Does the Bible say the Earth is Flat?

Well, I hesitated to—like, when I decided to make this video this morning for my social media, I was like contemplating, do I really want to do this? I’m opening myself up for criticism. But I was like, no, if I feel this way, I’ve got to go through with this just because I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How goes the storm, Dan?

Well, it seems to have left you and come to me. We, we live on opposite sides of the Salt Lake City Valley. And yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m hearing thunder in the background. I hope our listeners can’t hear it, but if you can, it’ll just, we’ll just call this a moody episode.

Little, little ambiance, that’s all.

Yeah, exactly. I love it. And speaking of moody. Moody, we’re, we’re gonna have some fun with a conspiracy. We’re doing Conspiracy Watch to start off with. And then we’re gonna have opportunities for growth. I think that should be a self-help. We’re gonna do Dan’s self-help and.

It’s gonna be me looking into a mirror, right?

Yeah, exactly. You’re good enough, you’re smart enough and—god doggone it or god dang it. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here.

Or you could just go all the way back to Shania Twain: “Gone and Done It.”

Gone and done it. There you go. I like it. Yeah. But no, you are going to be looking into a mirror a little bit because you’ve revised your position on something.

Yeah, yeah. I am capable of growth from time to time. It is painful and it leaves behind a foul-smelling husk. But we have opportunities for growth all the time. And I want to share a little bit about how I—I don’t think my position was necessarily wrong, but I’m going to revise it a little bit because I want to. I think I want to. I can point it a little more directly at the target. So we’ll get to that at the second half of this.

Oh, it sound—I mean, I made it sound all sexy and crazy and, and wild. And then you narrowed it down to the point where it almost doesn’t sound like anything happened at all. But that’s okay. We’re gonna have a good time. Everyone stay tuned to hear how Dan was almost, but not quite, a little bit, maybe wrong.

Ish. Yeah. Not the first time and won’t be the last time.

But before that, Conspiracy Watch. So for today’s conspiracy, Dan, you—you suggested this idea and I tried to Google it. And here’s the problem with Googling certain big conspiracies that have been widely and, and well refuted by respected sources.

Is it all the porn that comes up?

It’s all the porn. It’s a problem. No, the problem is that what you get is those respected sources and their refutations—and their refutations very rarely include like the real off-the-wall dingbat stuff that you’re looking for.

There’s not a lot of steelmanning going on when—when it comes time to refute some of these asinine conspiracy theories. So when you want—when you want the—the juicy stuff. When you want to—I want to know exactly what their argument is from their mouths. From their mouths. Yeah, you got to go into the trenches.

And so I. Here’s the thing. What we’re talking about today is flat Earth and what I found. And I think this is why we’re talking about it. I don’t know. I haven’t heard your argument yet. But I believe that this is why we’re talking about it. If I type flat Earth, I get like page after page after page of refutations of the flat Earth conspiracy and.

Probably something at the top saying, if you think the earth is flat, here’s a number for you to call.

Right. Yeah, something like that. The flat Earth crisis line or whatever. What I found helped was if I typed in the word firmament.

Because that changes things a lot and gets us to the heart of one of the main reasons why people are eager to believe that the earth is flat as opposed to a globe spinning in space. Okay, so let’s talk a bit about why the flat Earth conspiracy loops back to our subject matter, which is the Bible. Do, do you want to start on that or do you want me to start?

Okay. I thought you were still leading into.

No, no, I was leading into you going. Now you. Now you say words just to pull.

The curtain back a little bit. I, I imagine that sometimes people are like, they must have, like a script. They talked about this stuff beforehand. No, what usually happens is we’ll text each other and be like, what do you want to talk about? Oh, I, I thought of this, I thought of that. And then the other will go and poke around and do some research. And then we get together and we’re like, okay, hit record. So anyway, and.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s. It’s a miracle this makes sense at all.

It’s radio gold, in my opinion. So. So the, the Bible and the flat Earth, we’ve got a lot of different ways that the ancient conceptualization of the Earth and the universe is represented. But what we don’t have is somebody saying, this is what our Earth looks like. What we have are just kind of scattered references to different features of the Earth and the heavens. And we have to kind of piece it all together. And there are two different dimensions to think about this. And we got some $2 words coming up here. One of them is diachronically, and the other is synchronically. Diachronically means through time. And so there are differences as you go from the earlier layers of the Bible to the later layers of the Bible. And then synchronically means at the same time, there can be differences from person to person, place to place, at the same time. And so it’s not a.

Because the Bible’s not univocal. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this yet, but what, what.

When did this happen?

It happened on February 3rd. The Bible is no longer univocal. It’s multivocal. You have different people saying different things. And so there’s a lot of kind of assuming and guesswork and filling in the gaps and trying to construct a cosmology from the Bible. But there are a handful of things that are pretty consistent that we see repeated reference to throughout the Bible. And those things include things like the pillars of the Earth. You get these. These pillars are referenced all over the place. You get this idea that the the Earth has been fixed and is immovable. This is something that you find in a number of different places as well.

When you say pillars, are they pillars that are, like, holding up the sky? Are they pillars that are that the Earth is sitting upon? What pillars are we talking about?

So that it’s it’s not entirely clear. Just have a bunch of different references to pillars of the Earth. But this is this is very clearly like foundations, architectural foundations, slash pillars. So they are things that are supporting, in some sense, the earth.

And this is pretty consistent. And it’s not just kind of, you know, flowery, poetic stuff. There seems to be this idea that there are foundations and or pillars to the earth. And then we have you mentioned the firmament. And the firmament comes from the King James translation of a a Hebrew word raqia which occurs in Genesis 1 , where it talks about the the the heavens, the skies, and the idea in the priestly creation account from Genesis 1 . And you can go all the way back to the very first episode of this dumb podcast to hear about the creation in in the early chapters of Genesis. Yeah, but the idea is that the earth is underwater, right? And these kind of chaotic waters of creation. And God affects creation by creating this raqia, which literally, it comes from a word that means to hammer out.

And so you got to think of the steel drums playing while God kind of inserts this solid dome that separates the waters above from the waters beneath. So it is firm. It is a solid dome. And when you talk to conspiracy theorists today, they’re like, yeah, there’s no space travel. You you just bounce off.

So, oh, let me tell you something. I had the delightful misfortune of go I, I stopped on Google and went over to TikTok for some content about this. And man, the number of videos that I saw where it’s like, they either we can’t penetrate the firmament. If you look at all of the NASA, first of all, NASA is apparently a whole thing for these.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It’s like like this is a like they’re they’re talking about nas

deception, right.

In Hebrew. Which does it.

No, it doesn’t.

Are they referring to anything similar?

There’s a verbal root nasha, and because this is usually written with diacritics and they don’t know how to read diacritics, they think N-A-S with a chevron on top of it A is pronounced NASA, but it’s nasha. And then also that’s just a reconstructed verbal root. The word never actually appears as nasha. To mean deceive, it has to be used in the causative hifil stem. And so and so we get some morphological changes to it. You have to add a preformative he, you get an i-quality vowel. You get a you get a consonant cluster with the nun and the shin, which means the nun gets assimilated to the shin. And then you get an i-quality vowel between the second and the third radical. And so basically, wherever this word means deceive, it’s being pronounced like nasha. In Genesis 3 , where Eve says, the serpent beguiled me, and people are like, “That means nasha.”

That word appears as hishiani in that verse. So no relation whatsoever to NASA.

Sorry to— —not—

Not at all. Sorry I asked. But yeah.

So there’s a whole thing about serpent tongue in the logo.

Yeah. So the NASA talking about how like all the rockets actually curve and then just come down again. Nothing actually— And then there, and then there was all this stuff about SpaceX and how they’re trying to, like, how one of their things actually hit the firmament and they show a little thing and it’s obviously just like the separation of the stages or something like that. But man, a lot of talk about firmament. There was even one, I saw one where they— It was like just an image of an observatory that happened to have like, I don’t know, like looked like lasers shooting straight up. And it was like, are they trying to destroy the firmament?

It’s, it kind of gives you Mr. Burns vibes. For centuries, man has tried to blot out the sun.

And I’m going to do it. Yeah.

But the firmament, in the biblical conceptualization, there is a solid dome up there and it’s crystalline in nature and looks like sapphire and that’s why it’s blue. And the windows of heaven are actual like holes that open up to let the rain fall. And, and then the heavens of the— What’s that?

I was going to say the stars are like contained in the firmament.

Yes, yes. And, and they are, you know, they’re moving around. In fact, I think if you, if you look in— So, so this, this cosmology is kind of consistent in a bunch of different parts of ancient Southwest Asia going back to the Bronze Age. The Hebrew Bible’s representation is generally coming from the, let’s say the middle two-fourths of the first millennium BCE. That’s where we get most of the discussion.

And then we get— But it’s just these scattered references. We don’t actually get an attempt to describe things until the Book of Enoch, which is, as you can imagine, exciting. So the Book of Enoch is Hellenistic period. The majority of it’s probably written between the 3rd and the 1st century BCE. But you actually get a, here’s what the Earth looks like kind of pseudoscientific discussion. And I saw one part of it that was just so great. So the luminaries, the sun and the moon. And so this is First Enoch, chapter 72. This is the first law of the luminaries. The sun is a luminary whose egress is an opening of heaven, which is located in the direction of the east and whose ingress is another opening of heaven located in the west. I saw six openings through which the sun rises and six openings through which it sets. The moon also rises and sets through the same openings.

And they are guided by the stars together with whom they lead. They are six in the east and six in the west. Heaven. All of them are arranged one after another in a constant order. So now we’ve got this idea of the stars and, and the luminaries kind of following specific tracks.

Yeah. And through openings.

Through openings. Right. So it’s like the— Open the window. Open the window. The sun comes in. Hey, everybody. And, and here I’m, I’m thinking of the alternate universe from Rick and Morty where the sun is just constantly screaming. I don’t know if you’ve seen that episode, but it’s great.

I don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this Rick and Morty thing. But.

You’ve never seen Rick and Morty.

No, I saw, I saw like an episode or two. I, I didn’t, it, it didn’t suck me in the way I was promised it would.

I, I, I think if you, if you got into it, you would just love it. But yeah, I can see how just one episode might, you might not get, get hooked.

I like, I like this Enoch description just because it reminds me of like, you know, one of those big clocks in a German square that has all these things ticking around and like, coming out of openings and going.

Something like. A guy with a rolling pin around the, the outside. It’s kind of like a Disneyland situation.

Pirates of the Caribbean.

It is a small world after all. Yeah.

Or a planetarium or something like that. But the, the idea is basically that this dry land exists within these, within a ring of the sea. So basically you’re surrounded by seas and you have references to the disc or the circle of the earth. And then the firmament comes up from the outside of the waters and then encloses this area and all the, you know, the birds of the skies and everything are in there, and then the luminaries and the planets and, and all of that. But, but Enoch actually talks about a little bit what’s going on beyond the firmament when you go beyond the edges of the Earth. Getting a little Jules Verne on the Hellenistic Jewish world. And, and so I think there, there are a number of different drawings of, of the ancient Israelite concept of the cosmos. And who knows if any of them would actually match up with what an ancient Israelite or Judahite or early Jewish person might have drawn if you sat him down and were like, draw the, the cosmos.

But generally the idea is that you’ve got dry land surrounded by water. There’s a firmament that comes up out of there, that, that encloses that whole land, you’ve got an underworld, which is where the deceased are. And beneath that you’ve got the pillars of the earth. And then this is all resting on the broader kind of primordial waters of creation, slash chaos, slash whatever. And there’s also a concept that the gods inhabit the heavens above the heavens of the earth. And, and so from the way the Bible represents things, it’s a flat earth.

It’s obviously not what the earth is actually like.

Well, why wouldn’t they have that representation when. When no one could go more than, you know, literally, if no one, you know, has ever traveled more than a couple hundred miles in their whole life, you know, it, it, you’re not going to be able to come up with a, a spherical idea. You’re like, the Earth is huge and looks flat from where you are, other than like bumps and mountains and things.

And most people, like, you know, you can see that far away. You can’t really see things anymore. But they probably would have thought, oh, you just get smaller and smaller and smaller the further away you go, and you’re just too small to see.

And you have, you have references to there. There are a bunch of passages in the scriptures that make statements that suggest they imagine that they’re on a pretty limited plot of land that is fairly flat. So, you know, the idea that every eye will see when Jesus comes in the clouds only makes sense if it’s possible for every eye to see because, like, everybody can see the sun.

Right.

At least as far as we know, everybody can see the sun up in the sky.

And it probably is at the same time. Like, there’s no, there’s no way to, like, as you travel, there’s no way to see that, you know, you’re seeing the sun at a slightly different time than the place you came from or whatever.

Yeah. And you have, in the Greek world, you have in by, I think around the 5th century BCE, you start to have these ideas that the Earth is round. Now, this is not based on scientific study. Initially, it’s because Plato, I don’t know if he got dumped or something, but he just got really into spheres and was just like, man, I love spheres. And so just hypothesized that all the perfect things, all the central main, all the main characters in the universe are spherical. And the idea is that every point is the exact same distance from the center. And, and, ooh, doesn’t that just make the tuning fork in your loins ring? Plato was a weird dude. But this information doesn’t spread out to. To the Jewish world. But you have kind of the convergence of this aesthetic notion that the Earth is round with developing notions based on, like, people who are taking measurements about shadows that are being cast in Egypt and stuff like that, from one part to, you know, a bunch of miles down the other direction.

And, and as our ability to measure time and distances and things like that gets refined, it becomes more and more clear that we live on a spherical Earth. And some of the earliest Christians insisted that we live on a spherical Earth. Like, there’s a. There’s an early Christian and philosopher named Athenagoras toward the end of the second century CE who is like, yep, the Earth is straight up a sphere, and other people didn’t buy it. But that became kind of the, the consensus view among the more philosophically oriented, the more thoughtful Christians.

Yeah, I mean, the idea of a spherical Earth dates back to ancient Greece. Like, this is not. This is not something that was not around the, the people who, who, you know, were alive in biblical times, or at least late biblical times, they might have encountered this idea.

I. I imagine they did, but we, we don’t. We just don’t see it reflected in any of the texts. So folks like, you know, the author of the Gospel of John or Paul, maybe they believed in a spherical Earth, they never say one way or another.

Right.

And. And some people talk about this idea that there are the four corners of the Earth.

They’re like, oh, that means it’s got to be a flat Earth. And it’s like, I talk about the corners of the earth, the, the ends of the earth, the. The edge of the Earth. You know, that doesn’t mean that. I think there are actually four points that, that sit at the four corners of a square or something. It’s a figure of speech.

It is very funny to me how many people, how often I will hear someone say, you know, when they’re, when they’re defending their take on the Bible, one thing is obviously literal and another thing is obviously a metaphor or figurative. And. And it’s like, okay, well, if one be figurative, other things can also be figurative. And how do you know the difference?

Yeah, I. I think we. There’s a lot of rhetoric where we’re just kind of doing our best to try and feel it out and try to figure out, is this, does this make more sense as figurative? What’s the trend when we see this language being used? Is, are there any contexts in which it is more clear if it’s one or the other. more clear if it’s one or the other. But yeah, I, I don’t think the, the whole corners of the earth idea is very determinative, but we do see people talking about that. One thing I did want to bring up is there’s a word in Hebrew that is chug. And this word occurs in a handful of places, but Isaiah 40 , verse 22 is a place that people will bring up a lot. And this, let’s see, the NRSVUE says this. It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in. And this.

And, and people will appeal to this as evidence that the Bible is already aware that the earth is a sphere because they hear circle and then Job. I think there’s some stuff in. Yeah. Job 22:14 , he walks. He. The KJV says he walketh in the circuit of heaven, and NET says vault of heaven. NRSVUE says dome of heaven. So I guess they’re trying to link this word chug with, with the, the firmament, the dome. But, but chug is, is like you draw chug with a compass. So circle, disc. It’s not necessarily a sphere, it’s just a circle. And so Isaiah 40 , verse 22 is talking about this idea of the disc of the earth that’s surrounded by water.

And it is not talking about the globe of the earth. Proverbs 8:27 . The, the famous creation of, of wisdom has a part where it says, when he established the heavens, I was there when he drew a circle on the face of the deep. And this idea being we’re inscribing the boundaries of the deep, and the dry land is going to be within those boundaries. So it’s, it’s a circle, it’s not a sphere. So, so folks who appeal to that as, as evidence that, that Isaiah already knows about a spherical earth doesn’t work all that well.

Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, when I look at biblical references and I see references like ends of the earth or, you know, corners of the earth, I, I don’t see anyone. Yeah. It doesn’t seem to me like anyone’s trying to make a, a solid representation of what the earth is.

They’re just. It, it mostly seems to me to be either figurative language or, or just sort of a big, you know, like.

Another one that comes up quite a bit is Job 26:7 . Let me pull this up and, and see what, what the NRSV has to say. About this. So he stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth upon nothing. And so people will say that indicates God knows that the Earth is floating in space and that it is not on foundations, that it is not resting in a sea of, of primordial goo. And this.

But what about the pillars then? And what’s it hanging always?

You always bring it back to the pillars. No, the. And, and this is where Job is getting particularly poetic. He binds up the waters in his thick clouds and the cloud is not torn open by them. He covers the face of the full moon and spreads over it his cloud. He has described a circle on the face of the waters. That’s probably inscribed. Yeah, yeah. He. At the boundary between light and darkness, the pillars of heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke. So now Heaven has pillars and, and they get scared when. When God gives them a talking to. So, so this is, this is very, very figurative language, but for some people, it’s a proof text. If they want to try to suggest that as a, a scientific document, the, the Bible is accurate and, and all that it claims about the natural world, then they need to be. They need something in there, even if it means you gotta reject the other 999 things that are pretty clearly a flat Earth perspective and say, “Well, we got this one.”

Yeah, I guess I just, you know, it was so funny when, when the flat Earth theory started to regain prominence sort of 10 or 15 years ago, or it started to come back into, into sort of the, the, the parlance of our time, it took me by surprise. I was shocked.

Yeah. Yeah.

When it started to happen and I could not for the life of me figure out why it was happening. Like, we had thou— Literally thousands of years of knowledge all pointing to a spherical Earth. It was, it was set, it was done. It was easy. And then I—so I was like, why? Why is this happening? And I think that it, you know, Genesis is a problem. I think that a lot of it started from people not wanting that firmament model of a— Of, you know, an Earth with a dome over it to be refuted in their Bible. I think, I don’t think that’s the whole of the thing. I don’t think that’s all of why people— I think there’s a lot of people that just really want to reject, you know, sort of understood knowledge.

Because that’s part of their personality. They just, they, they, you know, skepticism is good, but badly applied skepticism is bad. And I think, yeah, I think there—

Are a lot of people who, there’s an awful lot of pushback. And so you can, you can revise your position or you can dig in your heels. And we’ve got an awful lot of that going on where people are just digging in their heels and saying, “No, I’m drawing a line here and I don’t care if it’s just bafflingly dumb, I’m going to dig in my heels because this is an identity marker now.” And so to show everybody I’m, I’m a real one, that I’m, I’m one of the, one of the good ones, I’m going to dig in my heels and make ridiculous claims in public just to put on display just how mindless I’m willing to be.

I don’t know, I, I’m gonna push back on you because I’ve seen a lot of actual, actually smart people making really interesting and scientifically literate arguments about why this could be true. And in the end it doesn’t hold up. But they’re using, they’re using real math, they’re using real, you know, real ideas and concepts that, that, that dumb people wouldn’t come up with.

Well, they’re, they’re performing that. Because when you try to take real math and real science and all— Take all of it.

Then it obviously doesn’t make any sense. I think those arguments are always isolating a tiny little sliver of real math and real science. To say if we, if we look at this little part right here, then that can be made to fit if you squint hard enough at it. And therefore the whole rest of the scientific community can just be summarily dismissed.

And it always seems to come down to that, whether it’s, it’s climate change or whether it’s the global flood or whether it’s a round Earth. I love the last couple times we’ve had these eclipses or there’s been a, a lunar eclipse. I love the, the folks who show the image of the moon and then there’s like a, a little tiny disk-shaped shadow passing over the moon. It’s like, “Shouldn’t we be seeing this?”

Like a slit as opposed to a circle or whatever?

And depending on which part of the Earth you’re on, maybe it’s a, it’s a little more oblong, but it’s— Right, it’s never approaching a perfect circle.

Yeah, it, it is funny. And you know, I, I will say that the guys, the people who are, who are genuinely smart and they, they focus in on some of these, you know, scientific questions and mathematical questions in terms of the, the shape of the Earth. You can generally find them like going all the way with their experimentation or with their, with their, you know, math and then eventually going, “Oh wait, that didn’t work out the way it should have.”

Hang on. And stuff.

So anyway, there have been some, there have been some people who have like converted to reality and, and like have been high profile about it, have gone out and say, I no longer believe this. And you know, they’ve been, they’ve had big time followings on YouTube and, and elsewhere in social media and have. Right. And have seen the light and then have come back to, to try to evangelize their, their compatriots and. Doesn’t go well for them at least. No, at least with their old community.

Once you’ve converted people to, to, to something like that, it’s hard to get them to let, to let go of it.

However, smart people, good people, people who are of good faith and wish only to be seeking better and more up to date knowledge, do often revise their positions, their older positions.

Yes, they do.

Which I think is a good segue into our opportunities for growth. So tell us, Dan, you, you know, we teased it at the beginning. You had a position that was, you know, that you took on our show and elsewhere, I think. Yeah, then, and then you, and you ended up butting up against some people. Talk us, talk us through it. Tell us what, what you had originally said. And then.

And then what arguments have been made that steered you in a slightly different direction?

Well, like nine or ten weeks ago we did an episode of the show where one of the things we talked about was Matthew’s description of the triumphal entry and Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two animals at the same time. And it was a laugh riot.

We had, we had a good time.

We had a good time and I had, and I had made a video about that probably two or three weeks prior to that. And the way I had interpreted the text is we have this text where it says Jesus tells them, hey, go get me. You go to this house, you’ll find a donkey and you will find a colt tied up with it. Untie them, bring them to me. If the owner gives you any guff, just give them a swift backhand. Tell them the Lord has need of them and they’ll let you go. And it says they brought the, the donkey and the colt to Jesus. And this was done so that the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9 would be fulfilled and they took their cloaks and they put them on them and they put him on them. And the, and initially I was, I was pointing out the distinction between the King James rendering, which I was suggesting obscures this by saying they sat him thereon, which is not marked for number.

Right.

But the them is very clearly plural. And whether you understand the, the antecedent of that pronoun to be the them that is the animals or the them that is the cloaks that are on the animals. The way the text is telling the story, Jesus is sitting on top of two animals.

Right. And, and we went through a bunch of different good ways to visualize this.

Yes, yes.

Including, including these sofa and ottoman style, the, the, the human donkey pyramid where you’ve got a donkey, a little donkey, and then a person up on top, right.

There. There are a bunch of different ways that it has been visualized historically. And as I pointed out, we even have like medieval artwork from Christians who are representing Jesus sitting on the larger donkey with his feet resting on the colt that is tied up. Or some people say he, he switched back and forth. And after I, I made my initial video and then we released the podcast episode, there was some debate online on places like YouTube and elsewhere where apologists were, were bringing up challenges to this. And most of it had to do with how we think Matthew was interpreting the prophecy, whether it was a misunderstanding or whether he was intentionally interpreting it a certain way and presenting the fulfillment of a prophecy in a very careful, very specific way. And I think in our episode I even said whether or not you think that Matthew misunderstood this, but I suggested that Matthew was representing Jesus as riding on two animals because they were so concerned with ensuring that Jesus is fulfilling this prophecy to the T. And the prophecy as Matthew is representing it comes through.

It’s, it’s a Greek translation. It’s not exactly what the Septuagint says, but it’s close to it. And I suggested that the apposition of the original prophecy. So the original prophecy in Hebrew says he will come riding on a donkey, even a colt, the foal of a donkey. And this is apposition. This is, this is just saying the same thing two different ways.

Right.

So there’s one animal in view. And, or actually, I think, I think the Hebrew says the foal of, of jennies or something like that. And in the Greek translation, however, it just seems to be two animals. He will come riding on a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey or jennies or something like that. And, and I suggested that Matthew was just trying to fulfill the prophecy exactly as they found in the Greek translation.

Right.

And, and listening to the discussion, watching people argue about this, I think that there’s a better way to understand it. I think that Matthew is actually trying to eat his cake and have it too. I think that Matthew is. Because there is ambiguity regarding the. “On them” pronoun. Does this refer to the clothing? Does it refer to the animals? And so naturally, like, if somebody told you this story and you’d never heard any of this before, you would be like, wait, is he sitting on both animals? Because it’s just not clear. You would want clarification and the story does not clarify.

Right.

So if Matthew sees the prophecy as saying two animals, it seems to me he’s telling the story in a way that plausibly could be said to fulfill this prophecy with two animals and yet also plausibly could be interpreted as only as him having only one mount, him riding on one. Only one animal. So the idea is, hey, Matthew, are there two animals or one? Precisely, yeah.

Are there two animals or one. Oh, look over there. So, so the, if I understand your. The new take. The new take is that it’s not Matthew specifically saying Jesus is riding on these two animals. It is Matthew being purposefully obtuse so that you can take, you could take either position and it would be justifiable with his language.

I, I think that makes more sense to me now in, in light of the, the arguments I’ve seen. And, and there, there are other arguments out there. There’s a scholar named Carlson who published two papers in, I think Catholic Biblical Quarterly like five years ago, arguing that, that the, the way Matthew describes the prophecy is the, the plenary fulfillment of of Zechariah 9:9 , where he’s trying to include all of the imagery, all of the possible imagery that comes from Zechariah. And it’s a complex argument for why the on them means that Jesus was actually on the colt there. I think reasonable people can disagree about this. There have been numerous different ways to try to explain what’s going on here. The more I think about it, the more I consider the other arguments. I don’t think there’s a way to say the text indicates Jesus is only riding on one animal.

I don’t think the two. The two mount reading is precluded by anything. I think that has to be a possibility. But it makes more sense to me now that the ambiguity there has a rhetorical role in the way that Matthew has crafted this. Because, you know, if Matthew shows this draft to somebody, hey, look what I’m working on. They’re going to be like, I think you may need to make it a little more clear what’s going on here. And he’s like, yeah, that’s the point that makes the most sense to me. And so this is the judgment that, that I am a little more comfortable with now. That’s not to say that, you know, this is the way it has to be and everybody is wrong. This is not the, the consensus view.

Oh no, no, no. This is, this is now. This is the official position of the Data over Dogma pod. Its listeners have to now assume and.

All of its subsidiaries and affiliates.

That’s right, everyone now from now on has to in perpetuity this way until further revised by you because we are all your acolytes and have to believe.

As you do, which is, is a horrific thing to think about. And I’m glad it will never be the case.

Well, I mean, it’s kind of the point of having this segment.

Right.

Is the idea that like, just to demonstrate that this is all we’re doing the best we can. Like scholarship in general as a concept is especially scholarship like this where it’s about something that was written 2,000 plus years ago.

You know, two or more. And, and all we have is best guesses and all we have. And, and you know, we, and it’s important to revise those ideas as other people’s arguments come into play.

Yeah, I agree. I think that, you know, this is not, is not a quote unquote hard science. It’s a real squishy science for the most part. What we’re doing is we’re taking a bunch of judgment calls and we’re just trying to see which judgment calls make the most sense, have the most support. And that’s kind of our moving target. This is where we are right now and, and everybody changes on these things. I’ve a paper I published in 2018 in the Journal of Biblical Literature on Psalms 82 where I argued that Psalms 82 is a post-exilic, very late composition. If you had told me 10 years before that that I was going to be arguing that Psalms 82 was post-exilic, I would have laughed in your face because I was with the majority of scholars who saw Psalms 82 as one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible. One of the earliest passages that sees Adonai and El as separate deities. That is a divine council scene.

That is just this archaic mythology. And the more I looked at it and the more I looked at it and the more I tried to figure out what was going on here, I, I slowly changed my mind until I got to the point that I was like, no, I am convinced that it is the other way around. And so if you want to go see the argument that I’ve made, you can find my article on, on my Linktree. It’s called The Gods’ Complaint. Plural Gods’ complaint. Psalms 82 is a psalm of complaint. And, and that’s an example. People ask me from time to time, what are some things you’ve changed your mind about. That’s an example. I think the Matthew writing, the triumphal entry question is another. There, there have been these things and as we talked with David Carr last week, and even he said that 1996 David Carr doesn’t always agree with 2024 David Carr. And yeah, this is just, this is just the nature of the beast. And so, and it’s the mark of.

A, of, of a honest scholar or an honest person to say, like, I don’t trust someone who agrees with their, you know, with 15 years ago, them about everything. That’s not, you haven’t done any work in that time period, if that’s how you are.

And I think that’s, I think that’s one of the indications of someone who is, who is not committed to a series of dogmas, because there are a lot of folks who, they have some wiggle room, but there are walls, and they are not going to go over those walls, not for anything whatsoever. And, and there are folks who, you know, they may be convinced of stuff to, to differing degrees, but for the most part, anything’s fair game. And, and I’d like to think that I’m in that position that I have tried to model that where I’m not committed to anything to the degree that I, I just will say, no, it’s impossible that it is this other thing within, within reason, you know, the flat earth, I think is something that’s, you know, that’s not the kind of thing we’re talking about.

I just thought of that, because you were talking about the walls that people have set up and they’re sort of dogmatic walls.

And my, and the image that instantly popped into my mind, the ice wall is the ice wall that flat earthers think surrounds the disc of the earth.

It would be, it would be fun to see if there were any flat earthers who were talking about this ice wall before. Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones. Hey, man, that, that thing looks pretty good.

I think this idea. Yeah, but in terms of actual, like, legitimate scholarly theories, I think everything has to be potentially on the table. And that’s one of the things that frustrates me with a lot of the content that I engage with, is that there’s only half a table there and they’re only going to play with whatever is on half of that table. Yeah, but, yeah, so not, not a.

Huge change, but no, it seems pretty minor when it comes to it.

Well, I hesitated to like, when I decided to make this video this morning for my social media accounts. The socials. It, it took me, I, I was like contemplating, do I really want to do this? I’m opening myself up for, for criticism, even though it’s a pretty minor thing. But, but that’s one of the, one of the things that, that, that bothers me. And that’s one of the things that can disincentivize more open, honest engagement. I would be lying if I said that, you know, I just go full bore whatever I’m thinking without ever considering the, the implications or the consequences. That’s just not true. I do think about that stuff and I would like to think that it does not. I am not self censoring because of that. So I, I was like, no, if I, I feel this way, I’ve. I’ve got to go through with this just because I, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror if I were like, oh, no, they’re gonna make fun of me.

Well, let them. I mean, the truth is that, like, the people who would make fun of someone for revising their position based on new or different information are the people that, like, they’re, they’re really telling on themselves about what, what’s important to them and what they value, which isn’t truth. Certainly it may be something like, you know, I mean, people value their dogmatic beliefs and whatever, but it would be pretty hypocritical of you to, to have a dogmatic view that is impermeable to data, considering the title of our show.

Yeah, I’m trying, I’m trying to live up. A lot of people are like, there’s not. You can’t be data over dogma. And I’m like, look, from day one, I have said this is aspirational. Yeah, nobody can, can do this perfectly. It is aspirational. And so I’m trying to live up to the standards to which we aspire on the Data Over Dogma podcast. And that’s why I thought, hey, maybe this would be a good segment to talk about. It’s. It’s a little shift, but it’s an example of, of me owning up to having changed my perspective.

Yeah. And I, and it’s funny, I made fun of it for being little, but as you point out, like, entire careers are made on tiny little. Like, like this is, this is a field of study that concerns itself with minutiae. So I think I, I think, you know, I, I should be more. I should be more open to little things.

It’s the little things.

Like the great poet once said, it’s. It’s the little people. Like you, Clark, and your family. That’s Christmas Vacation.

Just in case. One of. One of the greatest films ever made, in my humble opinion.

Yeah, well, it’s. That Griswold family is a real hoot. Beverly D’Angelo, you know, lots of, lots of, lots of young crushes. I’ll just say. Oh, okay.

We didn’t need to go there, but I.

Well, but.

All right, that’s fair that she came up.

She came up. All right, well, listen, you and I are going to continue our conversation in a much less formal way over on the Patreon. So if any of you friends out there would like to help be a part of making this show, go and get extra added bonus content and an early ad free version of every episode of the show. You can become a patron, too. Just go head over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma if you’d like to do that, you can reach us by writing into contact@dataoverdogmapod.com Other than that, we’ll just see y’all again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Does the Bible say the Earth is Flat?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology