Data Over Dogma

In 1929, a farmer in French-occupied Syria hit a rock with his plow and accidentally uncovered the lost city of Ugarit — and with it, a library of Bronze Age tablets that has been quietly reshaping how scholars read the Hebrew Bible ever since.

This week, we're diving into the Baal Cycle: an elderly patriarchal high god named El, a youthful storm-riding warrior who fights the chaotic sea (and then, memorably, drinks him), a goddess who winnows Death himself like grain, and a whole pantheon that ought to look awfully familiar.

Then, in History's Mysteries, we tackle a word Dan B has used his entire life without ever quite knowing what it means: Zion. Where did it come from, why does it seem to start out as a dry rocky stronghold, and how did it stretch into a portable, symbolic, cosmic idea that runs from Jerusalem all the way to Jackson County, Missouri?

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You've seen the claim: 66 books, 40 authors, 1,500 years, three continents, three languages — and not one contradiction.

This week we take that apologetic apart piece by piece, from the canon that was never fixed, to the authorship traditions nobody can source, to the "three continents" you could fit inside a circle smaller than the Mediterranean.

Then it's Twisted Scripture, where Mark Driscoll insists you can't be a Bible-believing Christian and a socialist, so we look at what the eighth-century prophets, Deuteronomy, Jesus, and the book of Acts actually say about wealth, debt, and who's on the hook for taking care of the poor.

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There isn't a single surviving original manuscript for any book of the Bible, so how do scholars decide what the earliest recoverable text actually said?

This week, it's a primer on textual criticism: why King James onlyists despise it (despite the KJV being a product of it), what Erasmus did when he ran out of Greek manuscripts for the last chapter of Revelation, and how one scribe's wandering eye can quietly delete an entire paragraph from Samuel.

Then it's chapter and verse on Zephaniah — three short chapters of unrelenting doom that promise to sweep humans, animals, birds, and fish off the face of the earth, before pivoting rather abruptly to "sing aloud, O daughter Zion."

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This week it's a "What's That?" double feature!

First, we take on the Great Commission. Does Matthew 28 really command every believer to accost strangers on airplanes and by the baggage carousel, or is "make disciples" a whole lot narrower (and quieter) than the modern evangelists think?

Then it's time for Data After Dark, where we ask whether the
Bible has anything at all to say about masturbation. Spoiler: Onan isn't your
guy, ritual impurity isn't the same as sin, and that "wasting seed"
argument really doesn't hold up.



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Watch every episode on YouTube:

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Follow us:

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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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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.



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

https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma



Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store:

https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/



Shop our classic collection before our old store closes: https://datadoverdogma.printful.me



Watch every episode on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma



Follow us:

Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod

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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