The End(s) of Monotheism w/ David Burnett

Dan McClellan There's some ambiguity there. Is Paul saying, "Oh yeah, these things that people call gods, but we know there's only one God." Is Paul saying that? Or is Paul saying, "Yeah, there are these gods all over the place, but as far as we're concerned, only one God matters to us." That is what he's saying. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

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

Dan Beecher Things are going great. I'm having a good time. I did not get to travel this last weekend, however, and apparently, you guys did. Yep. And I'm saying you guys because there's not just you here with us. Why don't you tell the people who we got here?

Dan McClellan So we got the people's champ, my old friend David Bernett is joining us again. Welcome to the show, David. I think it's our first-time repeat guest. Is that accurate, Dan?

Dan Beecher Yeah, a returning champion. A returning- Wow ... yes.

Dan McClellan So welcome to the show. Good to have you back. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Good to be back. Yeah.

David Burnett And the reason- Glad to be the... Oh, I was just saying I'm glad to be the first returner. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we're glad to have you back, and hopefully there will be more returners in the future. We are having you here because you and I just spent the first three days of the week hanging out together in lovely Providence, Rhode Island at Brown University. We were participating in a conference that we presented at as well as organized.

David Burnett That's correct.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and the weather was surprisingly, according to everybody who lived there, the weather was uncharacteristically nice, which was great.

David Burnett Yeah, it was really nice. Providence is beautiful, yeah.

Dan Beecher That was divine providence, is what that was. You guys were given the green light from above- Yeah ... to get to do this conference.

Dan McClellan Well, I think that has to be where they got their name from, right? That enlightenment-era notion of Providence.

Dan Beecher Yeah, something like that.

Dan McClellan Now, I think we've mentioned the conference before. In fact, I think, David, the last time you were here, we talked about this. The conference is called "The Meanings of Monotheism," and we had said we were going to live stream it. It turned out that that wasn't going to work for everybody, but we did record it, and it will be released publicly later. But we wanted to have you on the show so we could just jam a little bit about the conference. We're going to scoop the recording.

Dan Beecher We're going to get out in front of it and tell the people some of the cool stuff that you guys were able to talk about and that your guests were able to talk about. So I'm excited to hear about it. I was going to watch it streaming, and then it turns out that that wasn't an option for me. Well, yeah.

David Burnett In discussions in planning the conference, this has been a long time of planning ahead of time to work out the details. And for a conference like this, it very much was a scholarly workshop-style conference. So what we wanted from the conference and the sort of aims and goals of the conference, I think we accomplished better doing it this way, which is, this is something that scholars need to workshop these ideas and work together on and get good feedback on and discussion going and work out those ideas. And then we take our papers back, and there's going to be a six-month process before we get papers back in for them to make any edits they need to and all of that. And then we're going to share them with the actual conference members so that we can actually get feedback on each other's work, and then this is going to become a published volume. Love it. And so having it a small, intimate, scholarly conversation to work out those ideas and really test those ideas in a highly saturated peer review environment is really important. Because if we say we believe in peer review and we say we believe in scholarship, then it needs to be done properly, and that takes a long time. And so if it's done right, it takes a long time. And so that's the nature of the beast. Because like you, Dans, I believe in accessibility. I want to work towards that in the future as well and help bring scholarship to the masses. But for it to be done with peer review and worked out and established has to become scholarship. Yeah. And so there is a critical mass of scholars who agrees with us on this challenging the category of monotheism and the study of antiquity, and that's very much what this conference is about. The reason why we went with the name, "The Meanings of Religion," the S in ends is in parentheses, so it's a double entendre of sorts. The name comes from a famous Wilfred Cantwell Smith book called "The Meaning and End of Religion." And in that book, it was popular in the '60s. This is going to be rehashed for some who've heard us discuss this before.

Dan Beecher It was months ago. Right. Nobody even paid attention back then, am I- But this is important. Yeah.

David Burnett So the reason why we went with this name in particular, "The Meanings of Monotheism," it's a play off that title, "The Meaning and End of Religion" by Smith. And what that book did in the '60s, what it was a part of, was a kind of a paradigm shift in religious studies to say This category of religion, the way it operates in modern discourse, scholarly discourse, is very much anachronistic to the study of the past. In other words, we're bringing critical assumptions of modern scholars and taking them back to antiquity and foisting them on ancient people that wouldn't share those same assumptions and those same categories when it comes to religion. And so the book was saying that we shouldn't use the term religion at all in critical study when we look at these ancient communal traditions that are passed down and personal faiths of the peoples themselves. And that's how Smith sort of broke down the categories. But so what we were doing with the concept of "monotheism" quote unquote, is saying that category hasn't faced the type of critical scrutiny that religion has in any way that is helpful in the study of antiquity. And so we wanted to help spearhead that movement. There has already been scholarship that's been critical of monotheism for some time. That is not new. But what we wanted to do was get together some of those scholars in one place, in one conference, and say, "Okay, let's take the gloves off," so to speak. Let's be straightforward with this and not dancing around the issue, but just get right out there in the open and say, "This category should not be used for the study of antiquity anymore."

Dan Beecher Let's talk a little bit quickly about that category, about the idea of monotheism as it has been talked about up until now and what it meant, and then a little bit about why you think that is an outdated way of thinking about the beliefs and sort of practices of antiquity.

Dan McClellan I think my paper probably goes most directly into trying to figure out what's the origin of this conceptual package.

Dan Beecher This is fun. Dan, it's like I'm interviewing you, too. Yeah. I'm interviewing both of you guys.

Dan McClellan I'm a guest on my own damn show. So we first get the word monotheism in around 1660, a guy named Henry More, he's called a Cambridge Platinist or Platonist if you're nasty. He's one of these guys who's using Platonic philosophical frameworks to advance certain Protestant interests, particularly over and against the people who are perceived of as the enemy at the time, which included materialists like Thomas Hobbes, and people that they accused of being atheists and Muslims and things like that.

Dan Beecher How dare they? What a horrible accusation. To call someone an atheist.

Dan McClellan And they were like, "Oh, the materialists who worship the world as the one and only God are basically worshiping no god. They're all atheists." Right. So it's pretty complex when you drill down to the bottom of it, but they're using this concept of monotheism as a value judgment and an identity marker. And what I point out is that they're not using it to mean worship of one god. They kind of dance around it like this is what it means, but it's like, well, what about Islam? And then it's like that's a false pretense to monotheism. They're not true monotheists because they don't believe in the same God as us. And then- Okay ... like I said, the materialists, because they believe in an impersonal single deity, they're also not believing in a real god, and so they're atheists. And so basically, we're monotheists, and anybody who claims to believe in one god, if their god is too different from our god, then they don't believe in the right one god, and so they're not monotheists. So what I do in my paper is I explain three different ways historically that the concept of monotheism has been used. So when it was coined, and I call this enlightenment monotheism, it was basically this idea that there's this one personal, all-powerful, supremely sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who created everything that exists apart from them out of nothing. And so one of the necessary features of enlightenment monotheism is creation ex nihilo. Right. We think of this as, at least in the way I've seen it discussed, we think of it as just this kind of doctrine that's there. Oh, yeah, creation had to happen out of nothing. But this is huge. Anciently, when they're first debating this in the 2nd century CE, in the Enlightenment, if it's not creation out of nihilo, it's crap, as the great poet once said. But then you get in the 19th century, you get all these... In the 18th, 19th century, that's when dictionaries were suddenly all the rage. And Webster in 1928, I think this is the first time anyone ever defined monotheism as the belief in the existence of one sole deity. Prior to that, literally dictionaries defined monotheism as the doctrine of the Unitarians. Oh. Yeah. So you look in the dictionary, monotheism, the doctrine of the Unitarians. Next word. And then Webster says it's belief in one single sole deity, and I suggest this is an etymological fallacy because up until that point, no one had ever said, "Monotheism is this, and here you can apply it to all these different religions, and you can distinguish monotheism from not monotheism." It was an identity marker and a value judgment.

Dan Beecher That's so weird because the word itself just sounds so easy to break down. Yeah. Like mono, one, theism, God, easy. Done. Yeah. Out the door. And so to hear that it wasn't that is a little bit shocking, to be honest with you.

Dan McClellan And the etymological fallacy is very, very common. People use it all the time in the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st century. And then what I describe a third kind of monotheism, which is what I call, and you'll recognize this word, renegotiated monotheism. And this is where once we started noticing, "Hey, you know what? In the Bible, they talk about all kinds of different gods." Then we had to be like, "Well, what does this mean about monotheism?" And instead of saying, "Okay, that's not monotheism," we decided, "Oh, well, monotheism just means something else then." It means whatever we find in the Bible. And so you have these scholars who look in the Bible, and whether they're looking- Outlined ... in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament or whatever, they'll say, "Monotheism is this so that we can continue to identify this as monotheism." So they're changing, they're revising the definition so that we can continue to call what is in the Bible monotheism.

Dan Beecher And so- It seems to have become important in the history of, especially of Christianity- Mm-hmm ... to identify the Bible with the concept of a single God. Mm-hmm. With the belief in only one God- Yeah ... at any given time. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And in the paper, I argue that a big part of this, and what I think is probably the central part of this, is that as an identity marker and a value judgment, you want ideological continuity with these people who wrote the Bible that you believe you're a part of a continuation of the same community. You're the same group. And so you- Right ... want them to believe the same things that you're believing now. And so monotheism is the beating heart of Christianity for a lot of folks, particularly when they're comparing it to other things that they don't think are monotheistic. And so obviously, the authors of the New Testament had to be monotheistic. And I argue that scholarship today is trying to maintain that continuity, that connection, and they're willing to just revise the concept wherever they need to go with it in order to maintain that connection. And I argue that that is harmful to the academic endeavor- Hmm ... and that we need to acknowledge that there's not monotheism in the Bible. And if we want to argue for the utility of that framework, that analytical framework, if we want to say there's value in imposing this interpretive lens on the Bible, they should make a case for why it's valuable. We should no longer just give the benefit of the doubt. We should no longer just- Right. Exactly ... default to accepting the monotheism of the Bible. Exactly. And so that's the gist of my paper. And I conclude by saying, and so if anybody wants to use this framework, they first need to demonstrate that there is value to it, and that it's not just an attempt on their part to structure values and powers and boundaries and things like that, which is- Well, and to support a sort of dogmatic stance, right? Yeah.

Dan Beecher Isn't that what we're talking about is now that word, that monotheism word, is being used to support a dogma rather than to actually- Right ... just look at what is present and take it on its own terms. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And as you well know, the official position of the "Data Over Dogma" podcast is that data goes over the dogma rather than the other way around. Right. Yeah.

Dan Beecher We don't let the dogma wag the- Wag the data. Yeah. I like that. That's a shirt right there. Somehow we got to turn that into a shirt. Don't let the dogma wag the data. Something.

Dan McClellan So David, talk about your paper.

Dan Beecher Did you give a paper also?

David Burnett What was- Yeah, I gave a paper too. Yeah, I did.

Dan Beecher What was your paper about specifically? Yeah.

David Burnett My paper was sort of a revised version of a paper I gave a couple of years ago. Me and Dan were in a section at SBL in the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature section.

Dan Beecher They did- SBL, I'm just going to jump in and mention that SBL is the Society for Biblical Literature.

David Burnett Ah, yes. Yeah.

Dan Beecher That you're talking about their con- The Society of Biblical Literature. Yep. Their yearly conference.

David Burnett So a couple of years ago- Yeah ... at the Society of Biblical Literature, me and Dan gave similar papers to the ones we gave now. But the paper I did then is the paper I developed for this conference, which was called "Virtuous Gods or Deserving of Death? Conflicting Early Jewish Postures towards the Gods within Ancient Mediterranean Paganism." And so what I was trying to argue there, just briefly, is that when you look at a somewhat representative spectrum of early Jewish literature, so when I say early Judaism, I mean the Judaism of the Second Temple period, which is anywhere spanning back as far as 6th century BCE to 1st century CE, the end of 1st century CE after the destruction of the temple. So, generally speaking, when we look at early Jewish literature, we can find a spectrum of different postures towards the gods that are active in ancient Mediterranean world, and they largely vary. Hmm. But when you look at these varying postures towards the gods, none of them, not even on either pole, so on one pole, you'll have someone like Philo of Alexandria saying things like- Talking about the gods from, sort of the Deuteronomic vision of the cosmos, where you have the gods apportioned over the nations that we have happening at the Tower of Babel scene. Right. So in commentary on that text, in Philo, in the context of a Platonic philosophical discourse about the scala natura, the scaled nature, the hierarchy of the cosmos, he comments on this text saying, "Yeah, those gods of the nations, those celestial bodies that Deuteronomy says is God, yeah, they're gods. They're rulers that are appointed over the father of all, though. They are not the sole cause of everything themselves." And in this sort of critique of some Greek beliefs about the causation of all events to the celestial bodies, Philo critiques this and says, "No, they're gods, yep, but they are copying the rule. They're doing mimesis. They're imitating the rule of the father of all." Mm-hmm. And this is standard fare in Platonic cosmology of the day of an ordered cosmos, everyone- Yeah ... playing their part, keeping this perfect harmony thing. Well, Philo's on board and is like, "Yeah." And matter of fact, he goes as far to say that these gods, even though because they're rulers, like delegates under the father of all, that makes them liable to correction because they're not the father of all. They're not the head guy. Right. So he says they're liable to correction, but he says because of their virtue, they're never destined to undergo it. Okay. So this idea that Philo is not an apocalypticist, right? I think I talked about this last time, is there's no sense in which he sees some final end of days where the gods need to be judged and killed. There's none of that. Right. Okay? The gods aren't the issue. For Philo, he's sort of lampooning the Greeks who say that they're autocratic gods. He literally calls them that. He says, "For the Greeks who say they're autocratic powers, they're wrong. They rule under the father of all." So at no time in Philo, anywhere, does he negate the gods' existence, their agency, their rule that's delegated to them under the God of all, their regular place in ordering the cosmic government of sorts. Mm-hmm. All of that's very real, but they're virtuous for him. Right. But then if you fast-forward on the other side and you go to Paul, this is totally opposite end of the spectrum here, Paul will use the exact same terms for the gods of the nations that from the Septuagint, from the Greek translations of the Jewish Bible, and commenting on same texts in a very different context, very different rhetorical goals, very different things taking place. These are epistles to specific communities, and he's an apocalypticist, so the context couldn't be more different. Right. But what's interesting is when those texts come up, they all affirm that those gods are in fact real and are in fact agents in the world. But for Paul, as this radical apocalyptic Pharisee that's waiting for the final denouement of the resurrection from the dead, this great event, included in that event is the judgment of what he calls principalities, powers, rulers. These are the same terms used in these other Greek Jewish literature for those gods that are delegated over the world.

Dan Beecher And so- So the final judgment isn't just for us humans, it's also for all of these other ancillary gods. Oh, yeah. Interesting.

David Burnett So much so, it's so in your face that Paul actually uses the language of parousia to speak about the coming back of Jesus, where there's this final judgment of the cosmos, and he even includes the holy ones, he calls them, his fellow believers in Jesus who have received the pneuma from heaven, this heavenly spirit of the gods, so to speak. But it's the spirit of the high God, the most high God, that the Messiah himself shares, so that links them in some weird, mystic, cosmic way to them. And he says that you all are going to participate in this. Don't you know you're going to judge the cosmos? Don't you know you're going to judge the angels? Surprise. So that's part of their role. They're in the big judgment divine court scene at the end. Mm-hmm. Wow. And they're issued their judgment that they're going out the door. So that is a totally different picture than Philo. Paul would look like the crazy apocalypticist with the sign on the corner, right? Right. Yeah. The end is nigh. Where Philo is sort of like the urbane, sophisticate philosopher. So you couldn't get more opposite in terms of the views of the gods. But here's the point. Even if you consider these radically different poles of postures towards these deities in their own lived context, in their own lived religious context, you're not going to find anything remotely close to anything we could call monotheistic- Right ... in the way that that term is generically employed today. And what I did say on top of that is when you consider all of the nuances that get added to this term in contemporary scholarship on early Judaism and Christian origins in particular It dies the death of a thousand qualifications. Because like Dan said, once that definition has shifted, some might say, "Oh, well, yeah, but in scholarship it hasn't shifted." By ancient Jewish monotheism or an evolution of early Jewish monotheism into these Christological monotheism, whatever the heck that means. These terms get employed all the time, but you have to qualify them all day long, and in every text you reference, there's always other divine powers everywhere.

Dan Beecher And so- Isn't there even a problem with just saying Christological monotheism in the sense that if Christ is a god or is part of a godhead, that's plural, right? Yeah. Now suddenly we have a plural God in Christ and his godfather.

Dan McClellan Well, it- Yes ... and it manifests the problem, which is that monotheism isn't the rule that we're holding up. Monotheism is just an identity marker and a value judgment, and we will just massage it into whatever context we need that value judgment and that identity marker, whether it means inclusive monotheism, exclusive monotheism, ethical monotheism, Christological monotheism, first-century Jewish monotheism, whatever we need it to be. Yeah. If we need monotheism to be there, it's going to be there one way or another. Hmm. Right.

David Burnett And this is what happens here, Dan put it beautifully just then. It's like what tends to happen, these huge anachronisms take place in just a couple of sentences. People can bring entire categories that take hundreds of years to mete out, to develop, and they'll just say, "Oh yeah, here it is. Look at this text. Doesn't this-" Yeah ... "kind of sound like something that one day will become this? So it must be this." Right. And it's like, whoa, whoa, hold up. Take 1 Corinthians 15 as a great example of this. A lot of the talk about Christological monotheism and things like this around the New Testament, all the EHCC folk use this language.

Dan Beecher I don't know what that is.

David Burnett It's the Early High Christology Club. Oh, okay. There's like a little club of scholars that talk about this.

Dan McClellan The idea that Jesus didn't slowly develop into being God, but immediately- Yeah.

David Burnett Right off the bat ...

Dan McClellan was understood as God. That's right.

David Burnett First generation, right off the bat, everyone thinks that. Mutation. That's right.

Dan McClellan Heroes on the half shell, Christology.

David Burnett It was- But notice the nuances here. Notice the nuances. It's not a mutation of monotheism. Well, there's already this ancient Jewish monotheism where you have, okay, sure, there's these other gods, kind of, but they're created. See, there's only one creator. Even though some of these Jewish texts in the Second Temple period didn't get the memo about creatio ex nihilo. They didn't get it, because they're like, "Oh yeah, the powers and the rulers, they're involved in ordering the world too, and bringing it about and setting it in order." And it's like, I remember reading these texts in my early master's degree, like, "Wait, what? Why are these powers involved in creation? Well, I thought God was the only one doing all this stuff." Yeah.

Dan McClellan And even Jesus is like that. Right. A lot of people misunderstand. It's created through Jesus or something like that. Right. Jesus did the creating.

David Burnett Which technically would be a Tuesday in the ancient Mediterranean, really. Yeah. Because you have powers that Yahweh himself uses in these early Jewish texts to do all kinds of stuff in creation. Wisdom as an entity that creates for God is there in Proverbs 8, and the early Christology folks know that that category is already well-developed in Second Temple period. But anyways, the point is that we want to wipe all the anachronism off the table and say, "Let's just engage this literature and be critical about the use, the employment of this category." And a great paper that piggybacked right off of what Dan was talking about was towards the beginning by an amazing scholar, Deborah Scoggins Valentine. Wonderful scholar, also of Brown, who teaches at Rutgers. She did a paper called "Translating Monotheism: How a Lens of Monotheism Impacts Translation." And it, oh, man, it just knocked out of the park exactly what Dan was saying about these categories. The first paper of the conference. Yeah. Yeah. It was the first paper of the conference. Talk about a way to start. But she knocked it out of the park with this concept of saying, "Look, when you have this developed category of monotheism already where you assume that's what this religion is, that's what it's in the Bible," it's exactly what Dan was saying, like this is already monotheistic. When you go back to try to translate these texts, there's so much psychological influence over translation choices in very weird texts that don't fit any of those categories. Yeah. And so you see, and she shows multiple translations, English translations and ancient translations, how this happens. How at different times when you have theological development and this lens of monotheism developed, it's influencing all kinds of translation choices. And you can see it. It's really obvious to historians and translators when you're made aware of it. Problem is, there are so many interpreters that probably weren't even aware that those lenses are already fully developed. Right. And so you couldn't imagine seeing it any other way. Yeah. Does a fish know it's in water, right? Yeah. Right. So this is why a conference like this is so important, is we have to try to take these lenses off and be critical with the data and look at it and say, "Wait a minute, does any of this fit?"

Dan Beecher Can you guys provide an example? Sorry, the professor that you just named, I didn't catch her name.

Dan McClellan Deborah Scoggins Ballantine. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Maybe she provided an example of a scripture that has been traditionally translated one way, but would be better translated in another way if we sort of cast off the monotheism lens. Can you think of a specific example of that?

Dan McClellan Well, the one that she talks about in her paper was when Jacob and Laban are parting ways. And this is Genesis, oh, shoot, I forget. 31:53. Okay, 31:53, and I'm pulling it up right in front of me. But basically, they're both going to swear their oaths. And so the NRSV says it this way: "May the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor judge between us. So Jacob swore by the fear of his father Isaac. And Jacob offered a sacrifice on the height, called his kinfolk to eat the bread," blah, blah, blah. And so the question here is, and there is a part, it looks like the NRSV takes out the reading that she's talking about. There's another statement, Elohim avoteyhem, which means either God of their fathers or gods of their fathers. And so the question is- Right ... does God of Nahor and God of Abraham mean this is the one God who is both the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, or does this mean there's one God that's the God of Nahor and another God that is the God of Abraham? Hmm. And the statement, the Elohim of their fathers, is ambiguous. It could be- Right ... interpreted either way because Elohim can be- Right ... plural or singular. And so depending on the lens you're bringing to this passage, you may, one, try to preserve the ambiguity, which when I worked in scripture translation for the LDS church, we actually at one point wanted to make shirts that said, "Maintain the ambiguity." The idea being that you don't want to make the decision for the reader. You want to pass on- That's right ... the prerogative to make the interpretive decision to the reader. And so you can maintain the ambiguity, or you can decide for them, in which case- Right ... you say, "Oh, this is referring to different gods," or, "This is referring to one God." And so she talks about how the Septuagint makes a decision about that, about how the Vulgate makes a decision about that, and then how modern translation, the King James Version, the RSV, the NRSV, the NIV, how the translators make different decisions based on the lenses that they're bringing to the text. And when talking about Paul and the gods, if you go to 1 Corinthians 8, there's this famous passage where he says, and here's the NRSVUE, "Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as in fact there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, for whom are all things, and for whom we exist." And there's some ambiguity there. Is Paul saying, "Oh yeah, these things that people call gods, but we know there's only one God." Is Paul saying that? Or is Paul saying, "Yeah, there are these gods all over the place, but as far as we're concerned, only one God matters to us"? Right. Like with what lens are you bringing? That is what he's saying. Yeah. And I agree, that's precisely- Yeah ... what he's saying. And the metaphor that I use in my paper is the Broncos. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one. That was a lot easier to say back in the late '90s. But the Raiders, they're not even a real football team. It's just the kind of rhetoric that we use to juice each other up and to- Yeah ... make ourselves feel better than the other.

David Burnett Yeah, I've had to do the same thing. I remember giving my first paper in 2013 or 2014, and it was at this Paul and Judaism conference at HBU, or formerly Houston Baptist University. Now it's Houston Christian, I think. But I'd given this paper there, and I had talked about the gods of Deuteronomy in relation to the interpretation of Romans 4. And interestingly, this sort of pastor scholar, older pastor scholar, had a PhD. I think he taught at some point, but he had pastored most of his adult life. He's like the older statesman evangelical pastor in the pews looking out for these young heretically, "I'm going to show these kids what for." Yeah. He immediately tried to go in on me in the Q&A time and say, "Well, clearly by Isaiah, it says that there is only one God. There is no God beside me. What are you talking about that they were not monotheists?" Da, da, da. I said, "Wait a minute." I was like, "This is just incomparability language." At the time, I drove a Ford Focus. It's like me saying, "My Ford Focus is the only Ford Focus." There are no other Ford Focus out there. It's just mine. I'm not making an ontological claim- Right ... about the oneness of my Ford Focus. And I had already made points that look, Acadian hymns do this to their deities too. It's like- Yeah ... "Oh yeah, there is but one God. Who amongst the gods is like you?" It's like, wait, what? Yeah. So this is just common rhetoric.

Dan McClellan I've shared that on social media, the great Cairo Hymn to Aten- Yeah. There you go ... from Egypt. You read that, and that's even more emphatic than the stuff you find in Deutero Isaiah- Yeah ... in Second Isaiah.

David Burnett That's an awesome example, yeah.

Dan McClellan So the first session was Hebrew Bible, and there were three of us, Deborah Scoggins, Ballantine, I presented, and also, another wonderful scholar named Jennifer Singletary from Penn State University. Excellent. And her paper was called "The End of Hypostatization" ... or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Israelite Polytheism." Yes. And her paper was really cool. I didn't know what to expect with her paper. Me either.

Dan Beecher But hypostatization is this idea that- I feel like you're stuttering when you say that word, but that's- Um ... I'm sure you're not. It's a hell of a word.

Dan McClellan Yeah, no, I'm not stuttering. And that was something that she kept saying, she's like, "I had to practice pronouncing all the words over and over again." But this idea of a hypostasis is, I don't know if it originates in Christological scholarship, or it probably comes from- Yeah.

David Burnett Well, that's where it becomes a dominant category. Yeah. In the early Christological debates- Yeah ... about a hypostasis of God- Yeah ... that's still part of the one God, but it develops into this language of personhood in the- Yeah ... councilor debates- Yeah ... on Christology. But what happens is hypostasis then, because the Bible is now we have Christendom, everyone's Orthodox Christian. You have the Orthodox readings of the Bible. So if you have any weird God-looking stuff back here, oh, that's a hypostasis. Yeah. That's not a separate god, right? I still don't understand what- Part of the one God ...

Dan Beecher the word means.

Dan McClellan So this is a fancy Greek word that means substance. Mm. But the idea of a hypostasis or hypostasis is this is like an avatar. It's an entity that is distinct from the main entity- Mm ... but it only points back to the main entity. Okay. Interesting. And so, like a divine image is thought of as a hypostasis. And so when you have these texts that are talking about all these other gods, if you identify them all as hypostases of the main god, then that protects monotheism because it means- Right ... they're not autonomous, independent entities. Right. They're just the avatars of the main god.

Dan Beecher And her paper went- Which feels problematic considering that they fight each other, but okay. Well, yeah.

Dan McClellan It's highly problematic. Well- Go ahead, David.

David Burnett Yeah, I'll interject something here. The ones that are normally... And this is helpful for Hebrew Bible stuff because when Christian scholars want to talk about hypostases of God, they will go back like the councils did and talk about the wisdom of God. It appears as if wisdom is this second figure that has some sort of agency. It's described as if wisdom gets to create. Yeah. Wisdom gets to play a role. But it's still the wisdom of God, so it's- Mm ... sort of personified. So is it an agent in and of itself, or is it just part of God? And so that's what we mean by, well, it's a hypostasis. Right. It's part of God, but it just appears as a separate agent. And so, the name of God is another very important one in the Hebrew Bible- Mm-hmm ... that was very important all through early Judaism, this onomanology, this idea that the name has presence. Yeah. It signifies presence. Yeah. So you build a temple, Yahweh says, "You build a temple for my name." The tabernacle's where my name will dwell there. Yeah. And it's a real presence of the deity is there. Right. The Shekhinah can be called the name. The glory of God, the kavod, is often another one, too, the glory of God. Yeah. So these are all like hypostases. It appears like they're a second figure, but they're part of the one God. Okay. And so that discourse dominates a lot of scholarship because they impose it on much more ancient Israelite stuff because they need it to be there.

Dan McClellan And it functions as an explanation that cuts off any further interrogation because it's like- Bingo ... there's some kind of relationship there, boom, hypostasis. That's right. And that means we're done talking about the relationship because we've already presupposed that whatever that relationship is, it is subsumed within our understanding, which is, again, based on Christological stuff. And so it's basically just a way of shellacking everything over with Christology so that we don't complicate things any further, which was really- Right ... one of the main things I was trying to do in my book was show, hey, we can actually explain why people are thinking of these things this way. But it complicates Christology to do that. But she brought up some wonderful examples from Kuntillet Ajrud, some of the inscriptions there, where it refers to El, it refers to Adonai, it refers to Baal. And she complicates the assumption that these all must be hypostases of Adonai, and then talks about some really cool inscriptions from Elephantine. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. There was a Jewish garrison that was stationed there at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth centuries BCE, and they had a temple there. And it was destroyed by the locals. And the governor there was like, "Yeah, you can rebuild your temple, but no animal sacrifices, only fruits and vegetables and stuff like that." And they have references to a variety of different deities there, who are sometimes just dismissed as hypostases. Hmm, yeah. So also a phenomenal paper. Yeah, her paper is great. Yeah. And then, David, your section, Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins, was the longer. We had four in there, didn't we?

David Burnett Yeah, that was four. It was separated by a break. Yep. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, Emma Wasserman went right before you, and you could probably talk about her paper better than I can because you're a little more closely related to what she's doing. Yeah.

David Burnett Well, her paper was called "Pantheon Polemics and Intellectual Pressures: Reconsidering Paul's pneuma." She left off the pneuma part for this paper and sort of restructured it a bit. Yeah. But she was mainly talking about from a host of texts and comparing it to sort of the common intellectual context in philosophy in the Greco-Roman world to say that Paul believed in a pantheon very similar to the way the Greeks did. So it's this structured power, think of a pyramid or a hierarchy, a scala naturae, as they call it, that I was talking about earlier, like a scaled hierarchy. And that this is ubiquitous.

Dan Beecher You're talking about multi-level marketing. Yeah. Yeah.

David Burnett You got the CEO at the top.

Dan Beecher You got to have your sort of deity downlines, otherwise- Yeah.

David Burnett Emma's an incredible scholar because she has this encyclopedic knowledge of ancient philosophy. I tell you what, I am so jealous of those Stanley Stowers students because her and Robin Faith Walsh and others, Stephen Young, these guys know Greek philosophy backwards and forwards. They are great, and I'm so glad to have them because I have a ton to learn from her still. Yeah. But she masterfully showed that like, look, Paul's pantheon is actually no different in structure, in the way that it's imagined in tiers, and there's all kinds of discourse and rhetoric around that and navigating that. But everyone is sort of on that page. I think she talked about anxieties about affinity. Mm-hmm. Like the likeness. You get anxious that it sounds too much like your compadres over here, so you got to tweak things a little bit to sound unique. Yeah. And so these things that may sound radically unique in Paul aren't really. And so she's doing a high-level critical readings, talking about literary producers and shared repertoires of literary producers of the period. And the way she's critically discussing Paul is that it's just a varied model of a pantheon. That's what's happening here. Yeah. It's just one varied model of scholars looking back critically, "Oh, these are all pantheons. That's all this is." Yeah. And so the way she talks about these literary producers in that context has much more to do about anxieties towards affinities with others, to have some unique voice, to have some, you're a religious expert, in the words of Heidi White. He's a religious expert in the ancient Mediterranean. He's carving out his own place, his own voice. Yeah. And so he might tweak things this way. Well, they need to be dealt with this way, or this lower tier, there's a battle going on over here. But the whole time, for critical scholarship is, let's just admit, these are all pantheons, okay? Yeah. And this is something- There is no radically other- Right ... view of the cosmos going on. That's not a thing.

Dan McClellan And that's a big point to make here, is that a common theme in all of this is when we look at the relationship of the Jewish Christian Hebrew Bible literature to the literature and the societies around it, it's not a revolutionary departure. Mm-hmm. And particularly with monotheism, what scholarship wants is this to be a revolutionary break. Right. This just sudden, instantaneous mutation that nobody could've seen coming. Right. Or revolutionary monotheism or all these things, because what that means is this is divine in origin.

Dan Beecher This is special. Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is not just an incremental elaboration on everything that came before, which is, in reality, when you look at the data, that's what you see. They're not departing wildly from what's going on around them. They're just saying short, small, little deviations from what's going on. Around them. And so I think that's one of the important things that this conference is going to show is that there is not this radical revolutionary departure, but it is carrying on very similar traditions, just incrementally elaborating on them.

Dan Beecher I think it's one of the things that I think would be surprising to most people. I think a lot of people would be more comfortable admitting an idea of polytheism in Hebrew Bible times, in Old Testament times, and less comfortable with that being a part of New Testament Pauline beliefs. And I think that's the part that I think is the big revelation from what I'm understanding from you guys is that there's no, we've said it before, but there's no part of the Bible that doesn't have polytheistic belief.

Dan McClellan And I think one of the things we talked about, I would agree with that. One of the things we frequently brought up at the conference was the threshold of monotheism. Where do we identify when we finally have monotheism? And if you go back 150 years in scholarship, it's like, "Oh, Abraham was the first monotheist." And then a couple generations later, Moses was the first monotheist. Then a couple generations later, Deutero-Isaiah is the first monotheist. And so our generation is coming on what I hope is the tail end of the era of Deutero-Isaiah. They're constantly trying to hold that threshold against the data and say, "No, we have it by this time." And in addition to just blasting past Deutero-Isaiah, we're blasting past the New Testament also. We're not waiting for that era. Right. We're saying, "No, it's not in Deutero-Isaiah, it's not in the Greco-Roman period literature. It's not even in the New Testament." And, I think that's going to be another important contribution of this volume is we're going to point out, well, one, the question of where the threshold is the wrong question to begin with. But two, it's definitely not anywhere in the Bible. And I think Paula Fredriksen, who has the paper after yours, did a wonderful job of talking about her frustrations, with the use of the framework of monotheism and its abuse in light of the fact that it's just not identifiable anywhere in the Bible, including in the New Testament, and even within early Christianity. 100%. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think it's funny that when you mentioned the pushing forward of this threshold, I am no Bible scholar. I'm no expert in the Bible, but even I look at Moses and I'm like, "You guys remember in the story of Moses that the bad guys had gods that had powers, too, right?" That's just right there in the story. Yeah.

David Burnett It's right there. Yeah.

Dan Beecher How could you possibly... That's about as obvious a thing as I can imagine. And so the fact that what it speaks to my mind is how important it was to these scholars to maintain this dogma of monotheism. Yeah.

Dan McClellan We all saw Steve Martin in "Marty Short" throw their staffs down, and they became snakes. And, in fact, somebody brought up that this generation is a generation that was raised thinking about the story of the Exodus- Yeah ... based on "The Prince of Egypt." That's- "Prince of Egypt," yeah ... that's the lens so many come to it through. And in fact, I've- It's true ... I've heard people argue, "Well, Moses's brother gave him his ring," and it's like, "That's 'The Prince of Egypt.'"