Old Testament God vs. New Testament God

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

Dan Beecher I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, 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 Just peachy.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Things are peachy good. Yeah. Uh, I'm excited. We teased it on our last episode, at the end of our last, uh, uh, episode, that we were going to be doing this today. Today, we're gonna do a taking issue. Mm-hmm. And the, w- the thing we're taking issue with is some of the ways that it's, that the difference between Old Testament God and New Testament God is discussed. Because, uh, maybe that's a valid discussion, but maybe also you're just being an antisemite, and the... We're, we're gonna, we're gonna figure out how to avoid doing that- Yeah ... 'cause that sucks. So let's move on with taking issue. All right. So here we are. We got, we got a, we got a, a Hebrew Bible. We got a new thing. Mm-hmm. And I have heard many people talk about... And here's the thing, what I know of the Bible, and I have not read the thing cover to cover. We know this. I admit this. But, uh, when I read things from the Hebrew Bible, God can be kind of a jerk. Uh, he is- Mm-hmm ... he can be awful, and he can also be great, uh, or he can just be great to some people and awful to others.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And, uh, when I look at Jesus, at very least in the n- in the New Testament, uh, he seems a lot more love focused. So what I hear, what you hear a lot is God of the Bible, mean and bad, or God of the Hebrew Bible, mean and bad. God of the New Testament, uh, sweetness and love and sugar and spice and everything nice. So... And then you hear somebody go, "Antisemite," and that is a tricky thing. Yeah. So let's, let's dive into, you know, la- last segment we talked about, uh, all the different ways that God was not only referred to, but the, but how God was part of a pantheon, and God was the, the, the, not just one God, but there are many gods.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And s- so, so walk, walk me into this. Let's, let's, let's get chest deep into- ... uh, into Old Testament, New Testament. What do we got?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Yeah. The... And I, I think of a cartoon, uh, that I saw a while ago whenever I, I think about this. This was something years ago. It was a couple of kids, it was Christmas, and they're h- uh, peekin' around a corner, and they see Santa, who looks very angry and is holding an ax. And it says, "Oh, it's Old Testament Santa." And, um, and I saw some-

Dan Beecher Undeniably a cute, uh, co- a little, little comic. But-

Dan McClellan I saw, I saw a, a number of comments from, from, uh, friends and colleagues who were excoriating the, the antisemitism that lurked beneath- Okay ... the, the hood of this joke. Uh, and the problem is there's a, there's this notion that God is, is evil in the Old Testament, and God is merciful and good in the New Testament, and this is not a modern thing. Mm. In fact, it goes back to the very earliest generations of Christianity, and even before we had a New Testament. Uh, because Marcion is probably the first person to try to draw this distinction. Uh, we've talked a little about Marcion. We need to have a Marcion specialist on to, to help us fill in some of the gaps. But- Sure ... but this is probably an early adopter of some brand of what would later be called Gnosticism.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But, but a big part of this was imposing a specific kind of Middle Platonic cosmology on the Bible or, or incorporating the, the Bible into this Middle Platonic cosmological framework. And what this gives us is the creator god as a kind of JV squad, wicked god- Okay ... who creates using, using flesh and, and material to imprison or capture divine, the spirits of, of the divine, of the pleroma, in these fleshly prisons.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And, um, now there's, I don't know the degree to which Marcion gets into all of that, but Marcion, um, dismisses the God of the Hebrew Bible as a wicked, uh, god, a secondary god, and talks about the god of his version of the New Testament as the supreme god, the good god.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so Marcion's, uh, M- Marcion's New Testament is really just a version of the Gospel of Luke that, uh, fiddles with some things here or there, or might have been the original version prior to someone else fiddling with things in response to Marcion. And then-

Dan Beecher Something got fiddled.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then, uh, 10 of the letters of Paul.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So Marcion rejects some of the letters of Paul, and nothing else is in his, his version of the New Testament. Uh, and within Gnosticism, you have a few different streams of tradition that develop, but there's a very similar take, that, uh, that Adonai is Yaldabaoth, whi- which is the, the demiurge, which is the creator god, and this is the evil god who wants to imprison people, and Jesus came to free people from the imprisonment of that god. Mm. And what, what this does is it identifies the God worshiped by the Jewish people as evil. It identifies the God of their scriptures as a single deity that is evil and distinguishes that God from the superior good God of the New Testament. And this is kind of the root, the historical roots of this dichotomy.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And there is, there is some anti-Judaism, uh, going on there, because to say that all Jewish people worship a- an evil god is anti-Semitic. Um, it is to say that they are themselves evil, that they are, um... You know, and people say the same thing about Islam.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Suggest that Allah is, uh, an evil god, and therefore that evil god's followers are all evil. And it's to say it's, it's kind of a supersessionism, that, that Christianity is better than Judaism, that the God of Jesus Christ and Christianity is better than the distinct s- i- inferior god of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament-

Dan Beecher Can I-

Dan McClellan ... and the Jewish people.

Dan Beecher Just as a, just, just to put a fly in the ointment, can I not-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ... g- I... Is it not kind of inherent to Christianity that we are a level up of Judaism? Like, it, it, there, it feels like there's, that's inherent in the sort of, in the New Testament.

Dan McClellan Yeah, there's, there's certainly a case to make that supersessionism is baked into the foundation of Christianity, and there have been a variety of different ways that both Christian and Jewish folks have, have tried to engage with that. But generally, uh, you, there are an awful lot of Christians who are trying to do what they can to shed the, the most supersessionist and, and most problematic features of, of that approach. But yeah- But- ... it is, it is something that is, um, that is kind of a fly in the ointment.

Dan Beecher And in fairness, I don't think that, like, they didn't invent supersessionism. All throughout the Hebrew Bible is, "Our God is better than their God. We are the chosen people. We're better." Like, it seems like that's just continuing a tradition at that point, of, of, like, "We, uh, we're just better. Our group is always good. Their group, other groups are either less good or just pure evil," or something along those lines.

Dan McClellan I, I, and, and I think what I would say in response to that, which is, which is definitely accurate, is that there are systemic power asymmetries that are involved.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And there is a history of oppression and persecution, and there's also an ethnic dimension-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... that, that is, uh, that overwhelmingly attends that supersessionism and that atten- that, that othering. But, but also fundamentally, it's taking the, the origins of Christianity, the, the mother of Christianity to, uh, to put it a certain way, and rejecting that as, uh, a, an unworthy husk of what it should have been. And, uh, and so I, I think there is, yeah, again, it is kind of baked into, uh, the, the foundations of Christianity, but it is, obviously it's something that we need to be aware of and careful of, particularly in light of the way that Jewish people have historically been treated.

Dan Beecher Well, and that's what's m- that, again, you know, we talk about how muddied a lot of these waters are. The, I think the people who refuse to acknowledge... Like, part of this conversation has to be that acknowledgement, that this, uh, that, that the historic power asymmetries ca- cannot mean or, or inherently mean that this cannot be a pure conversation, where it's just, "Well, w- I'm just looking at these facts and saying this thing." Like, it, you can't, you don't get to ignore a f- you know, 2,000 years or more of, of ugly history-

Dan McClellan Right

Dan Beecher ... and only talk about facts and figures and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Dan McClellan And, and that brings up another issue-

Dan Beecher Uh-huh

Dan McClellan ... is that this, this clean dichotomy of Old Testament bad, New Testament good, is fundamentally inaccurate.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It is misrepresenting the data.

Dan Beecher So let's say then, let's-

Dan McClellan And, and I wanna make the point that when you misrepresent the data, what you're doing is you're retreating to the historical oppression, and that becomes the foundation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 'Cause you're not, the foundation is not the data. The foundation is now, well, this is the way that their oppression has been rationalized, and so let's just use that rationalization.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The, the foundation of it all becomes Jewish people bad.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, uh, it is not accurate because if you, there are occurrences of merciful, kind, gracious God rhetoric in the Hebrew Bible, and there are also occurrences of punitive, hateful, kill you and torture you for all of eternity God in the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And, and if you have to try to identify a, a, uh, a tipping point where one outnumbers the other and then the other eclipses the one, it's not at the seam between the Old and the New Testament. It's actually in the Old Testament.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because we get this tran- uh, we get this, um, kind of movement with- within, uh, Judaism, and it starts in, in, uh, post-exilic Judaism into the Persian and Greco-Roman period. And Christianity is really just kind of a, a crystallization of a specific movement of Judaism, and all that Jesus is doing ... is repeating a lot of stuff that is found, if not in the Hebrew Bible, in other contemporaneous Jewish literature. Like, there've been, there've been a lot of scholars who have tracked down... And, you know, if you pick up, I highly recommend picking up The Jewish Annotated New Testament.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan The, uh, third edition was just released a couple months ago, uh, and it's edited by, um, Amy-Jill Levine and, and Marc Zvi Brettler. And, uh, it talks an awful lot about this, gives the Jewish background to a lot of what's going on. There's not really much, if anything, that Jesus says that cannot be traced back to some Jewish tradition at some point. And so-

Dan Beecher That makes sense.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so the, the good God of the New Testament is really building on a foundation of Greco-Roman period Judaism. And-

Dan Beecher Right. Because, I mean, one of the things that we, i, i- that we saw last week or, or la- last episode, uh, last segment is what I'm trying to say.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Um, and that we've seen and discussed many times on this show, is that this idea, the g- the idea of God and who is our God and who, who God is, evolves over time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It keeps changing. And so yeah, it makes total sense to me that Jesus' version of God is maybe... You know, it may have been a controversial version of God at the time, but, but one that people are talking about.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Yeah. This, this... And that's, and that's how it gains purchase.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Like, th- this is something a lot of people don't, don't like thinking about when it comes to new ideas. There, there are no totally new ideas. The w- the way that ideas get picked up and get shared is that they resonate with others, and that usually means there have to be points of contact. There have to be things that are already in the air. These, uh, this is not, these are not revolutions so much as just incremental elaborations on existing traditions.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Little by little we're... And, you know, you have this thing called punctuated equilibria where you have, y- you know, evolution is, is kind of steady, steady, and then, boom, you have huge changes, and then go steady and steady and steady, and boom, and you have huge changes. And that happens as well, but for the most part, those huge changes are also not just complete whitewashes and breaks from what came before. It's usually rearranging the things that already exist or, you know, incrementally elaborating on things, just in larger increments and much more quickly. Uh, so I think the, the, uh, the main point to make is that the, the shift happens before you get the New Testament. It happens when you still have the Hebrew Bible. And, and there's also a shift between the God's people as an ethnic designation and God's people as more of a cultural ideological designation.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And, and this gets real fuzzy. Uh, but there's a point in following the exile where God's love is kind of extended to all, and all are invited in. And some people will identify the New Testament as a break from the, the earlier notion that God's people is just this ethnic group. But there is, you see it even in, in Deutero-Isaiah, uh, which is maybe late 6th, early 5th century BCE, and in other literature where God's people as a designation is kind of expanding and is kind of expansive. Now, you also see that alongside some ethnocentrism in Ezra-Nehemiah, for instance, and, and other places. But-

Dan Beecher Well, and, and of course you do. Like, you know, we look, you look at right now, and there is a constant tension between, uh, you know, one group of people who want to move forward in a way. You know, you just look at, at liberalism versus conservatism or whatever. It's not like all... It's not like societies all just go, "Oh, our new idea is X. That's what we all believe now."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher There's a, there's always push and pull, and the, you know, the scale slides slowly in one-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... direction or another.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there-

Dan Beecher But, but-

Dan McClellan There-

Dan Beecher ... both things are believed at the same time within the same, within the same culture.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And there's just that tension there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, and so I think there's, it's just, it's just an inaccurate dichotomy. And, and, and I think the, what I wanna kind of dwell on the most is that the God of the New Testament is, the author of the Book of Revelation anyway, is fantasizing about the God of the New Testament bathing their sword in blood that runs up to, uh, you know, over their feet.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you don't have the idea of eternal conscious torments in the Hebrew Bible. That is something that is exclusive to the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The notion that God would torture people for all of eternity, that's, that's not a, a merciful, loving God position. That is a vengeful, wrathful God position. And, and, you know, you have the sermon of the, um, sinners in the hands of an angry God kind of thing. That's, that's Christianity-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... uh, saying that. And, and you can go look in the Hebrew Bible at all kinds of different texts, particularly in the prophetic literature, but also places like Ruth and elsewhere, where God is long-suffering and God is kind, and God aids the poor and the widow and the orphan. And when God pun- There are some parts of the Hebrew Bible where God's most severe punishments are reserved for the people who hurt the foreigner-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... and who, who, uh, violate the, the social justice standards set up by, uh, the prophetic literature. And granted, there is an awful lot of hypocrisy going on there, because they are ethnocentric and, and sexist in, in their own Uh, different ways. But when we try to map the goodness versus badness of the representations of God in the Bible, it's all over the place in both corpora.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It is, it is not one and then another. It is a mix of both in the Hebrew Bible and a mix of both in the New Testament. And, and the, the exact manifestations of that goodness or badness change because times change.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And because the, the way they conceptualize of God changes. But to reduce it to Old Testament God bad, New Testament God good, is phenomenally inaccurate, and again, is really mortgaging everything to the antisemitic notion that the Gods w- that the Jewish people worship an evil God and Christianity had to come in and save it. And that's, that's just deeply antisemitic.

Dan Beecher That part, yeah. I, I, I do wanna just flag one thing, which is-

Dan McClellan Okay

Dan Beecher ... the, I think a lot of well-meaning people who aren't antisemitic might read a, you know, the Sermon on the Mount and go, "Oh, that's a really nice God," and might think o- and then they might think of, like, the flood or, you know, d- j- like, some of the sort of more horrific stories that we all know from the Hebrew Bible, and might innocently go, "Okay, I see good God here and bad God there."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And that, that doesn't mean that they are being antisemitic in that moment, but it does, but I think that, I, I think what we're saying is that, uh, it's inaccurate, and it-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... and so let go of it because it, because that's, because that position of good, you know, New Testament good, Hebrew Bible bad, is, has far too much antisemitic, uh, history-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... and underpinning. And so, and so, like, there's, there's no good reason to hold onto that. There's, it, it, it's, it can be arrived at in an innocent way, but it is important to let go of it very quickly.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, and I think one thing to add is that this does not mean you're not allowed to criticize the God of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You can still do that. I do that all the time.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan The difference is I don't say it's everything o- in this book.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that everything in this book is good. You can point out that in this particular passage or in this book, this is a hateful God. This is a God that does, uh, that endorses enslavements, that endorses sex slavery, that endorses sexual assault, things like that. Uh, you can, you can point out that there are problematic ways that God is being represented in particular texts.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The problem is when you say, "They all fit into this box right here, and that's the Old Testament, and they're not in this box over here, which is the New Testament. That's where the good God resides," 'cause that's just not true. 'Cause you can, you can point to, i- in the Book of Revelation, there's, there's a part where God, uh, threatens to throw the, the personification of, uh, the wicked onto a bed, this female personification of the wicked onto a bed, and the, this usually gets translated sick bed.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan But I think this is, there's a good case to make that this is dodging the implications of-

Dan Beecher Oh

Dan McClellan ... what's actually being stated here.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan That this is actually about sexual assaults.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Um, or sexual violence at least. And you have similar things going on in parts of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and things like that. So the, the, the representation of God as, as violent and, and vengeful is, is sprinkled all throughout. So what I'm arguing is don't reduce it all to this binary of Old Testament versus New Testament, because that is phenomenally inaccurate. But by all means, criticize- ... the way the God of the Bible is being represented. It, you can find those things to criticize all across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I think that's a, that's a, a great place to end it. Um, I think it just makes sense. It's, it, it's, and, uh, as long as people... People just need to sensitize themselves to the fact that it can, it, it, it's more than just being wrong. Y- you can be wrong in a way that also plays into the hands of people who are hurting other people.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And in this case, you know, it, people who want to attack, uh, Jewish people use that as, uh, as one of the fronts of their attack. So-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... so no, we're just not gonna, we're just gonna not do that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, and if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, most of the Sermon on the Mount is riffing on Hebrew Bible stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Oh.

Dan McClellan "The meek will inherit the earth," that's quoting the Psalms. Like, it's all, again, I, I don't know that there's much, if anything at all, that Jesus said that isn't in some way riffing on some kind of existing Jewish tradition, so yeah.

Dan Beecher So if you like the things that Jesus said, then you like the parts of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus liked. And there you go.

Dan McClellan The, and the interpretations that, uh, that the authors-

Dan Beecher That he favored

Dan McClellan ... of those texts, yes,

Dan Beecher favored. All right. Excellent. There you go. Well, if you would like to become a part of keeping this thing going, like, comment, subscribe, o- and/or give us five stars wherever you can. But also, we would appreciate it if you would consider becoming a patron of the show. That means either becoming a, a member over on YouTube or a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Um, you can get early access to ad-free versions of the show, uh, at different levels. You can get patron-only content, which is something that we like to do, and, uh, and you can also get a nice warm feeling in your, in your bosom for, uh, for, for be- for knowing that you're contributing to keeping us alive. So thank you so much to all of our patrons. Thanks to Roger for editing the show. Thanks to Sam for being our right-hand man, and thanks to all of you for tuning in. We'll check you next time.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.