66 Books, 40 Authors, Zero Contradictions?

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 insists you can't be a Bible-believing Christian and a socialist, so we look at what the eighth-century prophets, Deuteronomy, Jesus, and the book of Acts actually say about wealth, debt, and who's on the hook for taking care of the poor. Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/ Watch every episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  It's an accumulating anthology. It's not like they just all wrote their books independently and brought them together and we're like, what? Jackpot?

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. Good to be back, Dan. How are things?

• 1:35Speaker 04

  I'm impressed you remembered all of the things that we have to say at the beginning.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  I almost got it wrong. There was a pause there.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been a few weeks since I've had to say those words.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  But we're back in the saddle and ready to rock and roll, and I'm excited. We've got a couple of fun topics that we're going to get into. We're going to do a taking issue first, and the issue we're going to be taking is a thing that I have been seeing. You've probably, you probably have too. I've been seeing this popping up a lot in social media. I don't know who's popularizing this idea, but it is getting out there.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  This is the idea that 66 books written by 40 different people. Anyway, it's a whole big thing.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  We'll get into it when we do the thing. But yeah, it's a, it's a big claim, and we'll, we'll figure out if it actually means anything, if it's correct, and if it's worth refuting or worth talking about or whatever. And then, in the second half of the program, we're going to be doing a twisted scripture. Well, we're not going to be twisting the scripture, but Mark Driscoll sure as heck is.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  I guess the question that he has posed to us is, can you be a Bible-believing Christian and not be a capitalist? So that's going to be a fun one coming up in the latter half of the show.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  But let's dive in directly to our taking issue.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Okay, so the thing we're taking issue with, I'll just read the whole thing. This, this is a quote, or a partial quote, from something that was posted on a thread of mine. So it, it came into my backyard, and, but I've seen it a lot on social media and everywhere.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  And we know how, how NIMBY you can get.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's true. And this is the claim that the Bible is 66 books written by 40 different people throughout 1,500 years on three different continents, all saying the same thing.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Dun, dun, dun.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  And that, first of all, they, they seem to think that that is a very impressive thing. Like, how could they possibly all say the same thing?

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so impressive, it must be supernatural. Humans could not accomplish this thing.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that does seem to be the claim. The claim is that, like, there's no way that could happen. And I think we need to go through piece by piece and just talk about each of, because this is a series of claims. And the first time I saw it, before I'd ever seen you tackle any of these things, well, I mean, you've tackled bits and bobs of this. We've talked about a lot of this sort of peripheral claims that relate to this on the show plenty, but I looked at it and I was just like, is any of that correct? So let's just start with this 66 books idea.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  I, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how there's, there's no one canon of the Bible.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are, there are multiple different canons. When we determine what Bible we're looking at, that's based on answers that we're providing to questions that don't really have objective, empirically decidable answers. These are, these are preferences more than anything else, and they're, they're preferences of different groups of different sizes. So, you know, there are groups that have more adherence, that say one thing, and groups that have fewer adherence to say others. But 66 books is clearly a modern Protestant canon, because

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  if you went back to the King James Version, or even Martin Luther, like, they might say different numbers.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  So it's a modern Protestant concept of the canon. If you go to the Catholic Church, you have more.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  And if you go to, there are Eastern Orthodox, you've got Greek Orthodox, you've got Russian Orthodox, you've got Georgian Orthodox. They each have different ideas of the extent and the contours of the canon. And then we could get into the Armenian Apostolic Canon, the Ethiopian Orthodox, Tohito Canon is the biggest. That's like 88.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Don't get me started on that canon.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Church of the East, and that's just Christian.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Because we can go to Jewish, and we can talk about the, the Jewish canon, we can even talk about the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is a different canon. Like, there are still Samaritans around as well

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  who only hold the Pentateuch as the canon.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  And every one of those books has the word "the Bible" on the front of it. Like, maybe, yeah, maybe not the Jewish ones. The Jewish ones may not have the word.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Well, they, yeah, they generally call it Tanakh, but they, but in English, frequently, you will have them refer to the Bible.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  So, and, and also, within the canons, you can have different versions of these texts.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  So it's, so, right off the bat, we're, we're not talking about something that is objectively "the Bible," because there's no such thing as "the Bible."

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  There are Bibles, and this is just saying, this is the, this is the version of the Bible I prefer.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  But, you know, then you get into questions of, okay, well, what manuscripts are you using? Okay, what translation are you using? There are a lot of different ways this can go. So, so right off the bat, the first claim, 66 books, eh, flag on the play.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  That is, that is a preference, that is not a fact. If you, and, and if you want to give the modern Protestant movement's priority of place, then great, that's your preference, but that's, that's not a fact. And I think this, the first time I heard it, I, I'm, I would like to track down where it originally came from.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  But the first time I heard it was definitely, there's a comedian. I, the first time I ever saw it was somebody sharing a video of a sweaty comedian on a stage pacing back and forth, saying this. And I looked it up, and his, dude's name is Brad Stein.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And he's, there was a, he recorded this thing in 2012 called God's Comic. So that was the name of his special, his stand-up special. Yeah, so 14 years ago is, is the, the clip that I've seen shared the most, but it's been more widely shared ever since then, and I'm sure that he's not the first person to ever come up with that. But I think that clip is what has kind of popularized it on social media.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  But I, I just saw it on, I made a video last week when I was in San Diego responding to Wes Huff in his, in his new Peterson Academy

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  class.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Is that, is that the Peterson that I, that I'm thinking it is?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  It is, yes.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Yes. So that's, that was something that he shared there, only he said 66 books by 40 different authors over a period of about 1,600 years. So the, the, the window, the chronological window can go from 1,500 to 1,600, and we'll get to that.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  We'll get to it.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yes. But what's next on the list?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  40 different people. Authorship, as we know from doing this show, is very easy to nail down when it comes to the Bible.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  So we should easily be able to determine who wrote it and how many of those authors there are.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is the part of, this is why this claim is apologetics, because if it's, and, and the claim sometimes is 40, sometimes it's 45, sometimes it's 46, sometimes it's about 40.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  But that claim presupposes not only that every single word of the Bible is historical, but every single traditional assignment of authorship and dating is also traditional, or is also accurate.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  And so it's presupposing what it sets out to prove, because the whole point of this is to suggest, hey, this has got to be true because of all these things.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  But all these things presuppose that it's true.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Right. Well, and, and not even stuff like, like, these are not biblical claims, a lot of these authorship questions. There are claims that were made after the fact, long after the fact, in many cases.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Centuries after the fact, frequently after the Bible was completed, because it requires that only one person have written the entire Pentateuch, Moses.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Now, now you might say, well, maybe it's just one person, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Moses. Yes, it does, because the claim that it is 1500 or 1600 years of writing requires that it be written by Moses.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  You're jumping claims. You're jumping claims.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm, there've gotta be some points of contact here.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  There are points of, there are some, some very distinct points of contact.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there's, there's nothing in the Pentateuch that says Moses wrote all of this.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  There are a couple of places where it says, and Moses wrote down the law, or Moses wrote this down. But in every instance, what Moses wrote down is some discrete subsection of a single book within the Pentateuch, not even a whole book.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Well, it would be very weird for Moses to write down, and Moses wrote down the law. Like, that would be a very weird thing for a person to write.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And then to narrate what happened after he died.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  At the end of the Book of Deuteronomy.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  He, I died, and here's what happened a little bit after that.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and when we look at the Pentateuch, like, it's very clear, not only that it was not written by one person, because as we've discussed many times on this channel, it frequently contradicts itself and repeats itself, because different versions of stories are being brought together.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Sometimes they appear in separate chapters, sometimes they're right next to each other, sometimes they're interwoven. And, yeah, it's just not plausible that there was one author. And also, all of the anachronisms, it was not written in the second millennium BCE. There are people groups.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  How dare you?

• 12:30Speaker 03

  I dare. There are people groups that weren't around until the first millennium BCE. There are, and, you know, the, the text will frequently say, oh, such and such happened, and that place is still there down to this very day. So that's not what you write when the thing just happened.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  So, um, yeah, there, there are all kinds of indications that, no, this was not written by one person. It was not written in the 15th century BCE. It was not written by Moses. But in order for it to be 40 to 46 authors, it has to have all been written by Moses. It just didn't happen. And then, when we get to some of the other texts, the Book of Joshua, they say, oh, well, that was, that was written by Joshua, except for the parts in that book that narrate what happened after his death.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  But like Judges, Samuel, Ruth, like, nothing says anything about authorship here. And so there are traditional assignments of authorship. Samuel, Nathan, and Gad are assigned authorship of Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel. And then Jeremiah is traditionally assigned authorship of first and second kings. Based on what? Absolutely nothing.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Tradition. And then we've got Ezra is assigned authorship of first and second Chronicles, the Book of Ezra, the Book of Nehemiah. And then Esther, people say Mordecai wrote the Book of Esther. Except for the parts about his death.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  These are, these are presuppositions that are not supported by any data whatsoever. And then we get to the Psalms. David didn't write any of the Psalms.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  David didn't write the Psalms? Come on.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the notion that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon were all written by Solomon. No support for that at all. The Psalms, yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  I've, I've read some of this stuff. They don't even sound the same. They don't even sound, like, there's not, they're not even similar.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  In, I mean, and, okay, sir, an author can write in different writing styles. I guess I can, I can get behind that idea, but come on. It's just, it's weird. Um, yeah. You know, one of the things that I thought was salient is that it, you know, I want to, sorry, I want to go back to the Moses wrote the Torah thing. Because what language was it written in? Isn't that a bit of an issue?

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, because Hebrew didn't exist when a historical Moses would have existed. Hebrew didn't exist until around the 11th century BCE, at the very earliest. And that was a very rudimentary form of Hebrew. The Pentateuch is not written in a rudimentary form of Hebrew. It's written in a very developed form of Hebrew, something that is like the second quarter of the first millennium BCE. So, between the 8th and the 6th centuries BCE. And that happens to be when these people groups that are named were around.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And that happens to be far enough away from the setting of the events for somebody to say, and it's still there down to this very day. Like, all of the data point to a handful of centuries in the middle of the first millennium BCE. And there are no data that support the conclusion that it was written before the language it was written in even existed.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Let's, because we, you just mentioned it, let's get to the 1500 year

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  question. Because of 15, 1600 years, what, why are they making that state, that thing? Why is Wes Huff saying it's 1600 years? I mean, you mentioned that it's, it's to do with Moses. Is that really the only thing that pushes it back that far? Or do they have more than that?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  No. So, the idea is that it was written between, if they say 1500 years, they're thinking 1400 BCE to 100 CE. And as Wes has stated, he believes that 99% of all biblical scholars believe the 27 books of the New Testament were completed by the end of the first century CE, which is laughably untrue. But 1400 BCE to 100 CE, 1500 years. Now, there are early and late datings for a historical Moses. You have the crowd who thinks Moses lived in the 15th century, and the Exodus happened like between 1460 and 1420, or something

• 16:59Speaker 03

  like that. And so if, if Moses was writing around that time period, then it's more like 1500, or, yeah, 1560-ish years. So you say, in the neighborhood of 1600.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Why are people dating the Exodus to that time period?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  So, uh, when, when you read the Exodus and you try to figure out where it sits historically, the two places.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  And to be clear, we should mention, it is already the stated, the stated position of this podcast, that there was no Exodus. There probably wasn't a Moses. None, none of this is based on like, or, it may be based on a very, very, incredibly loosely based on a similar, interesting story.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  But it did not happen as it is recorded in the Bible.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Precisely.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  Okay. So, with, with that caveat in mind.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yes. We, we go looking through ancient Egyptian history to try to figure out when we can insert the events of the Exodus. And there's no place where it fits comfortably. But the place, there are two places where it is least uncomfortable. And that is not to say it's comfortable. It is still very uncomfortable. But it is least uncomfortable if you're talking about, um, the, toward the end of the 15th century, or toward the end of the 13th century. So around the, the late 1200s BCE. So that would be Ramses II is around that time period. And, you know, you've got the, oh, they, they

• 18:33Speaker 03

  built Pi Ramses. Okay, well, that must mean that this has something to do with Ramses. Okay, so that means we're looking at the, the late 1200s. And then you've got the other people who are like, no, it's Amenhotep III, or, or whatever. And so they, they argue for the early date. And so you have different camps. You have an earlier camp and a later camp. And the earlier camp is the one that gets you between 1500 and 1600 years.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house. We are.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  I've heard the construction.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you heard the construction too. Uh, we're, we're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're, we're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this, because we, I wanted to get a new car, and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house. But we had to pay off our, our old car, and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances. And we had to set dates, and we had to create a budget. And it was so satisfying to actually make a plan. And then even though it took some discipline, and there were some bumps

• 19:54Speaker 03

  in the road, we actually succeeded. And we're able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

• 20:17Speaker 04

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• 22:24Speaker 03

  And the three continents thing depends on that.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Because it is presupposing that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, at least partly, in Egypt.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Right. Which is also weird because he, why, I mean, it's all in the past tense. Like, the way that it's telling it is all in the past tense.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Like, why are we assuming that Moses wrote any of it before he Exodus did?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Well, the tradition is that the Book of Genesis was revealed to Moses, or Moses was the one who went and collated the history and wrote it all down, or something like that.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  In fact, when you get the beginning of what would become the documentary hypothesis, the notion that there are four different documentary sources, which is, you know, which is not the dominant theory anymore. But the beginning of that theory probably goes back to a French dude named Jean Astruc in like the 1760s, I believe, where he was looking at the fact that you've got repetitions, you've got what appear to be different sources for stuff, based on a few different observations. And he said, "Ah, well, Moses had four different sources for his history that he brought together." Moses is the redactor who brought together these

• 23:49Speaker 03

  different sources. And that's the beginning. That set the ball rolling on Pentateuchal source criticism. But it still identified Moses as the one who was ultimately responsible for bringing it all together, which we now know is just not plausible. And so, the tradition is that Moses did all of this, either because it was revealed to him, or because he went out and gathered all these traditions together and wrote them down. So the earliest author or editor of the Bible is Moses, until you get to the Job crap. The folks who are like, "Well, Job is the oldest book,

• 24:32Speaker 03

  because that was, you know, written before Israel existed," and all that kind of stuff. I would have, you know, you'd have to ask Wes if he has Job in mind when he says 1600 years, but I can't imagine he does.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  I don't think we're gonna be asking Wes anything. I don't think Wes is eager to come on the show anytime soon.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  But, yeah, and Job was definitely not the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible. One of the more recent, but also the New Testament has texts that were probably written in the second century CE, the early to mid second century CE. 2 Peter, probably the last text of the New Testament, written probably somewhere between 120 and 150. If we are talking about the chronological window for the composition of the texts that we now have in the Bible, I think you probably got 1100 to 1200 years, tops. And this is assuming that some of the poetic

• 25:35Speaker 03

  fragments embedded within larger poetic texts in places like Judges 5, Deuteronomy 32, Genesis 49, Exodus 15, Psalm 68. That's assuming those are phenomenally early poetic texts that go back to 1000 BCE, or maybe even a little earlier than that. So, so max, absolute max, is 1200 years for writing the Bible, probably closer to 1100 or even younger than that. But,

• 26:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  And that's if we're taking things seriously. If we're not taking anything seriously, sure, 1500, 1600 years. If you're just presupposing every word of it is historically accurate, and all of the traditional assignments of authorship that don't even come from the Bible are all true, then sure, 1500 to 1600 years.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  But, but, but the best scholarly guess as to the actual duration is closer to that?

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. 1100-ish probably years. And in terms of authors, authors and editors, because editors are responsible for composing a large chunks of this, I say it's north of 100.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  So, yeah. Because you've got, I don't know how many different authors. You've got probably at least four different main collections of texts throughout the Pentateuch, and those collections are probably the product of multiple different authors each and of themselves. And then the Psalms, who knows how many authors are responsible for writing Psalms? Isaiah, we've got at least three different main authors responsible for Isaiah, and who knows how many editors and redactors. Like, it just goes on and on. And then,

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Well, and a lot of these are based on oral traditions that have been passed down over centuries. That, which means that each time someone told that story a little differently, they get to, they get a clip of the authorship.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They're getting, they're getting some money. They're gonna get some residuals. You know, it's a, the check's gonna be for six cents, but, you know, they get their residuals. And then, you know, you got the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation, all the same dude.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Not actually.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  The Gospel of John was written by somebody, 1, 2, and 3 John, probably written by probably two different people who are not the author of the Gospel of John. And Revelation is just some other dude named John. So, the, yeah, the number of authors stacks up pretty quickly once you stop just presupposing that all the traditions you inherited are true.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And that brings us to the continents.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, we do need to talk about the continents, but that's just a brief thing, right? Like,

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Three continents, that is presupposing that the Pentateuch, or at least parts of it, were written by Moses in Egypt.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  In Egypt.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  In the 15th century BCE. That's not accurate. The, you could salvage it, though. If you conclude that one of the Catholic epistles, so like, maybe 3 John or 2 Peter, or something like that, was written in Alexandria. If you decide that, great, three continents.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Is that, is that plausible? Sure, it's plausible. I don't know, I don't know if scholars have argued that, that a given text was written in Alexandria. It's certainly plausible, but, but I don't know. And that's not what the claim is. Certainly, that's not.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  And it doesn't, yeah, and it doesn't really matter, but the other point is that like, three different continents makes it sound like there was someone in like Far East Asia writing one thing, and someone in North, you know, North Europe writing another thing, and someone in South Africa writing a third thing. And these are all like, it's this tiny little, even if we were to suppose that Egypt were part of it, the circle that you draw to get all of these on here, and I'm assuming, maybe I don't know, actually, I'm assuming that the Europe claim is just John of Patmos. Is there more than just that? Is there, who else? What other, what other thing could have been written in Europe?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Or is it just Revelation?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Well, it's the idea that Paul was writing some places from,

• 30:04Speaker 04

  From like Rome or something?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Somewhere around there, yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  And, and, you know, it depends on whether or not you identify Turkey as, as Europe, but,

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Well, part of it is.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  But yeah, that's the, the diameter of the circle you have to draw to include every last text of the Bible is, is smaller than the Mediterranean Sea.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Like, it's all surrounding the same body of water, which is not an ocean. So, so yeah, that, that doesn't say much. And then the, the claim that it's written in three different languages, that's accurate. So, you got one.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I'll give, we'll give you that one.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  That one's good.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, with parts of Ezra and Daniel, and then a few scattered verses elsewhere, written in Aramaic, the overwhelming majority of the Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew, and then the New Testament written in Greek. And then the last part of the claim is that it all tells the same story, or no contradictions.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Nor couldn't, yeah, exactly.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Which is, which, I mean, you know, obviously, we've talked a lot about that, but also, even, even if it did, even let's just say that it managed to line up with no contradictions the whole way, it's not as impressive as they think they're making it sound, because these were not written independent of each other.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Each of them had the one before, as they, as they were writing. So, it's like, it's like saying, you know, the last Spider-Man author, this Spider-Man author managed to get all of the canon in from the last guy, even though even those don't line up.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  It's, it's an accumulating anthology. It's, it's not like they just all wrote their books independently and brought them together and were like, "What? Jackpot?"

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  That's not how it went down. They were intentionally riffing off of responding to quoting, and when it comes to the Gospels, you know, they were, they were using the other Gospels as sources. Everybody used whatever was, was, had already been published as a source.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Well, and, you know, you look at the more ancient texts, you look at the texts that come to us from the Hebrew Bible, and they were changing each other as they went along. Like, you know, somebody might have written something new, and for all we know, they went back and changed the older book to line up with the new thing, or whatever. Like, they had the ability to do that. It's not like this, there were printing presses about. There were very few copies of these things.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  And you can, you can compare the books of Samuel and Kings to the books of Chronicles and see, They're telling the same stories, but in many cases, they're flatly contradicting each other. They're changing them significantly. And so the, when, when people say there are zero contradictions, like they can't support that.

• 33:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  But that's a claim. That's not a fact. That's not a datum.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  You can't point to the, that and go see no contradictions. That's, that's nonsensical. So once again, they're gathering together a bunch of disputed and in most cases, just flatly false claims. And they're saying, look at this evidence that the book is true. You just have to agree with me that all the book is true first.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  It's flagrantly begging the question.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Whenever they use that as, as an argument, it's just flagrantly begging the question because it simply doesn't work unless you already just arbitrarily presuppose that every last word of it is true and every tradition associated with date, authorship, and interpretation is true. And it just doesn't work that way.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Okay, fine. I guess I'll stop using that argument now.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Please, please do.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And please, if, if, if you see someone using that argument, send them this video or send them this, this podcast and, and, and maybe they will, uh, I, no, they won't reconsider using it. They'll continue using it.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  This, this is, this is not the domain of critical thinkers. Uh, the, this are, this claim is not something that people have decided after much research and introspection that they're going to promulgate. This is the kind of thing that they, they promulgate because it tickles the tuning fork in the loins of their dogmatism and, and they just want to pass that tickle along. So, so please stop giving people that kind of tickle because it's, it's inappropriate.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, there you go. The Bible says not to. So let's just do that. All right. Well, there you go with that. Uh, I, you know, it's hard to know what to say about that, but apologetics continue. Uh, and we're gonna, and we're gonna tackle some more in twisted scripture.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  All right. Uh, Mark Driscoll, he's a, he's a pastor. He's a, a formerly disgraced pastor, but apparently they let him back in.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Well, I think he's still disgraceful, but

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Disgraceful, yes.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  In a lot of ways, yes. But, uh, no, he started, he started his own

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, he started his own thing.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause he was, uh, yeah, he talks about humility despite, uh, being, being booted for, uh, his domineering and, and non-humble.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and some other problematic behaviors as I understand it, but I, but we, we don't need to get into any of that.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Cause all we care about is the claims that he's making, which are, uh, which are cute. He, he's gotten some cute claims and the claims today that we're going to be talking about, uh, are, and he, I'll just read from the post that he wrote, which says, that he wrote, he didn't write this, but, uh, but the post that is on his, on his page, it says, "You can't be a Bible believing Christian and a socialist. You can't separate Christian, Christianity from economics. If God owns everything, then the government doesn't. The

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Bible teaches that God delegates stewardship to individuals and families, protects private property with you shall not steal, and commands parents to leave an inheritance for their children. Those aren't modern political ideas. They're biblical principles."

• 36:58Speaker 04

  There's a lot packed into that.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  And, and he did a whole video. Uh, I actually watched the extended 20 minute version of it. I don't recommend it.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  My condolences. Yeah. That was, I

• 37:10Speaker 04

  I was trying to bone up. I don't know, you know? Uh, but yes, he made, the main thing that he does, and you know, we, he has a, a shorter clip too. And the first thing he says is that basically capitalism equals the correct Christian economic ideology? Question mark. Like he basically says that because God took his little finger and wrote in the stones to Moses, "Thou shalt not steal," that proves that capitalism, uh, that proves that ownership is a thing that we're, that, that, cause you, nobody can steal anything

• 37:53Speaker 04

  if nobody owns anything. And because ownership is a thing, therefore, dot, dot, dot, capitalism, not socialism.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  So when, when he says socialism, he means a specific brand of communism.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  He, he means Marxist communism. Yeah. He's not, he's not talking about socialism literally at all.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Right. But socialism is what the leftists are advocating for. So he needs to use that as the proxy for

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Uh, for his argument.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Good grief.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  It's a lot. It's a, it's a, because he literally is wrong about, like, he just keeps taking wrong things and adding them to his, like, his premises are all like, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Therefore, conclusion.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Because like socialism and capitalism are kind of, there's kind of a hydraulic relationship between the two. And, and they're also, they occupy, each occupies its own little spectrum because it has to do more with the degree to which the means of production are controlled by the public versus, um, private entities' interests.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  And you can have both capitalist and socialist systems within the same country.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Right. Like many countries do.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yes. And like, and there's, there's the great meme where it's like, we should have, uh, socialism like the Nordic countries. And the person responds, no, that's not socialism. It's capitalism with this, that, and the other sprinkled in and to it. Okay. Let's have that. No, that's socialism. Like it's, you, you can't win when, when everybody wants to reduce everything to these binary zero sum games.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Um, cause like, there are a lot of ways that America is, is socialist.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you like having a fire department? Cause that's a socialist program. That's that you're not paying for the fire department to come out to your house if, you know, if you need them. So.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  And, and we've got, we've got a lot of things that are, um, are providing social safety nets to people. I, I think when, when people think of, of socialism, what, what they mean is, is social safety nets. Um, and so.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  So things, things like, like Medicare and Medicaid.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Social security, uh, things like that. Um, and when we think about these as, as distinct, uh, economic approaches, or at least, um, occupying different ends of a spectrum of economic approaches, like that doesn't go back to the biblical period.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Like there are a lot of ways that, that, that you can't get there from here. That's, they didn't organize their economies that way anciently. So the Bible's not addressing socialism v. capitalism. Um, and, but the Bible does make a lot of moral assertions that I would say are going to resonate more with a socialist approach than, than a quote unquote capitalist approach today.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. I don't think Driscoll likes those ones very much.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  No, well, he certainly doesn't understand them, whether or not he, he likes them.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  It is really interesting. Like one of the big claims that he makes is that God commands us or, or wants us to accumulate generational wealth. Uh, he's, you know, he says, and pass it on to our descendants, which, you know, first of all, not easy for everyone to do, not a thing that everyone is capable of doing, especially when you're talking about, you know, a country like ours where wealth is being consolidated sort of purposefully with a single class of people. And they're making, they are intentionally making it

• 42:11Speaker 04

  difficult for other classes of people to even possibly accumulate wealth.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, you, you can go read the rule of, uh, or no, the color of law for a wonderful discussion of how our government was structured.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  To explicitly and programmatically systematically privilege the access of white folks to protections and to generational wealth over and against black folks who are explicitly marginalized in that. Redlining is still a thing.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  And you know, it's morphed, it's changed. Yeah. There are a lot of systematic or systemic, excuse me, power asymmetries that give folks who look like you and me easier access to generational wealth. You know, there's, and there's, you know, that's its own conversation. But Driscoll have no interest in overturning those systems of power.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  He looks like us. He's doing great.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's doing great. And so he wants to endorse those systems, even though they are quite intentionally and doing a good job of preventing people who don't look like us from accessing that. So when he, when he's talking about, he wants, God wants us to accumulate general generational wealth and pass it on. When he supports a system that prevents certain groups of people from doing that, that's like fundamentally, that's white supremacist. And, and I'm sure that he doesn't agree with that. I'm sure he doesn't understand that. I'm sure his brain will not allow him to understand that because that would indict him. And he's not going to allow himself to be indicted by anything.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it feels to me like the thing that most indicts him is his own book, which is the Bible constantly talking about, sell what you own and give it to the poor.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Wealth is, especially the New Testament, it is constantly talking about how wealth is bad. Being a rich man is bad. Give it to the poor. Like the best thing you can do in Mark 10, the best thing you can do if you want to be in the kingdom of heaven is to sell your wealth, sell your possessions and give it away.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and that's actually, that's distinct from where I think Driscoll will go when looking for his proof text. Because, and there are, and there are reasons for this. Because you can go in the Hebrew Bible and you can see, you know, wealth is, is not treated as the enemy, is not treated as a villain in places like Proverbs, in Samuel and Kings and things like that. But you also have in the prophets, for instance, condemnations of people who are doing land consolidation, who are engaged in a kind of, something that you could call, oh, I shoot, I forget the word, but it's, it's like predatory capitalism.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Like I'm, I'm lending money because I'm counting on them defaulting so I can then take their stuff, their collateral. Like that is something that was a problem in the eighth century BCE. And you had prophets coming out here and saying, you are doing this, consuming the houses of the poor. And that's incredibly bad. That's, that's immoral. That is grinding the faces of the poor and God hates you for it. Taking advantage of the economic system, taking advantage of the legal system in order to protect your own stuff over and against the interests of the poor and the needy is explicitly called out as immoral.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  So, so what Mark's defending is, is like, you can find defenses of, of being wealthy in the Hebrew Bible, but you also find excoriations of the kinds of things that Mark's talking about. And then we get to the New Testament. And this is being written by folks who are not in government. These are not people with, with systemic power.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. Very much the opposite.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, and there are reasons that they say, give everything to the poor, and they don't seem to care about intergenerational anything. They actually say, be celibate. And the reason is they thought Jesus was coming back right away. So it didn't matter. None of it mattered. And so you can't draw from the collection of texts from people who are like, the world's ending before I could ever have a kid anyway, so none of that matters. You can't draw principles to apply to 21st century America from those kinds of ideological texts. But if you were going to try, they would be, and they would say,

• 47:16Speaker 03

  give all your money to the poor. Don't worry about having kids. None of that matters.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. That, that does speak a little bit against generational wealth. If it's like, don't even have generations. What are you doing?

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. We, this is all coming to an end. The, the whole scene is going to be wrapped up and tied off with a neat little bow before you even have a chance for a baby to be born. So, yeah, it's, it's laughably uncritical and, and not thoughtful. But he, he focuses in on the 10 commandments, doesn't he?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  He, go ahead.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Which is problematic. He focuses on the shall not steal. The idea seems to be that if you have personal property, that's capitalism and cannot be socialism, which again, is, is drawing the line well outside of where it belongs when it comes to the relationship of socialism to capitalism. But the 10 commandments also twice, if I recall correctly, refer favorably to slaves that you own as well.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  So are we?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  They don't usually print that part. When you, when you see, when you see a 10 commandments in a, in a school, in a schoolroom in Texas, it's not going to say that.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. You've got dot, dot, dot. Well, what was there? Slaves were there. That's what the ellipses are occluding is the fact that the 10 commandments presuppose that you own slaves. And so where's that in this economy that, that Driscoll is, is constructing from the 10 commandments? Well, it's not there because we decided that was bad. We overruled that. And most of the, the 10 commandments that have anything to do with economics are about not necessarily protecting your private property, but protecting the weak and the poor from the wealthy and the strong.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  The, you know, the, the notion that you shouldn't be coveting.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Why do you think that is? It's because they don't want people going out there and doing what the prophets are excoriating in the, the Hebrew Bible. They don't want people going out there and engaging in land consolidation and predatory loans and stuff like that. Cause they, you, in the, in the ninth century and then in the beginning of the eighth century, you, it was basically a subsistence economy. You had your farm, you grew what you needed to survive on the farm. Maybe you had a little leftover to take to the farmer's market on Saturday. And maybe you made some, a little extra walking around something from a couple of extra handfuls of whatever you were growing.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  But basically you grew what you needed to survive. There, we had in Israel and Judah in the eighth century, kings that reigned for like 40 years each, exceptionally long reigns. And these were very prosperous times. A lot of people made a lot of money because we were beginning international trade. Primarily things like olive oil and wine and, and things like that was, was going into Phoenician and elsewhere. And so a lot of people are getting very wealthy and the economy shifts into what is called a command economy, where you didn't grow whatever you needed to survive. You grew what your creditor demanded you grow

• 50:54Speaker 03

  because you were now making money for whoever owned the property. And, you know, you would get loans and the loans would come due when it was harvest time, when money was worth, you know, your goods were worth the least amounts. And because you were growing what they told you to grow, you couldn't diversify as a protectionist strategy. Because if a, a specific crop fails, if you've got a bunch of crops, great, you can make up that, that gap. But if you're being told only grow this and that crop fails. You're up a creek.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  And so there's going to be a lot more defaulting on loans. There's going to be a lot more, basically it becomes serfdom, where the wealthy people in the city now own your property. And they're like, hey, you can stay on the property. You continue to work it, but I get all of the income from it. I get all the goods from it.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  And now you.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Sorry, I was just thinking that, that is that what led to the, the whole jubilee thing of like releasing people from these debts? And that's all, all, there was a whole, whole bunch of stuff.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. In, in response to this, the fact that suddenly this command economy was leading to a lot more income inequality and wealth being concentrated in cities. You had other folks coming out and you had the prophets who were saying, all of this is incredibly wicked and God hates you. And then you had people who were responsible for particularly the book of Deuteronomy, which is coming in the late seventh, it's probably starting up in the late seventh century BCE. So about a century after all this is getting really, really bad. You, it trickles down to the scribal class and they're like, okay, well, we're going to write laws

• 52:53Speaker 03

  that ease this, that make up for what's going on here. And that's why you have, oh, you gotta leave the gleanings for the poor. Oh, you've got to, in the seventh year, they go free. The debts are going to be all released in the jubilee or whatever, which we have no evidence that any such thing ever happened, but, but it's a nice thing to write down.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  And to, and to post in front of your courthouse, even if those laws have no authority within the courthouse itself.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Well, and it's a decidedly anti-capitalist idea that is, that is, like you say, it doesn't matter if it's, if it actually happened or not, it's in Mark Driscoll's book.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? Like he, it is the thing that he is decidedly ignoring.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it even says in that book, in Deuteronomy, that you're not even allowed to, like, when you give, you have to give to the poor, you're not allowed to do it reluctantly.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  It literally says, you must do it with a, with a happy heart.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's, and it's, it's interesting because Driscoll in his video says redistribution, it's a very, it's a very, he gets very libertarian about everything, but he's, he starts to say redistribution, even taxation is theft. And, and that, that is a really funny coming from someone who isn't paying taxes because he's, because he's a pastor and so shut up about that. Why, why are you even commenting on it? But the idea that redo, that redistribution of wealth is somehow theft

• 54:42Speaker 04

  is, feels really counter biblical to me. It feels real like, like, you know, like you said, landowners must, I think in Leviticus, when I was looking it up, it's, I saw something about landowners having to leave the edges of their fields.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, the gleanings. Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, so it's like, honestly, if it's like redistribution is about as biblical as you can get.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Particularly when you've got Jesus, who is supposed to be God for, for Driscoll.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Driscoll's supposed to like that guy a lot.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. And supposed to listen to him, saying multiple times, sell everything you have, give it to the poor.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  But also you've got like Acts four and five, which is a, which is explicitly communalism, where nobody, everybody gave everything that they had, and then it was distributed as people had need.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Right. And what's his name and what's her name were punished for not doing it.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Well, not just punished, they died. They were killed by God.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  That counts as punishment.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  But, um, and, and people say, oh, well, it's because they lied to the spirit. About what? About whether or not they gave them all their money.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, if you, you, you can't read that and, and be like, oh, well, that doesn't count. That's, and, and some people will say, oh, well, it's, it's not about the government. It's about how individuals are supposed to act. And I think the way you represented Driscoll, he was trying to make a big deal about a individualism.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Yes, he did. He very much said that, that yes, you should volunteer your tithes. Your charity should be voluntary and on an individual level, not, not done at a governmental level.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Which, which is something that is never said in the Bible, in the New Testament. This is kind of an is-ought fallacy that is overlooking the fact that it, the is part is a product of the fact that nobody writing the New Testament had any role in government or ever thought they would have any influence whatsoever in government.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  They were, the government was in a far off place and didn't care what they thought. And so they were just telling the other people around them, here's what we're going to do.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  So the is-ought fallacy ignores the circumstances that lead to the fact that the authors of the New Testament never say, hey, by the way, if you're in government leadership, because they never contemplated any such circumstance. But the notion that they would have said, hey, if you're any, ever in any kind of government leadership, it, the priority is not ensuring the poor have what they need. The priority is protecting the agency of the people who have money. So whether or not the poor eat is secondary. Our primary concern is that we not force somebody who has money to do anything that they don't want to do.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  I think we see from the example in Acts four and five, if you wanted to participate in the community, you kind of had to give them all your money. So it is reading into the text, things that are, one, not in the text at all, but two, only inappropriately imposed upon the text, based on the notion that we do find counsel for people in government in the New Testament. We don't.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Nobody ever anticipated that their messaging was going to influence people in positions of power within governments. So it's silent on that. So you can't really draw those kinds of conclusions. This is, this is more just rationalizing right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation into your interpretation of the biblical texts and ignoring most of the data.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Well, and you know, if you're going to be claiming that taxation is theft, what does the render under Caesar, unto Caesar that which is Caesar's text mean? What is he referring to in that moment when he says, when he says that? Like that, other than taxation, it seems like it's kind of the thing, like you're supposed to pay your taxes.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Which undermines the whole, everything belongs to God.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  When, when Jesus says, whose face and inscription is on it? Oh, Caesar's, okay. Give that to Caesar.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Render unto God what is God's. And Mark's saying, oh, well, turns out everything is God's, even Caesar's stuff. And yeah, you can, you can find that in other parts of the text, but only by just entirely overruling and silencing the rhetorical intent of that particular story, which is that, hey, you should be paying taxes that, you know, that coin, whether your money jingles or folds, the money was created by the government. That's, that's who created that. That's who is using it. So that is theirs to do with as they please.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  And also like, okay, your theology is that God owns everything. Well, in the meantime, until God decides to show up and collect and just say, you know what? I'm taking over. We're dealing with what we're, with our economies currently. So that's not a useful framing of anything to say that.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  It's evasion, pure and simple, because Mark will say, the churches need to be taking care of the poor. Okay, you haven't.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  Nobody has stopped you. And, and yes, there are a lot of organizations out there that are Christian that commit a lot of money to taking care of the poor and the sick and the disabled and, and a lot of different groups of people. And it's not enough and it will never be enough. And you are not trying to make it enough.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  It takes the government to be able to make it enough. So once again, you're saying, my priority is not ensuring that poor people have food. My priority is protecting my money.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  And that is definitely not a Christian, or at least not a New Testament outlook. That is definitely the outlook of one who loves money, which.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  Of a rich guy.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Which he definitely, yeah. I mean, this is, this, what he's doing is, is trying to leverage his Christianity so that none of his parishioners notice that he's being gross about his wealth. Like he's, like he's amassing as much wealth as he can and doesn't want to give it away. His, his whole position is about being, uh, you know, being protected by the law, but not bound by the law. But he wants others to be bound by the law and not protected by the law. And that just seems, uh, it seems as backwards as it could possibly be.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. It is, it is insincere. It is hypocritical. It is fundamentally selfish. And, and you know, the love of money is the root of all evil as.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Wait, where does it say that?

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Oh gosh, it's some, I don't know.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  I feel like that was, it was, was that, I think it was AA Milne.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  I think that was, it was a headline. I read a headline one time that said something like that. Yeah. And, and you know, if, if there's, if there's anybody who loves money, it's Mark Driscoll.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  Now, look, hey, I'm not opposed to generational wealth. I would love to get some, uh, but.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  I think we should make it available to everybody.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Without trying to mitigate other people's access to it, just because we think that that makes it easier for us to get it.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  Right. And if, and if you actually believe that the poor, the needy, the underserved should be well taken care of, the way it seems like a Christian should. Yeah. Like you point out, Dan, government's the only thing that can do that.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  It's the, it's the, it's literally the only way that can happen.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Alas. All right. Well, friends, uh, you know, that's it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show go and sticking a stick in the eye of people like Mark Driscoll, we'd love for you to join us.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Rhetorically, rhetorically.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Rhetorically speaking, uh, we, we definitely do not want to attack him physically.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  Much. Go, go be a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. It's the best way to help our, help us do what it is that we do. And you can get early and ad free access to the episodes. You can get our bonus content, which we do every week. And, uh, and you can get our eternal gratitude. And that's what's really worth the most, isn't it? Wouldn't you say? So thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. Thanks to Sam for being our right hand man. And thanks to all y'all for tuning in. We'll talk to you again next time.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:03:51Speaker 04

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