Data Over Dogma

This week, Christian nationalist Joel Webbin says the quiet
part out loud: lie to voters about your theocratic goals until you've got the
power to enact them. It's grotesque and profoundly un-American — but is
deception, weirdly, the one piece of the playbook that's actually biblical?

Then we wrestle with the baffling parable of the wedding
banquet, where a king burns a city, fills the hall with strangers, and casts
one guest into outer darkness over a missing robe — a story Matthew, Luke, and even the Gospel of Thomas each tell differently, all while pointing the finger at a different villain.



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This week we're taking on the thought-stopping cliché to end all thought-stopping clichés: "trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding." Is "reading with the Holy Spirit" a special line to God that us dirty scholars just can't access, or is it John Lennox's red Ferrari parked right next to an invisible dragon nobody else can see?

Then we wade into the online cottage industry of "secret" Hebrew letter codes—the ones that supposedly smuggle Jesus into the very first word of the Bible—and explain why Aleph-Tav, the Eth Cepher Bible, and every last appeal to Strong's tells you a lot more about the decoder than it does about the text.

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This week we crack open the Epistle of James — a letter that may claim to come from none other than James the brother of Jesus — and wade into one of Christianity's oldest arguments: faith versus works. Does James contradict Paul on how a person is saved, and is that why Martin Luther dismissed the whole book as an "epistle of straw"?

Then we go monster hunting for Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth, the primordial chaos beasts lurking in Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah — and find out that yes, there are dragons in the Bible, and they're far older than the Bible itself.

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This week the Dans try to count to twelve — and find that the number matters a lot more than the names. We dig into the twelve tribes of Israel: how Levi quietly drops out and Joseph splits into Ephraim and Manasseh to keep the total at twelve, why the Song of Deborah seems to remember only ten tribes (some with different names), and what it means that "Israel" may have begun as a confederation rather than one man's family tree.

Then, in History Is Mysteries, we ask who actually put the chapters and verses in your Bible — a thousand-year tale running from the Masoretes through a hastily printed Greek New Testament to the 1551 edition that finally numbered the verses — and why those tidy divisions quietly shape what the text is even allowed to mean.

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Shop from our classic collection before the old store closes:

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Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma

Watch every episode on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma

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Senator Mike Lee keeps accusing his opponents of sacrificing children to Moloch, so this week we ask who — or what — Moloch actually was, why abortion and child sacrifice are not the same thing, and the uncomfortable places child sacrifice really does turn up in the Hebrew Bible. Then, after the Pentagon quietly declined to list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian, we dig into the bigger question underneath the fight: who actually gets to decide what counts as "Christian"? Turns out the answer is nobody — which makes the whole boundary-policing exercise a lot more about identity and power than about theology.

Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma

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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/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices