Immaculate Apologetics?

Dan Beecher It suddenly occurred to me that when Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," good thing Mary wasn't there.

Dan McClellan Yeah, they could've trotted out his mom.

Dan Beecher She could've chucked a rock and- Yeah ... started that woman down a bad path.

Dan McClellan Jesus would've, "Mom."

Dan Beecher "Mom, stop it."

Dan McClellan "You're embarrassing me." 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 we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Good. I came back from my travels with no cold.

Dan McClellan No cold.

Dan Beecher And my voice is doing just fine, so I- ... feel like I'm a couple up on you on- Yes.

Dan McClellan Yes ...

Dan Beecher on that front.

Dan McClellan Long-time listeners will probably recognize I've got a little scratchy, little more baritone voice than- ... than normal. I'm approaching my silver fox era, so I've got to have the voice to match, I guess.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You're gonna have to take up smoking.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Then I can start doing voice work for, like, the... I wish I could remember the voice actor who does all the characters from The Simpsons.

Dan Beecher Right. Usually the ones who smoke.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, instead of that, we're gonna do a show today, and I think- Yeah ... I think it's gonna be a really fun one.

Dan McClellan Here we go. We're gonna give the people their money's worth for once.

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher First off, look, there was a clip that went around, or a series of clips that went around, got a little viral, from Tucker Carlson's show, which, don't go looking for them. Let's not give him any clicks. But we're gonna talk about some claims made by a guy named Jeremiah Johnston- Mm-hmm ... and talk about the apologetic of manuscripts. We're gonna talk about some apologetics.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that'll be a lot of fun. And then, in the second half of the show, for our What Is That, we're gonna discuss the much-misunderstood concept of the Immaculate Conception.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Which I think is... When I learned what was going on there, my mind was blew. It blew my mind.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, that'll be fun.

Dan McClellan Had no idea that Doug Flutie had any kind of involvement with the Catholic- And that's a sports reference for those of you who- Yeah ... for the longest time, when I heard Immaculate Conception, my cognitive repertoire immediately went to immaculate reception- Right ... which is Boston College Doug Flutie, a pass that won the game for...

Dan Beecher Anyway.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Doug Flutie, who some people know as a football player, but more people know as a breakfast cereal tycoon, so.

Dan McClellan Very nice.

Dan Beecher It's a long and storied legacy.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Anyway, let's move on with the show. Let's do our, what is it? Taking Issue. That's what it is.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher And what we're taking issue with this week is some statements made by this Jeremiah Johnston guy, not to be confused with Jeremiah Johnson. Wasn't that the name of an old Robert Redford movie way back in the day?

Dan McClellan Sure was, yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And if you've seen that GIF of the bearded gentleman by a stream who glances over and gives you a little nod, that's Jeremiah Johnson. No, this is Jeremiah J. Johnston, who is a scholar of New Testament. But he's made a claim that is related to a distinct claim, but his claim is that the crucifixion of Jesus is the best-attested fact from the ancient world, bar none. And this is something that- That's a big one. That is a- That's a- Yeah ... that's a big claim, yeah.

Dan Beecher And this is- He literally said, if I may quote him, he said- Quote him ... "If we can't know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record, we shouldn't believe anything in history at all." That's bold, I'm gonna say.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it is closely related to another claim that the manuscript evidence for the New Testament makes it the best-attested document from the ancient world. Basically, that Jesus is the best-attested figure from the ancient world, whether we're talking about his crucifixion at Roman hands, or we're talking about the historical witnesses to his life.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The claim is repeated that Jesus is the best-attested of all time. And this makes- He's the GOAT in- The GOAT, yes ...

Dan Beecher the GOAT of attestation. GOAT of attestation.

Dan McClellan And this makes people who study history for a living just guffaw with reckless abandon.

Dan Beecher What? Because- How dare you, sir?

Dan McClellan Because it could not be much further from the truth- ... whether we're talking about the crucifixion or the manuscript attestation. I actually want to start with the manuscript attestation, if that's okay- Okay ... with you.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I'm happy with it.

Dan McClellan And some people may have seen this claim going around. There'll be a list of ancient writers, Pliny, Plato, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Caesar, Tacitus, Aristotle, whatever.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan People will say, "Oh, there are only 12 copies of their writings," or, "There might be 100 copies of their writings." And the approximate gap between the composition of their writings and the earliest manuscript is 500 years, 1,000 years, 1,300 years, something like that. And then they'll say, "But the New Testament has 5,700 or 5,800 ancient Greek manuscripts. And then if you take translations, it has over 24,000 ancient manuscripts." And with the- Okay ... with the earliest coming less than 100 years after original composition. And so what this is supposed to be is evidence that there is something unique, something almost supernatural or otherworldly about the preservation and the transmission of the texts of the New Testament as historical witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ.

Dan Beecher Have you- Well, okay, I will say this. Taking it on its face, if I believe, and I don't know whether I'm meant to believe this or not, but let's just say that there are 5,800 manuscripts of the New Testament, or 20,000 or whatever it is, by their reckoning. That's impressive. That's a lot.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And if you compare that to a few hundred of the other things, that sounds like a big deal.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But number of copies doesn't sound like the same thing as historical attestation for something.

Dan McClellan Yes. That's the biggest problem with this argument, is the number of copies has zero relevance- Right ... to the historicity of the stories within the copies.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So there are literally hundreds of millions of copies of "Harry Potter" in circulation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That means nothing about the historicity of the stories within those copies- Right ... of "Harry Potter."

Dan Beecher Because we all know that Dumbledore existed, but Hagrid did not. That's right. That was a- Hagrid was a wholly made-up person.

Dan McClellan Yes, that's a late interpolation, so. And additionally, the length of time between the original composition and the earliest surviving manuscript. Also, it has something to do with our ability to reconstruct the transmission of the manuscript and its state at a period closer to its original composition. And so having 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts that range from the early 2nd century CE all the way down to the invention of the printing press, that gives us a lot of data- Mm-hmm ... to be able to track the transmission and the growth and change of these manuscripts, and that's very, very helpful, but also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the historicity of the narratives within- Right ... those manuscripts.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's a completely separate issue. And so the notion that this makes Jesus the best-attested figure from ancient history is profoundly silly. And another thing to consider is that when we look at the 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, the 2nd century, people say, "Oh yeah, the earliest copy comes from less than 100 years after its composition." And that would be a little piece of papyrus called P52, Papyrus 52. It's a fragment, kind of triangular in shape, about the size of a credit card. It's got about 36-ish words total on it, written on the front and on the back. It preserves a piece of the Gospel of John. It may date to 125-ish CE. It may date to 175 or even 200 CE, but most scholars would say it's probably in the 2nd century CE. But if we look in the entire 2nd century CE, you can count the total number of fragmentary manuscripts on one hand.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan There are four.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's the 3rd century, you get I think 50, 49 or 50 additional manuscripts. Again, mostly if not entirely fragmentary manuscripts. And then I think it's in the 4th century that we eclipsed-- I think we get another 48 or 49 manuscripts in the 4th century. And now we're getting our codices like Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which contain the full Septuagint as it was understood by whoever was copying it. The big spike, when you look at a graph that shows the number of manuscripts- Mm ... the spike starts in the 800s.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And then in the 900s, and then in the 1000s, it shoots way up.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So the overwhelming majority of those 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts come from 800 years or more after the death of Jesus and the composition of these texts.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So those inflated numbers are significantly less relevant when you actually look at when they come from. All they're showing you is that these texts were copied a lot more hundreds of years later.

Dan Beecher Well, and that brings up an interesting point, because as you've said a number of times on the show, the more something is copied, the more chances there are for scribal errors and interpolations and stuff. So it occurs to me that having a lot more manuscripts is actually a problem for attestation more than it is a confirmation.

Dan McClellan And for instance, if we go and look at the story of the woman taken in adultery.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan All but maybe three or four of those manuscripts has Actually, no, that's not true for the story of the woman taken in adultery. There are a handful of passages that are omitted from translations of the Bible these days. Story of the woman taken in adultery, it's absent from a number of manuscripts. But still, if we go, what about the 5,800? Yeah, well over 5,000 of them, like 5,750 of them are going to have it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But luckily, we have some very early ones that show it's not there. And so we- That that was a later addition.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan When you line them all up and you say, "Well, we got the earliest one, two, or three don't have this reading." And this could be Matthew 17:21, it could be John 5:4, it could be any one of a number of passages that we now omit from modern translations of the Bible. When you look at all the manuscripts, out of the 5,800, like 5,799 of them have it, one doesn't.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, if we didn't have that one, then yeah, that would be a liability. We would be misled- Well, and it seems- ... by the 5,799 manuscripts.

Dan Beecher And it seems obvious that what that means is that there are passages in all of our manuscripts that were interpolations, later additions- Yeah ... that just we don't have a manuscript early enough to catch it.

Dan McClellan I think it is beyond doubt that there are readings in the New Testament that we do not have any manuscript that lacks them, but these readings have been altered or added at some point between the composition of the text and our earliest surviving manuscript witness to that passage.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And that gap is different depending on the text, because if we're talking about P52, for those 36 words, that gap may be as small as 25 or 50 years.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But for the rest of the Gospel of John, the other 99.99% of the Gospel of John, that gap is going to be, add another 100 years onto it for some of those passages. The gap can be fairly large for a number of passages from the New Testament, and that's a black hole. We don't know what's going on in there. There could be lots of things added, and we just do not have the evidence.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan If we did not have one of these early witnesses to the absence of this statement about, "This kind doesn't come out except through much fasting and prayer," in Matthew 17:21. If we didn't have an early manuscript that omits that, we might think it was there all along, and that one manuscript changes the whole story. And who knows how many readings were not there in the original text that were added somewhere in that gap that we don't have witness to. So, there are scholars out there who say, "No, we can assume that based on all of the manuscripts that we have available to us now, we can reconstruct every word of the New Testament exactly as it fell from the pens of the authors." I think that assumption is profoundly misguided.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It seems, if nothing else, impossible to verify and just unlikely.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just knowing what we know about how-- And I think when we bring modern sensibility to this question, it's easy for my brain at least to mess up and think, well, and I'm coming at this from a perspective of someone who has lived not only in the world of printed books, the printing press and movable type, but computers, and the transmission of data is pure. You know what I mean? If I send you a manuscript over email, you get it exactly.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And if you forward it on to someone else, and they forward it on to someone else, it just transmits perfectly. But when someone has to handwrite it out, every single word gets handwritten by a person. And then that scribe, that person may or may not have an agenda when they're writing it out. It's a very different means of transmission.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the fact that these texts are spread all around the world is a kind of fail-safe against that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because it then becomes impossible to introduce a change that can go out and cover up all of the manuscripts already in circulation that don't have that change. But that brings us back to that black hole- Yeah ... of the earliest years when change is more likely to happen. And there are scholars who think that conjectural emendation. So, if we don't have evidence for a change, but we're like, "This seems really squirrely. It seems like at some point this was added to the text." There are some scholars who will be like, "You know what? My critical edition, I'm going to take that out because I don't think it was there originally."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan "Or I think it read a different way." That's called a conjectural emendation, and there are some scholars who think we ought to be engaging in the practice of using conjectural emendations. There are others who say, "That's anathema. No, we should never use conjectural emendations." But long story short, the number of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament that we have and their proximity to the composition of those texts has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever on the historicity of the stories about Jesus- Right ... and much less the historicity of the supernatural claims about Jesus. Which brings us to Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston, who made the claim on Tucker Carlson that is the best-attested fact from ancient history. I don't know if you picked up on this. This is something that irks me only because I have a graduate degree from the University of Oxford.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan But Dr. Johnston likes to bring up Oxford an awful lot.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Did you notice this in any of the stuff you looked up?

Dan Beecher I didn't catch it.

Dan McClellan Okay. So you will see him spoken of as an Oxford scholar.

Dan Beecher I did catch him saying that he was a scholar and using the phrase "critical scholars," but like, "I like to do what critical scholars do," which I thought was kind of funny. He didn't say, "I'm a critical scholar."

Dan McClellan Right. "I like to simulate what a critical scholar does."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan He has his PhD from a university called Middlesex University in England, and part of that included a residency at what's called the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which is not an arm of the University of Oxford. But it is located in the city of Oxford, and it has relationships with the Bodleian Library, and there are some scholars that will offer to tutor and give help to students there. They're basically there to train non-Western students to go out and be pastors and preachers- Okay ... and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher But when Dr.

Dan McClellan Johnston talks about his education, he will frequently talk about when he was at Oxford. Or no. He in Oxford.

Dan Beecher When I was in Oxford.

Dan McClellan He'll talk about being in Oxford, not at Oxford. Very carefully skirting around an explicit claim to have been enrolled at the University of Oxford, but loves to- ... make a big deal out of having been.

Dan Beecher I, too, have that level of Oxfordian education. I toured the campus. I went to several places within Oxford. It's a lovely place.

Dan McClellan But the only reason I bring this up is because it is so on the nose- Yeah ... that even his doctoral dissertation was then published as a book.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And in the acknowledgments, he never makes it clear that he was not enrolled at the- ... University of Oxford.

Dan Beecher So it's always- So what was it?

Dan McClellan ... like, "Were you enrolled there or not?" And the other, "No, he was not enrolled there."

Dan Beecher But what we're saying is that he is a very reliable guy. But- You can trust what he has to say.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You can take his statements to the bank. He's a big defender of the Shroud of Turin.

Dan Beecher Right. And that's what he was talking about mainly on this- Yes ... episode of Tucker Carlson.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Now, there's other stuff that he brings up, but the Shroud of Turin is his golden goose. This is what he thinks seals the deal on the historicity of Jesus's crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. But just to kind of address the claim, it is not the best-attested event in the ancient world.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan Not- How?

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan ... by a long shot. We can go and find the archaeological remains of battles that are discussed in texts written by Julius Caesar or written by people who accompanied Alexander the Great and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher We have- ...

Dan McClellan far better-attested events from the ancient world. And so the notion that the crucifixion is the best-attested event is just laughable on the very face of it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I would say even if the Shroud of Turin were somehow authentic, which it is not- Yeah. We've talked about the Shroud. We've- We've talked about the Shroud of Turin.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So we don't have to get into all of that stuff again. But I do want to bring up the fact that I find it hilarious that the first time the Shroud of Turin explicitly shows up in any historical documentation is from the bishop who says, "Some people conjured up this fake shroud and tried to pass it off as authentic, but we caught the guy."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So I just find that so hilarious. When people are like, "No.

Dan Beecher It's authentic.

Dan McClellan It's totally authentic."

Dan Beecher Yeah. But- It's amazing. That kind of stuff is crazy. But he wasn't just claiming that the Shroud was his only evidence that Jesus- No ... had actually done it. He kept talking about all of these sources that were almost contemporary- ...

Dan McClellan talking about it. Tacitus and Suetonius and- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher Lucian and- Yes ... these guys. Now, surely he must not be lying. Surely those guys historically must have had some sort of good evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Dan McClellan So the crucifixion at least, yeah, we have better data for that than the resurrection where we have zero data.

Dan Beecher But- Right ...

Dan McClellan yeah. We have folks like Josephus, folks like Tacitus and Suetonius and others who are non-Christian authors who-- Josephus is the earliest, writing in the mid-90s CE. We have two references in his works, and one of them is longer than the other. The longer one is known as the Testimonium Flavianum, which is where Josephus is like, "Oh, he was more than a man." And it's very clearly, it has been doctored- Right ... by Christian writers probably in the fourth or late third centuries CE. Some people think Eusebius, who talks about Josephus' text, might've been the one to doctor it. I think the majority of scholars still would suggest that there was a historical core to that, that was actually in Josephus' writings, but that they just expanded on it. Some people argue that it was entirely made up, that there was no reference to Jesus whatsoever. There's another reference to James being put to death, and it refers to James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That one's a lot more secure, but there are some folks who still try to argue that that is an interpolation also. And then we get to Tacitus. Go ahead.

Dan Beecher I want to stay with Josephus just long enough to mention that in that interview, Johnston did say that Josephus was so close to it that he would have, this is a quote, he said he "Would've had friends who were at the trial of Jesus, and he writes about that."

Dan McClellan Now- Oh, gosh ...

Dan Beecher when he says he writes about that, and also he seems to be claiming, and I don't know where this comes from, maybe you can enlighten me. He seems to be claiming that there's some really exciting stuff happening with Josephus right now. How would that work? How would there be new, exciting stuff happening with Josephus?

Dan McClellan There's a scholar, named Schmidt, I think T.C. Schmidt is the scholar's name, just published a book, called "Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ," where he makes the claim that the Testimonium Flavianum is entirely authentic.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Now, he does a little how's your father with the text to try to soften how much of a testimony of Jesus it is. But, I think he might be talking about that book, which just came out two or three months ago, I think.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And it's just making the case, "Hey, what if this is all authentic?" And it has not convinced the majority of scholars, and it's not going to convince the majority of scholars. And, there's a wonderful group out of University of Iowa, run by my friend Bob Cargill, called Bible and Archeology. And, Jordan Jones is a recent PhD from that program who is running that program. But I think they just interviewed Schmidt on there and talked about what his argument is.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So that's probably what's going on there. But no, Josephus wasn't born until well after Jesus was dead, so no, he wouldn't have had... And he's from the area. He's from Galilee area, and- Right ... he was involved in the Jewish revolts that took place in the '60s. But no, the notion that he had friends that would've been at the trial is pretty silly.

Dan Beecher Well, and then to say that he writes about that, I mean, I've read the clip, the what, two sentences or whatever it is- Yeah, yeah ... that Josephus writes in the Flavianum whatever, the Testimonium Flavianum.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, it's not much.

Dan Beecher And it's definitely not like, "Hey, my buddy Sam was there- Yeah ... and here's how the trial looked," or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's just like a quick tossed-off thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it just says, "Yeah, there was this dude," and if there is an original core, it probably would've said just that there was this guy, Jesus, some called him the Christ, and Pilate crucified him and I think it ends by saying, "And their tribe or their group has not ceased to exist down to today," or something like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it's the kind of report that you would expect from somebody who lived toward the end of the first century CE and just knew about this movement that sprung up after some guy got crucified.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And Josephus talks about multiple different wannabe Messiahs who got cut down by Rome. So it's not unusual at all. But yeah, the notion that Josephus went and had his buddies filling in on how the trial went is not supported by anything in anything that Josephus ever wrote.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah, I find that kind of silly as well. But the other Roman authors, they're basically saying, "Hey, there are these weirdos all over the place, and their movement started after this guy got executed." It's little more than that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So as historical attestation, I mean, certainly it suggests that these writers had access to some kind of reporting that was probably independent of what the gospel authors relied on. It was probably something that was in circulation in the non-Jesus follower literary circles and historical circles. So there is evidentiary value as attestation of the historical event of- Yeah, of course ...

Dan Beecher Jesus's crucifixion.

Dan McClellan But to the degree that it becomes the best-attested event in ancient history, that's, again, nonsensical. That's just laughable.

Dan Beecher Well, yeah. I mean, when we talk about things like how something is attested, yeah, there are- Thousands of manuscripts that mention Jesus being crucified, largely they're all produced by the group that wants you to believe it. You know what I mean? By a group that has an agenda. And then there's, like you said, nothing archaeological that we've ever found. With Caesar or Alexander the Great, we've got coins with their face on them. We've got other people talking about the wars that they went to. We've got statues. There's just their own writings and other people's writings and all this stuff. That's how you look at history.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I don't want anybody to mistake me or us for suggesting that there is good reason to doubt the existence of a historical Jesus.

Dan Beecher No, not at all.

Dan McClellan Because we're definitely not saying that.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan Because when it comes to archaeological data, there was no direct archaeological attestation of Pontius Pilate discovered until 1967, I believe.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan When an inscription was uncovered, a fragmentary inscription that mentions Pilate. Prior to that, we had some mentions in Philo and some mentions in Josephus, because those are the only two people who were writing about this part of the world in the middle of the first century CE, and they did not write about everybody.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so for 99.9999% of the people who lived in Judea or the Galilee in the first century CE, absolutely nothing survives about them. Even wealthy people, even powerful people, even important people.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And most likely, the historical Jesus lived and died without having become phenomenally popular. And the stories that are recorded in the Gospels are probably traditions that grew and developed after his death.

Dan Beecher Well, his ministry was only a few years long.

Dan McClellan Probably one year long.

Dan Beecher It's not enough time to get popular.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's enough time to say a bunch of stuff, and then if you have devoted followers, then they can start transmitting things.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, people say, "Well, we don't have anything from a contemporary." Yeah, we don't have anything from pretty much any contemporary of anybody who lived back then. That's not surprising. Well, what about all the stuff he did? Most of the stuff that we think about is probably later posthumous traditions that were based on stories that were being passed around. The historical Jesus probably never did anything that noteworthy apart from causing a riot in the temple around Passover, and that's probably what caused the Romans to execute him.

Dan Beecher So- Right ...

Dan McClellan even in the New Testament, his following ebbs and flows. He gains some and he loses a bunch, and a lot of people abandoned him. Even in the New Testament's telling of his life, it says he did all these miracles, but that's not supported by anything. And so we should not expect there to be a ton of material evidence for his life and for his exploits. I think we have precisely what we would expect to have. A few scattered references to this thing that happened many years ago, and then the traditions that get accumulated in the Gospels and in other texts that were written that didn't end up in the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Yeah. As a closing thought about this, again, what we encounter when we encounter apologetics is people who run up against something that challenges or that scares them theologically or scares them in a way that they... If they have to believe that everything is literally true in the Bible, then they bend over backwards to bend history to their will rather than just acknowledging what the data show.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it's just so much easier if you just encounter the Bible itself and the history on its own terms and just acknowledge that it's messy, it's not perfect, and that's okay. That doesn't have to bring the temple down.

Dan McClellan Well, I think if the temple is constructed on as rickety and as fragile a foundation as something like inerrancy and inspiration and univocality and all that, if the foundation is that rickety, then I think it frequently does need to be reduced to that zero-sum game. It's 100% or it's 0%. And I think that's why we see people retreating to these ridiculous claims that he's the best-attested figure in ancient history, and his crucifixion is the best-attested event in ancient history. And we have so many more thousands of copies of these texts than any other ancient text. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the movement that circulated those texts took over the Roman Empire.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then didn't really care about those other texts. So, there are a bunch of details of this that explain why the data are the way they are. But yeah, you have to loosen your grip on things like inerrancy and inspiration and univocality if you want to be able to engage with that. But because so much of this discourse doesn't go on at the level of critical interrogation and reasoning, because so much of it is really about vibes- Mm-hmm ... and is really about- Just cheerleading.

Dan Beecher And faith promotion- Yeah ... rather than actual inquiry.

Dan McClellan Like in that interview between Tucker and Jeremiah, Jeremiah speaks with a lot of conviction.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And a lot of authority.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan Even though the Oxford part of that authority is illegitimate, he speaks with a lot of authority. And for folks out there who don't have the time, the expertise, the resources, or the interest to actually go and drill down to the bedrock of the argument, that's good enough.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so that's really all that matters. And even though Tucker was like, "Really?" Even Tucker was a little skeptical, like, "What does that mean?

Dan Beecher What?"

Dan McClellan But that interview gets the job done for so many people. And so if you're an apologist, time to clock out. We did our job.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That's your job. Whether it actually does any justice to the data or whether it actually engages with it at all, your job is to make people feel better about believing.

Dan Beecher And if that works, then that works even if it means- Yeah, I don't want to spend more time on this, but it does seem like it does a disservice because it's just like, what it means is that people are hanging their hats on, like you say, very rickety information.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that means that their faith will be all that much more easy to rock when they encounter the truth.

Dan McClellan 100%.

Dan Beecher That's tricky.

Dan McClellan At SBL, one of the panels that I participated in was for this book published by The Bible for Normal People called "God's Stories for God's Children," which is a children's storybook Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I was responsible for writing a segment that dealt with 1 Kings 11 and 12. But one of the points that I made in there was that I wanted to engage the story in all its details, no matter how boring, no matter how controversial, because I wanted anyone who read that story and actually internalized the story and understood it, the last thing I wanted is for them to grow up and actually go, maybe they study it at school, or maybe they just find out on the internet, "Oh, I was lied to."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you can talk about milk before meat and you can talk about, "Oh, but this isn't as useful for children," stuff like that. That's not going to change the fact that somebody in their late teens, early 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever, if they are suddenly like, "Wait a minute, that's not what I was taught. I was very clearly taught this other thing," they're going to feel lied to.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I think we owe it to people to give them the truth to the degree that we have access to it, and which is one of the reasons I think these claims, whether it's about the manuscripts numbers or the Shroud or the claims about the crucifixion, they have to be called out because they're putting dogma over data.

Dan Beecher Yep.

Dan McClellan And that is the opposite of the title of our show.

Dan Beecher So we are not allowed to do that. We must object.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, let's move on to What's That? And this week's What's That? is really cool.

Dan McClellan I think.

Dan Beecher I don't know if you know this, Dan, I once wrote a play. You mentioned the Immaculate Reception.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher I once wrote a play called "The Immaculate Abortion," which I think- Is not going to surprise some of our viewers, but... It was a comedy. I think it was actually- Okay ... pretty funny.

Dan McClellan You know what?

Dan Beecher Let's make it a Patreon goal. If we get enough patrons- ... at some point, we'll produce that play and see if it's any good. Anyway, but no, what we're talking about is the Immaculate Conception.

Dan McClellan And- Conception, yes ...

Dan Beecher for the most of my life, now I wasn't raised Catholic. My understanding is this is a primarily Catholic- Yes ...

Dan McClellan belief.

Dan Beecher Yes. But I wasn't raised Catholic. I had heard of it, and I knew that it was to do with Jesus.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher And I just assumed, as so many people do, that the conception in question was of him. But it isn't.

Dan McClellan It isn't. Dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan The Immaculate Conception is not about the conception of Jesus. It is about the conception of Mary.

Dan Beecher So that is nuts.

Dan McClellan Go on.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Talk to us.

Dan McClellan What have we got? People will say, though, they'll be like, "Oh, well, what are we doing on Christmas? We're celebrating the Immaculate Conception."

Dan Beecher No, you're not.

Dan McClellan No, you're not. But yet it's a very widespread misunderstanding, and some of it has to do with the fact that, yes, it is a uniquely Catholic doctrine. Some of it has to do with the fact that people just don't pay an awful lot of attention to the details of doctrines like this. But the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is the notion that at the instant of Mary's conception, there was a special exemption that made her conceived without the stain of original sin. So original sin is supposed to be something that is passed on from parents to child, unavoidable.

Dan Beecher I think that's a segment we need to do.

Dan McClellan Original sin.

Dan Beecher Yes. We need to do original sin and dive in on that.

Dan McClellan So- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher look for that in the future, you guys- Yeah ... if you want to know a deep dive on that. But yes, okay. Original sin, ever since Adam, you're born tainted- Yes ...

Dan McClellan in some way.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And it's a way to kind of say that the That Jesus's atonement is necessary for all humans who are ever born.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because we are all born with this original sin. In the early periods of the church, there were some authors who suggested that children were born innocent and pure.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That they had no sin. But you also have- Fools! The lot of you.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan There were some passages that suggested that no, children are also born sinful. I want to pause and say that there are some apologists out there who will say things like, "None of us deserve anything but hell."

Dan Beecher Right. I've seen that.

Dan McClellan Which is just so stupid.

Dan Beecher I've seen that a lot.

Dan McClellan It's just an abominable notion- Yeah ... that even a one-day-old baby deserves eternal conscious torment.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because of their depraved nature that they had absolutely zero choice in.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I just find that the most abominable and stupid attempt to just kind of jerry-rig the need for Jesus' atonement.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Anyway, there's a passage in the Psalm, Psalm I think 51:5, that says, "I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." Where is it?

Dan Beecher Uh-oh.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So- And so people suggest that means, oh, there's sin involved in that whole process. And then you also have Romans 5. Paul says, "Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way, death came to all people because all sinned." These are the Lego bricks that are used to construct the doctrine of original sin, which then leads to, well, wait a minute, how did Jesus avoid getting it?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Well, and this is the question I always had. If we can just arbitrarily exempt somebody from it, why didn't we just arbitrarily exempt Jesus from it? Why did it have to be all the way back at Mary's conception?

Dan Beecher Well, you said it yourself. The Psalm said that it was the mother. So you got to clean out the mother.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then you got a pure vessel.

Dan McClellan Yes. And that's actually a big part of the rationale. There were theologians who were like, "Look, can we really imagine that the one sinless, pure savior gestated inside of a sinful environment?" "Even if there was this moment of exemption from the transmission or the imputation of original sin, can we imagine that Jesus was swimming around in amniotic fluid of sin?" So there was a desire to kind of push it back a ways, and it's really in the medieval period that we have folks kind of pushing in this direction. And there was one dude I had never heard of, John Duns Scotus- Mm ... who lived in the late 13th century CE. In fact, I think died around 1305 or something like that, 1308 CE. And he's the one who is thought to have first coherently explained how the idea of an immaculate conception is coherent within the grand network of doctrines of the Catholic faith.

Dan Beecher I'm just going to stop you right there and clarify something. What you just said is that this is a medieval or sort of Middle Ages idea. That's pretty far from being a concept that was actually laid out in the Bible.

Dan McClellan That's not even the half of it. That's not even the half of it. It was not formally articulated until 1854.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher No. Are you serious?

Dan McClellan I am dead serious, Enoch.

Dan Beecher So in terms of it being a canonized, sort of blessed by the church doctrine- Yep ...

Dan McClellan 1800s?

Dan Beecher 1854, yeah. Holy crap.

Dan McClellan Pope Pius IX.

Dan Beecher I did not see that coming.

Dan McClellan Yes. See, there was this notion that we got to figure this out. There's something going on here, and we're not sure exactly how to articulate this. And some people thought, "Eh, we don't really need this," because if Mary was sinless, was born sinless, never sinned throughout her life, then she had no need of Jesus' redemption. And that was what Thomas- Okay.

Dan Beecher That's an interesting problem.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's what Thomas Aquinas said. Others raised other issues with why we need to come up with an idea that Mary was conceived free from original sin, and if we're doing that, how are we doing it?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then you had this guy, and every time I see his name, I want to say Scotus.

Dan Beecher Because he is a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Dan McClellan The first time I read an article with that in it, I was like, "Was this written by AI?" "This is just a hallucination, isn't it?" But yeah, it becomes gradually more and more accepted between the 14th and 18th centuries, and then it's 1854. The Inef- And I'm going to pronounce this wrong because my Latin's terrible. Ineffabilis Deus was the 1854 pronunciation that declared the universal veneration of Mary's purity and all this. And this is what established the Catholic belief that life begins at conception. Because Mary was sinless from conception.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so it's two birds with one stone with that doctrine.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So the Immaculate Conception is entangled with the doctrine of personhood at conception.

Dan Beecher Of don't get an abortion.

Dan McClellan Well, yeah. That's the implication of that particular doctrine.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But yeah, that's how we get from folks like Augustine and others talking about, "Well, Mary was... She was just cool. That's all." And/or she had some kind of special exemption and all the way to... And I'm sure if we had Michael Peppard back on here, he'd be rolling his eyes. He'd be like, "You don't know what you're talking about."

Dan Beecher As a Catholic?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan As someone who is a scholar and knows the language, knows the history- Right ... knows the traditions a lot better than the two of us put together. But those are in rough outline. That's how we get to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Dan Beecher So, you listed what, two scriptures? You listed a Psalm and something else- ... as sort of the basis for this. Is that really it? Is it like- Oh, yeah. That- Because this doesn't feel like it needs to happen.

Dan McClellan No, it doesn't. It doesn't need to happen until you've figured out a whole series of other things that need to happen because of what you have decided the scriptures say need to happen. This is building on an edifice that was constructed over almost 2,000 years of philosophical reasoning about how to make sense of all of this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's all presupposing univocality and all that kind of stuff. Again, it's all presupposing- Yeah ... it's all presupposing inspiration, not inerrancy as we understand it today, because that's another thing that has really only come up in the last couple of hundred years, but as a formal doctrine. But yeah, this is just chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of ch- And it's implications all the way down until you get to the Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, yeah, it is not something that... You don't read the Bible and be like, "Well, we have to have the Immaculate Conception." You've got to go through a number of other things that you establish as a theological, a philosophical, a dogmatic foundation, and you're just accumulating all of this stuff, and it becomes necessary only at the end of all of that accumulation.