What IS the Bible?

Dan McClellan Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And 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 Things are good. I just want everyone to stop comparing me to Kyle Gass and Tenacious D. I don't know why that keeps happening. I have a white beard, and I'm balding, I guess.

Dan McClellan I don't know.

Dan Beecher But stop it.

Dan McClellan You can't play the guitar nearly as well as he can.

Dan Beecher No, I can't.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I'm not charming like he is, maybe. I don't know what it is. I don't think I look that much like Tenacious D, either of them, but...

Dan McClellan I don't see it.

Dan Beecher There you go. It's happened in multiple of our YouTube threads, and I'm ready for it to be over. Keep doing it. I don't care. It's fine. He's cool. Anywho, today, coming up, we're going to be talking about something really fun. This is a What Is That? that I think might surprise people because they think they know what it is.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher So, let's just dive right into it. So, Dan, what is that?

Dan McClellan The Bible.

Dan Beecher The Bible.

Dan McClellan Yes, this is the big one. And kind of the thesis statement of this What Is That? is that there is no such thing as the Bible.

Dan Beecher How dare you, sir.

Dan McClellan I dare.

Dan Beecher This coming from a guy who wrote a book called "The Bible Says So."

Dan McClellan Yes, and where I went in and said, "First, there's no such thing in the Bible, and second, there's no such thing as the Bible saying anything at all."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I was like, "Look, I didn't come up with the title. The publisher said, 'You've got to call it something.'"

Dan Beecher I've just proved my own theory. You may stop reading now.

Dan McClellan Yes. No, and I actually talk about this after the introduction- Yeah ... the first chapter, I talk about the fact that, look, and I go off on, don't get me started on the dictionary, because there's no such thing as the dictionary. There are dictionaries- Yeah ... but there's no the dictionary. People speak about it as if we have all agreed on one universally authoritative, consistent dictionary.

Dan Beecher Right. And that's just not true, and the same is true of- Merriam and Webster and Johnson and every big dictionary writer has all agreed on everything that's in all of them.

Dan McClellan Oxford is- "Big dictionary" is such an infelicitous phrase, but big dictionary energy, there's got to be.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Anyway, just like there's no such thing as the dictionary, there's no such thing as the Bible, and I want to talk about three different judgments that you have to make before you can even get to what you think is the Bible.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And I want to start with the canon, because we frequently talk about the Bible as if we all agree on what books are in the Bible, and the reality is that we can find collections of texts that constitute what we would call a bible that don't agree with what Christians today think of as the canon. We can find canons among Christian groups that differ. We can find canons within Jewish groups that differ. In fact- Yeah ... probably the smallest biblical canon is that of the Samaritans, which is just the five books of Moses, and that's it. And this is related to the Sadducees from the New Testament, which rejected the scriptures after the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. So, that's a bible, and none of us can say, "Well, that's not the Bible." Or none of us can say, "That's the wrong Bible." As definitively- I mean, they have a- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Authoritatively.

Dan Beecher I love the idea that none of us can say, because, boy, lots of us do say- Yeah.

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher that they know what is definitively and authoritatively the Bible.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Whether it be their Protestant Bible with however many books in there, or their, I think, Old Testament books.

Dan McClellan The Catholic Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You jump to Catholic, you go up a bunch of books. You go to Eastern Orthodox- Yep ... you go up a bunch more books. You go to Ethiopian Orthodox, and I don't think it's done. I think there's still more coming every week.

Dan McClellan It's like- Yeah. Orders of magnitude larger. I think the most expansive is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church's canon, which has significantly more books than the Armenian, than the Eastern Orthodox, than the Catholic, than the Protestant. And yeah, so nobody can authoritatively say, "This one's the real one, and the other one is not." Now, when you're speaking for your group, yeah, you can say, "This is what we like."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "We don't like the other one." But you're just speaking for your group. This is our Bible. It's not the Bible. And so, the first question I think that you've got to answer is related to canon. How many books are in your Bible? Which are those books? And we've talked about the canon before, the development of the canon, a very slow process that was done rather arbitrarily based on a lot of factors, a lot of them ad hoc. People will talk about how, "Well, these were the criteria that a book had to meet in order to make it into the Bible." And if you look at the history of this That's not what happened. What happened- Right ... is they said, "These are our books." And then people came in later and said, "What criteria can we use to rationalize why these are the ones we landed on?"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they come up with criteria, and there are exceptions to all the criteria that they come up with.

Dan Beecher But before you- And the criteria that were used to exclude books, you look at Martin Luther, and it was just like, "Nah." A lot of his was just like, "I don't like it."

Dan McClellan Not a fan.

Dan Beecher Yeah. "That one doesn't cut the mustard for me, so it's out."

Dan McClellan And even when we go to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, he also cut out Hebrews and James and Revelation, and it wasn't just the Apocrypha that he said, "We're going to put these in a separate section." That's what ultimately stuck, but not initially.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then all his other stuff about the other books from the New Testament, people were like, "Shut up, Martin. We're taking these back."

Dan Beecher "We liked those ones."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "We're leaving them."

Dan McClellan And once you get to the Counter-Reformation and the formation of the Deuterocanon and the formalization of the canon within the Catholic Church, then you've got kind of a graded canon. But the point there is that this is a question you have to answer, and your answer cannot be authoritative universally. Your answer cannot be objectively correct. It's just what you prefer or what your group prefers, or a rule that someone enforces.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There's no objective correct answer to that. So right off the bat, you've got one question that's going to determine what you think the Bible is, and you cannot be objectively right about it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then the next question that comes up is the manuscripts that you are going to use to cobble together your canon. Because whether we're talking Christian, Jewish, the Samaritan, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, there are a lot of different manuscripts that are available for us to draw from in order to form our Bible. And so, even in English today, Protestant Bible, let's say we got our 66-book Protestant canon. You're going to look at a variety of different ways to cobble it together. Are you going to go, for the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic Text? What New Testament critical text are you going to use? Are you going to use the USB 4 or 5? I think they got a six that just came out.

Dan Beecher The NA28.

Dan McClellan I think they got a 29 that's about to come out. Are you going to go back to the Textus Receptus? Which edition of the Textus Receptus are you going to use? For the Hebrew Bible, are you going to incorporate readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls? What about the Septuagint? The Jewish Study Bible and the JPS Tanakh sticks a lot more dogmatically to the Leningrad Codex, which is kind of the representative manuscript of the Masoretic tradition, and they are a lot less willing to alter a reading based on a reading in the Septuagint or in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we like better. You can go to Greek Orthodox. They are going to use the Septuagint. I have a Bible that's just the Septuagint on one page and the facing page is modern Greek translation of the Septuagint. And so their Old Testament is going to be very different from the Old Testament of an English-speaking Protestant.

Dan Beecher So the manuscripts- That's an interesting-- Sorry, I just wanted to touch just briefly on a thing that you said.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Because it's interesting that of course you would need it because they're not even the same language, but interesting that you would have a Greek translation of a Greek book. I love that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and I'm sure there are editions out there of Beowulf or something like that, where it's the Old English on one side, and then you've got a contemporary English translation on the other. Maybe there aren't editions like that.

Dan Beecher I don't know. But- I mean, there should be.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You get to Chaucer or whatever, and that's only a few hundred years ago. That's not thousands of years of difference, so wow.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So the manuscripts that you use, that's a question you have to answer, and once again, there's no way to say this is objectively the right answer.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan All you can say is, "This is what we prefer." And so you are now two steps removed from being able to say, "This is the Bible." And then a third question that you have to answer is what translation you're going to go with. Because while there are an awful lot of people who would say, "Well, let's go back to the Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible. Let's use the Greek for the New Testament," the number of people who are actually consuming the Bible in the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek is vanishingly small.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The devotional readers of the text in those original languages who may be able to access the manuscripts that they've chosen and the canon that they've chosen is a very, very small portion of all of the people who are reading the Bible devotionally. The overwhelming majority of people. And going back to the Septuagint, even people who have grown up their entire lives speaking Greek, and maybe they only speak Greek, they're consuming the Septuagint if they're part of the Greek Orthodox tradition in translation as well, most likely.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so then you've got to decide, "Well, am I using the Katharevousa?" Older Greek, or am I using a new, they usually call Demotic translation, a more modern Greek translation? Whose translation? Is it the Philospitos or is it another one? Even for someone who speaks the language in which it was originally written, the majority of those folks are going to be consuming it in translation, and they have choices regarding which translation they're going to be using.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And when it comes to English speakers, forget about it. There are tons and tons of different translations.

Dan Beecher Yeah, dozens.

Dan McClellan And you have people getting phenomenally dogmatic about which English translation is the right one or the best one.

Dan Beecher Oh, and the most dogmatic ones are the ones who are convinced that the worst translation is the right one.

Dan McClellan Yeah. They're all- "If the King James version was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me" is the- ... is the old joke.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But the old joke that most people who are dogmatically holding onto the King James wouldn't understand.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If you're that set on it has to be KJV, you don't get that joke.

Dan McClellan And I've recently talked about some of the ways that you can tell if your translation is being dogmatic.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Like, for instance, our policy on the "Data Over Dogma" show is that we use the NRSVUE, the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version, at least until a better translation comes out. But you've got a lot of folks who like... There are three translations that I see an awful lot in my engagement with evangelical content creators and scholars. The ESV, the NIV, and the LSB. Have you ever heard of the LSB?

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan Okay. It's the Legacy Standard Bible.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And it's MacArthur's revision of the New American Standard Bible. So the- Okay ... NASB is the translation, and then John MacArthur facilitated this revision that they now call the Legacy Standard Bible, the LSB. And weeks ago, I made a video where I talked about one way to tell if your Bible translation is being dogmatic. It can't tell you you have a good translation, but there's one verse you can look at to tell you if you have a bad translation.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And I think we've probably touched upon it at least once on the show at some point in the past, but Genesis 2:19, you have the creation account in Genesis 2 where God creates the human, God puts the human in the garden, God scratches their head and says, "Hmm, it's not good that the human is alone. I will make a..." And then we've got our "Ezer Kenegdo," "a suitable companion" or- Hmm ... "a help meet" or whatever for him. And then in verse 19, it says, "And God formed from the dust of the earth the animals of the field," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and on and on. But the problem with this is that it kind of screws up the order of creation because according to Genesis 1, the animals were all formed before the human.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so what they do is they go in and they say, "Okay, it's not that God formed from the dust of the earth the animals, God had formed." So they translate this verb as a pluperfect or a past perfect.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And that way they can say, "Oh, they had already been created. We're just kind of catching you back up on what happened previously in the narrative." And the NIV, the ESV, and the LSB all translate it that way. And so I basically say, "Look, if your translation uses the pluperfect at the beginning of Genesis 2:19, well, there's your problem." "You got a dogmatic translation." If it doesn't say that, it doesn't mean you have a good translation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But if it does say that, you got a bad translation.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And that's just- Or at very least, a translation that has an agenda, and that agenda overrides better translation.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And what's funny is the LSB, that Legacy Standard Bible, it's a revision of the NASB. The NASB doesn't use the pluperfect.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So when they revised this, they were like, "We're going to add the pluperfect here. We're going to make this translation worse." But it's basically them saying, "Yeah, we have imposed this dogma of univocality. The text is not allowed to disagree."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "We're going to alter the text in translation to force it to agree whether it likes it or not," and it doesn't.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So you've got choices to make about the translation as well. And most people, most traditions, they're not involved in these decisions. A lot of people don't even know that they're happening.

Dan Beecher Right. Of course. When you- I think most people that read the Bible have no idea that there's infighting, essentially, among different translations, among different versions.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think that most folks in the Christian tradition, in the US anyway, they're aware there are different translations out there, and they're probably aware that there is disagreement about which translations are good, which translations are bad. I see folks on social media, evangelical influencers, say, "Here are the translations that I use." And what's funny is they usually recommend multiple translations, and it's usually in an attempt to try to kind of- Give you this notion that you get to kind of negotiate yourself between the translations to figure out which reading you like the best. Even if you have zero qualification to assess the quality of any given translation compared to another translation, it's just, well, which one sets off the tuning fork in your loins?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, I think the translation question is one that people are aware of, and most of them are aware of the canon question as well. But the canon is something that's kind of already done and dusted for most traditions. You don't really have a say in that. You can't really go into a church and be like, "Well, I like these two canons, and I would just go back and forth between them." On your own dime, maybe that works, but if you try to stand up at the pulpit and say that, in most traditions, you're not going to be long for that pulpit.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You end up pulling out Bel and the Dragon in an Anglican church and see what happens.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You're going to ride the lightning, that's for sure. And then the manuscript one, I think, is the one that the people are least aware of, least familiar with. I think the folks who are KJV onlyists, that has to be part of their dogma.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because one of the big differences is between the critical text and the Textus Receptus. And so, I see a lot of folks on social media who are like, "The critical text is Alexandrian. Dirty, dirty Alexandrians. We've got to get back to the Byzantine tradition. The Textus Receptus is the true manuscript tradition." So, there are certainly traditions where that sits a little closer to the surface. But I think for most evangelicals around the US today, they're most aware of and have the most say in the translation question. They are less aware of and have less say in the canon question, and then a lot of them are not even aware of and have little say in the manuscript question, even though all three of them are critical to what ends up giving them their Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But the NRSV, they have Catholic editions of the NRSV.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And most of them have the Apocrypha in it already. The NRSV, I think maybe they published translations of the NRSVUE that don't have the Apocrypha, but everyone I've ever seen has the Apocrypha in it.

Dan Beecher Sure. Because it makes sense. You want sort of one-- That one's more universal. It's like blood types. This one can go to both Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants can just sort of not use those ones or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But you'll have some translations where they have an Orthodox edition, they have a Catholic edition, they have a Protestant edition. And so they're trying to play the field a little bit as well with the canon question. But the point is, there is no the Bible. There are Bibles, and when you like a Bible, when you say, "This is my Bible," that's because either you have participated in or you have just accepted the decisions of others who have participated in those three questions.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan What books are going to make up our Bible? What manuscripts of those books are we going to use to cobble together our Bible? And what translation are we going to prioritize? And there are an awful lot of translations out there, and some of them better than others, but an awful lot of them are quite dogmatic. And that's because I think they see the most wiggle room in how to kind of curate a Bible that best serves their interests. Translation is kind of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to how we're going to manipulate this Bible into what we need it to be. And as we've seen with the one example of Genesis 2:19, you can just take the Bible and say, "You're not allowed to say that, Bible. I tell you what you're allowed to say."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so when it comes to the NIV, the ESV, the LSB, that's people telling the Bible what it's going to be.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I think there's a degree to which it's their Bible in the sense that they have crafted it in their own image rather than endorsed the Bible as it has come down to them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, I think the translation issue is the one where you see an awful lot of opportunity to manipulate and to curate precisely the kind of Bible that is going to help you do what you want to do, which unfortunately, far too often these days involves politics and the rights of others who are not a part of your tradition.

Dan Beecher Well, and the other thing that's-- You talk about the translation issues and the manuscript issues and whatever, but people don't even realize that the manuscript thing, before there were even translations that brought it into English or whatever, there were people handwriting this for thousands of years- Yeah ... and inserting their own stuff and taking out their own stuff, and those manuscripts don't match up with each other throughout the centuries. So, you got a translation of a manuscript that was a rewriting of another manuscript that somebody got a wild hair and decided to add something about a lady caught in adultery or whatever, and then- Yep ...

Dan McClellan boom.

Dan Beecher God didn't reach down his hand and scribble all of these words in a way that would easily just be then transmitted perfectly to- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan everybody else.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan What the Bible is changes over time as well, depending on time, place, people, circumstance. All those things are changing what the Bible is. So it's a moving target as well. And it's interesting, and I don't know, I think we've mentioned it before. I don't think we've talked about it in any kind of depth, but my tradition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, recently implemented a new Bible translation policy where they're now endorsing multiple translations. The KJV is still the official one, but they're now saying, "Hey, go wild. Here's what we like for different reading levels." And they have the NRSVUE on there.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And they have the NIV, which when I was running testing on English translations years ago as a scripture translation supervisor, I kind of had to plug my nose and write in a report that that's the one that everybody liked, even above the KJV when it came to language register and style and stuff like that. And I think that's interesting that we've moved from-- Well, the Latter-day Saints started off without any kind of de jure translation that was correct.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You could use whatever translation you like. The King James Version was kind of the de facto translation until that became a significant question when they were starting to publish new translations following the critical text, and then we decided, "No, we're King James Version people." And now we're moving away from that and saying, "Hey, try other translations."

Dan Beecher And it's- Yeah, I got to think you had some influence on that decision.

Dan McClellan I had some influence on that decision for sure. But a large part of it was the fact that we were trying to provide translations into other languages for folks who didn't speak English.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And a lot of people think, "Well, don't we just have the King James Version in our language?" And it's like, I don't think you know what a Bible translation is. The King James Version is an English translation of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there are languages where they take the King James Version and just translate it into another language, but those are overwhelmingly very, very rare. But they are mainly like Creoles and pidgins and things like that.

Dan Beecher Oh, sure.

Dan McClellan If it's not- Creoles and pidgins of English.

Dan Beecher Of English, right.

Dan McClellan If it's not something that is already closely connected with English, it's phenomenally rare that they just translate from the King James Version. But when we were saying, "Okay, we'll go do the Almeida, do the Reina-Valera, do this Russian one," they're different. They differ. And so we found ourselves more and more frequently having to respond to issues where, well, we want to teach this thing in this general conference talk or in this article for the magazine. But the other languages, their Bibles say something different. So what do we do there?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And English speakers imagine that they're getting the experience in our church. But the reality is that it's been generations that folks who speak other languages have known that there are a lot of different ways this stuff gets translated, and the church has to kind of grapple with that. And they're aware that it's a lot fuzzier than we would like it to be. And so I think that's one of the things that forced the hand of the church to say, "Okay, even English speakers can play in that fuzziness. Go use some other Bible translation." So it's something that is undergirding everybody's experience of the Bible that most people have never even thought of.

Dan Beecher And it's- I think it's so interesting because the other thing that the Bible isn't is a book. It is at best a compendium. It's a library of books, and they're very, very different. And they're very different in their approach, and they're very different in what they're trying to accomplish. I see all of these creators, these Christian creators online who talk about dozens of authors over thousands of years- Oh, yeah ... in multiple languages- 40 authors, over 50, yeah ... blah, blah, blah, and it never disagrees. And it's like, uh.

Dan McClellan Have you read this thing?

Dan Beecher Yeah. You literally have to not read it to come to that conclusion.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And- Or just read it the way most people read it, which is just get through the words and understand a few of the stories, and then just the rest is just I don't know.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If you're just kind of passively reading the text, you're just going by your intuition.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And you have to actually think about who's writing this, to whom are they writing it, why are they writing it, what are they trying to accomplish with it? What were the circumstances of this writing?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that is phenomenally hard. A lot of people don't have the time. A lot of people don't have the training.

Dan Beecher Nobody has the time. Everybody that meets at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, they have the time, and the rest of us are just like, we're just trying to keep our heads above water when we read that thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And all that does is impose your own kind of intuitive lenses upon the text. You're just going to read it as if it was something for you.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the fact that we have a canon, and we've kind of delineated this set of texts, and then we've put it all within a front and back cover, and hopefully a spine, that makes it seem like a book, like a single book. And we've said, "Oh, God is the author." So now we have a single author, and that flattens all of that, and we read it as a single book. So, to bring it back around, yeah, there's no Bible, or there's no... Excuse me, I just said that the wrong way. There's no The Bible. There's no such thing as The Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Even though I introduce myself every single day on social media as a scholar of the Bible and religion. In fact, there was one video where I introduced it. I said, "There's no such thing as The Bible. Hi, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion."

Dan Beecher I- Yep.

Dan McClellan But we just colloquially refer to it that way. But- Yeah ... if we've got to drill down to what's going on there, yeah, there's no such thing as The Bible. It's all contested.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan So- It's all contested ...

Dan Beecher I guess you can unsubscribe from the show because- ... it's a show about nothing. The thing it's about doesn't even exist. So there you go. Well, that was fun and crazy, and I think you can have a lot of fun sharing this episode with some of your more dogmatic friends if you want to. If you want to stir the pot a little bit.

Dan McClellan You don't want them around much longer.

Dan Beecher Right. Well, if you would like to become a part of making this show go, we'd love to have you. The easiest thing to do is just hit like or subscribe here on this platform. Maybe make a comment. That just helps it go out to other people. We're just trying to juice that algorithm. Or if you really want to make a difference, you can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can give us a little chunk of your change. It's where you can get unlimited ad-free versions of every episode. You can find the after party, which is bonus content we do for you every week, and just make us feel real, real good, and let us know that you love us a little bit, and that's awesome. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll talk to you again next week.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.