Data Over Dogma

This week, we're finally reading a chapter verse by verse, and Exodus 24 does not make it easy: in just 18 verses, Moses climbs a mountain, wanders off to write everything down and splash the people with blood, climbs again, and somehow keeps finding more mountain. Along the way, seventy-four people look straight at the God of Israel (feet, sapphire pavement, and all) nine chapters before God insi...

Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty "inadmissible," and the internet promptly told him to go read his Bible—the one that prescribes execution for everything from kidnapping to picking up sticks on the Sabbath. But the Pope is making the same image-of-God argument from Genesis 1:27 that abolitionists used to argue their way past the Bible's acceptance of slavery, and the Gospel of Matthew can't s...

In the beginning was the Word, but what if the Word was Wisdom all along? This week we welcome Dustin Smith, New Testament scholar at Spartanburg Methodist College and host of the Biblical Unitarian Podcast, to talk about his book Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John, which traces how John's portrait of Jesus draws on Lady Wisdom from Proverbs, Sirach, and the wider Jewish wisdom tradition. Wa...

It's the most spookiest time of the year, so we're debuting a brand-new segment: Hexegesis! Did King James really slip "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" into Exodus because he hated witches, or does the trouble go all the way back to the Hebrew—and why does a Bible that bans divination keep showing its heroes doing it (as long as they're authorized, aiming at the right God, and conveniently...

The Daily Mail says the resting place of Noah's Ark has been "100% confirmed" on a hillside in Turkey, so we're lacing up our hiking boots to check the radar scans, the fundraising pitch, and what happened the last time someone drilled into this very same formation (spoiler: bedrock). Then, what exactly is a messiah? Long before the word meant one savior at the end of the world, it just meant some...

Open an English Bible and you'll mostly see "God" and "Lord," but underneath is a whole divine vocabulary: El, Eloah, Elohim, the tetragrammaton, and a few choice insults, including gillulim, which likely comes from a word for dung (shit gods, basically). First, we sort out which plural belongs to which singular (spoiler: Elohim isn't the plural of El), why Deuteronomy uses Elohim more than any ot...

This week, Paul finally gets his day in court — several of them, actually, and he spends nearly all of them in custody. We're going chapter and verse through Acts 23 to 26, where Paul lobs the word "resurrection" into a room full of Pharisees and Sadducees like a rhetorical grenade, forty-plus men swear off food and drink until they can kill him, and one well-timed nephew sets off a midnight caval...

This week we're taking issue with a Vice President! JD Vance recently sat down with a very young podcaster to discuss his lifelong fascination with end-times prophecy, his suspicion that the Antichrist may already be walking among us, and his willingness to shrug if doing "God's work" happens to bring on the eschaton — so, after being fairly fair to him, we're looking at what his newly adopted chu...

This week, we're taking issue with Mark Driscoll, who recently explained that a wife is a garden, a husband is the gardener, and — out loud, on purpose — that the finished result is "beautiful property." We dig into where that idea actually comes from: 1 Corinthians 11, the bride-price laws of Deuteronomy 22, ezer kenegdo, and an ancient world where a woman's social identity (and her virginity) be...

In three days, the earth opens up and swallows a household whole, fire consumes 250 men, and a plague takes 14,700 more — and then the very next chapter expects us to be impressed by a dead stick growing flowers. This week we're going chapter and verse with Numbers 16, where a rebellion that names four ringleaders forgets one of them entirely by verse two, can't keep straight which of the rest are...

Get your mind out of the gutter — this week it's Aaron's rod, the staff that sprouted buds, blossoms, and ripe almonds overnight to settle once and for all who was in charge. But the text is oddly insistent that it sat in FRONT of the ark rather than inside it, which raises a fascinating possibility: was this flowering stick in the holy of holies an Asherah pole that the priestly writers needed to...

In 1929, a farmer in French-occupied Syria hit a rock with his plow and accidentally uncovered the lost city of Ugarit — and with it, a library of Bronze Age tablets that has been quietly reshaping how scholars read the Hebrew Bible ever since. This week, we're diving into the Baal Cycle: an elderly patriarchal high god named El, a youthful storm-riding warrior who fights the chaotic sea (and then...

You've seen the claim: 66 books, 40 authors, 1,500 years, three continents, three languages — and not one contradiction. This week we take that apologetic apart piece by piece, from the canon that was never fixed, to the authorship traditions nobody can source, to the "three continents" you could fit inside a circle smaller than the Mediterranean. Then it's Twisted Scripture, where Mark Driscoll i...

There isn't a single surviving original manuscript for any book of the Bible, so how do scholars decide what the earliest recoverable text actually said? This week, it's a primer on textual criticism: why King James onlyists despise it (despite the KJV being a product of it), what Erasmus did when he ran out of Greek manuscripts for the last chapter of Revelation, and how one scribe's wandering ey...

This week it's a "What's That?" double feature! First, we take on the Great Commission. Does Matthew 28 really command every believer to accost strangers on airplanes and by the baggage carousel, or is "make disciples" a whole lot narrower (and quieter) than the modern evangelists think? Then it's time for Data After Dark, where we ask whether the Bible has anything at all to say about masturbatio...

This week, Christian nationalist Joel Webbin says the quiet part out loud: lie to voters about your theocratic goals until you've got the power to enact them. It's grotesque and profoundly un-American — but is deception, weirdly, the one piece of the playbook that's actually biblical? Then we wrestle with the baffling parable of the wedding banquet, where a king burns a city, fills the hall with s...

This week we're taking on the thought-stopping cliché to end all thought-stopping clichés: "trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding." Is "reading with the Holy Spirit" a special line to God that us dirty scholars just can't access, or is it John Lennox's red Ferrari parked right next to an invisible dragon nobody else can see? Then we wade into the online cottage industry of "sec...

This week we crack open the Epistle of James — a letter that may claim to come from none other than James the brother of Jesus — and wade into one of Christianity's oldest arguments: faith versus works. Does James contradict Paul on how a person is saved, and is that why Martin Luther dismissed the whole book as an "epistle of straw"? Then we go monster hunting for Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth,...

This week the Dans try to count to twelve — and find that the number matters a lot more than the names. We dig into the twelve tribes of Israel: how Levi quietly drops out and Joseph splits into Ephraim and Manasseh to keep the total at twelve, why the Song of Deborah seems to remember only ten tribes (some with different names), and what it means that "Israel" may have begun as a confederation ra...

Senator Mike Lee keeps accusing his opponents of sacrificing children to Moloch, so this week we ask who — or what — Moloch actually was, why abortion and child sacrifice are not the same thing, and the uncomfortable places child sacrifice really does turn up in the Hebrew Bible. Then, after the Pentagon quietly declined to list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian, we dig...

The sins of the fathers! It's a phrase you've heard a thousand times, but did you know it comes straight from the Bible? This week it's Bible versus Bible, and the topic is generational punishment: God visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generation. It's in the Ten Commandments. And the other Ten Commandments. So what did those poor great-grandkids do to...

What happens when you're raised to be a militant Christian nationalist Supreme Court justice, but you decide to actually study church history instead? This week, we are thrilled to welcome social media powerhouse, educator, and musician Monte Mader to the show! You probably know her from her viral videos expertly dismantling Christian nationalist talking points, but her story starts far from the i...

Most parents think their kids are pretty great. That makes sense. But if your son is the messianic savior of the world, the bragging rights are kind of through the roof. And that's what we get in Hebrews 1. The claim here is that God told the prophets about Jesus, and now all those awesome prophesies have come true. And Hebrews 1 seems to be bringing receipts. It quotes from all over the Hebrew Bi...

Beloved novelist Clive Staples Lewis (Jack to his friends)(?) went through an atheist phase in his life. But that didn't last, and when he came back to Christianity, he came back HARD! Everyone who knows his work beyond life in a wardrobe is well aware of his obsession with the Bible and Christianity. But though he was an academic, Lewis was careful to remind people he was not a Bible scholar. He...

Just when you think you have biblical theology figured out, they throw you a curveball! In this case, the curve in question is the character explicitly referred to in Jeremiah as the queen of heaven. "Wait!" you might be saying to yourself, "I know heaven has a king, which is God, but what's all this about a queen!" Well, apparently yes. And Jeremiah is none too pleased about it! Then, we're tackl...