It's a Jubilee!

Dan McClellan Somebody listening to this is going to be like, "Dan, you moron."

Dan Beecher Ah, got him. We got him, everybody. Got him.

Dan McClellan Okay, yeah.

Dan Beecher He didn't know which one it was.

Dan McClellan Ha. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan 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 Woo. It's been a long day for me. I had some family emergencies of the pet variety that were harrowing. It's been a harrowing day, but I'm- All, everything copacetic though? Everything's okay.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher We've got a cat with significantly less hair now because the vet had to shave her, and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Dan McClellan Anywho.

Dan Beecher All right. Other than that, things are great. So let's dive into some Bible stuff, shall we?

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher Okay, so today on the show, we're going to first have a Is It Canon? We're going to talk about a book that is canon, I understand, full- And an X-Man. Yes, it is, yes.

Dan McClellan Just putting it out there.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. There you go. So we'll get to Jubilees, and then, in the second half of the show, we'll be taking issue with a bunch of correlations.

Dan McClellan We're going to correlate- ...

Dan Beecher and see if it means everything- Yes ... and something and anything.

Dan McClellan Probably not.

Dan Beecher Probably not. But first, Is It Canon? All right, so we said it. We're getting into Jubilees here, and that- Jubilees. The word jubilee is interesting. Mm-hmm. I myself attended the Diamond Jubilee of Her Highness, the Queen of England- Ah, yes ... back in her days.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher I didn't attend it. I sat on the banks of the Thames and watched as the giant flotilla floated by, which sounds super exciting, the largest flotilla that has ever floated the Thames. It sounds very exciting until you realize it's just boats going slowly past you. One of which contained the Queen- Yes ... who waved in my direction.

Dan McClellan Well, I hear she's good at waving.

Dan Beecher She was.

Dan McClellan She was good at waving.

Dan Beecher Yes. Not as good anymore. And the other jubilee that I know of is that this year, the year of our Lord 2025, is a jubilee year for the Catholics. Mm-hmm. The Pope, before he died, declared this year to be a jubilee year.

Dan McClellan Indeed.

Dan Beecher So, I don't know what that means. But what I do know is there is also a book that was not in my Bible called Jubilees, and I don't know anything about it.

Dan McClellan Well, it is generally considered a pseudepigraphical text. It is non-canonical for the overwhelming majority of Christianity as well as Judaism. There is a movement, a Jewish movement, that is associated with the Christian movement that has it in the canon, that also has it in the canon, so.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has Jubilees in the canon. In fact, their inclusion of the Book of Jubilees in the canon is the only reason we can claim to have a full copy of the Book of Jubilees.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan Because it was only preserved in Ge'ez manuscripts for a long, long time, until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I think there's a little bit of a Latin translation from, like, the fifth century.

Dan Beecher But the dozens- So the last time we met the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo people- Mm-hmm ... Church, we were talking about 1 Enoch and how they include that also in their canon.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Is that correct?

Dan McClellan Yes. And this is closely related. In fact, Jubilees is probably basing some of its text on 1 Enoch.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so these are both texts that were written in the Hellenistic period. Most scholars would say Jubilees was probably written somewhere between 160 to 150 BCE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So this is just after the Maccabean period. This is during the Hasmonean kingdom, and it was probably originally written in Hebrew, and then probably translated into Syriac somewhere along the way. Also translated from Hebrew into Greek- Right ... and then from Greek into Latin and into Ge'ez because Jubilees was probably brought down to the Kingdom of Aksum, modern-day Ethiopia, by folks who had copies of the Septuagint, so the Greek translation- Right ... of the Jewish scriptures, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. And then, I think the oldest existing Ge'ez or Ethiopic manuscript of Jubilees is, like, from the 14th century.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan But there are, like, 50 or so manuscripts of Jubilees preserved in Ge'ez. And based on the manuscripts of Jubilees that were discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are more than a dozen different manuscripts of Jubilees, which puts it alongside 1 Enoch, outnumbering the number of manuscripts of every other book of the Bible except for Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Psalms.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan So Jubilees and 1 Enoch were quite influential.

Dan Beecher Yeah, if I'm understanding you, let me just say it in my own way just to make sure I'm getting it. But if there were that many copies of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in and among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And at least the people who were keeping those records near the Dead Sea, lo those many years ago, anciently. Clearly, it must have been very important. It must have been as important to them as you say, those other books- Yeah ... as Genesis, Exodus, or whatever ones you listed.

Dan McClellan Yeah. They definitely weren't the core of what was considered scripture for Judaism, but they seem to have been even more influential than books like Ezekiel and Daniel, and Numbers, and Joshua, and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan So, it was influential if we take the number of manuscripts preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls as a proxy for how important the text was. But we also see its influence on later rabbinic literature. We even see some stuff in the New Testament that seems to be reflecting, or not necessarily saying, "Hey, here's something I took from Jubilees," but references to traditions that look at those traditions in ways they are presented in Jubilees and not really anywhere else.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, indicating that they're familiar with, and they are influenced by the tradition as preserved in Jubilees. But in short, Jubilees is basically a rewriting of the Book of Genesis and a little bit of Exodus.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Interesting. And the idea is this: Moses is on Sinai in Exodus 24. God's like, "Hey, I'm going to give you these laws, but once you all get to the Promised Land, everybody's going to break all the laws. I'm going to send them away into exile. I'm going to destroy the temple. Then I'm going to bring them back, then I'm going to rebuild the temple, and then everything's going to be copacetic from then on out. Everything's going to be grand." And Moses is like, "What if you didn't do that?" And God was like, "No, I'm still going to do that." And then God is like, "Here's my angel, and he's going to give you all the deets." And God bounces. And so, the angel of the presence, and this is the Malach Adonai, the messenger of Adonai, that is introduced in Exodus 23, the chapter before, where God says, "I'm sending an angel before you to guard you along the way. My name is in him." And this angel's like, "Hey, Moses. Anyway, here's the deal," and retells the entire book of Genesis.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan Not verse for verse, but story for story. And an awful lot of it is condensed, but it's all being retold in a way that would be more meaningful for an educated Jewish person in the middle of the second century BC.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, what's going on in Jubilees, in my opinion, is close to what Joseph Smith was trying to do with his revision of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan Like the Book of Moses, where God's like, "Hey, Moses. So anyway, here's how everything's going to play out for- ... this is how everything began. Here's how everything's going to play out." And you're rewriting the whole book of Genesis and changing an awful lot, but following the same trajectory. And it's all divided up into jubilees. So, a jubilee is 49 years- Oh ... according to the Hebrew Bible.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan You have seven years, the seventh year is the Sabbath year, but every seven sets of seven years is the 49th year. That's the jubilee year. And so basically, we're imposing this chronological framework of sets of seven and jubilees and everything upon the book of Genesis. And so a lot of the chapters begin where the angel of the presence is speaking to Moses and says, "So anyway, during the fifth year of the fourth week of this jubilee, in the third month, in the middle of the month, Abram celebrated the festival of the first fruits and the wheat harvest." And it's kind of a way to say, this history is already written. It's playing out according to this very regimented chronology. Everything important happens on jubilee years or- ... in a way that can be measured against these jubilee years. And you get updates, and you get changes, and you get corrections, and stuff like that. I want to read a couple of examples of some of the ways they're retelling the story. But first, this is the very end of the first chapter. There are two sections to the book of Jubilees. Chapter 1 is one section, and then the other section is chapters 2 through 50.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And there are only 50 chapters in Jubilees.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Those are not evenly measured chapters or sections.

Dan McClellan It is definitely back-heavy. And the first chapter is just this narrative explaining what's going on, where Moses is like, "What?

Dan Beecher Why?

Dan McClellan Who?

Dan Beecher Okay."

Dan McClellan And anyway, verse 29 of the first chapter, it's a long verse: "The angel of the presence, who was going along in front of the Israelite camp, took the tablets that told of the divisions of the years from the time the law and the testimony were created for the weeks of their jubilees year by year in their full number, and their jubilees from the time of the first creation until the time of the new creation, when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be renewed like the powers of the sky and like all the creatures of the earth, until the time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mount Zion." So, that's the explanation of what the angel of the presence is about to drop on Moses. And so, in chapter 2, you have Adam and Eve, you have this whole creation, and then you have this statement, "There were 22 leaders of humanity from Adam until him, and 22 kinds of works were made until the seventh day." So, we've got another division into these very symbolic numbers, and 22 is symbolic.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Do you have any idea where 22 might be symbolic? 22 and 24 both pop up a number of times- No ... in early Judaism.

Dan Beecher I know the significance of six, seven, but I don't know the other ones.

Dan McClellan No, you don't. Nobody does.

Dan Beecher I'm the only one.

Dan McClellan 22 and 24 are significant. 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. And so, once you get into first-century CE, you have texts and folks, people like Josephus and other texts that say, "Oh, yeah. Are sacred scriptures number 22 or are they number 24?" That's how many books are in there, because that is symbolic, and if you like Greek, then you go with 24. If you prefer Hebrew, then you go with 22. So, that's what's going on with these symbolic numbers. And there's an interesting tradition that has its origin in the Book of Jubilees- Okay ... that might surprise some people. So, I've made videos before where I've said, "Hey, the first lie in the Bible is not the serpent talking to Eve. It actually comes before that." Genesis 2:17, where God tells Adam, "On the day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will certainly die." He doesn't die. What's going on there?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan One of the responses to this, there are two main responses. One is to say, "Well, he didn't mean die, die. He meant die as in not die."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The other response is to say, "Well, a day to the Lord is 1,000 years."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this is based on, there's a passage in, I always screw it up, I don't know why. It's either Psalms or Proverbs where it says, "1,000 years are like a day to the Lord," or, "like a watch in the night," which would be three or four hours. And I've always found that a rather silly argument, but it originates in the Book of Jubilees. So, Jubilees chapter 4, we're getting to the end of the story of Adam. "He was the first to be buried in the ground." And then verse 30, "He lacked 70 years from 1,000 years because 1,000 years are one day in the testimony of heaven. For this reason, it was written regarding the Tree of Knowledge, 'On the day that you eat from it, you will die.' Therefore, he did not complete the years of this day because he died during it."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, the Book of Jubilees is- So, we've got the apologetic built in.

Dan Beecher I like it.

Dan McClellan Yes, one of the first apologists- Okay ... going through and rewriting the text and smoothing out the problems- Right ... and being like, "You thought that was a contradiction, didn't you?"

Dan Beecher Ah. "Yeah, we got you."

Dan McClellan And so, it's very similar to Samuel and Kings and then Chronicles, where Chronicles is retelling a lot of the same stuff, but altering it and fixing it and like, "Wait a minute, we got to have our Levites here. Okay, drop some Levites in. We'll throw some Levites over there. We'll sprinkle some Levites on the ark." And in Jubilees, they're doing a very similar thing, retelling the Book of Genesis. And so, in a lot of ways, it is like one of the first commentaries on the Bible- Right ... because it's basically telling us what was important to them at the time and how they wanted to think about it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We could do the same thing today. If someone were to rewrite the Book of Genesis and somebody was like, "Hey, man, go nuts. You have all the authority you need. Just do what you need to do to make it work for you." And they would be like, "Oh, okay, I'm going to put more angels over here, and do this, that, and the other thing." It would be the exact same thing. And then, something that is very important here, remember, this is being written probably by a rather well-educated Jewish individual. They also have a concern for calendars.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And they say in chapter 6, here the angel of presence is talking to Moses and says, "Now you command the Israelites to keep the years in this number, 364 days. Then the year will be complete, and it will not disturb its time from its days or from its festivals, because everything will happen in harmony with their testimony. They will neither omit a day nor disturb a festival."

Dan Beecher So, we're getting- I mean, pretty close.

Dan McClellan Pretty close. We're getting closer to- Pretty darn close.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We're moving away from a lunisolar calendar to a strictly solar calendar.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan 364 days, not exactly getting us all the way there.

Dan Beecher And they divide it- It'll work for a while.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It'll work for a good little while.

Dan McClellan Yeah. There's going to be some drift- Uh-huh ... but we're not going to be alive to see it, so why do we care?

Dan Beecher And this is- Wasn't this holiday in September?

Dan McClellan This began as a harvest festival and- I swore this was supposed to be a winter thing. Yeah, and now it's a planting festival.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is why people are like, "Well, the solstice was on December 25th." It's not on December 25th.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan It was at one point, and then we had that Tokyo Drift. And they divide it into four quarters of 13 weeks each, and I want to say they use a Sabbath trick To resolve the- This one weird trick?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The angel of the presence hates this one weird trick. So, the calendar is a big part of this. Festivals are a big part of it.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan The Book of Jubilees is going along saying, "Then Abraham celebrated the Shavuot and the Festival of Booths," and stuff like that. And I think, I don't think that's anywhere in Genesis. That's a much later thing. But here's an example of one of the ways that a story is being retold- Okay ... in this, because it's 50 chapters. The Book of Genesis itself is 50 chapters. So, if it were an exact retelling, it would just be Genesis 1 through the end of Genesis 50.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But it's not. It's shortening things. So, this is Genesis 19. The entire chapter of Genesis 19 is five verses, and Genesis 19 is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, this is what the Book of Jubilees, how it recounts the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. "During this month," remember, we're dividing everything into months and weeks of years and stuff, "During this month, the Lord executed the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Zeboim, and all the environs of the Jordan. He burned them with fire and brimstone and annihilated them until the present in accord with what I have now told you about all their actions, that they were depraved and very sinful, that they would defile themselves, commit sexual sins in their flesh, and do what was impure upon the earth. The Lord will execute judgment in the same way in the places where people commit the same sort of impure actions as Sodom, just like the judgment on Sodom. But we went about-" I don't know, man.

Dan Beecher I've been to Vegas. I don't think that's right.

Dan McClellan You're a fan, from what I hear, too. I don't think that is right. "But we went about," and remember, this is still the voice of the angel of the presence to Moses.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "We went about rescuing Lot because the Lord remembered Abraham, so he brought him out from the overthrow of Sodom. He and his daughters committed a sin on the earth that had not occurred on the earth from the time of Adam until his time because the man had sex with his daughter."

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan "Here it has been commanded and engraved on the heavenly tablets regarding all his descendants, that He is to remove them, uproot them, execute judgment on them like the judgment of Sodom, and not to leave him any human descendants on the earth on the day of judgment." Which is rough.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because when we look in Genesis 19, the offspring of the incestuous pairing of Lot and his daughters are the people of Moab and Ammon.

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, we've got, ew, that's a little problematic.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But that's it. That's how the entire chapter of Genesis 19 is retold.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, it's condensing some stuff, and then when it comes to the Festival of Tabernacles, that gets- Which is my personal favorite.

Dan Beecher I love that festival ...

Dan McClellan that gets more than twice as many verses.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So, there's an awful lot about... The things that the author of Jubilees chooses to dwell on are sometimes a little unexpected, unusual. They're not the kinds of things that people today would choose to dwell on.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan If you had a lot of the megachurch pastors and the TikTok pastors of today doing this, we would probably have 20 chapters on Sodom and Gomorrah- Yeah ... and the Festival of Tabernacles wouldn't even be in there. But it probably shouldn't be anyway because it's not in Genesis. But the last few chapters cover the time in Egypt, and the angel of the presence is reminding Moses what Moses just did- ... and then getting up to the point where the angel of the presence is like, "So-" Just to recap- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher your story.

Dan McClellan And that brings us to right now- So- ... when I am talking to you on the mountain.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, I wanted to circle back to something, because at the very beginning of this segment, you called this book pseudepigraphical.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And I guess what I'm wondering is, are we meant to believe that Moses wrote this book?

Dan McClellan Well, we're meant to believe that the angel of the presence dictated this book to Moses.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, Moses wrote down what was dictated to him in the angel's voice. That's why the passages are like, "So, that's why we," and this is the two angels that accompany God in Genesis 18 and travel on to Sodom in Genesis 19.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "That's when we helped Lot out," but then God was like, "Destroy all of his descendants." So, it's the angel of the presence dictating the text to Moses, and Moses just furiously- Right ... writing everything down.

Dan Beecher "Slow down. Slow down, man. Come on."

Dan McClellan Even though Moses is probably, well, the text represents him as literate, but historically speaking, if there were a historical Moses- ... he would've spoken probably, I don't know, let's say Russian.

Dan Beecher So, I mean- Not Egyptian?

Dan McClellan ... that's as good enough an answer as any other. Sure, Egyptian. But this angel of the presence is the one that's delivering the laws to Moses.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, you go to Galatians, written by Paul. Galatians 3:19 says, "Why then was the law given? It was added because of the transgressions until the arrival of the descendant to whom the promise had been made. It was administered through angels by an intermediary."

Dan Beecher Which- Okay ...

Dan McClellan seems like it's referencing this tradition of an angel mediating between God and Moses, who then turns around and gives the law to the people.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, this is one of the indications that the Book of Jubilees was probably influential enough to be reflected in some New Testament passages. And there are a handful of other places where scholars think that the influence is coming through. And we do have evidence that early Christians knew of the Book of Jubilees, the writings of Epiphanius, Justin Martyr, Origen, Diodorus of Tarsus, Isidore of Alexandria, Isidore of Seville, Eutychius of Alexandria. A number of early Christians make reference to Jubilees. They probably had either Greek copies or maybe Syriac copies, or Latin copies before. Just being left out of the canon, it was a text non grata, and so probably faded away.

Dan Beecher So, I'm sorry, just the idea is that those people who referenced it, the theory is that they were referencing it as scripture- No ... in the same way?

Dan McClellan No?

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan No. They were just witnessing to the existence of the text.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Not necessarily saying, "We got scripture here, people." I would have to look into those texts to see exactly how they're representing it. Like 1 Enoch, definitely there were people who were referencing it as scripture. The New Testament references it as prophecy.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Jubilees, I think the evidence is not nearly so strong, but these are folks who are referencing it as a text that was in circulation.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And based on comparison of the, I think I said this already, but based on comparison with the Hebrew manuscripts that were discovered at Qumran, the Ge'ez versions are pretty faithfully translated. So, the Ethiopic versions that exist have not significantly changed much.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It pretty closely follows the ancient versions that we have from among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, it's a fascinating book. I think it's interesting to see how the interpretive lenses that educated Jewish writers in the middle of the second century BCE, how they're interpreting what's going on in Genesis, what they don't like. They edit out a lot of the stuff where God is motivating people to lie and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Some of that gets edited out. The stuff where either God- More apologetics, by the way.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, the author of Jubilees, yeah, is one of the first apologists, wants to present this as something that is not going to rub the Jewish intelligentsia the wrong way- Right ... but is going to make this sound like inspired scripture, make it a little easier for them to game the algorithm so they can make that scratch off of more people seeing their videos- ... talking about how awesome the Book of Genesis is. So, a fascinating text. I don't think it's as influential as the book of 1 Enoch. It passes along some of the traditions of 1 Enoch, but it was an influential text in some ways, and as we've seen, it is the origin of one of the apologetic arguments against understanding God's statement in Genesis 2:17 as a lie, or at the very least, something that doesn't actually come to pass that God said would come to pass. Which I think makes it fascinating in its own right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But there's the Hermeneia commentary series. That's where you're going to find the best discussion of Jubilees. There's two volumes on Jubilees, and they took the translation that James VanderKam did for that commentary series, and they published it as a standalone translation. So, if you would like a really, really good translation of Jubilees, it's like 17 or 18 bucks to get a paperback version of the Hermeneia translation. So, don't go chasing down the TikTok shop folks who are putting the, "This is the real Ethiopic Bible with all 88 books. We got them all." They'll have a version of Jubilees in there, but it's going to be a public domain translation from 150 years ago.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan It's not going to have the updates that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff like that, and it's not going to be a very good translation. So, if you want a good translation, don't waste your time with the Ethiopian Bibles that people are selling on the internet right now. Just go get your Hermeneia translation- Okay ... of Jubilees.

Dan Beecher All right. Jubilees, sounds fun.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Let's move on to our next segment, which is Taking Issue.

Dan McClellan Bum, bum, bum.

Dan Beecher And this week's Taking Issue, we're going to take issue with a rather attractive image, a beautiful chart that was built a while ago, called the Cross Reference Visualization.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher And it was done by a guy named Chris Harrison, I think.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Chris Harrison. And basically, what it purported to be was, imagine a A horizon line, essentially. A line in the lower third of the image, and below it are these lines. These just so many lines.

Dan McClellan Just a stack of vertical lines of different lengths- Yeah ... that are descending down from the horizon line.

Dan Beecher And I guess those are the chapters of the Bible. Is that right?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And then above it are these big, beautiful curves and multi-colors, and it's very pretty. And the curves go from one vertical line below, all up and over to some other vertical line, and it's just interconnecting all of these different chapters. And what it purports to be, if I understand this correctly- Mm-hmm ... is a visualization of all the ways that the Bible, all the verses in the Bible that correlate with each other.

Dan McClellan Yes. It is the Bible cross-references chart that began as a collaboration between a pastor named Christoph Rommel and Chris Harrison in 2007. They claim to have cataloged 63,779 cross-references in the Bible.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is a visualization of those 63,779 cross-references. And as you mentioned earlier while we were discussing what we were talking about tonight, there was a very popular mimicking version of this chart- Mm-hmm ... that is Bible contradictions.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Now, the handy thing about the Bible contradictions chart is that it actually catalogs all the actual contradictions. Chris Harrison's chart, to my knowledge, I think somebody has tried to recreate it in an interactive way so you can actually see the verses, but in addition to the fact that it does not include all 63,779 cross-references, it doesn't even tell you what verse. It just says Genesis 1, Ezekiel 37.

Dan Beecher And- Right, which means go read both of these full chapters- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan and then figure out- Figure out what we're talking about ...

Dan Beecher what they have in common.

Dan McClellan But I see this chart, or at least the claim, 63,779, this is in my head like that song that I don't even remember the number, but it's 600 something, something, something.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You probably know what that's from.

Dan Beecher It's from "Rent."

Dan McClellan It's from "Rent." I was going to say, is it from "Rent?" But I've never seen "Rent." And you usually see that number included in this claim, the Bible, 1,500 years, 45 authors, three continents, three languages, 63,779 cross-references, no contradictions, one message, or something like that.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan That's been shared far and wide.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And it drives me nuts because it's pretty much entirely wrong. The only thing that is accurate is that it is written in three different languages.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. But when I first saw that, I had to chase down this chart and see what was going on here, because people make it sound like this is such an anomaly that the only plausible explanation is something supernatural. Like this is evidence for the inspiration, the inerrancy, the univocality, the supernatural origins of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it just didn't pass the sniff test for me. So I chased down the origin of it, and here's the way Chris Harrison defines a cross-reference.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "Cross-references are conceptual links between verses, connecting locations, people, phrases, et cetera, found in different parts of the Bible."

Dan Beecher Great.

Dan McClellan That, however, does not tell us who is making these links.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this is my biggest problem with this. There is nothing that supports the notion that these links are inherent to the text, native to the text, understood and intended by any of the authors and editors.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan These links are often so thin and so ambiguous as to be pretty meaningless. There's a partial list of these cross-references that I found where somebody was like, "Genesis 1:1 talks about the creation of the heavens and the Earth, and so this cross-references with every single passage in the Bible that uses a word for create."

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan It's like, no, it doesn't.

Dan Beecher Or heaven or Earth.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's not indicative of intent- Right ... or cognizance on the part of any of the authors. That is us saying, "I matched these two."

Dan Beecher Right. Well, and not only that, but not for nothing, later books had the previous books to reference.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The authors were familiar with the work going before. So a reference doesn't mean, like if the guy who writes Spider-Man 211 also read Spider-Man 3- Yeah. See, issue number three ... he could reference it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That doesn't prove anything divine happening.

Dan McClellan Right, and that's another part of this. The Bible is unique in a lot of ways. It is an anthology of texts for a community that lasted a lot longer than most other communities have lasted. It shouldn't have lasted as long as it has. But because it lasted as long as it did, because the authoritative literature accumulated for as long as it did, and every layer that was added to it had the benefit of looking back at some, if not all, of what came before, you have a lot of intentional allusion and paraphrase and even direct quotation of the things that came before.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so it is a uniquely self-referential text, but not in a way that is implausibly human curated.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The uniqueness of the circumstances contributes to the uniqueness of the features of the text, and definitely not in a supernatural way.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But it gets even worse for Chris's explanation because in addition to the fact that what this is basically saying is, "I can create links 63,779 times," which says nothing about what the text itself intended. I can take "Lord of the Rings" and "Hellboy" and the Bible, and I bet you I can create thousands of cross-references as well.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Look, we got a reference to mountains over here. We got a reference to mountains over here.

Dan Beecher Boom.

Dan McClellan Cross-reference roasted. It doesn't mean much, but Chris goes on in where he's selling versions of this chart. It says, "Cross-references are included in the margins or footnotes of some Bibles." And then he says, "Example here," and there's a hyperlink to a version of the Bible that has, in the margins, a bunch of cross-references. And I'm like, great. I want to look at the cross-references that Chris chose to show us as an example of cross-references to see what a prototypical cross-reference in the mind of Chris Harrison is. And the page that is linked to is Acts chapter 1, and the cross-reference that is in the dead center is Acts 1:18, which describes the death of Judas. The first cross-reference is Matthew 27:3-10, which is the contradictory account of the death of Judas. So when you look at the first cross-reference of the example of cross-references provided by Chris Harrison, what do you find? A contradiction in the Bible. And we've gone over this contradiction before. I think we have. Have we talked about the death of Judas?

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher We've talked about the death- We did the various Judases exploding- Yes ... in whatever way he's going to explode.

Dan McClellan And we know that if you need these texts to both be accurate descriptions of a single event, you can force them through the square hole.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But for anybody capable of abstract and critical thought, these very clearly contradict each other. And so I think it's funny to try to use this as evidence of something when your evidence directly refutes and contradicts your claim.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then the other references are Matthew 18:7, 26:14, 15:24, Mark 14-- And these are references to Jesus basically lamenting Judas's destiny.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, okay, great. You've got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all talking about Judas because they're four different tellings of the same story.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it's like these- That's a pretty solid and easy thing to correlate.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That's pretty low-hanging fruit. That's an accident of having four different tellings of the same story.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Nothing supernatural about anything yet.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the fact that when I look at that one verse, I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight cross-references in the one verse. One of them is a contradiction, and the others are just the same story told four different times- Right ... by the four different authors. If these are your cross-references that are supposed to be manifesting the supernatural nature of this book, how dare it have 63,779 cross-references? Has any such thing ever existed before?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is nothing special.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I try to bring this up. You've seen me on Twitter. I get pretty chippy. You have a good time. I have a good time. When I see this, usually I can't pass up the opportunity to correct it, because it's just so silly, and it's not evidence of anything. And if you think critically about it for any amount of time at all, you can see that this isn't really evidence of anything. But man, the pushback I get when I point out how silly this is for folks who just-- I don't know what they're thinking about when they're looking at this. If I bring this up and show this to them, I don't know what's going through their head, but certainly not critical thinking- ... which is a problem. So this chart, as pretty as it is- Yeah ... and I got no complaints, the aesthetic is fine.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan When you look at the lines across the bottom as well, they're also shaded. You go from light to darker to darker to lighter to darker to lighter to darker, and those are the different books of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Sure. So Genesis is the light one on the left, and then you go all the way to the very light one towards the right. That's Matthew. And so you can see the different books of the Bible. So it's a good little visualization of there's a lot of data in the visualization.

Dan Beecher What's that really long chapter in the middle? Psalms 129, I think.

Dan McClellan Oh, okay. Is that the-- Gosh, I always forget.

Dan Beecher I'm pretty sure- I would've guessed it was a psalm.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it has 150 verses in it.

Dan Beecher Oh my gosh.

Dan McClellan Nope, it's not 129. Somebody listening to this is going to be like, "Dan, you moron."

Dan Beecher Ah, got him. We got him, everybody. We got him.

Dan McClellan Okay, yeah.

Dan Beecher He didn't know which one it was. Got you.

Dan McClellan I've been got. That is true. It is in the one...

Dan Beecher We don't need to know. It's fine.

Dan McClellan Yeah, okay.

Dan Beecher Fine. Everyone can look it up on their own.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Just go through Psalms until you find the one that's too annoyingly long.

Dan McClellan But something else that I see when people do this, when they say, "Oh, here's all the cross-references." You know the cross-references claim is circulating enough to have a life of its own when you begin to see supplementary claims, like people posting a very similar chart that has only maybe a couple dozen links.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan All these rainbows going across the horizon line. A bunch of people are sharing a very similar-looking one with only a couple dozen lines, and they're labeling it Cross-references in the Quran.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And I was like, "Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa."

Dan Beecher So they're claiming, "Look, our book has 6,000..." 63,000.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher 63,000. And they've only got 42, so clearly their book is false and our book is real.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the first time I saw this, I was like, "That doesn't look right." The Quran has an awful lot of cross-references, and you can even find books published on cross-references in the Quran. There are a lot of them. And so I did something that the overwhelming majority of the people on the internet don't seem capable of. I saved the image- Mm-hmm ... and then did a reverse image search.

Dan Beecher Uh-oh.

Dan McClellan For those of you out there who don't know about this, go to tineye.com, or you can even just go to Google Images, and you plop in the image, and it will tell you where this is found on the internet. TinEye I like because you can sort them according to date.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So it will give you the earliest occurrence of this image anywhere on the internet. Drop it in there. I took this chart, I dropped it in there, and it took me to a website called Adam Lambert Full Circle Moments and Firsts. What this is, is a timeline of the life of the American Idol singer Adam Lambert- ... with life events and when they come around again or capitulate or whatever. And the people who say, "Cross-references in the Quran," it's a fuzzy chart. You can't really tell what's going on there. You can't read anything. But if you just do a reverse image search or you go to that website, you can see that the events are like, American Idol audition, San Francisco, California, July 17th, 2008. And then 2009, meeting Madonna, Madonna's home, New York City, New York, May 27th, 2009. Ring of Fire, Glam Nation Tour, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, July 7th, 2010. Somebody found a chart that looked similar but had- ... significantly fewer connections and were like, "I'm taking this." And then slapped this label on it, ensuring that the image was blurry enough that you couldn't see anything- Uh-huh ... and just passed this off as the cross-references of the Quran.

Dan Beecher And yes. I've got to say, the way that, I assume mostly American, but maybe not just-- I don't know. I've seen Islamophobia all over the world. The way that Christians badmouth the Quran, these are people who, of course, have never read the Quran. They don't know what's in the Quran. They know what some very Islamophobic pastor on the internet has told them about the Quran- Mm ... which is all misinformation. But it's just so weird to me. I made a very fiery post on Threads a while back. I have zero Threads followers. You guys are welcome to try to follow me on Threads. I don't even know what my Threads handle is. But I did a post, and I made a claim about Christianity and Islam being essentially the same thing.

Dan McClellan And all the people got mad.

Dan Beecher And okay, fair enough, you disagree with my claim that theologically they're similar. That's fine, but they didn't present theological arguments. Multiple people were like, "No, because they worship Satan." And I was like, "Really?" So the desire to just full-on slander Islam with no- Yeah ... knowledge, just invective is amazing.

Dan McClellan And a lot of them will be outraged at anything remotely similar coming from non-Christian religions. Have you ever seen people who are like, "The Talmud says Jesus is boiling in a pot of feces for eternity"? It's like, well, you just said Muslims worship Satan.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. On what grounds do you say what you're saying is appropriate or what this 2,000-year-old text said is inappropriate? And- I don't know if anyone has noticed, but there has been an increase in Islamophobic rhetoric on the part of evangelical Christians online recently.

Dan Beecher Because- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan there are influencers who are like, "Islam is the next mountain that we're going to conquer."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so there is an intentional and a concerted effort to turn everyone's sights on Islam. So there's going to be a lot of Islamophobic crap on the internet.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Push back against that, folks- Yeah ... when you see that.

Dan McClellan And especially if people are using Sam Harris post-2011 Islamophobic pseudo-scholarship. That stuff's no good. But you have Ali Beth Stuckey coming out and saying, "Literally 99% of the world's terrorism is rooted in Islam. It's a uniquely and inherently violent religion." It's like you've got more violent passages in the Bible than you do in the Quran.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And they'll be like, "Well, obviously Jesus said this, that, and the other." And it's like, okay, that doesn't make those passages go away.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That is just you renegotiating what you think the Bible is telling you, and guess what? People do the same thing with the Quran.

Dan Beecher Right. Which is why we have- Do you want us to find messages of peace and love in the Quran? Because we can find them.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They're there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they'll be like, "No, no, they have to interpret it this way." And it's like, well, you don't think you have to interpret the Bible that way. Everybody's going to engage with their texts in ways that make them meaningful and useful. And unfortunately, there are a lot of societies right now that don't have a lot of political stability, where the state is not considered to be legitimate, where there is a lot of ethnic conflict and stuff like that. And so if people find meaning in the more violent parts of the text and decide they're going to go out and do something desperate in order to try to save their people or their nation or whatever, that's going to happen, just like it does when Christians are in those- Or to consolidate control and gain power.