#dan mcclellan

[lenbryant]

American Taliban taking over the classrooms in Oklahoma!

[cargopantsman]

source

[nerdygaymormon]

[thesobsister]

A great video from Dan McClellan, a Bible scholar who records short videos explaining aspects of the Hebrew and Christian testaments and politely and thoughtfully eviscerating those who use the language of the Bible for their own malign purposes.

This one, posted today, is titled "Did God choose an adulterous man to rule his nation?"

[zenosanalytic]

Hey! So I Wrote This RB back in 2013 about how the name Yeshua shifted to Jesus, and lately I've been watching videos from this biblical scholar named Dan McClellan and realized I was wrong about allot of it!

Here's A Good Video of his responding to someone with similar misunderstandings to mine, which I think explains the actl linguistic principles at play really well. Of particular interest to me is his discussion of how the aleph was pronounced(It's a glottal-stop not an 'ah' sound :D), and how the Galilean accent most likely operated. Tl;dr: it was probably pronounced something more like yea-shoo! Neat!!

Anyway, for me he shall Eternally Remain "Oily Josh" uwu uwu uwu

[shevibe]

SheVibe SHOUT OUT! Dan McClellan & DATA over DOGMA!

[joe-england]

Does scripture say gender is immutable?

[vigilante-duck-hawk]

I'm in a parasocial relationship with him actually

[lenbryant]

Eyewitnesses? Yeah, right.

[nerdygaymormon]

Dan McClellan shares an important way a scripture was originally understood and intended versus how Latter-day Saints now use and understand it.

It doesn’t make sense that whatever our church president says is the same as God saying it. Rather, the scripture is saying all of God’s word will be fulfilled, whether by God’s voice or the voice of His servants.

Here's an example. There are many verses that in different ways say that all are alike unto God. We are all one in Christ. God does not shows partiality, doesn’t show respect to some people and not to others. Love your neighbor as yourself. Treat others how you want to be treated.

Unfortunately we have a history of LDS presidents denying whole groups of people from having access to blessing and from having access to leadership. That was in opposition to God’s word. We also have moments of LDS presidents removing some of those restrictions and those were cases of fulfilling God’s words.

[the-psudo]

Bible scholar Dan McClellan has several videos analyzing this, including this one.

This is a reference to the Talmud, where the rabbis determined that between 40 days gestation and birth, a fetus is a part of a woman's thigh, like a limb. Prior to 40 days gestation, it's just considered water. For this reason, within Jewish Halakha, Jewish law, abortion is permissible. And there are even times when it is considered a religious obligation. ... We have other parts of the Hebrew Bible that make clear that a fetus was not considered a full legal and moral person until birth.

He details a couple of Bible passages that confirm that thesis sentence. Christians call the Hebrew Bible "The Old Testament." It's part of the Christian Bible, too.

For the overwhelming majority of the history of Christianity, a fetus was not considered a full moral and legal person until what was known as the quickening, which was associated with the feeling of independent movement on the part of the fetus, which was associated with its full development.

It's odd how often modern Christians don't believe what Christians used to believe, or what was believed by the societies that wrote the Bible.

[andrewpcannon]

The Bible Has No Inherent Meaning

In this episode, I consider the claim that the Bible has no inherent meaning or authority.

[illnessfaker]

idk how to rly mentally handle the fact that dan mcclellan is mormon i mean i get that mormonism is a situation that can be hard if not impossible to leave once you're apart of it due to high-control group dynamics (especially in utah) but i dunno about the intellectual honesty(?) of assuming his circumstances are in line with that idea & he staunchly refuses to talk about his own personal faith situation aside from the fact that he is mormon & used to work for the church as a translator or something

[tanadrin]

The Gish Gallop was a term coined I think on the 2000s internet for a rhetorical maneuver where to buttress an argument you provide a ton of low-quality evidence; that the evidence is bad means it should be easy to refute, but the very large volume means it will take much longer to explain why it's all wrong than it did to copy-paste a bunch of links, and to a certain kind of very naive onlooker, it looks like the galloper is winning--after all, the one interlocutor has presented a ton of evidence! The second interlocutor has to spend so much time bending over backwards to refute it! Surely the first guy is more knowledgeable and authoritative. You aren't going to look at all that evidence yourself, of course--who has the time?

But listening to Dan McClellan talk about the Gospel of John this morning, it occurs to me that I don't think this is disingenuous. Not entirely. I think this is just the style of argumentation a lot of Christians (of a particular religious flavor) are used to. And I'm not just talking about in non- or para-religious matters like evolution. This is how Christianity understands the Bible.

This week's Data over Dogma is about the theology of John, and why it is non-trinitarian (because the Trinity is a much later doctrine developed as a kind of political compromise, maintained only because it had state backing) and does not actually identify Jesus with God (the theological developments are more complicated here; but suffice it to say it was not at all a given that "authorized bearer of the divine name" and "actually God" were the same being in 1st century Hellenistic Judaism, and indeed the distinction between the two had developed in Jewish thought precisely to avoid the awkwardness of anthropomorphic figures proclaiming themselves God in some of the older sections of the Hebrew Bible).

The funny thing is, there are a ton of passages in John that get trotted out as proof texts that Jesus is God. There are very good reasons in the case of each one to doubt that that is actually the correct reading; but of course, if you don't know anything about Greek, all you have are modern translations produced under the assumption of the dogma of the Trinity--mostly for devotional readers of the Bible who would be outraged if the Trinity wasn't in the New Testament--and you have been raised in a cultural and/or educational milieu where it is simply a default assumption about the way the world works that the Trinity is a timeless concept that has been in the Bible from the beginning, it sure looks like one side is spinning up tendentious arguments based on silly semantics that have nothing to do with the religion you learned as a kid.

But this exegetical approach (really, eisegetical) is common to many topics in traditional Christian theology. There are a ton of passages from the Septuagint that the Gospels warp to be about Jesus, even though, in their original context, this doesn't make any sense; sometimes even they're based on obvious mistranslations, like having Jesus ride into Jerusalem on the back of two animals simultaneously because you don't understand appositives. And you can poke holes in any individual bit of this exegesis, but psychologically having a ton of low-quality evidence for a thing is a pretty effective bulwark against thinking critically about that evidence; for every individual argument you knock down, the person you are arguing against is probably thinking, "yeah, but what about all that other stuff," even if they can't actually name all that other stuff in the moment.

And it's not mendacious! This is the stuff of true belief; this is how you get breathless Christian commentators saying the Bible couldn't possibly be written by human hands, because it so perfectly predicted Jesus even in the Old Testament--and the evidence they point to is, to anyone not steeped in traditional Christian exegesis, and especially to Jews who have their own exegetical traditions, absolutely barmy. Like really pants-on-head crazy stuff. But of course even now it is still being processed, in many parts of the world, through a two thousand year old tradition trying to reconcile it all and to normalize it all, and--to bring it back to discussions of evolution on the internet in the 2000s--I can't help but think of all those people who talk about the experience of thinking evolution was so obviously nonsense, because all they were exposed to was the fundamentalist strawman of it. When they finally sat down and began to read about it on their own, from unbiased sources--often with the intent of criticizing it--they realized how distorted their understanding was, and how limited their supposed outside view.

(If there are general lessons to be wrung from this situation, I think it's simply "beware of echo chambers." Social consensus in a bubble can make bad arguments feel much stronger than they really are, especially if you are not exposed to the actual opposing view. Be on guard against mistaking "quantity of evidence" for "quality of argument," especially if you're not gonna evaluate that evidence yourself. Also all religious traditions are fundamentally eisegetical, because in order to keep holy writ relevant to the community its meaning has to be constantly renegotiated. So, uh. If you want high-quality exegesis, ask an academic, not a theologian.)