God Breathed?

The concept of writing history wasn’t exactly… There weren’t rules laid out for people in ancient West Asia for how to do it appropriately and correctly.

Yeah, yeah. There was no, you know, you weren’t going to get an email if you said something from some authority who’s going to come down on you. And you know your badge isn’t going to work the next day when you try to badge in at the front door.

Hey, friends, welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast. I’m Dan Beecher.

And I’m Dan McClellan. And we are here to try to help increase access to the academic study of the Bible and religion for the general public and also to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion.

Right. Today we’re going to be doing a couple things. You, Dan, are going to be talking about the fact that only one person wrote the Bible.

Yes. There’s the “one source” of the Bible I’m going to be talking about in my segment, “What Does That Mean?” What does that mean? I’m going to be talking about the word that you will hear almost every day, if not every day, across my social media channels where I use this word frequently and frequently have to define it. But I wanted to talk about this for a little bit just to clarify what that word means and why I think it’s important to the way we talk about the Bible. And then you’re going to be talking about the Word.

The Word. Sorry, you didn’t actually say the word.

No.

Okay, we’re going to get to the word.

All right.

And the Word was… was with God. And the Word was God and… No, not that word.

The bird is the word. As…

The bird is the word, as the…

Great poet once said. Yeah, I got tagged 50 times, and I know I still get tagged. It’s got to be over a hundred times so far that I’ve been tagged in some video where somebody was trying to show if this is that and this is that and this is that, then that means the bird is the word. Um, and people are like, “Facts, Dan.” And oh, gosh, dude, you don’t need…

To fact-check a joke. You can just be okay with it. You can just let the joke stand. That’s pretty… That’s… That’s… That’s one… That’s a lesson we can all learn, and I think that’s useful.

Yeah. I usually don’t respond when people tag me in jokes, but that one, I’m still getting tagged in.

Yeah.

And then we’ve got another segment that you’re going to be talking about, an interesting verse from the New Testament.

Yeah, we… We have a segment called Chapter and Verse. This time we’re basically mostly just going to be focusing on a verse and see if we can… If we can tease out what exactly is happening in that verse. It’s a pretty popular verse. It’s a pretty influential verse. It… people make a lot of decisions based on that verse. And… And we’re going to talk about it. Yeah, but why don’t you launch in first?

Okay. For my segment, “What Does That Mean?”, we’re going to be talking about univocality. And this is a word that I’m quite fond of using. I don’t remember where I heard it first, but I have seen it being used by a number of scholars in addition to a couple other variations on this theme. But univocality, from the Latin, means “one voice.” And the idea is basically that the Bible, all the different passages in the Bible, they all share the same perspective. In other words, the Bible speaks with one single and unified voice.h one single and unified voice. One passage cannot disagree with another. And this is something that developed long ago as early Jewish readers of the Jewish Scriptures and early Christian readers of the Christian and the Jewish Scriptures were wrestling with how to make sense of the different passages that seem to be saying a lot of different things. And there are readers within the Rabbinic tradition, there are readers within the early Christian tradition that developed a number of different ways to tease out lots of different insights from the text.

But one thing that was kind of always in the background and was never that explicitly prescribed. It was never really declared that we. We have to read the text this way, but it was always an assumption. There is the univocality, the idea that this is all inspired by God, therefore it must mean the same thing. It must all agree. And this is something that leads to also the idea of inerrancy. Inerrancy and univocality really go hand in hand in a lot of ways.

And inerrancy is the idea that the Bible itself cannot be in error.

Right.

There’s no. Because it’s inspired by God or even written by God through his messengers or whatever. There’s no chance that it could possibly be wrong about anything.

Yeah, and there are different. There are variations on inerrancy. Like, some people say it’s anything. Everything is exactly accurate. Other people say, well, no, it’s just matters of doctrine or even central matters of doctrine. Other people say doctrine or history. Some people say it’s limited to the autographs. So only those original texts that were physically written on by the actual authors themselves. Other people say it’s, you know, any version of the Bible. It’s. There are a lot of variations on it, but yeah, the idea is basically that it cannot be an error. And univocality kind of goes hand in hand with that because a disagreement, a contradiction, would be viewed by many people to be an error. If these two things don’t agree, one has to be, at least one has to be wrong if any are to be right. And I have a big concern with univocality because nowhere in the text, nowhere in the text of the Bible is it asserted or promoted. This is something that must be imposed upon the Bible from outside the Bible and really is only a possibility once the Bible comes together as a single collection of texts.

And the biggest problem I have with univocality is that it silences the biblical authors because we are imposing this expectation from the outside. This is not something that the biblical authors have signed off on. This is not something that they have asserted themselves. Because we impose that on the text from the outside. We don’t allow two authors to disagree. The authors have to agree. And if there does seem to be a disagreement, we’ve got to reconcile that disagreement. We’ve got to figure out how to make the two texts agree.

And yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot of, like, backbending and very serious twisting. Yeah, that has to occur to make a lot of these things, because they are a lot of times in direct disagreement with each other, in direct conflict with each other. And boy, do you have to really twist your, your brain around to make that work.

Yeah, and that’s the phrase mental gymnastics is very popular among folks who want to criticize that approach to the Bible. Because, yeah, there are authors that manifestly disagree with other authors in the text. But if we presuppose univocality, that they are both inspired by the same source, that they are both representing the same perspective, the same vision, the same voice, then they have to be made to agree.they have to be made to agree. And usually what that is going to mean is the voice, the perspective that is closer to what we already agree with, or the perspective that supports our structuring of power, our ideologies, our identity politics in a given argument or circumstance, whatever makes that argument easier for us. That’s going to be the perspective that we center and we give priority to. And then the other perspective is going to be renegotiated. We’re going to say, well, this must not mean this. This has to mean that. Let’s look at the broader context.

And if we bring that in, we can, you know, fiddle with the meaning here. And the other text gets reread, reinterpreted, marginalized, or entirely ignored in some instances, in order to make it seem like the Bible is in agreement. We don’t have any disagreement, we don’t have any contradiction. And I just want to talk about some of the examples of passages where this is an issue and where we are.

I was hoping you’d get to some examples, because there’s a lot of people who would bristle at this thought. Just the idea.

And one of the interesting things about text is if we want to harmonize two texts, we’re going to find a way to harmonize them. I can’t think of any instances off the top of my head of two texts that say things that are just physically impossible to make agree, provided we are allowed to imagine any scenario that we want. And this is something that folks who deny that the text ever contradicts itself will always bring up. If it’s possible, if it is in any way, shape or form physically possible to imagine a way that these two texts agree, then there’s no contradiction. And that’s a silly standard, because you can imagine all kinds of scenarios to make just about anything agree. And so I’m not saying that these are contradictions that cannot be shown to be harmonized in any way, shape or form.

That’s not a realistic standard. We can make up whatever we want to try to make things agree. I’m pointing to things where it is implausible and improbable that these were intended to agree. And something that I’ve complained a lot about with apologetics is that the goal is not to find out what’s probable or even what’s plausible. The goal of most apologetics, and particularly apologetics that are focused on univocality, is to gin up the tiniest little sliver of “not impossible.” And as long as you can gin up that sliver of not impossible, you win, because all you’re trying to do is make folks who already agree with you feel like it is not impossible. And therefore my dogma, my ideology, my belief is justified. So one of the ones that I always think of when people talk about univocality is faith and works. We have, in Romans 3 and 4, we have Paul talking about faith and works, and in Romans 3:28 , he says that we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.

And then just a few verses later, in Romans 4:3 , Paul brings up Abraham and said Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him for righteousness. In James 2 , we have an interesting discussion where James talks about faith without works being dead. And James also quotes that passage in Genesis: Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. But James doesn’t say that we’re justified by faith apart from works. James says Abraham was justified by works and that is what fulfilled that statement, that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. And then in the next verse, James says, thus we see a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And so folks like Martin Luther and many others read James as directly disagreeing with Paul. And I think originally he was doing that, intentionally quoting Paul and disagreeing with him, saying, no, that’s not accurate.00:11:43.100] Dan McClellan: But this gets harmonized, it gets reread.

And obviously for Protestants, sola fide, faith alone, that is one of the central doctrines of Protestant Christianity. And so because of that, the Romans passages are going to take priority. The James passages must then be reread in order to bring them into alignment in order to maintain the univocality of the text. And so then we have this idea that James is not saying works are necessary for salvation. James is saying, if your faith is adequate, works will be the fruit of your faith. And so it’s putting the cart before the horse because James is not saying, hey, everybody, have faith. And then you’ll know you have faith because. Because then. Because then these works will start sprouting out everywhere. James is saying your faith needs works in order to progress. And he explicitly says that by works is faith perfected.

In other words, the faith is the end goal, the works are the means. Paul is the other way around. And so this is a passage where we have two different authors disagreeing. And the voice of one of those biblical authors, ostensibly an inspired author of the Bible, is. Is silenced by those who impose this presupposition of univocality from the outside. And James is being told what he is and is not allowed to say by the readers of the Bible.

Isn’t it so much more interesting if we see the New Testament as a conversation between disciples of. Of a new sort of way of thinking? Yeah, like it seems. It surprises me that people need it to be so hard and fast as opposed to an interesting exploration of this new era of thinking. Yeah, because it’s so much more interesting. And it’s so much more honest if we can say they’re both, you know, both Paul and James are disciples. They’re both, you know, they both believe firmly in Jesus and what Jesus brought to the table in terms of this conversation. But now we need to figure out what it all means. And they’re exploring and they’re disagreeing with each other, and that’s okay. You know what I mean? Like, it just, it’s. It’s a much more. It’s just a much richer take on what’s happening in, you know, the first century AD, yeah. Or CE rather.

I agree. And I think the Bible also becomes much more dynamic for readers of the Bible who want to find inspiration and guidance. If the text can represent disagreement and can say, well, there’s this consideration over here. There’s also this consideration over here. Someone searching for answers, I think, is going to have an easier time feeling inspired, finding meaning, finding utility in the text if they can see different perspectives. But the text doesn’t function for a lot of people as a fountain of inspiration or guidance. For many people, it is a constitution, it is a rule book. It is a bludgeon for boundary maintenance. And that is when the univocality must be asserted. Yeah. I often wonder if we did not have the explicit declaration that Paul and Peter disagreed with each other, how Paul and Peter would be reconciled. Certainly if we did not have the text saying that they disagreed, there would be people out there today saying, no, no, they totally agreed. We just have to reread Peter.

And we still have in like Acts, for instance, we have the statement where they’re just finishing up the Jerusalem Council. And we have this statement that, okay, we don’t have to follow the works of the law anymore.[00:15:40.780] Dan McClellan: There are just four things that everybody is still required to abstain from. Idolatry, fornication, eating meat that has been strangled, and consuming blood. And then they write that in this text and they send the text all throughout the Christian world. And this is the law going forth. And Paul totally disagrees with that. Paul couldn’t care less about eating meat that has been strangled or eating blood. He says it doesn’t matter. And so we have that disagreement as well. And that’s something that must be reconciled. And interestingly enough, you’ve got different groups on that. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, use that text as one of the proof texts for this idea that blood transfusions are improper, inappropriate, based partly on this passage.

Whereas most are thinking that that’s somehow equivalent to eating the blood of someone?

Yeah, that it’s consuming, to some degree, blood. But there’s also the idea that the life is in the blood, which is something you see in the Hebrew Bible in Leviticus and elsewhere. And so to put someone else’s blood into your own body is to inappropriately appropriate life. And, you know, this is a renegotiation of the text, just like any other. But it’s one that is not phenomenally popular, incidentally. That’s not phenomenally popular. And so it is rejected by most people who say, no, Paul’s the one we’re going to listen to in this instance. And so again, the imposition of univocality compels people to say, man, we don’t care about the Jerusalem Council. We’re going to put Paul front and center. And I think there are loads of fascinating examples in the Hebrew Bible as well. Anyone comparing the books of Samuel and Kings to the books of Chronicles is going to find all kinds of disagreement. For instance, a famous one, one that I think is fascinating, is the question of who killed Goliath.

Because we have the story in 1 Samuel 17 —in 16 and 17—we have Saul being introduced to David, and then we have Saul being introduced to David all over again. And then we have David going out and killing Goliath. But if we go look in 2 Samuel, in chapter, I believe it’s 21:19, we have… We’re rattling off some victories over giants and the Philistines. And it talks about four giants who were killed by Israelites. And one of them is Goliath. And Goliath is described in the exact same way that Goliath is described in 1 Samuel 17 . His spear was like a weaver’s beam. Goliath, whose spear was like a weaver’s beam, that is the enemy of David, and that is the giant that is killed in 2 Samuel 21:19 . But it says he was killed by somebody named Elhanan, a Bethlehemite. And we can go to 1 Chronicles, and there they are recounting a similar story, only there they change it a little bit.

It’s a little bit tweaked. It says that Elhanan killed somebody named Lahmi, who was the brother of Goliath.

Right.

This is textually interesting because Bethlehemite can, with just a few small tweaks, be changed to look like Lahmi, the brother of Goliath. And so likely the authors of Chronicles, who are writing centuries after whoever wrote this tradition as it’s found in 2 Samuel , are not happy—not comfortable with this idea since we already know who killed Goliath, and so they tweak the text just slightly in order to make it agree with the rest of the tradition. And there are a number of ways that people try to argue that this can be harmonized. But some people argue that it is the 2 Samuel text that is textually corrupt because of the close proximity of Bethlehemite and Lahmi.:50.840] Dan McClellan: But that doesn’t make much sense because the name Lahmi would mean “my bread,” which is not a naming convention that is known from this time or anywhere near this place.

It would also be a Semitic name when this is supposed to be a Philistine. And yeah, there’s, there’s just not a good argument to make that there was ever some giant roaming around named Lahmi who got 86ed by Elhanan. It is likely that the tradition of David aggregates or consolidates all these other less well-known champions into this one figure, larger-than-life figure who then goes on to become king of Israel and one of the central figures of the early Israelite state. So as another example of what I think is quite clearly two different authors disagreeing here—not, not explicitly, not saying “I don’t like that dude,” but a story that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor or editing room floor. I don’t know what the saying is, but a story that probably should have been clipped from the text remained in the text to show there was a different way that story is told.

Now I’m imagining people taping pieces of the scroll back together after they’ve snipped it all up.

Reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s Bible where he cuts out all of the, all the supernatural events, all the miracles to just leave the sayings of Jesus, the greatest moral philosopher of all time. And there are, and I know you’ve been, as someone who has been operating, swimming in the, in the atheist community for, for some time. I’m. I’m sure that there are favorite contradictions that, that get brought up from time to time. Whole.

Whole websites devoted to it. Yeah, entire. Entire things devoted to it. Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, I think the, the Reason Project, I think that was a website that, that did a big chart. They took that, that famous chart of all of the quotations and cross-references and then he did it over again, but only this time it was contradictions.

Yeah, it was, it was actually. And it was a. They stole a beautiful idea like that. It was this beautiful, like all these sort of, this arcs to that. And that arcs to this. And these are all correlated. And yes, it turns out you can make a very similar image with the contradictions.

Yeah.

Or the perceived contradictions, at least.

Yeah, I think I looked through that on my blog from oh, over 10 years ago. I think I looked through that and was like, some of these are a little squishy. Some of these require specific interpretations that are not really that widespread. But. But yeah, I think it is. It is an interesting illustration of that point. And I think that people should become comfortable with the idea of biblical authors disagreeing with one another. That’s why we have the text that we have today. And if we decide, no, we’re not comfortable with that because of our dogmatism, we’re literally telling the biblical authors what they are and are not allowed to say. And I think that’s problematic. That distorts the text and it turns the text into just a utensil, a tool for people to use in their boundary maintenance in their identity politics today. So.

Well, and if you want protection from atheists coming at you with a bunch of contradictions, the best thing you can do is embrace the contradictions. They’re there, they’re obvious. You know what I mean? Like, this Elhanan-David thing couldn’t be more clear.

Yeah.

In terms of, like, you’ve got one. One text saying that, that, you know, that Goliath was killed by David, one text saying he was killed by somebody else.body else. It’s a very obvious thing that, like, you’re in trouble if you’re trying to hold on to this univocality idea. If you’re trying to, like, cling to some sort of inerrancy, you’re just going to get beat up by people who, who know where these contradictions are. And you don’t have to be. You can just say, yeah, that’s right. That happens in the, in the book. What a weird thing. You know, and just be okay with the fact that these were, you know, the concept of writing history wasn’t exactly. There weren’t rules laid out for people.

Yeah.

In, in, in the ancient, you know, in ancient West Asia for how to do it appropriately and correctly.

Yeah, yeah. There was no, you know, you weren’t going to get an email if you said something from some authority who’s going to come down on you and your badge isn’t going to work the next day when you try to badge in at the front door. So, yeah, that’s. Univocality is an issue. And I think most people, once they become aware that this is going on. Every time you see someone making an argument for a contemporary conservative ideology from the Bible, univocality is there. Every time somebody quotes a scripture in order to suggest that another scripture can’t mean what people say it’s meaning, that’s univocality. Because you’re saying this writer from 400 years before on literally another continent governs what this other writer over here is allowed to say. Every time somebody tries to develop an idea by saying, if you look at this passage from the New Testament and this passage from Isaiah and this passage from Genesis and this passage from Revelation, and you put it all together and it says one thing, that’s univocality.

And I, it’s. When I first kind of started teasing apart a lot of the arguments that I was seeing from, from conservative Christian apologists and content creators online, it was surprising how much of it requires you accept univocality. It’s a dogma that people just choose to accept. And there are so many arguments that only can be sustained if both sides decide to accept univocality. If I just said, oh, you’re presupposing univocality, which I do many times, 60, 70% of the arguments that I engage on social media just fall to the ground.

Well, and it’s just. I don’t know. I’m trying to. I’m trying to. There’s. There’s a, there’s a thought forming in my brain somewhere, my very small brain. It. Things rattle around in there, but it just feels like I get, I get why you want it to be simple, and I get why you want it to be easy. Like it. This would be an easier book if, if it were univocal. If it were, you know, if it, if everything lined up with everything else, it would be easier. It would be easier to say this is text that is directly from God, which we’ll talk about in our next segment. And, and, and yeah, simplicity is nice, but that’s not how, that’s not how any of the world works. Why should it be how this book works?

Yeah, yeah. I think there are other ideologies that get imposed as well. I just had somebody comment on a video of mine. I think today that somebody shouldn’t have to have a PhD in order to understand the Bible. God wants everybody to be able to understand the Bible. Therefore, my take, which requires understanding Hebrew and requires understanding some of the other Northwest Semitic literary conventions, obviously can’t be right. And those are ways to protect people’s dogmas and as the name of our show indicates, we try to put the data over the dogma here to show how. How much is reliant on dogma. How much is reliant on dogma. And univocality is one of those dogmas. Once you pick at that, you’re going to find that it is laying underneath so much of the dogma that we hear about regarding the Bible today.

All right, well, there you go. Univocality. Ditch it. Get it out. It’s no good.

Or they at least learn to recognize when it’s going on so that you can think more critically about it, so then you can work towards ditching it.

Perfect. I love it. All right, let’s move on.

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Thank you.

In keeping with the theme today, we’re going to do a Chapter and Verse, and we’re going to go mainly with verse. You suggested we look at a single verse. Yeah, that a lot of folks see as very important and exegetical and instructive, but they might not actually be interpreting it a hundred percent correctly. And that’s part of the trick of the Bible. As we said, it was written thousands of years ago with idioms and colloquialisms that made all the sense in the world then, but don’t exist anymore. Not to mention the fact that the writers of the book were super rude and didn’t write any of it in English, which I just think that’s not nice. You know, it’s funny because as I think about this, and this has been something that I have struggled with with the Bible for a long time, I think of all the trouble that modern English speakers have understanding Shakespeare. Like that was only 400-ish years ago and it was written in our language, and yet everything sounded totally different.

Like half the time people have to be told that a joke has occurred because the language and the idioms have changed so much that it no longer makes sense. You go back 200 years before that to Chaucer and it’s barely recognizable as English. So I mean, forget about the idioms. Good luck even understanding the words if you look at them, especially if you look at them sort of hand-printed on a page; it is almost impossible to read if you haven’t trained and studied in reading that. And that’s only going back 600 years, not a thousand, certainly not 2,000-plus years.

Yeah.

And language is like that.

An illustration of that—this is… people who are watching the video are going to get more out of this than people who are not, but I was given a gift, suckers. I was given a gift when I left my previous job from the people who—my co-workers who worked with me. It is a page from an edition of the Bible published in 1539. Okay. It is Isaiah 29 and Isaiah 30 from the—it’s called the Tyndale-Matthew Bible and it is written in what’s called Fraktur script. So we colloquially refer to it as Gothic script. But the spelling is wildly different and the grammar and the syntax are phenomenally different as well. So it’s just a—it’s just sometimes at some point I’ll have to let you see this, Dan, and see how much of it you can read because this is just going back less than 500 years ago.ars ago. It’s ostensibly English, but it is difficult to get through.

And, and yeah, when you, when you think about something that was written two to almost 3,000 years ago, it becomes an entirely different ball game.

Yeah. I mean I. Look, my grandma was born in the year 1900 and for her the difference between the words shall and will was incredibly important.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like tiny bits of slang that I would use in her presence were utterly baffling to her. So.

Yeah.

As are a lot of the slang terms that like my nephews are using with me.

Yeah. My 14 year old says stuff and I’m like, I don’t stop doing that. I don’t know what you’re saying.

What does BET mean? Why are you saying bet right now? That doesn’t make any sense.

Fine, I’ll say less. Excuse me.

So anyway, I point all of this out because it has been one of the great frustrations as I’ve tried to read the Bible because I don’t know if you know this, Dan, but not everyone can read ancient Greek or Hebrew, like even native Greek and Hebrew speakers would understandably struggle with much of the ancient writings.

I worked on a translation of the Book of Mormon into modern Greek up until January, when I left my job. And there’s an edition of the. There’s a translation in an earlier version of modern Greek called Katharevusa that is only 60, 70 years old. And a lot of people struggle with Katharevusa, with reading that. And so, yeah, this is, this is something that all languages evolve, all languages change more rapidly than most people realize. And so, yeah, this is, this is something that’s. That’s an issue.

Yeah. So we are literally sort of at the mercy of a whole bunch of different translators. And, you know, we, the Bible itself, we’ve got a bunch of writings by a bunch of different authors in a bunch of different languages from a bunch of different time periods. And every translator does their best, but they’re making choices about how to capture the meaning of the original text in a way that makes sense to a modern reader. And if you compare translations, it becomes clear very quickly that the various translators often do not agree. So. So given all that, I think a modern Bible reader could be forgiven if their best guess as to what the original authors meant on any given thing is not a hundred percent on the money.

Yeah.

So with that in mind, let’s look at Paul’s second letter to Timothy with an asterisk that I think you wanted to chat about a little bit right off the bat.

Yeah. So we’re talking about 2 Timothy 3:16 , to be specific. But one of the first things that I think it’s important to understand, even before we get into what this means, is that the academic consensus, a strong academic consensus, holds that this text was not written by Paul. This was written decades after Paul’s death. Can you believe it?

I am outraged. Outraged.

I’m sure there will be letters to an editor somewhere. We don’t have.

We will get epistles. People are going to be epistling to us.

So 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are what are known as the Pastoral Epistles. And they are known that way because they take a more pastoral approach to what’s going on here. They’re not letters to a community saying, hey, stop doing that, start doing this. They’re letters to individuals saying, hey, my dude, here’s what I want you to know." I, you know, you’re doing a great job, but we’re going to, we need to talk about this, that, and the other. And these letters are wildly different from the rest of Paul’s letters. For, in a number of different ways, scholars have looked at every single word across these letters, and only about one-third of the words, apart from names and place names and things like that, in the Pastoral Epistles occur in the other Pauline letters. Two-thirds of the words in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus aren’t used by Paul in any of the other letters that are widely understood to be Pauline.

That’s not a small number. Two-thirds is big.

Yeah, two-thirds is quite big. And in addition to that, a lot of the terminology that Paul uses in the rest of what are called the undisputed Pauline Epistles—the ones that everybody pretty much agrees are genuine—the terminology is used in different ways. Like Paul talks about these things very differently in those letters than he does in the Pastoral Epistles. And there are some concepts that Paul really likes to talk about that aren’t really addressed at all in the Pastoral Epistles. And so it just—you, a reader, gets the sense that this is a very, very different writer, whoever’s doing this.

Yeah.

And a lot of people say, “Well, that’s just Paul learning and growing as Paul is writing.” And because these are written to individuals rather than communities, maybe Paul’s style is changing. But if we look at those words that are different, they are far more commonly used in the Greek literature, both within and outside of Christian communities, far more commonly at the end of the 1st century CE and at the beginning of the 2nd century CE, and Paul died in the middle of the 1st century CE. And so just from a statistical point of view, it seems more likely these come from the late 1st century or the early 2nd century. They also seem concerned with issues that come from a later church environment. Things are more developed. We’re concerned for the long-term life of the church. Paul thought Jesus was coming back any day now. And so we all needed to stay doing what we were doing and get ready for Jesus to come back. We have a different take in the Pastoral Epistles.

And we also have, if we look in the early manuscripts, these epistles are missing from some of our earliest witnesses to some of these. And we have some early Christians saying these probably aren’t genuine. Now, Marcion is one of the first, who is now widely considered a heretic by pretty much everybody. But we also have the Pastoral Epistles omitted in some other manuscripts that are considered quite reliable manuscripts. And so, the preponderance of evidence would suggest that 1 and 2 Timothy were not written by Paul. So when people appeal to 2 Timothy, they’re appealing to a text that was written pseudonymously, so falsely in someone else’s name. And they were written probably late 1st century, maybe even early 2nd century CE. So in another time, written for another purpose. And, and so when it comes to the authority of this text, I think that’s just a question.

That’s an observation that people need to be aware of. The consensus is that 2 Timothy is not written by Paul.

Yeah, whoever wrote 2 Timothy used “shall” and “will” all wrong and used the word “bet” all the time. There’s a totally different thing. Okay, so we’re— And one of the things actually that that demonstrates, you mentioned how Paul thought that Jesus was going to return, like, in that generation. Isn’t that the term that he used, “in this generation”? And then here we have 2 Timothy, chapter 3, opening with a whole thing about the last days.ays. And like, it seems much further off. It seems, it doesn’t seem like in this generation. He says, “You must understand this, that in the last days, distressing times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Which, by the way, that’s got to be now, right? Right?

It has problems. Yep.

I’ve seen so many pastors and priests talking about how perfectly this passage describes this moment in history, as though this isn’t just how humans have always been.

Yeah.

Like, clearly, for thousands of years, those have been issues that humans face.

Yeah. Nobody was ever profligate.

Right. Yeah. Right. Or no. Yeah. No one was ever disobedient to their parents. I know. I never was. So anyway, we’re going with, we’re going to look at 2 Timothy 3:16 , which is the lesser of the famous 3:16s, especially if you’re a sports fan, but still pretty important to a lot of folks.

Austin 3:16, right. Right.

Right. So, 2 Timothy, Timothy, Timothy, Tiffany. I don’t know. Second Tiffany. That would be a… That’s a very different book, I think. Or “Two Timothy,” if you’re using the Trumpian nomenclature. So verse 16, I’m going to give you the NIV first, the New International Version first, which says, “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

Okay.

All scripture is God-breathed. Or as the NRSV puts it, “All scripture is inspired by God.” Or as that scamp King James and his merry men rendered it, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.”

Yes.

Now, each of those has a slightly different meaning, but they all seem to be saying there’s… There’s a couple of things that I’m tripping up on. First of all, they all say “all scripture.” And I… how do I know what that means? What are we referencing here? Yeah, I don’t know what all scripture… like, if I start to write scripture, will it then automatically be God-breathed? Is that how it works?

Well, it was. If we take this as the inspired word of God, if we plug that surge protector into itself and say that… So we’ve got, in the Greek, pasa graphe, “all scripture,” literally “writings.” But by this time, this term had come to refer to scripture, which was basically an authoritative text. And depending on when you think this text was written… Well, actually, independently of when you think this text was written, this word was used exclusively to refer to Jewish scriptures in this time period. So the author here is without a doubt referring to the texts that were in circulation, that were considered authoritative, inspired, that were considered scripture by the Jewish community. And this is not necessarily the equivalent of what we know today as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. We are still either at the end of the first century CE or the beginning of the second century CE, and so there are some fuzzy boundaries to what would later become the canon of the Hebrew Bible, or as Christians usually refer to it today, the Old Testament.

And so we have a sense of what those books were.

For the most part, it’s what we have now. But there are some texts that were disputed.xts that were disputed. So, like the Book of Esther was—even in the second century, there are some folks who said, “No, this is not scripture.” Even within a couple of rabbinic writers, we have other books like Ben Sira, also known as Sirach, that is included by a lot of folks and is considered scripture; we have several copies of that text. At Qumran, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran also had over a dozen copies of the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. So these are texts that were considered by many to be authoritative. There are debates that are reported to have taken place around the late first century CE regarding whether or not texts like Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon defiled the hands. And “defiled the hands” is basically their way of thinking of these texts as inspired.

The idea is these texts were composed in some sense by God. And so there is some residual holiness located within them. And if you touch them, and you’re not— you’re not properly prepared, ritually cleansed to do so, then you become unclean. It defiles the hands. And so there are some—Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther— these are some of the texts that were debated in the late first century, early second century regarding the degree to which they may or may not have defiled the hands. So most of the core—the Pentateuch, the prophets, Psalms, things like that—those were mostly agreed upon. It was really the fuzzy boundaries that were being debated. And what we have now has— has omitted some of the stuff that many people included and includes some of the stuff that many people omitted.

Well, I mean, we got not-Paul, we got— we— sorry, we got not-Paul here very clearly saying that all of it is God-breathed. So don’t omit anything. Esther’s in, baby! Esther’s straight in. As far as not-Paul is concerned.

Yeah. And one thing to note here is that the earliest indication of any kind that we have of any text of the New Testament being referred to as Scripture comes from one of the epistles of Peter. Off the top of my head, I don’t remember which one, but it refers to Paul’s writing, and then some of Paul’s texts, and then it refers to— “and the other scriptures,” which would suggest that Paul is being considered among the Scriptures. And 2 Peter is one—first or second? Gosh, I wish I could remember which one, 1st or 2nd Peter it is. These are among the last texts of the New Testament written. So we’re early to mid-2nd century CE when these texts are being written, also not by the real Peter. But it’s not until the second century that some collection of Paul’s writings are being referred to as Scripture. And so when 2 Timothy was written, none of the— we have no indication any of the texts of the New Testament were identified as Scripture.

Well, yeah, I mean, we’re in the middle of a letter. It’s not like the writer of the letter was like, “I am going to be—” “this letter is going to be Scripture.” By the time people get used to the—like, “Hang onto this, Timothy.” “You’re going to want to—” “you’re going to want to keep this one because it’s going to be scripture eventually.”

Write that down. Log that away. Yeah.

Although, like, literally, in prepping for this segment, I did see apologetic articles online that basically, as you say, sort of plug into themselves and say that, yes, this means that scripture that was written after this all counts. All counts. Which is funny because it was written by a Protestant, and, like, you know, have you seen a Catholic Bible? Because what about that? Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of books in there that count as scripture to somebody.

Yeah. And, and whoever determined they were scripture, that kind of arrogates inspiration to their decision about what’s going to be scripture. To say that anything that we agree on and you know, obviously it’s anything that I agree is part of scripture, is therefore God-breathed, which is a different discussion entirely.

But if you start to, if you bring up the Bhagavad Gita or the, you know, the Quran, that’s not scripture. That doesn’t count.

Right. And this is an interesting argument. A lot of, I get criticized a lot and people say you don’t accept supernatural explanations for things. It’s like I’ve got no problem with people believing things because they have a supernatural explanation for it. But you can’t use it in an argument because methodologically it is self-defeating. Because once you accept any supernatural argument, you must accept all supernatural arguments. Because to accept a supernatural argument is to say we’re going to suspend our hermeneutic of suspicion. We’re going to suspend our critical examination of this and we’re going to just arbitrarily allow this to stand on the grounds that maybe it’s real. And once you do that once, then you have no way of objectively saying, well, in this instance we’re not allowed to. So if you say, well, you got to allow for supernatural explanations, well, why do you not allow that for the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, any one of a number of different texts?

And it’s because they’re outside your tradition and you don’t want them to be considered inspired. And so you must arbitrarily say for those books, no, we have to apply our hermeneutic of suspicion. We have to apply critical methodological lenses. But only for the stuff that’s important to me should we allow for supernatural explanation. So it’s people, people think I’m being arbitrary. No, it’s a methodological decision because there is no way to methodologically delineate what supernatural claims you’re allowed to criticize and what supernatural claims you are not. So sorry for that little rant, but.

No, no, no, you’re absolutely right. Because if you’re, if you’re not careful, suddenly somebody can bring in like Spider-Man. Yeah, you have no, you have no way of getting around it.

Yeah, well, you know, since New York is in the texts and New York is real, so therefore Spider-Man.

Yeah, exactly.

And particularly the Miles Morales. That’s, that’s the real one.

That’s the true.

That’s the canonical. Yeah, the true and living Spider-Man.

I like that. I’m just going to write a quick note to self to look up the word hermeneutic and I will talk to that later.

We’ll do a “what does that mean?” segment on hermeneutics.

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a good idea. Okay, so we’ve, so we talked about what scripture means. What does God-breathed mean? What are we talking about when we say all of the scripture is is is God-breathed or inspired by God? What, what are we talking about here?

So the, the word in Greek there is literally. And. And for those who are not aware, I use modern Greek pronunciation when I pronounce the Greek of the New Testament. So it’s going to sound a little different to you, but the word there in Greek is theopnevstos. It’s literally God-breathed in Greek, one word.d. And so I think you read the NIV first and it just rendered God-breathed, which I think is a good way to do it because it’s not really staking a claim regarding what God-breathed means. The overwhelming consensus among believing readers of the text is that God-breathed means inspired, that the scriptures were breathed out by God or they were in some sense composed under God’s breathing authority or influence. God is breathing down the author’s neck in some way. And that’s been a very, very common reading for a long, long time, but not the entire time. We can roughly pinpoint when that reading started.

It was around the third century with the writer Origen who kind of popularized and promulgated that reading, understanding theopneustos to mean inspired. Before that, there’s a different reading and there’s a great book on this if you’re interested in this from 2021. The author is John C. Poirier and he published a book called The Invention of the Inspired: Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture. And what his argument is, is he goes through and looks at the use of this word anywhere he can find it in Greek writing. And it is, it occurs in a number of different places. And when you look at the usage in those texts and he looks at the Sibylline Oracles, he looks at the Testament of Abraham, a pseudepigraphical Jewish Christian text. He looks at Pseudo-Plutarch, Pseudo-Phocylides, and shows that in all these instances the idea of inspired doesn’t make sense as the interpretation of this word.

What makes sense is life-giving. Theopneustos means God-breathed, not in the sense of inspired, but in the sense of what we see in Genesis 2:7 , where God breathes the breath of life into the human and he became a living soul. In other words, this is breath that brings things to life. And in pretty much everywhere that Dr. Poirier found this word in Greco-Roman, Jewish or Christian literature prior to Origen, that’s the meaning. And I think he makes a very strong case that this text was intended to function that way, that it should be understood to mean all Scripture is life-giving and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. So the scriptures, the graphai, the Jewish Scriptures are not inspired, according to this passage, but are.

And not to say that it’s not saying they’re not inspired, it’s not claiming they are inspired. It’s claiming that all the Jewish scriptures give life, vivify, and are good for these other things. So in addition to the fact that that makes better sense within the broader usage of this term in this time period, the late first, early second century CE, it also seems to fit with the rest of the verse. If we started off saying, hey, these are all legit, they’re good for this, this, this and this, that’s one thing. But I think it makes more sense that he is saying, hey, all these Scriptures, they give life, they’re good for. They. He’s talking about all the different ways that the Scriptures are profitable. And I think that’s a better reading. And so if you would like to see that argument, check out that book, The Invention of the Inspired Text by John C. Poirier.

That’s interesting. There’s this sense that, I mean, I think this goes back to our, our other conversation, because this, again, rather than being a rule book, rather than being a, you know, something that we have to follow sort of to the letter, that interpretation of this phrase makes it an inspirational thing rather, and something that you can use to correct and train yourself or others for teaching. But it doesn’t give you all the answers, it just helps you work toward better answers.

Yeah, yeah. And I think this, I think there are a lot of people who engage the Bible with that goal. They read the text in order to be filled with the spirit, in order to feel enlivened, in order to get all these benefits out of it.. But the reading that has become more popular is the reading that is useful primarily for boundary maintenance, for defense, for identity politics, to say, all these texts are inspired, therefore they’re all inerrant, therefore they’re all univocal. So this is one of the proof texts for that as well, the idea of univocality. And so when we’re weighing, well, what, what sense are we going to find here? Are we going to go for the sense that makes the text more dynamic and useful for us as we try to apply Christian principles for those who are engaged in that kind of life, or are we going to go with the one that makes it a better weapon in our battles against the people we disagree with and that we don’t want to be associated with?

And unfortunately, it seems an awful lot of people are pretty deeply embedded in the latter. And I think that demonstrates a concern that James had in James 2 regarding faith without works. What is your faith about? Is it about becoming better people? Is it about loving your neighbor? Or is it about winning arguments? Is it about making sure your team wins? And so, yeah, I struggle with that.

Yeah, a bit, I will say, you know, because this book has, has something for everybody, like whatever interpretation you want to go with, you’re gonna find it. Yeah, I find it a little disturbing as someone who has been on the receiving end of rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness from people who don’t like my perspective on things. You, you also have received some rebukes of your own.

Oh, yeah, well, I, I published a video today saying the Trinity is not in the Bible, so.

Oh, we’re gonna have to talk about that one on the show.

Yeah. Oh, that’s a, that’s a great topic.

Yeah, I just think it is interesting. I, it’s sad to me that, you know, a scripture that when, when we look at it, you know, with, with, with the lens that you’ve given us it from, you know, and that other scholars have, have, have sort of supported with, with their work, it’s so much nicer and. But then you got these words like rebuking and correcting and it’s just like, oh, okay, I guess, fine, you’re gonna rebuke us.

I guess it’s kind of funny that. Well, funny maybe isn’t the right word. Not funny haha, but funny sad that a lot of the texts that people use as harsh weapons really weren’t intended to be that harsh. But then there are a lot of other passages that get ignored and nobody talks about that are wildly harsh and wildly problematic. And I just find it just endlessly fascinating but also troubling how the, how the text is.

I rebuke those people that want to use those weapons. I rebuke them, I correct them. I, I will train, we will train you in righteousness.

I’m dusting off my socks right now. Whatever dust may have been on my socks is gonna. Is now on my office floor and will no doubt end up back on my socks soon. But.

I have no idea what you mean by that.

Oh, the, the idea of dusting off your feet.

But we’ll get to it eventually. We’ll get to it at some point. Dusting off the feet. All right, well, there you have it. That’s. That’s 2 Timothy 3:16 . 16. Thanks, Dan, for, for all of that explication. I appreciate that.

Well, I appreciate you walking us through the verse and, and talking about the context a little bit. I think, uh, hopefully this makes sense to some folks and hopefully it helps people feel a little better about how they feel about the text. I think one of the most fascinating things about some of the social media content that I’ve produced is how many people out there can appreciate their faith tradition a lot more when it has been disarmed of all these things that have caused so much trauma and so much worry and so much anxiety in the past.and so much anxiety in the past. I get, I get messages all the time from people who say that this helps them heal. And so hopefully there’s someone out there that finds this a healing message. No doubt there are those out there who find this an aggravating and an angering message, but.

Well, if you’re one of either of those camps, you can write into us. The, the, the email address is contact at dataoverdogmapod.com. You can also, if you are one of the people who appreciates this stuff, you can become a patron of our show by going to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, I think patreon.com. Yeah, yeah, there’s a dot com in there.

Hopefully you figured out that needs to be there by now and you’re in your journey on the internet.

Yeah, exactly. And, and you can, you can sign up to be a patron at whatever level you want, whatever you’re comfortable with. If not, that’s fine too. Thank you so much for joining us today and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.