The Bible Doesn’t Say Anything: Oxford Scholar Dr. Dan McClellan Exposes Biblical Misinformation

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova of the Sound of Heaven Church. Our guest today is Dr. Dan McClellan. Maybe you've seen him on TikTok, Instagram, social media, and learned from his posts. Dr. McClellan, thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Johnny.

Johnny Ova: Let's jump right in, because your journey is a very interesting one. It's a different one. You've got degrees from Oxford and Exeter, you worked for over a decade as a scripture translation supervisor, and now you've got almost a million people following you just on TikTok, and I'm sure way over a million across all your platforms. Not a typical path for a biblical scholar. So take us back to the beginning. What started your love affair with the Bible and these ancient texts?

Dr. Dan McClellan: It was actually serving a proselytizing mission for the LDS Church. I joined the LDS Church when I was 20, and I moved down to Uruguay to spend two years as a missionary. Between joining the church and leaving on my mission, I realized I was going to be around a bunch of people roughly my age who had grown up reading Latter-day Saint scripture, which is the Bible but also what we call restoration scripture, which is other stuff. I realized I was way behind. So I decided I needed to read everything we had in the year before I left. I read the Bible cover to cover and all the other LDS scriptures, got down there, and realized I was now way ahead of everybody else, because most of them hadn't done a very good job of reading through everything growing up.

Dr. Dan McClellan: But I just fell in love with reading the Bible, particularly the Gospels. That was my favorite part. I loved immersing myself in that literary world, getting to know an entirely different culture, getting to know the stories. I loved learning about the languages, the literature, the traditions. It fascinated me. And I learned in Uruguay that you could make a living studying the Bible. If you went on and got a bunch of graduate degrees, you could teach or do a variety of things. I thought that would be about the coolest thing in the world, so I decided that's what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I had already been kicked out of one college, the University of Northern Colorado, in 1998. So I had an awful lot of work to do to get accepted into an undergraduate program, graduate, and go on to graduate degrees. It was a long, rough road, but I enjoyed every minute of it and ended up with a bachelor's, two master's degrees and a PhD from Exeter. It was a hard-fought victory, and I'm very proud of it.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. You said you love the Gospels. I love the Gospels too. They challenge me. And I find a lot of people like "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth" better than the "love your neighbor, turn the other cheek" message that Jesus commands us to live.

Dr. Dan McClellan: I was just going to say, you can find a whole spectrum of perspectives just in the Gospels, within the broader New Testament, within the entire Bible. It really depends on what people are looking for, and in a lot of ways they're going to find what they're looking for.

Johnny Ova: So you leave a stable career and go all in on public scholarship: TikTok, YouTube, the Data Over Dogma podcast. What pushed you to make that leap? And when you first started posting, what were you seeing out there that made you feel someone needed to step out and speak up?

Dr. Dan McClellan: I had been arguing about the Bible on the internet for 20 years by then. Back in the early days of chat rooms and message boards, I was happy to argue about that kind of stuff. When I got into graduate school, the more I studied the Bible and the worlds of and around the Bible, the more I realized there was a large gap between the way we thought and talked about the Bible in the pews and on the streets and the way scholars were thinking and talking about it in the ivory tower. A perennial concern of scholars is how to communicate what's going on in scholarship downstream to the pews and the streets, because a lot of the folks there don't want to hear it and aren't going to accept it anyway. But I think it's incumbent on us to communicate it. There's a life cycle of scholarship where it usually takes decades for things to get digested and make their way into public discourse, and by then the scholarship has usually moved past it. These days you've got a lot of people trying to be edgelords on social media saying controversial stuff, and they're appealing to literature from the 1800s as if it were cutting edge.

Dr. Dan McClellan: So I've always been concerned about this. About 15 years ago, some friends and I created a little Facebook group where we were going to use our expertise to confront misinformation, particularly about artifacts people claimed to find. The Jordan lead codices are one example, from almost 15 years ago, of people claiming to find ancient Christian texts that are clearly forgeries. They don't go back anywhere near early Christianity. We'd been doing this a long time, but it's hard to get a big audience on blogs and message boards, because the audience has to come to you, and a lot of people aren't on the lookout for that. Then in 2020, I started seeing people on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter sharing TikTok videos about the Bible and religion. I thought TikTok was just for recording yourself dancing, and for Korean teenagers to disrupt Republican presidential campaigns, and I was happy to let them have it for that.

Johnny Ova: Wait, so you don't dance while you teach? You're not doing the trendy dances?

Dr. Dan McClellan: Not anymore. I hurt my knee, so I'm out of that game. But I saw people talking about the Bible on TikTok, and I thought, this could be another channel, another line of communication for this stuff. So I lurked for a while and saw a really robust set of communities in the discourse about the Bible and religion. You've got your apologists, your progressive Christians, your deconstructionists, your hardcore atheists, your conspiracy theorists. What I didn't see was a credentialed expert. So I thought, I might as well throw my hat in the ring and position myself as an umpire, calling balls and strikes: here's what the data indicate. Oddly enough, the first video that got me annoyed enough to actually hold up my phone and push record, because nobody is excited about seeing themselves on their phone, least of all me, was a video about the Jordan lead codices. I was on the ground floor of all that. I know the whole story. So I thought, all right, I've got to get into this.

Dr. Dan McClellan: It's still fun to some degree, but initially it was so much fun to find out what people were saying, what information was trickling down into the pews and the streets and in what way, and where I could close the gap and help people understand. I thought it would be like it always had been, where not many people cared. But this was a platform pushing the content out to others with a very robust algorithm. Their search function is terrible, but TikTok has a very robust algorithm. TikTok knew there were a lot of people out there who'd be interested in the kind of content I was creating but didn't know it existed. A lot of people didn't know there were critical scholars of the Bible and religion. They'd always thought of the Bible as something you study if you're going to be a priest. The notion that you'd study it for purely academic purposes, not devotional ones, seemed to fly over a lot of heads. So people were discovering this, and I got more and more attention, which was surprising in a good way. I started monetizing on YouTube and TikTok, and people asked me to teach online classes.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Within a few months of teaching online classes, I was making more money from social media each month than from my full-time job. So by the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, I decided there was really no ceiling to what I could accomplish if I committed full-time to engaging misinformation on social media and helping people understand what's going on. My wife was not incredibly excited about it. She saw the vision, but she was pretty nervous, particularly about health insurance, because I had phenomenal employer-paid health insurance, and I was saying, "I want to quit my job and find health insurance I pay for myself." We were able to figure it out, and we're doing quite well now.

Johnny Ova: It's funny when you say it like that. "I'm going to quit my job and make TikTok videos, hon. What do you think?"

Dr. Dan McClellan: Yeah, and particularly for academics. "I'm quitting my job. I'm going to go argue on the internet for a living." People say, "You can do that?" Evidently you can.

Johnny Ova: When I came across your videos, I appreciated the challenge to misinformation, because many times the misinformation is the mainstream information. I don't think people realize how much it impacts our worldview, how we treat people, how we view people, how we view God. But I'm sitting there thinking, this guy's hate mail must be something else. It could be a thing of its own. Were you surprised at how many people were interested in scholarly information on TikTok and YouTube?

Dr. Dan McClellan: I was surprised, because I know it's fascinating stuff, and I knew there had to be millions and millions of people out there as fascinated by it as I am. So I was surprised that this one little social media channel was able to open the floodgates of access to it. Pleasantly so. And I think people might be surprised how little hate mail I actually get. I do get it from time to time. There are women out there even more advanced and senior academically than I am who have dipped their toe into this, and when the hate mail is gendered, it tends to be an awful lot worse. So I don't deal with the kinds of things a lot of my colleagues deal with.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Overwhelmingly I get messages of support and gratitude, because a lot of people have never felt they had permission to think and talk about the Bible and their faith this way. One of the things a lot of faith traditions really try to do is limit exposure to information that's going to contradict or problematize the dogmas that prop them up. So a lot of people are raised with a worldview that has no space for this kind of thing, and I think it can be an incredibly freeing thing to find it. I'm very privileged that, because one day I was annoyed enough to start arguing about the Bible on TikTok, I get to be the point of contact between an awful lot of people and the critical study of the Bible and religion. I'm happy to be part of it.

Johnny Ova: The statement you make that caused me to go, "All right, let me hear what this guy is talking about," is when you said, "The Bible doesn't say anything." That's the line. For someone hearing that for the first time, what do you mean?

Dr. Dan McClellan: What I mean is that people say all the time, "The Bible says this," and unless they are literally quoting the text verbatim, they're interpreting it. Their interpretation isn't necessarily what's in the text, because ultimately texts don't have any inherent meaning. A text is just a collection of signs and symbols. And the nature of human language is that there is a virtually limitless number of interpretations that could be intended with any given set of signs and symbols. You can have secret codes, inside jokes, vernacular, all kinds of ways a linguistic expression could be understood to mean any number of things depending on the author and the audience. When we whittle it down to one thing, we're making choices about the meaning we're going to create with a text.

Dr. Dan McClellan: The cognitive process is kind of a two-step thing. Whenever we see a text, unconsciously, our mind generates all the potential meanings that could have been intended. Then we use contextual clues, non-linguistic clues, all kinds of cues, to whittle those down to what we think was intended. And we frequently get it wrong. Anyone who's married knows you can say something that makes perfect sense to you and your spouse says, "Oh, you mean this other thing?" and you say, "No." Misunderstanding happens all the time, precisely because we're using human language to encode something in our mind that isn't isometric with language, and on the other end somebody has to decode it based on what's in their mind.

Dr. Dan McClellan: A story I tell: my first week in Oxford, I was on Cornmarket Street, a little foot-traffic retail district downtown. I was there to set up my phone or my bank account, I forget which. I was hungry, I saw a KFC, and I thought, sweet, I'm going to get some biscuits. I went in and asked for biscuits. A lot of people who know the UK know that there, biscuits means cookies. So this poor young man behind the counter was like, "Why would we have biscuits?" And I said, "This is KFC." I didn't understand what was going on. Then I remembered: when I use that code, they're decoding something entirely different on the other end, because there's no inherent meaning. It's just a sign. I realized I didn't know what combination of words could help that poor young man generate in his mind the buttery, flaky goodness I was after. I was lost for words.

Dr. Dan McClellan: People have said, "You should have said a scone." I don't dignify that with a response, because a KFC biscuit is not a scone by any stretch of the imagination. That's a simple example. It can get a lot more complex. But there's no meaning metaphysically inhabiting the ink on a page, the pixels on a screen, the sound waves in the air, or the light bouncing off of hand signs. There's no meaning hiding out anywhere. It's just a code, and the person receiving it is responsible for generating what they think it was intended to mean. So in that sense, the Bible doesn't say anything. It only says whatever we create in negotiation with the text. If you're reading it in translation, you're working with idioms and choices. If you're reading the original text, you have a lot more work to do and a lot further to travel, reconstructing what you think is going on.

Dr. Dan McClellan: So what the Bible says is really what you are constructing, what you are deciding the Bible says. And an awful lot of people who read the Bible are motivated to allow it to say only certain things. The Bible is not allowed to contradict itself. God is not allowed to lie. God is not allowed to command child sacrifice. There are all kinds of things the Bible is and is not allowed to do for its readers. So when they come to the text and subconsciously create meaning with it, that meaning is overwhelmingly going to serve the interests they bring to it and operate within the boundaries they impose on it. That's a drawn-out, rambly way to answer your question.

Johnny Ova: No, it was great, because I'm in total agreement. People say "the Bible says it, the Bible's always said it" to try to end the conversation. But who is the Bible saying it to? What was the author's original intent? Do we even know what he means? Terms like "heaven and earth" come to mind. I hear a lot of sermons on the end of the world. I never hear any sermons on the end of heaven, the destruction of heaven.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Or on the destruction of hell, because that's in Revelation. Hell gets thrown into the lake of fire and suffers the second death as well. You don't hear very many sermons about that either.

Johnny Ova: It's like, let's just skip over that. We don't want to answer that. My argument would be that it's done a disservice to the body of Christ and to representing God. So my question back to you: if the Bible doesn't speak on its own, and meaning is created when readers engage the text, what does that mean for somebody sitting in a pew on Sunday being told the Bible clearly says X?

Dr. Dan McClellan: An awful lot of people ask me, "If this is all true, then what's the point? Why do we even have the Bible?" I've set certain boundaries on my content. I try to focus on the data and the scholarship and leave the faith part out of it. But what I usually say is, you don't have to believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant to believe that it is inspired. If you want to believe it is inspired, nothing's stopping you from believing it is inspired so as to inspire you, not necessarily as some kind of contract or constitution, written rules for how everything works and always has worked. Why can't it be a catalyst for your own inspiration or guidance, if that's what you're trying to get out of it? If you want to understand it as a constitution, you're going to have a bad time. But that doesn't mean it has no use for someone trying to commune with God.

Dr. Dan McClellan: There are a lot of ways the Bible has functioned as a divine image of sorts. I talk about this in my open-access academic monograph, YHWH's Divine Images: the Bible started out, in a sense, as a way to evoke God's presence and power through the inscription of the divine name, and the law was understood as a conduit for God's presence, power and authority. A lot of people approach the Bible that way. If you want to approach it as literature, inspired or otherwise, I think it's Harold Bloom, and I ought to look this up because I misquote it all the time, who said something like, we read to learn about ourselves, or to change ourselves. If that's true, the Bible can still do an awful lot for us.

Dr. Dan McClellan: I think the people most scared of the implications of what I share are the people who use the Bible to structure power, who use it for boundary maintenance, to draw a line in the sand and say, you can't cross this line. Folks who just want to get to know God better, learn things about themselves, understand how they should behave, that's going to happen more on the social level than on the level of the text anyway. So lean into that. Let it happen on the social level. Use the text to the degree you find it helpful. Where the text says you should beat your kids, you can say, "I know better than that. I don't need to let the Bible tell me to do bad stuff." I understand the concern, but I think there are ways to resolve it for well-meaning people who are actually out there trying to seek God, rather than seeking their own access to power and resources.

Johnny Ova: I just did a terrible job, because I know my listeners are going to want me to backtrack. Did you get the buttery, flaky goodness? That's a sad ending to a movie.

Dr. Dan McClellan: No, I didn't. I've been to KFCs all around the world, and they always conform to their locale. There it was more kebab-style stuff. They didn't have biscuits. I went across the street to Burger King. I was like, I'm out of here.

Johnny Ova: Come on, KFC. I was hoping you decoded the secret language and were able to order.

Dr. Dan McClellan: No, I went across the street. I learned very quickly where to eat and where not to eat. They don't do good Mexican food in Oxford. There was one Chipotle-style restaurant called The Mission that was about as good as it got, and it wasn't great. When I celebrated finishing my finals, I went to The Mission and had a burrito that wouldn't have gone over well in the States, where there are much better options. But if you want curry, nobody can lay a finger on the curry in the UK. It's phenomenal. I had some neighbors from India, and one of them was at school for hotel management but had spent his whole life cooking in Indian restaurants. I'd go over to his house and say, "Make me whatever you want." It was unreal how good that stuff was.

Johnny Ova: That's a disappointing ending. All right, we'll have to encourage ourselves to keep going. I want to talk about misinformation, because you've built your platform stitching videos and correcting false claims. What are some of the most common types of biblical misinformation you see spreading online?

Dr. Dan McClellan: There are all kinds, and they come from all sides. I'll split it into the non-believer end and the believer end. From the believer end, the foundation of most misinformation regarding the Bible is the presupposition of univocality, the notion that the entire Bible speaks with one single, unified, consistent voice from one consistent perspective. It cannot disagree with itself. It can never contradict itself. That isn't supported by any data. That is a dogma people have developed over the millennia as a way to protect their leveraging of the Bible as a source of authority. And it undergirds virtually everything I respond to that has to do with how you interpret the Bible. It's so pervasive that a lot of people don't even realize it's there. Even critics responding to apologists will unconsciously adopt it, as if to engage the argument on its own terms. I always try to point that out: this whole thing presupposes univocality, and that's just not supported by any data, so the whole argument falls apart.

Dr. Dan McClellan: On the other end, from the non-believing side, there's the notion that the whole Bible is just the ramblings of Bronze Age goat herders, which is wildly inaccurate for a number of reasons, including that not a single word of it was written in the Bronze Age. At best, maybe 10 to 20 percent was written in the Iron Age. The majority comes from the second half of the first millennium BCE and the first 125 to 150 years of the Common Era, and it was written by some of the best trained, most educated people in those societies. These are smaller societies, not the giant civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the writers are still phenomenally well educated. They're not folks learning to write in their spare time after coming in from the field. I see that a lot in the more polemical, vituperative rhetoric from the non-believer side. There's a ton of stuff between those two poles, but those are the things that motivate a lot of the misinformation I see from all ends of the spectrum of belief and non-belief.

Johnny Ova: I've got your book right over there, and that's actually me standing on it. I see you've got comic books behind you. My thing is professional wrestling. I was a professional wrestler for 15 years, and that's my action figure standing on your book. Thank you for sending it.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Awesome. Really? What was your name when you were a wrestler?

Johnny Ova: This is the funny part. My name was Johnny Ova, O-V-A. My real name is John Sleonski. Obviously not a great wrestling name.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Doesn't roll off the tongue.

Johnny Ova: So when I became a pastor, I just kept the name, because everybody knew me as Johnny Ova. People would ask, "Who's John Sleonski?" and then look it up: "Oh, that's Johnny Ova." There are people in my church who've been here five, six, seven, eight years who go, "Wait a second, your name really isn't Johnny Ova?" My wife has Rachel Sleonski with Ova in parentheses, and everybody asks, "What's with the Sleonski thing?" It was a lot of fun. So I have the book here. I tried to get through as much as I could before we chatted, and I can't wait to get through the rest, because it tackles some of the most controversial issues in scripture head-on. I want to go there. When it comes to what the Bible says about same-sex relationships, what do people get wrong, and what does the text actually say in its ancient context?

Dr. Dan McClellan: What I think people get wrong is that they retroject the category of homosexuality as we understand it today into the Bible. They're trying to find out what the Bible thinks about what we call homosexuality, which overwhelmingly refers to a sexual orientation, and our understanding of that whole conceptual package has been developing for not even 200 years. They had nothing that remotely approximates what we understand as a homosexual orientation. They didn't organize their knowledge of human sexuality that way in the ancient world. So when we ask what the Bible says about homosexuality, it says absolutely nothing, because they had no such category. It would be like asking what Genghis Khan had to say about the NFL. They had running, they certainly had tackling, they had throwing, they had kicking. They did not have the NFL. It was just a category that didn't exist. What I normally say is that we can talk about same-sex intercourse, and they had rationalizations for why certain people seemed compelled to engage in it, but they organized their understanding in very different ways. That's point number one.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Point number two is that while the biblical authors who address it are very clearly not fans of same-sex intercourse, the texts discussing it are very limited: Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26 and 27, something in 1 Corinthians 6 and something in Timothy. That's about it for texts directly addressing the propriety of same-sex intercourse. They're not fans of it. But when we look closely at what they're saying and why, we see that their rationalizations and understandings are entirely outdated and have no relevance today. For instance, the Hebrew Bible says absolutely nothing about female same-sex intercourse. The only concern is male same-sex intercourse. So the notion that sex was designed for a man and a woman, and that anything outside that is, one, a sin, and two, all the same kind of sin, we can throw out. They just did not care about female same-sex intercourse, because for them sex was penetration. If there's no penetration, who cares?

Dr. Dan McClellan: And in addition to being about penetration, it was about power asymmetries. The more powerful person is doing something to a less powerful person. Sex was not a mutual activity between two equal partners. It was something a dominant person did to a subordinate person, and the subordinate person's agency and consent weren't really relevant. So in Leviticus 18 and 20, what we see is a prohibition on a man taking the insertive role in male same-sex intercourse with another man. The prohibition is on one part of a specific type of male same-sex intercourse. Why would they be concerned about that? Not because it violates God's design. It's because of what it does to a man who is supposed to occupy the top of the socially conventionalized hierarchy of domination and penetration. It lowers him. He's supposed to be the penetrator, not the penetrated. To penetrate him violates those categories, and you don't do that to another man.

Dr. Dan McClellan: We see other cultures in the Greco-Roman world grappling with the same concept of domination versus subordination, and with whom it is and isn't appropriate for a man to penetrate. So their idea of why this is wrong has nothing to do with what we understand about human sexuality today. I don't think you can appeal to Leviticus 18 and 20 in a remotely informed way as something that should have anything to do with how we police human sexuality today, or how we think God thinks about it, because it rests on an entirely outdated and scientifically inaccurate understanding of human sexuality.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Here's a funny example of how this plays out elsewhere, unrelated to homosexuality. In ancient Mesopotamia, in early Judaism and in early Christianity, over more than a thousand years, we find the notion that it's inappropriate for a man to be on the bottom during sex, even with his own wife, because it put the man in the subordinate position. It feminized him, emasculated him, subordinated him to a woman. We have Mesopotamian and early Jewish texts saying this is a no-no. Not the death penalty, but in Mesopotamia there's a sex omen saying you'll lose your personal god for a month, and personal god there is something like your masculinity, your vitality. And a Jewish text says if you do that, you'll be stricken with diarrhea. They're coming up with these weird consequences. It's exactly like "you'll grow hair on your palms." We don't like it, so we'll make up some ridiculous reason you should fear doing it, precisely because of those categories. Those categories are mostly not active anymore.

Dr. Dan McClellan: But we still have the notion of penetrating another man as a means of dominating, emasculating and feminizing him, and I think people entirely ignore that. A while ago, a kid in his early 20s was making videos about how he and his buddies were going to vote for Kamala Harris, "real men vote for Harris." Then some ex-Navy SEAL who has apparently been all over social media claiming to be the one who killed Osama bin Laden, I don't remember his name, an alpha-type macho guy, responded saying, "If we lived in a better world, you would be my concubine." Basically: you're not a real man, you're a woman, and I should be raping you. When we look at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sin of the men of Sodom was threatening male outsiders with sexual assault as a means of dominating and emasculating them. So I made a video asking, who are today's men of Sodom? It's clowns like that, who use the threat of sexually assaulting another man to say, "You're not a real man, you're a woman, I'm going to have sex with you, and you have no control, no consent, no agency."

Dr. Dan McClellan: So in a very real sense, when you understand what's going on with human sexuality in the Hebrew Bible, the men of Sodom are folks like this guy, an avowed Christian nationalist who imagines he has the corner on how God wants you to have sex, while doing precisely what the Hebrew Bible condemns. That's another rambling way to answer the question. But they thought about human sexuality in vastly different ways. If we import the words of the text wholesale without trying to understand how they understood those words and what made them meaningful to them, we're not trying to understand what the Bible said. We're just leveraging the authority of the Bible for what we say, based on our own right-wing authoritarian identity politics. Taken to its extreme, somebody can reinscribe precisely what the story of Sodom and Gomorrah condemns while pretending to be an advocate against it. It's just bafflingly ignorant to me how people misuse the Bible when it comes to homosexuality.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting point. I wish we had more time, but I've got two questions left, if we can.

Dr. Dan McClellan: I apologize for rambling. That's kind of my thing, though.

Johnny Ova: No, listen, I'm good. I want to be respectful of your time, but I want to get to hell and eternal conscious punishment before we wrap up, especially since we saw Kirk Cameron come out recently against eternal conscious punishment, which is great. Watching the responses is pretty funny. It would be funny if it weren't true. So, hell and eternal conscious punishment, a big one for a lot of Christians. What does the biblical data actually show us?

Dr. Dan McClellan: When we look in the Bible, the majority of it doesn't have a concept of hell that is at all recognizable to us. The Hebrew Bible doesn't have the idea of hell. You have the idea of Sheol, which is just the realm of all the dead. Good, bad, indifferent, everybody goes to the same place, a murky underworld. We don't know what goes on there. Around the Hellenistic period, partly because the people of Judah are constantly being subjugated by larger empires, you have wisdom literature contemplating the origins of evil and why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. The people of Judah are asking, where is God's justice in all this? People are dying without receiving God's justice. People are living long, successful lives while being evil. And the idea arises: maybe it's in the afterlife. Maybe that's where God's justice is meted out.

Dr. Dan McClellan: One of the clearest discussions is in 1 Enoch, a Hellenistic-era composition that was phenomenally influential on Greco-Roman period Judaism and early Christianity. As much as people like to distance Christianity from the book of Enoch, it's baked into Christianity in so many ways. Enoch is taken on a tour of the afterlife, basically, and shown places where the disobedient angels are held in darkness and chains under the mountains to await judgment. There's a description of three smooth places in a valley where people are being held. The three categories seem to be people who did good in their lives, people who did bad and weren't punished during their lifetime, and people who did bad and were punished during their lifetime. They seem to be awaiting some kind of judgment, and something will happen after it. It's not entirely clear. But this is where we start to get the idea of some kind of divine reward and punishment after death. And the punishment isn't clear or systematic. They're working out what it will look like.

Dr. Dan McClellan: There are a few different categories. One seems to be annihilationism: the wicked are punished at death by simply not existing anymore. They're annihilated. That's what Kirk Cameron evidently recently said makes the most sense to him. What's so funny about the responses, and I think he's doing something good for once with his Christianity there, is that the arguments against him are always about the implications. It's never about what the text indicates. Another idea is temporary conscious torment followed by either annihilation or salvation. That's where we get ideas like purgatory, and some of the Gnostic ideas where after death the wicked are re-educated, and once they get the knowledge they need, they rejoin the Pleroma. Then apokatastasis, and I've read it for years and still don't know exactly how to pronounce it, which is the restoration of all things. We see that idea in Origen, and some people think Paul is talking about it too: punishment, the buffetings of Satan and so on, purify you so you go on to be saved. Or you're punished for a while and then annihilated. And then the other idea is eternal conscious torment, where you're tormented forever.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Those three ideas, to one degree or another, seem to be present in the New Testament. So there's not really a single idea of hell in the New Testament. As for the words: one is Sheol from the Hebrew Bible, which usually gets translated into Greek as Hades, adopting the Greek idea. Gehenna is another term, a reference to the Valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, because in the Enochic literature it seems to be the symbolic location of this eschatological, post-mortem punishment. So the Valley of Hinnom becomes the location of hell, though not in the sense a lot of people think. When Jesus said you're going to Gehenna, he didn't mean that valley right there. It's a symbolic eschatological location where the wicked will be punished. And then there's Tartarus, another Greek idea, which occurs once. Those are the three words that get translated "hell" in the New Testament.

Dr. Dan McClellan: It's not until after the Bible is complete that later Christians look back on the New Testament, try to sift through and systematize it into a single idea, and land on basically eternal conscious torment, because that's the most rhetorically useful. It's the most threatening. One of the responses to Kirk Cameron was, "If the punishment is just annihilation, then God's mercy isn't that great, because you're only being saved from annihilation, which isn't a big deal." That's one of these ridiculous arguments. Cameron is asking, why would you punish someone with eternal torment because they didn't decide to follow Jesus but otherwise lived a perfectly fine life? That's inhumane. That's evil. And other people say, "No, it has to be that way so God's mercy can be so great. You're being saved from the worst thing ever." That's the bigger carrot. I find it baffling that people would say, we're going to employ this horrific, inhumane, evil thing because it makes better motivation to believe in Jesus. But that's the reasoning that led the early church to go with it. And most of what we think of when we think of hell is really a product of medieval Italian literature and the books, movies and public discourse since then.

Johnny Ova: That's crazy. Dante's Inferno.

Dr. Dan McClellan: So hell when we think of it is overwhelmingly a post-biblical creation. It's not really in the Bible.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Matthew Hester tells a great analogy. He was actually at my church sharing a story about a father who ran into a burning house and saved his whole family. He had burns on his arms. It sounds like an amazing story until you find out the dad was the one who started the fire in the first place. All of a sudden the story and its meaning change. He related that to eternal conscious punishment in fire: how could God's mercy even be merciful when he's the one who started the fire to throw you into? You don't need that punishment aspect to make the message of God's grace and love amazing.

Dr. Dan McClellan: And I find it such a baffling way to conceptualize mercy. Mercy doesn't mean you're phenomenally kind to the people who've done what you say. Mercy is more like you're not incredibly harsh to the people who've done wrong. They say there are two kinds of people: the kind who will feed ten people so that one doesn't starve, and the kind who will starve ten people so that one undeserving person isn't fed. It seems to me the eternal conscious torment folks have very clearly chosen the latter, which I find incredibly unmerciful, insensitive and cruel.

Johnny Ova: I agree. Dr. McClellan, I've enjoyed this conversation tremendously, getting to know you and hearing your thoughts. I'm going to have your book linked on YouTube and in all the podcast information. Could you share how people can get in touch with you, and wrap that around an answer to a question I know I'm going to get? You're a scholar and also a person of faith. How do you hold those two together? A lot of people think that if you're a scholar, you're the enemy of belief. "Don't send your kids to Bible school, because they may learn things outside what we teach."

Dr. Dan McClellan: I'll dance around that answer, because one thing I've said is that I don't talk about my own personal faith or how I reconcile things. Again, bad knee, so not a TikTok dance. But I will say that I came to faith later in life, as an adult. I wasn't raised in the kinds of faith-based worldviews people raise their children in. So I came into religious belief with a lot of ideas about the world, how it worked, history and so on, that disagree with the way a lot of people are raised, and nobody ever tried to disabuse me of them. A lot of people talk about deconstruction. I never constructed in the first place, so there wasn't much for me to deconstruct. There are a lot of folks in the process of deconstructing, which is ongoing, who don't want to miss out entirely on what they see as the good and constructive parts of faith. So there's a lot of talk about reconstruction, and I think that's healthy. I'd say the main difference between me and people who find an insurmountable amount of cognitive dissonance is that I was spared the need to wrestle with a whole edifice of a simplistic, binary, brittle worldview related to faith. That's about as much as I tend to say on that.

Dr. Dan McClellan: I'm on most of the main social media sites: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky and Threads, at maklelan, M-A-K-L-E-L-A-N, a phonetic spelling of my last name I used in Uruguay so people could pronounce it. I also have the Data Over Dogma podcast, with episodes every Monday. My co-host Dan Beecher and I have a great time making it. I do online classes. I'm starting an Introduction to Biblical Hebrew class in February, and I have a bunch of other online classes. I also have a Patreon. Search Patreon with my username and you'll find me easily. We have our threads and a nice community there that I'm pretty active in, for people who want to get to know me a little better and interact with me. That's probably the best way to do that. And I'm just about to start on book number two, so I'm very excited about that. I'll be doing book tours before too long, getting to know people in person and hearing their stories. So stay tuned for more about book number two, which is going to be a biography of the God of the Bible. I'm excited about writing it. That's going to be a lot of fun.

Johnny Ova: Congrats. That's going to be a great read. Again, Dr. McClellan, thanks so much. I really enjoyed this and learned a lot, and I'm looking forward to connecting in the future. Thanks for joining us on Dig In.

Dr. Dan McClellan: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.