Who are the REAL Christians?

Angels can’t rebel. They don’t have their own agency. They can’t do that. They’re not sexually compatible. They’re not made of flesh and bone.

Never mind.

So to speak. Yes. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion. We combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

So it’s a steamy hot day here in Salt Lake City, and life is good.

All right.

Excited. We’re diving into some fun issues. I think we’re going to get some juice out of it. We’ll squeeze some juice out of these controversial issues.

Yeah, it’s going to be a juicy day. I went for a walk earlier today, and my shoes were pretty juicy by the time I was I was done. I got a— I’ve got really comfortable shoes that I like to walk around in, but if my feet sweat, I’m just slipping and sliding all over the place in those shoes, and, and I hate it. But that’s neither here nor there. I need— I do need better socks.

Yeah, indeed. All right, well, we’re— what we’re going to be doing, we’re going to— we have two segments today as per the usual. The first segment is a, uh, Taking Issue, and the issue— what we’re going to be Taking Issue with is What counts as a Christian? What are the markers of a Christian?

Yes. And who— and who gets to decide?

It’s the one who— spoiler alert— it’s me. I get to figure it out. So you’ll have to come to me to know for sure if you’re actually a Christian. And then the second half of our show will be a What’s That? And the what’s that that we’re talking about are the sons of God.

Benei Elohim. Yes, the sons.

The sons. That’s a plural thing. That’s not— we’re not talking about just the Son of God.

So that’ll be interesting. That’ll be fun to dive into. But first, let’s take issue. And this week we’re Taking Issue with Christians. We’re Taking Issue with you Christians.

Yeah, we’re gonna go off the beaten path this week, and we’re gonna blaze a new trail through the tangled undergrowth of contemporary Christian identity politics. We had a wonderful discussion with my friend David Congdon a while ago on Who Is a Christian, his book that he published. I thought that was a fascinating discussion. But this was catalyzed by a recent discussion that was had on the Joe Rogan podcast when Texas state representative and Opie Taylor lookalike, Representative Talarico—I believe James is his first name, right? James Talarico. James Talarico, who, if I understand, is hiding out somewhere right now. I don’t know if he’s—if the sheriff and his posse have caught up with him yet.

Check Mayberry because he’s probably there down by the fishing hole.

Yeah, check the fishing hole. He’s got a cane pole on him. I know it. And by the way, oh man, that brings back memories. Cane pole poppers. Oh, I don’t even want to get into it. I cannot get sidetracked.

I don’t know all of your drug talk, weirdo.

No, this is, this is growing up on, on a farm in West Virginia. Um, but, but that is also neither here nor there. Nothing is here or there, uh, for this discussion. But, uh, and he made, he made an interesting point when he was talking to Brother Rogan. He was talking about— Rogan asked him about a biblical case for legalized abortion. But there was one part where James made the case that he didn’t— he said, I get suspicious when people say certain issues need to be at the center of our identity as Christians.

Right, right.

When Jesus never said anything about them.

He’s specifically referring to the fact that the political right and the sort of the Christian right of the United States have coalesced very strongly around the subjects of abortion and the rights of LGBTQ people.

As the identity markers that make you Christian.

Yeah, and, and his main— one of the things he concluded with was like, he said, I just don’t think it’s fair that to be a Christian, or when, when people understand that you’re a Christian, they automatically assume that you’re against abortion and against gay folks. Uh, and he says, because there are lots of Christians who do not subscribe to those particular policy positions. And I thought—.

He’s one of them specifically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are many of them. And I thought he made a pretty good appeal and also pointed out, he said, you know, my Christian brothers and sisters, they will have their passages to which they point in defense of their opposition to these things, and we can have that debate, and we should be able to have that debate. And he said, this is different from my concern, which is the notion that you have to oppose abortion and homosexuality if you’re a Christian. And that’s what he was speaking against. And immediately, uh, everybody jumped down his throat, and the overwhelming majority of the negative responses I saw were all entirely misrepresenting his argument. And sure, they all thought that he was saying, uh, nobody has a biblical case to make against abortion or homosexuality, which is what he specifically said, we can have that debate, that’s a separate thing.

Well, and the way that he phrased it seemed important to me. Uh, by the way, we should mention, he— we, we introduced him as a, as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, which is true, but he was— he’s also a pastor.

Uh, so people should be aware that, like, he doesn’t— he’s not dumb about theology. He does know what he— you know, he’s, he’s— yes, he went to theological seminary, etc.

But what he said specifically was that he gets suspicious when people say that you have to centralize these ideas, ideas that Jesus never specifically spoke about.

And I think that that’s an important mark, an important thing. Like, again, he, like you said, he recognized that you can make a case one way or the other on both of these things, and a biblical case at that. But you can’t— but to say that the thing, the thing that defines your Christianity is something that Jesus didn’t even talk about is— I think that’s a pretty strong, uh, point to make.

Yeah, yeah. I, I think the, the idea there is that, hey, if the Bible and the New Testament are the roadmap if that is what is supposed to be dictating our morality, our identity, our faith, and all that to us, and Jesus never says anything about it, on what grounds do we say, well, this, this now takes priority over these other things? It’s basically, I think he’s pointing out that it is kind of a socially and historically contingent identity that these folks are asserting, as if what it means to be a Christian changes from generation to generation depending on the particular political stances.

And I think I have news for you. I think what it means to be a Christian does change from generation to generation.

Well, yes. And that is because it’s all socially contingent, right? For folks who insist this is all inspired, I mean, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically here by saying that it is ever-changing and it is always subordinated to social and historical context and circumstances.

Yeah, I think so. What are we talking about? What does make a Christian? Because I think that it is an interesting— I think when he said that and everybody jumped down his throat, I think what they were jumping down his throat about was they they do mark those as key and central points to their Christianity and to what they believe a Christian has to believe.

And I think, and I believe we’ve talked about it before, but at least in the case of abortion, this is of recent historical origin, right? Like, we can trace in the ’70s, yeah, an intentional rhetorical campaign to turn abortion into a central evangelical identity marker. It was for a time something that evangelical leaders did not feel so strongly about until some folks decided that they needed to gin up some outrage, and they identified abortion as their golden ticket, uh, because they were trying to, uh, arrogate more authority, government authority, to the Christian right so that they could exercise political power in their favor rather than being on the, uh, on the losing end of—.

Well, and specifically, they were losing traction because they had been using the idea of race as a— as their, as their bludgeon, as their wedge point. And they were losing— they were losing traction on that. They were— they— the writing was on the wall for that point. Yes, at least then I don’t know. It’s making a comeback.

The pendulum is unfortunately swinging the other direction. But with the Civil Rights Act, the government was starting to deny funding to schools that were not admitting Black students and denying grants and things like that to students.

Oh, I need state vouchers so that I can send kids to private schools, even though the vouchers really are only going to work for people who can already afford to send kids to private schools. But this is no different from Remember the Titans and people getting upset about desegregation. Yeah, like it’s the same concern, really. It’s just reborn in slightly different packaging. But, and so yeah, I think that the pendulum swinging back and I don’t know how, if Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich are celebrating in their graves right now about white supremacy becoming such a big part of right-wing politics again. But yeah, it’s certainly hurting a lot of the living these days. But yeah, you can see kind of in their trying to orchestrate what the central identity markers of Christianity are so that they can structure power.

And I was talking before we hit record, was mentioning that there are a lot of folks who make an awful lot of money trying to curate the boundaries of Christianity, a lot of apologists. I brought up James White, someone I got into it with on blogs back when blogs were a big thing.

Almost dueling blogs. Oh, it feels like the internet of yesteryear. It’s like Home on the Prairie for the internet.

Yeah, we were, we were so young and naive. I can remember when if my blog had 200 visits in a day, I was like, I had a good day today. And to quote the great poet, to misquote the great poet. But yeah, James White was fond of denying a lot of other folks their Christianity. And he had a video denying that Mormons were Christians. And on my blog, I was like, hey, you know, if self-identity is really the main marker of membership in something like Christianity. And so if somebody’s like, “I don’t think you’re a Christian,” great. You can’t really tell them they’re not allowed to think that. But it doesn’t go beyond their own perception. And when they try to make a case for why this should be authoritative beyond the boundaries of their own skull, that case is never anything but dogmatic and arbitrary and usually pretty hypocritical.

Because James White will say that, you know, well, the Trinity is the defining feature of Christianity. But then when he wants to turn around and tell Catholics that they’re not Christians, suddenly the defining feature of Christianity is something entirely different. For a lot of people, what defines Christianity changes depending on who it is precisely they’re trying to shove out of Christianity.

Uh, and yeah, I guess that’s the more salient question, is who isn’t Christian? Yeah, right, like, because the, the project is one of exclusion.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s from, from my, uh, cognitive linguistic, uh, days and, uh, prototype theory. Uh, we approach categories as if they are naturally bounded, as if they have natural boundaries inherent to them. And the reality is that when we form conceptual categories, and religious identity is 100% conceptual categories, we actually focus on prototypes. We focus on the center of the category, and membership radiates out towards nonexistent initially or fuzzy boundaries where membership is debated. And, you know, there’s a lot of examples that linguists will use to talk about this. Like, if you had 100 different pieces of dining in a row going from a cup to a bowl and just kind of incrementally changing a tiny bit between the two ends of that, where do you say this is no longer a cup, this is now a bowl?

Like, it’s entirely arbitrary.

And so, and so that’s absolutely the case with something like religious identity. There’s no inherent essence to being Christian. There’s no inherent boundaries to what makes a Christian. And so when people try to define it overwhelmingly in order to exclude, because those fuzzy boundaries, they really only harden up when you need to exclude something, right? When you run into an argument about whether or not this is a member of the category and it’s an undesirable member, that’s when you tend to come up with boundaries.

And this is kind of a rather silly example of how attempts to define things cause problems. When it’s like, well, when you look at the definition of a sandwich, a hot dog qualifies. I was like, well, these are conceptual categories. Definitions are arbitrary. They’re imposed upon the category. They don’t actually have anything to do with how categories function in real life. But, but that’s one of the artifacts of, of this, is that you get these silly— I’m talking about a sandwich.

And, um, and then, I mean, listen, hot dog, I can go with you on, but if a hot dog’s a sandwich, then is a taco a sandwich? And now we’re in a whole heap of—

Yeah. And, and so when it comes to Christian, it’s always contextual. Yeah, it’s like, who’s asking? Why? Who is it you’re trying to keep out? And then you basically, you argue from the conclusion, right? It’s overwhelmingly a conclusion in search of an argument, right? So I decide Dan McClellan is a Mormon, and therefore, ’that’s not a Christian, let me find an argument that fits that conclusion. ’ Yeah, and it’s funny because people will be like, ‘Well, Christians don’t accept them as Christians. ’ It’s like, well, that’s kind of begging the question. Yeah, because you have to decide whether or not they count in the Christian part of it all, and if you already are denying them that identity, it’s kind of begging the question. But also, you know, Pew and others have done research on this. And actually, majority of Christians in America say that Mormons are Christians.

So, I mean, you got the name Jesus Christ right there in the full version, full title of the church, which Mormons now feel obligated to say every time they say the name. They got yelled at pretty hard by their daddy. Yeah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We’re not supposed to say Mormons. They don’t want us to. Yeah, we’re all very shocked, Dan, that you go along with this word Mormon.

Yeah, well, if you go on Twitter or X or whatever the hell it’s going by these days, there you will find a lot of people who insist that I probably can’t even call myself a Mormon anymore and shouldn’t call myself a Mormon for multiple reasons. One of them being that you’re not supposed to use that word. Yeah, it’s— I was gonna make an R-word joke and thought better of it.

So, well, it is your word. I don’t know.

But we’re not even allowed to use it now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, but that becomes an identity marker in and of itself. That’s a piece of costly signaling also. If you go online and you go, “How dare you say Mormon? You’re not supposed to!” That’s a way to put on display to everybody else that you’re willing to berate another Mormon, all in the name of defending the prophetic counsel that we’ve all been given. So that’s just credibility-enhancing displays. It’s identity politics all the way down. So, well, and that’s whether it’s— that’s what we’re talking about.

What we’re getting at is, is that identity is the, is the issue here. And, you know, whether you’re an evangelical or a Catholic, or, you know, some other kind of Protestant or LDS or whatever. If the, if the word Christian is important to you, which presumably it is to all of those categories, or most of those categories, or most people who inhabit those categories, the question of what makes someone a Christian becomes very, very vital.

And it becomes— and can lead to some very silly arguments about like, no, Christians believe— you know, it’s funny, I remember at one point I heard a guy that I knew and his brother who was of a different religious ilk, arguing just furiously about, you know, what makes you a Christian is your belief in faith by works, or, you know, salvation by faith or by works or whatever. And they kept both— like, from an outside perspective, they were saying exactly the same thing. They were using different words, but they were saying exactly the same thing. And I was just sitting there giggling as I listened from the other room.

And sometimes it comes down to whether or not you say the right— the thing with the right words. Yeah, because you can say the right thing and with the wrong words, and then suddenly you’re, uh, you’re out. And I’ve been surprised how frequently this comes up on like TikTok, because I— every single day, multiple times a day, people will comment that non-Christians shouldn’t be talking about the New Testament or the Bible or things like that. And if I happen to see those and respond to them, I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m a Christian.” And then, you know, heads explode at that point.

Right. All hell breaks loose.

Yeah, because inevitably there will be those who will be like, “Mormons aren’t Christians!” And, you know, and then that whole argument erupts. And then there will be others who, you know, it just does not compute for them. It’s like, “You’re an atheist.” And it’s like, no, I’m I’m not an atheist. Like, the video I responded to some guy, some Catholic apologist, I think he goes by Jimmy Akin, but he made a video responding to me, and one of the things that he was talking about was my Mormonism, and he was like, “And you know, you say that it doesn’t matter, but then you go and make statements like this,” and then he shares a clip of me saying, “I am not an atheist.” And like, checkmate, I imagine he felt like saying. But I get kind of annoyed by how frequently I have to curate the understanding of the relevance of my religious identity on my channel.

I wish— and, you know, people like, you’re lying to people, you need to let them know at the top of every video that you’re a Mormon. It’s like, that would be kind of dumb.

But sometimes I’m like, I should do that just, just so, you know, that will reduce the number of comments I have on most of my videos by probably 20 to 25%.

But I think it would just change the comments.

Yeah, there would be different comments. I’m still surprised by how many times, like, in this video I posted where I was responding to this this individual, I was still getting comments from people like, I’ve been following Dan for 2 years. I didn’t know he was a Mormon.

And it’s like, only every other video now has to address it.

I think it’s funny. You know, it’s the other funny thing about that is that, like you say, if a person, I mean, or rather, what I assume you mean is that if a person knows what they’re talking about, why, you know, this whole idea of the, you know, atheists, Mormons, whoever shouldn’t be talking about the New Testament or shouldn’t be talking about the Bible. If they know what they’re talking about, why, why wouldn’t you want their, their input? Why wouldn’t you want to hear it? But again, it’s like, it’s this grabbing of ownership of something, which You know, by that logic, probably Christians, you know, if you want to say that, like, we own this, so you shouldn’t have any access to it, I got bad news about the Old Testament for you guys, because somebody else claims that one.

Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, there are a lot of folks, folks like Cristina Rosetti and others who study Mormonism who are not Latter-day Saints, And I’m not about to step to them, say, hey, that’s your wheelhouse, the particular fields of study that they’re in. Just because you happen to be a living, breathing human does not make you an expert on human biology, just kind of innately. That’s not how it works. But, uh, but yeah, it frequently comes down to boundary maintenance and, uh, and who gets to be in charge. And something that I frequently pointed out: who gets to be in charge of who’s a Christian? Nobody. There is no individual or combination of individuals on the planet who has authority over another individual’s ability to identify as a Christian. Really, it comes down to consensus and like ecclesiastical hierarchy.

If there’s a group out there where you actually have to have a membership card, or you have to have the tattoo, or you have to have some kind of indication that you are an official member of that group, like, that’s the only time somebody can say, “You’re not a member of our particular group. " Right. But there is no such group.

Every individual Christian church can say that.

Yeah, and there’s no group that has authority over all Christians. That just doesn’t exist. So there’s no person or combination of people who has any authority at all over anyone’s ability to identify just as a Christian. And anybody who pretends to arrogate that authority to themselves is just playing identity politics.

Damn you, Martin Luther. There used to be a guy who had— who had authority over who got to call themselves a Christian. Oh, I guess not, because there were still Eastern Orthodox. Oh yeah, there are Christians all over the place who— but there was a guy who was pretty sure he had the— there’s lots of people who are pretty sure they have the authority, uh, to do it.

Yes, they come to my website and my channel every single day to let me know that they’re the ones.

I, I, I— now I’m tempted to start calling myself a non-believer— calling myself a Christian who doesn’t believe in Jesus or God, just to mess with people, just, just, just to really mess up the category.

You know, I— and okay, I’m gonna throw a wrench into this discussion a little bit.

Great.

Talked about Pew. Pew does— not pew-pews, but the Pew Research Center, right? They do a wonderful religious landscape survey every few years, and one of the things they talk about is belief in God. And it’s fascinating because, you know, you get like Buddhists and things like that where like 25% of them are positive that no God exists, right? And it’s comparable for Jewish folks. Yeah. And then there’s like 3% of Orthodox Christians say they’re positive God doesn’t exist. And about the same percentage of atheists are positive that a God does exist. I know. And I think it’s so fun because, hey man, atheism is just as much an identity as any of the religions. Or can be, sure. Yeah, it can be. And so I think as much as Christians are like, “You can’t be an atheist Christian,” I frequently get, “You can’t be a believing atheist,” from the other side as well when I point that out.

Those kinds of identities are messy and they are tricky and they have to do with belonging and membership commonly more than they have to do with a creed that you sign off on. And again, when it comes to a lot of these religions, signing off on the creeds doesn’t necessarily mean you actually believe those things. There are an awful lot of people who are like, “Oh yeah, I’m willing to sign off on that. I say the Nicene Creed every Sunday, but it’s like, come on.” Yeah. And I think one of the things that Protestantism did was it reduced Christianity at least, but religion really, because our conceptualization of religion is a thoroughly Protestant conceptualization, but reduced it all down to a set of truth claims. And so now people think of religious identity and religion as just a set of truth claims. But it’s never been that. It’s never been reducible to that. It’s community. It’s, you know, it’s ritual.

It’s behaviors.

It’s meaning-making. It’s behaviors. It is anxiety, death anxiety curating. It’s all of these things all wrapped into one. And there are an awful lot of people who enjoy everything about it, but maybe not so much the truth claims. That doesn’t make them any less Christian or Jewish or Muslim, right? Or atheist. So I think it’s a fun conversation to have, mainly because of how just enraging it is for people who would like everything to fit into a neat, nice little box.

Well, one of the interesting things, you know, when you listen, when you ask a Christian, you know, what makes a Christian? You’ll get a lot of different answers. But one of the things that I never— like, you’ll, you know, you’ll get people that say you have to personally accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, or that, you know, the Bible is the final authority on whatever, blah, blah, blah. And what I’ve never hear is the one section of Romans. I think it’s Romans 12 . Romans 12 , where Paul is talking about— is this actually Paul? I never remember which one.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Romans is one of the genuine Pauline epistles.

Okay, so Paul is talking about— well, the section, Romans 12 , verse 9 through the end of the chapter, the section in multiple translations is marked Marks of the True Christian.

And you know what it doesn’t say? Any of the things that I hear people say when they say what— when they’re asked what a true Christian is.

Well, yeah, there’s nothing about belief in here. There’s certainly nothing about whether you are a dyophysite or monophysite or miaphysite or whatever.

I don’t know what those words mean at all. I don’t know what any of those things were.

Those are— remember we talked about saying the same thing but using different language? Yeah. These are some of the debates that raged in the 3rd and 4th and 5th and 6th centuries about, you know, when you’re whittling down your conceptualization of Jesus, like it came down to, well, how do you understand the distinction between Jesus’s divine and human natures?

It says, uh, let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor. Uh, you know, it’s, it’s real nice.

Well, here’s, here’s, uh, one verse that I think a lot of people would do well to, uh, to take note of: contribute to the needs of the saints. Pursue hospitality to strangers. So the— for the folks who are like, hey, I’m sorry, we gotta, you know, snatch Jesus from the parking lot of the Home Depot that he’s working at and send him off to a gulag and leave his kids in the car that is running, right, because of Romans 13:1 , it’s like, but you just entirely ignored Romans 12:13 , which is quite a bit more central to defining Christianity, if we take Paul’s word for it.

Right. Yeah, there you go. All right. Well, you can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. And we will move on to our next segment, which is What’s That? And the what’s that that we’re talking about, we’re going to Genesis 6 . As our starting point.

Yes, because jumping off point, our springboard, our springboard, if you will.

And we’ll just start with— because Genesis 6 opens up with people multiplying. We’re in the early days of humanity in this.

Yes, we’re about to segue into the flood.

Right, right. Yeah, the multiplying of people will about to be— will— is about to get—.

Yeah, it’s not subtle. It’s a quick pivot. Yeah. So it says, when people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and, and it literally says that, al penei haadamah, uh, the face of the ground, the sons of God, the bene elohim— oh, it says, uh, daughters were born to them. And then it says, the sons of— daughters were born to the people, to the people who were multiplying like rabbits. Yes, on the face of the ground. The sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. So the bene elohim, or bene elohim if you’re nasty, that is what we’re talking about here. Uh, but Genesis 6:3 says, then Adonai the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh. Their days shall be 120 years. And which is actually a weird, weird thing to say in chapters before Noah, because it did not turn out to be 120 years.

Because yeah, he theoretically lived way longer than that, as did all the patriarchs except for one. I forget which one it was, but it might be like Isaac or somebody. I forget, but somebody was like Oh darn it, they didn’t get to live as long. Um, and then we get to verse 4, which is the peculiar verse. The Nephilim were— or Nephilim if you’re nasty, uh, if you’re wrong, if you’re right. I, I see people tag me in videos where people are like, I’m gonna drop some knowledge on y’all about the Nephilim. It’s like, is this a battery that you— um, they were on the earth in those days and also afterward. When the sons of God went into the daughters of humans who bore children to them, these were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown. And so here’s, here’s a peculiar thing about this passage, which I think is unclear both in the English and in the Hebrew. It does not say that the Nephilim were the offspring.

Of the union of the sons of God. And I think benot haadam, the, the daughters of humanity, it just says they were there. Yeah, it’s like this was when those weirdos were around.

And then, and so it does not necessarily say that. It gets interpreted that way by an awful lot of folks, but I’m not— it’s not clear to me that this text is stating that the Nephilim were the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of humans. That is how 1 Enoch takes it.

Oh, okay.

So like, that is the traditional reading. I don’t think it’s necessarily there now. And here’s—.

There may have been like a cultural unders— excuse me, a cultural understanding of who these people were. Well, and that isn’t present in this text, right?

And we may have a little hat tip in the direction of a similar cultural understanding because it says the Nephilim were in— were on the earth in those days. And also afterwards, we have a little parenthetical— yeah, a little interjection there.

So Numbers 13 , verse 33, the word Nephilim occurs twice there. And this is part of the the— what do they call it? The wicked report. The bad report.

If that’s not the title of someone’s TikTok channel, the wicked report, somebody’s missing out.

Yeah. So that is when the spies are sent into the land and they come back and they’re like, oh yeah, it sucks. It all sucks. We shouldn’t go in there. We should go back to Egypt. But one of the things they say is that they saw the Nephilim and we were like grasshoppers. To them.

And, um, and this is, I think, where we get the idea that Nephilim means giants, because the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, renders gigantes. Um, or I think I might be slurring my Spanish and my Greek together. It’s probably not gigantes. Um, when they, uh, in those days No, that was right. Gigantes. Okay, so, um, they, uh, they render, they translate Nephilim as giants, and Nephilim does not mean giants. Uh, the— our best, best bet is that it means fallen ones, and probably is a reference to, uh, some kind of post-mortem fallen warrior race or class or something like that.

They’re zombies?

Something like that.

Yeah, I like it. They are zombies.

Yeah. And so they get translated as giants, and I think probably because of the other story where the spies come back and they’re like, “Oh, we were like little grasshoppers to them,” which, you know, is probably hyperbole, right? They probably weren’t like, literally, they’re 300 feet tall. We average 5 feet 4. They were at least 10.5 feet tall. I don’t know that that verse ought to be taken so literally. And they link them with the— what was it?

The Anakites.

Which is interesting. The other interesting problem here is that this is theoretically post-Diluvian. We’re after the flood in this moment.

So presumably, the Nephilim either were drowned, so how could the Anakites come from them? Or they had snorkels. Yeah, they were so— they’re so giant that their heads were above water the whole time. And they just waited it out.

I always want to point out, be like, yeah, they drowned in the flood, trailing off kind of. And I’m thinking of Frank Drebin when he’s like, got the evidence that so-and-so was involved in all these crimes. And he’s like, and where is this evidence? And he’s, well, it burned in the fire. So yeah, but that’s what verse 4 is like, parenthetically, they’re like, oh, and they were there afterwards too. Yeah, well, we’re not going to tell you how, because according to the flood tradition, everything that drew breath, everything that had the breath of life in it, was snuffed out, was destroyed. So they should not have survived. And this is one of the clues that combines with a number of other clues to convince, I think, most critical scholars that the flood tradition is a secondary insertion into The Primeval History.

How dare you? How dare you, sir?

Dare, dare. That’s another, not too deep a cut, but dare I say, dare, dare. That is Blazing Saddles, excuse me. But yeah, this is probably why the Nephilim were there before and after, because there was no flood.

Right. And then you think that that phrase, the parenthetical and also afterward phrase, was inserted later as when somebody was like, oh wait, we mentioned that also in Numbers. Crap, let me just chuck this in here real quick just to cover our butts.

It certainly could be.

It reads like that to me. That’s—.

Yeah, yeah, it does. It’s kind of like your Book of Mormon ‘Oh, and by the way, you’re thinking that this actually means this, but here’s a little clue so that you are not led astray by what I just said. ’ It sounds like an afterthought, but something that was inserted in there later. We certainly don’t have, as far as I’m aware, we don’t have any textual evidence of that, but I think there are certainly scholars who would raise an eyebrow or two. About the integrity of this passage. But there— and you also have some folks who think that this whole story about the Bene Elohim is inserted in here secondarily because it seems like it’s supposed to be motivation for God to send the flood, but it doesn’t really have a connection to what the next verse says catalyzed the flood.

And it’s like, well, but what about these demigods that are evidently roaming all over the place? Like, they’re setting it up as if the reason everything’s going wrong is because the Bene Elohim, um, were causing trouble. But then this verse is like, oh, the silly humans. And if you, you take out the Nephilim account, then it doesn’t feel like the problem is big enough to merit killing everything, because then it’s just like, and God looked at humans and like, they’re mad at everything, look at them, they got anxiety. Um, like, all it says is, oh, the, the every inclination of the thought of their hearts was evil continually. Oh, I guess I’ll just destroy them all. That, that doesn’t sound adequate. That doesn’t sound like a just reason for the deluge. And so maybe somebody—.

I have bad news for you, nothing sounds like a just reason for the deluge.

But somebody at some point was like, what if we threw the Nephilim in there?

What if we threw these guys? So let’s talk a little bit about these—.

Who them are.

What’s that?

Who them are? Yeah.

Who are them?

The Bene Elohim.

These sons of God who aren’t Jesus.

No. And they’re plural.

And ain’t us.

Yes. We’ve got a few different phrases that we see throughout the Hebrew Bible. Here we have Benei ha-Elohim, which is literally sons of the God or sons of the gods, and then elsewhere it’s just Benei Elohim, sons of God or gods, because Elohim can be plural or singular. This is what you see in Job 1:6 , in Job 2 , where the sons of God come prancing before God’s throne to present themselves. Ta-da! And Hasatan, the Satan, is among them. Uh, in Job, what is it, 37 or 38, the sons of God shouted for joy with all the stars, uh, at the foundation of the earth. You have, uh, I think you have Bene Elim, which would also be sons of gods but more explicitly plural, in, uh, Psalms 29 and in a few other places. And then you have Bene Elyon, sons of the Most High, in Psalms 82 , which is probably a callback to Deuteronomy 32:8-9 , where Elyon divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of God.

Right.

And there’s a long history of interpretation here, which I would argue begins in hoary antiquity with the conceptualization of the gods of the Divine Council as the offspring, the literal children of the high deity and the high deity’s consort, partner, or wife. We see this in the Ugaritic literature where El is the high deity, Athirat is the consort, partner, or wife of El, and then all of the gods of the divine council are referred to as the children of El or the 70 sons of Athirat. And so this is probably the tradition that’s influencing what’s going on here. So in the earliest conceptualization, the Bene Elohim would have been the literal offspring of the divine couple, the children of God, and that would have constituted the various patron deities of the different nations of the earth and the various members of the divine council. So that, I think, is the oldest concept.

And this would have been written at a time when the— this was before Yahwism, is that correct? This is before sort of that, but that got conflated with El, do we know?

So these hierarchies and structures, yes, predate Adonai’s arrival into the area. Now, their use in the Hebrew Bible probably does not, but Deuteronomy 32:8-9 , I and many other scholars think, preserves an early understanding of Adonai as one of the Bene Elohim, as one of the children of God. Right. And so Elyon would be a separate deity, the Most High, and then Adonai would have been one of the Bene Elohim who was given Israel as their inheritance. That was the nation that they inherited from Elyon, and that was— and which is why Israel is repeatedly referred to referred to as Adonai’s inheritance in the Hebrew Bible. And but that meant that Adonai’s purview and sovereignty, geopolitically speaking, was limited to the land of Israel, which we’ve talked about many times on this channel.

So theoretically, what we could be talking about then is sort of other patron deities, or at least entities of that level, whether they were given a patronage or not, deciding to live here on Earth and grab them one of those pretty human girls that seem so fun.

Yeah. And this story, like, there’s no good place to slot this into, like, the rest of kind of the narrative that we find in the Hebrew, or the narratives that we find in the Hebrew Bible, or in other literature. Like, there aren’t a lot of traditions of, you know, demigods running around the different nations of the earth because they are the offspring of their patron deity and human women.

Yeah, it really does seem like it’s just thrown away.

It’s like they dropped this bomb at the beginning of this chapter and then just, “Nah, never mind.” And that’s one of the reasons I think that you have later elaboration on it by other texts, and the main one being 1 Enoch. Which kind of takes this text in the Greco-Roman period, the Hellenistic period, and runs with it. And one of the first things that they do is they reinterpret the Bene Elohim as angels. And this is part of the post-exilic kind of squishing down of the divine council, which occurred alongside the elevation, the exaltation of Adonai, the God of Israel. There’s basically, they’re trying to distinguish and separate these two groups of deities, Adonai in one group, and then everybody else in another group, and they get shoved down into angelic status. And so these are now angels, and you know, they’re given a bunch of names in Enoch, and you have the head malevolent angel and all this.

And so a bunch of angels rebel and descend to Mount Hermon on Earth, and then they have sex with all these human women, and the offspring are the giants. And then the giants give birth to the Nephilim, and then the Nephilim die, and their spirits rise up and become the disembodied demons that inhabit the earth and possess people.

Wow. Okay.

Yes, that’s the story in 1 Enoch. Well, it’s one of the stories. They actually repeat things a few times, and it’s not always consistent.

Repetition in the Bible? What?

Yeah, can you believe it?

Only that’s not the Bible, right? That’s— or the non-canonical Bible, or what?

Well, depends on whose canon you’re talking about, because it’s still a part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Right. So I remember that. Yes, it is in there. But this, this raises an interesting question, because once you get down into early Christianity and early Judaism in the 1st century BCE, 1st century CE, people are beginning to ask questions. Because they’re like, wait a minute. So the angels had sex with humans?

And they were rebelling against God. And you had a bunch of different people on different sides of this going, wait a minute, angels can’t rebel. They don’t have their own agency. They can’t do that. And then there were other people saying they’re not sexually compatible. They’re not made of flesh and bone, never mind. So to speak. Yes.

As it were.

As it were. In the parlance of our time. Uh, and so, and, uh, and so you had a bunch of different ideas developing about the sexual compatibility of angels. And so there are— and, and you see actually different, uh, positions in the New Testament because you have the idea that, uh, that is reflected in, in one of the epistles, I think Peter, that these angels— no, it’s Jude, we talked about this— the angels kept not their first estate, and they came down and did the naughty. And then it talks about Sodom and Gomorrah in like manner pursued other flesh. And so this is condemning the angels who are trying to have sex with women as, you know, this perverse abomination, just like the men of Sodom who tried to have sex with angels. You know, we’re crossing boundaries here that ought not be crossed.

Right?

And there’s a wonderful paper from, oh gosh, now 40, 53 years ago, written by Philip Alexander called Targumim and the Early Exegesis of Sons of God. But he talks about a lot of early Jewish debates about this. For instance, some of the folks said that the Testament of Reuben says that there was no actual intercourse between the angels and the women. The angels changed themselves into the shape of men and appeared to the women when they were with their husbands. Oh, so yeah, they were basically just leering at them, uh, in the shape of male humans. Um, and what does it say? Oh, and the women lusting in their minds after their forms. So the women are with their husbands in the biblical sense, and suddenly an angel decides to take the form of a human male, and the ladies are like, hey now, right?

And this resulted in them giving birth to giants, for the Watchers appeared to them as reaching even unto heaven. Wow. So now I’m thinking of Isaiah 6 and what exactly it was that filled the temple.

But, um, right, right. But yeah, I know the reference.

Yeah. So, and, and now we’re getting into the sympathetic magic with, uh, with, uh, Jacob and the, the sticks in front of the sheep. Uh, like they, they, they saw these well-endowed in, in who knows how many ways angels while they were, uh, doing the hibbity-dibbity with their husbands, and so they conceived giants, evidently. Um, and then you have others, uh, let’s see. Another text that said Rabbi Joshua ben Karha said the angels are flaming fire, as it is said, his servants are flaming fire, Psalms 104:4 . The fire had intercourse with flesh and blood, yet did not burn the body. But when they fell from heaven from their holy place, their strength and stature became like that of the sons of men, and their frame was made of clods of dust. “As it is said, my flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust.” Job 7:5 . And so Alexander says the implication is that real intercourse took place, made possible because the angels assumed material bodies of evidently fire and dirt.

So I mean, it’s like in Superman 2 when Superman goes into the chamber and reverses the thing. Yeah, and then he’s suddenly not Superman anymore.

And, uh, and then he tricks him, and so the one guy goes, yeah, and then just—.

Whoa, spoiler alerts, man.

Hey, if, if you have not seen Superman 2 yet, uh, I’m not gonna ruin Superman 4. Yeah, what’s the guy’s name, Nuclear Man or something?

Oh my goodness. Well, listen, when you get a hair from Superman, what are you gonna do with it? Yeah.

Um, so, so basically there was just there was a lot of controversy about sexy angels. Yeah, um, stupid sexy angels.

Dang it, they stop being so hot.

And so this is what’s going on. We, we’ve talked about Jude, uh, that was one of the things that was going on. However, the, the folks who were like, wait a minute, angels can’t rebel, wait a minute, angels can’t have sexual intercourse with human women, another interpretation popped up.

What if they’re humans? Hmm, yeah, the angels. Well, the Bene Elohim, the children of God. And so a different interpretation of Genesis 6 popped up, which understood the Bene Elohim, the children of God, to be a reference to the line of Seth. And so this is humans who are doing this, and therefore not gods at all.

And so this is kind of sidestepping the Enochic tradition, saying, we don’t like that tradition, we’re going to go this other way that interprets things as humans. And what this facilitated was this allowed them to now look at other passages that use the word Elohim and say, maybe it’s humans there too. And so we get Exodus 21 and Exodus 22 , where you have these different rituals that you’re supposed to do before haElohim, and the verbs associated, at least in Exodus 22 , make clear that these are plural Elohims, and so it’s not just God. You see a lot of translations that render judges there, because they’re like, well, this must be— so by analogy with the human reading of Genesis 6 , we’re also going to read these Elohim as humans as well, and we’re just going to imagine that they’re judges. So this debate resulted in a few different interpretations of what the Bene Elohim could be.

And one of those interpretations was, oh, they’re just humans. They’re the line of Seth.

Which is weird because they do seem to be very much differentiated from the daughters of people.

Humans. Yes. Of mortals. It’s an odd contrast to draw.

It starts with the idea, yeah, If that is your interpretation, then Genesis 6 says when people had daughters, then the sons of other people thought that they were fair. Yeah, I, I think that’s how it works.

Yeah, it, yeah, the— it doesn’t make much sense to, to, to be like the humans, they had children with the daughters of humans, right?

Exactly. It feels, it feels like a weird thing to, uh, make a distinction about.

Yeah, it’s a little anticlimactic, but, um, so yeah, it’s clearly not what was originally intended, but, but that became for a lot of people, and particularly as the Enochic tradition kind of faded into the background, that kind of became a more standard view.

It’s a mess. It’s like so many of the topics that we go over. It’s entirely unclear. But what we do know is that there’s something fishy going on. Yeah, something weird happens. And something tells me that if biblical authors had any idea how much, like, turmoil their little, their little things would cause in the future, I think they might have thought a little better of how they did a few things.

But I think an awful lot of them would be proud of how influential their texts have been. They would be like, “I did that!”

That is the true answer of the perpetual provocateur. So there you go, well done to you. Uh, I guess that’s it for the show. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. If you would like to become a part of what makes this show happen and part of like our favorite people, please consider becoming a patron of the show over on Patreon, patreon.com/dataoverdogma. We’re very easy to find and you can choose what you want to give us and in return you’ll get, you can get early and ad-free access to every episode and, uh, and the, uh, the after-party bonus content every week. And, uh, that’s about it for that. Uh, feel free to give as much as you want. Uh, give, give a lot if you really want to. We’d be pleased with that. Uh, thanks so much to Reid Gowerly for editing the show. If you want to reach out to us, it’s contact at dataoverdogma.com, and we will talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Who are the REAL Christians?

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Scripture Index

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