Data Over Dogma

The Daily Mail says the resting place of Noah's Ark has been "100% confirmed" on a hillside in Turkey, so we're lacing up our hiking boots to check the radar scans, the fundraising pitch, and what happened the last time someone drilled into this very same formation (spoiler: bedrock).

Then, what exactly is a messiah? Long before the word meant one savior at the end of the world, it just meant someone who'd had oil poured on their head, which is how kings, priests, and even a Persian emperor ended up with the title, and why Dr. Dan thinks the whole job description had to be rewritten after Jesus was executed.

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Open an English Bible and you'll mostly see "God" and "Lord," but underneath is a whole divine vocabulary: El, Eloah, Elohim, the tetragrammaton, and a few choice insults, including gillulim, which likely comes from a word for dung (shit gods, basically). First, we sort out which plural belongs to which singular (spoiler: Elohim isn't the plural of El), why Deuteronomy uses Elohim more than any other book, and how the Shema's "your God" quietly assumes other gods are out there.

Then we take issue with the old line that the Old Testament God is wrathful and the New Testament God is all love—where it came from (hello, Marcion), why its roots are antisemitic, and why it falls apart once you notice where eternal torment actually shows up.

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This week, Paul finally gets his day in court — several of them, actually, and he spends nearly all of them in custody.

We're going chapter and verse through Acts 23 to 26, where Paul lobs the word "resurrection" into a room full of Pharisees and Sadducees like a rhetorical grenade, forty-plus men swear off food and drink until they can kill him, and one well-timed nephew sets off a midnight cavalry escort to Caesarea.

Then it's artifacts and fiction, where Dan tells Dan about the Tel Dan Stele — a ninth-century BCE Aramaic brag-in-stone that gives us our earliest extrabiblical mention of the "House of David," and also names a killer for two kings that neither Kings nor Chronicles agrees with.

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This week we're taking issue with a Vice President!

JD Vance recently sat down with a very young podcaster to discuss his lifelong fascination with end-times prophecy, his suspicion that the Antichrist may already be walking among us, and his willingness to shrug if doing "God's work" happens to bring on the eschaton — so, after being fairly fair to him, we're looking at what his newly adopted church actually teaches about hastening the end, what Matthew 24 was really promising and to whom, and why every flood and drought now arrives with a prophecy hot take attached.

Then, at a listener's request, it's the gifts of the Spirit: what Paul was actually arguing back in 1 Corinthians 12, why the list works nothing like leveling up in D&D, and whether celibacy (or its opposite) counts as a charisma.

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This week, we're taking issue with Mark Driscoll, who recently explained that a wife is a garden, a husband is the gardener, and — out loud, on purpose — that the finished result is "beautiful property."

We dig into where that idea actually comes from: 1 Corinthians 11, the bride-price laws of Deuteronomy 22, ezer kenegdo, and an ancient world where a woman's social identity (and her virginity) belonged to whichever man held the deed.

Then: is the Bible the world's oldest game of telephone? If you mean translation, no — but when it comes to the transmission of the manuscripts, from the verses that quietly vanished from your New Testament to a version of Jeremiah a full sixth shorter, the comedians may be onto something.

Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:

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Watch every episode on YouTube:

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Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So:

https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/
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