Help Meet, Not Help Yourself

And a lot of guys look at a married woman, they’re like, I wish I could find a girl like that. That’s like looking at a piece of land that nobody’s, you know, ever worked on versus looking at a place where for 30 years, a guy’s been cultivating his land.

And you look at the land and you’re like, look at that beautiful property. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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, Dan?

Things are good. Things are good. It’s a… it’s a sunshiny day and life is pleasant all around us, and we’re going to talk about awful things. So what could go wrong? Yeah, we’re going to start this today with a… what… what are we calling this one?

Taking Issue.

Oh, we’re going to take issue. And, boy, when you’ve got Mark Driscoll loaded up, you’re going to take issue. Yeah, you…

You’ve gotta come loaded for bear. And… and this time we’re going to read the transcript of some things that Mark has said. And we know that you’re going to be biting through your tongue and you’re going to be pulling the armrests off of your chair the whole time. But just be patient, we’ll get to it.

We get to do misogyny with this one. He covers many different areas of being a jerk, but this time it’s misogyny, so that’s going to be fun. And then in the second part of the show, it’s… it’s going to be… what’s that? What’s what we’re doing? Yeah, and we’re going to be playing the telephone game because a lot of people are making claims about the transmission of the Bible and the reliability thereof. So that’s what we’ll do in the latter half of the show. But for now, let’s take issue. All right, so the good brother Driscoll has had some stuff to say. Should we just dive in with… yeah, you know, it was a clip from his… from his YouTube show or whatever that… that he himself clipped and he himself put out into the world.

This is something that he wants us to know he believes.

Right. He’s… we can go… I’m happy to just read the transcript if… if that’s okay with you.

Sure, sure.

Okay. So… and so I always… and… and this is Mark Driscoll now.

Yes, we would very much like to distinguish ourselves from the beliefs that we are about to be speaking.

Yes. So, Mark Driscoll quote: “And so I always say, you know, it’s no problem being married to a strong woman. It’s a big problem being married to an independent woman. And there’s a big difference between a woman who’s independent and a woman who’s strong. A woman who’s strong comes along and she strengthens you. An independent woman, she’s fighting you, and she’s exhausting you.”

And what most guys don’t really consider is it says in 1 Corinthians 11, it says that the woman is the glory of the man. So I always use this analogy that the woman is like a garden and the man is like a gardener. And a lot of guys look at a married woman. They’re like, I wish I could find a girl like that. That’s like looking at a piece of land that nobody’s, you know, ever worked on versus looking at a place where for 30 years, a guy’s been cultivating his land.

And you look at the land and you’re like, look at that beautiful property.

Oh, my God. Like, sorry, I just… I’ve heard this before, and I’m still, like, reacting viscerally.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know how much work that guy put in to take it from raw land to a beautiful garden. That’s marriage. Like, you marry a woman, and it’s like, is she going to follow my leadership? Will she allow me to love her and serve her and disciple her and walk with her and cultivate her so that she becomes more fruitful and more beautiful over time? And so most guys, they’re looking for a park. They’re not… they’re not… look… is that… that’s an odd statement. They’re looking… Okay, yeah. Somebody… somebody’s already dressed it up for them. They’re not looking for a woman who’s willing to be led. And if you get a woman that’s willing to follow your leadership and you’re willing to put in the work, then eventually what you realize is we have a fruitful marriage and I have a beautiful wife. Yikes. Yeah, yikes.

All right, so let’s all take a moment and sort of cleanse ourselves.

Yes. Serenity.

If you’ve got some sage, feel free to burn it to get rid of the…

The…

The. The vibes.

I’m going to wash down those words with a swig of. Of my diet Dr. Pepper.

And that will. Yes.

It will be insufficient to really fully cleanse. So let’s dive in let’s cleanse ourselves by tearing this apart.

Yes. So to begin. 1 Corinthians 11. This is, this is this idea that the. And. And people have seen a drawing of three umbrellas, one on top of the other. The. Each one below is smaller umbrella and the woman is at the bottom.

And the, the. And this is the idea that. That Jesus is the head of the man, man is the head of the woman, and the woman is the glory of the man.

Never mind the fact that that drawing never understood what. How umbrellas work, but there you go.

Yeah, well, the idea there is that a woman exists basically as a supplement to a man. As, as an accoutrement of a man. The. The woman’s identity is found in the man’s identity. And this, and this goes back to the ancient world where a woman’s social identity was literally subordinate to the identity of the pater familias of the household of which she was a part, whether that was her father or an older brother, or her, her master if she was enslaved, or her husband, the man was the one with the identity and the woman had no independent social identity. And here it sounds like Mark is endorsing precisely that. She’s not independent. You don’t want an independent woman. You don’t want a woman with her own identity. You want a woman who is willing to be basically a supplement to your identity.

And you want a robot that you get to program.

Yeah. And, and this is a way that weak men and small men can protect their self esteem.

Right?

Because if you are married to an independent woman, then she has her own identity that is not reliant on you. And that makes folks like Mark feel lesser because they don’t really have. They don’t really have a full complete self.

Right.

Until they have a woman that they can consider their subordinate, that they can.

Consider the second that that woman has opinions or has, you know, has anything to say or brings something of her own to the table. As he said, he, he sees that an independent woman, she’s fighting you and she’s exhausting you or she’s contributing. You know what I mean? Like. Yeah, what are you talking about? The, his whole garden metaphor just mystifies me because you know who gardens a woman the best? The woman. Like, you know, like, you’re. You’re a garden too. If we’re gonna, if we’re gonna make a human a garden, we’re all gardens. And, and we all. Although that’s a dumb metaphor. Like.

Yeah, well, I think the part that really allows what’s under the surface, to bubble to the surface is when he says, look at that beautiful property.

Right.

And he means property in the sense of real property, land.

Right.

But really he’s betraying that he believes a woman is a man’s property.

That this is, this is something I possess and own. This is not someone with their own personhood and agency. This is just someone who exists to complement and supplement me and my agency and identity. And I. It for me, this goes back to again, the ancient world I made. I made a video recently where I talked about virginity, which is a biologically meaningless thing. Like it’s a social construct.

And it is something that we frequently see talked about on, on social media. You know, body counts. You, you’ve seen, you’ve seen guys talk about body counts.

Yes. Don’t do that, by the way. Yeah. Just as a, just as a data over dogma psa. Don’t, don’t talk about body count. That’s gross.

Grow the hell up. But all of that is rooted in the perception of a woman as a, a commodity to be bought and sold. Because when, when we look in the Bible and we see this, or at.

Least a commodity to be used like.

Well, I’m going to argue that it is rooted in the economic transmission of a woman’s body, specifically her sexual availability and her procreative capacities. Because we see this in the Bible. I’ve talked, I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about it on the program Deuteronomy 22, 28 and 29, where we have. Well, actually verse 22 all the way through 29, we’ve got these laws about what happens if, if a man is found sleeping with the wife of another man, it’s death penalty for both of them. What happens when a man finds a virgin who is betrothed and then it gives two examples where he violate. He sexually assaults her and another where it seems to be consensual based on the stupid logic of the, the Deuteronomistic author. There’s. And it’s the death of the man in both cases and the death of the girl if they think it’s consensual. And then what to do if a man sexually assaults a virgin who is not betrothed and then it’s a fine and the guy marries her and he’s never allowed to divorce her.

And the. What’s, what’s so ridiculous about this is that the punishment is different depending on the who has possession of the woman.

Right.

If it’s a husband who has possession of the woman. That’s a sacrosanct relationship, the violation of which incurs the death penalty. If it’s a father, really all he’s out is a bride price. So that’s how you make the victim whole, is you have the perpetrator pay.

The bride price, the victim not being the woman.

Right. The, the primary victim is the owner of the woman, the one who stood to benefit monetarily from, from marrying her off. And in a world where a woman was a commodity to be bought and sold, when you purchase that commodity, you expect to be the first one to set foot inside, to cross the threshold, so to speak. And you expect that woman to have a shiny new car smell and to be in pristine condition. That’s where like that’s the at root what’s going on with this idea of virginity. The only sense in which virginity could possibly be socially relevant is in the sense that, well, I don’t want anyone to have been there before me, right? I’m getting this thing and I want to be the first one to have broken ground, to use Mark’s garden metaphor.

Right.

And so Mark is, is really allowing that kind of just troglodyte-ish conceptualization of women to bubble to the surface in referring to her as a piece of property. A piece of property that he has ownership over, he controls, but is also there to show off to other men. So it’s always all about Mark’s self-esteem. It’s always all about his identity.

I think one of the things that’s uncomfortable about this discussion is that Mark Driscoll, as we, you know, you, he referred to Corinthians, you’re talking about Deuteronomy. It’s a biblically defensible position that he’s taking.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And that’s tricky that, I mean, that’s obviously rough because we are, we are explicitly saying the Bible gets this very wrong in a bunch of places. Like the Bible is kind of awful about that. So, and that’s funny that, you know, you’re, you’re still a believer. So I, I mean, but I think that that’s part of the way that this show works, right, Is that we have to say, we have to be willing if we’re going to be honestly engaging with the Bible to say we actually know better now. We actually know stuff that the authors of the Bible didn’t know and we can do a better job than the authors of the Bible did.

And there are, and there are certainly things about which even somebody like Mark Driscoll if he were forced to be honest about things, would say, yeah, we know better when it comes to slavery. Yeah, we know better. Like, it’s. That’s just not up for serious debate. The notion that the Bible is accurate on its—is, or at least is morally defensible on its perspective regarding slavery is a deeply unserious position. And. And Mark certainly is not going to swing in and defend slavery, although some have.

I was gonna say recently, some have.

We’ve been seeing Doug Wilson really trying to thread a needle on that.

Yeah. But. But, you know, it was in the. In the lifetime of my mother, there was a time when she was alive when she could not get a bank account, get a credit card in her own name. She had to be married, and then her husband could get the credit card, and then she would get one of those credit cards. And like, in. In the lifetime of my own mother, only like, less than a decade before I was born, I think, is when that was. They put a stop to that. And there are. There. It’s. You know, the pendulum kind of swings back and forth. Women’s liberation movement is now. I think the pendulum’s moving in the opposite direction. We’ve had so many people who on social media, quite prominently are advocating for taking the vote away from women.

And talking about how, you know, the—even here in Utah, in Davis County, I think we had a precinct chair up in Davis County say that society—all of society’s problems began when women were allowed out of the kitchen to vote.

And—and you have people who are defending slavery. You have people who are defending—there—there are people today who suggest there’s no such thing as marital rape, that once you’re married, that your body is the property of your spouse. And you even see this in 1 Corinthians—1 Corinthians 7. You’ll see a lot of people go, “No, look at that, look at that, look at that. It says that the wife has just as much a right to the husband’s body.” How many times do we see that playing out in marriages all around the U.S. today where the wife demands satisfaction and then takes it against the will of the husband? It does happen, but it happens far more and to far more deleterious effect for the other spouse in the other direction.

And there are people who say there’s—there’s nothing wrong with that, that the wife owes the husband her body, which is another conceptualization of—of a woman as—as property. So while—and talking about the virginity thing, a lot of people point out, “Well, wait a minute. A lot of—a lot of churches emphasize the need for men to be virgins until they’re married as well.” The Latter-day Saint tradition certainly does that.

But they don’t emphasize it nearly as much.

Yeah. Yeah, they don’t. The—the—the shame that attaches to women’s loss of virginity—

Right.

—is—is an order of magnitude higher than that—that attaches to—

—to—to—to a man or a young man, a kid losing his virginity.

Yeah. And—and I think that is rooted in the perception that—that we expect a woman to be a piece of property that is in pristine condition. Yeah. A man—the man’s body is not being in any sense entered or soiled or—yeah—or broken into or anything like that.

Well, and there is a perception of—yeah, again, I think you’re right. Like, the woman is tarnishing the thing that she is supposed to then give over as a possession to the man, whereas the man is just sort of soiling himself when he—when he loses his virginity before marriage. The woman is actually, like, ruining the gift, ruining the thing that goes to the man, ruining the property, as you say. You know, that—that—or as Driscoll says. You know, Driscoll is—you’re right that he liked that word when he says, “Look at that beautiful property.”

It may have been an accidental inference, but it was obvious—like, it is—it’s clear from what he’s saying that that’s the thing, you know, and if—

And if the—if the transcription is correct and he says later on, “So most guys, they’re looking for a park.”

It sounds like what Mark’s saying is a real man wants to be able to point to the woman and say, “I did all that. That was all me.”

Right.

“I am not benefiting from anybody else’s work. I am not coming in after someone else has already been there. I’m the one who is responsible for all this.” Which is—it—which is going back to a sense of pride. This is about, “I’m the only one who is—who has dug in this garden, and this is all me.” So—and again, the woman there is there to supplement.

Well, and then she becomes a reflection of him.

Right.

And that—and he’s—he’s explicit about that, too. The idea is this—and that becomes problematic on its own, in its own regard.

Right.

And we—we start to see these men who, you know, who demand that their woman look a certain way and act a certain way, not because it’s—it—it’s an expression of who she is, but because it’s a reflection of who he is.

Right.

“I want my woman to be blonde, have her hair long, have big boobs, have—whatever,” because it reflects well on me if she’s putting out the image that I want to put out.

Like Marty McFly’s mom said to Biff, “You’re the one who wanted me to have these things.” That is—

I—that—that must be from the second movie.

That is from the second movie, which I am.

I’ve only seen once and. And vow never to see again.

That. But that’s. That’s a metaphor. That’s a trope.

And. And. And there’s another example.

The. The whole idea of, you know, you trade in for. For a younger woman because she’s a reflection of. Not necessarily your identity, but it’s. It’s a trophy wife. It’s a way in. In Mark’s opinion, your beautiful wife is there to show off to other men, to see. See how good a man I am.

Right.

That I was able to. To secure the bag this. This beautiful wife whom I have cultivated over.

Well. And you’re right to point out that, like, that’s why trading. That’s why these men, like, they’re willing to cast out a. A woman that has, you know, really given a lot of time and effort and, and her whole life to this guy because she, you know, she aged and now the garden looks different than. Than he wants her to look. Yeah. I. I also think that the garden metaphor is particularly interesting because the Bible has a garden. Like we have a very famous biblical garden, and very famously, in that the gardener is not the man. The gardener is God or. Or is the man. But then the woman is. Is brought in as a, quote, helper and partner. So, like, she’s not. She’s also a gardener. Like, I think the idea. The entire idea of the garden metaphor is these two people are meant to garden together and, and build something with each other.

You know what I mean? Like, it’s a partnership. It’s explicitly a partnership.

And the word that gets translated in the KJV help meet. The idea is that this is someone who’s equivalent to.

Right.

And, you know, you can. You can massage the nuances a little bit and make it sound like it’s not necessarily equivalent to so much as it is adequate for. Or something like that. But. But the idea is the word is kenegdo is across from him. In other words, you. You and I are right across from each other.

Right.

And the, and the idea there is matching sufficient equivalent, something like that. But, but the, the helper is not necessarily the, the subordinate. The helper is, is God is called a helper in, in many places. In fact, I, I think the, the ezer helper. I think that’s applied to God more than it is to humans. But at the same time, however, this is also coming from a, a deeply patriarchal society, right, where you then have the curse in Genesis 3, where I think it’s forget which verse it is. But the idea is that the man will rule over the woman. And you know, that’s, that’s what has somebody like Mark licking his chops. The opportunity to, to rule over a woman.

It, it just, you know, you said it earlier and it just. What if it’s so clear that this, this kind of, of an aesthetic, this kind of idea erupts out of deep insecurity? Like. Yeah, like it’s this sense that, like, if I can’t control everything, it’s going to get away from me or I’m gonna lose it or I’m not valid. I’m not worthy if I’m not the one in control.

Right.

And, and yeah, it becomes very obvious. You know, you look at modern psychology, you look at attachment theory, you look at all of these things and it becomes very clear that like, this is not the pathway to a happy marriage. It’s the pathway to a good presenting marriage that will be. That’s going to be miserable.

Well, and you’ll notice that so much of what Mark’s concerned for is how his marriage looks to other people.

Right?

And how, what it makes other people think about him, it’s, it’s very much praying on the street corner. It’s very much trying to put on display your piety through this notion that your wife is supposed to be your, your window dressing or something. And when, and when you look at Mark’s rap sheet, what did he get in trouble for? Domineering leadership.

Right?

Like all, all of the, the trappings of an abusive control freak and a narcissist. That’s, that’s what. Why, you know, and he hasn’t changed. No, because he’s, it’s not like he took accountability for and repented of all of the things that he was accused of doing.

Right. He never, he never came out and said, I’ve gone to so much therapy about this and, and I see now why what I did was bad.

He just skedaddled and found a group that would let him take over and. Which shows that all he’s doing is preaching the same stuff that got him in trouble, and he’s just found a group that will allow him to do that.

One of the things that this points out is the fact that those who want, like, there are different ways that people feel the desire to preach to, to be in front of a congregation. Some people who, who become pastors, who become priests are doing it out of a genuine desire to help people and a genuine desire to, to, to show love for their community.

And then others get there because it’s a, you know, it fulfills a narcissistic desire. It fulfills this sense of like, you know, I want to prove that I have power. I want to prove that I’m above other people and stuff. And that’s going to be a huge percentage of pastors. You know what I mean? It’s like it’s, it’s the kind, it’s exactly the kind of job that a narcissist will want.

Yeah. It. And it’s like, it’s very much like politics. And Plato lamented that the people who are probably best suited to run a republic are the people who are least likely to actually go out and, and seek office, which is why they should be forced to do it. But yeah, the, the folks who, who run from accountability from one congregation to another and then preach this kind of just profoundly misogynistic understanding of a marriage relationship, they’re not, they’re not getting any better at following Jesus even according to the way they talk about Jesus. Because if you compare all, all of Mark. Mark’s sermons, you’ll find him talking about a very flowery picture of Jesus in, in some limited circumstances. But, but once it comes time to start talking about practical stuff like marriage and stuff like that, you’re. Then you get into old school domineering Mark Driscoll, the kind of stuff that, that got him run out of Mars Hill.

Well, I guess the, the, the takeaway then is that in both your marriage and in your church, believe the red flags, get out. It’s you, you, you don’t. You, you deserve better if, if, if they’re coming at you like Driscoll is anyway. All right, well then let us move on to. What’s that? All right, so you mentioned the, this telephone game. Comedians have talked about it. You, you sent me a thing where one of, one of my. Not. Not. Yeah, I guess I’m gonna call him one of my favorite comedians.

Had talked about it a little bit. I’m trying to find the quote. It was David Cross who.

Who said, and I’ll just use his, his quote as our, as our launching off point. He said, back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re edited, then translated from dead languages, then re translated, then edited, then rewritten. So I guess what I’m saying is the Bible is literally the world’s oldest game of telephone. And Dan, I, I take it you have something to say about that claim.

Well, I, you get this. I think there are two dimensions in which people talk about the Bible as, as the world’s oldest or longest game of telephone. And I think there’s one dimension that’s a little more accurate than the other because sometimes people will say it’s been translated so many times that we can’t know what it was saying.

Right.

And this is, this is something that, you know, a lot of people are vaguely aware that the Bible exists in a variety of languages and that Hebrew and Greek and Latin and English are, are relevant to the, that whole process. And they imagine that what we have today are translations of translations of translations.

Of translations which is, which, if anybody has ever taken a piece of text and put it into Google Translate and had it translated into one language and then take that and translate it into another language and then you keep doing that and then eventually you try to come back to English and it’s fun.

Oh boy. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s a mess.

And, and a lot of people think that that’s what’s going on and that we can’t trust translations of the Bible these days because of that. And there’s just zero truth to that. Well, I’ll say it this, there’s as, as a game of telephone, there’s zero truth to that. But I do want to talk about some of the nuances of reliance on translations in translation, but whenever we get a new translation of the Bible, particularly into English, but in most languages, there are languages where there are exceptions, but for the most part into English, a new translation of the Bible is going to be a translation of some version of the Hebrew, the Aramaic or the Greek. In other words, we always try to go back to the source languages so we can skip over the Arabic and the Latin and the Gothic and the Syriac and the other translations and go back to Hebrew and Greek. And so if someone is thinking that the Bible has been translated so many times that we’re really, you know, helplessly disconnected, decoupled from the source texts or the source languages, at least that’s just not true.

There’s no truth to that, right?

It’s not like, it’s not like it was translated into the Latin, and then the Latin was translated into the French, and then the French was translated into the German, and then the German was translated into the English. And never once did anybody look, look back several steps to check in to see if, like, how we’re doing on this. It’s. That’s not what happened.

And that’s, and that’s actually part of what is responsible for the Protestant Reformation was a bunch of people going, hey, what if instead of just translating the Latin Vulgate, we went back to the Greek and Hebrew? And that’s what folks like Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale and Martin Luther all did, right? Was Erasmus prepared an edition of the Greek New Testament that was Greek rather than the Latin. And then a bunch of people went, whoa, wait a minute, we can translate the New Testament directly from the Greek now. And ever since then, we’ve been trying to figure out what the earliest recoverable shape of the New Testament was using Greek manuscripts. So, like, that was an issue, but it was really Latin was the only language that was in the way, right? And even, even some of the Catholic editions of the Bible that used to be translated from the Latin, they now translate them from the Greek and the Hebrew as well.

So, so we, we got around that obstacle. So when it comes to translation, that’s just not really an issue now.

Okay. I mean, we’ve read bad translations before, so it can be an issue. But it’s a one issue. It’s a one, it’s a one step issue. Yeah.

If you got a bad translation, you got a bad translation. That’s the fault of the translation.

Right?

And there are, you know, there are other languages, so there are some pidgin and creole languages. Tok Pisin, for instance, like I, I think one of the most popular translations of the Bible into Tok Pisin is actually a translation of the King James Version or some other English translation into the Bible into Tok Pisin. So, you know, there are languages where it is from one language to another to another, but that’s, that’s phenomenally rare. So, but the, the dimension where this is more accurate, I think, is when it comes to the transmission of manuscripts. Because one of, one of the things that when we look back at the history of Bible translation, Desiderius Erasmus was starting from manuscripts that dated to between the 1100s and the 1500s, right? Like that’s very recent compared to, you know, the. A thousand years, 1500 years earlier, right? We have since found a lot of much earlier manuscripts, and so now we can cobble together a version of the Greek New Testament that we think is more reliable.

And this is where we have, you know, verses that are just entirely cut out of modern translations because we’ve managed to recover better versions of the New Testament, for instance. And so our New Testaments today will omit usually about 16 verses. So we’ve done a really good job of making up for that gap. But when we go back to our earliest manuscripts of every last verse of the New Testament, let’s say we have a bunch of manuscripts and a bunch of quotations from patristic authors dating to between the 2nd century CE and then even following after the invention of the printing press.

Sorry, you said patristic authors. And I almost let it slide, and then I realized I don’t even know what patristic means.

Church fathers. So this would be the very influential, authoritative early Christian thinkers and writers. Okay, so from the second century you have, like, Justin Martyr and Tertullian, and from the third century you have folks like Origen and. And people like that. So those folks are quoting an awful lot from the Bible. And so we can use their quotations to kind of triangulate what the. The manuscripts they were looking at may have looked like. Even if we don’t have an actual manuscript from that time period, which we don’t. Well, for. For most of the texts of the New Testament, I would say. Well, maybe not most. I think you certainly don’t get a full. You can’t cobble together every last verse of the New Testament until you get to the great uncial manuscripts of the fourth century. So like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, those are the first. Those allow us to fill in every single gap prior to that.

You probably have between the patristic quotations and New Testament manuscripts, you can probably account for like 95% of the New Testament text. But there are only four fragmentary manuscripts of the New Testament that are even dated anywhere in the second century CE. And then I think when you get into the third century CE, it’s like five or six.

Right.

So like you.

And those are just either a fragment of a single book or maybe fragments of a collection of Pauline epistles or something like that. So it’s not large percentages of the New Testament, but then you’ve got a black hole between those earliest manuscripts and whenever these texts were written. And that’s where the telephone game is a live option, because that’s where you have people passing these manuscripts along and copying them. And the closer you get to their original composition, it seems to me, the more likely there is to be change and the least likely that changes to be detectable.

Right.

And. And so we don’t know who was on the other end of the line after the message got passed on from whoever wrote it, and we don’t know how much they changed that message. And I think we can probably say we were pretty close when it comes to the New Testament, but we have all kinds of theories about changes that were introduced. We.

Well, like you say, I mean, even we know there’s a whole bunch of verses that we now eliminate because they just, they showed up later and we have earlier versions that don’t have them. Right. So we know that this is happening. That’s kind of like sort of proof of concept that something that these, These texts get messed with. They get added to. They get. They do get changed.

Yeah. And I think there. There are folks out there. I’ve had arguments with at least one of them on Twitter, scholars who work in textual criticism who have told me to my virtual face that we can be confident that nothing changed in between original composition and our earliest manuscripts. And that just baffles me because, like, we know things change when the manuscripts get transmitted. On what grounds are we justified to say except for those decades or that century where magically nothing changed?

Right.

So I, I do think there’s a sense in which the telephone game is a live option. And I think it gets. And, and I mentioned theories about things, and this is not just, you know, maybe this word actually said something different, but like, adding entire chapters. Like, we had Hugo Mendez on talking about the Gospel of John, and, you know, we already know about the, the woman taken in adultery story.

Right.

But he says all of chapter 21 was added later. And I, And, And I think the case for that is strong when you look at how 20 seems to tie things off in a nice, neat little bow. And then 21’s like, so then this happened, and then ties things off in almost the exact same way and says things like, yeah, this, this is the. The testimony. You know, this is the. The disciple who wrote this testimony, and we know that it’s true. Who’s we? So I, I think there’s, that, there’s, you know, people who think that Luke 1 and 2 were added secondarily. There are folks who think that 2 Corinthians is actually a cobbling together of multiple different letters that Paul wrote. But when, then, when we get to the Hebrew Bible it’s even like significantly worse for a number of reasons, including the fact that a lot of these texts were written many centuries prior to our earliest manuscript.

Right.

And then so, and we have evidence of significant change. So for instance, the Book of Jeremiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have manuscripts of very, very fragmentary manuscripts, just a handful of verses that match up with the Septuagint version of Jeremiah over and against the Masoretic Text. And the Septuagint version has things in a different order and it also eliminates some things. And the Septuagint’s book of Jeremiah is about 1/6 shorter than the Masoretic Text version of the Book of Jeremiah. But the Dead Sea Scrolls would suggest that, that that 1/6 shorter version of Jeremiah was in circulation in Hebrew very, very early. And so it certainly sounds like somebody has added a bunch of texts to Jeremiah. And then we get into Pentateuchal source criticism. How did the five books of Moses come together? We got all kinds of theories about that.

And there, there are texts that make it really clear that at some point these stories look much different than how we have them. So for instance, Exodus 6:3. In Exodus 3, God has already introduced themselves to Moses and said, you know my name is Ehyeh asher ehyeh, you shall tell them Ehyeh sent you. And then in Exodus 6, God comes back and says, hey, it’s me, I am Adonai. But Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew me as El Shaddai, and they did not know me by my name Adonai. But you can go look at Genesis 15:7 where God says to Abraham, hey man, my name’s Adonai. And Abraham goes, oh, Adonai. And so where is the author of Exodus 6 getting this idea that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob didn’t know the name Adonai? Most likely they had versions of these stories before them that did not have those stories or did not have the name Adonai in them.

And so Deutero-Isaiah—Isaiah, the original book of Isaiah was probably at absolute most Isaiah 1-39, 40-55 added later. Despite what Dan Ellsworth may think about the strength of that argument, that is.

A, that is a reference to conversation that we had in our patrons only content. Check it out over on patreon.com and.

Then Isaiah 56 through 66 even later. Like that’s an example of the telephone game where the, the stories are getting added to, they’re accreting more details as they go. And so I think the, the telephone game is a live option when it comes to the transmission of the manuscripts.

I think it’s almost guaranteed to not be to. It’s not. It’s more than a live option. It must have happened. It did happen. And the nice thing about it, and frankly, it’s probably great that it happened, because the truth of the matter is that much of these writings, they’re not historical. We’ve talked about that. We know that this is not. These are not, you know, we’re not transmitting the true and accurate history of the peoples of, you know, the, the, the Israelite people were. We’re transmitting myth and we’re transmitting stories that are, that shape culture. And as you’ve talked about, you’ve talked about in textual criticism, how what ends up happening isn’t that it gets worse or it gets changed to be, you know, to. It can get changed just to serve a purpose, you know, a specific ideological end, but it can also change just to make it make more sense and to make it, like, less incomprehensibly weird or like, you know, the first guy that wrote it wasn’t a very good writer, and the next guy, like, is like, let me fix a couple things here or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. And. And certainly there are ways that the, the changes that have been introduced help accommodate the text and the story and the characters to new circumstances and new situations. But. And it also results in more of a pluriformity in, in some ways, but then more uniformity in others.

Right.

And a lot of that has to do with the interpretive lenses that you’re bringing to the text. And the book I’m writing right now, my second trade book, God’s Biography, is precisely about how having different conceptualizations of God gives you a more flexible toolbox. If you, if you need a vindictive God, hey, we got verses for that. If you need a, a loving and a forgiving God, we got verses for that. If you need a young God, we got verses for that. You need an old God. Guess what? We got verses for that. But wait, there’s more. If you need a God who is, you know, without body parts or passions, we got verses for that. If you need a God who has a body part and passions, we got verses for that. Like, it is, it is your utility deity. It is your all purpose, you know, boy scout, utility deity can be all things to all people.

A Swiss Army God, if you will.

A Swiss Army God, if you will. Yeah. So, and, and certainly a lot of the textual transmission has people going, ooh, don’t like that. Gonna add this little part here. And then the next person’s like, oh, I like that. And then, you know, down the road somebody’s got, going to be comparing and be like, oh, it looks kind of problematic. Oh, I’ll invent a new third thing. And that will harmonize the two things that I don’t like. So it, it makes for a more dynamic, a more versatile understanding of history, understanding of God, even understanding of the biblical texts because, you know, you develop ideas like accommodationism that God accommodates everything to the capacities and the, of the times and the places and the cultures and everything like that. Which is, which is just. I love accommodationism because like, we don’t have any evidence for this, but whatever we got wrong, God did that on purpose.

Okay, like, well, can you demonstrate that? It’s just the way it is, man.

It’s just how I do.

Yeah. And that’s really what like every now and then I’ll have, I’ll have people comment on my videos and be like, you haven’t even considered accommodationism. And it’s like, oh, I have. I rejected it long ago because it’s really just saying God did it.

Right?

It’s like, yeah, these things are all wrong. God did it.

Well, I mean that’s, at some point, theologically speaking, when you run up against entire roadblocks, when you run up against something that is just not going to work, you got to retreat to something, you know what I mean? And I don’t know, is unsatisfying for a lot of people. So God done it is like, okay, I guess, fine, you can have that if you need it, I guess. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s certainly not a satisfying data driven position to take.

Yeah, yeah, it’s, but it, but it assuages the cognitive dissonance. It helps people make themselves feel validated. It helps them to feel like the problem goes away by ginning up that tiniest little sliver of not impossible. And, and when it comes to the telephone game, a lot of people will just dismiss that metaphor as just nonsense. And if they’re talking about translation, I think that’s accurate. If they’re talking about transmission, I think the telephone game is definitely an accurate metaphor to some degree. It has its limits and a lot of folks who deploy it because it is, it is a pretty juvenile way to go about this, I think sometimes stretch it well beyond a breaking point. But.

Right.

But there is something to the telephone game. As long as we’re understanding it correctly. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, we’re not going to go all the way to David Cross levels. He’s a comedian. He’s exaggerating for comic purposes. But he’s not wrong in the sense that, like, what we get, the thing that we have, this doesn’t diminish its value, but the thing that we have has changed dramatically over time. Yeah. I mean, half of these stories were probably oral traditions for decades, centuries before they were even written down.

And were honed and refined through that process because it was so. It was literally a game of telephone where one guy, you know, he’s telling the story to his people and then somebody else hears it and goes and transmits it to his people with his own flourishes and whatever. We know how that goes.

Yeah. And a lot of people. There are a lot of people out there that are under the misapprehension that primarily oral cultures somehow magically have the ability to transmit complex stories over centuries without error. And that’s just demonstrably not true. We have tested this over and over and over and over again. And oral traditions change, period. There’s no other option, of course. And so, yeah, that’s going to happen. And then when you commit it to text, what that does is kind of leaves an imprint of what was supposed to have been said, an imprint that will remain as long as the text remains. And so that does provide a little more accountability, a little more permanence, but it doesn’t prevent people from altering stuff. People can still alter things all the time. If you get a manuscript and it says something, you can change that manuscript and then destroy the original. And then unless there are tons of other copies out there that people who are going to see your copy have access to, your copy is going to be promulgated in a lot of different ways.

And that’s why we have different manuscript families is kind of out of vogue, but. But that’s why we have kind of concentrations of traditional readings that are largely interpolations, things that people have added.

Well, yeah, I. Sorry, I just wanted to just marvel at the thought. I’m going back a little bit, but you were talking about how people are claiming that oral transmission of stories could be perfect or whatever. And that’s so like, I. You know, there’s family stories in my family that were passed down and, you know, it’s Grandma and Grandpa’s story about this, that and the other. And then I talk, you know, I check in with my cousins about it, and they have a totally different version of that story than I have. And that’s just like two generations. That’s it. So, like, so the thought that it can’t, you know, that something could make it not only two generations, but within the same generation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That. It’s absurd.

My family watched the episode of Bob’s Burgers the other night where the pigeon gets into the restaurant. And Bob is terrified of the pigeon, right, and tells the story about how he was attacked by the pigeons. Terrified him. And they were like, that wasn’t you. That was Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

That’s right.

And he was like, oh. And it was just a false memory. Yeah, that movie traumatized him to the degree that he internalized that scene and thought that that was—that was a real memory of his. And that happens. That totally happens all the time.

And that’s how human brains work. Our brains are—they’re great for a lot of things, but yeah, look, perfection is not what they do. That’s not—that’s not how our brains work.

There’s another one. I forget the show, but there was a show where a guy was like, oh, I’m—I’m going to see this guy that I knew when I was younger, and I need to apologize to him because I bullied him when we were kids. And I remember this event where I did this and tied him up and—and then he confronts him and the guy was like, “Is this supposed to be a joke?” And he was like, “No, what are you talking about?” And—and the other guy was like, “I bullied you. I was the one who did that to you.” And he was like.

Yeah, human memory is—is so bizarre. And part of it is the fact that we don’t—we’re not like, capturing and storing memories. Every time we remember something, we’re actually generating it based on the last time that we generated it.

And that’s precisely the telephone game.

Right.

Because if you generated falsely, that’s going to influence how you generate it every single time into the future until you have some kind of corrective. And that’s.

And what’s amazing about that is if the telephone game is operational in our own brains, just like—not—not even like me to someone else to someone else to stop, but me to me, then yeah, I—I think it’s safe to say that a book that is a collection of writings over many centuries, you know, that it was passed down and transmitted by, you know, one scribe does it, and then another scribe copies that. Yeah. We’re going to—we’re going to have some—some changes, we’re going to have some—some transmission errors or improvements or whatever you want to call it.

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