Does the Bible say the Earth is Flat?

Dan McClellan Well, I hesitated. When I decided to make this video this morning for my social media, I was contemplating, "Do I really want to do this? I'm opening myself up for criticism." But I was like, "No, if I feel this way, I've got to go through with this," just because I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How goes the storm, Dan?

Dan Beecher Well, it seems to have left you and come to me.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher We live on opposite sides of the Salt Lake City Valley, and yeah. I'm hearing thunder in the background. I hope our listeners can't hear it, but if you can, we'll just call this a moody episode.

Dan McClellan Little ambiance, that's all.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Cuddle up. I love it.

Dan Beecher And speaking of moody- Moody ... we're going to have some fun with a conspiracy. We're doing "Conspiracy Watch"- Excellent ... to start off with. And then we're going to have opportunities for growth. I think that should be a self-help thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We're going to do Dan's self-help.

Dan McClellan And it's going to be me looking into a mirror, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan At an angle.

Dan Beecher You're good enough, you're smart enough, and dog-gone it, or God-done it. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here.

Dan McClellan Or you could just go all the way back to Shania Twain, "Gone and done it." Gone and done it.

Dan Beecher There you go. I like it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But no, you are going to be looking into a mirror a little bit because you've revised your position on something.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I am capable of growth from time to time. It is painful, and it leaves behind a foul-smelling husk. But we have opportunities for growth all the time, and I want to share a little bit about how... I don't think my position was necessarily wrong, but I'm going to revise it a little bit because I think I can point it a little more directly at the target. So we'll get to that at the second half of the show.

Dan Beecher Ooh, I made it sound all sexy and crazy and wild, and then you narrowed it down to the point where it almost doesn't sound like anything happened at all. But that's okay, we're going to have a good time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Everyone, stay tuned to hear how Dan was almost, but not quite, a little bit maybe wrong-ish.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Not the first time, and won't be the last time.

Dan Beecher But before that, "Conspiracy Watch."

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher So for today's conspiracy, Dan, you suggested this idea, and I tried to Google it.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher And here's the problem with Googling certain big conspiracies that have been widely and well refuted by respected sources.

Dan McClellan Is it all the porn that comes up?

Dan Beecher It's all the porn. It's a problem. No, the problem is that what you get is those respected sources and their refutations.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And their refutations very rarely include the real off-the-wall, dingbat stuff that you're looking for.

Dan McClellan There's not a lot of steelmanning going on when it comes time to refute some of these- Yeah ... asinine conspiracy theories. So when you want the juicy stuff, when I want to know exactly what their argument is, you- From their mouths. From their mouths, yeah. You've got to go into the trenches.

Dan Beecher And so here's the thing. What we're talking about today is flat Earth. And what I found, and I think this is why we're talking about it. I don't know, I haven't heard your argument yet, but I believe that this is why we're talking about it. If I type flat Earth, I get page after page after page of refutations of the flat Earth conspiracy theory.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And probably something at the top saying, "If you think the Earth is flat, here's a number for you to call."

Dan Beecher Right. Yeah, something like that. The flat Earth crisis line or whatever. What I found helped was if I typed in the word firmament.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Because that changes things a lot and gets us to the heart of one of the main reasons why people are eager to believe that the Earth is flat as opposed to a globe spinning in space.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So let's talk a bit about why the flat Earth conspiracy loops back to our subject matter, which is the Bible.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Do you want to start on that, or do you want me to start on that?

Dan McClellan Oh, okay. I thought you were still leading into...

Dan Beecher No, I was leading into you going.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Now you say words.

Dan McClellan Just to pull the curtain back a little bit, I imagine that sometimes people are like, "They must have a script." "They've talked about this stuff beforehand." No, what usually happens is we'll text each other and be like, "What do you want to talk about?" "Oh, I thought of this, I thought of that." And then the other will go and poke around and do some research, and then we get together and we're like, "Okay, hit record.

Dan Beecher So anyway..."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that's- It's a miracle this makes sense at all, ever.

Dan McClellan It's radio gold, in my opinion. So the Bible and the flat Earth. We've got a lot of different ways that the ancient conceptualization of the Earth and the universe is represented. But what we don't have is somebody saying, "This is what our Earth looks like." What we have are just scattered references to different features of the Earth and the heavens, and we have to piece it all together. And there are two different dimensions to think about this. And we got some $2 words coming up here. One of them is diachronically, and the other is synchronically. Diachronically means through time. And so there are differences as you go from the earlier layers of the Bible to the later layers of the Bible. And then synchronically means at the same time. There can be differences from person to person, place to place, at the same time. And so because the Bible's not univocal, I don't know if you've heard about this yet, but- What?

Dan Beecher When did this happen?

Dan McClellan It happened on February 3rd. The Bible is no longer univocal, it's multivocal. You have different people saying different things. And so there's a lot of assuming and guesswork and filling in the gaps and trying to construct a cosmology from the Bible. But there are a handful of things that are pretty consistent that we see repeated reference to, throughout the Bible. And those things include things like the pillars of the earth.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan These pillars are referenced all over the place. You get this idea that the Earth has been fixed and is immovable. This is something that you find in a number of different places as well.

Dan Beecher When you say pillars, are they pillars that are holding up the sky? Are they pillars that the Earth is sitting upon? What pillars are we talking about?

Dan McClellan So it's not entirely clear. We just have a bunch of different references to pillars of the Earth. But this is- Okay ... this is very clearly foundations, architectural foundations/pillars. So they are things that are supporting, in some sense, the Earth.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is pretty consistent. And it's not just flowery poetic stuff. There seems to be this idea that there are foundations and/or pillars to the Earth. And then we have, you mentioned the firmament. And the firmament comes from the King James translation of a Hebrew word, raqiya, which occurs in Genesis 1, where it talks about the heavens, the skies. And the idea in the priestly creation account from Genesis 1, and you can go all the way back to the very first episode of this dumb podcast to hear about the creation in the early chapters of Genesis.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But the idea is that the Earth is under water.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And these chaotic waters of creation, and God affects creation by creating this raqiya, which it comes from a word that means to hammer out. And so you've got to think of the steel drums playing while God- ... inserts this solid dome that- Yeah ... separates the waters above from the waters beneath. So it is firm. It is a solid dome. And when you talk to conspiracy theorists today, they're like, "Yeah, there's no space travel. You just bounce off, so."

Dan Beecher Oh, let me tell you something. I had the delightful misfortune of, I stopped on Google and went over to TikTok- Mm-hmm ... for some content about this. And man, the number of videos that I saw where it's like, either we can't penetrate the firmament. If you look at all of the NASA-- First of all, NASA is apparently a whole thing for these people.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher They're talking about NASA means deception- Deceive, right ... in Hebrew, which, does it?

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan No, it doesn't.

Dan Beecher Are they referring to anything similar?

Dan McClellan There's a verbal root, nasa, and because this is usually written with diacritics- Mm ... and they don't know how to read diacritics, they think N-A-S with a chevron on top of it, A, is pronounced NASA, but it's nasa. And then also, that's just a reconstructed verbal root. The word never actually appears as nasa. To mean deceive, it has to be used in the causative hifil stem. And so we get some morphological changes to it. You have to add a performative he. You get an I-quality vowel. You get a consonant cluster with the nun and the shin, which means the nun gets assimilated to the shin, and then you get an I-quality vowel between the second and the third radical. And so basically wherever this word means deceive, it's being pronounced, like in Genesis 3, where Eve says, "The serpent beguiled me." And people are like, "That means NASA." That word appears as hishtani in that verse. So no relation whatsoever to NASA.

Dan Beecher Cool.

Dan McClellan Sorry to interrupt.

Dan Beecher Not at all sorry I asked. But, yeah, so there's a whole thing about- The logo.

Dan McClellan You got the serpent tongue in the logo.

Dan Beecher Oh, see?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So the NASA thing, they're talking about how all the rockets actually curve and then just come down again. And then there was all this stuff about SpaceX and how one of their things actually hit the firmament, and they show a little thing, and it's obviously just the separation of the stages or something like that.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher But man, a lot of talk about firmament. I saw one where it was just an image of an observatory that happened to have, I don't know, looked like lasers shooting straight up, and it was like- Mm-hmm ... "Are they trying to destroy the firmament?"

Dan McClellan It gives you Mr. Burns vibes. For centuries, man has tried to blot out the sun.

Dan Beecher And I'm going to do it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But in the biblical conceptualization, there is a solid dome up there, and it's crystalline in nature and looks like sapphire, and that's why it's blue.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And the windows of heaven are actual holes that open up to let the rain fall. And then the heavens of the- What's that?

Dan Beecher I was going to say the stars are contained in the firmament.

Dan McClellan Yes. And they're moving around. In fact, so this cosmology is kind of consistent in a bunch of different parts of ancient Southwest Asia, going back to the Bronze Age. The Hebrew Bible's representation is generally coming from the, let's say, the middle two quarters of the first millennium BCE. That's where we get most of the discussion.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But it's just these scattered references. We don't actually get an attempt to describe things until the Book of Enoch.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which is, as you can imagine, exciting. So the Book of Enoch is Hellenistic period. The majority of it's probably written between the third and the first century BCE. But you actually get a, here's what the Earth looks like, kind of pseudoscientific discussion. And I saw one part of it that was just so great. So the luminaries, the sun and the moon. And so this is 1 Enoch chapter 72. "This is the first commandment of the luminaries. The sun is a luminary whose egress is an opening of heaven, which is located in the direction of the east, and whose ingress is another opening of heaven located in the west. I saw six openings through which the sun rises and six openings through which it sets. The moon also rises and sets through the same openings, and they are guided by the stars together with whom they lead. They are six in the east and six in the west heaven. All of them are arranged one after another in a constant order." So now we've got this idea of the stars and the luminaries kind of following specific tracks.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Through openings. Through openings, right. So it's like the, "Open the window," the sun comes in, "Hey, everybody." And here I'm thinking of the alternate universe from "Rick and Morty" where the sun is just constantly screaming. I don't know if you've seen that episode, but it's great.

Dan Beecher I don't think I've ever seen this "Rich and Marty" thing, but- Sounds good ...

Dan McClellan you've never seen "Rick and Morty?"

Dan Beecher No, I saw an episode or two.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher It didn't suck me in the way I was promised it would.

Dan McClellan I think if you got into it, you would just love it. But yeah- Okay ... I can see how just one episode, you might not get hooked.

Dan Beecher I like this Enoch description just because- Yeah ... it reminds me of one of those big clocks in a German square that has all these things ticking around and- Yeah ... they're coming out of openings and going over.

Dan McClellan Some lady chasing a guy with a rolling pin around the outside. It's kind of like a Disneyland situation- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher when the- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan Pirates of the Caribbean.

Dan Beecher It is a small world after all.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or a planetarium or something like that. But the idea is basically that this dry land exists within a ring of the sea.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan So basically, you're surrounded by seas, and you have references to the disc or the circle of the Earth. And then the firmament comes up from the outside of the waters and then encloses this area, and all the birds of the skies and everything are in there, and then the luminaries and the planets and all of that. But Enoch actually talks about, a little bit, what's going on beyond the firmament when you go beyond the edges of the Earth. Getting a little Jules Verne- Yeah ... on the Hellenistic Jewish world. And so I think there are a number of different drawings of the ancient Israelite concept of the cosmos, and who knows if any of them would actually match up with what an ancient Israelite or Judahite or early Jewish person might have drawn if you sat them down and were like, "Draw the cosmos." But generally, the idea is that you've got dry land surrounded by water. There's a firmament that comes up out of there that encloses that whole land. You've got an underworld, which is where the deceased are, and beneath that, you've got the pillars of the Earth, and then this is all resting on the broader kind of primordial waters of creation/chaos/whatever. And there's also a concept that the gods inhabit the heavens above the heavens of the Earth. And so from the way the Bible represents things, it's a flat Earth.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's obviously not what the Earth is actually like.

Dan Beecher Well, why wouldn't they have that representation?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Literally, if no one you know has ever traveled more than a couple hundred miles in their whole life, you're not going to be able to come up with a spherical idea.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The Earth is huge and looks flat from where you are- Yeah ... other than bumps and mountains and things.

Dan McClellan And most people, you can see that far away, you can't really see things anymore, but they probably would've thought, "Oh, you just get smaller and smaller and smaller the further away you go- Yeah ... and you're just too small to see."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And you have references to, there are a bunch of passages in the scriptures that make statements that suggest they imagine that they're on a pretty limited plot of land that is fairly flat. So the idea that every eye will see When Jesus comes in the clouds.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Only makes sense if it's possible for every eye to see. Because like everybody can see the sun.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan At least as far as we know, everybody can see the sun up in the sky.

Dan Beecher And it probably is at the same time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher As you travel, there's no way to see that you're seeing the sun at a slightly different time than the place you came from or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And in the Greek world, you have in, I think, around the 5th century BCE, you start to have these ideas that the Earth is round. Now, this is not based on scientific study. Initially, it's because Plato, I don't know if he got dumped or something, but he just got really into spheres- ... and was just like, "Man, I love spheres." And so just hypothesized that all the perfect things, all the central main, all the main characters in the universe are spherical. And the idea is that every point is the exact same distance from the center and ooh, doesn't that just make the tuning fork in your loins ring? Plato was a weird dude.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But this information doesn't spread out to the Jewish world, but you have kind of the convergence of this aesthetic notion that the Earth is round with developing notions based on people who are taking measurements about shadows that are being cast in Egypt- Right ... and stuff like that from one part to a bunch of miles down the other direction. And as our ability to measure time and distances and things like that gets refined, it becomes more and more clear that we live on a spherical Earth. And some of the earliest Christians insisted that we live on a spherical Earth.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan There's an early Christian and philosopher named Athenagoras toward the end of the second century CE who is like, "Yep, the Earth is straight up a sphere." And other people didn't buy it, but that became kind of the consensus view among the more philosophically oriented, the more thoughtful Christians.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The idea of a spherical Earth dates back to ancient Greece. This is not something that was not around the people who were alive in biblical times, or at least late biblical times. They might have encountered this idea.

Dan McClellan I imagine they did, but we just don't see it reflected in any of the texts. So folks like the author of the Gospel of John or Paul, maybe they believed in a spherical Earth. They never say one way or another.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And some people talk about this idea that there are the four corners of the Earth.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan They're like, "Oh, that means it's got to be a flat Earth." And it's like, I talk about the corners of the Earth, the ends of the Earth, the edge of the Earth. That doesn't mean that I think there are actually four points that sit at the four corners of a square or something. It's a figure of speech.

Dan Beecher It is very funny to me how often I will hear someone say when they're defending their take on the Bible, one thing is obviously literal and another thing is obviously a metaphor or figurative.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it's like, okay, well, if one thing can be figurative, other things can also be figurative, and how do you know the difference?

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think there's a lot of rhetoric where we're just kind of doing our best to try and feel it out and try to figure out does this make more sense as figurative? What's the trend when we see this language being used? Are there any contexts in which it is more clear if it's one or the other? But yeah, I don't think the whole corners of the Earth idea is very determinative, but we do see people talking about that. One thing I did want to bring up is there's a word in Hebrew, chug, that is Chet, Vav, Gimel, and this word occurs in a handful of places, but Isaiah 40 verse 22 is a place that people will bring up a lot. And let's see, the NRSVUE says this, "It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in." And people will appeal to this as evidence that the Bible is already aware that the Earth is a sphere.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Because they hear circle. And then Job, I think there's some stuff in, yeah, Job 22:14. The KJV says, "He walketh in the circuit of heaven."

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan And NET says vault of heaven. NRSVUE says dome of heaven. So I guess they're trying to link this word chug with the firmament, the dome. But chug is like you draw chug with a compass.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So circle, disc, it's not necessarily a sphere, it's just a circle. And so Isaiah 40 verse 22 is talking about this idea of the disc of the Earth that's surrounded by water.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And it is not talking about the globe of the Earth. Proverbs 8:27, the famous creation of wisdom has a part where it says, "When he established the heavens, I was there. When he drew a circle on the face of the deep." And this idea being we're inscribing the boundaries of the deep and the dry land is going to be within those boundaries.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So it's a circle, it's not a sphere. So, folks who appeal to that as evidence that Isaiah already knows about a spherical Earth- Mm-hmm ... doesn't work all that well.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And I think when I look at biblical references, and I see references like ends of the Earth or corners of the Earth, I don't see anyone-- Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like anyone's trying to make a solid representation of what the Earth is.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It mostly seems to me to be either figurative language or just sort of a big "I dunno."

Dan McClellan Yeah. Another one that comes up quite a bit is Job 26:7.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And let me pull this up and see what the NRSV has to say about this. So, "He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth upon nothing." And so people will say, "That indicates God knows that the Earth is floating in space, and that it is not on foundations, that it is not resting in a sea of primordial goo."

Dan Beecher And this is- But what about the pillars then? And what's it hanging on?

Dan McClellan You always bring it back to the pillars. No, and this is where Job is getting particularly poetic. "He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not torn open by them. He covers the face of the full moon and spreads over it his cloud. He has described a circle in the face of the waters." That's probably inscribed.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "At the boundary between light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke." So now heaven has pillars- Yeah ... and they get scared when God gives them a talking to. So, this is very, very figurative language. But for some people, it's a proof text if they want to try to suggest that as a scientific document, the Bible is accurate in all that it claims about the natural world. Then they need something in there, even if it means you've got to reject the other 999 things that are pretty clearly a flat Earth perspective and say, "Well, we got this one."

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's so funny. When the flat Earth theory started to regain prominence sort of 10 or 15 years ago, or it started to come back into sort of the parlance of our time, it took me by surprise. I was shocked- Yeah ... when it started to happen, and I could not for the life of me figure out why it was happening. We had literally thousands of years of knowledge all pointing to a spherical Earth. It was set. It was done. It was easy. So I was like, "Why? Why is this happening?" And I think that Genesis is a problem. I think that a lot of it started from people not wanting that firmament model of an Earth with a dome over it to be refuted in their Bible. I don't think that's the whole of the thing. I don't think that's all of why people-- I think there's a lot of people that just really want to reject sort of understood knowledge- Yeah ... because that's part of their personality. Skepticism is good, but badly applied skepticism is bad. And I think a lot of people- Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think there are a lot of people who-- There's an awful lot of pushback. And so you can revise your position, or you can dig in your heels, and we've got an awful lot of that going on, where people are just digging in their heels and saying, "No, I'm drawing a line here, and I don't care if it's just bafflingly dumb. I'm going to dig in my heels because this is an identity marker now."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "And so to show everybody I'm a real one, that I'm one of the good ones, I'm going to dig in my heels and make ridiculous claims in public just to put on display just how mindless I'm willing to be about this issue."

Dan Beecher I don't know. I'm going to push back on you because I've seen- Okay ... a lot of actually smart people making really interesting and scientifically literate arguments about why this could be true. And in the end, it doesn't hold up. But they're using real math. They're using- Yeah ... real ideas and concepts that dumb people wouldn't come up with.

Dan McClellan Well, they're performing that because when you try to take real math and real science, and take all of it- Yeah ... then it obviously doesn't make any sense. I think those arguments are always isolating a tiny little sliver of real math and real science to say, "If we look at this little part right here, then that can be made to fit if you squint hard enough at it. And therefore, the whole rest of-" The scientific community can just be summarily dismissed.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It always seems to come down to that, whether it's climate change or whether it's the global flood, or whether it's a round Earth. I love the last couple of times we've had these eclipses, or there's been a lunar eclipse. I love the folks who show the image of the Moon, and then there's a little tiny disc-shaped shadow passing over the Moon. It's like, "Shouldn't we be seeing this?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. Like a slit as opposed to a circle or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And depending on which part of the Earth you're on, maybe it's a little more oblong, but it's- Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan it's never approaching a perfect circle.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It is funny. And then, I will say that the people who are genuinely smart, and they focus in on some of these scientific questions and mathematical questions in terms of the shape of the Earth, you can generally find them going all the way with their experimentation or with their math, and then eventually going, "Oh, wait, that didn't work out the way it should have. Hang on," and stuff.

Dan McClellan So anyway- There have been some people who have converted to reality- Yeah ... and have been high profile about it, have gone out and said, "I no longer believe this." And they've had big time followings on YouTube and elsewhere on social media, and have- Right ... and have seen the light, and then have come back to try to evangelize their compatriots. And it doesn't go well for them.

Dan Beecher Nope.

Dan McClellan At least with their old community.

Dan Beecher Once you've converted people to something like that, it's hard to get them to let go of it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher However, smart people, good people, people who are of good faith and wish only to be seeking better and more up-to-date knowledge do often revise their positions, their older positions.

Dan McClellan Yes, they do.

Dan Beecher Which I think is a good segue into our opportunities for growth. So tell us, Dan, we teased it at the beginning.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher You had a position that you took on our show and elsewhere, I think.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And then you ended up butting up against some people. Talk us through it. Tell us what you had originally said and then- Yeah ... and then what arguments have been made that steered you in a slightly different direction.

Dan McClellan Well, nine or 10 weeks ago, we did an episode of the show where one of the things we talked about was Matthew's description of the triumphal entry, and Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two animals at the same time.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And it was a laugh riot. We had- We had a good time. We had a good time. And I had made a video about that probably two or three weeks prior to that. And the way I had interpreted the text is we have this text where it says Jesus tells them, "Hey, go to this house. You'll find a donkey, and you will find a colt tied up with it.

Dan Beecher Untie and bring them to me.

Dan McClellan If the owner gives you any guff, just give him a swift backhand. Tell him the Lord has need of them, and they'll let you go." And it says, "They brought the donkey and the colt to Jesus, and this was done so that the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9 would be fulfilled. And they took their cloaks, and they put them on them, and they put him on them." And initially, I was pointing out the distinction between the King James rendering, which I was suggesting obscures this by saying, "They sat him thereon," which is not marked for number.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But the "them" is very clearly plural, and whether you understand the antecedent of that pronoun to be the "them" that is the animals, or the "them" that is the cloaks that are on the animals, the way the text is telling the story, Jesus is sitting on top of two animals.

Dan Beecher Right. And- And we went through a bunch of different good ways to visualize this.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Including the sofa and ottoman style- Yeah ... the human donkey pyramid, where you've got a donkey, a little donkey, and then a person up on top.

Dan McClellan Right. There are a bunch of different ways that it has been visualized historically, and as I pointed out, we even have medieval artwork from Christians who are representing Jesus sitting on the larger donkey with his feet resting on the colt that is tied up, or some people say he switched back and forth. And after I made my initial video, and then we released the podcast episode, there was some debate online on places like YouTube and elsewhere where apologists were bringing up challenges to this. And most of it had to do with how we think Matthew was interpreting the prophecy, whether it was a misunderstanding or whether he was intentionally interpreting it a certain way and presenting the fulfillment of a prophecy in a very careful, very specific way. And I think in our episode, I even said whether or not you think that Matthew misunderstood this. But I suggested that Matthew was representing Jesus as riding on two animals because they were so concerned with ensuring that Jesus is fulfilling this prophecy to the T. And the prophecy, as Matthew is representing it, comes through-- It's a Greek translation. It's not exactly what the Septuagint says, but it's close to it. And, I suggested that the apposition of the original prophecy, so the original prophecy in Hebrew says, "He will come riding on a donkey, even a colt, the foal of a donkey." And this is apposition.

Dan Beecher This is- Right ...

Dan McClellan this is just saying the same thing two different ways.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So there's one animal in view. Or actually, I think the Hebrew says the foal of Jenny's or something like that. And in the Greek translation, however, it just seems to be two animals. He will come riding on a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey or Jenny's or something like that. And, I suggested that Matthew was just trying to fulfill the prophecy exactly as they found in the Greek translation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And listening to the discussion, watching people argue about this, I think that there's a better way to understand it. I think that Matthew is actually trying to eat his cake and have it, too. I think that Matthew is-- Because there is ambiguity regarding the "on them" pronoun.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Does this refer to the clothing? Does it refer to the animals? And so naturally, if somebody told you this story and you'd never heard any of this before, you would be like, "Wait. Is he sitting on both animals?" Because it's just not clear. You would want clarification, and the story does not clarify.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So if Matthew sees the prophecy as saying two animals, it seems to me he's telling the story in a way that plausibly could be said to fulfill this prophecy with two animals, and yet also plausibly could be interpreted as him having only one mount, him riding on only one animal. So the idea is, "Hey, Matthew, are there two animals or one?"

Dan Beecher "Precisely." Yeah, exactly . And so- "Hey, Matthew, are there two animals or one?" "Oh, look over there."

Dan McClellan And so- Yeah.

Dan Beecher So then, if I understand the new take, the new take is that it's not Matthew specifically saying Jesus is riding on these two animals. It is Matthew being purposefully obtuse so that you could take either position and it would be justifiable with his language.

Dan McClellan I think that makes more sense to me now- Okay ... in light of the arguments I've seen. And there are other arguments out there. There's a scholar named Carlson who published two papers in, I think, "Catholic Biblical Quarterly," five years ago, arguing that the way Matthew describes the prophecy is the plenary fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, where he's trying to include all of the imagery, all of the possible imagery that comes from Zechariah. And it's a complex argument for why the "on them" means that Jesus was actually on the colt. I think reasonable people can disagree about this. There have been numerous different ways to try to explain what's going on here. The more I think about it, the more I consider the other arguments. I don't think there's a way to say the text indicates Jesus is only riding on one animal. I don't think the two mount reading is precluded by anything. I think that has to be a possibility, but it makes more sense to me now that the ambiguity there has a rhetorical role in the way that Matthew has crafted this. Because if Matthew shows this draft to somebody, "Hey, look what I'm working on." They're going to be like, "I think you may need to make it a little more clear what's going on here." And he's like- Right ... "Yeah, that's the point." That makes the most sense to me. And so this is the judgment that I am a little more comfortable with now. That's not to say that this is the way it has to be and everybody is wrong. This is not the consensus view.

Dan Beecher This is the- Oh, no, this is now the official position of the "Data Over Dogma" podcast, and all of its listeners have to now assume- And all of its subsidiaries- ...

Dan McClellan this as- ... and affiliates and- That's right.

Dan Beecher Everyone from now on has to believe- In perpetuity ... this way until further revised by you- ... because we are all your acolytes and have to believe as you do.

Dan McClellan Which is a horrific thing to think about- ... and I'm glad it will never be the case.

Dan Beecher Well, it's kind of the point of having this segment, right? Is the idea that just to demonstrate that this is all-- We're doing the best we can. Scholarship in general as a concept is-- Especially scholarship like this, where it's about something that was written 2,000-plus years ago.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Or more. And All we have is best guesses. And it's important to revise those ideas as other people's arguments come into play.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I agree. I think that this is not a quote-unquote "hard science." It's a real squishy science. For the most part, what we're doing is we're taking a bunch of judgment calls, and we're just trying to see which judgment calls make the most sense, have the most support, and that's kind of our moving target. This is where we are right now. And everybody changes on these things. A paper I published in 2018 in the "Journal of Biblical Literature" on Psalm 82, where I argued that Psalm 82 is a post-exilic, very late composition. If you had told me 10 years before that, that I was going to be arguing that Psalm 82 was post-exilic, I would've laughed in your face because I was with the majority of scholars who saw Psalm 82 as one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible, one of the earliest passages that sees Adonai and El as separate deities, that is a divine council scene that is just this archaic mythology. And the more I looked at it, and the more I looked at it, and the more I tried to figure out what was going on here, I slowly changed my mind till I got to the point that I was like, "No, I am convinced that it is the other way around." And so if you want to go see the argument that I've made, you can find my article on my Linktree. It's called "The Gods' Complaint," plural Gods' Complaint. Psalm 82 is a psalm of complaint. And that's an example. People ask me from time to time, "What are some things you've changed your mind about?" That's an example. I think the Matthew writing, the triumphal entry question is another. There have been these things, and as we talked with David Carr last week, and even he said that 1996 David Carr doesn't always agree with 2024 David Carr.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is just the nature of the beast.

Dan Beecher And so- Well, and it's the mark of a honest scholar or an honest person to say, I don't trust someone who agrees with 15 years ago them about everything.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You haven't done any work in that time period if that's how you are.

Dan McClellan And I think that's one of the indications of someone who is not committed to a series of dogmas. Because there are a lot of folks who, they have some wiggle room, but there are walls.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And they are not going to go over those walls, not for anything whatsoever. And there are folks who, they may be convinced of stuff to differing degrees, but for the most part, anything's fair game. And I'd like to think that I'm in that position, that I have tried to model that, where I'm not committed to anything, to the degree that I just will say, "No, it's impossible that it is this other thing." Within reason. The flat Earth, I think, is something that's- ... that's not the kind of thing we're talking about.

Dan Beecher It was funny because you were talking about the walls that people have set up- ... and their sort of dogmatic walls.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And the image that instantly popped into my mind- The ice wall?

Dan McClellan ... is the ice wall- Yeah.

Dan Beecher ... that the flat Earthers think surrounds the disc of the Earth.

Dan McClellan It would be fun to see if there were any flat Earthers who were talking about this ice wall before "Game of Thrones" came out.

Dan Beecher "Game of Thrones." Hey, man, that thing looks pretty good.

Dan McClellan I think it's a great- Yeah, I kind of like this idea.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But, in terms of actual legitimate scholarly theories, I think everything has to be potentially on the table. And that's one of the things that frustrates me with a lot of the content that I engage with, is there's only half a table there, and they're only going to play with whatever is on half of that table.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But yeah.

Dan Beecher So not a huge change, but- No, it seems pretty minor when it comes down to it.

Dan McClellan Well, I hesitated to, when I decided to make this video this morning for my social media accounts, the socials, it took me, I was contemplating, "Do I really want to do this? I'm opening myself up for criticism," even though it's a pretty minor thing. But that's one of the things that bothers me, and that's one of the things that can disincentivize more open, honest engagement. I would be lying if I said that I just go full bore, whatever I'm thinking, without ever considering the implications or the consequences. That's just not true.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I do think about that stuff, and I would like to think that it does not, I am not self-censoring because of that. So I was like, "No, if I feel this way, I've got to go through with this-" "... just because I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror." If I were like, "Oh, no, they're going to make fun of me."

Dan Beecher Well, let them. The truth is that the people who would make fun of someone for revising their position based on new or different information are the people that, they're really telling on themselves about what's important to them and what they value, which isn't truth, certainly. It may be something like, people value their dogmatic beliefs and whatever, but it would be pretty hypocritical of you to To have a dogmatic view that is impermeable to data- Yeah ... considering the title of our show.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I'm trying to live up... A lot of people are like, "You can't be 'data over dogma.'" And I'm like, "Look, from day one, I have said this is aspirational."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Nobody can do this perfectly. It is aspirational. And so I'm trying to live up to the standards to which we aspire on the "Data Over Dogma" podcast. And that's why I thought, hey, maybe this would be a good segment to talk about. It's a little shift, but it's an example of me owning up to having changed my perspective.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And- And it's funny, I made fun of it for being little, but as you point out, entire careers are made on tiny little... This is a field of study that concerns itself with minutia.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So I think I should be more open to little things. It's the little things. It's the little things.

Dan McClellan Like the great poet once said, it's the little people like you, Clark, and your family. That's "Christmas Vacation."

Dan Beecher Yes, it is.

Dan McClellan Just in case. One of the greatest films ever made.

Dan Beecher Indeed.

Dan McClellan In my humble opinion.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, that Griswold family is a real hoot. Beverly D'Angelo. Lots of- ... lots of young crushes, I'll just say.

Dan McClellan Oh, okay. We didn't need to go there, but- Well- But all right. That's fair ...

Dan Beecher she came up.