you have the influence of Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, and you begin to have different ideas about when the soul enters the body.

And you have the epicureans in the Pythagoreans, for instance, said that it happened at conception where the stoic said it happened when the baby was born and made contact with the outside air. And then the aristotelians said that it happened at the quickening when the fetus had fully developed. And within early Christianity, you had different debates about which one was right. And by Augustine in the fourth century ce, he establishes the consensus that would hold until the middle of the 19th century, which was that the soul entered the body around the quickening. And so abortion was not murder until and unless the baby was already moving on its own. And so the debate is actually a lot more complex and has a lot more moving parts than a lot of people want to acknowledge. Even within Christianity. And from Augustine until around the 1830s to the 1850s, the majority of Christians thought that an abortion was not murder unless it had passed the quickening and the fetus was moving on its own.

And even when Roe v Wade was decided, and I think I talk a little bit about this at the beginning of the chapter on abortion, a lot of the evangelical leadership didn't have an issue with it. They said, this is between a woman and her doctor and God, and it's not our business. Some of them came out in support of Roe v Wade and said, I think this is a good compromise where we've established 20 weeks or so is where you kind of trade off the agency and the ability to stop that life. And then we had you brought up Phyllis Schlaffley and the movement with the ERA, which was happening in the late seventies and into the eighties. And around the same time, we also had folks like Paul Wyrick and Jerry Falwell who also decided abortion would be a handy rallying cry on its own terms, not as an end to itself, but as means to another end.

Because what they were upset about was not men being off the hook for supporting a family, but they were upset that the government was forcing them to allow black students into their evangelical universities. And so they decided, we need more Christians in government. We need the silent majority to rise up so that we can start this religious right. And they decided that abortion would be the best rallying cry for that as well. And so there was a nationwide tour that they engaged on in for years where they went around getting evangelicals riled up about the evils of abortion. And obviously that dovetails nicely with Philip Chassis's campaign as well. And so you have a lot of different forces coming together in the seventies to get everybody upset about this, to decide that it's always wrong, it should always be illegal, and there are no instances where it is anything other than murder, which is really overturning the whole history of Christianity for the sake of some contemporary politics, which is a shame that not more people are aware of that

ELISE:

And the way people are manipulated. Phyllis Schaffley's interest was nuclear armament and wanting to be an ambassador to the UN. She was this far right wing nut who managed to use fear as a cudgel to band women together who were terrified that they would be turned out on the street. And it's wild to watch, and it's happening obviously today where these questions of who belongs and who doesn't and harm are used to turn us against each other for some other completely alternate desire. So let's talk too about this idea of homosexuality. The way you describe it is so fascinating that it's articulated in a power structure. It has nothing to do with sexual identity, it has to do with dominance. So can you explain what this is?

DAN:

Well, I start out with pointing out that human sexuality was understood on very different terms. It was nothing like how we understand it today. And I think one of the main differences is that sex was not an activity that was mutually engaged in by two equal consenting partners. Sex was something that an active sexual agent did to a passive sexual object. And the agency, the consent of that sexual object was usually irrelevant. They really had no say in the matter. And so while a lot of folks today want to try to assert that there's no such thing as marital rape, which is something on the right that we see a lot, that is just grotesque, that was more of a reality. You would've never seen Anciently, any man dragged before a court for sexually violating his wife because as his wife, that's what she's there for to be available whenever the two partners are on very different levels when it comes to power.

And sexual agency always flowed downhill. And there was this socially standardized hierarchy of domination and penetration where the penetrate was higher up on that hierarchy than the penetrate Ted. And the different sexes, the different genders plotted you on that hierarchy. And you were not supposed to go anywhere. But where that hierarchy says, and I think a fascinating illustration of this is the idea that we see in first millennium, BCE Mesopotamia, we see it in first millennium ce Jewish literature, this idea that it was inappropriate for a man to be on the bottom during sex with his own wife because that is to take a submissive position in an act of sexual intercourse. And because the man was supposed to be higher on that hierarchy that violated the hierarchy. And so that was a no-no. And so these mesopotamian sex omens say they're pretty short, but they say that if that happens, the man will lose his.

The text says his personal God, but the idea is his vitality, his masculine energy, he'll lose that for a month. And then there's a text in Talmud, I believe, where it says, if that happens, the man will be stricken with diarrhea. So we have a bizarre reflections of this idea that sex really has social and physical consequences related to the maintenance of this hierarchy. And so the reason that male same-sex intercourse was seen as such a violation of that hierarchy is because it takes the sexual agent who's supposed to be at the top of the pinnacle of that hierarchy and subordinates him and puts him in a lower position as one who is penetrate Ted. And that basically feminizes him, emasculates him. And so that's considered to be a severe violation of that hierarchy, and it becomes in Leviticus something worthy of death. And another illustration of the fact that this is all about this hierarchy in those chapters in Leviticus, if you look in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20, it's a bunch of prohibitions on the sexual partners that a man will take.

A man will not sleep with this, that, or the other except for one where it does prohibit a woman from a specific sexual partner. And that's only when that sexual partner is an animal because that's the only time where the woman would be the sexual agent and the partner would be lower down on the hierarchy of domination than she would be. And so when we recognize that their concept of human sexuality and their sexual ethic is built upon this unequal and grotesque concepts of how sex was supposed to work, I think it renders it really irrelevant. That's not to say that everything they said was wrong is automatically right, but it is to say that it's up to us to decide what's right and wrong in terms of sexual ethics. And we already do that. We've already overruled Paul's desire that everybody be celibates. He said, we should all be celibate.

And if you can't hack celibacy, it's okay. It's better to get married than to burn. And then you can have occasional prophylactic intercourse just to keep down the urges. You don't want them to build up to the degree that they cause sexual immorality. And he obviously understood that kind of sexual desire, heterosexual desire, although he wouldn't have understood it as such and wouldn't have labeled it as such. He obviously understood that to be something that needed to be addressed, to be something that needed to be satisfied if it was getting too pent up. But what about homosexual desire? It comes from the exact same place. There's no real difference between heterosexual and homosexual desire. So why would that not be something that should be allowed to be relieved so that it doesn't get too pent up? That's not something we can ask Paul.

ELISE:

And he also thought the end was near and there was no point in having children.

DAN:

He never talks about procreation, at least not in the genuine Paul in epistles because he tells everybody, stay in whatever circumstances you were in when God called you. The time is shorts. Jesus is coming back too soon for us to worry about trying to change our life situation. And certainly having children would be one of those. And when he talks about being celibate, he never says, unless you want to have kids, then obviously you got to get married. No, he says, be celibate unless your sexual desire is going to drive you to fornication or something like that. In which case do the prophylactic sex thing. It's never about having kids. And so when people base their sexual ethic and their demonization of homosexuality on the notion that it doesn't facilitate procreation, that has nothing to do with Paul's rationalization. That's something that we've made up. But again, that's generally what's going on. When we try to transfer their sexual ethic to today, we've got to change it all around so that it fits how we think about sex, because what they were thinking about in the ancient world is totally alien to how we think about it today. So it's got to be retrofitted to make it relevant to today. And if we're already trying to fiddle with it to make that round peg fit in that square hole, why don't we just let it be what it is and leave it at that?

ELISE:

And if we're going to be literalists, then people need to be gouging out their eyes. If they look at a woman with lust, there's some calls for castration, and we're also supposed to be polyamorous at times. I don't know if we're going to be literal then. There's a lot in there that I think we would not enjoy.

DAN:

Yeah, and within early Christianity, charging interest on loans was strictly prohibited. We seem to have decided we know better. Now. Every word of the Bible is negotiable. None of it is non-negotiable. And so we are the ones who get to decide. So it's up to us, which means that whatever decisions we do make, that's on us. Unfortunately, far too many people are making their own decisions to serve their interests, but then pretending that their hands are tied. It's what the Bible says, it's not what I want. It's just what the Bible says. And the reality is, no, it's what you want, even if it's what you want, because doing it gets you the other stuff. The access to power and resources allows you to keep black folks out of your university, allows you to force men to take financial responsibility for families. Whatever the ends are, you're in charge of the means. And so I think for a lot of people, it just reveals when they are so adamant about their hatred of and their desire to dehumanize and to other and to subordinate members of the L-G-B-T-Q-I-A communities, I think it just reveals that they find value in that. Not because the Bible forces it upon them, but because they just think it's a valuable thing to do. And that's usually where I end my videos by telling those folks they need to grow the hell up.

ELISE:

And do you spend so much time in the trenches here? Is anything effective or is it mostly just holding a line? Do you have any advice?

DAN:

There's a lot of research that would suggest that when it comes to these kinds of identity politics, all the facts in the world are not going to change people's minds because they're going to have their walls of defense up. Because when it's about identity politics, people are going to be very protective of their own self-esteem, their own sense of self. And so they're not going to let those walls of defenses down. There are two exceptions. Close personal relationships can facilitate bringing down the walls of defense, which can then facilitate more critical discussion, more critical thinking. And then the other thing, it tends to be intense personal experiences people have, and this is one of the things that contributed to the abolition of slavery, to the degree that it has been abolished, is some of the most fervent abolitionists in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, they only became abolitionists once they were exposed to the brutalities of slavery and suddenly realized, oh my gosh, this is horrific.

We need to do something about this. So I can share all the data in the world, and it won't change the overwhelming majority of people's minds. However, what I'm hearing from a lot of people is they actually share my videos and hopefully they will share the book with friends and family who trust them, and that hopefully will allow some people to let down their defenses so that they can think more critically about these things. So it's an inevitably losing battle, and I'm not going to win, but I think there are victories here and there. And even if all I'm doing is helping the folks who are already making their way to the other side feel better about it, feel more confident about it, feel more validated by it, I think for me, that's good enough. I get messages every day from folks who say that I have helped them be more comfortable in having left the faith or be more comfortable in remaining in their faith, or they've been able to repair relationships or understand their parents better or things like that. There are all kinds of ways that what I'm doing has made a difference for other people that I never could have anticipated. And so in that sense, I'm always winning. But in terms of the battle against the misinformation, the disinformation, the bigotry, all of that kind of stuff, that's going to take a long, long time and a lot of close relationships and intense personal experiences. But I have faith that one day we will overcome this. I don't think I'll live to see it, but I have faith that it'll happen one day.

ELISE:

I love Dan's mind. He is a total geek and I'm a nerd too. So thank you for staying with us. I think this is such an important conversation just because it's one of those cudgels that informs policy and shapes the way that people perceive the world. And so much of the mechanism is consolidated in fear and manipulating people to believe that if they belong or are in the group and not the out group, that they will be saved either by patriarchal power or I got. So I wanted to just read a short paragraph where he goes into some of the problems of accepting the inner receive of the Bible. He writes, “Does Speaker Johnson really believe this? Even where it explicitly endorses chattel slavery, even where it treats rape of a woman as a property crime against whatever man has rights over the victim's body, even where it acknowledges that the God of Israel demands child sacrifice, even where it insists women aren't allowed to teach and are supposed to just shut up because they were the ones who got duped by the talking snake.

What about where it endorses communalism? What about where it says, A man should gouge out his eye if that eye causes him to lust after a woman? What about where it says, the most pious people will castrate themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? Isn't that what the Bible says? Oddly enough, for most Christians today, the concern doesn't seem to be about figuring out what the Bible actually says as much as it seems to be about convincing others of what it says.” If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible.

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