The God-Forsaken Psalm

So before we start the show, I just want to jump in on something. An event has occurred, an announcement has been made. Dr. Dan McClellan, that something big is going to be happening and you can, you can pre-order it now.

What’s happening, what’s happening is that I have written a book again and this one is a little different though this is not an academic tome. This is what’s called a trade book, meaning it is written for a general audience and, and there’s actually money behind publicity. So this book is called The Bible Says: So What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. And this is something I’ve been working on for a while now. I’m very, very happy to have this almost ready to go. I’m very excited for people to see this. It’s a collection of. The first chapter is kind of a bird’s-eye view of how scholars think the Bible came together. And then we’ve got 18 chapters, each one addressing a different claim that begins with “The Bible says” and then it’s homosexuality is an abomination, abortion is murder, Jesus is God, you should beat your kids that you know, sinners are going to be punished forever in hell.

So I’m going to be addressing a bunch of different things that we hear every day on social media about the Bible saying so and it comes out 04-29-2025 and it is available for pre-order now. I think we will probably put in the show notes, the link to the, the landing. Yeah.

And, and we really hope that you’ll do put in your pre-orders because it helps Dan out a lot and it’ll, it’ll, it’ll help him get to the, to the top of the charts, to the tops of the pops.

And then, and, and that will make it so that we can get to your area and do like lectures or book signings or things like that. The, the publisher is, is very eager to, to get us out there provided there’s an indication that the book is, is highly desired.

So yeah, we’re, we’re currently talking about doing live shows all over the country, that sort of thing. So if you want to help make all of that happen, putting in a pre-order is a great way to do it.

There will be an audiobook that I will be narrating as well. So nice. If that’s your, if that’s how you prefer to consume your literature, that’ll be available. They have epub as well. You can get it on Kindle, you can do the hardcover. All that’s available for pre-order now.

Sweet. Let’s keep doing this show.

Okay.

You know, it’s funny that they were working so hard to try and get Elijah to show up, because I went to the Jewish Community Center for preschool, and there was one day every year when they would leave the door open and pour a glass of wine for Elijah, and then we would all go out and play in the playground. And when we came back, he had been there and drank that glass of wine, so. And our teacher was a little happier. So I think, I think he’s pretty easy to summon if you’re, if you’re careful.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Getting over some jet lag, but everything’s great.

Accent has not come back too, too much. Shifted toward, toward the Manc. Yeah, Manc, I understood was, was kind of influential on you.

Yeah, I, if, if I, if I felt at all comfortable doing a Merseyside accent. You know, my favorite, my favorite example of a, of a Manchester accent is Ferry Cross the Mersey. No, no, no, it’s. Do you remember on Ted Lasso, the character Jamie Tartt, I think, is from Manchester and he keeps saying that things are poopy. Everything that’s poopy. And I love how he says that anyway. But yes, I had a lovely time in, in England. I think I’m going to, I’m going to just tease and listen. Reach out to us if this interests you. I think you and I are going to lead a tour to England because it is awesome and we can find some really cool stuff for us to show you guys and talk about. And I’m pretty sure that the Da Vinci Code is real.

And we can show you the Middle Temple Church where you can, where you can see the Knights Templar and all that sort of stuff. We’ll figure it all out for you, man. Yeah. So if that interests you at all, feel free to reach out to us. Contact at dataoverdogmapod.com and let us know. We’ll, we’ll keep you on the list. We got a show coming up. We’re doing a show here. We’re going to start with a Chapter and Verse, and I believe this is our first Psalm-focused Chapter and Verse. Is that.

Well, we did Psalms 82 a while ago, but. But yeah, It’s. We. We have not done a bunch of.

Them, so there’s a lot of psalms, aren’t there?

And there are even more if you go outside of the Protestant Bible.

How dare you.

What?

Yeah. And they’re allowed to do that. There are even more at Qumran, so.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, some. The psalmist was more prolific than. Than.

I don’t know, than a prolific author today.

Yeah, I’m. I was. I was looking for a songwriter because at least today’s psalm seems to be in the form of a song. I don’t know if they’re all that or if they’re. If they’re all meant to be sung or if they. What. What’s the deal with psalms? We’ll talk about it. We’ll get to. And then at the end of the show, we’re gonna do an artifacts and fiction, and we’re gonna be talking about where Jesus was absolutely, definitely buried for sure. No questions.

Yes. And where the Ark of the Covenant was. Was even briefly spotted.

Oh, really? Oh, that’s right. That’s right. Yes. I remember a certain TikToker making a video about that at some point.

Yeah.

Well, all right, let’s just dive right in with our chapter and verse. So we’re here In Psalm, what, 22? Psalms 22 .

Yes. Now, if you’re reading in your Septuagint, that’s gonna be as you should be.

I think we all have. Everyone get out your copy of the Septuagint.

That’s gonna be Psalms 21 . But for everyone following the Masoretic tradition, which is most English translations, we’re going to be in Psalms 22 .

Okay, interesting.

And we.

What accounts for that? Did someone add in a psalm?

Yes, yes, I said there are more Psalms. And so the. The Septuagint has 151.

Okay, we.

We’ve got an extra Psalm. And so the. But they’re. Yeah, the, The. The numbering is a little skewed there. So, yeah, we have Psalms 22 , verse 1, verse 0 in the English translations. But verse 1 in. In the Hebrew says that it is to the. The leader, the chief musician, something like that, according to. And then we have this wonderful phrase, Ayelet Hashachar, which means the deer of the dawn. Okay, this may be like a tune. It’s like. All right, everybody, this is to Amazing Grace. And right here we have the deer of the dawn. Or the doe of the dawn. The morning doe, if. If you’re nasty.

And the morning doe. It does. It does remind me of a different phrase. That I won’t say on the air. Anyway. Yeah, I, Yeah, when I first looked at this, I was like, I, I saw the, the, the instruction. And you know, in the NRSVue, you’re looking at it, it’s in bold and as you say, verse zero, it’s before verse one. And it just says to the leader, colon, according to deer of. To the deer of the dawn, a psalm of David. And I was like, I don’t know what any of that is. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but. So are you saying that it means that according to the deer of the dawn is like as sung to the tune of the deer of the dawn?

That’s what some scholars think. We don’t have a really good idea. Like, people all the time are like, what does Selah mean? And the best I got is, oh, it might be, it might be a pause, it might be dance break. Like, we’re not, we’re not sure exactly what’s going on there. And then, and then I think it.

Means something similar to cuckoo Kachu.

Yeah, it could mean this is where you scat. You know, dealer’s choice now. And then at the very end, a psalm of David, mizmor ledavid in Hebrew, which could mean a song about David. It could mean a song belonging to David. It could be a song for David. Like, there are a bunch of different ways we could interpret this, but the, the traditional notion that David wrote all the psalms or any of the psalms is not considered to be historical by scholars. So. Okay, so when, when folks try to talk to me about Psalms 22 , they’re like, David said, David said. David said. No, a psalmist writing well after David was dead and gone said these things. And yeah, this is, this was not written by David.

Remind me, do we think that there was a historical David?

I, I would say there are some who think there was no historical David. I think it’s probably more likely than not that there was a warlord named David who managed to conquer Jerusalem and set up a chiefdom.

That spread far and wide. Absolutely not. The Omride dynasty is when Israel was first put on the map. And that was after the House of David was likely established.

Great. So not David wrote this probably song.

Yeah.

And it’s a. It’s an interesting one.

Yeah, it is.

It is a bummer. I’m going to just put that out there.

Yeah. When we. When we first were talking about this, before we hit record, you were like, it is bleak. And. Yeah. And this is what’s called a lament, an individual lament. And. And we can narrow it down to an even more specific genre called the God complaint. Where. And you see a bunch of psalms of this style. There are communal ones and there are individual ones where they’re basically just shaking their fist at God going, why are you doing this to me? Or to us? And it follows a pattern. It starts off with a complaint, and it usually starts with the Hebrew word lama, which means why? Or sometimes we have admatai, which means how long? So Psalms 82 , for instance, begins, how long are you going to judge unjustly? Selah, whatever that means. And so here we have Eli lama.

Why have you forsaken me? And this is going to sound familiar to a lot of folks who have read the New Testament because we have the transliteration into Aramaic in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, where Jesus on the cross says Eloi or Eloi or Eli, lama sabachthani, why have you forsaken me?

Yeah, I. I think it’s inter. Okay, so what. Can I just go down a brief rabbit hole just about. Let’s do it really quickly because I looked at that, and when I did the. What I see in many of the translations, though not all, is that the. That quote doesn’t quite match from Mark to Matthew.

Correct.

Like, it’s a. Like one is Eli and one is Eloi and one is. And. And one is lema and one is lama and I don’t know. So. So. So talk, talk. What are we looking at? What. I don’t even know what language that’s supposed to be.

So Aramaic, it’s a transliteration into Greek from Aramaic.

Okay.

And so in the. In the Hebrew, it’s actually a different word. It’s not sabachthani toward the end there, it’s azavtani. Okay. So. Yeah, and. And the difference is probably just to be attributed to whatever version of, of the, of the psalm the author had in front of them. Mark was the first. Matthew’s coming decades later. So for whatever reason, they, they chose a different version or just transliterated it differently because.

Right.

You, you know, we didn’t even standardize transliteration of Hebrew until the last couple hundred years. And so.

Right.

You, you go back to the 18, 17, hundreds, and people are transliterating Hebrew and it could sound a. It could look a dozen different ways.

Right.

So back then, they had no real standardization either. So. So that accounts probably for the different readings there. But. But basically, this is my God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Which is the beginning of this individual lament. This God’s complaint or God complaint of Psalms 22 .

What? I. So having read the psalm, I look at it and I. And I. It doesn’t. It’s not clear to me why Jesus on the cross right before he dies would quote this psalm.

Yeah, yeah. When you’re in, when you’re in dire straits and you’re about to die, you’re not thinking, what can I quote to really put a, Put some stank on the. Make sure this really lands rhetorically like, this is. This is clearly a literary creation. Yeah, but the idea is to have scripture in Jesus’s mouth, sure. And to reflect his despondency. But, but this is a particularly famous psalm. But to get back to the. The God complaint, you start off going, why? Or how long?

Oh, and, and the idea is, remember you used to do all this stuff for us. And, and you’re kind of trying to manipulate God. And then you come in with the petition, you say, save me, help me, deliver me. And, and sometimes there are multiple cycles of this reminding of past deeds, petition, reminding of past deeds, petition. And so the point is, the psalmist is kind of engaged in a bit of a speech act. It’s an act of worship, while at the same time going, come on, dude, why don’t you help me? So that’s what we have going on here in Psalms 22 . And it’s interesting. You have in the four Gospels. All four Gospels represent Psalms 22 around the crucifixion, but in two different ways, because. Yeah. Mark and Matthew have Jesus say, why have you forsaken me on the cross?

Right.

Luke and John have nothing about why have you forsaken me on the cross? But Luke and John then have the Roman soldiers casting lots for Jesus’s clothing. And that’s actually verse 18.

Right.

They divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. So Psalms 22 is in the background of all four crucifixion accounts, but it’s verse one in the first two and it’s verse 18 in the second two, oddly enough. Yeah.

And then obviously. And this is. This is what we’re shooting towards. Then there’s verse 16.

There’s verse 16. Yeah.

Which is used, I think, by a lot of people to. As a sort of proof text that this psalm was a prophecy about the crucifixion itself.

Yes, yes.

Let’s talk about why, first of all. Okay, let me go to. I’m in the NRSVUE, but I don’t think that’s going to be helpful for.

For this point. No, for this point.

So I’m going to. I’m going to switch to the KJV real quick.

Yeah, do it.

If I can find it. All right, There we go. KJV heading down to verse 16. And it says, and this is in the midst of all of these complaints. And boy, you know, I think you. I think you gave short shrift to the amount of complaining.

Oh, yes.

Before there’s the reminding God that he’s supposed to be helping us sort of thing. Because it is many verses of, like, everything in my life is terrible. I. My teacher beat me at school and.

I, like, ran away.

Yeah, it’s. Yeah. Country songs have nothing on this.

Yeah. As you said, it’s bleak.

And then verse 16 says, for dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. They pierced my hands and feet. That’s what the KJV says.

Right?

What? You know, I. The dog’s part. I suppose you could say that that would be a metaphor for bad people or whatever. And it does say, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. I can see how you would look at that and think that that is a prefiguring of the Jesus crucifixion story. Well, why. Why are you then? Why. Why are we talking about it now, then?

We’re talking about it because that’s actually. You mentioned the, the NRSVUE is not really going to help that claim. And that’s because they don’t, they don’t translate it that way because what they translate there is they bound my hands and feet.

Yeah.

And even this is only a guess. And the reason is that in the Hebrew we don’t really have a sensical reading. If we go into the Masoretic Text, what we have is like a lion. My hands and my feet. Kaari yadai va raglai. And so we have this clause that doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense. You can take this as a verbless clause. My hands and my feet are like a lion.

Rawr. Yeah.

You know, but that. And, and you could force that into the context. You could find a way for that to make sense, but it doesn’t really feel quite right.

And so, yeah, nothing about the rest of, of these verses is saying anything about, I’m doing okay. Yeah, I got powerful hands and feet. Like, like, you know, there is nothing like a comparison from the self to a lion for sure. But it does shock me now that you say that, that none of the versions that I read use the word lion.

Yeah. Because most of them come up with some kind of reconstruction that makes better sense. Now what we have when we go, one of the things that we do if, when we’re trying to translate and we run up against something and we’re kind of like, we will go to the Septuagint and we’ll see how the Septuagint translated. And this was the scriptures for early Christians, the first multiple centuries Christians read the Septuagint, even the Gospel authors are reading the Septuagint, are quoting from the Septuagint.

Just remind everybody what the Septuagint is.

Septuagint is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. This was done in like the 3rd or 2nd century BCE where each book was separately translated into Ancient Greek. And one of the reasons that it’s fascinating is there are a lot of differences between that and our medieval Masoretic Text, which is the traditional source text for the Hebrew Bible. And there are, and you know, you can have several reasons for this because they had a variant source text or maybe they interpreted it differently or a bunch of different reasons. And so when we look in the Septuagint of this, what we have is they, they dig out my hands and feet. And this is a bit of a head scratcher. It’s, it’s a verb, orusso, which means to dig or to dig out. And the semantic focus here is on removing material in order to make use of the space that remains or to create something out of the material that had parts removed.

So this is, this is used to talk digging ditches and rivers and canoes and things like that now. And so that, that is peculiar as well. You know, we’ve got dogs are around me and surrounding me, and so maybe they’re gnawing at hands and feet, something like that. And at Qumran we have what could be a variant reading. It could be like a lion, but it could also be the final letter, instead of being a yod, could be a vav, which at Qumran, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, they often were indistinguishable from each other. And so if it is a vav, then we could have a misspelling of the verbal root karah, kaf resh hey, which would also mean to dig out in the sense of dig out a canoe, dig out a river, dig out a canal, or there’s one passage that says, you’ve dug out my ears so I can hear.

Okay.

And so that’s a possible reconstruction. It seems like the translator of the Septuagint might have had something like that in front of them, right? And so translated it with this verb orusso. And so when we get to the English translations, we’ve had several centuries for people to get comfortable with thinking about Psalms 22 as a prophecy. They’ve dug out my hands and feet. This sounds an awful lot like they pierced my hands and my feet. And, and this goes back to the patristic authors. There are some patristic authors that talk about, make reference to verse 16 as a prophecy of Jesus’s crucifixion. But, and, and I’ve made this point a number of times. The semantic package of the verbs that we find both in the reconstructed Hebrew and in the Septuagint do not match the concept of piercing someone’s hands and feet in order to crucify them, because that is driving a sharp instrument through material in order to secure it to something that is not digging out in order to make use of the space like there.

But it’s close enough that if people squint hard enough, they can make the edges blur and overlap. And suddenly we’re there. We have reached our desired goal. And so ever since, like the Coverdale Bible way back in 1535, rendered pierce my hands and my feet, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the Great Bible, the Matthew Bible, they all say they have pierced my hands and feet. And so the King James Version obviously does the same. And this is then understood as a prophecy about the crucifixion. And it would, if it were, that it would be particularly miraculous because the author of Psalms 22 knew nothing about the practice of crucifixion.

Right.

That. That is a Roman innovation that’s coming on another part of, in another part of the world shortly after that. So, yeah, it would be pretty, a pretty miraculous prophecy if you could make a plausible argument that that’s what was meant. But it was clearly not what was meant. But there, there have been a bunch of other ideas as well. In fact, there’s a, there’s a scholar named Michael Wechsler who has published a paper where he reviews a bunch of different proposals about how to reconstruct this.

“They… my hands and my feet have been torn.” So this makes sense of the dogs encircling me. “My hands and my feet are wasted away.” “My hands and my feet hurt” or are pained because they “picked clean,” or “as if to rip apart my hands and my feet because they picked clean.” And “like a lion, my hands, my feet.” “My hands and my feet are shriveled up, gone lame, contracted.” Like, a bunch of different ways scholars have tried to reconstruct something that makes better sense than what we have in the text.

Right.

But obviously if you’re a Christian and you think that this thing that originally was just a God-complaint and was not a prophecy about anything in the future—this is talking about somebody’s own struggles—if you think this is a prophecy about the crucifixion, just intuitively you are going to be gravitationally pulled toward recognizing this as “they pierced my hands and my feet.”

Well, especially if every single one of the Gospels makes mention of this Psalm, it only makes sense to then read this psalm with that context in mind, with that idea in mind. Like, I totally understand that.

Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it just kind of fills out this notion that the crucifixion was this, you know, big canon event within the life of Jesus. And that Psalms 22 is this big kind of interpretive lens for understanding what’s going on here and for how to think about it and how to understand Jesus’s prophetic presence within the Hebrew Bible.

Other than the fact that the rest of the content of the psalm doesn’t feel like it comports with Jesus’s attitude anywhere else at all. Yeah, like Jesus is not a complainer about himself. Matter of fact, it to the point where it actually has always bothered me, even when I was a believer. Like the thought of Jesus on the cross despairing and saying, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” felt wrong.

Yeah.

He knew this was coming. He was resigned to it. So even that part felt out of character to me. But surely it must feel out of character as you read. You know, you don’t want to think of Jesus just whimpering about how bad his life is and everything. “I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among themselves.” You know, all of this stuff just doesn’t feel like Jesus to me.

Yeah, yeah. And when people go in and look at the God-complaint and the laments, you know, you don’t see a lot of people preaching on complaining to God.

Right.

Usually it’s “don’t complain to God, just praise God nonstop and be happy that you have dogs encircling you.” And they are doing something to your hands and feet that’s unspeakable.

But it might be “lion,” so that could be cool.

But the psalmists are very much like, “Hey, hey, what’s going on over here, man? Why are you letting this happen to us? You’re supposed to be the dude who did all these things, but you’re letting us suffer. You’re letting the enemy come into your house. You’re letting them trample us. You’re letting them burn down the holy city. You’re doing all this stuff.” So the psalmist is very much a complainer in a bunch of places, and a lot of people want to overlook that. But yeah, you have Jesus doing the same thing on the cross. And I don’t remember if it happens in Mark; in Matthew he says, “Eli Eli lama sabachthani.” And everybody hearing says he’s calling for Elijah. And—

Yeah, and I don’t know what that means. What does that mean?

So the end of Malachi says, “Elijah will come before that great and dreadful day, turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, of the children to the father, lest the earth.” And so there is the messianic hope that was developing in Greco-Roman period Judaism frequently focused on Elijah—that Elijah was going to be the one who was going to come back and restore things.

Let me see. Yeah, Mark does the same thing. And “some of them that stood by when they heard it,” as the King James Version says, “behold, he calleth Elias,” which is just a Greek transliteration of Elijah, so that it could be playing that literary function there. He—they could be like, he should say something that sounds like Elijah. Oh, what about Psalms 22 ? Ooh, I love it. Let’s do it. And, and maybe the, the fact that it’s representing Jesus suddenly losing confidence and faith in God and being abandoned by God, maybe, like, we can, we can deal with that. We can hold our breath through that. And so even people today, when they’re like, “Oh, I read this, and, and it sounds like, you know, Jesus is complaining.” But then I learned that it was a quotation of Psalms 22 . And suddenly it’s like, we can look past that, right? We can, we can say, oh, it’s performing a different rhetorical function. And then you also have, in part, I know this is particularly common among Latter-day Saints.

Some kind of—they work it into kind of a systematic theology of the Crucifixion, where it’s like, oh, God had to abandon Jesus so that Jesus could go through this without God’s aid or something like that, because the, the atonement wouldn’t be adequate if God were there supporting Jesus. And so he had to go through it alone. And he complained, “Why? Why have you forsaken me?” So there are a bunch of different ways to negotiate with the text to make it fit the presuppositions you’re bringing to it. And many of them are fascinating and creative, but I’m most fascinated by whatever the authors were trying to do. That’s the one I’m interested in.

Yeah, we should ask them.

Yeah, one day.

You know, it’s funny that they were working so hard to try and get Elijah to show up, because I can verify that he—he’s actually pretty easy to summon, because I went to the Jewish Community Center for preschool, and there was one day every year when they would leave the door open, an empty chair, pour—pour a glass of wine for Elijah, and then we would all go out and play in the playground. And when we came back, he had been there and drank that glass of wine, so. And our teacher was a little happier. So I think—I think it’s pretty easy to summon if you’re.

I’m getting some—some hints of Bel and the Dragon there. Well, that’s a—that’s a good way to make kids feel bad about wanting to play. Be like, oh, you just missed him. You know, he was just here. You would have seen Elijah that we’ve been waiting for thousands of years to come back.

I mean, I guess I—you know what? As someone who—who had believed in both the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, I was used to magical beings showing up when I wasn’t looking.

I think it was fine. So your parents said, “Get used to disappointment.” And you said, “Hey, that’s a quote. I know what you’re doing.”

I—wait, what is that from? “Get used to disappointment.”

That’s from the—the most quoted film on the BYU campus, The Princess Bride.

Oh, okay. Okay.

There you go. I must know. Get used to disappointment.

Oh, right, right, right. Now I remember.

Yeah. When I first came—when I first moved to Utah, people were like, “You know what the most quoted movie at BYU is, right?” I was like, “Caddyshack?” And they were like, “What’s that?” I was like, “What have I done?”

Why am I here? This is not—these are not my people. All right, well, I mean, you could do worse than The Princess Bride still. All right, well, is there more, or is that—is that—

Like—there could always be more, but I think—I think we’ve covered the basics of what we wanted to talk about with—with this passage.

I think that’s a good place to finish that off with. And now we’ll move on to our next segment, Artifact or Fiction. Woo! All right, so now, since we’ve been on the topic of Jesus and his unfortunate passing away.

There is unaliving, as the kids say, as.

As. As everyone who’s trying to avoid getting their videos taken down from TikTok says. Yes, yes. The unaliving of Jesus and then real living, actually. So he, he’s the only one that got that privilege. You, you brought up the idea of us talking about a thing called the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem. Now my, this surprised me when you brought this up to me as a, as a thing because I had always heard about the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as being the, the, the sort of locus of attention in terms of the tomb of Jesus Christ.

Yes.

It, it has for a very long time held the distinction of sort of claiming that that’s what it was.

Yes, since the early 300s.

So yeah, that’s. I mean that’s far sooner after than now for. But I don’t know how strong their claim is. I’ve done no archaeology whatsoever. But there’s also this other place. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about it?

Yeah. So just north of Jerusalem by Nablus Road, there is a place you can go. To this day, it is a very well curated and kept location. Very quiet. And I’m actually going to get into why that is relevant. But there is a, there’s a place called the Garden Tomb where they have two different locations. One of them’s inside the property and the other’s outside the property. There’s a kind of a rocky cliff face that’s right next to a bus depot. And sure. On the top of.

Because how else was Jesus gonna get there? He needed. You take the bus.

Yeah. This is all, you know, downtown. You, you gotta get to the bus. And then there’s. There are burials, graves on the top of the cliff face. But way back in the 19th century, there were a lot of Germans who were spending time in and around Jerusalem, particularly military men, but other scholars. And there was one in 1842 by the name of Otto Thenius. And as the story goes, he was just in his hotel room looking out the window and noticed a rocky outcropping and was like, hey, that kind of reminds me of a skull. That’s weird. And thought of the story of the crucifixion with Golgotha, which means place of the skull, and the wheels started turning. And it, because it’s this rocky outcropping and it looks like it has a couple of, of little indentations that could be eyes and then one looks like they could be the bottom of a jaw or something like that.

And so Germans started poking around there, suggesting that this was the location of Golgotha. And then there was this Major General named Charles Gordon, the very model of a modern Major General. I hope you saw that coming about 40 years later. He was in Jerusalem and he came up with this. With this idea that you could kind of overlay a skeleton on Jerusalem. And the. The Dome of the Rock is right where the pelvis is. And then the City of David is this little kind of the legs sticking out from the south. And then the Pool of Siloam is the foot, is the feet of the skeleton. And then at the very top, north of Jerusalem, this rocky cliff face that looks kind of like a skull from a certain angle would be the skeleton’s skull. And so he’s all feeling very.

Dan Brown.

Yeah, this was Dan Brown before there was Dan Brown.

Yeah.

And.

But I gotta say, making the. What was the pelvis thing? Making the Dome of the Rock. Dome of the Rock into the. Into the penis of this thing seems.

Well, it wasn’t an obelisk. If it was an obelisk, that would be a little more on the nose. But. But he came up with this idea and, and, and he kind of is the main popularizer of the notion that this is. This is Golgotha. In fact, it is frequently referred to as Gordon’s Calvary by a lot of folks these day, these days. And nearby, couple hundred feet away, there is a tomb that is carved into another cliff face, a related but separate cliff face. And you can go visit it to this day. And, and there are an awful lot of people who think this is where Jesus was buried. And so the Garden Tomb Association is this German Protestant organization that curates this space. It’s gorgeous. There are places to sit. There are places to have little meetings. There are. They have seating right next to the bus depot where they give a little presentation.

And you look out over the buses at the. The. The cliff face.

Oh, beautiful.

And. And, well, here’s the thing. A lot of Protestants, I don’t know if you know anybody who’s ever been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is a cacophony. Like, you go in, there are people everywhere.

It’s, they feel uncomfortable in a place like this. This is not the quiet dignity that they expect for a location like this. And, and there have been, there have been outbreaks of violence and things like that that take place. It’s a fascinating location and, and I hope people who are interested in this kind of stuff at some point have an opportunity to go visit it. It’s quite an experience. But if you go to the Garden Tomb Association, you’re basically in a little, a literal garden just walking around listening to birds chirping and people are whispering to each other. And it just feels a lot more serene and a lot more solemn. And so to, to put it in terms Gen Z can understand, the Garden Tomb passes the vibe check for the place where something as solemn and serious as Jesus’s resurrection took place. And so a lot of Protestants tend to gravitate toward the Garden Tomb as the location. But in addition to the, the fact that there are absolutely no archaeological or other data that would indicate this cliff face was Golgotha, the tomb itself is definitely not where Jesus was buried.

Okay, that’s, that’s a strong claim, my friend.

Strong claim indeed. Yes. Now if you go there, it’s, it’s a pretty flat cliff face and there’s a little door-size opening and then there’s a little track kind of in front of the door. And they say, oh, that held the round stone that was rolled over the door. And then you can even see that there’s kind of a big semicircular carve-out that goes around the door and then kind of stops and, and is flat for a few more feet and, and you know, that’s, that’s when you look at it, that’s the vibe you get. But archaeologists have said, well, okay, problems. One, most of this dates to the Crusader era. Two, this is not a track to hold a stone. This is a watering trough. And three, this carve-out area held a roof when this was an animal pen during the Crusader era.

And so just the outside of the tomb doesn’t fit at all. The, the things that kind of evoke notions of this being Jesus’s burial place on the outside are actually from over a thousand years later. Inside, the problems are even more significant because this is a rock-cut bench tomb, which means that you have a couple of benches that were hollowed out underneath and bodies would be laid on these benches until they decomposed to the point that it was just bones. And then the bones would be gathered and then dumped more ceremoniously than I’m making it sound into the cavities below. And you know, you would get a mountain of bones underneath. And there’s a, there’s an argument to make that this is what it means to be gathered to your ancestors is your body has decomposed, your bones are all gathered together and you are dumped into the pile of your ancestors.

You are deposited into the ancestral dump. I get it.

Okay, yeah, sure. And so that’s how they did things in the Iron Age. This is, this tomb dates to the 8th or 7th century BCE.

Oh wow.

Now when you look in the New Testament, Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb was a brand new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. So this doesn’t fit. And at the same time the style of tombs were different because you would have benches where the bodies would be laid, but when they were, when they were decomposed, the bones were not just dumped into a hole underneath, they were put into an ossuary, a bone box, a little, you know, it’s a little higher than, than a Nike box, but, but that’s basically what you’re talking about, a box that the bones would go in, you’d scratch your name on the side sometimes and then you were deposited in a little cubby hole that was carved in the rock. And so they had a different style of rock-cut burial tomb in the 1st century CE. And this is not that. This is an 8th or 7th century BCE rock-cut bench tomb. And so it does not fit the description of the tomb in which Jesus was buried.

And that’s all we have to go on for identifying where Jesus was buried. And so it is not that. So the case for this being Jesus’s tomb is, is phenomenally weak. It, it is disqualified by several of the features both outside and more strongly inside the tomb. So that’s, this is like it’s, and here’s the thing, I, when I led a tour in Israel and Palestine last year, I kept saying to people, look, a lot of people think there’s something metaphysical, something special about being able to identify the exact spot. But most people are not here because they think it’s the exact spot. They’re here because they want to experience something that gives them kind of a visceral, phenomenological connection to the idea.

Right.

Not. Not necessarily the exact place itself, because you can go there and you can have a wonderful experience and you can contemplate what Jesus’s death and resurrection means to you, and you can be in a location that is very close to where this all happened and is very similar to what it would have been like. It’s not the exact place, but you can still get that experience and you can still make connection with that part of the world and with, with all those feelings and, and I think that’s the most valuable part of that kind of stuff. So, so I, I tell people, hey, this is not it, but this is about as close as you’re going to get to actually seeing it until they.

Invent time travel without fights breaking out.

Yeah, but, but this is. And that’s a. And I think a lot of people appreciate knowingly going into that situation like that, saying, we’re going to have an experience, we’re going to enjoy it, we’re going to drink deep from it. And we. But we know it’s not the actual place where it happened.

Well, and it’s not like it’s archaeologically not interesting.

Oh, it’s. It’s archaeological. I think it’s fascinating.

I think it’s really interesting. I mean, it’s not that thing, but it’s still a 7th- or 8th-century BCE burial place, and that’s. That in and of itself is really cool to visit.

Absolutely. And you’re, you’re just down the street from the Temple Mount, and it’s, It’s a phenomenal place. And in that, in Jerusalem, to have a little area that’s quiet and peaceful like that, that’s. That’s a, that’s pretty cool in and of itself.

Yeah, that sounds like gold.

So I’ve. Every time I’ve been there, I’ve gone to the garden tomb and I have sat there and done, you know, my little personal style of meditation, and I have enjoyed it immensely. I have wonderful memories about that place. But it’s not where Jesus was buried, and it’s not where Jesus was crucified.

I just, I guess I do want to go back and check in with, since we mentioned it, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Yeah.

Because as you said, that has a much longer claim to, to, to being the actual burial place. What, what are our thoughts on that?

Of all the candidates, that’s the one that makes the most sense. But we’ll never know for sure, but I would point out that. So a couple of things as it exists today, a ton of stuff has been, has been carved away and carted out and changed. So the landscape is different and that’s without all of the architecture that has been built over it. And so you’re not experiencing the landscape the way it was because this was part of a quarry in the 1st century CE. And this kind of makes sense for where they would have a bunch of people being crucified and then where they would bury them. But if, if you find yourself in the, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, you, you like, go up some stairs and then you wait in line and you get to pass in front of the rocky outcropping that they identify as Golgotha. Only it’s covered by a ton of stuff and you actually only look at it indirectly for the most part. You have a few little pieces of glass that allow you to look into it, but there are icons and drapery and things everywhere.

And you can look at the back of it because they’ve got a little mirror held up at an angle to let you see the back of it. But once you’re done, if you go down the stairs and then instead of turning left to go to the crypt, you turn right, there’s actually a, a larger glass portion that nobody ever goes by where you can see a larger chunk of that cliff face. But the, the actual place that they identify with the, with the burial, you’ve got to wait in line. No pictures inside the little building. It’s a building inside a building.

And so you get a sense of what the tomb would have looked like. If you go there now, you, you have, you can have the whole experience. You can wait in line, you can go inside the building, you can look at, you can touch the, the place where they, they think he was buried. It’s, it’s quite the experience. But there are also other things that allow you to get a little closer to what it probably would have been like in the ancient world. But there was, there was a Roman temple built over that spot shortly after, after they destroyed Jerusalem and after the Bar Kokhba revolt. They came back in. They. They renamed it Aelia Capitolina. They built this temple. And then in the 300s, when you had Constantine and his mother kind of trying to come. Come back and be like, is that the cross? Where the. Where’s this? Where’s that? Where’s the other thing? This is the rock that Jesus gave Peter the fish on and all that kind of stuff. And. And they identified that spot as where Jesus was crucified and buried.

And so they tore down the. The Roman temple and built a little shrine there. And over the years that it has been added to and supplemented and grown. But yeah, you can. You can still go there today. And so I would say, if you want to get a sense for something, that it’s a little closer to what it would have been like, even though it has been significantly changed.

The.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher has that. And if you want to go sit there and meditate and pray and be in the peace and the quiet and the serene nature next to a tomb, you. There is that at the Garden Tomb. So a little bit for everybody.

There you go. I think that, that those are great tips and I. And a fascinating look at the things. I think that one of the things that’s so interesting and I love that. I love your take on it, which is that it’s not the. The point doesn’t have to be is this the real place? Because you can’t know for a lot of these things, you can’t know for sure. There’s no way. So, yeah, you go with the idea of, like, trying to just get a sense of what it might have been like and to contemplate the. The story itself. And yeah, that’s. That’s valuable in and of itself. I like that a lot. And maybe you get to see a fight.

Hopefully you don’t see a fight. But the one more thing to add. Ron Wyatt thought that. That he thought that was a place where Jesus was crucified. And which one?

The Garden Tomb.

Garden Tomb.

Okay.

He talked them into allowing him to excavate to go into some. Some caves and things underneath. Even though he’s. He’s not an actual archaeologist. He had no certification or anything. They were like, yeah, sure, whatever. And he claims that under the garden, under the Golgotha, so by the bus depot, that he saw the Ark of the Covenant and that it was directly under the place where Jesus was crucified and that he saw dried blood that had spilled upon the Ark of the Covenant. And he claims that he took it to a lab and they tested it and came back and said, where did you get this? It’s still alive. And it only has 23 chromosomes. And of course, produced zero evidence for any of this. But if you go to the Garden Tomb today, you can go up and say, hey, can I see your Ron Wyatt letter? Because he. He went out and publicized these claims and people came to the Garden Tomb and they were like, is this for real?

And they wrote a letter that is still. They will give it to you if you go and ask for it. That says the Council of the Garden Tomb Association, London totally refutes the claim of Wyatt to have discovered the original Ark of the Covenant or any other biblical artifacts within the boundaries of the area known as the Garden Tomb Jerusalem. Though Wyatt was allowed to dig within this privately owned garden on a number of occasions, the last occasion being the summer of 1991, staff members of the association observed his progress and entered his excavated shaft. As far as we are aware, nothing was ever discovered to support his claims, nor have we seen any evidence of biblical artifacts or temple treasures. So this Protestant group that runs the Garden Tomb Association was like, yeah, totally a hoax. He didn’t find jack.

We should not have let that guy dig. That was a bad. That was our bad. We made mistakes. I’m sorry. Well, there you go. I think that that’s fascinating. And Ron. Ron Wyatt was a crackpot. All right. If you dear friends at home, would like to. To be a part of making this show go, have we got an opportunity for you. You can become one of our patrons over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. There you can sign up to get early and ad free access to every episode of our show. You can also sign up to to receive the After Party, which is more content every single week. And you just become a part of what makes this show possible. And so we, we greatly appreciate our patrons. If you’d like to reach out to us, it’s contact at dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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