Immaculate Apologetics?

It suddenly occurred to me that when Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” good thing Mary wasn’t there.

Yeah, they could have trotted out his mom.

She could have chucked a rock and started that woman down a bad path.

Jesus would have been, “Mom!”

Mom, stop it!

You’re embarrassing me. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Good. I came back from my travels with no cold. No cold. And my voice is doing just fine. So I feel like I’m a couple up on you on that front.

Longtime listeners will probably recognize I’ve got a little scratchy, a little more baritone voice than I’m in my— yes, I’m approaching my silver fox era, so I gotta have the voice to match.

Yeah, yeah, you’re gonna have to take up smoking.

Yeah, then I can start doing voice work for like the— who’s the— I wish I could remember the voice actor who does all the characters from The Simpsons. Usually the ones who smoke.

All right.

Well, instead of that, we’re going to do a show today. And I think it’s going to be a really fun one.

We’re going to give the people their money’s worth for once.

That’s right. So first off, we’re— look, there was a clip that went around or a series of clips that went around, got a little viral from Tucker Carlson’s show, which— don’t go looking for them. Let’s not give him any clicks. But we’re going to talk about some claims made by a guy named Jeremiah Johnston. And talk about the apologetic of manuscripts. We’re going to talk about some apologetics. And that’ll be a lot of fun. And then in the second half of the show, for our What Is That, we’re going to discuss the much misunderstood concept of the Immaculate Conception.

Which I think is— when I learned what was going on there, my mind was blown. It blew my mind.

So that would be—

I had no idea that Doug Flutie had any kind of involvement with the Catholic— and that’s a sports reference for those of you who— for the longest time, when I heard Immaculate Conception, my cognitive repertoire immediately went to Immaculate Reception, which is Boston College Doug Flutie. A pass that won the game for— anyway. Yeah.

Doug Flutie, who some people know as a football player, but more people know as a breakfast cereal tycoon. So I think that’s it. It’s a long and storied legacy. Anyway, let’s move on with the show. Let’s do our— what is it? Taking Issue. That’s what it is. All right. And what we’re Taking Issue with this week is some statements made by this Jeremiah Johnston guy, not to be confused with Jeremiah Johnson. Wasn’t that the name of an old Robert Redford movie way back?

Sure was, yeah. Okay, if you’ve seen that GIF of the bearded gentleman by a stream who glances over and gives you a little nod, that’s Jeremiah Johnson. No, this is Jeremiah J. Johnston, who is a scholar of New Testament. But his claim is that the crucifixion of Jesus is the best attested fact from the ancient world, bar none. And this is something—

That is a big claim. Yeah, and he literally said, if I may quote him, he said, if we can’t know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record, we shouldn’t believe anything in history at all. That’s bold, I’m gonna say.

Yeah. Um, and, uh, it is closely, uh, related to another claim that the manuscript evidence for the New Testament makes it the best attested document from the ancient world. Basically, that Jesus is the best attested figure from the ancient world, whether we’re talking about his crucifixion at Roman hands, or we’re talking about the historical witnesses to his life. The claim is repeated that Jesus is the best attested of all time, and this makes—

Goat— the goat of attestation.

Goat of attestation. And this makes people who study history for a living just guffaw with reckless abandon.

What? Because how dare you, sir?

Because it is—it could not be much further from the truth, whether we’re talking about the crucifixion or the manuscript attestation. I actually want to start with the manuscript attestation, if that’s okay with you.

Yeah, yeah, I’m happy with it.

And some people may have seen this claim going around. There’ll be a list of ancient writers: Pliny, Plato, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Caesar, Tacitus, Aristotle, whatever. People say, oh, they have, you know, there are only 12 copies of their writings, or there might be 100 copies of their writings, and the approximate gap between the composition of their writings and the earliest manuscript is, you know, 500 years, 1,000 years, 1,300 years, something like that. And then they’ll say, but the New Testament has 5,700 or 5,800 ancient Greek manuscripts. And then if you take translations, it has over 24,000 ancient manuscripts, and with the—okay, with the earliest coming less than 100 years after original composition. And so what this is supposed to be is evidence that there is something unique, something almost supernatural or otherworldly about the preservation and the transmission of the texts of the New Testament as historical witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ.

Well, I mean, I—okay, I will say this. Taking it on its face, if I believe—and I don’t know whether I’m meant to believe this or not, but let’s just say that there are 5,800 manuscripts of the New Testament, or, you know, or 20,000, or whatever it is, by their reckoning. That’s impressive. That’s a lot. Like, yeah, you know, and if you compare that to a few hundred of the other things, that sounds like a big deal. Yeah. But like, number of copies doesn’t sound like the same thing as like historical attestation for something.

Yes, that’s the biggest problem with this argument is the number of copies has zero relevance to the historicity of the stories within the copies. Right. So there are literally hundreds of millions of copies of Harry Potter in circulation.

Right, right.

That means nothing about the historicity of the stories within those copies of Harry Potter.

Because we all know that Dumbledore existed, but Hagrid did not. Hagrid was a wholly made-up person.

Yes, that’s a late interpolation. And so additionally, the length of time between the original composition and the earliest surviving manuscript also has something to do with our ability to reconstruct the transmission of the manuscript and its state at a period closer to its original composition. And so having 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts that range from, you know, the early 2nd century CE all the way down to the invention of the printing press, that gives us a lot of data to be able to track the transmission and the growth and change of these manuscripts. And that’s very, very helpful, but also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the historicity of the narratives within those manuscripts. It’s a completely separate issue. And so the notion that this makes Jesus the best-attested figure from ancient history is profoundly silly.

And, um, and another thing to consider is that when we look at the 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, the 2nd century people say, oh yeah, the earliest copy comes from less than 100 years after its composition. And that would be a little piece of papyrus called P52, Papyrus 52. It’s a fragment, kind of triangular in shape, about the size of a credit card. It’s got about 36-ish words total on it, written on the front and on the back. It preserves a piece of the Gospel of John . It may date to 125-ish CE. It may date to 175 or even 200 CE. But most scholars would say it’s probably in the 2nd century CE. But if we look in the entire 2nd century CE, you can count the total number of fragmentary manuscripts on one hand. Okay, there are 4. Okay, it’s the 3rd century, you get like I think 50, 49 or 50 additional manuscripts, again, mostly, if not entirely fragmentary manuscripts.

And then I think it’s in the 4th century that we eclipse, I think we get another like 48 or 49 manuscripts in the 4th century. And now we’re getting our codices like Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which contain the full Septuagint as it was understood by whoever was copying it. The big spike when you look at a graph that shows the number of manuscripts, the spike starts in the 800s. Oh, and then in the 900s, and then in the 1000s, it shoots way up. So the overwhelming majority of those 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts come from 800 years or more after the death of Jesus and the composition of these texts. So those inflated numbers are significantly less relevant when you actually look at when they come from.

Well, and that brings up an interesting point, because as you’ve said a number of times on the show, the more something is copied, the more chances there are for scribal errors and interpolations and stuff. So like, it occurs to me that having a lot more manuscripts is actually a problem for attestation more than it is a confirmation.

And for instance, if we go and look at the story of the woman taken in adultery, Right. All but like maybe 3 or 4 of those manuscripts has the— actually, no, that’s not true for the story of the woman taken in adultery. There are a handful of passages that are omitted from translations of the Bible these days. Story of the woman taken in adultery, it comes from— it’s absent from a number of manuscripts. But still, if we go, what about the 5,800? Yeah, well over 5,000 of them like 5,750 of them are going to have it, right? But luckily we have some very early ones that show it’s not there.

That was a later addition.

Yeah, when you line them all up and you say, well, we got, we got the earliest 1, 2, or 3 don’t have this reading, and you know, this could be Matthew 17:21 , it could be John 5:4 , it could be any one of a number of passages that we now omit from modern translations of the Bible. When you look at all the manuscripts out of the 5,800, like 5,799 of them have it, one doesn’t, right? So like, if we didn’t have that one, then yeah, that would be a liability. We would be misled by the 5,799 manuscripts.

And it seems obvious that what that means is that there are passages in all of our manuscripts that were interpolations, later editions. Yeah, that just— we don’t have a manuscript early enough to catch it.

Almost. I think it is beyond doubt that there are readings in the New Testament that we, we do not have any manuscript that lacks them. But these readings have been altered or added at some point between the composition of the text and our earliest surviving manuscript witness to that passage, right? And that gap is different depending on the text, because if we’re talking about P52, for those 36 words, that gap may be as small as 25 or 50 years, right? But for the rest of the Gospel of John , the other 99.99% of the Gospel of John , that gap is going to be, you know, add another 100 years on to it for some of those passages. Like, the gap is, is, uh, can be fairly large for a number of passages from the New Testament. And that’s a black hole. We don’t know what’s going on in there. There could be lots of things added, and we just do not have the evidence, right? If we did not have one of these early witnesses to, uh, you know, the, the absence of this, uh, statement about this kind doesn’t come out except through much fasting and prayer in Matthew 17:21 .

If we didn’t have an early manuscript that omits that, we might think it was there all along, and that one manuscript changes the whole story. And, and who knows how many readings were not there in the original text that were added somewhere in that gap that we don’t have witness to. So there are scholars out there who say, no, we can assume that based on all of the manuscripts that we have available to us now, we can reconstruct every word of the New Testament exactly as it fell from the pens of the authors. I think that assumption is profoundly misguided.

Yeah, it seems, if nothing else, impossible to verify and just unlikely. It just, like, knowing what we know about how— and I think when we bring a modern sensibility to this question, it’s easy for my brain, at least, to mess up and think, well, And, you know, I, I’m coming from— at this from a perspective of someone who has lived not only in the world of printed books, you know, the printing press and movable type, but, but computers. And like, the transmission of data is, is, is pure, you know what I mean? Like, if I send you a manuscript over email, you get it exactly. And if you forward it on to someone else and they forward it on to someone else, it just transmits perfectly. But when someone has to handwrite it out, every single word gets handwritten by, you know, by a person, and then, and you know, that scribe, that person may or may not have an agenda when they’re writing it out.

It’s just, it’s a very different means of transmission.

Yeah. And the fact that these texts are spread all around the world, is a kind of failsafe against that, right? Because it then becomes impossible to introduce a change that can, um, you know, go out and cover up all of the, um, manuscripts already in circulation that don’t have that change.

There are others who say That’s anathema. No, we should never use conjectural emendations. But long story short, the manuscript, the number of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament that we have and their proximity to the composition of those texts has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever on the historicity of the stories about Jesus, and much less the historicity of the supernatural claims about Jesus. Which brings us to Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston, who made the claim on Tucker Carlson that is the best attested fact from ancient history. I don’t know if you picked up on this. This is something that irks me only because I have a graduate degree from the University of Oxford.

But Dr. Johnston likes to bring up Oxford an awful lot.

Did you notice this in any of the stuff you looked up?

I didn’t catch it.

Okay. So you will see him spoken of as—.

I did catch him saying that he was a scholar and using the phrase critical scholars, but like, I like to do what critical scholars do, which I thought was kind of funny. He didn’t say I’m a critical scholar.

Right. I like to simulate what a critical scholar does. He has his PhD from a university called Middlesex University in England, and part of that included residency at what’s called the Oxford Center for Mission Studies.

Which is not an arm of the University of Oxford, but it is located in the city of Oxford, and it has relationships with the Bodleian Library, and there are some scholars that will offer to tutor and give help to students there. They’re basically there to train, um, non-Western, uh, students to go out and be pastors and preachers and stuff like that. But when, when Dr. Johnston talks about his education, he will frequently talk about when he was at Oxford— or no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he— in Oxford. When I was talking about being in Oxford, not at Oxford. Very carefully skirting around an explicit claim to have been enrolled at the University of Oxford, but loves to make a big deal out of having—.

I too have that level of Oxfordian education. I toured the campus. I went to several places within Oxford. It’s a lovely place.

But the only reason I bring this up is because it is so on the nose.

That like even his, uh, his doctoral dissertation was then published as a book, and in the acknowledgments he never makes it clear that he was not enrolled at the University of Oxford. So it’s always, it’s always like, what, were you enrolled there or not? And the answer, no, he was not enrolled there.

But what we’re saying is that he is a very reliable guy, uh, you can, you can, you can trust what he has to say.

You can, yeah, you can, you can take his statements to the bank. He’s a big defender of the Shroud of Turin.

Right. And that’s what he was talking about mainly on this episode of Tucker Carlson.

Yeah. Now there’s other stuff that he brings up, but, but the Shroud of Turin is, is his golden goose. This is what he thinks seals the deal on the historicity of Jesus’s crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. But just to kind of address the claim It is not the best attested event in the ancient world.

Not, not by a long shot. Like, we have— we can go and find the archaeological remains of battles that are discussed in texts written by Julius Caesar or written by people who accompanied Alexander the Great and stuff like that. We have, we have far better attested events from the ancient world. And so the notion that the crucifixion is the best-attested event is just laughable on the very face of it.

And even— and I would say even if the Shroud of Turin were somehow authentic, which it is not.

Yeah, we’ve talked about this.

We talked about the Shroud of Turin. Okay, so we don’t have to get into all of that stuff again, but Uh, but I, I do want to bring up the fact that I, I find it hilarious that the first time the Shroud of Turin explicitly shows up in any historical documentation is from the bishop who says some people conjured up this fake shroud and tried to pass it off as authentic, but we caught the guy.

Right, right.

So like that, I just find that so hilarious. Uh, people are like, no, no, no, it’s authentic, it’s totally authentic.

But it’s amazing. That kind of stuff is crazy. But he wasn’t just claiming that the Shroud was his only evidence that Jesus had actually done it. He kept talking about all of these sources that were almost contemporary talking about it. Tacitus and Suetonius and Lucian and these guys. Now surely He must not be lying. Surely those guys historically must have had some sort of good evidence for the resurrection, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

So the crucifixion, at least, yeah, we have better data for that than the resurrection, where we have zero data. But yeah, we have folks like Josephus, folks like Tacitus, and Suetonius and others who are non-Christian authors who— Josephus is the earliest, writing in the mid-90s CE. We have two references in his works, and one of them is longer than the other. The longer one is known as the Testimonium Flavianum, which is where Josephus is like, “Oh, he was more than a man!” And it’s very clearly, it has been doctored. Right, by Christian writers, probably in the 4th or late 3rd centuries CE. Some people think Eusebius, who talks about Josephus’s text, might have been the one to doctor it. I think the majority of scholars still would suggest that there was a historical core to that that was actually in Josephus’s writings, but that they just expanded on it.

Some people argue that it was entirely made up, that there was no reference to Jesus whatsoever. There’s another reference to James being put to death, and it refers to James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.

Right.

That one’s a lot more secure, but there are, there are some folks who, who still try to argue that that is an interpolation also. Uh, and then we get to Tacitus.

I don’t, I, I don’t want to— I want to jump— I want to stay with Josephus just long enough to mention that in that interview, Johnston did say that Josephus was so close to it, that he would have— quote, this is a quote— Josephus, he said, he would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus. And he writes about that. Now, when he says he writes about that, and also he seems to be claiming, and I don’t know where this comes from, maybe you can enlighten me, He seems to be claiming that there’s some really exciting stuff happening with Josephus right now, which— how would that work? How would there be new exciting stuff happening with Josephus?

There’s a scholar named Schmidt, and I think, I think T. C. Schmidt is the scholar’s name, just published a book called Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, where he makes the claim that the Testimonium Flavianum is entirely authentic. Now, he does a little, um, he does a little how’s your father with the text to try to soften how much of a testimony of Jesus it is. But, um, I think he might be talking about that, that book which just came out, uh, 2 or 3 months ago, I think.

Uh, and it’s just making the case, hey, what if this is all authentic? And it has has not convinced the majority of scholars, and it’s not going to convince the majority of scholars. And there’s a wonderful group out of University of Iowa run by my friend Bob Cargill called Bible and Archaeology. And Jordan Jones is a recent PhD from that program who is running that program. But I think they just interviewed Schmidt on there and talked about what his argument is. So that’s probably what’s going on there. But no, Josephus wasn’t born until well after Jesus was dead. So no, he wouldn’t have had— and he’s from the area, he’s from Galilee area. And he was involved in the Jewish revolts that took place in the 60s.

But no, the notion that he had friends that would have been at the trial is pretty silly.

And then to say that he wrote, he writes about that, it seems like, I mean, I’ve read the clip, you know, the little, the what, 3, 2 sentences or whatever it is that Josephus writes in the Flavianum, whatever.

And it’s not much. And it’s definitely not like, hey, my buddy Sam was there and here’s how the trial looked or whatever. It’s just like a quick tossed-off thing.

Yeah. And it just says, yeah, there was this dude and Pilate. Like, if there is an original core, it probably would have said just that there was this guy Jesus, some called him the Christ, and Pilate crucified him. And I think it ends by saying, and their tribe or their group has not ceased to exist down to today, or something like that. So it’s the kind of report that you would expect from somebody who lived toward the end of the 1st century CE and just knew about this group, this movement that sprung up after some guy got crucified. And Josephus talks about multiple different wannabe messiahs who got cut down by Rome. So it’s not unusual at all. But yeah, the notion that Josephus went and had his buddies fill him in on how the trial went is not supported by anything in anything that Josephus ever wrote. So yeah, I find that kind of silly as well.

But the other Roman authors, they’re basically saying, hey, there are these weirdos all over the place, and their movement started after this guy got executed. Like, it’s little more than that. So as historical attestation, I mean, certainly it suggests that these writers had access to some kind of reporting that was probably independent of what the gospel authors relied on. It was probably something that was in circulation in the non-Jesus follower literary circles and historical circles. So there is evidentiary value as attestation of the historical event of Jesus’s crucifixion. But to the degree that it becomes the best attested event in ancient history, that’s again nonsensical. That’s just laughable.

Yeah, I mean, you know, when we talk about things like, you know, how something is attested. Yeah, there are thousands of manuscripts that mention Jesus being crucified. They’re all, you know, largely they’re all produced by the group that wants you to believe it. You know what I mean? By a group that has an agenda. And then there’s, like you said, nothing archaeological that we’ve ever found. You know, with Caesars, or with, you know, with, like you said, Caesar or Alexander the Great, we’ve got coins with their face on them. We’ve got other people talking about the wars that they went to. We’ve got statues. We’ve got, you know, there’s just their own writings and other people’s writings. And, you know, all this stuff, it’s just, that’s how you look at history.

Yeah. And I don’t want anybody to mistake me or us for suggesting that there is good reason to doubt the existence of a historical Jesus.

No, no, no.

Because we’re definitely not saying that. No. Because when it comes to archaeological data, there was no direct archaeological attestation of Pontius Pilate discovered until 1961, I believe.

When an inscription was uncovered, a fragmentary inscription that mentions Pilate. Prior to that, we had some mentions in Philo and some mentions in Josephus, because those are the only two people who were writing about this part of the world in the middle of the first century CE, and they did not write about everybody. And so for 99.9999% of the people who lived in Judea or the Galilee in the first century CE, absolutely nothing survives about them. Even wealthy people, even powerful people, even important people, right? And most likely the historical Jesus lived and died without having become phenomenally popular. And the stories that are recorded in the Gospels are probably traditions that grew and developed after his death.

Well, his ministry was only a few years long, probably one year long. It’s not enough time to get popular. It’s enough time to say a bunch of stuff, and then if you have devoted followers, then they can start transmitting things.

Yeah, so people say, well, why we don’t have anything from a contemporary? Yeah, we don’t have anything from pretty much any contemporary of anybody who lived back then. That’s not surprising. Well, what about all the stuff he did? Most of the stuff that we think about is probably later posthumous traditions that were based on stories that were being passed around. The historical Jesus probably never did anything that noteworthy apart from causing a riot in the temple around Passover, and that’s probably what caused the Romans to execute him. So even in the New Testament, you know, his following ebbs and flows, like he gains some and he loses a bunch, and a lot of people abandoned him even in the New Testament’s telling.

Yeah, I think, I think that like, just sort of as a sort of closing thought about this, I, again, what we encounter when we encounter apologetics is people who run up against something that challenges their— or that scares them theologically, or scares them in a way that they— you know, if they have to believe that everything is literally true in the Bible, then they bend over backwards to sort of bend history to their will rather than just acknowledging what the data show. And it’s just so much easier if you just encounter the Bible itself and the history on its own terms. And just acknowledge that it’s messy, it’s not perfect, and that’s okay. That doesn’t have to shake— that doesn’t have to bring the temple down.

Well, I think if the temple is constructed on as rickety and as fragile a foundation as something like inerrancy and inspiration and univocality and all that, if the foundation is that rickety, then I think it frequently does need to be reduced to that zero-sum game: it’s 100 percent or it’s 0 percent. And I think that’s why we see people retreating to these ridiculous claims that he’s the best-attested figure in ancient history and his crucifixion is the best-attested event in ancient history, and we have so many more thousands of copies of these texts than any other ancient text. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the movement that circulated those texts took over the Roman Empire, right? And then didn’t really care about those other texts. Um, so like, there are a bunch of details of this that explain why the data are the way they are. But yeah, you kind of have to loosen your grip on things like inerrancy and inspiration and univocality if you want to be able to engage with that.

But because so much of this discourse doesn’t go on at the level of critical interrogation and reasoning, because so much of it is really about vibes and is really about just cheerleading and faith promotion rather than actual inquiry. Like in that interview between Tucker and Jeremiah, Jeremiah speaks with a lot of conviction and a lot of authority.

Oh yeah.

Even though the Oxford brand of that authority is illegitimate, he speaks with a lot of authority. And for folks out there, who don’t have the time, the expertise, the resources, or the interest to actually go and drill down to the bedrock of the argument, that’s good enough. And so that’s really all that matters. And even though Tucker was like, “Really?” Even Tucker was a little skeptical. He was like, “What does that mean? What?” But that interview gets the job done for so many people. And so if you’re an apologist, time to clock out. We did our job. Yeah, that’s your job. Whether it actually does any justice to the data or whether it actually engages with it at all, your job is to make people feel better about believing. And, you know, if that works, then that works.

Even if— yeah, I don’t want to spend more time on this, but it does seem like it does a disservice because it’s just like, you know, wait, what it means is that people are hanging their hats on, like you say, very rickety information. And that means that their faith will be all that much more easy to rock when they encounter the truth.

100 percent.

That’s tricky.

This at SBL, one of, one of the things, one of the panels that I participated in was for this book published by The Bible for Normal People called God’s Stories for God’s Children, which is a children’s storybook Bible, right? And I was responsible for writing a segment that dealt with 1 Kings 11 and 12, which— but one of the points that I made in there was that I wanted to engage the story in all its details, whether, you know, no matter how boring, no matter how controversial, because I wanted anyone who read that story and actually internalized the story and understood it. The last thing I wanted is for them to grow up and actually go, you know, maybe they study it at school or maybe they just find out on the internet, “Oh, I was lied to,” right? And you know, you can talk about milk before meat and you can talk about, “Oh, but you know, this isn’t as useful for children,” stuff like that.

And I think we owe it to people to give them the truth, uh, to the degree that we have access to it. And which is one of the reasons I think these claims, whether it’s about the manuscript numbers or the Shroud or the claims about the, uh, the crucifixion, they have to be called out because that is— they’re putting dogma over data.

And, and that is the opposite of the title of our show.

So we, we are not allowed to do that. We must object. All right. Well, let’s move on to What’s That? And this week’s What’s That is really cool. I think it is.

It’s—

I don’t know if you know this, Dan. I once wrote a play. You know, you mentioned the Immaculate Reception.

Uh-huh.

I once wrote a play called The Immaculate Abortion. Which I think is not going to surprise some of our viewers, but it was a comedy. I think it was actually pretty funny. Maybe, you know, let’s make it a Patreon goal. If we get enough patrons, at some point we’ll produce that play and see if it’s any good. Anyway, but no, what we’re talking about is the Immaculate Conception. And for the longest, for the most of my life. Now, I wasn’t raised Catholic. My understanding is this is a primarily Catholic belief.

But I wasn’t raised Catholic. I had heard of it, and I knew that it was to do with Jesus. And I just assumed, as so many people do, that the conception in question was of him. But it isn’t.

It isn’t. Yes, the Immaculate Conception is not about the conception of Jesus. It is about the conception of Mary.

So that is nuts. Go on, talk to us. What do we got?

People, people, they’ll be like, oh well, we’re— what are we doing on Christmas? We’re celebrating the Immaculate Conception. No, you’re not.

No, you’re not.

Yeah. It’s, it’s, uh, it’s a very widespread misunderstanding, and some of it has to do with the fact that yes, it is a uniquely Catholic doctrine. Some of it has to do with the fact that people just don’t pay an awful lot of attention to the details of doctrines like this. But the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is the notion that at the instant of Mary’s conception, there was a special exemption that made her conceived without the stain of original sin. So original sin is supposed to be something that is passed on from parents to child, unavoidable.

I think it’s a thing that’s, that’s a segment we need to do.

Original sin.

We need to do original sin and dive in on that. So yeah, look for that in the future, you guys, if you want to know a deep dive on that. But yes, okay, original sin, ever since Adam, it’s You’re born tainted.

In some way.

Yes. Yeah. And it’s a way to kind of say that Jesus’s atonement is necessary for all humans who are ever born, because we’re all born with this original sin. In the early periods of the church, there were some authors who suggested that children were born innocent and pure, right? Had no sin. But you also— then you have— yes, um, there were some passages that suggested that no, children are also born sinful. I just— I want to pause and say that there are some apologists out there who will say things like, uh, none of us deserve anything but hell, right? Which is just so stupid.

I’ve seen that a lot.

It’s just an abominable notion. That even a 1-day-old baby deserves eternal conscious torment, right, because of their depraved nature that they had absolutely zero choice in. Like, I just find that the most abominable and stupid attempt to, uh, just kind of jerry-rig the need for, uh, for Jesus’s atonement. Anyway, there’s a passage in the Psalm— Psalm, uh, I think 51:5, uh, that says, I was, um, uh, I, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Where is— yeah, so, and so people suggest that means, oh, there’s, there’s sin involved in, in that whole process. Uh, and then you also have Romans 5 , Paul says, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin. And this way death came to all people because all sinned.

Uh, and there— this is the— these are the Lego bricks that are used to construct the doctrine of original sin, which then leads to, well, wait a minute, how did Jesus avoid getting it? Right? Well, and, and, and this is— this is the question I always had: if we can just arbitrarily exempt somebody from it, why didn’t we just arbitrarily exempt Jesus from it? Why did it have to be all the way back at Mary’s conception?

Well, you said it yourself, the psalm said that it was the mother, and so like, you gotta clean out the mother. Yeah. And then you got a pure vessel.

Yes, and that’s actually a big part of the rationale. There were theologians who were like, look, can we really imagine that the one sinless, pure Savior gestated inside of a sinful environment, even if there was this moment of exemption from the transmission or the imputation of original sin? Can we imagine that Jesus was swimming around in amniotic fluid of sin? So there was a desire to kind of push it back a ways. And it’s really in the medieval period that we have folks kind of pushing in this direction. And there was one dude I had never heard of, John Duns Scotus, who lived in the late 13th century CE. In fact, I think he died around like 1305 or something like that, 1308 CE.

And he’s the one who like is thought to have first coherently explained how the idea of an immaculate conception is coherent within, uh, you know, the grand, uh, network of doctrines of the Catholic Church.

I’m just going to stop you right there and clarify something. What you just said is that this is a, like, a medieval or sort of Middle Ages idea. We’re— so this is— that’s pretty far from being a concept that was actually laid out in—.

That’s not even the half of it. That’s not even the half of it. It was not formally articulated until 1854.

Yes. No.

Are you serious?

I am dead serious.

So like, so like, like in terms of it being a canonized, uh, uh, uh, sort of Blessed by the church doctrine.

1800s?

Yeah, Pope Pius IX.

I did not see that coming.

Yes, see, there was this notion that we got to figure this out. There’s something going on here, and we’re not sure exactly how to articulate this. And some people thought, eh, we don’t really need this, because, you know, if Mary was sinless, was born sinless, never sinned throughout her life, then she had no need of Jesus’s redemption.

Okay, that’s an interesting problem.

Yeah, that’s what Thomas Aquinas said. Uh, others raised other issues with, with why we, why we need to come up with, uh, um, an idea that Mary was conceived free from original sin. And if we’re doing that, how are we doing it? And then, you know, you have this guy, um, uh, and every time I see his name I want to say Scotus.

I’m pretty sure he’s a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The first time I read an article with that in it, I was like, was this written by AI? Is this really— this is just a hallucination, isn’t it? But yeah, it becomes gradually more and more accepted between the 14th and 18th centuries. And then it’s 1854, the— in effect, and I’m going to pronounce this wrong because my Latin’s terrible— Ineffabilis Deus was the 1854 pronouncement that declared the universal veneration of Mary’s purity and all this. And this is what established the Catholic belief that life begins at conception, because Mary was sinless from conception. Oh, and so it’s two birds with one stone with that doctrine. So the Immaculate Conception is entangled with the doctrine of personhood at conception.

Don’t get an abortion.

Well, yeah, that’s the implication of that particular doctrine.

Right.

But yeah, that’s how we get from folks like Augustine and others talking about, well, Mary was— she was just cool, that’s all. And/or, you know, she had some kind of special exemption, and all the way to— and I’m sure, you know, if we had Michael Peppard back on here, he’d be rolling his eyes. He’d be like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” As a Catholic? Yeah, as someone who is a scholar and knows the language, knows the history, knows the traditions a lot better than the two of us put together. But those are in rough outline.

So are there, other than the— I mean, you listed what, two scriptures? You listed a psalm and something else as sort of the basis for this. Is that really it? Is it like—.

Oh yeah.

Because this doesn’t feel like it needs to happen.

No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to happen until you’ve figured out a whole series of other things that need to happen because of what you have decided the scriptures say need to happen. This is building on an edifice that was constructed over almost 2,000 years of philosophical reasoning about how to make sense of all of this, and it’s all presupposing univocality and all that kind of stuff. Again, it’s all presupposing inspiration, not inerrancy as we understand it today, because that’s another thing that has really only come up in the last couple hundred years, but as a formal doctrine. But yeah, this is just chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of chasing down the implications of— and you know, its implications all the way down until you get to the Bible. And so, yeah, it is not something that you— you don’t read the Bible and be like, well, we have to have the Immaculate Conception.

You’ve got to go through a number of other things that you establish as a theological, a philosophical, a dogmatic foundation, and you’re just accumulating all of this stuff, and it becomes necessary only at the end of all of that accumulation.

It also seems to me that it would— that one of the things that would have had an influence on the development of this idea is just— and I only know this from sort of the artistic world, but it’s very clear that at some point, Mary becomes almost as venerated, if not more at some points, than Jesus himself. Like, Mary is the beloved figure of at very least the art world, which I have to believe has to be a reflection of the sort of theological reality of those times.

Yeah. And there were a lot of different streams of tradition that are coming together for that. The notion that Mary was the mother of God, Theotokos, is the Greek word, and I can’t remember the last time I saw the accent on that word, so I probably accentuated it incorrectly. But yeah, um, from the, the 5th century CE on, she was understood to be holy. And you get to the 1100s and 1200s, and now you start to see, um, a lot of, um, veneration of Mary through, uh architecture and churches, and because like relics became a big deal, and Mary becomes a part of that, and Mary becomes somebody who’s venerated and somebody who starts appearing to people all over the place as this virgin, as the mother of God, as this supremely holy figure who in some way, shape, or form seems to have been without sin.

Yeah, and in a tradition where you have a bunch of intermediaries between you and God and between you and Jesus, Mary is one of the main ones. And so there’s veneration of Mary, and, you know, we’ll have to get some— another Catholic scholar on to talk about the difference between veneration and worship and I don’t know if you’ve seen on Twitter, but my algorithm is shot, shot to crap.

I’m not on Twitter.

I’m not on X anymore.

I left.

I still call it Twitter. That’s how much of a get off my lawn old man I am. But the Protestant hate aimed at Catholics for Mary as well as for just images and things like that is just a sight to behold.

Anyway, it’s crazy. It’s crazy to me. I think Mary is an interesting figure. You know, we mentioned the woman taken in adultery in John earlier in the show. It suddenly occurred to me that when Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” Good thing Mary wasn’t there.

Yeah, they could have trotted out his mom.

She could have chucked a rock and started that woman down a bad path.

Jesus would have had to— Mom!

Mom, stop it!

You’re embarrassing me.

Yeah, okay, so in terms of the Gospels, in terms of the Bible itself, there is no— is there anything about Mary being without sin? Or being— like, is there anything like that?

No. The closest we get is, and this is something a lot of Catholic apologists will appeal to, is at the Annunciation, the angel says, “Hail Mary, full of grace. " And so that word that is “full of grace,” some folks will insist that this can only mean someone who is absolutely without anything other than grace, or, you know, free from sin.

They are full of crap then. She’s full of grace and they’re full of crap.

What’s the- what’s- oh gosh, um, I just keep thinking of Coach Hines from Mad TV. Hail Mary full of bullets. Um, which- that, that’s Keegan-Michael Key’s character. He’s, he’s mouthing off to a nun at a basketball game. Um, oh gosh, good stuff. They don’t make- they don’t make sketch comedy like that anymore. No, they don’t.

I don’t think they make sketch comedy anymore.

Not really.

Alrighty, well, I guess we’ll leave it at that. That- I’m- it’s a fascinating thing.

Your 1854 has just blown my noodle. So that- I’m glad that we had one of those moments in the episode. If you have had your noodle blown, I don’t- that’s not even a saying. But if you have felt like you have gotten something out of this show or any of our episodes, there are ways that you can support us. You could give us 5 stars on, on one of the various places. You can like and subscribe over on our YouTube channel. You can become a patron of the show. And that’s sort of the biggest thing because it is our major source of income here. If you go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, you get to choose what level you want. You can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get access to the after party, which is bonus weekly content, and also just, you know, have a little bit more access to us. Our, you know, 10 dollar a month patrons can ask us questions.

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Bye, everybody.

Immaculate Apologetics?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology