The End(s) of Monotheism

There’s some ambiguity. There is Paul saying, oh, yeah, these things that people call gods, but we know there’s only one God. Is Paul saying that or is Paul saying, yeah, there are these gods all over the place, but as far as we’re concerned, only one God matters to us.

That is what he’s saying.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are 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 are things, Dan?

Things are going great. I’m having a good time. I did not get to travel this last weekend, however, and apparently you guys did. And I’m saying you guys, because there’s not just you here with us. Why don’t you tell the people who we got here?

So we got the people’s champ. My old friend David Burnett is joining us again. Welcome to the show, David. I think it’s our first time repeat guest. Is that.

Yeah.

A returning champion.

A returning. Yes. So welcome to the show. Good to have you back. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Thank you. Good to be back.

Yeah. And the reason.

Oh, I was just saying I’m glad to be the first returner.

Yeah. And we’re glad to have you back and hopefully there will be more returners in the future. We are having you here because you and I just spent the first three days of the week hanging out together in lovely Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University. We were participating in a conference that we presented at, as well as organized.

Correct.

Yeah. And the weather was surprisingly, according to everybody who lived there, the weather was uncharacteristically nice. Which was.

Yeah, it was really nice. Providence is beautiful.

Yeah, that was, that was divine providence is what that was. That you guys, that you guys, you guys were given the green light from above.

Yeah.

To get to do this conference.

Well, I think the, that has to be where the. They got their name from, right? That Enlightenment era notion of. Of Providence.

Yeah, something like that.

Now we’ve, I think we’ve mentioned the, the conference before. In fact, I think, David, the last time you’re here, we talked about this. The conference is called the Meanings and Ends of Monotheism. And we had said we were going to livestream it. It turned out that that wasn’t going to work for, for everybody. But we did record it and it will be released publicly later. But we, we wanted to have you on the show so we could just jam a little bit about the conference.

We’re going to scoop the recording. We’re going to, we’re going to, we’re going to get out in front of it and, and tell the people some of the cool stuff that you guys were able to talk about and, and that, that your guests were able to talk about. So I think that that’s, I’m excited to hear about it. I was, I was going to watch it streaming and then it turns out that that’s, that wasn’t an option for me.

Well, yeah, I mean in discussions, in planning the conference, you know, this has been a long time of planning ahead of time to work out the details. It has been a long time of planning ahead of time to work out the details. And for a conference like this, it very much was a scholarly workshop, you know, style conference. So what we wanted from the conference and the sort of aims and goals of the conference, I think we accomplished better doing it this way, which is, you know, this is something that scholars need to workshop these ideas and work together on and, and get good feedback on and discussion going and work out those ideas. And then we take our papers back and there’s going to be like a six month process before we get papers back in for them to like make any edits they need to and all of that. And then we’re going to share them with the actual conference members so that we can actually get feedback on each other’s work.

And then this is going to become a published volume. And so the having it a small, intimate scholarly conversation to work out those ideas and really test those ideas in a, in a highly saturated peer review environment, you know, is really important because if we say we believe in peer review and we say we believe in scholarship, then it needs to be done properly. And that takes a long time. And so if it’s done right, it takes a long time. And so that’s the nature of the beast, you know, because, you know, like you, Dan, I believe in accessibility. I want to work towards that in the future as well and help bring scholarship to the masses. But for it to be done with peer review and worked out and established has to become scholarship, you know.

Yeah.

And so there is a critical mass of scholars who agrees with us on this. Challenging the category of monotheism in the study of antiquity. And that’s very much what this conference is about. I mean the, the reason why we went with the name, the Meanings and Ends of Monotheism, the S in ends is in parentheses. So it’s a double entendre of sorts. It’s the, the name comes from a famous Wilfred Cantwell Smith book called the Meaning and End of Religion. And in that book it was popular in the 60s. This is going to be rehashed for some who’ve heard us discuss this.

It was months ago. Nobody, nobody even paid attention back then.

But this is, this is important. So the, the reason why we went with this name in particular, the Meanings and Ends of Monotheism, it’s a play off that title, the Meaning and End of Religion by Smith. And what that book did in the 60s, what it was a part of, was a kind of a paradigm shift in religious studies to say this category of religion, the way it, it operates in modern discourse, scholarly discourse, is very much anachronistic to the study of the past. In other words, we’re bringing assumptions, critical assumptions of modern, like scholars, and taking them back to antiquity and foisting them on ancient people that wouldn’t share those same assumptions and those same categories when it comes to religion. And so the book was kind of saying that we shouldn’t use the term religion at all in critical study when we look at these ancient communal traditions that are passed down and personal faiths of the peoples themselves.

And that’s how Smith sort of broke down the categories. But so what we were doing with the concept of monotheism, quote unquote, is saying that that category hasn’t faced the type of critical scrutiny that religion has in any way that is helpful in the study of antiquity. And so we wanted to help spearhead that movement. There has already been scholarship that’s been critical of monotheism for some time that is not new. But what we wanted to do was get together some of those scholars in one place, in one conference and say, okay, let’s, let’s take the gloves off, so to speak. You know, let’s be straightforward with this and not dancing around the issue, but just get it right out there in the open and say this category should not be used for the study of antiquity anymore.

Let’s talk a little bit quickly about that category, about the idea of monotheism as it has been talked about up until now and what, what it meant and then, and then a little bit about why you think that it, that that is an outdated way of thinking about and, you know, the, the, the beliefs and, and, and, and sort of practices of antiquity. This is fun. It’s like. Dan, it’s like I’m interviewing you too. Yeah, I’m I’m, I’m interviewing you.

I’m a guest on my own. I, on my own damn show. So we first get the, the word monotheism in around 1660. Guy named Henry More, who’s a, he’s called a Cambridge Platonist or Platonist if you’re nasty. He’s one of these guys who’s, who’s using platonic philosophical frameworks to advance certain Protestant interests, particularly over and against the people who are perceived of as the enemy at the time, which included materialists like Thomas Hobbes and, and people that they accused of being atheists and Muslims and things like that.

How dare they. What a horrible accusation. Call someone an atheist.

But, well, and, and they were like, oh, the, the, the materialists who, who worship the world as the one and only God are, you know, are basically worshiping no God. They’re all atheists. So it’s pretty complex when, when you drill down to the bottom of it. But they’re using this concept of monotheism as, as a value judgment and an identity marker. And what I, what I point out is that they’re not using it to mean worship of one God. Like, they kind of dance around it like this is what it means, but it’s like, well, what about Islam? And then it’s like, that’s a, that’s a false pretense to monotheism. They’re not true monotheists because they don’t believe in the same God as us. And then, okay, like I said, the materialists, because they believe in an impersonal single deity, they’re also not believing in a real God. And so they’re atheists. And so basically a monotheist, we’re monotheists. And anybody who, you know, claims to believe in one God, if their God is too different from our God, then they’re, they don’t believe in the right one God.

And so they’re not monotheists. So I, what I do in my paper is I, I explain three different ways historically that the, the concept of monotheism has been used. So when it was coined and I call this Enlightenment monotheism, it was basically this idea that there’s this one personal, all powerful, supremely sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who created everything that exists apart from them out of nothing. And so one of the necessary features of, of enlightenment monotheism is creation ex nihilo.

Right?

Which is, and, and like we kind of think of this as, at least in the way I’ve seen it discussed. We kind of think of it as, as just this kind of doctrine that’s there. Oh yeah. Creation had to happen out of nothing. But this is huge. Anciently, when they’re first debating this in the second century CE in the Enlightenment, if it’s not creation ex nihilo, it’s crap as, as the great poet once said. But then you get in the, in the 19th century, you get all these like, in the 18th, 19th century, that’s like, that’s when dictionaries were suddenly all the rage. And Webster in 1828, I think this is the first time anyone ever defined monotheism as the belief in the existence of one sole deity. Prior to that, literally, dictionaries defined monotheism as the doctrine of the Unitarians.

Oh, yeah.

So like, you look in a dictionary, monotheism, the doctrine of the Unitarians, next word. And then Webster says, belief in one single sole deity. And I suggest this is an etymological fallacy because it’s never, up until that point, no one had ever said monotheism is this. And here you can apply it to all these different religions and you can distinguish monotheism from not monotheism. It was an identity marker and a value judgment.

And then so weird because it does, like, the word itself just sounds so easy to like, to, to break down it like mono one, theism, God easy done. Yeah, out the door. And so to hear that it wasn’t that is a little bit shocking, to be honest with you.

And you know, the, the etymological fallacy is very, very common. People use it all the time in the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st century. And then what I describe a third kind of monotheism, which is what I call, and you’ll recognize this word, renegotiated monotheism. And this is where once we started noticing, hey, you know what? In the Bible, they kind of talk about all kinds of different gods, then we had to be like, well, what does this mean about monotheism? And instead of saying, okay, that’s not monotheism, we decided, oh, well, monotheism just means something else. Then it means whatever we find in the Bible. And so you have these scholars who look in the Bible and whether they’re looking in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament or whatever, they’ll say monotheism is this so that we can continue to identify this as monotheism. So they’re changing, they’re revising the definition so that we can continue to call what is in the Bible monotheism.

It seems to have become important in the, in the history of, especially of Christianity, to identify the Bible with the concept of a single God, with the concept, with the belief in only one God at any given time.

Yeah. And, and in the, in the paper, I argue that a big part of this, and what I think is probably the central part of this, is that as an identity marker and a value judgment, you want ideological continuity with these people who wrote the Bible that you believe to be. You believe you’re a part of a continuation of the same community, you’re the same group, and so you want them to believe the same things that you’re believing now. And so monotheism is the beating heart of Christianity for a lot of folks, particularly when they’re comparing it to other things that they don’t think are monotheistic. And so obviously, the authors of the New Testament had to be monotheistic. And I argue that scholarship today is trying to maintain that continuity, that connection, and they’re willing to just revise the concept wherever they need to go with it in order to maintain that connection. And I argue that that is harmful to the academic endeavor and that we need to acknowledge that there’s not monotheism in the Bible.

And if we want to argue for the utility of that framework, that analytical framework, if we want to say there’s value in imposing this interpretive lens on the Bible, they should make a case for why it’s valuable. We should no longer just give the benefit of the doubt. We should no longer just default to accepting the monotheism of the Bible.

Exactly.

And so that, that, that’s the gist of my paper. And I conclude by saying, and so if anybody wants to use this framework, they first need to demonstrate that there is value to it and that it’s not just an attempt on their part to structure values and powers and, and, and boundaries and things like that and.

To support a sort of dogmatic stance. Right. Isn’t that what we’re talking about is like some, you know, now that word, that monotheism word is being used to support a dogma rather than to actually, you know, just look at what is present and, and, and take it as, you know, on its own terms.

Yeah. And as you well know, the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast is that data goes over the dogma rather than the other way around. We don’t let the dogma wag the data.

Yeah, I like that. That’s. That’s a shirt right there. Somehow we got to turn that into a shirt. Don’t let the dogma wag the data. Something. So, David, what was it? Talk about what? Your paper. Did you give a paper also? What was.

Yeah, I gave a paper too.

What was your paper about specifically?

Yeah, my paper was sort of a revised version of a paper I gave a couple of years ago. Me and Dan were in a section at SBL on. In the Deuteronomy. Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature section. They.

SBL. I’m gonna, I’m just gonna jump in and mention that SBL is the Society of Biblical Literature.

Ah, yes, you’re talking about Society of Biblical Literature. Yep. Years ago at the Society of Biblical Literature, me and Dan gave similar papers to the ones we gave now. But the, the, the paper I did then is the paper I developed for this conference, which was called Virtuous Gods or Deserving of Death: Conflicting Early Jewish Postures towards the Gods within Ancient Mediterranean Paganism. And so what I was trying to argue there, just briefly, is that when you look at a somewhat representative spectrum of early Jewish literature, so when I say early Judaism, I mean the Judaism of the Second Temple period, so, which is anywhere spanning back as far as 6th century BCE to like 1st century CE, the end of 1st century CE, after the destruction of the temple. So generally speaking, when we look at early Jewish literature, we can find a spectrum of different postures towards the gods that are active in the ancient Mediterranean world.

And they largely vary. But when you look at these varying postures towards the gods, none of them, not even on either pole. So on one pole you’ll have someone like Philo of Alexandria saying things like talking about the gods from Deuteronomy, sort of the Deuteronomic vision of the cosmos, where you have the gods apportioned over the nations that we have happening at the Tower of Babel scene. So in commentary on that text in Philo, in the context of like Platonic philosophical discourse about the scala naturae, the scaled nature, the hierarchy of the cosmos, he comments on this text saying, yeah, those gods of the nations, those celestial bodies that Deuteronomy says are gods. Yeah, they’re gods. They’re rulers that are appointed by the Father of all, though they are not the sole cause of everything themselves.

And in this sort of critique of some Greek beliefs about the causation of all events to the celestial bodies, Philo critiques this and says, no, they’re gods. Yep, but they are copying the rule. They’re doing mimesis. They’re. They’re imitating the rule of the Father of all. And this is standard fare in Platonic cosmology of the day of, you know, an ordered cosmos, everyone playing their part, keeping this perfect harmony thing. Well, Philo’s on board and is like, yeah. And matter of fact, he goes as far as to say that these gods, even though, because they’re rulers, like delegates under the Father of all, that makes them liable to correction because they’re not the Father of all. They’re not the, like, head guy.

Right?

But. So he says they’re liable to correction, but he says because of their virtue, they’re never destined to undergo it. Okay, so this, this idea that Philo is not an apocalypticist, right. I think I talked about this last time, is there’s no sense in which he sees some final end of days where the gods need to be judged and killed. There’s none of that. Okay? The gods aren’t the issue for Philo. He’s sort of lampooning the Greeks who say that they’re autocratic gods. He literally calls them that. He says for the Greeks who say they’re autocratic powers, they’re wrong. You know, they rule under the Father of all. So at no time in Philo anywhere does he negate the. The gods’ existence, their agency, their. Their rule that’s delegated to them under the God of all, their regular place in ordering the cosmic government of sorts.

All of that’s very real. But they’re virtuous for him. Right? But then if you fast forward on the other side and you go to Paul, like, this is totally opposite end of the spectrum here. Paul will use the exact same terms for the gods of the nations from the Septuagint, from the Greek translations of the Jewish Bible, and commenting on same texts in a very different context, very different rhetorical goals, very different things taking place. These are epistles to specific communities. And he’s an apocalypticist, so the context couldn’t be more different.

Right?

But what’s interesting is when that those texts come up, they all affirm that those gods are in fact real and are in fact agents in the world. But for Paul, as this radical apocalyptic Pharisee that thinks he’s waiting for the final denouement, the resurrection from the dead, this great event, included in that event is the judgment of what he calls principalities, powers, rulers. These are the same terms used in these other Greek Jewish literature for those gods that are delegated over the. Over the world.

So that’s not so. So, so, so the final judgment isn’t just for us humans. It’s also for all of these other ancillary gods.

Oh yeah.

Interesting.

So much so. It’s so in your face that the. Paul actually uses the language of parousia to speak about the coming back of Jesus where there’s this final judgment of the cosmos and he even includes the. The holy ones, he calls them his fellow believers in Jesus who have received the pneuma from heaven, this heavenly spirit of the gods, so to speak. But it’s the spirit of the high God, the most high God that the Messiah himself shares. So that links them in some weird, mystic, cosmic way to them. And he says that you all are going to participate in this. Don’t you know you’re going to judge the cosmos? Don’t you know you’re going to judge the angels? You know, surprise. So that’s part of their role. They’re in the big judgment divine court scene at the end, you know, and they’re issued their judgment that they’re going out the door, you know.

So that is a totally different picture than Philo. I mean, Paul would look like the crazy apocalypticist with the sign on the corner, right, the end is nigh, you know, where Philo is sort of like the urbane sophisticate philosopher, you know, so you couldn’t get more opposite in terms of the views of the gods. But here’s the point. Even if you consider the. These radically different poles of postures towards these deities in their own lived context, in their own lived religious context, you’re not going to find anything remotely close to anything we could call monotheistic in the way that that term is generically employed today. And what I did say on top of that is when you consider all of the nuances that get added to this term in contemporary scholarship on early Judaism and Christian origins in particular, it dies the death of a thousand qualifications.

Because like Dan said once, once that definition has shifted. Some might say, oh well, yeah, but in scholarship it hasn’t shifted, you know, by ancient Jewish monotheism or, or like an evolution of early Jewish monotheism into these christological monotheism, whatever the heck that means. You know, that these terms get employed all the time, but you have to qualify them all day long. And in every text you reference, there’s always other divine powers everywhere.

Is there even a problem with just saying Christological monotheism in the sense that, like, if Christ is a God or is part of a godhead, that’s plural right now, suddenly we have a plural God in Christ and his God the Father?

Well, and it manifests the problem, which is that monotheism isn’t the rule that we’re holding up. Monotheism is just an identity marker and a value judgment and we will just massage it into whatever context we need that value judgment and that identity marker, whether it means inclusive monotheism, exclusive monotheism, ethical monotheism, Christological monotheism, 1st century Jewish monotheism, whatever we need it to be. If we need monotheism to be there, it’s going to be there one way or another.

Right. And this is what happens here. Like Dan put it beautifully just then, it’s like what tends to happen. These huge anachronisms take place in just a couple of sentences. I mean people, people can bring entire categories that take hundreds of years to mete out, to develop and they’ll just say, oh yeah, here it is, look at this text. This. Doesn’t this kind of sound like something that one day will become this? So it must be this, you know, and it’s. And it’s like, whoa, whoa, hold up. I mean you take 1st Corinthians 15 is a great example of this. If you know a lot of the talk about Christological monotheism and things like.

This.

Around the New Testament, all the EHCC folk use this language. This is the Early High Christology Club.

Oh, okay.

There’s like a little club of scholars.

The idea that Jesus didn’t slowly develop into being God, but immediately. Yeah, right off the bat, he’s understood as God.

That’s right. First generation, right off the bat, everyone thinks that mutation. That’s right.

Heroes on the half shell, mutant Christology.

But notice the nuances here. Notice the nuances. It’s not a mutation of monotheism. Well, there’s already this ancient Jewish monotheism where you have, okay, sure, there’s these other gods, kind of, but they’re created, see, they. There’s only one creator. Even though some of these Jewish texts in the Second Temple period didn’t get the memo about creatio ex nihilo, they didn’t get it because they’re like, oh yeah, the powers and the rulers, they’re involved in ordering the world too and bringing it about and setting it in order. And it’s like I remember reading these texts in my early master’s degree. Like, wait, what? Why are these powers involved in creation? Well, I thought God was the only one doing all this stuff, you know? Yeah, so.

And even, even Jesus is like that. It’s a lot of people misunderstand. It’s creation through Jesus or something like that.

Jesus did the creating, which technically would be a Tuesday in the ancient Mediterranean. Really?

Yeah.

I mean, because you have powers that Yahweh himself uses in these early Jewish texts to do all kinds of stuff in creation. I mean, wisdom as an entity that creates for God is there in Proverbs 8 . And the Early High Christology folks know that that category is already well developed in the Second Temple period. But anyways, the point is that we don’t. We want to like, sort of wipe all the anachronism off the table and say, let’s just engage this literature and be critical about the use, the employment of this category. And a great paper that piggybacked right off of what Dan was talking about was towards the beginning by an amazing scholar, Debra Scoggins Ballentine, wonderful scholar, also of Brown, who teaches at Rutgers.

She did a paper called Translating Monotheism. How a Lens of Monotheism Impacts Translation. And it. Oh, man, it just knocked out of the park exactly what Dan was saying about the first category conference. Yeah. Is the first paper of the conference. Talk about a way to start, you know, but she, she knocked it out of the park with this concept of saying, look, when you have this developed category of monotheism already where you assume that’s what this religion is, that’s what it is in the Bible. It’s exactly what Dan was saying. Like, this is already monotheistic. When you go back to try to translate these texts, there’s so much psychological influence over translation choices in very weird texts that don’t fit any of those categories.

Yeah.

You know, and so you’re trying, you see, and she shows like, multiple translations, English translations and ancient translations, how this happens, how at different times when you have theological development and this lens of monotheism developed, it’s influencing all kinds of translation choices. And you can see it. I mean, it’s, it’s. It’s really obvious to historians and translators when, when you’re made aware of it. Problem is there are. There are so many interpreters that probably weren’t even aware that those, that those lenses are already fully developed.

Right.

And so you couldn’t imagine seeing it any other way. You know, if you’re just. It’s. Does a fish know it’s in water? Right. You know.

Yeah.

Right.

So this is why a conference like this is so important is like we have to try to take these lenses off and be critical with the data and look at it and say, wait a minute, does any of this fit?

You know, can you guys provide an example? Maybe that, that. Sorry, the, the professor that you just named. I’m, I didn’t catch her.

Debra Scoggins Ballentine.

Yeah.

Can you provide maybe she provided an example of, you know, of a scripture that has been traditionally translated one way but would be better translated in another way if we sort of cast off the, the monotheism lens. Is there, can you think of a, of a specific example of that?

Well, the one that, that she talks about in her paper was when Jacob and, and Laban are parting ways and this is Genesis. Oh, shoot.

31:53. 31.

53. Okay. 31:53. And I, I’m pulling it up right in front of you. But, but basically they’re both going to, you know, swear their oaths. And so the NRSV says it this way. May the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor judge between us. So Jacob swore by the fear of his father Isaac, and Jacob offered a sacrifice on the height, called his kinfolk to eat the bread, blah, blah, blah. And, and so the, the question here is, and there is a, there is a part, it looks like the, the NRSV. Yeah, the NRSV takes out the, the reading that she’s talking about. There is, there’s another statement, Elohei avotehem, which means either God of their fathers or gods of their fathers. And so the question is, does God of Nahor and God of Abraham mean this is the one God who is both the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor? Or does this mean that there’s one God that’s the God of Nahor and another God that is the God of Abraham?

And, and the statement “the Elohim of their fathers” is ambiguous. It could be interpreted either way because Elohim can be plural or singular. And so depending on, on the lens you’re bringing to this passage, you may one try to preserve the ambiguity, which when I worked in scripture translation for the LDS Church, we actually at one point wanted to make shirts that said “maintain the ambiguity.” The, the idea being that you don’t want to make the decision for the reader. You want to pass on the prerogative to make the interpretive decision to the reader. And so you can maintain the ambiguity or you can decide for them, in which case you say, oh, this is referring to different gods or this is referring to one God. So, and so she talks about how the Septuagint makes a decision about that, about how the Vulgate makes a decision about that, and then how modern translation, the King James Version, the RSV, the NRSV, the NIV, how translations, the translators make different decisions based on the lenses that they’re bringing to the text.

And when, you know, talking about Paul and the gods, you know, if you go to 1 Corinthians 8 , there’s this famous passage where he says, and here’s the NRSVUE: “Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as in fact there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, for whom are all things and for whom we exist.” And there’s some ambiguity. Is Paul saying, oh, yeah, these things that people call gods, but we know there’s only one God? Is Paul saying that, or is Paul saying, yeah, there are these gods all over the place, but as far as we’re concerned, only one God matters to us?

Right?

Like, with that lens. Yeah, yeah. And I, I agree. That’s. That’s precisely what he’s saying. And, and the, what I, the metaphor that I use in, in my paper is the Broncos. Like, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one. You know, that was a lot easier to say back in the late 90s. But, you know, like the Raiders, they’re not even a real football team. Like, it’s, it’s just the kind of rhetoric that we use to juice each other up and to make ourselves feel better than, than the other.

Yeah, I’ve had to do the same thing. I mean, I remember giving my first paper like in 2014, 2013 or 2014, and it was at this Paul and Judaism conference at HBU, or formerly Houston Baptist University. Now it’s Houston Christian, I think. But this, I’d given this paper there and I talked about the gods of Deuteronomy in relation to the interpretation of Romans 4 . And interestingly, this sort of pastor-scholar, older pastor-scholar, you know, had a Ph.D., I think he taught at some point, but he had pastored most of his adult life. You know, he’s like the older statesman, evangelical pastor in the pews, looking out for these young heretics. You know, I’m gonna show these kids what’s what for. You know, he immediately tried to go in on me in the Q and A time and say, well, clearly by Isaiah it says that there is only one God.

There is no God beside me. You know, what are you talking about? That they were not monotheists. I said, wait a minute. I was like, that’s just incomparability language. At the time I drove a Ford Focus. It was like, it’s like me saying, “My Ford Focus is the only Ford Focus.” You know, “There ain’t no other Ford Focus out there.” It’s just mine. You know, I’m not making an ontological claim about the, the oneness of my Ford Focus, you know, and I’m. And I had already made points that. Look, Akkadian hymns do this to their deities too. You know, it’s like, oh yeah, there is but one God who, who amongst the gods is like you. It’s like, wait, what? So this is just common rhetoric.

You know, I’ve shared that on, on social media. The, the Great Cairo Hymn to Aten from Egypt. Like you read that and like that’s, that’s even more emphatic than the stuff you find in Deutero-Isaiah. Second.

That’s. That’s awesome. Example. Yeah.

The. So the, the first session was Hebrew Bible and there were three of us. Deborah Scoggins Ballentine. I presented another wonderful scholar named Jennifer Singletary from Penn State University. And her. Her paper was called “The End of Hypostatization; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Israelite Polytheism.” And her paper was really cool. I didn’t know what to expect with. With her paper, but hypostatization is this.

Idea that I feel like you’re stuttering when you say that word, but that’s. I’m sure you’re not.

And that was something that she kept saying. She. Like, I had to practice pronouncing all the words over and over again. But this idea of a hypostasis is. I don’t know if it originates in Christological scholarship or it probably comes from.

That’s. That’s where it becomes a dominant category.

Yeah, yeah.

In the early Christological debates about a hypostasis of God, that’s still part of the one God, but it develops into this language of personhood in the conciliar debates.

Yeah.

On Christology. But what happens is hypostasis then because, you know, the Bible is. Now we have Christendom. We, we. Everyone’s orthodox Christian. That’s. You have the orthodox readings of the Bible. So you got. If you have any weird, you know, god-looking stuff back here. Oh, that’s a hypostasis. That’s just.

Yeah.

That’s not a separate God. Right. You know, I still don’t understand what one God.

So this is a, this is a fancy Greek word that means substance. But the idea of a hypostasis or hypostases is. This is like an avatar. It’s an entity that is distinct from the main entity, but it only points back to the main entity.

Okay.

And so, and so like a divine image is thought of as. As a hypostasis. And so when, when you have these texts that are talking about all these other gods, if you identify them all as hypostases of the main God, then that protects monotheism because it means they’re not autonomous, independent entities. They’re just. They’re just the avatars of the main God. And her paper went.

Feels problematic considering that they fight each other, but.

Okay, well, yeah, it’s. It’s highly problematic. Go ahead, David.

Yeah, I just. I’ll interject something here. The ones that are normally. This is, and this is helpful for Hebrew Bible stuff, because when, when Christian scholars want to talk about hypostases of God, they will go back like the councils did and talk about the wisdom of, of God is. It appears as if wisdom is this other. This second figure that has some sort of agency. You know, it’s… It’s described as if wisdom gets to create, wisdom is… Gets to play a role. But… But it’s still the wisdom of God. So it’s sort of personified. So is it an agent in and of itself or is it just part of God? And so it’s, that’s what we mean by… Well, it’s a hypostasis. It’s like, it’s, it’s… It’s part of God, but it just appears as a separate agent. And so the name of God is another very important one in the Hebrew Bible that was very important all through early Judaism, this onomatology, this idea that the name has presence, you know, it’s…

It signifies presence. So the… You build a temple. Yahweh says, you know, you build a temple for my name. The tabernacle is where my name will dwell there.

Yeah.

And it’s a real presence of the deity is there.

Right.

You know, the Shekinah can be called the name. You know, the, the glory of God and the Kavod is… Is often another one too. The glory of God. Yeah. So these are all like hypostases. These are like… It appears like they’re a second figure, but they’re part of the one God. And so this is… That discourse dominates a lot of scholarship because they, they impose it on much more ancient, ancient Israelite stuff because they need it to be there.

And it functions as an explanation that cuts off any further interrogation because it’s like there’s some kind of relationship there. Boom. Hypostasis. And, and that means we’re done talking about the relationship because we’ve already presupposed that whatever that relationship is, it is, it is subsumed within our understanding, which is again, based on Christological stuff. And so it, it’s basically just a way of shellacking everything over with Christology so that we don’t complicate things any further. Which was really one of the main things I was trying to do in my book was show, hey, we can actually explain why people are thinking of these things this way. But it complicates Christology to, to do that. But she brought up some wonderful examples from Kuntillet Ajrud, some of the inscriptions there where it refers to El, it refers to Adonai, it refers to Baal and, and she complicates the assumption that these all must be hypostases of Adonai and then talks about some, some really cool inscriptions from Elephantine.

This.

Yeah, fascinating.

Yeah, there, there was a Jewish garrison that was stationed there at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th centuries BCE and they had a temple there and like it was destroyed by the locals and the governor there was like, yeah, you can rebuild your temple, but no animal sacrifices only, only fruits and vegetables and stuff like that. And, and they have references to a variety of different deities there and so who are sometimes just dismissed as hypostases. So also a phenomenal paper.

Yeah, her paper is great.

Yeah. And then, David, your section, Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins was the longer… We had four in there, didn’t we?

Yeah, that was the, that was four. It was separated by a break.

Yeah. And so Emma Wasserman went right before you and you could probably explain, talk about her paper better than I can because it is a little more closely related to what she’s doing.

a little more closely related to what she’s doing. Yeah, well, her paper was called Pantheon Polemics and Intellectual Pressures: Reconsidering Paul’s Pneuma. She left off the pneuma part for this paper and sort of restructured it a bit. But she was, she was mainly talking about, from a host of texts and comparison, comparing it to sort of the common intellectual context in philosophy in the, in the Greco-Roman world to say that Paul believed in a pantheon very similar to the way the Greeks did. So it’s this structured power. Think of like a pyramid or a hierarchy, a scaled scala naturae, as they call it, that I was talking about earlier, like a scaled hierarchy and that this is, this is ubiquitous.

You’re talking about multi-level marketing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got the, the CEO at the top. But you got, you got to have.

Your, your, your, your sort of deity downlines, otherwise.

Yeah, what. Emma, Emma’s an incredible scholar because she has this encyclopedic knowledge of ancient philosophy. I tell you what, I am so jealous of those Stanley Stowers students because her and Robin Faith Walsh and others, Stephen Young, these guys know Greek philosophy backwards and forwards. They are great and I’m so glad to have them because I have a ton to learn from her still. But she, she masterfully showed that, like, look, these pantheons, Paul’s pantheon is actually no different in like, structure, in the way that it’s imagined in tiers. And, and there’s all kinds of, like, discourse and rhetoric around that and navigating that, but everyone is sort of on that page, you know, and so it’s not, it’s more of, I think she talked about anxieties about affinity, like the likeness.

If, ooh, it’s you. You get anxious that it sounds too much like, you know, your compadres over here. So you got to tweak things a little bit to sound unique. And so this, the, these things that sound may sound radically unique in Paul aren’t really. And so she’s doing a high-level critical readings, doing like, talking about literary producers and shared repertoires of literary producers of the period. And Paul, the way she’s critically discussing Paul is that it’s just a varied model of a pantheon. You know, this, that’s what, that’s what’s happening here. It’s just one varied model of, of scholars looking back critically. Oh, these are all pantheons. That’s all this is. And so the way she talks about these literary producers in that context has much more to do about anxieties towards affinities with others. You know, to have some unique voice, to have some. You’re a, you’re a religious expert, in the words of Heidi Wendt.

So this is, this is. He’s a religious expert in the ancient Mediterranean. He’s carving out his own place, his own voice. And so he might tweak things this way, you know, well, they need to be dealt with this way or that this lower tier needs to. There’s a battle going on over here. But the whole time for critical scholarship is, let’s just admit these are all pantheons.

Yeah.

And this, there is no radically other view of the cosmos going on. You know, and that’s, that’s not a thing.

And that’s a big point to make here. Is that a common theme in all of this is when we look at the relationship of the, the Jewish Christian, Hebrew Bible literature to the literature and the societies around it. It’s not a revolutionary departure. And for, and particularly with monotheism, what scholarship wants is this to be a revolutionary break. This, this, you know, just sudden instantaneous mutation that nobody could have seen coming or revolutionary monotheism or all these things. Because what that means is this is divine in origin.

This is special. This is.

Yeah, this is, this is not just an incremental elaboration on everything that came before, which is, in reality, when you look at the data, that’s what you see. They’re not departing wildly from what’s going on around them. They’re just saying short, small, little, little deviations from what’s going on around them. And so I think that’s one of the important things that this conference is going to show, is that there is not this radical revolutionary departure, but it is, it is carrying on very similar traditions, just incrementally elaborating on them.

I think it’s one of the things that’s, that I think is. Would be surprising to most people. I think a lot of people would be more comfortable admitting an idea of polytheism in a, in, in sort of in Hebrew Bible times, in, in, in Old Testament times, and less comfortable with that being a part of New Testament, you know, Pauline beliefs. And I think that’s the part that I think is, is this the, the big revelation from, from what I’m understanding from, from you guys is that like there’s no, you know, we’ve, we’ve said it before, but there’s no part of this, of the Bible that doesn’t have polytheistic belief.

I, and, and I think one of the things we talked about, I would agree with that. One of the things we, we frequently brought up at the conference was the threshold of monotheism. Where do we identify when we finally have monotheism? And if you go back 150 years in scholarship, it’s like, oh, Abraham was the first monotheist, and then a couple generations later, Moses was the first monotheist. Then a couple generations later, Deutero Isaiah is the first monotheist. And so our generation is, is coming on what I hope is the tail end of the, the era of Deutero Isaiah. They’re, they’re constantly trying to hold that threshold against the data and say, no, no, no, we have it by this time. And we’re, we’re in addition to just blasting past Deutero Isaiah, we’re blasting past the New Testament also, we’re not waiting for, for that era. We’re saying, no, it’s not in Deutero Isaiah, it’s not in the Greco Roman period literature, it’s not even in the New Testament. And I think that’s going to be another important contribution of this volume is we’re going to point out the.

Well, one, the question of where the threshold is is the wrong question to begin with. But two, it’s definitely not anywhere in the Bible. And I think Paula Fredriksen, who has the paper after yours, did a wonderful job of talking about our frustrations with the use of the framework of monotheism and its abuse in light of the fact that, that it’s just not identifiable anywhere in the Bible, including in the New Testament and even within early Christianity.

I think it’s funny that when you, when you mentioned like, you know, the, the pushing forward of this threshold, like, you know, I am no Bible scholar. I am no, I’m no expert in, in the Bible, but even I look at Moses and I’m like, you guys remember in the story of Moses that like, the bad guys had gods that had powers too, right? Like, that’s just right there in the story.

I don’t know.

Like, how could you possibly. Like that’s just, that’s about as obvious a thing as, as I can imagine. And so the fact that it, what it speaks to, to my mind is how important it was to these scholars to maintain this dot, this dogma of monotheism.

Yeah, we all saw Steve Martin and Martin Short throw the, their staffs down and they became snakes. And, and in fact, somebody brought up that this generation is a generation that was raised thinking about the story of the Exodus based on the Prince of Egypt. That’s Prince of Egypt. That’s the lens so many come to it through. And in fact, I’ve, I’ve heard people argue, well, you know, Moses’s brother gave him his ring and it’s like, that’s the Prince of Egypt.

That’s from a cartoon. That’s not from the Bible.

Yeah. And you know, Whitney Houston is impeccable in the soundtrack, but that’s not the text of the Bible.

And then so, yeah, with Paula’s paper, just real quick, I mean, she’s, I mean, for Paula, what else can you say that she has not already said many, many times about monotheism? And she basically was saying that, you know, her article, Philo, Herod, Paul and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish Monotheism is a masterpiece that’s Harvard Theological Review from. Yeah, yeah, just excellent, excellent piece. But she. Lots of the points that she’s made before, but she goes out, she’s been going after for a very long time the types of that use language like Jewish biblical monotheism, you know, the ancient talking about New Testament authors and, and saying, oh, they’re using Jewish biblical monotheism, you know, and they’ll talk about, well, faithful Jews, you know, who read their Bible, you know, will use this will be monotheists.

And it’s just like every time you hear this, it’s like the Christian exceptionalism is, is, is whoa. It’s wow. It’s like, oh my goodness. And you think in a post-Holocaust world where there’s been droves of writing in what does it mean to do hermeneutics of text that even have anti-Jewish stuff tinging in them. How do we read them and how do we be honest with them and critical of them and interrogate them in a post-Holocaust world? And it’s. There’s so much of this monotheism talk runs into this problem. And this runs into Robyn’s paper too. Yeah, so.

And Steven’s to some degree as well, I think.

Yeah. So Robyn Faith Walsh’s paper, just incredible as well. I mean, just really great paper. She did a paper on Jesus in Berlin on monotheism and origins at the fin de siecle. My French is terrible. What, how do you say it, Dan?

I said fin de siecle and yeah, something like that.

My French is terrible, so minus two. But you know, Robyn’s is impeccable. So. But you know, her paper was brilliant because she was showing, she was actually doing. She had a very unique paper in our conference and, and I almost wish we had. And in the future we will. But she, she brought an example of. Okay, let’s see on the ground, how is this term functioning in the 18th and 19th centuries? Like specifically in Germany, in Berlin. Look at these German scholars, the way they’re employing the term. And she shows the history and the development of this in really brilliant ways that shows the supersessionistic agendas in the rise of monotheism as it grows.

In that period rhetorically as an anthropological category, that’s kind of the heyday of the apologist. And monotheism becomes a main category for kind of ordering the development of humanity and this evolutionary teleological.

Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard that sort of in my sort of encounters with biblical scholarship or, or anthropological scholarship talking, I’ve heard people say that monotheism was a big turn in in, in anthro, in. In sort of the development of human belief systems, etc.

Yeah, it’s, it’s. It’s radical exceptionalism and essentialism. You know, it’s like, well, now we’ve reached this, you know, pinnacle of monotheism and we’re at the heights of. And all these little pagans that still worship all their little gods are somewhere under us. They’re othered, you know.

Right.

So we’ve evolved to the supreme race, so to speak, you know, who understand this. And her.

There’s that value judgment again.

Right.

Of course, the value. It’s. But it’s tied. You can’t separate, she proves pretty substantial substantively that you can’t separate that rhetoric in German scholarship from that supersessionistic essentialist project. You know, it’s all wrapped up with it and it’s used rhetorically to function that way as well.

Yeah, I mean, I, I’ve heard it used to be. You know, I remember when I was in school, I took a class and it was a philosophy class. And, you know, this is 20 years ago or something, but not that long ago. But, you know, my professor at the time was sort of looking down on all of these silly polytheists and, and. And it becomes, you know, a vehicle for racism and for sort of putting down of. Of other cultures that. Which is really probably not great.

Yeah, she. One of the points she makes is, is she was talking about the fits and starts and the zeal from like the 18th and 19th century to discover these natural laws that govern the world. And so monotheism is like the culmination of that, that they’ve found out, you know, and she even talked about Jesus as culmination. You know, it’s like we’ve arrived, you know, versus those others that haven’t, and we solved religion.

Congratulations, everybody.

So, I mean, literally, what it was.

Literally, I mean, so she makes the point, the very clear point at that point. So what taxonomic value does monotheism have at all when you know that, that that’s the way that it’s functioning, that’s the way it’s been appropriated and employed, you know, So I, I thought that was great. I thought her paper was needed at our conference.

Yeah.

And.

And that leads into the. The last section had two papers in it that we don’t have time to get deep into. But Stephen Young, who was participating over Zoom because he was ill, his was entitled Monotheism as a Competitive Strategy, Athenagoras, the Pseudo-Clementine Literature and Manufacturing Christian Exceptionalism. And he didn’t get into Pseudo-Clementine literature in the presentation, but he talked about Athenagoras and some other early Christians who were basically using the claim of monotheism to try to manufact, manufacture this idea that we’re, we’re different, we’re revolutionary, we’re radical and we’re better. So that identity marker and that value judgment where they’re using monotheism already to do what Robin points out is being done in the 19th century in an effort to try to distinguish themselves and primarily because they’re on the losing end of imperialism and. But they need to find a way to, to pump themselves up.

What, what era was Athenagoras? Is it what.

I don’t know.

This is late 2nd century CE, beginning of the 3rd century CE. So this is right after the New Testament has been written. It’s still kind of crystallizing. And these are the earliest, what they call apologists who are basically starting in the middle of the second century CE. You get a bunch of, of Christians who are philosophers, who are thinkers, who are trying to make Christianity palatable for the Greco-Roman intelligentsia. They’re going to kind of meld and merge the philosophical frameworks of the day with Christianity to try to argue, hey, Christianity is compatible with all this. In fact, Christianity is the best manifestation of everything that you’re already saying, well.

Yeah, in explicit exceptionalism in Athenagoras. I mean, going to the extreme, I mean, calling things like pagans, they’re all, they just, they’re all, you know, porneia. going to the extreme, I mean, calling things like pagans, they’re all, they just, they’re all, you know, porneia. That’s all they’re doing in their worship of their gods. And it’s like we have the right readings of Homer, we have the right readings of this. Everyone else is sort of, you know, they’re seen as like the filthy other, you know.

Yeah, I mean, exceptionalism and othering is not new in any religious practice. That, that, that is sort of a feature of most religions that I’ve encountered. I would say like.

But I think one of his important points is that when you start talking about other cults to other deities that way, but our cult to our deity this way, it’s, you know, this is all wrapped up in their monotheism. So he’s showing the rhetorical function of it. It’s like in your face and brutally obvious. Then it might not be so much to someone who doesn’t know the history of it in, in Christian, in early church fathers and afterwards, but if you know that history, you, you’d be more prone to catch it in the, in the more developing periods, you know, later.

Yeah.

And so the exceptionalism involved and what you can sneak in with that exceptionalism gets really dangerous, you know.

Well, there’s so much more to talk about but alas, we need to cut this off. So everything else is going to go to our patrons and that’s going to include. There’s one more paper that we needed to talk about. Is that right?

So we’ve got Josiah Bisbee’s paper. Josiah is another one of the organizers of this conference and a longtime friend of, of David’s and he had a phenomenal paper entitled The Divine Council, Divine Multiplicity, Simplicity, and Gradations of Divinity in Late Antique Midrash. Oh yeah, we’ve been waiting for the rabbinic literature. His is all about that.

Epic.

Nice, nice. And I also want to talk about like sort of situating all of this that we’ve been talking, talking about within sort of modern scholarship and, and, and sort of get a. If you guys have, you’re not allowed to answer this now, but if you have a shakedown of like where modern scholarship is with all of this, I’d love to talk about it. But that’s for our patrons only, I’m afraid. If you become a ten dollar a month patron, all of the after parties are available on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. You can also join at the five dollar month level and, and receive an early and ad free version of every show. So, so we encourage you to do that if, if that’s appealing to you. If you want to reach out to us, contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the address. David, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

It’s my pleasure guys and we will.

Talk to you all again next week.

Bye everybody.