Should Wives Submit?

Dan Beecher As conspiracy theories go, okay. No, definitely not, but okay.

Dan McClellan 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 go things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher They go.

Dan McClellan They go.

Dan Beecher Things are trucking along. I'm pretty excited- Excited ... about today's episode because, A, we're going to uphold the patriarchy, which we always love to do. And B, we're going to get into some space stuff. We're going to get into some- Yeah ... some conspiracy theories. I hope everybody's got their tin hats- Yeah ... ready to go. Their tin foil hats.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't even know if I can say those notes or if that- Yeah.

Dan Beecher I like that I've terrified you enough- ... about copyright infringement or- Yes.

Dan McClellan Yes ... trademark or whatever the heck it is that- We've built a fence around the law, as it were- ... regarding my ability to sing anything terribly.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think our listeners also thank me for beating that into your head.

Dan McClellan When you said patriarchy, all I could hear was Fergie in that, "Tonight's going to be a good..." Is that what it's called?

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah, where she goes, "Smash it."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So that's all I thought about.

Dan Beecher Smash it. I don't know why- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan it was Fergie's voice doing it that way.

Dan Beecher I like it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay. Well, why don't we get into our chapter and verse and smash that patriarchy?

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher Okay. So, the chapter and verse that we're getting to is Ephesians 5.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Verse, oh, what verse is it?

Dan McClellan You know. Well, 22 is the main one.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But if you wanted to try to get the whole sense unit, it's really got to be verse 18 through to the end of the chapter.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But we're not going to focus on all of that.

Dan Beecher We're really going to zoom in on verse 22, which is- Yeah, you don't want to start with 18 because 18 says, "Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery."

Dan McClellan And we don't want anybody to know that it's in the Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah, no.

Dan McClellan Ignore that.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan That's actually where the sentence begins. And this is part of the controversy of- ... Ephesians 5:22. And if you have heard people talk about this, I'll just read 5:22, just verse 22- Okay ... from the NRSVU, and then we'll talk about why it's a bit of a mistranslation.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It says, "Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord." And then verse 23 says, "For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior." And there's a pilcrow in the NRSVUE. And for those of you who- ... grew up on the right side of the tracks, a pilcrow is the little backwards P- Right ... paragraph indicator, basically.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And a lot of translations of the Bible present verse 22 as the beginning of a new section. It's not even its own sentence. In fact, it doesn't have a verb in it. The verb is actually a participle that is in the previous verse. Now, this is actually relevant to what's going on here. A participle is like an ING verb- Right ... in Greek. So, I am running has a subject, a verb, and then this gerund- Right ...

Dan Beecher running.

Dan McClellan But the verb in the sentence is am. You are saying I, and then you are connecting it to running with the verb am.

Dan Beecher So- Am doing run.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, the am is the actual verb of that clause.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And running is helping out. And so in verse 22, we don't even have a participle. It's verse 21 that has the participle, and verse 22 is just, we're going to borrow the force of the participle from verse 21. But even verse 21 is not its own sentence. We have to go all the way back to verse 18, and- Okay.

Dan Beecher But I'm just going to interject here because- Yeah ... the thing that my head was bumping up against, I don't know how ancient Greek was structured.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And so I know that I've seen ancient Hebrew texts, and it's just letters without any spaces and- Right ... definitely no punctuation or anything.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher What should I be imagining when I'm thinking of an ancient Greek text?

Dan McClellan Oh, same thing. It was just continuous text. They didn't put spaces between the words. They certainly didn't have verses in the earliest manuscripts. They didn't have chapters or anything like that.

Dan Beecher And no punctuation?

Dan McClellan No punctuation.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan They didn't even have the diacritics. If you look in a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, you've got rough and smooth breathings, you've got acute, you've got grave, you've got circumflex accents all over the place. None of that is in the earliest manuscripts. So- It's just the letters ...

Dan Beecher so when you say it's not even the same sentence, or that it is the same sentence, you're getting that just grammatically. You're not getting that from any kind of markings.

Dan McClellan Just syntactically.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Okay. And this is one of the things you learn to do when reading Greek, is you got to go, "Okay, where's the verb?

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan There's a verb.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan I'm looking for objects, I'm looking for subjects," and all this kind of stuff. And Greek is very cool because in English word order- It tells you what role certain words are playing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "I am running." The subject frequently comes first.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan If I say, "Am I running?" that sounds like a question.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because we've switched the subject and the verb. In Greek, the word order doesn't really matter too much. It is a case-based language, and anybody who's learned German or something like that will know that in a case-based language, the word form itself changes to tell you what role it is playing in the sentence.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Whether it's a subject, an object, whether the thing is being done to it, or something like that, you change the way the word looks in order to indicate that. Which means you can fiddle with the word order all you want, and a lot of ancient Greek poets would fiddle with the word order like crazy.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah, which makes it very hard to translate. But anyway, we've got to go all the way back to verse 18, and it starts with this, "Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery." And then we get the beginning of our sentence. "But be filled with the Spirit." So we have this imperative, "Be filled with the Spirit"- Right ..."as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts." So we've got another one of these participles, singing. "Giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." So the being filled with the Spirit either is caused by these other things, by the singing and by the giving thanks and by the being subject, or it results in the singing, the giving thanks, the being subject. And then we get to verse 22, which is again kind of borrowing the participle from the verse before. So, "Wives, being subject to your husbands as to the Lord." And apologists who want... Well, there are actually two people who make this argument. There are folks who want this to not be misogynistic.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan They want this to be something that is not misogyny, will point this out and suggest that the fact that the participle, the verbal force of verse 21 is feeding verse 22, and verse 21 says, "Being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," you maybe borrow that sense. And so really what this is saying is wives and husbands, you're both going to be subject to each other.

Dan Beecher So- Okay, but- ...

Dan McClellan sometimes folks will argue that.

Dan Beecher But then verse 23 exists, so.

Dan McClellan Right. Yes, that's the main problem with this, because it then goes on to explain, yes, the husband is like Jesus, and the wife is like the church.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the wife has to submit to the husband as the church submits to Jesus. But then the other thing that folks who don't want this to be misogynistic will point out is that, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. The husband has to love the wife as Jesus loved the church. Jesus died for the church. The husband has to have this self-sacrificing, unending love for his wife, which means it's fair.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because while the wife's got to make the sandwiches and got to do the dishes and got to do the laundry and got to do the vacuuming and everything like that every single day because the husband said so, one day, probably not, but maybe one day he'll have to sacrifice his life for her.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But probably not. And so it's even.

Dan Beecher I see that so much in the sort of the Christian manosphere.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher When these guys are talking about how their job is as protector and provider and blah, blah, blah, and in their minds, when they start talking about this protector role, they bring up scenarios that are vanishingly small- Yeah ... percentage chance that this could happen.

Dan McClellan Absolutely.

Dan Beecher You're not going to get attacked in the way that you're imagining, but they're making themselves these grand heroes in their own imagination.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's a power fantasy.

Dan Beecher And then their wife is doing very real work.

Dan McClellan Labor, yeah.

Dan Beecher Continually- Yeah ... while he is like, "Yes, but if this- Yes ... were to happen, you have no idea how awesome I would be."

Dan McClellan Yeah. "I'm going to be over here emotionally masturbating about how cool I'm going to look when I save everybody's life." I see that a lot of times with... Every time there's some kind of mass shooting that makes national headlines, people are like, "I conceal carry even where I'm not allowed to. Not to protect me, it's to protect everybody else."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because these things are everybody needs some dude with a power fantasy about being John Wayne.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Not John... Dirty Harry. I guess John Wayne, too.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan If we didn't have them- Man with gun.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Hero with gun.

Dan McClellan Yes. I'll come to your college campus and probably end up being the one shooting somebody.

Dan Beecher Yeah. 99% of the time, being, yeah, I will injure innocent people or- Yeah ... kill innocent people.

Dan McClellan But anyway, that's the idea that they run with.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like, well, it's okay that I'm in charge of my wife because I'm supposed to love her, and so I'm not going to exercise unrighteous dominion, ideally.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The reality is that they frequently are.

Dan Beecher But- Well, the reality is that dominion in and of itself is- is a pretty gross idea.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But what Paul is-- Not Paul, pseudo Paul, excuse me.

Dan Beecher Pseudo Paul, fake Paul. Pseudo Paul, fake Paul. We should have started with that.

Dan McClellan Pretend Paul, yes. Oh yeah, by the way- This is one of the bad epistles. Well, technically it's one of the disputed ones.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Like the Pastorals, a good strong majority of scholars are like, "Yeah, that's not Paul."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, I think it's a little closer to half and half.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan I think I would still give it to the people who reject Pauline authorship, but once I am able to get my survey off the ground- ... which I'm still working on, I'm still working on. We're going to have hard- Yeah.

Dan Beecher We'll believe it when we see it ...

Dan McClellan we're going to have rock hard numbers.

Dan Beecher But- And abs. Rock hard numbers and abs.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and we're going to end the list there. And a good number of scholars don't think that Paul was responsible for Ephesians- Okay ... Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and there are a number of good reasons for that, but we digress. So, this is probably not Paul anyway. However, what the author is doing here with this pivot, verse 21 is kind of a pivot point. We've been talking about the congregation as a whole- Right ... and then we say, "Mutually submit to each other," and that submitting participle then becomes the hinge on which we pivot to what's called household codes, and this is kind of a standard genre in the Greco-Roman period within broader Greco-Roman literature. So not just Jewish and Christian, but broader Greco-Roman literature. In fact, what the author is appealing to is a pretty standardized kind of checklist of the people involved. And to demonstrate this, I want to read a little something from Aristotle.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan This is Aristotle on government. "Since it is now evident of what parts a city is composed, it will be necessary to treat first of family government. For every city is made up of families, and every family has again its separate parts of which it is composed. When a family is complete, it consists of freemen and slaves. But as in every subject, we should begin with examining into the smallest parts of which it consists, and as the first and smallest parts of a family are the master and slave, the husband and wife, the father and child, let us first inquire into these three, what each of them may be and what they ought to be. That is to say, the herile, the nuptial, and the paternal. Let these then be considered as the three distinct parts of a family." What are the three things that the author addresses in between verse 22 and the beginning of chapter six? Husband and wife, children, and slave people.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan So this is a pretty standardized way of approaching the question of the household and how it is governed, and we see this in other Jewish literature as well. So for instance, Philo, in some fragments referred to... This fragment is the "Hypothetica." And this is something that you run into a lot when you're dealing with ancient literature. You'll have authors and you'll have their complete works, and then there will be fragments.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And what this is, is this is all the places where we have somebody saying, "Yeah, so and so wrote in their text X all this stuff." And it's like, okay, we don't have a copy of X. All we have is whatever this person quoted from X.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so that goes into the file as a fragment. But we have a fragment of a text called "Hypothetica," and Philo says, "Wives must be in servitude to their husbands, a servitude not imposed by violent ill treatment, but promoting obedience in all things." And if we go back to Aristotle, and particularly ideas of ensoulment and personhood and things like that, Aristotle thought a woman was just an undercooked man.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That the gestation just moved more slowly for women, and they were born before they were fully cooked.

Dan Beecher Aristotle had an astoundingly weird sense of how a lot of things worked- ... that then was picked up on and held as gospel for thousands of years.

Dan McClellan And you want to know, I have a friend of mine named Jonathan Jung, he's a wonderful psychologist, cognitive scientist of religion.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And in a paper he once commented, "The ghost of Aristotle haunts us still"- Yeah ... because of how much we rely on definition. It was so- You know?

Dan Beecher Yeah. He was a nut, that Aristotle.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And one of the most influential thinkers in all of human history, obviously, and actually was profoundly prescient in a lot of ways about a lot of stuff, and then way off the mark- Yeah ... with a lot of other stuff. But the practice of definition and our assumptions that everything can and should be defined, that's the ghost of Aristotle.

Dan Beecher That's your favorite thing in the whole wide world.

Dan McClellan Don't get me started. Don't get me started. And then we've got Josephus, who is writing the 90s CE in "Against Apion." He says, "The woman, says the law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed, for the authority has been given by God to the man." Which I don't know if the author of Ephesians would really have a problem with what Josephus said.

Dan Beecher No, that sounds perfectly in line with- It sounds quite Ephesian.

Dan McClellan But yeah, this is very clearly A systemic power asymmetry. The idea that women are inferior, therefore they must submit, therefore they must be obedient, therefore the husband is in charge, is misogyny, pure and simple.

Dan Beecher This goes back to, we talked just a couple weeks ago about the ideas of adultery and the absolute double standard of, like sexual double standard between men and women.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It should come as zero surprise to anybody that this patriarchal view is what is being promoted at that time in this region.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It just seems right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And of course now, as you point out, the Greek influence is permeating the Jewish culture as well. So you get added and perhaps more nuanced patriarchy and misogyny.

Dan McClellan Well, and there are so many different ways, a lot of people don't realize it, there are so many different ways Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society contributed to Christianity becoming what it is, and contributed to the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism. Because one of the things that Judaism did, with Rabbinic Judaism, one of its priorities was trying to divest itself of this influence of the Gentile world.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And there are debates to be had about the effectiveness and how committed to it everybody was. But there's a reason that Rabbinic Judaism and down to the Judaism of today is very, very distinct from Greco-Roman period Judaism, and it was precisely a refutation of that influence. They went back to the Hebrew Bible and said, "You know what? We're not going to do as much philosophizing like Philo and Josephus did. We're going to get back into the text of the Hebrew Bible, and we're going to engage in halakhic interpretations, hermeneutics," which is really just saying, "What is the text telling us?" And that is one of the things I think that contributes to Judaism having a lot of positions that are far more closely aligned with what the Hebrew Bible says than does Christianity, which is far more influenced by Greek philosophy.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And not just the Trinity, but the idea of creation out of nothing, the idea about ensoulment and abortion, up to and including the enthusiastic Christian adoption of Greco-Roman patriarchy and social conventions. And that's not to say that Rabbinic Judaism was an ally.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah. The bastion of feminism that is Rabbinic Judaism.

Dan McClellan No, but it is to say that Christianity leaned heavily into the influence of Greco-Roman social conventions.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And Ephesians, you have it elsewhere, the pastoral epistles as well appeal to these household code ideas. And really what it is, is it is the authors saying, "We like this social convention. We're taking it. This is ours now, and we're going to come up with a gospel rationalization for it. We're going to explain it in a Christological way." So you have the author doing that here in Ephesians 5 and Ephesians 6. But this is the same thing that happens in 1 Corinthians 11 with Paul saying women have to cover their heads when they're praying and prophesying.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That was just a convention, and Paul's like, "Well, what if we said that it's about the Christ is the head of the man, the man is the head of the woman, so therefore if a woman's head is uncovered, she's glorifying the man, but she needs to be glorifying God, so she's got to cover it." It's just saying, "Let's slap a gospel rationalization onto the Greco-Roman social convention we're adopting."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because we're, again, leaning heavy into that. So when people talk about Christians not caring what society does, that's the exact opposite of what happened.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Christians were like, "What society does is all that matters, and we're going to come up with rationalizations for why that's what God wanted all along."

Dan Beecher Christians were the Jews that wanted to be Greekified and Romanified.

Dan McClellan And I think that with the destruction of the temple and with the debates that were going on with the development of Rabbinic Judaism, with the Christian following and worshiping of Jesus, those kind of all just contributed to the parting of the ways. And when exactly that happened and precisely how is a huge debate- Yeah ... that I'm definitely not going to pretend to be an authority on.

Dan Beecher Since you mentioned these household codes a couple of times- Mm-hmm ... I'm just going to impress you with my knowledge of Greek, because- You texted me about this.

Dan McClellan You texted me ...

Dan Beecher as I was doing some research on this, I did check in with ChatGPT. I find it a helpful research partner, but also, I always find good reasons to double-check anything it tells me. One of them being that it said to me, quote, "This passage sits in what scholars call the household codes," and then in parentheses it said, "Greek Haustafeln," which I'm pretty sure ain't Greek. I know enough German to know that Haustafeln, that's not a Greek word.

Dan McClellan I'll have to go dust off an old Greek grammar, but yeah, it doesn't sound as Greek to me as it probably should.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Greek isn't a Germanic language, and I just didn't hear about it, is it?

Dan McClellan No. And the Greek word for house is not house.

Dan Beecher House?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We don't- Oh, man ...

Dan McClellan go find a gasthof to- Yeah, exactly.

Dan Beecher So there you go. I like that you were talking earlier about people who want to try to make Ephesians 5 not be- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan misogynistic. Rehabilitate it. Domesticate it.

Dan Beecher I certainly understand that impulse.

Dan McClellan Absolutely.

Dan Beecher Because if you want to be a Bible-believing person who is also respectful of all of the genders, et cetera, you don't want that to be as misogynistic as it sounds. But I think we have to just allow that it is a product of its time and absolutely as patriarchal and misogynistic as we read it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It is definitely upholding the patriarchy of that time and place, which- Yeah ... yeah, is a problem. And there's a point to be made about the fact that it does take some baby steps because in this time period, and we've talked about this before, how some Roman authors refer to Christianity as a religion for women and slaves.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Because they had equality. There was a dimension in which they were considered equal within a Christian congregation. And so for this author to say, "Wives, submit to your husbands, but husbands, you got to love your wives. You have to treat them as not equals, but at least you have to love them the way Christ loved the church," that's taking a step forward.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And you see this as well with Paul, in a lot of different ways, tries to assert a kind of reciprocity. Not full reciprocity, but at least gestures in the direction of it. And we've talked about how, in some ways, that is harmful. So for instance, the idea that in 1 Corinthians 7, that the woman's body is not her own. It's the property of her husband, but her husband's body is her property.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's kind of saying, "Well, it goes the other way, too."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is an attempt at trying to gin up some parity, some reciprocity. It doesn't work, of course, because great, what does that mean? It's like saying, "The husband is going to beat the wife, but the wife is free to beat the husband right back."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it's equal. There's no problem.

Dan Beecher It's the same.

Dan McClellan Right. That passage has been leveraged as an excuse for marital rape for literally millennia. I was alive when marital rape was not a crime- Right ... in more than one state in the United States of America.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's only been since I think 1993 that it has actually been outlawed in all 50 states.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And I think it started in 1971 or 1972. That's when the first state said, "Hey, we're actually going to make marital rape a crime."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because the patriarchy has always treated marriage as a man basically having possession of a woman's body and having rights over her sexual availability.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which, yeah. It's sickening.

Dan Beecher It's not okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think one of the themes of our show has been that you have to reject certain tenets that are explicit in the Bible.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That are explicitly laid down as though they are laws, as though they are rules. You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But I think one of the things that can be comforting in all this is that the laws change from Old Testament to New. The fact is that laws change. Well, even- Even within the Bible, the law continually changes and modifies itself.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and I'll let you finish your point here, but even before you transition from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament, things were changing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You can just look at the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Already, they're reinterpreting stuff all over the place.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And that's one of the things that Jesus was doing, too. So I'm just saying this because I don't want to create this binary- Right ... between Hebrew Bible versus New Testament.

Dan Beecher Totally understand that. Yeah, and that makes sense. The Hebrew Bible actually spans more time, and therefore, it would make sense for the Hebrew Bible to actually have more changes- Yeah ... even inside of itself.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But I think that's the key to understanding how a modern believer should be looking at the Bible.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Not as a system of laws that apply today necessarily, but rather as a snapshot of that time period and the amount that they had learned up until then. And the fact that it's so heavily influenced by Greek culture and Roman culture- Yeah ... at very least points out that cultural influence is important.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And as cultures advance and learn more- The laws and the rules of societies should necessarily change.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think there's good reason to be glad that the Greco-Roman world influenced Christianity. Because I think the collaboration between the two took a long time to, but ultimately resulted in very good things. I think the Renaissance, I think the Enlightenment were ways that there were new insights, there were new consensuses. Obviously technology changed so much about the world as a result of collaboration between the followers and the adherence to these traditions and these texts and the world around them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And a lot of people want to claim that when it comes to slavery. "Oh, our abolitionists were all originally Christians." Well, that's not totally true, but it was in spite of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Not because of the Bible. So let's give credit where credit is due. And when it comes to things like abolitionism, the credit is not to the Bible. The credit is to other things, including the influence of classical philosophy, which was influential in the Middle Ages and was restored thanks to its preservation among Muslim and Jewish groups and its translation back into Latin and all of this stuff. So, it's always going to be socially contingent. We have a lot of people trying to insist that it's not, that it transcends society, and that's just demonstrably false. And so don't poo-poo on the influence of society because it made Christianity the many different things that it is today.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right. Thus endeth my silly little rant.

Dan Beecher Sorry. Our rants.

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Beecher All right. We're going to move on to our next segment, and we came up with a title for this, and it's nerdy and it requires explanation, and I apologize for it, but welcome to- It's going to make more sense on the screen. Welcome to The Chi Files. Okay, so The Chi Files. Talk to me about what we're doing here. That's just a nerdy Greek joke, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're just using the Greek character, Chi, which is written just like the X. The capital Chi is like the X.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But this is what you would see spelled out C-H-I. So if you're in a college town and you see somebody going, "Cairo," or something like that, then they're probably just mispronouncing C-H-I.

Dan Beecher But- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan anyway, it looks like an X, looks like X-Files.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's an homage.

Dan Beecher Because we're going to be talking about aliens, and that's exciting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, we had somebody ask us a few weeks ago about aliens and the Bible, and I dove into some stuff. There's that stupid show on History Channel called "Ancient Aliens," which was a spinoff because they kept doing shows about the pyramids or whatever.

Dan McClellan And this- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher dude with this crazy hair- Yeah ... would come on and be like- It's aliens ... "It had to be aliens because we didn't have the technology to make these things," and blah, blah, blah. And everybody, apparently people glommed onto that and him, and anyway, now it's its own show, and it has 200 episodes or something crazy like that.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I want to- But a bunch of it is about the Bible and aliens.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So, let's dive into that, shall we?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I want to start by talking about somebody who, this is also depressing, that somebody sold millions and millions of copies of books promoting bizarre ancient alien conspiracy theories.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan A dude by the name of Zecharia Sitchin. Does that name ring any bells for you?

Dan Beecher I've got his Wikipedia pulled up right here.

Dan McClellan Oh, you do?

Dan Beecher Okay. I'm all over Zecharia.

Dan McClellan Also- Okay ... a little bit ironic that his name is Zecharia, considering that is a- Well, one of the texts that we're going to look at is in Zecharia.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But he published a book in 1976. He claims to have learned Sumerian, autodidact. That's great if you've taught yourself a language like that, but based on his arguments, he either didn't learn any discipline and didn't learn any method and didn't learn any theory, or didn't really learn Sumerian that well.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But he wrote a book, published a book in 1976 called "The 12th Planet." And the idea is basically that we had more planets in our solar system long, long ago, and one of them was called Nibiru.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And this planet is outside Neptune or something like that, and it passes close by Earth every 3,600 years. And there was a time when it collided with another planet called Tiamat, and the idea is that the ancient Sumerian texts that talk about these gods are actually astronomical metaphors and narratives and things like that. So Tiamat was an actual planet. The collision resulted in, if I remember my 12th planet lore correctly- ... resulted in the creation of Earth. And about 450,000 years ago, the extraterrestrials from Nibiru- Were they had worn out their atmosphere.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And they came to Earth in order to get gold because they could aerosolize the gold, and that could become kind of an artificial atmosphere that- Oh ...

Dan Beecher would help them maintain- Why is it always that they go after whatever- It's because everybody's borrowing from "Spaceballs."

Dan McClellan It's all about you're going to be in trouble because we're going to steal your air.

Dan Beecher I just feel like you choose gold just because we sort of inexplicably still value gold.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Even though it's just shiny metal.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But apparently, it's also good for turning into air.

Dan McClellan Okay. And yeah. It's good for what ails you or for what ails the Anunnaki anyway.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So Anunnaki, that is a word that we have in some of these ancient texts- Right ... that is really just a class of deity. But for Sitchin, these are to be identified with the Nephilim, I believe.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. So we're making a connection between ancient- Sumerian texts and the Bible, yes.

Dan McClellan And so this is- And wait, Sumerian texts and the Bible and extraterrestrial- Right ...

Dan Beecher life forms.

Dan McClellan So this is an even more expanded scope of univocality.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Where it's all talking about the same reality.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the key is to get it all together. And the Anunnaki needed people to work the mines, and so they created- ... through genetic engineering of some kind, humanity.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And there was some kind of hominid race that was on Earth. Something went on under the cover of darkness that resulted in humanity.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And so, the Anunnaki DNA ends up in humanity. So, and somehow this resulted in eight more books where he further fleshes out this theory of the Anunnaki/Nephilim- Right ... and genetic engineering of humanity and all of this stuff, and sold millions of copies of this book.

Dan Beecher So- Can I just say one of the things that I like about this theory that at least as someone who has read some... I have not studied astrophysics. I have read about astrophysics.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I've learned a lot about astrophysics, but certainly I am no scholar of astrophysics.

Dan McClellan But you're a scholar of Dianetics, right?

Dan Beecher Is that- Yes, 100% that. But we'll get into that in another episode. But I like that his thing wasn't interstellar or intergalactic.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher His aliens were at least from- Intergalactic, yes ... at least from our solar system, and that puts me at ease a little bit. Because the travel possibilities, it makes it that much more plausible, at least physics-wise.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So I appreciate that about it.

Dan McClellan And unfortunately, there are a lot of people on social media who are sharing videos, most of them recorded in the '80s and '90s- Mm ... where people are actually taking these ideas and running with them and going on TV and talking about how, "Oh, Elohim is plural, and that means it was the gods- Uh-huh ... who created the heavens and the Earth. And they said, 'Replenish.' What does replenish mean? It means to fill again."

Dan Beecher It means it was plenished.

Dan McClellan Which it doesn't. Which it doesn't.

Dan Beecher It was already plenished- Yes ... and then they replenished it.

Dan McClellan Yes, which is so misguided. But anyway, that's an example of one person's very fecund imagination- Mm-hmm ... just coming up with all kinds of ways to read aliens into the Bible.

Dan Beecher But- Right ...

Dan McClellan let's look at some other ways that people have found- Yeah ... negotiated aliens into the Bible. And I think one of the most common ones, one of the most famous, is to be found in Ezekiel's vision.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan This is Ezekiel 1. Verse 4, I think, is where we ought to start. I'm going to read a little bit of this, and then we'll... There are 25 verses- ... that make up the kind of alien part of this, but we'll just kind of get a little bit into it. And the thing you have to understand is some of you are like, "Just read the damn passage." But the thing you have to understand is this is kind of like the Book of Revelation where it's like, "And their breastplates were multicolored and like fire, and they had the heads of lions, and their tails were like scorpions." And people are like, "Well, that's how an ancient person would describe a tank."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because they didn't know what a tank was.

Dan Beecher That's exactly like an Apache helicopter- Yeah ... if you think about it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's exactly like it.

Dan McClellan They wouldn't know what it is. They wouldn't be like, "Well, that's an Apache." So here we go. Ezekiel 1:4, "As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually. And in the middle of the fire something like gleaming amber." So if you're thinking the movie "Independence Day" where the thing is coming through the clouds, that's kind of what I think some people imagine.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance. They were of human form. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings."

Dan Beecher Okay, I'm going to just say that's not of human form. You can't tell me that they are human form, but they have wings and four faces. That's not how human form is.

Dan McClellan But if the faces look human, then- Sure.

Dan Beecher And the wings look human.

Dan McClellan Do you have another thing to compare it to?

Dan Beecher Just skip that. You don't have to say-- Okay, fine.

Dan McClellan Go.

Dan Beecher Keep going.

Dan McClellan "Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot, and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands, and the four had their faces and their wings thus. Their wings touched one another; each of them moved straight ahead without turning as they moved. As for the appearance of their faces, the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies. Each moved straight ahead; wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went. In the middle of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures. The fire was bright, and lightning issued from the fire. The living creatures darted to and fro like a flash of lightning." And I think we can just pause here for a little bit, but- Can I just say, you've convinced me.

Dan Beecher I believe they are aliens. That description, to me, is sufficient to say, "Yeah- It's very alien ... we're talking about aliens." I don't know why anyone's arguing with this.

Dan McClellan What else is it going to be? Do you have another category for this? Yes, we do. It's apocalyptic imagery.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan This is one of the things that convinces a lot of people that they were all on drugs back then. Not every apocalyptic author was on drugs, okay?

Dan Beecher They just have- It wouldn't hurt to come up with this kind of imagery.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think drugs is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what's happening here.

Dan McClellan And Ezekiel looks at the living creatures. "I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them." And here's something that gets brought up. You've heard of Dyson spheres, right?

Dan Beecher Yes. So, and there was a paper that- But you need to explain what that-- It's a sphere, but it's like a planet, but you live on the inside. It's hollow, right? Is that what it is?

Dan McClellan Well, the idea is this is a hypothesized, if there were these advanced civilizations, we would expect to see a lot more energy coming off these planets- Hmm ... unless they created these things around the planets to absorb the energy, and that would explain why planets of certain mass, certain whatever, might be giving off less energy than we expect them to give off.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there was a paper, and I'm sure I'm getting that very wrong, and anybody out there who is an expert in this is going to be like, "I'm so disappointed in you, Dan." Me too. Me too. But there was a paper published a bit ago that said, "If there is such a thing as Dyson spheres, here are some candidates. Here are some planets we've identified- Oh, okay ... that would be giving off less energy than we would expect." And it was just a hypothetical like, "Hey, if we imagine that these things exist, these are a handful of planets, or a handful of celestial objects that could be..." And people took that to mean we've discovered Dyson spheres.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because people don't read.

Dan Beecher Right. And so, but- Can we just say, for everyone out there, the concept of a Dyson sphere is impossible. Basically, you can't- Yeah.

Dan McClellan You wouldn't have the materials. It's just impossible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But when we get to this part of Ezekiel, a lot of people are like, " That's what the Dyson sphere is." Because they've looked at artist renderings of what a Dyson sphere might look like. But, "As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl, and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved. Their rims were tall and handsome, for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose."

Dan Beecher Wherever- What you're saying is spaceship. That's exactly what you're saying.

Dan McClellan Spaceship, yeah. And actually, I tend to think that what Ezekiel is actually doing here is trying to say that God's throne was pimped. We pimped God's ride by mobilizing it, giving it these wheels that have to be fantastical- Mm-hmm ... and have to be grotesque, and have to be all these things, because there's a throne on top of a platform on top of wheels.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, the idea that- Which, if you just describe it like that, not that cool. But if it's like wheels within wheels, and it's going left, right, up, and down, you don't know which way, it's- And there are blinking eyes all over.

Dan McClellan And the reason that I think Ezekiel is doing this, Ezekiel's sitting on the river in Babylon. They're exiled. They cannot access their God that is way back in the temple in Jerusalem that has been destroyed. "Woe is us. What are we going to do? We cannot sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land." And suddenly, they hear the rumbling of God's new ride, because suddenly the throne, which used to be stuck in the temple, has now been pimped out. And God can just floor it over to Babylon- ... and ride his throne on his platform on his wheels to come visit the Judahites.

Dan Beecher Dude's got a new Cadillac, and he is- Yeah ... ready to rumble.