66 Books, 40 Authors, Zero Contradictions?

It’s an accumulating anthology. It’s not like they just all wrote their books independently and brought them together. And we’re like, what? Jackpot. 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. Good to be back, Dan. How are things?

I’m impressed you remembered all of the things that we have to say.

I almost got it wrong because there was a pause there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had to say those words.

But we’re back in the, back in the saddle and ready to rock and roll and I’m, I’m excited. We got a couple of fun topics that we’re going to get into. We’re going to do a Taking Issue first. And the issue we’re going to be taking is a thing that I have been seeing. You’ve probably, you probably have too. I’ve been seeing this popping up a lot in social media. I don’t know who’s popularizing this idea, but it is getting out there.

This is the idea that 66 books written by 40 different people. Anyway, it’s a whole big thing.

We’ll get into it when we do the thing. But yeah, it’s a, it’s a big claim and we’ll, we’ll figure out if it actually means anything, if it’s correct and if it’s worth refuting or worth talking about or whatever. And then in the second half of the program, we’re going to be doing a Twisted Scripture. Well, we’re not going to be twisting the scripture, but Mark Driscoll sure as heck is.

I guess the question that he has posed to us is can you be a Bible believing Christian and not be a capitalist? So that’s going to be a fun one coming up in the latter half of the show.

But let’s dive in directly to our Taking Issue. Okay. So the thing we’re Taking Issue with. I’ll just read the whole thing. This, this is a quote or a partial quote from something that was posted on a thread of mine. So it, it came into my backyard and. But I’ve seen it a lot on social media and everything and we know.

How, how NIMBY you can get.

Yeah, exactly. It’s true. And this is the claim that The Bible is 66 books written by 40 different people throughout 1500 years. On three different continents all saying the same thing.

And that, first of all, they seem to think that that is a very impressive thing. Like, how could they possibly all say the same thing?

Yes. So, so impressive. It must be supernatural. Humans could not accomplish this thing.

Yeah, that does seem to be the claim. The claim is that, like, there’s no way that could happen. And I think we need to go through piece by piece and just talk about each of. Because this is a series of claims. And the first time I saw it before I’d ever seen you tackle any of these things. Well, I mean, you’ve tackled bits and bobs of this. We’ve talked about a lot of this sort of peripheral claims that relate to this on the show plenty. But I looked at it and I was just like, is any of that correct? So let’s just start with this 66 books idea. I, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how there’s. There’s no one canon of the Bible.

Yeah, there are. There are multiple different canons. When we determine what Bible we’re looking at, that’s based on answers that we’re providing to questions that don’t really have objective, empirically decidable answers. These are, these are preferences more than anything else. And they’re. They’re preferences of different groups of different sizes. So, you know, there are groups that have more adherents that say one thing, and groups that have fewer adherents to, say, others. But 66 books is clearly a modern Protestant canon because.

Right.

If you went back to the King James Version or even Martin Luther, like, they might say different numbers.

So it’s a modern Protestant concept of the canon. If you go to the Catholic Church, you have more.

And if you go to. There are Eastern Orthodox, you’ve got Greek Orthodox, you’ve got Russian Orthodox, you’ve got Georgian Orthodox. They each have different ideas of the extent and the contours of the canon. And then we could get into the Armenian Apostolic Canon. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon is the biggest. That’s like 88.

Don’t get me started on that canon.

Yeah. Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Church of the East. And that’s just Christian. Right. Because we can go to Jewish and we can talk about the Jewish canon. We can even talk about the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is a different canon. Like, there are still Samaritans around as well who only hold the Pentateuch as the canon.

And every one of those books has the word the Bible on the front of it. Like. Yeah, maybe not the Jewish ones. The Jewish ones may not have the word.

Yeah. They generally call it Tanakh, but they, but in English, frequently you will have them refer to the Bible. Yeah. So. And, and also within the canons, you can have different versions of these texts. Yeah. So it’s. So right off the bat, we’re, we’re not talking about something that is objectively the Bible because there’s no such thing as the Bible.

Right.

There are Bibles. And this is just saying this is the, this is the version of the Bible I prefer.

But you know, then you get into questions of, okay, well, what manuscripts are using? Okay. What translation are you using? There are a lot of different ways this can go. So, so right off the bat, the first claim, 66 books, flag on the play.

That is, that is a preference. That is not a fact. If you, and, and if you want to give the modern Protestant movements priority of place, then great, that’s your preference. But that’s, that’s not a fact. And I think this, the first time I heard it, I, I’m, I would like to track down where it originally came from. Yeah, but the first time I’ve heard it was definitely there’s a comedian I, the first time I ever saw it was somebody sharing a video of a sweaty comedian on a stage, pacing back and forth saying this. And I looked it up and this dude’s name is Brad Stine.

And he’s. There was a. He recorded this thing in 2012 called God’s Comic. So that was the name of his special. His stand up special. Yeah. So 14 years ago is, is the, the clip that I’ve seen shared the most, but it’s been more widely shared ever since then. And I’m sure that he’s not the first person to ever come up with that, but I think that clip is what has kind of popularized it on social media.

But I just saw it on. I made a video last week when I was in San Diego responding to Wes Huff in his. In his new Peterson Academy.

Class.

Is that, is that the Peterson that I, that I’m thinking it is. Is that.

Is. Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. So that was something that he shared there only he said 66 books by 40 different authors over a period of about 1600 years. So the window, the chronological window can go from 1500 to 1600. And we’ll get to that.

We’ll get to it.

Yes. But what’s next on the list?

40 Different people, authorship, as we know from doing this show, is very easy to nail down. When it comes to the Bible.

So we should easily be able to determine who wrote it and how many of those authors there are.

Yeah. And this is the. Part of this is why this claim is apologetics. Because if it’s. And. And the claim sometimes is 40, sometimes it’s 45, sometimes it’s 46, sometimes it’s about 40. But that claim presupposes not only that every single word of the Bible is historical, but every single traditional assignment of authorship and dating is also traditional or is also accurate.

Right.

And so it’s presupposing what it sets out to prove. Because the whole point of this is to suggest, hey, this has got to be true because of all these things, but all these things presuppose that it’s true.

Right.

And not even stuff like these are not biblical claims. A lot of these authorship questions, they are claims that were made after the fact, long after the fact, in many.

Cases, centuries after the fact, frequently after the Bible was completed, because it requires that only one person have written the entire Pentateuch, Moses. Now, you might say, well, maybe it’s just one person, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be Moses. Yes, it does, because the claim that it is 15 or 1600 years of writing requires that it be written by Moses.

You’re jumping claims. You’re jumping claims.

Okay. There’ve got to be some points of contact here.

There are points of. There are some. Some very distinct points of contact. Yeah.

But there’s. There’s nothing in the Pentateuch that says Moses wrote all of this.

Right.

There are a couple places where it says, and Moses wrote down the law, or Moses wrote this down. But in every instance, what Moses wrote down is some discrete subsection of a single book within the Pentateuch, not even a whole book.

Well, it would be very weird for Moses to write down and Moses wrote down the law. Like, that would be a very weird thing for a person to write and.

Then to narrate what happened after he died.

Right? Yeah.

At the end of the book of.

Deuteronomy, he, I died. And here’s what happened a little bit after that.

Yeah. And. And when we look at the Pentateuch, like, it’s very clear not only that it was not written by one person, because as we’ve discussed many times on this channel, it frequently contradicts itself and repeats itself because different versions of stories are being brought together.

Right.

Sometimes they appear in separate chapters, sometimes they’re right next to each other, sometimes they’re interwoven and yeah, it’s just not plausible that there was one author. And also of the anachronisms, it was not written in the second millennium BCE. There are people groups.

How dare you.

I dare. There are people groups that weren’t around until the first millennium BCE. There are. And, you know, the text will frequently say, oh, such and such happened. And that place is still there down to this very day. It’s like, that’s not what you write when the thing just happened.

Right.

So, yeah, there are all kinds of indications that, no, this was not written by one person. It was not written in the 15th century BCE, it was not written by Moses. But in order for it to be 40 to 46 authors, it has to have all been written by Moses. It just didn’t happen. And then when we get to some of the other texts, the Book of Joshua, they say, oh, well, that was. That was written by Joshua, except for the parts in that book that narrate what happened after his death. But like Judges, Samuel, Ruth, like, nothing says anything about authorship here. And so there are traditional assignments of authorship. Samuel, Nathan and Gad are assigned authorship of Judges, Ruth, First and 2 Samuel, and then Jeremiah is traditionally assigned authorship of First and 2 Kings, based on what? Absolutely nothing. Right. Tradition. And then we’ve got Ezra is assigned authorship of First and 2 Chronicles, the Book of Ezra, the book of Nehemiah, and then Esther.

People say, Mordecai wrote the book of Esther, except for the parts about his death. These are presuppositions that are not supported by any data whatsoever. And then we get to the Psalms. David didn’t write any of this.

David didn’t write the Psalms.

Come on. Yeah. And then the notion that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon were all written by Solomon. No support for that at all. The Psalms.

Yeah, I. I’ve read some of this stuff that they don’t even sound the same. They don’t even. Like, there’s not. They’re not even similar.

In the. I mean. And. Okay, sir, an author can write in different writing styles. I guess I can. I can get behind that idea. But come on. It’s just. It’s weird. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I thought was salient is, is that, you know, I want to. Sorry, I want to go back to the Moses wrote the Torah thing, because what language was it written in? Isn’t that a bit of an issue?

Yeah, because Hebrew didn’t exist when a historical Moses would have existed. Hebrew didn’t exist until around the 11th century BCE at the very earliest. And that was a very rudimentary form of Hebrew. The Pentateuch is not written in a rudimentary form of Hebrew. It’s written in a very developed form of Hebrew. Something that is like the second quarter of the first millennium BCE so between the 8th and the 6th centuries BCE. And that happens to be when these people groups that are named were around.

And that happens to be far enough away from the setting of the events for somebody to say, “And it’s still there down to this very day.” Like all of the data point to a handful of centuries in the middle of the first millennium BCE and there are no data that support the conclusion that it was written before the language it was written in even existed.

Let’s, because we just mentioned it, let’s get to the 1500-year question. Because 15, 1600 years—why are they making that statement? Why is Wes Huff saying it’s 1600 years? I mean, you mentioned that it’s to do with Moses. Is that really the only thing that pushes it back that far, or do they have more than that?

No. So the idea is that it was written between—if they say 1500 years, they’re thinking 1400 BCE to 100 CE. And as Wes has stated, he believes that 99% of all biblical scholars believe the 27 books of the New Testament were completed by the end of the first century CE, which is laughably untrue. But 1400 BCE to 100 CE, 1500 years. Now there are early and late datings for a historical Moses. You have the crowd who thinks Moses lived in the 15th century and the Exodus happened like between 1460 and 1420 or something like that. And so if Moses was writing around that time period, then it’s more like 1500 or, yeah, 1560-ish years. So you say in the neighborhood of 1600.

Why are people dating the Exodus to that time period?

So when you read the Exodus and you try to figure out where it sits historically, the two places—

And to be clear, we should mention it is already the stated position of this podcast that there was no Exodus. There probably wasn’t a Moses.

Correct.

None of this is based on, or it may be based on a very, very incredibly loosely based on a similar interesting story, yeah, but it did not happen as it is recorded in the Bible.

Precisely.

Okay, so with that caveat in mind,

Yes, we go looking through ancient Egyptian history to try to figure out when we can insert the events of the Exodus. And there’s no place where it fits comfortably, but there are two places where it is least uncomfortable.

And that is not to say it’s comfortable. It is still very uncomfortable. But it is least uncomfortable if you’re talking about toward the end of the 15th century or toward the end of the 13th century. So around the late 1200s BCE. So that would be Ramesses II is around that time period. And you know, you’ve got that, “Oh, they built Pi-Ramesses.” Okay, well that must mean that this has something to do with Ramesses. Okay. So that means we’re looking at the late 1200s. And then you’ve got the other people who are like, “No, it’s Amenhotep III or whatever.” And so they argue for the early date. And so you have different camps. You have an earlier camp and a later camp. And the earlier camp is the one that gets you between 1500 and 1600 years. And the three continents thing depends on that.

Because it is presupposing that the Pentateuch was written by Moses at least partly in Egypt.

Right. Which is also weird because why—I mean, it’s all in the past tense. Like the way that it’s telling it is all in the past tense. Why are we assuming that Moses wrote any of it before the Exodus?

Well, the tradition is that the book of Genesis was revealed to Moses or Moses was the one who went in and collated the history and wrote it all down or something like that.

In fact, when you get the beginning of what would become the documentary hypothesis, the notion that there are four different documentary sources, which is not the dominant theory anymore. But the beginning of that theory probably goes back to a French dude named Jean Astruc in like the 1760s, I believe, where he was looking at the fact that you’ve got repetitions, you’ve got what appear to be different sources for stuff based on a few different observations. And he said, “Ah, well, Moses had four different sources for his history that he brought together. Moses is the redactor who brought together these different sources.” And that’s the beginning that set the ball rolling on Pentateuchal source criticism. But it still identified Moses as the one who was ultimately responsible for bringing it all together, which we now know is just not plausible.

So the, the earliest author or editor of the Bible is Moses. Until you get to the Job crowd. The folks who are like, well, Job is the oldest book because that was, you know, written before Israel existed and all that kind of stuff. I would have, you know, you’d have to ask Wes if he has Job in mind when he says 1600 years, but I can’t imagine he does.

I don’t think we’re going to be asking Wes anything. I don’t think Wes is eager to come on the show anytime soon.

But yeah, and, and Job was, was definitely not the, the oldest texts of the Hebrew Bible. One of, one of the more recent. But also the, the New Testament has texts that were probably written in the second century CE. The, the early to mid second century CE, 2 Peter, probably the last text of the New Testament written probably somewhere between 120 and 150. If we are talking about the chronological window for the composition of the texts that we now have in the Bible, I think you probably got 1100 to 1200 years tops. And this is assuming that some of the poetic fragments embedded within larger poetic texts in places like Judges 5, Deuteronomy 32, Genesis 49, Exodus 15, Psalms 68, that’s assuming those phenomenally early poetic texts that go back to 1000 BCE or maybe even a little earlier than that.

So, so max, absolute max is 1200 years for, for writing the Bible. Probably closer to 1100 or even younger than that. But okay, that. And that’s if we’re taking things seriously. If we’re not taking anything seriously. Sure, 1500, 1600 years. If you’re just presupposing every word of it is historically accurate and all of the traditional assignments of authorship that don’t even come from the Bible are all true, then sure, 1500 to 1600 years.

But, but, but the best scholarly guess as to the actual duration is closer to that.

Yeah, yeah, 1100-ish. Probably years. And in terms of authors, authors and editors, because editors are responsible for, for composing large chunks of this. I say it’s north of 100. Okay. So yeah, because you’ve got, I don’t know how many different authors. You’ve got probably at least four different main collections of texts throughout the Pentateuch. And those collections are probably the product of multiple different authors each in and of themselves. And then the Psalms. Who knows how many authors are responsible for writing the Psalms? Isaiah. We’ve got at least three different main authors responsible for Isaiah. And who knows how many editors and redactors. Like, it just goes on and on and then.

Well, and a lot of these are based on, on oral traditions that have been passed down over, over centuries. That. Which means that each time someone told that story a little differently, they get to, they get a clip of the credit.

Yeah, yeah, they’re getting, they’re getting some money, they’re gonna get some residuals. You know, it’s a. The check’s gonna be for six cents, but, you know, they get their residuals and then, you know, you got the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John and Revelation. All the same, dude. Yeah, not actually. Yeah, the. The Gospel of John was written by somebody; First, Second and 3 John, probably written by probably two different people who are not the author of the Gospel of John; and Revelation is just some other dude named John. So. Right, the. Yeah, the, the number of authors stacks up pretty quickly once you stop just presupposing that all the traditions you inherited are true.

Right.

And that brings us to the continents.

Yeah, we do need to talk about the continents. But that’s just a brief thing. Right? Like.

Yeah, yeah, three continents. That is presupposing that the Pentateuch, or at least parts of it, were written by Moses in Egypt. In Egypt in the 15th century BCE. That’s not accurate. The. You could salvage it though, if you conclude that one of the Catholic epistles, so like maybe 3 John or 2 Peter or something like that, was written in Alexandria. If you decide that, great. Three continents, is that, is that plausible? Sure, it’s plausible. I. I don’t know. I don’t know if scholars have argued that. That a given text was written in Alexandria. It’s certainly plausible. But. But I don’t know. And that’s not what the claim is. Certainly that’s not.

And it doesn’t. Yeah. And it doesn’t really matter. The other point is that like three different continents makes it sound like there was someone in like Far East Asia writing one thing and someone in North Europe writing another thing and someone in South Africa writing a third thing.

Well, it’s the idea that Paul was writing some places from, like, Rome or somewhere around there.

And, you know, it depends on whether or not you identify Turkey as Europe, but—

Well, part of it is.

Yeah, but, yeah, that’s the… the diameter of the circle you have to draw to include every last text of the Bible is smaller than the Mediterranean Sea.

Right.

Like, it’s all surrounding the same body of water, which is not an ocean. So, yeah, that doesn’t say much. And then the claim that it’s written in three different languages, that’s accurate. Sure. We’ll give you that one.

That one’s good.

Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, with parts of Ezra and Daniel and then a few scattered verses elsewhere written in Aramaic. The overwhelming majority of the Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew, and then the New Testament written in Greek. And then the last part of the claim is that it all tells the same story, or no contradictions, no inconsistencies.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Which is… I mean, you know, obviously we’ve talked a lot about that, but also, even if it did, let’s just say that it managed to line up with no contradictions the whole way. It’s not as impressive as they think they’re making it sound, because these were not written independent of each other.

Right.

Each of them had the one before as they were writing. So it’s like saying the last Spider-Man author managed to get all of the canon in from the last guy.

Even though even those don’t line up.

It’s an accumulating anthology. It’s not like they just all wrote their books independently and brought them together and were like, “What? Jackpot?”

Yeah, exactly.

That’s not how it went down. They were intentionally riffing off of, responding to, quoting, and when it comes to the Gospels, you know, they were—

Borrowing.

They were using the other gospels as sources. Everybody used whatever had already been published as a source.

Well, you know, you look at the more ancient texts, you look at the texts that come to us from the Hebrew Bible, and they were changing each other as they went along. Like, you know, somebody might have written something new, and for all we know, they went back and changed the older book to line up with the new thing or whatever. Like, they had the ability to do that. It’s not like there were printing presses about. There were very few copies of these things.

And you can compare the books of Samuel and Kings to the books of Chronicles and see they’re telling the same stories, but in many cases, they’re flatly contradicting each other. They’re changing them significantly. And so when people say there are zero contradictions, they can’t support that. But that’s a claim; that’s not a fact. That’s not a datum. You can’t point to that and go, “See, no contradictions.” That’s nonsensical. So once again, they’re gathering together a bunch of disputed and, in most cases, just flatly false claims, and they’re saying, “Look at this evidence that the book is true.” You just have to agree with me that the book is true first. It’s flagrantly begging the question. Whenever they use that as an argument, it’s just flagrantly begging the question because it simply doesn’t work unless you already just arbitrarily presuppose that every last word of it is true and every tradition associated with date, authorship, and interpretation is true, and it just doesn’t work that way.

Okay, fine. I guess I’ll stop using that argument now.

Please, please do.

If you see someone using that argument, send them this video or send them this, this podcast. And, and, and maybe they will. No, they won’t reconstruct. They’ll continue using it.

This is not the domain of critical thinkers. This claim is not something that people have decided after much research and introspection that they’re going to promulgate. This is the kind of thing that they promulgate because it tickles the tuning fork in the loins of their dogmatism. And, and they just want to pass that tickle along. So, so please stop giving people that kind of tickle because it’s, it’s inappropriate.

Yeah, well, there you go. The Bible says not to, so let’s just do that. All right, well, there you go with that. I, you know, it’s hard to know what to say about that, but apologetics continue and we’re gonna, and we’re gonna tackle some more in twisted scripture. All right? Mark Driscoll. He’s. He’s a pastor. He’s a formerly disgraced pastor that apparently they let him back in.

Well, I think he’s still disgraceful, but.

Disgraceful in ways.

Yes, but no. He started, he started his own.

Yeah, he started a different church.

Yeah. Because he was. Yeah. He talks about humility despite being. Being booted for his domineering and, and non-humble.

Yeah, well, and some other problematic behaviors, as I understand it. But I, but we don’t need to get into any of that. No, because all we care about is the claims that he’s making. Which are, which are cute. He, he’s gotten some cute claims and the claims today that we’re going to be talking about are. And he, I’ll just read from the post that he wrote which says that he wrote. He didn’t write this. But, but the post that is on his, on his page, it says you can’t be a Bible believing Christian and a socialist. You can’t separate Christianity from economics. If God owns everything, then the government doesn’t. The Bible teaches that God delegates stewardship to individuals and families, protects private property with you shall not steal and commands parents to leave an inheritance for their children.

Those aren’t modern political ideas, they’re biblical principles. There’s a lot packed into that. Yeah, and he did a whole video. I actually watched the extended 20 minute version of it. I don’t.

My condolences.

Yeah, that was, I, I was trying to bone up. I don’t know, you know, but yes, he made the main thing that he does and you know, we, he has a shorter clip too. And the first thing he says is that basically capitalism equals the correct Christian economic ideology. Question mark. Like he basically says that. And because God took his little finger and wrote in the stones on to Moses, thou shalt not steal, that proves that capitalism, that proves that ownership is a thing that we’re. Because nobody can steal anything if nobody owns anything. And because ownership is a thing. Therefore, dot dot dot, capitalism, not socialism.

So when, when he says socialism he means a specific brand of communism.

He means Marxist communism. Yeah, he’s not, he’s not talking about socialism literally at all.

Right. But socialism is what the leftists are advocating for. So he needs to use that as the proxy for his argument. Good grief.

Because he literally is wrong about meanings. Like he just keeps taking wrong things and adding them to his. Like his premises are all like wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

Therefore, conclusion.

Because like socialism and, and capitalism are kind of, there’s kind of a hydraulic relationship between the two. And, and they’re also, they occupy. Each occupies its own little spectrum because it has to do more with the degree to which the means of production are controlled by the public versus private entities interests.

Right.

And you can have both capitalist and socialist systems within the same country.

Right. Like many countries do.

Yes. And like, and there’s, there’s the great meme where it’s like we should have socialism like the Nordic countries. And the person responds, no, that’s not socialism. It’s capitalism with this, that and the other sprinkled in to it. Okay, let’s have that. No, that’s socialism. Like it’s. You, you can’t win when, when everybody wants to reduce everything to these binary zero sum games.

Right.

Because like, there are a lot of ways that America is, is socialist. Yeah.

Do you like having a fire department? Because that’s a socialist program. That’s that you’re not paying for the fire department to come out to your house if, you know, if you need them.

So we’ve got, we’ve got a lot of things that are, are providing social safety nets to people. I think when, when people think of, of socialism, what they mean is, is social safety nets. Sure. And so, so, but these are things.

Like, like Medicare and Medicaid.

Yeah. Social Security, things like that. And when we think about these as, as distinct economic approaches or at least occupying different ends of a spectrum of economic approaches, like that doesn’t go back to the biblical period.

Right.

Like there are a lot of ways that you can’t get there from here. They didn’t organize their economies that way anciently. So the Bible’s not addressing socialism versus capitalism. But the Bible does make a lot of moral assertions that I would say are going to resonate more with a socialist approach than, than a quote unquote, capitalist approach today.

Yeah. I don’t think Driscoll likes those ones very much.

No. Well, he certainly doesn’t understand them whether or not he, he likes them.

Yeah. It is really interesting. Like one of the big claims that he makes is that God commands us or, or wants us to accumulate generational wealth. He’s, you know, he says, and pass it on to our descendants. Which, you know, first of all, not easy for everyone to do. Not a thing that everyone is capable of doing. Especially when you’re talking about, you know, a country like ours where wealth is being consolidated sort of purposefully with a single class of people and they’re making, they are intentionally making it difficult for other classes of people to even possibly accumulate wealth.

Yeah. You can go read The Color of Law for a wonderful discussion of how our government was structured to explicitly and programmatically systematically privilege the access of white folks to protections and to generational wealth over and against black folks who are explicitly marginalized in that redlining is still a thing.

And there are, you know, it’s morphed. Yeah. There are a lot of systematic or systemic, excuse me, power asymmetries that give folks who look like you and me, easier access to generational wealth. You know, there’s, and, and there’s, you know, that’s its own conversation. But Driscoll has no interest in overturning those systems of power.

He looks like us. He’s doing great.

Yeah, he’s doing great. And so he wants to endorse those systems even though they are quite intentionally and doing a good job of preventing people who don’t look like us from accessing that. So when he, when he’s talking about he wants—God wants us to accumulate generational wealth and, and pass it on. When he supports a system that prevents certain groups of people from doing that, that’s like, fundamentally, that’s white supremacist. And, and I’m sure that he doesn’t agree with that. I’m sure he doesn’t understand that. I’m sure his brain will not allow him to understand that because that would indict him, and he’s not going to allow himself to be indicted by anything.

Well, I mean, it feels to me like the thing that most indicts him is his own book, which is the Bible. Constantly talking about, sell what you own and give it to the poor.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Wealth is especially the New Testament. It is constantly talking about how wealth is bad, being a rich man is bad. Give it to the poor. The best thing you can do in Mark 10, the best thing you can do if you want to be in the kingdom of heaven is to sell your wealth, sell your possessions and give it away.

Yeah, and, and that’s actually, that’s distinct from where I think Driscoll will go when looking for his prooftext. Because, and there are, and there are reasons for this, because you can go in the Hebrew Bible and you can see, you know, wealth is, is not treated as the enemy, is not treated as a villain in places like Proverbs, in Samuel and Kings and, and things like that. But you also have, in the prophets, for instance, condemnations of people who are engaged in land consolidation, who are engaged in a kind of something that you could call what, oh, I shoot, I forget the word. But it’s, it’s like predatory capitalism.

And that’s incredibly bad. That’s immoral. That is grinding the faces of the poor, and God hates you for it. Taking advantage of the economic system, taking advantage of the legal system in order to protect your own stuff over and against the interests of the poor and the needy is explicitly called out as immoral. So what Mark’s defending is you can find defenses of being wealthy in the Hebrew Bible, but you also find excoriations of the kinds of things that Mark’s talking about. And then we get to the New Testament and this is being written by folks who are not in government. These are not people with, with systemic power.

Right. They’re very much the opposite.

Yeah. And so. And there are reasons that they say give everything to the poor. And they don’t seem to care about intergenerational anything. They actually say be celibate. And the reason is they thought Jesus was coming back right away, so it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. And so you can’t draw from the collection of texts from people who are like, the world’s ending before I could ever have a kid anyway. So none of that matters. You can’t draw principles to apply to 21st century America from those kinds of ideological texts. But if you were going to try, they would be. And they would say, give all your money to the poor. Don’t worry about having kids. None of that matters.

Right, so that does speak a little bit against generational. If it’s like, don’t even have generations. What are you doing?

Yeah, this is all coming to an end. The whole scene is going to be wrapped up and tied off with a neat little bow before you even have a chance for a baby to be born. So, yeah, it’s, it’s laughably uncritical and, and not thoughtful. But he, he focuses in on the Ten Commandments, doesn’t he? Yeah, yeah, he.

Go ahead.

Which is problematic. He focuses on the shall not steal. The idea seems to be that if you have personal property, that’s capitalism and cannot be socialism, which again, is drawing the line well outside of where it belongs when it comes to the relationship of socialism to capitalism. Yeah. But the Ten Commandments also, twice, if I recall correctly, refer favorably to slaves that you own as well.

So are we.

They don’t usually print that part. When you, when you see, when you see a Ten Commandments in a school room in Texas, it’s not going to say that.

Yeah, you’ve got dot, dot, dot. Well, what was there? Slaves were there. That’s what the ellipses are occluding is the fact that the Ten Commandments presuppose that you own slaves. And so where’s that in this economy that Driscoll is constructing from the Ten Commandments? Well, it’s not there because we decided that was bad. We overruled that. And most of the Ten Commandments that have anything to do with economics are about not necessarily protecting your private property, but protecting the weak and the poor from the wealthy and the strong. The notion that you shouldn’t be coveting. Why do you think that is? It’s because they don’t want people going out there and doing what the prophets are excoriating in the Hebrew Bible. They don’t want people going out there and engaging in land consolidation and predatory loans and stuff like that because they.

In the, in the 9th century and then in the beginning of the 8th century, you. It was basically a subsistence economy. You had your farm, you grew what you needed to survive on the farm. And maybe you had a little leftover to take to the farmer’s market on Saturday and maybe you made some, a little extra walking around money from a couple extra handfuls of whatever you were growing. But basically you grew what you needed to survive there. We had in Israel and Judah in the 8th century, kings that reigned for like 40 years each, exceptionally long reigns. And these were very prosperous times. A lot of people made a lot of money because we were beginning international trade, primarily things like olive oil and wine and things like that was going into Phoenicia and elsewhere. And so a lot of people are getting very wealthy. And the economy shifts into what is called a command economy, where you didn’t grow whatever you needed to survive.

But I get all of the income from it. I get all the goods from it.

And now.

Sorry, I was just thinking that. Is that what led to the whole Jubilee thing of like releasing people from these debts and that’s all there was? A whole, whole bunch of stuff.

Yeah. In response to this, the fact that suddenly this command economy was leading to a lot more income inequality and wealth being concentrated in cities. You had other folks coming out and you had the prophets who were saying all of this is incredibly wicked and God hates you. And then you had people who are responsible for particularly the book of Deuteronomy, which is coming in the late 7th century BCE, so about a century after all this is getting really, really bad. It trickles down to the scribal class and they’re like, okay, well we’re going to write laws that ease this, that make up for what’s going on here. And that’s why you have, oh, you got to leave the gleanings for the poor. Oh, you’ve got to. In the seventh year they go free. The debts are going to be all released in the, the jubilee or, or whatever. Which we have no evidence that any such thing ever happened.

But, but it’s a nice thing to write down.

And to, and to post in front of your courthouse. Even if those laws have no authority within the courthouse itself.

Well, and it’s a decidedly anti-capitalist idea that is, that is like you say, it doesn’t matter if it’s, if it actually happened or not. It’s in Mark Driscoll’s book. You know what I mean? Like he, it is the thing that he is decidedly ignoring.

Yeah. And it even says in that book, in Deuteronomy that you’re not even allowed to like when you give, you have to give to the poor. You’re not allowed to do it reluctantly.

Right.

It literally says you must do it with a, with a glad heart.

Yeah. And that’s, and it’s, it’s interesting because Driscoll in his video says redistribution. It’s a very, it’s a very. He gets very libertarian about everything, but he starts to say redistribution, even taxation is theft. And that is a really funny coming from someone who isn’t paying taxes because he’s a pastor and so shut up about that. Why, why are you even commenting on it? But the idea that redistribution of wealth is somehow theft is, feels really counter-biblical to me. It feels really like, like you know, like you said, landowners must. I think in Leviticus, when I was looking it up, I saw something about landowners having to leave the edges of their field.

Yeah, that’s for the poor. The gleanings. Yeah.

And so, yeah, so it’s like, honestly, redistribution is about as biblical as you

Can get, particularly when you’ve got Jesus, who is supposed to be God for Driscoll.

Driscoll is supposed to like that guy a lot.

Yeah. And supposed to listen to him saying multiple times, sell everything you have, give it to the poor.

Right.

But also you’ve got like Acts 4 and 5, which is a, which is explicitly communalism, where nobody. Everybody gave everything that they had and then it was distributed as people had need. Right.

And what’s his name and what’s her name were punished for not doing it.

Well, not just punished, they died. They were killed by God. But. And people say, oh, well, it’s because they lied to the spirit. About what? About whether or not they gave them all their money.

Right.

And yeah, if you—you can’t read that and be like, “Oh, well, that doesn’t count.” And some people will say, “Oh, well, it’s not about the government, it’s about how individuals are supposed to act.” And I think the way you represented Driscoll, he was trying to make a big deal about individualism.

Yes, he did. He very much said that, yes, you should volunteer your tithes, your charity should be voluntary and on an individual level, not—not done at a governmental level, which—

Which is something that is never said in the Bible, in the New Testament. This is kind of an is-ought fallacy that is overlooking the fact that the “is” part is a product of the fact that nobody writing the New Testament had any role in government or ever thought they would have any influence whatsoever in government.

Right.

They were—the government was in a far-off place and didn’t care what they thought. And so they were just telling the other people around them, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Right.

So the is-ought fallacy ignores the circumstances that lead to the fact that the authors of the New Testament never say, “Hey, by the way, if you’re in government leadership,” because they never contemplated any such circumstance. But the notion that they would have said, “Hey, if you’re ever in any kind of government leadership, the priority is not ensuring the poor have what they need; the priority is protecting the agency of the people who have money. So whether or not the poor eat is secondary. Our primary concern is that we not force somebody who has money to do anything that they don’t want to do.” I think we see from the example in Acts 4 and 5, if you wanted to participate in the community, you kind of had to give them all your money. So it is reading into the text things that are, one, not in the text at all, but two, only inappropriately imposed upon the text

based on the notion that we do find counsel for people in government in the New Testament. We don’t. Nobody ever anticipated that their messaging was going to influence people in positions of power within government. So it’s silent on that. So you can’t really draw those kinds of conclusions. This is—this is more just rationalizing right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation into your interpretation of the biblical text and ignoring most of the data.

Well, and you know, if you’re going to be claiming that taxation is theft, what does the “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” text mean? What is he referring to in that moment when he says—when he says that, like that, other than taxation? It seems like it’s kind of the thing like you’re supposed to pay your taxes.

Which undermines the whole everything belongs to God, right? When—when Jesus says, “Whose face and inscription is on it?” “Oh, Caesar’s.” “Okay, give that to Caesar. Render unto God what is God’s.” And Mark’s saying, “Oh, well, turns out everything is God’s, even Caesar’s stuff.” And yeah, you can—you can find that in other parts of the text, but only by just entirely overruling and silencing the rhetorical intent of that particular story, which is that, hey, you should be paying taxes. That, you know, that coin, whether your money jingles or folds, the money was created by the government. That’s—that’s who created that. That’s who is using it. So that is theirs to do with as they please.

And also like, okay, your theology is that God owns everything. Well, in the meantime, until God decides to show up and collect and just say, “You know what, I’m taking over,” we’re dealing with our economies currently. So, yeah, that’s not a useful framing of anything.

And to say that—it’s evasion, pure and simple, because Mark will say the churches need to be taking care of the poor. Okay, nobody has stopped you. And yes, there are a lot of organizations out there that are Christian that commit a lot of money to taking care of the poor and the sick and the disabled and a lot of different groups of people. And it’s not enough. And it will never be enough. And you are not trying to make it enough.

Right.

It takes the government to be able to make it enough. So once again, you’re saying, “My priority is not ensuring that poor people have food. My priority is protecting my money.” Right. And that is definitely not—at least not a New Testament outlook. That is definitely the outlook of one who loves money.

Of a rich guy.

Which he definitely is. Yeah. I mean, this is—what he’s doing is trying to leverage his Christianity so that none of his parishioners notice that he’s being gross about his wealth. Like, he’s amassing as much wealth as he can and doesn’t want to give it away. His whole position is about being, you know, being protected by the law but not bound by the law. But he wants others to be bound by the law and not protected by the law. And that just seems—it seems as backwards as it could possibly be.

Yeah, it is. It is insincere, it is hypocritical, it is fundamentally selfish. And, you know, the love of money is the root of all evil, as—

Wait, where’s it say that?

Oh, gosh, it’s somewhere. I don’t know.

I feel like that was—was that—I think it was A. A. Milne.

I think that was—it was a headline. I read a headline one time that said something like that. Yeah.

And, you know, if there’s anybody who loves money, it’s Mark Driscoll.

No, look, hey, I’m not opposed to generational wealth. I would love to get some, but—

I think we should make it available to everybody without trying to militate against other people’s access to it just because we think that that makes it easier for us to get it, right?

And if—and if you actually believe that the poor, the needy, the underserved should be well taken care of, the way it seems like a Christian should. Yeah. Like you point out, Dan, government’s the only thing that can do that. Yeah, it’s the—it’s literally the only way that can happen.

Alas. All right, well, friends, you know, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show go and sticking a stick in the eye of people like Mark Driscoll, we’d love for you to join us. Speaking of which, we definitely do not want to attack him physically.

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66 Books, 40 Authors, Zero Contradictions?

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