Data Over Dogma

Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty "inadmissible," and the internet promptly told him to go read his Bible—the one that prescribes execution for everything from kidnapping to picking up sticks on the Sabbath. But the Pope is making the same image-of-God argument from Genesis 1:27 that abolitionists used to argue their way past the Bible's acceptance of slavery, and the Gospel of Matthew can't seem to decide whether Jesus overturned "eye for an eye" or still invoked the death penalty.

Then, in Thicker Than Water, we finally tackle animal sacrifice: why Israel's temple offerings look so much like the meals people left for their dead, and Jacob Milgrom's theory that sacrificial blood was a ritual detergent for the sanctuary, not the sinner.

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In the beginning was the Word, but what if the Word was Wisdom all along?

This week we welcome Dustin Smith, New Testament scholar at Spartanburg Methodist College and host of the Biblical Unitarian Podcast, to talk about his book Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John, which traces how John's portrait of Jesus draws on Lady Wisdom from Proverbs, Sirach, and the wider Jewish wisdom tradition.

Was Jesus a consciously preexistent Son, or the embodiment of a personified attribute of God? And why are the women of John's gospel the ones who actually get it, while the twelve remain the "duh disciples"?

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It's the most spookiest time of the year, so we're debuting a brand-new segment: Hexegesis!

Did King James really slip "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" into Exodus because he hated witches, or does the trouble go all the way back to the Hebrew—and why does a Bible that bans divination keep showing its heroes doing it (as long as they're authorized, aiming at the right God, and conveniently male)?

Then we're Taking Issue with one of Jesus' roughest moments, when he compares a Syrophoenician woman to a dog, and ask why she has to beg for crumbs while a Samaritan woman at a well gets offered living water.

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

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