What Is The Bible?
The Transcript
There are an awful lot of people on social media who just lap that up. They just suckle that garbage from the fetid and swollen teat of this fascist regime because it makes them feel good about being on the right team. Right. And I think the point of the Beatitudes is what the world imagines to be the right team and the team that’s going to win is the wrong team. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan. And I’m Dan Beecher. And this is 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. How are things today, Dan? Things are good. I’m looking forward to this one. We got a lot. It’s, it’s, it’s fun stuff that we’re going to be discussing today. We’re going to be challenging some people. Uh, yeah, here we’re— matter of fact, we’re going full combat mode in terms of the misinformation out there. Uh, yeah, you always talk about us combating. Yes, uh, we’re gonna get our battle rattle on and really get out into it because, all right, uh, at very least in the second half of the show, we, we got to go up against the Department of Homeland Security. So that’s going to be— yeah, that’s going to be some rough stuff. That’ll be a lot of fun. Uh, and the Department of War, if you’re nasty. And they are. And they are very, uh, but no, we’re— this is just DHS mostly. Anyway, we’ll, we’ll get to it. Uh, before that though, we’re gonna do a What’s That? And it’s sort of maybe the biggest What’s That? We have. It’s a doozy for this show, uh, because it’s going to be— what, what’s that? The Bible. So that’s a big one. So maybe we should just dive right in to What’s That? So, Dan, what is that? The Bible. The Bible. Yes, this is the big one. It’s— and kind of the thesis statement of this What Is That is that there is no such thing as “The Bible.” How dare you, sir? I dare. This coming from a guy who wrote a book called “The Bible Says So.” Yes, and where I went in and said, “First, there’s no such thing as the Bible, and second, there’s no such thing as the Bible saying anything at all.” And I was like, “Look, I didn’t come up with the title. The publisher said you gotta call it something.” I have to state my own theory. You may stop reading now. Yes. No, and I actually talk about this in, after the introduction, the first chapter, I talk about the fact that, look, just like, and I go off on, don’t get me started on the dictionary, because there’s no such thing as the dictionary. There are dictionaries, but there’s no the dictionary. People speak about it as if we have all agreed on one universally authoritative, consistent dictionary. And that’s just not true. And the same is true—. Merriam-Webster and Johnson and every big dictionary writer has all agreed on everything that’s in all of them. Oxford—. Big dictionary is such an infelicitous phrase, but big dictionary energy, I think, ought to be. Yeah. Anyway, we are— just like there’s no such thing as the dictionary, there’s no such thing as the Bible. And I want to talk about 3 different judgments that you have to make before you can even get to what you think is the Bible. And, and I want to start with the canon, because we frequently talk about the Bible as if we all agree on what books are in the Bible. And the reality is that we can find collections of texts that constitute what we would call a Bible that don’t agree with what Christians today think of as the canon. We can find canons among Christian groups that differ. We can find canons within Jewish groups that differ. In fact, you know, probably the smallest biblical canon is that of the Samaritans, which is just the 5 books of Moses, and that’s it. And this is related to the Sadducees from the New Testament, which rejected the scriptures after the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of Moses. So that’s a Bible, and none of us can say, “Well, that’s not the Bible.” Or none of us can say, “That’s the wrong Bible.” That’s definitive. I mean, they have it, yes, authoritatively. I love the idea that none of us can say, because boy, lots of us do say that they know what is definitively and authoritatively the Bible, whether it be their, you know, their Protestant Bible with however many books in there, or they’re, you know, I think Old Testament, Catholic Bible. Yeah, yeah, you jump to Catholic, you go up a bunch of books. You go to Eastern Orthodox, you go up a bunch more books. You go to Ethiopian Orthodox, and I don’t think it’s done. I think it’s— there’s still more coming every week. Yeah, orders of magnitude larger. You’ve got I think the most expansive is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s canon, which has significantly more books than the Armenian, than the Eastern Orthodox, than the Catholic, than the Protestant. And yeah, so nobody can authoritatively say this one’s the real one and the other one is not. Now, when you’re speaking for your group, yeah, you can say this is what we like, Yeah, we don’t like the other one, but you’re just speaking for your group. This is our Bible. It’s not the Bible. And so the first question I think that you got to answer is related to canon. How many books are in your Bible? Which are those books? And we’ve talked about the canon before, the development of the canon, a very slow process that was done rather arbitrarily based on a lot of factors, some a lot of them ad hoc. People will talk about how well these were the criteria that a book had to meet in order to make it into the Bible. And if you look at the history of this, it’s not what happened. What happened is they said, these are our books, and then people came in later and said, what criteria can we use to rationalize why these are the ones we landed on? Right. And they come up with criteria, and there are exceptions to all the criteria that they come up with. But before we—. The criteria that were used to exclude books I mean, you know, you look at Martin Luther and it was just like, “Nah. " Like, a lot of his was just like, “I don’t like—” Not a fan. “That one’s not, that one doesn’t cut the mustard for me, so it’s out. " And even when we go to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, like, he also cut out Hebrews and James and Revelation. And it wasn’t just the Apocrypha that he said, “We’re gonna put these in a separate section. " That’s what ultimately stuck, but not initially. And then all his other stuff about the other books from the New Testament, people were like, “Shut up, Martin. We’re taking these back. " We liked those ones. We’re leaving them. And once you get to the Counter-Reformation and the formation of the deuterocanon and the formalization of the canon within the Catholic Church, then you’ve got kind of a graded canon. But, but the, the point there is that you— this is a question you have to answer, and your answer cannot be authoritative universally. Your answer cannot be objectively correct. It’s just what you prefer, or what your group prefers, or a rule that someone enforces. You— there’s no objective correct answer to that. So right off the bat, you’ve got one question that’s going to determine what you think the Bible is, and you cannot be objectively right about it. Um, and then the next question that comes up is the manuscripts that you are going to use to cobble together your canon. Because, uh, you know, whether we’re talking Christian, Jewish, the Samaritan, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, there are a lot of different manuscripts that are available for us to draw from in order to form our, uh, our Bible. And so even in English today, Protestant Bible, let’s say we got our 66-book Protestant canon, we have— you can look at the, you’re going to look at a variety of different ways to cobble it together. Are you going to go from, for the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic Text? What New Testament critical texts are you going to use? Are you going to use the UBS4 or 5? I think they’re coming out with— they got a 6 that just came out, the NA28? I think they got a 29 that’s about to come out. Are you going to go back to the Textus Receptus? Which edition of the Textus Receptus are you going to use? For the Hebrew Bible, are you going to incorporate readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls? What about the Septuagint? The Jewish Study Bible and the JPS Tanakh sticks a lot more dogmatically to the Leningrad Codex, which is kind of the representative manuscript of the Masoretic tradition, and they are a lot less willing to alter a reading based on a reading in the Septuagint or in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we like better. You can go to Greek Orthodox, they are going to use the Septuagint. Like, I have a Bible that’s just the Septuagint on one page and the facing page is modern Greek translation of the Septuagint. And so their Old Testament is going to be very different from the Old Testament of an English-speaking Protestant. So the main difference—. Sorry, I just wanted to touch just briefly on a thing that you said, because it’s interesting that of course you would need it because they’re not even the same language, but interesting that you would have a Greek translation of a Greek book. Well, and you can— I’m sure there are editions out there of like Beowulf or something like that where it’s the Old English on one side and then you’ve got a contemporary English translation on the other. Maybe there aren’t editions like that. I don’t know. I mean, there should be. Yeah. You get to like Chaucer or whatever and it’s like— and that’s only a few hundred years ago. Or that’s not, you know, that’s not thousands of years of difference. So. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the manuscripts that you use, that’s a question you have to answer. And once again, there’s no way to say this is objectively the right answer. All you can say is this is what we prefer. And so you are now two steps removed from being able to say this is the Bible. And then a third question that you have to answer is what translation you’re going to go with. ‘Cause while there are an awful lot of people who would say, “Well, let’s go back to the Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible, let’s use the Greek for the New Testament,” the number of people who are actually consuming the Bible in the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek is vanishingly small. Yeah. The devotional readers of the text in those original languages who may be able to access the, you know, the, uh, the manuscripts that they’ve chosen and the, the canon that they’ve chosen is a very, very small portion of all of the people who are reading the Bible devotionally. The overwhelming majority of people— and, and going back to the, the Septuagint, even people who have grown up their entire lives speaking Greek, and maybe they only speak Greek, they’re consuming the Septuagint if they’re part of the Greek Orthodox tradition. In translation as well, most likely, right? And so then you’ve got to decide, well, am I using the Katharevousa, uh, older Greek, or am I using a new, uh, they usually call, uh, Demotic translation, a more modern Greek translation? Which— whose translation is it? The Spiros Filos, or, or is it another one? There, there are— even for someone who speaks the language in which it was originally written the majority of those folks are going to be consuming it in translation, and they have choices regarding which translation they’re going to be using. And when it comes to English speakers, forget about it. There are tons and tons of different translations. Yeah, dozens. You know, you have people getting phenomenally dogmatic about which English translation is the right one or the best one. And the most dogmatic ones are the ones who are convinced that the worst translation is the right one. Yeah, yeah. If the King James Version was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for me is the old joke. But the old joke that most people who are dogmatically holding on to the King James wouldn’t understand. Like, if you’re that set on it has to be KJV, you don’t get that joke. And I’ve recently talked about some of the ways that you can tell if your translation is being dogmatic. Like, for instance, I— we, you know, our policy on the Data Over Dogma show is that we use the NRSV-UE, the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version, at least unless and/or until a better translation comes out. But you’ve got a lot of folks who like— there are 3 translations that I see an awful lot in my engagement with evangelical content creators and scholars: the ESV, the NIV, and the LSB. Have you ever heard of the LSB? No. Okay, that is the Legacy Standard Bible. Oh, and it’s MacArthur’s revision of the New American Standard Bible. So the NASB is the translation, and then John MacArthur facilitated this revision that they now call the Legacy Standard Bible, the LSB. And weeks ago I made a video where I talked about one way to tell if your Bible translation is, is being dogmatic. It can’t tell you you have a good translation, but there’s one verse you can look at to tell you if you have a bad translation. Okay. And I think we’ve probably touched upon it at least once on the show at some point in the past, but Genesis 2:19
, you have the creation account in Genesis 2
where God creates the human, God puts the human in the garden, God scratches their head and says, “Hmm, it’s not good that the human is alone. I will make a,” and then we’ve got our ezer kenegdo, a suitable companion or a helpmeet or whatever for him, and then in verse 19, It says, “And God formed from the dust of the earth the animals of the field,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and on and on. But the problem with this is that it kind of screws up the order of creation, because according to Genesis 1
, the animals were all formed before the human. And so what they do is they go in and they say, “Okay, it’s not that God formed from the dust of the earth the animals.” God had formed. So they translate this verb as a pluperfect or a past perfect, and that way they can say, oh, they had already been created. We’re just kind of catching you back up on what happened previously in the narrative. And the NIV, the ESV, and the LSB all translate it that way. And so I basically say, look, if your translation uses the pluperfect at the beginning of Genesis 2:19
, well, there’s your problem. You got a dogmatic translation. It can’t tell you you have a—if it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t mean you have a good translation. But if it does say that, you got a bad translation. Yeah. Or at the very least, a translation that has an agenda, and that agenda overrides better translation. Yeah. Yeah. And what’s funny is the LSB, that Legacy Standard Bible, it’s a revision of the NASB. The NASB doesn’t use the pluperfect, so when they revised this, they were like, uh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna add the pluperfect here. We’re gonna make this translation worse. But it’s basically them saying, yeah, we have imposed this dogma of univocality. We’re not—the text is not allowed to disagree, right? We’re going to alter the text in translation to force it to agree, um, whether it likes it or not. And it doesn’t. So, um, you’ve got choices to make about the translation as well. And so once you’ve—you know, you—and, and most people, most traditions, they’re not involved in these decisions. A lot of people don’t even know that they’re happening, right? Of course. I think most people that read the Bible have no idea that there’s like infighting essentially among different translations, among different versions. Yeah, I think most folks in the Christian tradition, in the US anyway, they’re aware there are different translations out there, and they’re probably aware that there is disagreement about which translations are good, which translations are bad. I see folks on social media, evangelical influencers, say, here are the translations that I use. And what’s funny is they usually recommend multiple translations, um, and, and it’s, it’s usually in an attempt to try to give you this notion that you get to kind of negotiate yourself between the translations to figure out which reading you like the best, even if you have zero qualification to assess the quality of any given translation compared to another translation. It’s just, well, which one sets off the tuning fork in your loins. So I think the translation question is one that people are aware of, and most of them are aware of the canon question as well. But the canon is something that’s kind of already done and dusted for most traditions. You don’t really have a say in that. You can’t really go into a church and be like, well, I like these two canons, and I would just go back and forth between them. You know, on your own dime, maybe that works. But if you try to stand up at the pulpit and say that in most traditions, you’re not going to be long for that pulpit. Yeah, you end up pulling out Bel and the Dragon in an Anglican church and see what happens. Yeah, you’re going to ride the lightning, that’s for sure. And then the manuscript one, I think, is the one that the people are least aware of, least familiar with. I think the folks who are KJV-onlyists, that has to be part of their dogma, right? Because one of the big differences is between the critical text and the Textus Receptus. And so I see a lot of folks on social media who are like, “The critical text is Alexandrian, dirty, dirty Alexandrians. We’ve got to get back to the Byzantine tradition. The Textus Receptus is the true, you know, the true manuscript tradition.” So there are certainly traditions where that sits a little closer to the surface, but I think for most evangelicals around the US today, they’re most aware of and have the most say in the translation question. They are less aware of and have less say in the canon question. And then a lot of them are not even aware of and have little say in the manuscript question, even though all three of them are critical to what ends up giving them their Bible, right? But like, you can, you know, the NRSV, they have Catholic editions of the NRSV. Yeah. And most of them have the Apocrypha in it already. The NRSV, I think maybe they publish translations of the NRSV-UE that don’t have the Apocrypha, but everyone I’ve ever seen has the Apocrypha in it. Sure, because it makes sense. You want sort of one— that one’s more universal. It’s like blood types. This one can go to both Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants can just sort of not use those ones or whatever. Yeah. But you’ll have some translations where they have an Orthodox edition, they have a Catholic edition, they have a Protestant edition. And so they’re trying to play the field a little bit as well with the canon question. But the point is there is no “the Bible.” There are Bibles, and when you like a Bible, when you say, “This is my Bible,” that’s because either you have participated in or you have just accepted the decisions of others who have participated in those three questions: what books are going to make up our Bible, what manuscripts of those books are we going to use to cobble together our Bible, and what translation are we going to prioritize? And there are an awful lot of translations out there, and some of them better than others, but an awful lot of them are quite dogmatic. And that’s because I think they see the most wiggle room in how to kind of curate a Bible that best serves their interests. Translation is kind of the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to how we’re going to manipulate this Bible into what we need it to be. And as we’ve seen with the one example of Genesis 2:19
, you can just take the Bible and say, “You’re not allowed to say that, Bible! I tell you what you’re allowed to say.” Right. And so that when it comes to the NIV, the ESV, the LSB, that’s people telling the Bible what it’s going to be. Yeah. And I think there’s a degree to which it’s their Bible in the sense that they have crafted it in their own image rather than, you know, endorsed the Bible as it has come down to them. So I think the translation issue is the one where you see an awful lot of opportunity to manipulate. And to curate precisely the kind of Bible that is going to help you do what you want to do, which unfortunately, far too often these days involves politics and the rights of others who are not a part of your tradition. Well, and the other thing that’s, you know, you talk about the translation issues and the manuscript issues and whatever, but people don’t even realize that the manuscript thing— before there were even translations that brought it into English or whatever, there were people handwriting this for thousands of years. Yeah. And inserting their own stuff and taking out their own stuff. And like, those manuscripts don’t match up with each other throughout the centuries. So you got, you got a translation of a manuscript that was a rewriting of another manuscript that somebody got a wild hair and decided to add something about a lady caught in adultery or whatever. And then, yep, boom, you just— you like— it’s— yeah, it, it’s not— it’s not like God didn’t reach down his hand and scribble all of these words in a way that would easily just be then transmitted perfectly to everybody else. Yeah, what the Bible is changes over time as well, depending on time, place, people, circumstance. All those things are changing what the Bible is. So it’s a moving target as well. And it’s interesting, and I don’t know, I think we’ve mentioned it before. I don’t think we’ve talked about it in any kind of depth. But my tradition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, recently implemented a new Bible translation policy where they’re now endorsing multiple translations. The KJV is still the official one, but they’re now saying, “Hey, go wild. Here’s what we like for different reading levels.” And they have the NRSV-UE on there, and they have the NIV, which, you know, when I was running testing on English translations years ago as a Scripture translation supervisor, kind of had to plug my nose and write in a report that that’s the one that everybody liked, even above the KJV when it came to language register and style and stuff like that. And I think that’s interesting that we’ve moved from— well, the Latter-day Saints started off without any kind of de jure translation that was correct. You could use whatever translation you like. The King James Version was kind of the de facto translation until that became a significant question when they were starting to publish new translations following the critical text. And then we kind of, we decided, no, we’re King James Version people. And now we’re moving away from that and saying, hey, try other translations. Yeah, I got to think you had some influence on that decision. I had some influence on that decision for sure. But a large part of it was the fact that we were trying to provide translations into other languages for folks who didn’t speak English. And there’s no, you know, a lot of people think, well, don’t we just have the King James Version in our language? They differ And so we found ourselves more and more frequently having to respond to issues where, well, we want to teach this thing in this General Conference talk or in this article for the magazine, but the other languages, their Bibles say something different, so what do we do there? And English speakers imagine that they’re getting the experience in our church, but the reality is that it’s been generations that folks who speak other languages have known that there are a lot of different ways this stuff gets translated, and the church has to kind of grapple with that, and they’re aware that it’s a lot fuzzier than we would like it to be. And so I think that’s one of the things that forced the hand of the church to say, “Okay, even English speakers can play in that fuzziness. Go use some other Bible translation.” So it’s something that is undergirding everybody’s experience of the Bible that most people have never even thought of. And I think it’s so interesting because the other thing that the Bible isn’t is a book. Like, people are like, it is at best a compendium. You know, it’s a library of books, and they’re very, very different, and they’re very different in their approach, and they’re very different in what they’re trying to accomplish. And they’re like, the idea, you know, I see all of these creators, these Christian creators online who talk about, you know, a thousand, you know, dozens of authors over thousands of years in multiple languages, blah, blah, blah. And they’ve never, and it never disagrees. And it’s like, uh, have you read this thing? Yeah, you, you literally have to not read it to come to that conclusion. Yeah. Or just read it the way most people read it, which is just get through the words and understand a few of the stories, and then just like the rest is just, I don’t know. Yeah. If you’re just kind of passively reading the text, you’re just going by your intuition. You have to actually think about who’s writing this, to whom are they writing it, why are they writing it, what were they trying to accomplish with it? What were the circumstances of this writing? You know, and that is phenomenally hard. A lot of people don’t have the time. A lot of people don’t have the—. Nobody has the time. Like, you— Everybody that meets at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, they have the time, and the rest of us are just like, you know, we’re just trying to keep our heads above water when we read that thing. Yeah, yeah. And, and that all that does is you’re— is impose your own kind of intuitive lenses upon the text. You’re just going to read it as if it was, um, something for you. And, and, you know, the fact that we have a canon and we’ve kind of delineated this set of texts, and then we’ve put it all within, um, a front and back cover and hopefully a spine, um, that makes it seem like a book, like a single book. And we’ve said, oh, God is the author. So now we have a single author, and that flattens all of that, and we read it as a single book. So to bring it back around, yeah, there’s no Bible, or there’s no— excuse me, I just said that the wrong way. There’s no the Bible. There’s no such thing as the Bible, right? Even though I introduce myself every single day on social media as a scholar of the Bible and religion. In fact, there was one video where I introduced it. I said there’s no No such thing as the Bible. Hi everybody, I’m Dan McClellan. I’m a scholar of the Bible and religion. Yep. But we just colloquially refer to it that way. But, uh, if we’ve got to drill down to what’s going on there, yeah, there’s no such thing as the Bible. It’s all contested. All right. It’s all contested. I guess you can unsubscribe from the show because it’s a show about nothing. It doesn’t even—the thing it’s about doesn’t even exist. So there you go. All right. Well, that’s crazy and fun, but let’s move on to our next segment, Taking Issue. And the issue that we’re taking is with this video that the Department of Homeland Security put out not too long ago, just a few weeks ago. And oh daddy, is it rough? First of all, yes, when I went to look it up, uh, today just to remind myself what it’s—I had seen it before, but just to remind myself what it was, uh, I went to several platforms where you couldn’t hear it. You could see it. Oh yeah, hear it, because, uh, they were using, um, Lorde’s, uh, version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Yes. And they didn’t have permission. And so they shut that down. But reliably, X as a platform still has it up because it’s—they’ll just do whatever they want. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody tells the richest man on earth what to do. Right? He’s above the law. Above the law. I am above the law. So that was—that’s an old South Park thing. We should get quickly to the reason why a show about the Bible is talking about a video from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Yes. Which there should not be a reason for us to be discussing this. Yeah, most days there’s not a lot of overlap. Well, let’s say most administrations, there’s not an awful lot of overlap between combating the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion and the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of War if you’re nasty. Um, now they’re two departments. They’re two different departments. Is DHS under Department of War? The—. They changed their—. Well, no, that was the Department of Defense. Oh, Defense. That’s right. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That’s okay. It’s hard to keep track, man. There’s no reason—like, first of all, DHS is fairly recent, at least, you know, it’s in our lifetime that DHS just existed. That was after 9/11. George W. decided to make a whole new department for no good reason. Yeah. So they’re separate cabinet-level agencies. Yeah. So no, they’re not, they’re not directly under one another. But this one is the video, like a similar video that was done a few months ago includes a lot of footage of, you know, military-style kind of night vision goggle-esque flying around in helicopters and knocking down doors and raiding and rifles in their arms, you know, whatever. Yeah. And the only difference is it, you know, it looks military. It looks 100% military, except that every now and then they cut to a guy and his bulletproof vest says the word “police” on it, which is weird. Yeah. And then you’ve got to have—there’s the obligatory Kristi Noem in a helicopter fist bumping somebody who is cosplaying as a soldier. And then you have Lorde’s version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and then you have “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God.” It says that in big bold letters right across the screen. Yes, and, uh, and I, I made a video responding to this, and, um, I can’t even—I—there were so many people who were like, that made me physically ill, like, uh, just deeply disturbed at the use of the Beatitudes to try to romanticize and glorify what is essentially a goon squad. Yeah. And this is prime. Yeah. And I went, I went straight to the Greek and was like, I’m pretty sure, I’m pretty sure that what the Greek has to say in the Beatitudes does not support this notion of people who are ostensibly making peace through aggressive military action. Right. Authoritarian power constraint as a method of peacemaking. Yes. And so it seems a little too Pax Romana, which is the peace that you achieve through domination and through fear. And famously, Romana referring to Rome, which the Beatitudes was talking about as the bad guys of this, and now they’ve flipped it and they’re, they’re making it, you know, the, the Romans are now the good guys, and that’s who Jesus was referring to in the Beatitudes. Before we get to the Beatitudes themselves, I was trying to figure out what they were trying to say with the use of “everybody wants to rule the world.” Were they trying to say we’re here to stop the people who want to rule the world, or were they trying to say we’re the ones who want to rule the world? It’s mystifying either way. Yeah, and we will make peace via ruling the world. But I looked up the song, just to get a little more context. And so the idea is it’s an interpersonal attempt to try to reconcile, to make things right. So almost a mediator. It can be like that, but I think the way it’s used, it’s usually talking about one party, one of the parties, yes, seeking to reconcile, seeking to make peace with the other party rather than somebody mediating between two parties. And you have in parts of the New Testament references to God as using the verb, this verb, as God is the one who is doing this peacemaking by offering his Son as a sacrifice to reconcile all the people to him. In other words, when God is the peacemaker, using the verbal root that is at the root of this noun, God is sacrificing his own Son in order to reconcile the other party, humanity, to him. And in other words, self-sacrifice is the mechanism for bringing about this reconciliation. It’s not God saying, “Hey, I’m gonna kill you unless you stop being unpeaceful. " And so I really don’t think that representing oneself as a peacemaker because look at the cool helicopter that we fly around in and all the bullets that we’re gonna fire at anybody who doesn’t like what we’re doing. Maybe Jesus was referencing when he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” maybe he was referencing a Colt 45. Do you think there’s any chance that he was talking about a 45 caliber peacemaker, six-shooter over in the Wild West? Yes. And when we sell this in this state, it’s a peacemaker. In the other state, it’s the Widowmaker. Yeah. And I think that we can drive the point home even more by kind of spreading the scope of our concern to the rest of the Beatitudes to see if this style of peacemaking is consonant with the general message that the author of Matthew is putting into the mouth of Jesus. And we’ve reviewed this in the past. You say that, but I think you’re going to feel dumb, because I happen to know for a fact that verse 5, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” is about being a monster. An absolute monster. Yes, it’s about we having a sword but not using it, according to one Jordan Peterson. Yes, ding dong of the First Order. Yes, who, um, I, I have not heard any recent news about his health, but evidently, I don’t know, wasn’t cleaning his room enough or something, and, um You’ve heard about this, haven’t you? No, I try to avoid Jordan Peterson as much as possible. Well, I guess if you spend more time in Canada than most Americans, and so— Well, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah, he’s evidently been at death’s door. Oh my. Because of an illness that seems to have been caused by some kind of exposure to mold or something like that. Oh my gosh. Well, I don’t feel good about that. Way to make me feel bad about joking about it. But he was very wrong about the Beatitudes. But the— and we talked about this on an episode a long time ago, but I think the reason I wanted to bring it up is because it seems like his position was coming from this same perspective of like, it can’t possibly mean be meek, make peace, be gentle, be kind. It can’t possibly mean that because that’s not manly and strong, and I want manly strong Jesus, so I gotta make it mean something else. Yeah, I’m thinking of the painting of the big bodybuilder Jesus who’s snapping the arms of the cross off, right? Which is amazing because the point Yeah, kind of misses all of the points. Yes. But if we start from the very beginning, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. " This is the humble, the poor in spirit. And there, I think you cannot ignore the socioeconomic dimension to this. And particularly if you bring Luke’s version, the sermon on the plain, into play, because in Luke he just says, “Blessed are the poor. " full stop. Right. So I think there is a socioeconomic dimension. And yeah, the humble, the economically underprivileged. That does not describe the folks who run DHS right now, and doesn’t support the notion that they’re out there being peacemakers. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. You got an awful lot of people around the US who are mourning right now as a result of the agents of the Trump regime taking the lives and ruining the lives of folks who are poor in spirit. So, I mean, you recall the— I was just gonna say, point of order, you could say that those— that the person who creates the mourners is creating people who are then blessed, for they will be comforted. So, uh, checkmate, McClellan. Well, I, I— either way though, it’s not these folks who are running around Jonesing to start shooting people. Yeah. You’ve got, I don’t know if you noticed, but there was a photo going around of either CBP or ICE agents who used a little 5-year-old boy in his little blue hat to lure his mom out so they could arrest her. And he spent, I don’t know how much time, in a detention center and now evidently is phenomenally traumatized. Of course. And his health is failing and the family’s like, it’s not the same. It’s not the same kid. So there are a lot of people mourning who are being mocked by the folks who are championing the kind of stuff that Kristi Noem and DHS and the Trump regime are doing. So yeah. Strike two. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. We’ve talked about this, the fact that the word here for meek was used in Classical Greek, not Koine Greek, but Classical Greek, to refer to the breaking of a war horse. And so the idea is that, oh well, everything that goes along with that gets to be imported with any use of this word, even in later Koine Greek. That’s just garbage. Uh, that’s not what meek here means. It means somebody who is gentle, somebody who is harmless, somebody who is meek. And it’s overturning stuff. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They will own the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth. So those who are humble, those who are gentle, they will be in charge of the whole earth. So it entirely, it just nukes the whole kind of rhetorical function of the Beatitudes to say, “No, it means you get to be a monster, but you have to control it.” And “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Yeah, trying to— yeah, this is not that. Blessed are the merciful. You don’t feel a hunger and thirst for righteousness coming out of Kristi Noem’s office? I see a hunger and a thirst for power is what I see. And which stands in stark and open contrast to the ideologies of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. I mean, folks who are like, you know, I want to kill you, give me an excuse, come over here. Yeah. You know, a lot of it seems like CBP and ICE, it seems like their missions these days are primarily to confront members of the public who are not immigrants. Well, and it seems like— And pepper spray first and ask questions later. Well, while you’re laughing, it feels like the opposite of mercy. No one’s looking for mercy, to be merciful. Yeah, among these agents.
Um, yeah, it’s just bafflingly stupid. And then we get, blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. These folks are not pure in heart. Then we get to peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.
Well, I was— I, I, I picked up on something earlier when you were talking, and I didn’t know the right moment to get to it, but I do want to get to— and I didn’t let you finish all of the blesseds. So maybe I should have done that. I thought we were done with the persecutors.
There’s just one last one. There’s one last one.
So go for it. And then we’ll get back to it.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. There are an awful lot of people out there who are standing up for their neighbors and for their communities and for the safety of some of the folks among them who are vulnerable, either because they are undocumented immigrants or because they’re documented immigrants or they’re US citizens or they’re refugees. And there is no legal justification for harassing them, arresting them, beating them, trying to deport them. And there are folks who are standing up for them precisely because they believe they have been called to do so by their faith. By their belief in the fact that mercy triumphs over judgment. And the fact that—.
And they’re frequently being slandered for it. Like, you know, the Department of Homeland Security, every press conference that you see someone from DHS talking, they are slandering some protester as being ‘You know, a violent terrorist group or whatever,’ you know, and they’re constantly saying that. So yeah, uttering all kinds of evil against them falsely. Yeah, yeah, calling people—.
Like, both Ranae Goudie and Alex Papali were immediately labeled domestic terrorists. Right. And there are an awful lot of people on social media who just lap that up. They just suckle that garbage from the fetid and swollen teat of this fascist regime because it makes them feel good about being on the right team. Right. And I think the point of the Beatitudes is what the world imagines to be the right team and the team that’s going to win is the wrong team.
And also, don’t be a team. Don’t worry about the team. Be you and be the best you you can be. You know, be a meek and peaceful and peacemaking you. And don’t worry about what team you’re on. Mind your business. Go after your stuff. The thing that I wanted to dive into just briefly, it’s not a big thing, but it’s to do with the peacemakers. It’s to do with this video that we saw, because they specifically in this video, and I hadn’t picked up on it until you quoted it, But in the video, it says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. " And, you know, I’ve got NRSVUE up, and it says “children of God. " And maybe you can help me out with that and lend some—.
Well, one of the things that the NRSVUE did, one of the reasons there was an updated edition, and this was partly done in the regular NRSV, but using less gendered language as part of it. And so the Greek there is huioi, which is the plural of huios, which would be son. So using children there is one of the ways that the NRSVUE is kind of taking the gendered part of that out. And there, and you know, you see a lot in particularly Paul’s letters, brothers and sisters, even though in the Greek it will just say adelphoi, it will be just brothers.
And so is in KJV, does it say sons? Is that what it says? Even KJV, it says they should be called the children of God.
So they probably would. That’s the ESV. You’ll recall recently in a segment we talked about how garbage the ESV is, says Sons of God. Um, I, I, let me, I’m curious what the NET says. The NET says children of God. Okay. Uh, I bet the, I bet the NIV says, uh, says sons. Sons. Because, well, no, the, the NIV probably, it might not. I don’t know if I have NIV in my, in my concordance, but the, the whole reason the ESV exists is because a bunch of evangelical white men got together in Colorado Springs and decided that they needed a translation that was not as gender-neutral in translating pronouns and things like that. So yeah, maybe they intentionally went with the ESV.
Let’s see, hang on, I got NIV right here. That’s the one that we were asking about, right? Nope, children. Children. Yep. So, I mean, it seems to me that that is a distinctly— that is a purposeful choice on their part, because even though you could totally be an officer of Homeland Security as a woman, again, they’re just being jerks. They don’t want women. They want macho, masculine. They’re specifically recruiting men.
They’re on purpose They are going after men with, you know, even though Kristi Noem is in charge of them all.
She may not be by the time this comes out. I don’t know. Well, like we’re saying that, but she’s definitely on the ropes right now. And we’ll see.
So the other— I mentioned the NIV, the ESV, and the LSB as the translations that are very dogmatic. The LSB also has sons of God. Okay. But I also mentioned that that is a revision of the NASB, and the NASB also has sons of God. So there’s a clear trajectory.
Yeah, well, there you go. I’ve decided I’m not a fan of Homeland Security, just sort of as a department. You may be shocked to learn this. I mean, it’s so funny because we didn’t need it. And then 9/11 happened and suddenly we did? Question mark? No, get rid of it. The whole thing. We don’t need ICE.
We don’t need Homeland Security. It’s become a goon squad. Yeah. And it’s literally murdering civilians in the street and then lying about it.
Yeah. So, well, and then using the Bible to recruit. So that’s great. A lot of fun happening out there in the world. Don’t, don’t join the Department of Homeland Security and try to keep yourself safe out there, kids. It’s, it’s hairy. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you’d like to become a part of keeping this show rocking and rolling, you can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can give us as much or as little as, uh, as you can afford. And you can get access to early ad-free versions of every show and the bonus content that we do every week. And our eternal gratitude, you will have access to there as well. Uh, so we, we encourage that. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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