It's a Jubilee!

Somebody listening to this is going to be like, “Dan, you moron.” Ah, got him!

He got him, everybody! He didn’t know which one it was. Ha!

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Oh, it’s been a long day for me. I had some family emergencies of the pet variety that were harrowing. It’s been a harrowing day, but I’m— All—.

Everything copacetic?

Everything’s okay. We’ve got a cat with significantly less hair now because the vet had to shave her and all sorts of crazy stuff. Anywho, all right, other than that, things are great. So let’s dive into some Bible stuff, shall we?

Let’s do it.

Okay, so today on the show we are going to, uh, we’re going to first have a Is It Canon? We’re going to talk about a book that is canon, I understand, and an X-Man. Yes, it is.

Putting it out there, just putting it out there.

Oh, okay, there you go. Uh, so we’ll get to Jubilees, and then, uh, in the second half of the show, we’ll be, we’ll be asking ourselves, uh, we’ll be Taking Issue with a, a bunch of correlations. We’re gonna correlate and see if it means everything. Yeah, and something and anything.

Probably not.

Probably not. But first, Is It Canon? All right, so we said it, we’re going, we’re getting into Jubilees, uh, here, and that, uh, The word Jubilee is interesting. I myself attended the, uh, the Diamond Jubilee of Her Highness, uh, the, the, the Queen of England. Ah yes, back in her days.

Uh-huh.

I didn’t attend it. I sat on the banks of the Thames and watched as the giant flotilla floated by, which sounds super exciting. The largest flotilla that has ever floated the Thames. It sounds very exciting until you realize it’s just boats going slowly past you. One of which contained the Queen. Yes. Who waved in my direction.

Well, I hear she’s good at waving. She was good at waving.

Not as good anymore. And the other Jubilee that I know of is that this year, the year of our Lord 2025, is a Jubilee year for the Catholics. The Pope, before he died, declared this year to be a Jubilee year.

Indeed.

So, uh, I don’t know what that means, but what I do know is there is also a book that was in— that was not in my Bible called Jubilees, and I don’t know, uh, anything about it.

Well, it is, uh, it is generally considered a pseudepigraphical text. It is non-canonical for the overwhelming majority of, uh, Christianity as well as Judaism. There is a, uh, a movement, a Jewish movement that is associated with the Christian movement that has it in the canon, that also has it in the canon. So, okay, um, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has Jubilees in the canon. In fact, their inclusion of the Book of Jubilees in the canon is the only reason we can claim to have a full copy of the Book of Jubilees, because it was only preserved in Geez manuscripts for a long, long time until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I think there’s a little bit of a Latin translation from like the 5th century. But the dozens—.

So the last time we met the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo people, church, we were talking about 1 Enoch and how they include that also in their canon. Is that correct?

Yes. And this is closely related. In fact, Jubilees is probably basing some of its text on 1 Enoch.

And so these are both texts that were written in the Hellenistic period. Most scholars would say Jubilees was probably written somewhere between 160 to 150 BCE.

So this is just after the Maccabean period. This is during the Hasmonean kingdom, and it was probably originally written in Hebrew and then probably translated into Syriac somewhere along the way, also translated from Hebrew into Greek, and then from Greek into Latin and into Geez, because Jubilees was probably brought down to the Kingdom of Aksum, modern-day Ethiopia, by folks who had copies of the Septuagint, so the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. And then I think the oldest existing Geez or Ethiopic manuscript of Jubilees is like from the 14th century, but there are like 50 or so manuscripts of Jubilees preserved in Geez.

So Jubilees and 1 Enoch were quite influential.

Yeah. So the way you’re— if I’m understanding you, let me just say it in my own way, just to make sure I’m getting it. But like, what if there are— if there were that many copies of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at least the people who were keeping those records near the Dead Sea, lo, those many years ago, anciently. Clearly, it must have been very important. It must have been as important to them as, as you say, those other books, as Genesis, Exodus, or, you know, whatever ones you listed.

Yeah, they definitely weren’t the core of what was considered scripture for Judaism. But they seem to have been even more influential than books like Ezekiel and Daniel, Numbers and Joshua and stuff like that. So, it was influential if we take the number of manuscripts preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls as a proxy for how important the text was. But we also see its influence on later rabbinic literature. We even see some stuff in the New Testament that seems to be reflecting, or not necessarily saying, hey, here’s something I took from Jubilees, but references to traditions that look at those traditions in ways they are presented in Jubilees and not really anywhere else. Okay, so, so indicating that they’re familiar with and they are influenced by the tradition as preserved in Jubilees. But in short, Jubilees is, is basically a rewriting of the Book of Genesis and a little bit of Exodus.

Oh, okay.

And the idea is this: Moses is on Sinai in Exodus 24 . God’s like, hey, I’m going to give you these laws, but once you all get to the promised land, everybody’s going to break all the laws. I’m going to send them away into exile. I’m going to destroy the temple. Then I’m going to bring them back. Then I’m going to rebuild the temple, and then everything’s going to be copacetic from then on out, everything’s going to be grand. And Moses is like, what if you didn’t do that? And God was like, no, I’m still going to do that. And then God is like, here’s my angel, and he’s going to give you all the deets. And God bounces. And so the angel of the presence— and this is the Malak Adonai, the messenger of Adonai that is introduced in Exodus 23 , the chapter before, where God says, I’m sending an angel before you to guard you along the way, uh, my name is in him. And this angel’s like, hey Moses, anyway, here’s the deal, and retells the entire book of Genesis .

Oh wow.

Not verse for verse, but like story for story. And an awful lot of it is, um, is condensed, but it’s all being retold in a way that would be more meaningful for an educated Jewish person in the middle of the 2nd century BC.

So it’s kind─ like, I— there are— what’s going on in Jubilees, in my opinion, is kind of close to what Joseph Smith was trying to do with his revision of the Bible. Like the Book of Moses, where God’s like, “Hey, Moses, so anyway, here’s how everything’s gonna play out for, uh, this is how everything began, here’s how everything’s gonna play out. " And and you’re rewriting the whole book of Genesis and changing an awful lot, but kind of following the same, uh, trajectory. And it’s all divided up into jubilees. So a jubilee is 49 years according to the Hebrew Bible. Okay, you have 7 years, that’s the 7th year is the Sabbath year, but every 7 sets of 7 years is the 49th year, that’s the jubilee year. And so basically, we’re imposing this chronological framework of sets of 7 and Jubilees and everything upon the book of Genesis .

And so a lot of the chapters begin where the angel of the presence is speaking to Moses and says, so anyway, during the 5th year of the 4th week of this Jubilee, in the 3rd month, in the middle of the month, Abram celebrated the Festival of the First Fruits and the wheat harvest. And it’s kind of a way to say this history is already written, it’s playing out according to this, uh, very regimented chronology. Everything important happens on Jubilee years, or, uh, in a way that can be measured against these Jubilee years. And you get updates and you get changes and you get corrections, uh, and stuff like that. I want to read a couple of examples of, uh, of some of the things that, uh, some of the ways they’re retelling the story.

Chapter 1 is one section, and then the other section is chapters 2 through 50.

Oh, okay.

And there are only 50 chapters in Jubilees.

That’s not that—those are not evenly measured chapters or sections.

It is definitely back-heavy. And the first chapter is just kind of this narrative explaining what’s going on where Moses is like, “What?

Who? Okay." And anyway, verse 29 of the first chapter, it’s a long verse. “The angel of the presence who was going along in front of the Israelite camp took the tablets that told of the divisions of the years from the time the law and the testimony were created for the weeks of their jubilees year by year in their full number, and their jubilees from the time of the first creation until the time of the new creation, when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be renewed like the powers of the sky and like all the creatures of the earth, until the time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mount Zion.” So, um, that’s the explanation of what the angel of the presence is about to drop on Moses. Um, and so you have, uh, in chapter 2, you have Adam and Eve, you have this whole creation, and then you have this statement: there were 22 leaders of humanity from Adam until him, and 22 kinds of works were made until the seventh day. So we’ve got another division into these very symbolic numbers, and 22 is symbolic.

Uh, do you, do you have any idea where, where 22 might be symbolic? 22 and 24 both pop up a number of times, uh, in early Judaism.

I know the significance of 6, 7, but I don’t know the other ones.

No, you don’t. Nobody does.

Um, I’m the only one.

Um, 22 and 24 are significant. 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. And so once you get into the 1st century CE, you have texts and folks, people like Josephus and other texts, that say, oh yeah, our sacred scriptures number 22. Or are they number 24? That’s how many books are in there, because that is symbolic. And, you know, if you like Greek, then you go with 24. If you prefer Hebrew, then you go with 22. So that’s what’s going on with these, uh, these symbolic numbers. And there’s an interesting tradition that has its origin in the Book of Jubilees. Okay, um, might surprise some people. So I’ve made videos before where I’ve said, hey, the first lie in the Bible is not the serpent talking to Eve. It actually comes before that. Genesis 2:17 , where God tells Adam, “On the day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will certainly die.” He doesn’t die.

What’s going on there?

Right.

One of the responses to this—there are two main responses. One is to say, “Well, he didn’t mean die die. He meant die as in not die.” The other response is to say, Well, a day to the Lord is a thousand years, right? And this is based on, uh, there’s a passage in—I always screw it up, I don’t know why—it’s either Psalms or Proverbs where it says the, um, the—a day is like a thousand, or a thousand years are like a day to the Lord, and, uh, or like a watch in the night, which would be like 3 or 4 hours. And, and I’ve, I’ve always found that a rather silly argument, but it originates in the Book of Jubilees. So Jubilees chapter 4, we’re getting to the end of the story of Adam. He was the first to be buried in the ground. And then verse 30, he lacked 70 years from 1,000 years because 1,000 years are one day in the testimony of heaven. For this reason, it was written regarding the tree of knowledge, on the day that you eat from it, you will die.

Therefore, he did not complete the years of this day, because he died during it. Okay, the Book of Jubilees.

We’ve got the apologetic built in.

Yes, one of the first apologists going through and rewriting the text and smoothing out the problems, right? And being like, you thought that was a contradiction, didn’t you? Yeah, we got you. And so this is doing some—it’s very similar to Samuel and Kings and then Chronicles. Where Chronicles is retelling a lot of the same stuff but altering it and fixing it and, and like, wait a minute, we gotta have our, our Levites here. Okay, drop some Levites in, we’ll throw some Levites over there, we’ll sprinkle some Levites on the, on the Ark.

And they would be like, oh, okay, I’m gonna put some, uh, you know, more angels over here and do this, that, and the other thing. It would be the exact same thing. And then something that is very important here, remember this is being written probably by a rather well-educated Jewish individual. They also have a concern for calendars. And they say in chapter 6, here the Angel of the Presence is talking to Moses and says, “Now you command the Israelites to keep the years in this number.” 364 days. Then the year will be complete, and it will not disturb its time from its days or from its festivals, because everything will happen in harmony with their testimony. They will neither omit a day nor disturb a festival. So we’re getting pretty close. Pretty close.

We’re getting pretty darn close.

Yeah, we’re moving away from a lunisolar calendar to a strictly solar calendar, right? 364 days, not exactly getting us all the way there. And they divide it for a while.

It’ll work for a good long while.

There’s going to be some drift, but, you know, we’re not going to be alive to see it. So why do we care? So, and this is—.

Wasn’t this holiday in September?

This began as a harvest festival.

This was supposed to be a winter thing.

Yeah. And now it’s a planting festival. Which is why people are like, “Well, the solstice is on December 25th.” It’s not on December 25th. It was at one point, and then we had that Tokyo drift. And they divided into 4 quarters of 13 weeks each. And they use, I want to say they use a Sabbath trick to resolve the—.

This one weird trick?

Yeah, the Angel of the Presence hates this one weird trick. So the calendar is a big part of this. Festivals are a big part of it. The Book of Jubilees is going along saying, “Then Abraham celebrated the, you know, Shavuot and the Festival of Booths and stuff like that.” I don’t think that’s anywhere in Genesis. That’s a a much later thing. Um, but here’s an example of, uh, one of the ways that a story is being retold. Okay, in this, because, uh, it’s 50 chapters. The Book of Genesis itself is 50 chapters. So if it were an exact retelling, it would just be Genesis 1 through the end of Genesis 50 . Uh, but it’s not. It’s shortening things. So this is Genesis 19 , the entire chapter of Genesis 19 is 5 verses, and, um, and Genesis 19 is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So this is what the Book of Jubilees, how it recounts, uh, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

During this month— remember, we’re dividing everything into, into months and, and weeks of years and stuff— during this month, the Lord executed the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Zeboiim, and all the environs of the Jordan. He burned them with fire and brimstone and annihilated them until the present, in accord with what I have now told you about all their actions, that they were depraved and very sinful, that they would defile themselves, commit sexual sins in their flesh, and do what was impure upon the earth. The Lord will execute judgment in the same way in the places where people commit the same sort of impure actions as Sodom, just like the judgment on Sodom. But we will—.

I don’t know, man. I’ve been to Vegas.

It’s— I don’t think you’re a fan from what I— from what I hear, too. I don’t think that’s— that is right. But we went about— and remember, this is, uh, still the voice of the Angel of the Presence to Moses— we went about rescuing Lot because the Lord remembered Abraham, so he brought him out from the overthrow of Sodom. He and his daughters committed a sin on the earth that had not occurred on the earth from the time of Adam until his time, because the man had sex with his daughter.

Here it has been commanded and engraved on the heavenly tablets regarding all his descendants that he is to remove them, uproot them, execute judgment on them like the judgment of Sodom, and not to leave him any human descendants on the earth on the day of judgment.

Because when we look in Genesis 19 , uh, the offspring of the incestuous pairing of Lot and his daughters is— are the people of Moab and Ammon. Oh, so, so we’ve got— that’s a little problematic. But, but that’s it. That’s how the entire chapter of Genesis 19 is retold. So it is. Yeah. So it’s condensing some stuff. And then, you know, when it comes to the Festival of Tabernacles, that gets—.

Which is my personal favorite. I love that festival.

That gets like more than twice as many verses. So there’s an awful lot about the things that the author of Jubilees chooses to dwell on are sometimes a little unexpected, unusual. They’re not the kinds of things that people today would choose to dwell on. I mean, if you had a lot of the megachurch pastors and the TikTok pastors of today doing this, we would probably have 20 chapters on Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah. And the Festival of Tabernacles wouldn’t even be in there, but it probably shouldn’t be anyway, because it’s not in Genesis. But the last few chapters cover the time in Egypt and the Angel of the Presence is like reminding Moses what Moses just did, and then getting up to the point where the Angel of the Presence is like, “Just to recap your story.” And that brings us to right now. So I am talking to you on the mountain.

Yeah. So I wanted to circle back to something, because at the very beginning of this segment, you mentioned you called this book pseudepigraphical. And I guess what I’m wondering is, is it meant to be that it is— are we meant to believe that Moses wrote this book?

Well, we’re meant to believe that the Angel of the Presence dictated this book to Moses. Okay, so Moses wrote down what was dictated to him in, in the angel’s voice. That’s why the passages are like, so that’s why I— we, uh, and, and this is the two angels that accompany God in Genesis 18 and, and travel on to Sodom in Genesis 19 . That’s when we helped Lot out, but then God was like, destroy all of his descendants. So that’s— it’s the Angel of the Presence dictating the text to Moses, and Moses just furiously writing everything down.

Slow down, slow down, man.

Come on. Even though Moses is probably— well, the text represents him as literate, but historically speaking, if there were a historical Moses, he would have spoken probably I don’t know, let’s say Russian. Um, so that’s as good an answer as any other. Sure, Egyptian. Um, but, uh, we have— but this Angel of the Presence is the one that’s delivering the laws to Moses.

And so, you know, you go to, uh, Galatians written by Paul. Galatians 3 , verse 19 says: Why then was the law given? It was added because of the transgressions until the arrival of the descendant to whom the promise had been made. It was administered through angels by an intermediary, which— okay, seems like it’s referencing this tradition of an angel mediating between God and Moses, who then turns around and gives the law to the people.

Right.

So this is one of the indications that the Book of Jubilees was probably influential enough to be reflected in some New Testament passages. And there are a handful of other places where scholars think that the influence is coming through. And we do have evidence that early Christians knew of the Book of Jubilees: the writings of Epiphanius, Justin Martyr, Origen, Diodorus of Tarsus, Isidore of Alexandria, Isidore of Seville, Eutychius of Alexandria. A number of early Christians make reference to Jubilees. They probably had either Greek copies or maybe Syriac copies or Latin copies before it just being left out of the canon. It was a text non grata, and so probably faded away.

And so, I’m sorry, just the idea is that those people who referenced it, probably the theories that they probably were referencing it as scripture, like in the same way? No. Oh, okay.

No, no, just they were just witnessing to the existence of the text, not necessarily saying, “We got scripture here, people.” I would have to look into those texts to see exactly how they’re representing it. Like 1 Enoch, definitely there were people who were referencing it as scripture. The New Testament references it as prophecy. Jubilees, I think the evidence is not nearly so strong, but these are folks who are referencing it as a text that was in circulation.

And based on comparison of the— I can’t I think I said this already, but based on comparison with the Hebrew manuscripts that were discovered at Qumran, the Geez versions are pretty faithfully translated.

The stuff where um, where either apologetics, by the way.

Yeah, so, so the author of Jubilees, yeah, is, is one of the first apologists, wants to present this as something that is not going to rub the Jewish intelligentsia the wrong way, but is going to make this sound like inspired scripture, make it a little easier for them to, um, to game the algorithm so they can make that scratch off of more people seeing their videos talking about talking about how awesome the book of Genesis is. Uh, so a fascinating text. I don’t think it’s as influential as the book of 1 Enoch. It passes along some of the traditions of 1 Enoch, but it was an influential text in some ways. And as we’ve seen, it is the origin of one of the apologetic arguments against understanding God’s statement in Genesis 2:17 as a lie, or at the very least something that doesn’t actually come to pass that God said would come to pass, which I think makes it fascinating in its own right.

But there’s the Hermeneia commentary series. That’s where you’re going to find the best discussion of Jubilees. There’s 2 volumes on Jubilees, and they took the translation that James VanderKam did for that commentary series, and they published it as a standalone translation. So if you would like a really, really good translation of Jubilees, it’s like $17 or $18 to get a paperback version of the Hermeneia translation. So don’t go chasing down the TikTok shop folks who are putting the, “This is the real Ethiopic Bible with all 88 books. We got them all. " You know, they’ll have a version of Jubilees in there, but it’s going to be a public domain translation from 150 years ago.

Oh, wow.

It’s not going to have the updates that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff like that, and it’s not going to be a very good translation. So if you want a good translation, don’t waste your time with the Ethiopian Bibles that people are selling on the internet right now. Just go get your Hermeneia translation.

Jubilees. All right, Jubilees. Sounds fun. Let’s move on to our next segment, which is Taking Issue.

Bum bum bum.

And this, this week’s Taking Issue, we’re going to take issue with a rather attractive image, a beautiful chart that was built a while ago called the Cross-Reference Visualization. And this was— I think it was done by a guy named Chris Harrison, I think.

Yes. Or, uh, yes, Chris Harrison.

And, uh, and, and basically the— what it purported to be was, uh, imagine a, a horizon line, essentially a line in the lower third of the, uh, of the image, and below it are these lines, these just so many lines, stack of vertical lines of different lengths.

Yeah. That are descending down from the horizon line.

And I guess those are the chapters of the Bible, is that right?

And then, uh, and then above it are these big beautiful curves and multi-colors, and it’s very pretty. And the curves go from one vertical line, uh, below, all up and over to some other vertical line, and it’s just interconnecting all of these different chapters. And what it purports to be, if I am to— if I understand this correctly, is a visualization of all the ways that the Bible, all the verses in the Bible that correlate with each other.

Yes, it is the Bible Cross References chart that began as a collaboration between a pastor named Christoph Romhild, and Chris Harrison in 2007. They, they claim to have cataloged 63,779 cross-references in the Bible.

And this is a visualization of those 63,779 cross-references. And as you mentioned earlier, while we were discussing what we were talking about tonight, there was a, a very popular kind of mimicking version of this chart that is Bible Contradictions.

Um, now the handy thing about the Bible Contradictions chart is that it actually catalogs all the actual contradictions. Uh, Chris Harrison’s chart, to my knowledge— I think somebody has tried to recreate it in an interactive way so you can actually see the verses— but in addition to the fact that it does not include all 63,770 cross-references, it doesn’t even tell you what verse. It just says Genesis 1 , Ezekiel 37 , right?

Which means go read both of these full chapters and then figure out what they’re talking about, what they have in common.

But I see this chart, or at least the claim, 63,779, uh, like this is in my head, like that, like that song that’s, uh, that I don’t even remember the number but it’s 600 something something something. Uh, you probably know what that’s from.

It’s from Rent.

It’s from Rent. I was gonna say, is it from Rent? Um, but I’ve never seen Rent. Um, and you usually see that number included in this claim. The Bible: 1,500 years, 45 authors, 3 continents, 3 languages, 63,779 cross-references, no contradictions, one message. Something like that. That’s been shared far and wide, and it drives me nuts because it’s pretty much entirely wrong. The only thing that is accurate is that it is written in 3 different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Um, but when I first saw that, I had to chase down this chart and see what was going on here, because people make it sound like this is such an anomaly that the only plausible explanation is something supernatural. Like, this is evidence for the inspiration, the inerrancy, the univocality, the supernatural origins of the Bible.

Right.

And it just doesn’t— it just didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I chased down the origin of it, and here’s the way Chris Harrison defines a cross-reference.

Cross-references are conceptual links between verses connecting locations, people, phrases, etc., found in different parts of the Bible. Great. That, however, does not tell us who is making these links, right? And this is my biggest problem with this. There is nothing that supports the notion that these links are inherent to the text, native to the text, understood and intended by any of the authors and editors. Sure, these links are often so thin and so ambiguous as to be pretty meaningless. Like, the— there’s a partial list of these cross-references that I found where somebody was like, Genesis 1:1 talks about the creation of the heavens and the earth, and so this cross-references with every single passage in the Bible that uses a word for create. It’s like, no, it doesn’t.

Or heaven or earth.

Yeah, that’s not indicative of intent, right? Or cognizance on the part of any of the authors. That is us saying, I matched these two, right?

Well, and not only that, but like, not for nothing, later books had the previous books to reference.

They were—.

The authors were familiar with the work going before, so a reference doesn’t mean, like, you know, if the guy who writes Spider-Man 211 also read Spider-Man 3.

Yeah, see, he can reference it. Number 3.

Yeah, it doesn’t— that doesn’t prove anything divine happening.

Right. And that’s another part of this. The Bible is unique in a lot of ways. It is an anthology of, uh, texts for a community that lasted a lot longer than most other communities have lasted. It shouldn’t have lasted as long as it has, but because it lasted as long as it did, because the authoritative literature accumulated for as long as it did, and every layer that was added to it had the benefit of looking back at some, if not all, of what came before, you have a lot of intentional allusion and paraphrase and even direct quotation of the things that came before. And so it is a uniquely self-referential text, but not in a way that is implausibly human-curated.

Right.

Uniqueness of the circumstances contributes to the uniqueness of the features of the text, uh, and definitely not in a supernatural way, right? But it gets even worse for Chris’s explanation because in addition to the fact that what this is basically saying is I can create links 63,779 times, which says nothing about what the text itself intended, like I can take Lord of the Rings and Hellboy and the Bible, and I bet you I can create thousands of cross-references as well. Look, this— we got a reference to mountains over here. We got a reference to mountains over here. Boom. Cross-reference roasted. Like, it doesn’t mean much. But Chris goes on in the— where he’s selling versions of this chart.

And I’m like, great, I want to look at the cross-references that Chris chose to show us as an example of cross-references to see what a prototypical cross-reference in the mind of Chris Harrison is. And it is—the page that is linked to is Acts chapter 1. And the cross-reference that is in the dead center is Acts chapter 1, verse 18, which describes the death of Judas. The first cross-reference is Matthew 27:3-10 , which is the contradictory account of the death of Judas. So when you look at the first cross-reference of the example of cross-references provided by Chris Harrison, what do you find? A contradiction in the Bible. Um, and you know, we, we’ve gone over this contradiction before. I think we have. Have we talked about that?

Oh yeah, yeah, we did the various Judases exploding in whatever way he’s going to explode.

And, and you know, we, we know that if you need these texts to both be accurate descriptions of a single event, you can force them through the square hole.

Right.

But for anybody capable of abstract and critical thought, these very clearly contradict each other. And so I think it’s funny to try to use this as evidence of something when your evidence directly refutes and contradicts your claim.

And then the other references are Matthew 18:7 , 26:14-15, 24. Mark 14 . And these are references to, uh, Jesus basically lamenting Judas’s, um, destiny.

And so, okay, great, you’ve got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all talking about Judas because they’re four different tellings of the same story, right? So it’s like, these—

Okay, pretty— that’s a pretty solid and easy thing to correlate.

Yeah, that’s pretty low-hanging fruit. That’s an accident of having 4 different tellings of the same story. Nothing supernatural about anything yet, right? And so the fact that when I look at that one verse, I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 cross-references in the one verse. One of them’s a contradiction, and the others are just the same story told 4 different times, right, by the 4 different authors. If these are your cross-references that are supposed to be manifesting the supernatural nature of this book, how dare it have 63,779 cross-references? Has any such thing ever existed before? Yeah, this is nothing special. So I am— and I try to bring this up, like, you’ve seen me on Twitter, I get pretty chippy.

You have a good time.

I have a good time. Um, I, when I see this, I usually, I can’t pass up the opportunity to correct it, uh, because it’s just so silly and it’s not evidence of anything. And if you think critically about it for any amount of time at all, you can see that this isn’t really evidence of anything. And, uh, but man, the pushback I get when I point out how silly this is. For folks who just— I don’t know what they’re thinking about when they’re looking at this. If I bring this up and show this to them, I don’t know what’s going through their head. But certainly not critical thinking, which is a problem. So this chart, as pretty as it is, yeah, and I got no complaints. The aesthetic is fine. Yeah, uh, when you look at the, the lines across the bottom as well, uh, they’re also shaded.

You go from light to darker to darker to lighter to darker to lighter to darker, and, and those are the different books. Okay, sure. So, so Genesis is the light one on the left, and then you go all the way to the very light one towards the right, that’s Matthew. And so you can see the different books of the Bible. So it’s a good little visualization of— there’s a lot of data in the visualization.

What’s that really long chapter in the middle?

Psalms 129 , I think. Oh, okay. Is that the— gosh, I always forget. I’m pretty sure—

I would’ve guessed it was a psalm.

Yeah, it is. It has like 150 verses in it.

Oh my gosh.

Um, nope, it’s not 129. Uh, somebody, somebody listening to this is going to be like, Dan, you moron.

Uh, got him, everybody. He didn’t know which one it was.

Gotcha. I’ve been got. That is true. Um, it is in the, it is in the one we don’t need to know.

It’s fine.

Okay, okay, fine.

Everyone can look it up on their own. Just go through Psalms until you find the one that’s too annoyingly long.

But there’s something else that I see when people do this, when they say, oh, here’s all the cross-references. The, you know, the cross-references claim is circulating enough to have a life of its own when you begin to see supplementary claims like people posting a very similar chart that has only maybe a couple dozen links, all these rainbows going across the horizon line. A bunch of people are sharing a very similar looking one with only a couple dozen lines, and they’re labeling it cross-references in the Quran. And I was like, what? Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.

So they’re claiming, they’re claiming like, look, our book has 6,000, 63,000. Yeah, yeah, 63,000. And they only have got—they’ve only got like 42,000. So clearly their book is, is false and our book is real.

Yeah. And the, the first time I saw this, I was like, that doesn’t look right. Like, the Quran has an awful lot of cross-references, and you can even find books published on cross-references in the Quran. There are a lot of them. And so I did something that the overwhelming majority of the people on the internet don’t seem capable of. I saved the image and then did a reverse image search.

Uh-oh.

For those of you out there who don’t know about this, go to like TinEye.com, or you can even just go to Google Images. And you plop in the image and it will tell you where this is found on the internet. TinEye I like because it will tell—you can sort them according to date. So it will give you the earliest occurrence of this image anywhere on the, on the internet. Drop it in there. I took this chart, I dropped it in there, and it took me to a website called Adam Lambert Full Circle Moments and Firsts. What this is is a timeline of the life of the American Idol singer Adam Lambert with life events and when they like come around again or recapitulate or whatever. And so you can—and, and the people who say cross-references in the Quran, it’s a, it’s a fuzzy chart, you can’t really tell what’s going on there.

You can’t read anything. But if you just, you know, do a reverse image search or you go to that website, you can see that like the events are like American Idol Audition, San Francisco, California, July 17th, 2008. And then 2009, meeting Madonna, Madonna’s home, New York City, New York, May 27th, 2009. Ring of Fire Glam Nation Tour, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, July 7th, 2010. Somebody found a chart that looked similar but had significantly fewer connections and were like, I’m taking this, and then slapped this label on it ensuring that the image was blurry enough that you couldn’t see anything.

Uh-huh.

And just passed this off as the cross-references of the Quran.

I, and I gotta say, the way that I assume mostly American, but maybe not just, I don’t know, I’ve seen Islamophobia all over the world. The way that Christians badmouth the Quran, these are people who of course have never read the Quran. They don’t know what’s in the Quran. They know what, you know, some very Islamophobic pastor on the internet has told them about the Quran, which is all misinformation. But it’s just so weird to me that like, how, you know, I made a very fiery post on Threads a while back. I have zero Threads followers. You guys are welcome to try to follow me on Threads. I don’t even know what my Threads handle is. But I did a post and I made a claim about Christianity and Islam being essentially the same thing. And all the people got mad.

And, you know, okay, fair enough. You disagree with my claim that theologically they’re similar. That’s fine. But they didn’t present theological arguments. They basically, like, multiple people were like, no, because they worship Satan. And I was like, really? That’s—that’s so like the desire to just, just full-on slander Islam with no knowledge, just, just invective is amazing.

And, and a lot of them will be outraged at anything remotely similar coming from non-Christian religions. Like, have you ever seen people who are like, “The Talmud says Jesus is boiling in a pot of feces for eternity”? It’s like, well, you just said Muslims worship Satan.

Right.

Like, on what grounds do you say what you’re saying is appropriate and what this 2,000-year-old text said is inappropriate? And I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but there has been an increase in Islamophobic rhetoric on the part of evangelical Christians online recently, because there’s been a—like, there are influencers who are like, Islam is the next mountain that we’re going to conquer.

Push back against that, folks, when you see that.

And especially if people are using Sam Harris post-2011 Islamophobic pseudo-scholarship. That stuff’s no good. But you have Allie Beth Stuckey coming out and saying, “Literally 99% of the world’s terrorism is rooted in Islam. It’s a uniquely and inherently violent religion.” I was like, you’ve got more violent passages in the Bible than you do in the Quran. Yeah. And they’ll be like, well, obviously Jesus, you know, said this, that, and the other. And it’s like, okay, that doesn’t make those passages go away. Yeah. That is just you renegotiating what you think the Bible is telling you. And guess what? People do the same thing with the Quran.

Right.

Which is why you have—.

Do you want us to find messages of peace and love in the Quran? Because we can find them. They’re there.

Yeah, and they’ll be like, “No, no, they have to interpret it this way. " And it’s like, well, nobody— you don’t think you have to interpret the Bible that way. Everybody’s going to engage with their texts in ways that make them meaningful and useful. And unfortunately, there are a lot of societies right now that don’t have a lot of political stability, where the state is not considered to be legitimate, where there is a lot of ethnic conflict and stuff like that. And so if people find meaning in the more violent parts of the text and decide they’re going to go out and do something desperate in order to try to save their people or their nation or whatever, that’s going to happen, just like it does with Christians sometimes.

Or to consolidate control and gain power. That’s also— But I mean, it’s so funny to hear all this talk about Islam is the terrorist religion, when the majority of terrorist acts that happen in the United States are done by Christians. Now, that’s just— I mean, you know, Christians, white supremacists too. Yeah. Christians are the vast majority here. And right now, Christianity, you know, evangelical Christianity is getting radicalized in ways that we’ve never seen, really. But, but yeah, I mean, if we’re going to judge a religion by what the extremists in that religion do, I don’t think Christianity comes out smelling very good.

No, no, obviously not. And all the folks who have like crusader armor in their profile pictures and stuff like that, like, you’re kind of undermining your own case, right?

Yeah, by talking about Pete Hegseth with his crusade cross up tattooed on his arm or whatever.

Which is like, that’s the Jerusalem cross. And if you go to Jerusalem, they’re all over the place. And in Jerusalem, like, it has a very different significance. But for Petey Hegseth, the Fox News talking head who has almost killed people numerous times because he can’t throw an axe accurately, and because he does all this goofy frat boy Chad stuff, when he has it, it’s not for the uses that are old and historical. It’s for right-wing identity politics. And yeah, if you want to find inspiration for violence in your holy book, you can find it.

I mean, that’s there. Yeah, we see it all over the place. And a lot of Christian nationalists are trying to do that. While also trying to walk this tightrope or thread this needle, if you like, of trying to get biblical authorization for their violence while condemning Quranic authorization for other people’s violence. Right.

Frequently using their Bible to justify violence against Muslims.

Who, because of their Quranic history of violence. So no irony there at all.

It’s identity politics all the way down. And the sooner people realize that, the sooner we can actually grow the hell up.

And move on as a globe, as a world.

Move on from what? Humanity? It feels like this is a thing that we—.

Feels like we’re stuck here for a bit.

This is where we’re at.

It was Psalms 119:18 , by the way. I was off by 10. Oh, I had two-thirds of the numbers correct. I just didn’t get that second position right. I was—.

Ah, all right. Well, on that note, now that we are finally come full circle and we know, just like Lambert would have liked—yeah, yeah, praise be he. Uh, uh, let’s close it off. Thanks so much, uh, for listening, everybody. Uh, if you would like to become a part of making this show go and show some appreciation for the work that we do, we would love for you to become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Is that what it is? I think that’s what it is. Uh, you’ll find it. You can search us, whatever it is. Um, thanks so much to Robbie Goudie for editing the show. Thanks to all of you for tuning in, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

It's a Jubilee!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology