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I think a certain amount of biblical literacy and a certain amount of empowering people to interpret the Bible for themselves is just a critical part of building up a society that can stand up to bullies, people who are going to use the Bible to bully people. And so I think this is like a defense against the dark arts book. This is, this is to help people protect themselves against a very real evil out there.

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan, and today we do not have Dan Beecher, but this is still Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. This is normally where I would ask how Dan is doing, and Dan is traveling right now—he is not near, he is afar, and he wishes he could be here, but we are having me fly solo. So if your audio catches on fire, that’s why, because I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing. But luckily, I am here with two special guests, the authors of a new book from Broadleaf Books, and I assume in association with The Bible for Normal People, but I will get clarification on that in a moment. But our guests today are Jennifer Garcia-Bashaw. She’s a professor at Campbell University and an ordained Baptist minister. And her PhD is in New Testament from Fuller Seminary, and she’s published two books already, Scapegoats and John for Normal People.

And then returning to the show for, I think, the third time—we’ve got to get jackets—for Aaron Higashi, who is a public Bible scholar, much like myself, with a PhD in biblical interpretation from Chicago Theological Seminary, and he is the author of 1 and 2 Samuel for Normal People. Thank you so much for being here, Jen and Aaron. And I’m sorry you had to be a part of our little let Dan fly the plane experiment, but hopefully nobody’s phone catches on fire. How have you all been?

Pretty good. Cold, but—.

Are you on the East Coast? East Coast. Okay. So it’s Hoth right now for you. I was— I I watched the, I mourned the Denver Broncos game the other day, and it was like halfway through the third quarter, it just suddenly started snowing, and it was a whiteout by the time the game was over. And we got nothing where I am. And are you still, you’re not in Arizona, are you, Aaron? Yes, yeah. Still in Arizona, okay.

It is brutally cold, 62 degrees. Shut your mouth. It’s been very difficult.

Well, I’m glad to hear that it got under 100 for part of the year, at least. Yeah. And we’re here to talk about your new book, which I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, just was technically released today? Yes, today. Today. All right. And when you’re hearing this, it will obviously not still be today. It’ll be a couple weeks from now. But yeah, January 27th is today. Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others. And you have a foreword here by Pete Enns. And I’m just curious, the Bible for Normal People affiliated with this book at all, or just Bible for Normal People folks doing their own thing? We’re just doing our own thing.

Awesome. We started talking about the book when we were meeting together, some of the Bible for Normal People. That’s when we started conversations about the book. But no, it’s our own thing. Awesome.

Very exciting to do. Well, congrats on the book. And I even offered a little blurb. I don’t know how helpful it was, but— Extremely helpful. I was honored to be invited to offer that blurb and to endorse the book. I think it’s a wonderful discussion, but on the cover I think some people, when they saw the cover imagined that there was going to be paddling involved or something like that. I don’t know if anybody else noticed that, but we’ve got a serving platter on the cover. And I just want to get to start off by discussing the way you’re framing the book as having to do with cooking and serving. Can you tell us how you came up with this metaphor for how to think about biblical interpretation, private and public?

Sure. Well, Jen and I sat down at the beginning and we’re like, we need a cute metaphor for this book. And I think the first thing that we talked about is like a journey or a quest, which I think is really good. And we would have gotten a lot of mileage out of because in many ways it is. You set off in a particular direction, you bring tools and stuff with you to navigate on that journey. That is all part of the interpretive process. I think there was already a book though that used that if I remember correctly. And so it was getting a little bit too close to that. But my advisor at Chicago Theological Seminary, a biblical scholar named Ken Stone, has written a couple books now using food as sort of a touchpoint for biblical interpretation. And so I’ve always thought about food and Bible together, the way that people interpret passages related to food in the Bible, just the way that cultural anthropology about food can also be helpful when thinking about things in the Bible.

And so I I offered that up as a suggestion. Maybe there’s something here about how interpreting the Bible is kind of like cooking. And it ended up being endlessly helpful. I mean, we got a lot, we got a lot more out of it than I initially thought. I was like, we’re going to make 2 cute points and that’s going to be it. But then it just ended up going and going.

Yeah. And the idea of scripture as food is something we see in the Bible itself. Yes. On multiple different occasions. So, so yeah, there are a lot of points of contact and it seems like it’s a pretty helpful metaphor, but, but can you break down the structure of it? Tell us the main— Jen, maybe you can tell us the main representations here. What are the different ways that food is informing your discussion about the interpretation of the Bible? Yeah, right.

So we talk about how interpreters are like chefs in that it matters who you are and where you come from and what experience and experiences that you’ve had, and that all plays into interpretation, or it plays into how you cook and what you cook, where you cook. So it has to do with the chef. But also, interpretation is like cooking because you have like the main ingredients that you work with, which are like the passages or the verses or whatever that you’re interpreting. But there’s so many different ways that you can prepare that. There’s many different seasonings and dishes from different countries that you can prepare. And that’s like biblical interpretation too. We have these passages, and then depending on what we ask of the passage or what purpose we have for interpreting it, it’s gonna, it’s gonna come out differently. And this is why I really love this metaphor, and it was Aaron’s idea, so I give you full credit, Aaron. Um, but I love it because it kind of takes you through the whole process, and then at the end you have a dish that you serve when you’re cooking and when you are interpreting the Bible, you, you serve it for your family, for your community, people that you love.

Yeah. And it’s going to, it’s going to be different every time.

Or you can serve it for yourself. And if you’re like me, you serve it to yourself over the sink standing. But whatever gets it done. But I appreciated a number of things about the way you approach the question. You start off with, you talked about how the chef matters, and you talked a little bit about biases. And one of the things that I like to harp on so much that I’m sure it irritates a lot of the people who at one point may have made the mistake of subscribing to my channel is how texts don’t have inherent meaning. And when we’re reading, we’re actually, in my nomenclature, we’re negotiating a meaning with the text. And I think that’s an important insight that not enough people have at the forefront when they’re approaching this. But I think you make clear you need to be aware of, you know, you need to have an intentionality, to steal something from the world of yoga. You need to set your intention, so to speak, at the beginning of this study.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you address the problem of the texts really being just a conversation partner with the chef rather than depositories of meaning that we’re just excavating. Yeah.

So the way that we define interpretation in the book is, is to describe it as a process of asking questions of the text. In the absence of those questions, there would be no interpretation. So the text is not itself sitting there generating meaning on its own. Yeah, it’s us bringing questions to the text. And there are lots of different questions that you can bring to this. There are very simple narrative questions that people are really used to asking. Who’s the main character in this passage? What’s happening? What’s the theme? What are characters’ motivations? We’re all used to asking those kinds of questions. But then there are a variety of historical questions you can ask. Who wrote this? When? Where? Why? How? Under what circumstances? There are more complicated literary questions you can ask. What’s the genre? What’s the rhetorical technique that an author is using? There are big theological questions. How is God being represented in this passage? What might I take away from this passage about God if I choose to do that? There are ideological questions about the relationship between gender, race, class, power dynamics in the text.

And we really want to impress upon the reader that in the absence of these questions, the text isn’t doing anything. And your experience, the context in which you’re coming out of, is going to affect which of these questions you think are most worth asking, but, but that doesn’t determine— that doesn’t fix the total number of questions that can be asked, nor is there ever one question that somehow supersedes others.

And part of your background is in what folks call contextual theology, which I think has a lot to do with the kinds of questions that a specific interpretive lens is going to bring to a text. Can you talk a little? We’ve talked about it before on the channel, but just in the context of this book, do you get into contextual theology? What ways might knowing the background of, you know, considering one’s background, somebody whose experiences, whose lenses might fall into the contextual theology category—can you talk a little bit about how an application of that to the interpretation of the Bible? I’m fumbling around trying to ask for an example of one way that this might work.

There are, there are a couple of ways it comes up. One, when I think we talk about early on, is about taking responsibility for our interpretations. So many people, because they don’t think they’re interpreting the Bible from their particular, from their own particular perspective, will say things like, “That’s just what the text says.” Yeah, that I’m not interpreting at all. I’m just reading what the words on the page say. One of the nice things that happens in contextual theology for example, in like Black theology or feminist theology or queer theology, is that theologians and biblical scholars in these traditions are very transparent about where they are coming from. They’ll say, “Because of these experiences I’ve had as a Black American, or because of these experiences that I’ve had as a woman, here is my interpretation.” And so contextual theology serves as a model for how really everybody should be engaging the biblical text. Here is where I’m coming from. It’s not disinterested.

I don’t pretend to be objective. I’m trying to be fair, right? I am trying to be informed, but I’m not objective. I’m coming at this from a particular perspective. And that example then casts in sharp relief those people out there who will say, “I’m just reading the text for what the text says.”

Yeah, yeah. I think for far too long, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, those interpretive lenses have been the defaults. And so they get treated as if they are the point of reference, they are the foundation, as if they are not themselves contextual approaches to the text. And how do you, Jen, I know you also have a lot to add about these questions. And I don’t think I got a sense for—there were times when I could tell who was probably writing—but can you talk about your approach to contextual theology, your background, and how that contributes to the questions that we bring to the text?

Yeah, it has to do with what you were saying. But Aaron and I have been talking about how the white, you know, male perspective is sort of the default perspective. But we were—we had just been talking about how we should just name what it is and call it, “This is white theology. I’m doing male theology. I’m doing this kind of theology.” And then we don’t. Feminists will do it, and womanists will do it, and Black theologians will do it, but we don’t do that. And I think that that has set a lot of people back. And we’re hoping, as we make this more obvious, that we all come from a place and we all have our own theology and our own experiences, once we make that more apparent to them, then we can start calling things what they are, right? Not just for other people, but for ourselves and say, “Oh, I am doing evangelical theology as I read this text.”

And I think a lot of people aren’t aware of how deep into history a lot of these go. Liberation theology, for instance, has a long history, particularly in Latin America and in South America. And a lot of—are there ways that—one of the things that I’ve been engaging with a lot on social media recently is the ways that sometimes the folks whose identities are centered and given priority are poaching some of the insights from contextual theology as if they’re their own. They’re exploiting what minoritized and marginalized and oppressed groups and scholars have generated through those approaches. And I’m just curious if you talk about anything like that in the book, or if you have examples that you’re aware of that you think more people should be aware of.

There are an awful lot of people, particularly right now, who are talking about Jesus in terms of liberation and Jesus and the oppressed, which is really coming out of one of those contextual theology categories. And so I’m just curious if any spring to mind, any other examples spring to mind for y’all. You’re talking about people like appropriating?

Yeah. Appropriating these approaches. I have not seen anybody appropriating those approaches. Okay. I mean, generally speaking, generally speaking, it’s that theology that’s coming from a very centralized white and masculine place fails to identify itself as what it is. And they’re not usually engaged in, or at least I don’t know where they are stealing other things from. I think that this is a perfect moment, especially in America right now with a lot of things that are going on. I think this is a perfect moment for there to be more liberation theology in conversation. There are some great lessons to be learned there about seeing God in the face of the people who are marginalized, seeing God in the face of the people who are persecuted, seeing God in the face of people who are publicly executed. God takes on the form of the oppressed. That’s a major insight of liberation theology, both Latin American and Black.

And so I would love to see more conversation around those.

Liberation theology recognizes that the people who wrote the Bible are speaking from a context of empire, and they are themselves marginalized. And I think, I mean, one way people appropriate that is that, you know, people who are in the majority today, when they read scripture, they identify with the people who are in the minority. They say, well, we’re like the disciples, or we’re like Jesus, instead of realizing that they’re like Herod and they are like Caesar, right? And I say, I think that happens a lot.

Yeah, that’s something I see come up when people bring up Revelation a lot. Because Revelation is about this oppressed minority trying to survive, maintain their kind of ethnic integrity under the boot of empire. And now we have people who literally give orders to regimes and soldiers and things like that who try to identify with the oppressed minority. And it seems to me you have to identify an enemy. Somebody has to be that large empire. And far too often, it is precisely the victims of their oppression who get identified with the enemy, and particularly trans folks and members of other minoritized, marginalized, oppressed classes. They kind of try to flip the tables rhetorically and say, these people who we’re squishing under our boot are the ones who are the beast, who are this empire.

And, you know, we’ve seen, I don’t know if y’all have seen some of the drawings that have gone on lately in the light of Tortuguita’s murder at the hands of DHS agents. I’ve seen drawings, cartoons, showing Jesus in Tortuguita’s place under the, you know, being beaten up by agents. So that reflects exactly that idea that we’re trying to see the face of God in the faces of these folks who are the victims of empire and of fascism and things like that. Something else I really appreciated about the book, which is something I tried to do at the beginning of my recent book, but not nearly in as much detail as y’all do, is you give kind of a brief 30,000-foot view of the different genres of the Bible. Why did you include that in the book? Was this just something that had to come up in the process of talking about ingredients, or were you like, this would be a really helpful tool for readers to be able to, as a kind of a reference tool to go back to?

What were your thoughts?

Well, when I first envisioned this book, it was actually going to be sort of a textbook for my biblical interpretation class. And we spent weeks and weeks talking about the different genres of the Bible, right? Because laying that foundation for how can we read this well, you have to know that the genres of the Old Testament and the New Testament are not the genres that we have today. What are the different features of genres so that you can read them well? And so that becomes such a big part of biblical interpretation that I thought we had to spend time on this because folks in the pews do not know this. They just open the Bible and start reading and they don’t realize that they’re— what is an epistle and why? How should I read it? Or, you know, what is ancient narrative like and how should I read that?

Yeah, that’s such a big insight. I recall I was at Trinity Western University. I was doing my second master’s degree and I was talking with some of the other students in my cohort and they were talking about how they were learning things that nobody ever talked about in the pew or even on the streets. And they were just struggling with how do we communicate this downstream? How do we bridge the gap between the ivory tower and the pews and the streets? And it was something that they really, really struggled with, not only because a lot of it can be very complex. I mean, there’s a way to simplify stuff, but I think a lot of them were mainly worried about how it might come across as threatening to a lot of what was going on in the pews. If they come in and say, you know, if we understand the genre here, it changes how we interpret the text and it helps us to reveal a little more about what the authors might have been trying to get their text to do.

And frequently that can threaten kind of some of the orthodoxies out there. And you do that to some degree in the book as well. You got the peel-off-the-Band-Aid part about contradictions and talking about the multivocality of the text, which I was very pleased to see. Obviously, that’s another one of the things that people are sick of me talking about. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the examples that you used in there and how you felt about writing this part of the book that was probably going to be the most challenging for people who are coming to the book from a confessional, from a devotional point of view?

Yeah, I mean, the, the middle of the book is really dedicated to an academic introduction to the Bible. It’s a miniature introduction to the Bible. It’s obviously not in as much detail as you might find in, in, in a full textbook that’s dedicated to that, but we wanted to give people an opportunity to to see the text in a different light, right? This is how biblical scholars approach the text, so, so that that’s an option that’s on the table and available to you. And, and when you’re going to do that, you have— I mean, if you’re going to read the Bible from left to right, you got to start in Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, and you are going to immediately then run into a major contradiction between the orders of creation in Genesis 1 through the beginning of chapter 2, and then chapter 2 verse 4 or 5 and following, right? There is an immediate contradiction there. And in a way, I mean, I tried to— I think I wrote that part and I tried to frame it in the best way possible. Like, look, this is, this is a benefit to you, right? The Bible is announcing immediately what kind of book it is.

It’s immediately telling you that this is a, this is an anthology of religious literature that’s been collected and edited together. It’s not a book that you can just read straight left to right and understand every one of the many different voices that’s in it. And so I try and do it in an optimistic way and in a friendly way, in a way that’s not going to raise people’s defenses. But yeah, you immediately get into a contradiction because the Bible is a multivocal text that’s been written by so many different people with very different theologies for very different audiences. Studying the genres is part of the multivocality of the Bible. I mean, that’s a feature of the many voices that it’s not just historical narrative, but it is poetry and law and 10 different kinds of poetry and law and epistle and the gospel and history, 3 different kinds of history. And so it can be threatening for people, I think, when we emphasize those human characteristics of the text, when we emphasize the human motivations.

People select genres to write in because of points they want to communicate. And I think that make— can make it feel less like, you know, this is what God is doing. This is more like what people are doing. Yeah, but it is still necessary for being able to interpret, at least in light of what the original author has intended.

The illustration I like to use when I’m speaking in churches, because I can’t usually do the peel the Band-Aid approach like Aaron’s so good at, I don’t usually do that in churches, but, um, the illustration I use is If we were today to read a murder mystery as if it were a cookbook, you would be following instructions and you would commit a murder. You know, like genre is important and we do it automatically in our own contemporary genres, but we don’t do it automatically with ancient genres. And so we have to make sure that we aren’t reading genres in the wrong way because we could cause harm.

Yeah. Well, and that brings up a— I was recently asked a question. Somebody was like, how did the earliest Christians, did they interpret everything literally? And the example I brought up is one that you use in the book. It’s one that I remember reading in a history, John Barton’s book, A History of the Bible, Origen’s Four Levels of Interpretation. Can you talk about Origen’s 4 levels of interpretations and/or interpretation and how that kind of complicates the assumption that Christians have always been inerrantists and have always just believed that we’re just looking for God’s voice in the text?

Right. Oh, we’re going to have to come up with those off the top of our heads.

Oh, well, I guess it’s in the book somewhere. I know it is. It’s okay. Wait, I think I got it. Um, oh, I see, uh, the literal. Yeah, the literal, the logical, the allegorical, the anagogical is, uh, literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. I think that’s Augustine’s. Um, but yeah, those are, those are the four, I think. So the literal sense, the text surface meaning, which refers to real people, places, events from the past. And what I find fascinating is that a lot of times early Christians, particularly the more thoughtful ones, folks like Origen, were kind of like, eh, we’re setting this aside. We’re not really concerned for that. The allegorical, the text’s symbolic or metaphorical meanings. The moral sense, the text’s teaching applied to our own lives. And the anagogical, the text’s spiritual and heavenly significance, which was the bread and butter of Origen’s approach, particularly to things like an imprecatory psalm. That blesses those who bash their babies’ heads against the rock.

And Origen says, “No, no, no, you gotta think about those babies as wicked thoughts. Those are evil thoughts, and you just gotta bash ’em against the—” But there’s a sense in which they’re already trying to salvage the Bible from itself in early Christianity. Do you think this will come as a surprise to a lot of folks who, who are not familiar with, uh, with biblical scholarship when they read this part of the book?

Yeah, I, I imagine it will. I mean, the— especially the priority given to non-literal interpretations of the Bible. I mean, that, that was really the emphasis. And, and I think— I mean, that’s not without reason. It’s because if you want to have a systematic theology of the Bible, like a really coherent, everything lines up and makes sense and you want every passage of the Bible to be able to equally communicate, equally contribute to that theology that you’re building, you have to do it with a non-literal sense because the literal sense is going to contradict itself. The literal sense is going to have God doing awful things. Literal sense is going to have all these problems in it, things that are not actually historical. It’s going to be difficult. But with a figurative thing, right, with a figurative level, whether that be moral, anagogical, or whatever, in that space, you then have the freedom to craft a coherent theology of the entirety of the Bible, right? Without the literal sense getting in the way of that. Literal— you can invite the literal sense whenever it’s useful to you to do so. But in prioritizing the figurative, you can have— and that’s what most people would be approaching the text for, right?

A person 2,000 years ago is not interested in the kind of scholarly questions that people with PhDs are asking about the text today. They don’t care who wrote it and when. They don’t care about the philological questions. They don’t care about the history. They care about their lives and what God is going to do in them. Right. And so the figurative sense is the sense that’s going to give them the answers that they’re looking for. And that’s fine as long as you acknowledge that that’s what you’re doing. Right. And the problem is that people stop acknowledging that. And they’re just like, they— especially today when the priority has more shifted to the literal sense, they want to still find all those systematic doctrines in the literal sense, and they’re not going to find— they want to find the Trinity in the literal sense of, you know, anywhere in the Bible, and they’re not going to find that. You know, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find even a monotheism. You’re already strained enough to do that, let alone a doctrine that did not come until several centuries later and in pieces at that.

Right. So first we need to make people aware of the history. Then we need to get them to see how they are participating in that history. We try and do a little bit of both in the book and that history of interpretation section, and especially Jen’s contributions to that, I think go a long way to to pushing people in that direction.

But you made me start thinking about something that— so the early interpreters of Scripture did have this flexibility that I think is good, but they could have also actually paid attention to genre as well. Like, they could have said the Psalms are a way for the people of Israel to express their feelings, not something that God is saying to us. So they could have done that, but they didn’t do that. So like, we can appreciate their flexibility, but also be like, we’ve learned a little bit since then. We’re asking better questions, you know?

Yeah, I think I was gonna bring up the problem of how, you know, somebody who is committed to the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy or something like that, I think they want to achieve the kinds of things that Origen’s framework facilitated, but they can’t really retreat to Origen’s framework. They’ve gotta stick within that. How do you think they go about renegotiating things? What are the techniques? I mean, y’all travel a lot more in evangelical circles than I do. I’m sure you see a lot more of this than I do. How is that circle squared? Is this an ongoing project today, you know, in the post-structuralist, or they probably are still somewhat stuck in a bit of a modernist perspective, but how is that, how do they try to achieve those things under the strictures of an inerrantist approach? I’m just not aware of what techniques they have.

I mean, I think they prioritize and ignore. I mean, I think they have particular ways of reading Scripture that they prioritize and then they call it the way. And then there are just many things that they ignore, right? It’s like blinders, I think. And they’ve been doing it for a long time, and so they don’t even know they’re doing it anymore. So the—.

It has to get a lot more atomistic. You have to be focused on individual portions, and that, and that kind of makes it easier to, to let the other ship pass in the night without— almost knocked over a huge pile of books, uh, without, without having to engage it. So, um, that’s interesting.

Yeah, there are a lot of qualifications. I, I think of the recent Zondervan publication about inerrancy and the different contributions to that volume. Is it 5?

The 4, 5 views on inerrancy? Wasn’t Pete— didn’t he contribute to it?

He contributed one of the— yeah, obviously my favorite contribution. Since he wrote the foreword, it is obviously— it would have been anyway. But, um, but yeah, you, you see the kind of qualifications that people need to make to the doctrine. So it’s an— it’s inerrant, but in what it teaches. Yeah. And, or, or in what it affirms. And then that— and choosing very carefully the terms that you use there, and then allowing yourself the power to define those terms in whatever idiosyncratic way is going to be necessary. Yeah, that’s kind of how you work it in there, because as soon as you say, well, teaches and affirms, and teaches and affirms is going to be anything that is going to agree with our theology, right? You’ve kind of managed to undercut— you’ve bought yourself as much room as you need. Yeah, right. So if the text makes an error somewhere, well, that’s not in something it teaches or affirms. Right? Or it’s not, you know, whatever terms they want to invent to do that. Yeah. So you have to buy yourself flexibility one way or the other if you want to try and play that inerrancy game.

Something else I’ve noticed—.

Oh, I grew up all around evangelicals, so you’re going to get a lot from me about this. Something else that I’ve noticed is that they, they tend to pay attention to word studies. They like to get like dig really deep into what is the meaning of this word and how do, where do we see it, you know, which is fine, like a Dallas Theological Seminary or something like that would do that. But then they completely ignore how that word functions in a sentence or how that sentence is in a paragraph or in the whole book. They just like dig deep on this word and then they can do whatever they want with it, but they’re just not reading literature, you know. And so I see that over and over.

Yeah, I, I see that a lot. In fact, to— today and yesterday, I, I was talking, I was on social media, as is my wont. It’s my job. I’m, um, but we were, uh, talking about, uh, Acts 7:16 . Stephen, before the Sanhedrin, says, uh, talks about Jacob, and he was buried in the, in the tomb that Abraham purchased from the sons of Hamor in Shechem. And it’s like, wait a minute, no, he was in Hebron. And Shechem was Joseph’s grave that was purchased by Jacob.

It’s, uh, it’s— and it— the author was like, “Everybody will know what I’m talking about.” So because Luke knew the reality and the truth and was just recording what Stephen said, then it’s not— and like, the fancy— yeah, it’s pretty fancy. But, but I, I’ve also been talking to some folks about Genesis 1 and 2, one that I think is always so fascinating to go back to. And the argument that I keep hearing is that, “Oh, Genesis 2 is not chronological,” which is a way to try to kind of simulate literary criticism. And it’s like, “This is a Hebrew literary style.” And it’s like, “It’s a bunch of yiqtol and wayiqtol verbs in a row.” And, you know, and then in verse 8, you’ve got your relative pronoun with a qatal verb, which indicates pluperfect. So it very clearly is saying this happened, then this happened, then this happened, very chronologically.

And so it, yeah, they seem to pick and choose even in the methodologies that they’re going to appeal to in an effort to try to ignore those ships passing in the night. And looking back, in a lot of ways, I think some of the exegetes of early Christianity were more honest about things than folks sometimes are today. Origen, for instance. And I think others would be like, “Yeah, the Gospels conflict in a few places, but it’s no big deal. We’re not really worried about it.” Because they did not have a piece of paper, a statement on inerrancy that they had to— that you know, some administrator was going to email them about if they said something that, uh, that didn’t sufficiently align with it, uh, which is something that a lot of folks deal with, uh, deal with today. Um, now I want to, I want to talk a little bit about the— we were talking about preparing the food. You bring questions to it. Uh, this is one of the, this is one of the things that I find fascinating about scholarship.

Uh, a lot of people, if they ask me questions about stuff and it’s like, “Well, this is really complex.” And they’re like, “I don’t need all that, all that mumbo jumbo. Why can’t you just make it simple?” Well, because the text was not written to answer the specific question that you asked. It was written to achieve something. And then we’re coming to it and asking questions of it that it wasn’t intended to address. Can you talk a little bit about how these— a lot of times the questions we’re bringing to it are not things the text was designed for? Are we— is this comparable to new cooking techniques that we’re, that we’re trying out on, on old recipes? Or how do you, how do you frame the bringing of questions to, to the Bible?

Yeah, well, I mean, one way we talk about it is, I mean, the ingredients that you have, the biblical passages that you have in front of you, already have some significance in your community. They’re the ingredients that your community is familiar with working with. And then there’s often an expectation that you prepare those ingredients in a certain way according to whatever the norms of that community are. And there is some social danger involved in doing it otherwise, in preparing a particular meal in a way that’s different or new. “Did you try something new in this dish tonight? It’s terrible.” Or, “Did you try something new? It’s been made better.” And the thing about it is—.

I can’t use rum in any of my cooking in my neighborhood ‘cause it’s all Mormons, so yeah. That’s difficult.

Or I think, you know, I make a lot of simple dishes for my kids, for example. They are very picky eaters, something they’ve inherited from both my wife and I. And so you end up cooking very limited things and it’s a bit of a risk to try and prepare something else. You’ve got a palate. Yeah, a very set palate that we’re trying to diversify, but it’s difficult. But that’s a good analogy for biblical interpretation. Your community is already used to interpreting the Bible in some ways, and so it looks very strange. It runs afoul of their tastes in a very visceral way to interpret the Bible otherwise. But there’s also the opportunity there to encounter other people, other cultures, other experiences. And if you can make that exciting for people— “We’re going to eat this new food at a new restaurant, and it’s with a new setting”—and if you can make that exciting for people, both with food and with biblical interpretation, then you can get them outside their comfort zone a little bit.

And so the chapter where we introduce a lot of the historical and theological questions, that’s an opportunity, an invitation to people to explore ways of interpreting the Bible and questions that they can ask of the text that perhaps they haven’t thought of before.

I was just thinking about how a lot of times with the Gospels, people will ask their big question that they come to it is this, this is how it happened. Is this how it happened or why did it happen this way? And it’s not a terrible question, but it’s not a question that the text is answering, right? Instead, to get them to ask ask more literary questions like, why would the author say it this way? Or why would Luke put this in the beginning of his gospel instead of the end? You know, that just gives him actually more to work with and more questions to ask. Um, so I think that’s one way too.

Yeah, I, I think it’s such a fascinating metaphor to use now. And now that I think more about how, how food is, is so deeply entwined in culture- like, food, dress, language are the three main markers of of culture. So, so there’s some more- there’s, there’s a lot of additional flexibility to that. And I was thinking, as, as you were talking, Aaron, about how the- my kids, when I try to feed them stuff they’ve never had before, generally it’s like, I’m not gonna like this, you’ve never had it. And they go, And I hate it. And I’m curious, and Jen, you kind of talked about that your topic was somewhat related to this as well. Do you all have experiences with people trying something new when it comes to Bible interpretation and being fascinated by it?

Because in my experience, the critical lenses that I’ve brought to the Bible, that I’ve seen other people bring to the Bible, makes it so much more interesting, makes it so much more fun because I don’t already know what to expect. So many theological communities, you know what to expect and you’re not allowed to have anything that you don’t already expect. And so I think that’s a wonderful metaphor. But if you had experiences in the classroom, on social media, elsewhere with, with people discovering how much they love a new approach, to interpreting the Bible?

I feel like I just talked, but-.

Oh, no, I just talked. It’s your turn.

Oh, okay. Some of the easier ones that I’ve seen light up students’ faces before are some pretty basic feminist interpretations of the text, showing them alternative ways of interpreting, you know, 1 Timothy 2 , or showing them so many women in the church at the end of Romans, you know, just pointing these things out and asking the right question, like, who benefits from reading it this way versus who benefits from reading it this way? That, that can- I mean, in the classes that I taught, if I’m teaching 100 undergraduates 65 of 70 of them are women. And so being able to show them women’s voices and alternative ways that empower women in the text is a very easy way, or at least I’ve had a lot of success with giving them an alternative way to look at the text.

Occasionally, one that I got dozens of messages after I made a TikTok was talking about a queer interpretation of Genesis 3 . This I can’t take any credit for. I read it in one of my advisor’s books. But there’s a way to read Genesis 3 in which Eve is originally a queer person prior to her disobedience, because part of her disobedience is the consequence of it is desire for her husband. So previous to that, it must have been- her desire must have been directed elsewhere. Either she was asexual in some way, or her desire was directed towards herself, or perhaps towards God, but not towards a man. That heterosexual desire is a consequence of the fall and therefore not an ideal condition, right?

I think a lot of women would agree that’s a curse.

So maybe this would even help some straight women, but I had a number people. It’s a relatively small observation, and it’s just a shift in perspective to ask the right question, like, who benefits from reading it this way, right? Who benefits? I mean, there are still a lot of, you know, fundamentalists who will read this and be like, and this is why women must depend on men and why they must invest all their time and energy and effort into men when it’s really- but if you just sort of shift your perspective to, no, this is a consequence. But this is not the ideal state. None of the punishments there are idealized states of affairs. That was whatever happened before. And I got a number of messages.

Yeah, I’m sure there are a lot of folks who talk about how, “Oh, that’s the consequence of a fallen world.” So is that. Right, exactly. So are we going to overcome that as well? Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we do.

I mean, for all the other ones, we try to overcome them. We try and overcome the difficulty of agriculture. We try and overcome death, you know, in all sorts of different ways. Adam’s consequences. We try and overcome pain in childbearing. I mean, epidurals are there for a reason. But the one that we haven’t really tried to overcome collectively is, you know, is Eve’s desire for Adam. And that’s because trying to do that would chip away at heteronormativity and the power that, you know, straight folks have to just be able to claim that, you know, their desires happen to be the God-ordained desires.

Yeah, there’s a— and I imagine that in a classroom there are going to be a lot of folks who are members of institutions where that is something that’s even enforced. I have seen people who have been hesitant to, to take up more critical approaches precisely because it’s a threat to whatever worldview is is being imposed upon them. And so just for their own protection, they have to, they have to keep it at arm’s length. But, but yeah, those, those are a couple of wonderful examples. Did you have any that you thought of, Jen?

Yeah. I mean, when you were talking about queer readings, this isn’t even necessarily a queer reading. I think it’s, it is, but it’s also historical reading. But when I have students in class who are of some sort of sexual minority, and we start asking questions of the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, or just even calling him a sexual minority, and then seeing how, you know, Philip was going to baptize him, and he says, “Is there anything to keep me from being baptized?” The Ethiopian eunuch says that, and Philip just goes ahead and baptizes him. Like, when we ask questions of who the people are in their historical context, then they start seeing themselves better in the text. Yeah. Um, and I think that is really freeing for many students.

Yeah, I— it’s such a, it’s such a tragedy that, that virtually all the characters in, in the Bible are, are men. Um, and I have, I have, I live in a house with a wife and three daughters, and so I, my perspective, my understanding of— I, I still, you know, obviously can never experience the world the way a woman does, but I have those experiences around me a lot more regularly, so I’m a lot more aware of them. But now I see stuff and I’m like, “Oh, the main character’s a girl! My daughters will love this!” And they see themselves in that. There are so many stories of that. And I think just telling those stories, even if you don’t have to necessarily interpret them for people, but but they will find themselves in them. I love in Isaiah that the eunuchs are basically banned from the temple in most of the Hebrew Bible, but according to Isaiah, in that day, you know, the eunuch will have a monument in the temple and will be better than many sons and daughters, will be better off.

So, yeah, I think there are a lot of interesting ways we can bring some of those, those identities, experiences to the surface. And, and yeah, I, I’m always surprised by how few people are aware that a lot of those stories are in the Bible. And I’ve always wondered if, you know, when somebody goes to a college classroom or on social media or somewhere else, discovers this feature of critical scholarship, how they feel about how the text has been represented to them by the authority figures in their lives. This was something I thought about when I was writing one of the stories for God’s Stories, the children’s storybook Bible for The Bible for Normal People. I was, I think, intentionally assigned Jeroboam and Rehoboam, like not the most exciting story, but but it was funny. I had to try to come up with a way to tell a story of violence and these kinds of things in a way that I didn’t want to misrepresent the story.

Because one of the things I hear all the time is from people who come to me and say, you know, “I didn’t know any of this. You opened my eyes to all this kind of stuff.” A lot of them feel betrayed. About the way that they were raised to think about the Bible. And when they see that there’s this vast, you know, endless horizons of ways to approach the Bible and to find themselves in the Bible, a lot of them feel betrayed. It’s what I imagine it’s like for people to try Dr Pepper after a lifetime of not having it and being like, why wasn’t I allowed to? To have this when I was a kid.

I mean, I don’t do cognitive anything, but I think at the end of the day, we believe a lot of what we believe in general because we trust the people who told us whatever it is rather than some unbiased evidential investigation of whatever it is.

Well, they told me 9, so—.

Well, yeah, I got 9 in kindergarten too, and then I had to update it. It’s a traumatic thing. But I think, yeah, so when you are confronting people with different approaches to the Bible, there is that extra layer, that feeling of betrayal, you know, is very real. When people start seeing the text for what it actually is, or even just seeing the text in different ways. Because, I mean, their belief—when the belief changes, they then have to reckon with that community that gave them that belief. These things are always attached together. It’s not just, oh, I was persuaded of one thing and now I am persuaded of another. It’s, I—my mind has changed and now I have to go back and really redefine my relationship to the community that gave me that belief. Yeah. And so it is, it’s difficult in a way that it might not be for some other, you know, matter of fact where, uh, it’s a less, it’s a less a kind of social knowledge.

Yeah, I think the, um, that’s a feature of the human experience that I think can sometimes be detrimental to some of the religious communities that train up children in certain ways, because that feeling of betrayal results in abandonment of those traditions. There are an awful lot of people who, once they hit their teen years or get into college or they’re in their 20s, they suddenly are like, “Everything they were telling me was wrong. I reject that now.” And I think more open communities that allow people to be more flexible and to bring different kinds of questions to the text, I think tend to—they tend to have more porous and fuzzy boundaries, which is not great for the institutions. It’s not great for the hierarchy and the authority and stuff like that. But I think it is much greater for the well-being of the folks who are involved, that they can feel free to come and go.

I think maybe in situations where they do feel betrayed, it might not—all of the blame might not be laid at the feet of the institution. But yeah, and you and Jen, I don’t know the degree to which you do social media content creation. I know I’ve seen you on a little bit. I know Aaron, Aaron and I engage a lot. And, and I imagine that we both have people with those kinds of experiences reaching out to us and talking to us. I know I certainly do. Is that your experience as well, Aaron?

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s been a lot. I mean, I wish I had—I honestly wish I had more time. I feel guilty not spending more time with the people who do reach out, but it gets to be so much at a certain point where, you know, it’s, it’s very strange to open TikTok to 50 messages from people you don’t know who are in various states, you know, who are like, “You caused my deconstruction,” and that, you know, “And you now you need to take responsibility for it, for guiding me through this process.” Wow, I don’t know, I don’t know if I can, if I can do that. I wish I had enough of me to do that. I just, I don’t.

But you have a much harder job, I think, on social media than I do in the classroom, because I see these people every week, right? And I can give them like a soft landing. You know, I can tell them, you know, the umbrella of Christianity is much bigger than you think it is. And it’s okay that if you go in a different direction than your pastor or your father, you can still be under the umbrella. You know, I can put that from the very beginning into my classes, and so then they feel like they have flexibility. They’re not going to get pushed out of the church or anything like that. But you all are encountering people, one-offs maybe, and it must be much harder to try to encourage them in their deconstruction or whatever it might be.

I think it is definitely hard if you’re trying to engage with as many of them as you can. Because that’s—and that’s a lot of emotional labor to expose yourself to their experiences, particularly if there is trauma, if there is abuse and things like that, which is why I am incredibly selective in what I choose to engage. But I’ve seen recently the overwhelming majority of the messages that I get are, “This has helped me heal from trauma, from, you know, I’ve repaired relationships because now I understand what they’re thinking.” And people have said, “Oh, now I can go back to my old faith.” Or people say, “You made me feel good about leaving my faith entirely, and now I don’t have the guilt or the shame that I used to have.”

But it is such a privilege to be able to see that working in the lives of other people. People ask me if I get an awful lot of hate mail, if I get a lot of angry messages. And the reality is I get barely any. I don’t know if the experience is the same for you, Aaron, but I get like maybe one a month. And that’s— and that’s— I get thousands of messages a day. And so it’s— I think it’s— this kind of stuff does a lot of good for people. I think even people who feel threatened by it initially, I think if they can lower their guard, I think they can find ways to incorporate features of a critical approach that allow them to, to maintain what they like about their approach to the Bible and add more to it to make it richer and deeper. Can, can we conclude by just talking about what you hope this book achieves for people, who you, who you think should read this book, what you hope they get out of it?

Yeah, that’s a good segue because you were just talking about people healing. And I think that if what we have written can help people heal and move forward, um, to understand themselves better, to understand the Bible better, um, I think, I think it would be worth it.

Yeah, I, I think the answer has changed a little bit for me just in the time that we’ve spent writing it and, and now it’s come out. Initially we were like, this would be great in, you know, like freshman-level courses and in churches and stuff, and I still think that’s true. The more time that’s gone on, the more people’s hands I think it would be good for, the more people’s hands I’d like to see it in. I mean, we live in a world where there are people all the time trying to use the Bible very publicly, very loudly in support of— I mean, today, now it’s just like literally fascism, white supremacist fascism. I mean, I started— I got interested in biblical interpretation back in college in the Bush years because you know, there was some public Bible talk around the war on terror, you know, and but that was abroad and that was, you know, that was more diffuse and stuff. And it’s only gotten more pressing and more immediate. And so now I think a certain amount of biblical literacy and a certain amount of empowering people to interpret the Bible for themselves is just a critical part of building up a society that can stand out to bullies, people who are going to use the Bible to bully people.

And so I think this is like, this is like a Defense Against the Dark Arts book. This is to help people protect themselves against a very real evil out there.

Yeah, I agree. And I appreciated this book an awful lot. And I hope that it does reach the folks who, who need healing, who have been traumatized, who have been hurt, who are trying to find a way to belong, trying to find a way to escape. Trying to find a way to repair relationships, trying to find a way to find their identity or feel better about their identity. And yeah, we’re all, as I’m wont to say, we’re all negotiating with the text in one way or another. And I think it can only be helpful to make others aware that they have the authority to negotiate on their own behalf with the text and to help others do the same. Uh, any— and, and yeah, I like that you brought up bullies because, because every time I try to condense down my, um, my rage and my position on, on so many things related to how people are misusing the Bible— I saw a pastor today on Twitter citing, uh, Deuteronomy, your, your eye shall not show any pity, um, which is literally about genocide.

Yeah. Um, what— but what I always come back to is a line from Captain America. I don’t like bullies. And yeah, people who use the Bible to facilitate bullying, I think, yeah, I think they’ve got a big problem. And hopefully this book will go an awful long way to helping people overcome some of the things that maybe the Bible has done to them in the past. Well, Jen and Aaron, thank you so much for being here. We’re out of time. Thank you, everybody, for listening or for watching. I’m gonna try to do the outro on my own, and I completely forgot that I was responsible for doing this today, so I have nothing prepared. But in short, thank you so much. We appreciate you very much. You’re the reason that this show can be made. And if you would like to contribute to helping this show go, the preferred way of doing that is at patreon.com/dataoverdogma.

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