It's a Jubilee!

Its Jubilee time- and what are we celebrating? A no-longer-canonical book, I guess. Jubilees is a Second Temple rewrite of Genesis that reshapes creation stories, adds angelic narration, and updates the calendar to aaaaaalmost get the number of days in the year right. Then we tackle the viral claim that the Bible has 63,779 perfect cross-references. Does it prove divine authorship? Maybe! Ok, no. But we still have a lot of fun breaking it down. We look at how these “links” are created, where the argument collapses, and why the attractiveness of a chart doesn't mean it's actually useful. ---- For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:40Speaker 00

  Somebody listening to this is gonna be like, Dan, you moron.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Ah, got him. We got him, everybody. He didn't know which one it was. Ah!

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  You're listening to the Data Over Dogma Podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been a long day for me. I had some, some family emergencies of the pet variety that were harrowing. It's been a harrowing day, but I'm, I'm.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  All, everything copacetic?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Everything's okay. We've got, we've got a cat with significantly less hair now because the vet had to shave her and all sorts of crazy stuff. Anywho.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  All right.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Other than that, things are great. So let's dive into some Bible stuff, shall we?

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so today on the show, we are going to, we're going to first have a, is it canon? We're going to talk about a book that is canon, I understand.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  And an X-Man.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Just putting it out there, just putting it out there.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, there you go. So we'll get to Jubilees and then in the second half of the show, we'll be, we'll be asking ourselves, we'll be taking issue with a, a bunch of correlations. We're going to correlate and see if it means everything and something and anything.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Probably not, but first, is it canon?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  All right, so we said it, we're going, we're getting into Jubilees here and that.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  The word Jubilee is interesting. I myself attended the, the diamond Jubilee of Her Highness, the, the Queen of England. Back in her days. I didn't attend it. I sat on the banks of the Thames and watched as the giant flotilla floated by, which sounds super exciting, the largest flotilla that has ever floated the Thames. It sounds very exciting until you realize it's just boats going slowly past you.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  One of which contained the queen.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Who waved in my direction.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Well, I'm here. I hear she's good at waving. She was good at waving.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Not as good anymore. And, and the other jubilee that I know of is that this year, the year of our Lord 2025, is a jubilee year for the Catholics. The Pope, before he died, declared this year to be a jubilee year.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  So I don't know what that means, but what I do know is there is also a book that was in, that was not in my Bible called Jubilees, and I don't know anything about it.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Well, it is, it is generally considered a pseudographical text. It is non-canonical for the overwhelming majority of Christianity as well as Judaism. There is a movement, a Jewish movement that is associated with the Christian movement that has it in the canon, that also has it in the canon. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahado Church has Jubilees in the canon. In fact, their inclusion of the Book of Jubilees in the canon is the only reason we can claim to have a full copy of the Book of Jubilees. Because it was only preserved in Gez manuscripts for a long, long time,

• 5:28Speaker 00

  until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I think there's, there's a little bit of a Latin translation from like the 5th century. But the dozens-

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So the last time we met the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahado People Church, we were talking about First Enoch and how they include that also in their canon. Is that correct?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Yes. And these, and this is closely related. In fact, Jubilees is probably basing some of its text on First Enoch.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  And so these are both texts that were written in the Hellenistic period. Most scholars would say Jubilees was probably written somewhere between 160 to 150 BCE.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  So this is just- After the Maccabean period, this is during the the Hasmenean Kingdom. And it was probably originally originally written in Hebrew. And then probably translated into Syriac somewhere along the way, also translated from Hebrew Hebrew into Greek. And then from Greek into Latin and into Ge'ez. Because Jubilees was probably brought down to the kingdom of Aksum, modern day Ethiopia, by folks who had copies of the Septuagint, so the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, including First Enoch and Jubilees. And then I think the oldest existing Ge'ez or Ethiopic manuscript of Jubilees is like from the 14th century.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  But there are like 50 or so manuscripts of Jubilees preserved in Ge'ez. And based on the manuscripts of Jubilees that were discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are more than a dozen different manuscripts of Jubilees, which puts it alongside First Enoch, outnumbering the number of manuscripts of every other book of the Bible, except for Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Psalms.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  So Jubilees and First Enoch were quite influential.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the way you're, if I'm understanding you, let me just say it in my own way, just to make sure I'm getting it. But like, if there if there were that many copies of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at least the people who were keeping those records near the Dead Sea, lo those many years ago, anciently. Clearly, it must have been very important, it must have been as important to them as, as you say, those other books, as Genesis, Exodus, or, you know, whatever ones you listed.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, they definitely weren't the core of what was considered scripture for Judaism, but they seem to have been even more influential than books like Ezekiel and Daniel and Numbers and Joshua and stuff like that. So it was influential if we take the number of manuscripts preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls as a proxy for how important the text was. But we also see its influence on later rabbinic literature. We even see some stuff in the New Testament that seems to be reflecting, not necessarily

• 8:47Speaker 00

  saying, "Hey, here's something I took from Jubilees," but references to traditions that look at those traditions in ways they are presented in Jubilees and not really anywhere else. Okay. So indicating that they're familiar with and they are influenced by the tradition as preserved in Jubilees. But in short, Jubilees is basically a rewriting of the book of Genesis and a little bit of Exodus. Oh, okay. And the idea is this: Moses is on Sinai in Exodus 24. God's like, "Hey, I'm gonna give you these laws, but once you all get to the promised land, everybody's gonna break all the laws. I'm gonna send them away into exile.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  I'm gonna destroy the temple. Then I'm gonna bring them back. Then I'm gonna rebuild the temple. And then everything's gonna be copacetic from then on out. Everything's gonna be grand." And Moses is like, "What if you didn't do that?" And God was like, "Mmm, nah, I'm still gonna do that." And then God is like, "Here's my angel, and he's gonna give you all the deets." And God bounces. And so the angel of the presence, and this is the Malach Adonai, the messenger of Adonai that is introduced in Exodus 23, the chapter of four, where God says, "I'm sending an angel before you to guard you along the way. My name is in him." And this angel's like, "Hey, Moses." Anyway, here's the deal, and retells the entire book of Genesis. Oh, wow.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Not verse for verse, but like story for story. And an awful lot of it is condensed, but it's all being retold in a way that would be more meaningful for an educated Jewish person in the middle of the second century B.C. Okay. So it's kinda like I- There are, what's going on in Jubilees, in my opinion, is kinda close to what Joseph Smith was trying to do with, with the, his revision of the Bible.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Uh, like the book of Moses, where God's like, "Hey Moses, so anyway, here's how everything's gonna play out." For, uh, "This is how everything began, here's how everything's gonna play out." And, and you're rewriting the whole book of Genesis and changing an awful lot, but kinda following the same, uh, trajectory. And it's all divided up into Jubilees. So Jubilee is 49 years, according to the Hebrew Bible.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  You have seven years, that's, uh, the seventh year is the Sabbath year. But every seven, sets of seven years is the 49th year, that's the Jubilee year. And so basically, we're, we're imposing this chronological framework of sets of seven and Jubilees and everything upon the book of Genesis. And so a lot of the chapters begin, uh, where, uh, the, the angel of the presence is, uh, speaking to Moses and says, "So anyway, during the fifth year of the fourth week, fourth week of this Jubilee, in the third month, in the middle of the month, Abram celebrated the festival, festival of the first fruits and the wheat harvest."

• 12:00Speaker 00

  And it's kind of a way to say, this history is already written. It's playing out according to this, uh, very regimented chronology. Everything important happens on Jubilee years, or, uh, in, in a way that can be measured against these Jubilee years. And, and you get updates, and you get changes, and you get corrections, uh, and stuff like that. I wanna read a couple of examples of, uh, of some of the things that, uh, some of the ways they're retelling the story. But first, this is, uh, the very end of the first chapter. There are two sections to the book of Jubilees. Chapter one is one section, and then the other section is chapters two through 50.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  And there are only 50 chapters in Jubilees.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  That's not, that, those are not evenly measured chapters or sections.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  It is definitely back-heavy, but, um...

• 12:57Speaker 00

  And the first chapter is, is just kind of this narrative explaining what's going on where Moses is like, "What? Why? Who? Okay." And anyway, verse 29 of the first chapter, it's a long verse. "The angel of the presence, who was going along in front of the Israelite camp, took the tablets that told of the divisions of the years from the time the law and the testimony were created, for the weeks of their jubilees, year by year, in their full number, and their jubilees from the time of the first creation until the time of the new creation, when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be renewed like the powers of the sky and like all the creatures of the earth, until the time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mount Zion."

• 13:37Speaker 00

  So, that's the explanation of what the angel of the presence is about to drop on Moses. And so you have, in chapter 2, you have Adam and Eve, you have this whole creation, and then you have this statement, "There were 22 leaders of humanity from Adam until him, and 22 kinds of works were made until the seventh day." So we've got another division into these very symbolic numbers, and 22 is symbolic. Do you have any idea where 22 might be symbolic? 22 and 24 both pop up a number of times in early Judaism.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I know the significance of 6, 7, but I don't know the other ones.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  No, you don't. Nobody does.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I'm the only one.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  22 and 24 are significant. 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. And so, once you get into first century CE, you have texts and folks, people like Josephus and other texts that say, "Oh yeah, our sacred scriptures, number 22." Or they number 24. That's how many books are in there. Because that is symbolic, and you know, if you like Greek, then you go with 24. If you prefer Hebrew, then you go with 22. So that's what's going on with these symbolic numbers.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And there's an interesting tradition that has its origin in the book of Jubilees. Okay. That's, um, might surprise some people. So I've made videos before where I've said, hey, the first lie in the Bible is not the serpent talking to Eve. It actually comes before that. Genesis 2:17, where God tells Adam, "On the day you eat of the fruit of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil, you will certainly die." He doesn't die. What's going on there? Right. One of the responses to this, there are two main responses. One is to say, well, he didn't mean die, die. He meant die as in not die. Um, the other response is to say, well, a day to the Lord is a thousand years. Right.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And this is based on, uh, there's a passage in, I always screw it up. I don't know why. It's either Psalms or Proverbs where it says the, um, the, a day is like a thousand, or a thousand years are like a day to the Lord and, uh, or like a watch in the night, which would be like three or four hours. And, and I've, I've always found that a rather silly argument, but it originates in the book of Jubilees. So Jubilees, chapter four, we're getting to the end of the story of Adam. "He was the first to be buried in the ground." And then verse 30, "He lacked seventy years from one thousand years, because one thousand years are one day in the testimony of heaven. For this reason, it was written regarding

• 16:30Speaker 00

  the tree of knowledge, 'On the day that you eat from it, you will die.' Therefore, he did not complete the years of this day, because he died during it."

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Okay. The book of Jubilees is- We've got the apologetic built in. Yes, one of, one of the first apologists. Okay. Going through and rewriting the text and smoothing out the problems. Right. And being like, you thought that was a, that was a contradiction, didn't you? Uh, we got you. Um, and, and so this is doing, so it's very similar to Samuel in Kings and then Chronicles, where Chronicles is retelling a lot of the same stuff, but altering it and fixing it. And, and like, wait a minute, we gotta have our- Our Levites here, okay, drop some Levites in, we'll throw some Levites over there, we'll sprinkle some Levites on the, on the ark. And in Jubilees, they're, they're doing a very similar thing, retelling the book of Genesis.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  And so in a lot of ways, it is kind of like one of the first commentaries on the Bible. Right. Because it is, it's basically telling us what was important to them at the time and how they wanted to think about it. You know, we, we could do the same thing today. If someone were to rewrite the book of Genesis and somebody was like, hey, man, go nuts. You have all the authority you need. Just do what you need to do to make it work for you. And they would be like, oh, okay, I'm gonna put some, you know, more angels over here and do this, that, and the other thing. It would, it would be the exact same thing. And then there's something that is very important here.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Remember, this is being written probably by a rather well-educated Jewish individual. They also have a concern for calendars. And they say in chapter six, here, the, the angel of the presence is talking to Moses and says, now you command the Israelites to keep the years in this number, 364 days. Then the year will be complete and it will not disturb its time from its days or from its festivals because everything will happen in harmony with their testimony. They will neither omit a day nor disturb a festival. So we're, we're getting- Pretty close. Pretty close. We're getting closer to- Pretty darn close.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're moving away from a lunar solar calendar to a strictly solar calendar. Right. 364 days, not exactly getting us all the way there. And they divide- It'll work for a while. It'll work for a good long while. There's gonna be some drift, but you know, we're not gonna be alive to see it, so why do we care? So, and, and this is- Wasn't this holiday in, in September? This began as a harvest festival- I swear, this was supposed to be, this was supposed to be a winter thing. Yeah, and now it's a planting festival. Which, which is why, you know, people are like, "Well, the solstice was on December 25th." It's not on December 25th.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  It was at one point, and, and then, and then we had that Tokyo Drift.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And they divided into four quarters of 13 weeks each. And they used, I want to say they used like a Sabbath trick to, to resolve the-

• 19:48Speaker 01

  This one weird trick?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the angel of the presence hates this one weird trick.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  So, the calendar is a big part of this. Festivals are a big part of it. The book of Jubilees is going along saying, "Then Abraham celebrated the, you know, Shavuot, and the festival of booths and, and stuff like that." I was like, "I don't think that's anywhere in Genesis. That's a, it's a much later thing."

• 20:15Speaker 00

  But here's an example of, of one of the ways that a story is being retold in this. Because it's 50 chapters, the book of Genesis itself is 50 chapters. So i- if it were an exact retelling, it would just be Genesis 1 through the end of Genesis 50. But it's not. It's shortening things. So this is Genesis 19. The entire chapter of Genesis 19 is five verses. And, and Genesis 19 is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So, this is what the book of Jubilees, how it recounts the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. "During this month," remember, we're dividing everything into, into months and, and weeks of years and stuff.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  "During this month, the Lord executed the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Zebowim, and all the environs, environs of the Jordan. He burned them with fire and brimstone and annihilated them until the present, in accord with what I have now told you about all their actions, that they were depraved and very sinful, that they would defile themselves, commit sexual sins in their flesh, and do what was impure upon the earth. The Lord will execute judgment in the same way in the places where people commit the same sort of impure actions as Sodom, just like the judgment on Sodom." But we went about- I don't know, man. I've been to Vegas. It's, uh, I don't think that's right. You're a fan, from what I, from what I hear, too.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  I don't think that's, that is right. But we went about, and remember, this is still the voice of the angel of the presence to Moses. "We went about rescuing Lot because the Lord remembered Abraham, so he brought him out from the overthrow of Sodom. He and his daughters committed a sin on the earth that had not occurred on the earth from the time of Adam until his time, because the man had sex with his daughter." Yes. "Here it has been commanded and engraved on the heavenly tablets regarding all his descendants that he is to remove them, uproot them, execute judgment on them like the judgment of Sodom, and not to leave him any human descendants on the earth on the day of judgment." Which is rough.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because when we look in Genesis 19, uh, the offspring of the incestuous pairing of Lot and his daughters, uh, is, are the people of Moab and Ammon. Oh, right, right. So we've got, ew, that's a little problematic, but, um, but that's it. That's how the entire chapter of Genesis 19 is retold. So it is- Interesting. Yeah, so it's condensing some stuff, and then, you know, when it comes to the festival of tabernacles, that gets- Which is my personal favorite. I love that festival. That gets like more than twice as many verses.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  So there's, there's an awful lot about, the, the things that the, the author of Jubilees chooses to dwell on are sometimes a little unexpected, unusual. They're not the kinds of things that people today, uh, would choose to dwell on. I mean, if, if you had a, a lot of, uh, the megachurch pastors and the, and the TikTok pastors of today doing this, we would probably have 20 chapters on Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah. And the festival of tabernacles wouldn't even be in there, but it probably shouldn't be in- Anyway, because it's it's not in Genesis, but the the story, the the last few chapters cover the time in Egypt and the angel of the presence is like reminding Moses what Moses just did.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  And then getting up to the point where the the angel of the presence is like.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Just to recap, uh, your story.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And that's, that brings us to right now. So I am talking to you on the mountain.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 00

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

• 24:16Speaker 01

  We are. I've heard the construction.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  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, um, 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. Um, 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.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car. I 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.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can try to do that on your own or you can use a phenomenally useful tool like Monarch to do something like that. Uh, Monarch is set up exactly for that kind of financial planning. They have things like their debt pay down simulator and visualizer to help you track your progress, which I, this is brilliant. The fact of the matter is that all of these concepts are so ethereal, it's hard to sort of wrap your head around it a lot of the time. And with this visualizer, you can see how that debt is going to go down. You can actually simulate your freedom occurring in front of your very eyes. And I think that is an amazing thing.

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• 27:30Speaker 01

  So I wanted to circle back to something because at the very beginning of this segment, you mentioned, you called this book pseudographical. And I guess what I'm wondering is, is it meant to be that it is, are we meant to believe that Moses wrote this book?

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Well, we're meant to believe that the angel of the presence dictated this book to Moses. So Moses wrote down what was dictated to him in, in the angel's voice. That's why the passages are like, so that's why we, and, and this is the two angels that accompany God in Genesis 18 and, and travel on to Sodom in Genesis 19. That's when we helped Lot out, but then God was like, destroy all of his descendants. So that's, it's the angel of the presence dictating the text to Moses and Moses just furiously writing everything down. Slow down, slow down, man, come on.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Even though Moses, Moses is probably, well, the text represents him as, as literate, but historically speaking, if there were a historical Moses, he would have spoken probably, I don't know, let's say Russian.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  So I mean, that's as good, as good enough, an answer as, as any other, sure, Egyptian.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  But we have, but this angel of the presence is the one that's delivering the laws to Moses. Yeah. And so, you know, you go to Galatians, written by Paul, Galatians 3, verse 19, says, "Why then was the law given? It was added because of the transgressions until the arrival of the descendant to whom the promise had been made. It was administered through angels by an intermediary." Which seems like it's referencing this tradition of an angel mediating between God and Moses, who then turns around and gives the law to the people. Right.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  So this is one of the indications that the book of Jubilees was, was probably influential enough to be reflected in, in some New Testament passages. And, and there are a handful of other places where, where scholars think that the influence is, is coming through. And we do have evidence that early Christians. New of the Book of Jubilees, the writings of Epiphanius, Justin Martyr, Origen, Diodorus of Tarsus, Isidore of Alexandria, Isidore of Seville, Eutychius of Alexandria, a number of early Christians make reference to Jubilees.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  They probably had either Greek copies or maybe Syriac copies or Latin copies before it just being left out of the canon, it was a text non grata and so probably faded away.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And so, so I'm sorry, just the idea is that those people who referenced it probably, the theories that they probably were, they were referencing it as scripture. It's like in the same way, no, oh, okay.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  No, no, just they, they were just witnessing to the existence of the text, not necessarily saying this, we got scripture here, people. I would have to look into those texts to see exactly how they're representing it. Like First Enoch, definitely, there were people who were referencing it as scripture. The New Testament references it as prophecy. Jubilees, I think the, the evidence is, is not nearly so strong, but these are folks who, who are referencing it as a text that was in circulation.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  And, and based on comparison of the, I can't, I think I said this already, but based on comparison with the Hebrew manuscripts that were discovered at Qumran, the Ges versions are pretty faithfully translated. So, so the, the, the Ethiopic versions that exist have not significantly changed much. It pretty closely follows the ancient versions that we have from, from among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating book. I think it's, it's interesting to see how the interpretive lenses that educated Jewish writers in the middle of the second century BCE are, how they're interpreting what's going on in Genesis, what they don't like. Like they, they edit out a lot of the stuff where God is like motivating people to lie and stuff like that. Some of that gets edited out. The stuff where, where either-

• 32:20Speaker 01

  More apologetics, by the way.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so the author of Jubilees, yeah, is, is one of the first apologists, wants to present this as something that is not going to rub the Jewish intelligentsia the wrong way, but is going to make this sound like inspired scripture, make it a little easier for them to, to game the algorithm so they can make that scratch off of more people seeing their videos talking about, talking about how awesome the book of Genesis is. So, a fascinating text. I don't think it's, it's as influential as the book of First Enoch. It passes along some of the traditions of First Enoch, but it was an influential text

• 33:07Speaker 00

  in some ways. And as we've seen, it is the origin of one of the apologetic arguments against understanding God's statement in Genesis 2:17 as a lie, or at the very least, something that doesn't actually come to pass that God said would come to pass, which I think makes it fascinating in its own right. But there's the Hermenea Commentary series, that's where you're going to find the best discussion of Jubilees. There's two volumes on Jubilees. And they took the translation that James Vanderkamp did for that commentary series, and they published it as a standalone translation. So if you would like a really, really good translation of Jubilees, it's like 17 or 18 bucks to get the paperback

• 33:52Speaker 00

  version of the, of the Hermenea translation. So, don't go chasing down the, the TikTok shop folks who are putting the, this is, this is the real- Ethiopic Bible with all 88 books. We got them all. You know, they'll, they'll have a version of Jubilees in there, but it's going to be a public domain translation from 150 years ago.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  It's, it's not going to have the updates that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff like that. And it's not going to be a very good translation. So if you want a good translation, don't waste your time with, with the Ethiopian bibles that people are selling on, on the internet right now. Just go get your Hermonia translation.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Okay. All right. Jubilees. Sounds fun. Uh, let's move on to our next segment, which is taking issue.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  And this, this week's taking issue, we're going to take issue with a, a rather attractive image, a beautiful, uh, chart that was built, uh, a while ago, uh, called the, uh, the, the cross-reference visualization. And this was, I think, it was done by a guy named Chris Harrison, I think.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yes. Or, uh, yes, Chris Harrison.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, and basically the, what it purported to be was, uh, imagine a, a horizon line, essentially, a, a line in the lower third of the, of the image. And below it are these lines, these just so many lines.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Stack of vertical lines of different lengths.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  That are descending down from the horizon line.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  And I guess those are the chapters of the Bible. Is that right?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And then, uh, and then above it are these big, beautiful curves and multi-colors and it's very pretty. And the curves go from one vertical line, uh, below all up and over to some other vertical line. And it's just interconnecting all of these. Different chapters. And what it purports to be, if I am to, if I understand this correctly, is a visualization of all the ways that the Bible, all the verses in the Bible that correlate with each other.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Yes, it is the Bible Cross References Chart. That began as a collaboration between a pastor named Christoph Romild and Chris Harrison in 2007. They, they claim to have cataloged 63,779 cross references in the Bible.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  And this is a visualization of those 63,779 cross references. And as you mentioned earlier, while we were discussing what we were talking about tonight, there was a very popular, kind of mimicking version of this chart that is Bible contradictions.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Now, the handy thing about the Bible contradictions chart is that it actually catalogs all the actual contradictions. Chris Harrison's chart, to my knowledge, I think somebody has tried to recreate it in an interactive way, so you can actually see the verses. But in addition to the fact that it does not include all 63,779 cross references, it doesn't even tell you what verse. It just says Genesis 1 Ezekiel 37.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Right, which, which means go read both of these full chapters and then

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Figure out what we're talking about.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  What they have in common.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  But I, I see this chart, or at least the claim, 63,779. Like, this is in my head like that, like that song that's, that I don't even remember the number, but it's 600 something, something, something. You probably know what that's from.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  It's from Rent.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  It's from Rent. I was gonna say, is it from Rent? But I've never seen Rent. And you usually see that number included in, in this claim. The Bible, 1,500 years, 45 authors, three continents, three languages, 63,779 cross references, no contradictions, one message, or something like that. That's been shared far and wide. And it drives me nuts because it's Pretty much entirely wrong. The only thing that is accurate is that it is written in three different languages, Hebrew, American, Greek. But when I first saw that, I had to chase down this chart and see what was going on here.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Because people make it sound like this is such an anomaly that the only plausible explanation is something supernatural. Like, this is evidence for the inspiration, the inerrancy, the univocality, the supernatural origins of the Bible.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  And it just doesn't, it just didn't pass the sniff test for me. So I chased down the origin of it. And here's the way Chris Harrison defines a cross-reference.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  "Cross-references are conceptual links between verses, connecting locations, people, phrases, etc., found in different parts of the Bible." Great. That, however, does not tell us who is making these links.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  And this is my biggest problem with this. There is nothing that supports the notion that these links are inherent to the text, native to the text, understood and intended by any of the authors and editors.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  These links are often so thin and so ambiguous as to be pretty meaningless. Like, there's a partial list of these cross-references that I found where somebody was like, Genesis 1:1 talks about the creation of the heavens and the earth. And so this cross-references with every single passage in the Bible that uses a word for create.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  It's like, no, it doesn't.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Or heaven, or earth.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's not, that's not indicative of intent.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Or cognizance on the part of any of the authors. That is us saying, "I matched these two."

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Right. Well, and not only that, but like, not for nothing, later books had the previous books to reference. They were, the authors were familiar with the work going before. So a reference doesn't mean, like, you know, if, if the guy who writes Spider-Man 211 also read Spider-Man 3.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, see-ish number three.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It doesn't, that doesn't prove anything divine happening.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:02Speaker 02

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• 42:02Speaker 00

  There's all this tech shit going on right now. We have facial recognition. We have our Ring cameras giving data to police. We have the Flock safety cameras. We have Amazon Echo and all these devices that are constantly listening to us and using our data for one purpose or another. Hey, we have a national security problem. When a company like Flock turns it into this organized system that law enforcement can access.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  To hear more on why you should rethink every safe camera you drive past, check out episode 1308 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  The Bible is, is unique in a lot of ways. It is an anthology of texts for a community that lasted a lot longer than most other communities have lasted. It shouldn't have lasted as long as it has. But because it lasted as long as it did, because the authoritative literature accumulated for as long as it did, and every layer that was added to it had the benefit of looking back at some, if not all, of what came before, you have a lot of intentional allusion and

• 43:15Speaker 00

  paraphrase and even direct quotation of the things that came before. Right. And so it is a uniquely self-referential text.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  But not in a way that is implausibly human curated. Right. Like, the uniqueness of the circumstances contributes to the uniqueness of the features of the text. And definitely not in a supernatural way. Right. But it gets even worse for Chris's explanation. Because in addition to the fact that, what this is basically saying is, "I can create links 63,779 times," which says nothing about what the text itself intended. Like, I can take Lord of the Rings and Hellboy and the Bible, and I bet you I can create

• 44:09Speaker 00

  thousands of cross-references as well. Look, we got a reference to mountains over here, we got a reference to mountains over here. Boom, cross-reference, roasted. Like, it doesn't mean much. But Chris goes on in the, where he's selling versions of this chart, says, "Cross-references are included in the margins or footnotes of some Bibles." And then he says, "Example here," and there's a hyperlink to a version of the Bible that has in the margins a bunch of cross-references. And I'm like, "Great, I want to look at the cross-references that Chris chose to show us as an example of cross-references, to see what a prototypical cross-reference in the mind of Chris Harrison is."

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And it is, the page that is linked to is Acts, Chapter 1. And the cross-reference that is in the dead center is Acts, Chapter 1, Verse 18, "Which describes the death of Judas." The first cross-reference is Matthew 27, 3 through 10, "Which is the contradictory account of the death of Judas."

• 45:21Speaker 00

  So when you look at the first cross-reference of the example of cross-references provided by Chris Harrison, what do you find? A contradiction in the Bible. And, you know, we've gone over this contradiction before. I think we have. Have we talked about the?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We did the various Judas's exploding in whatever way he's going to explode.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  And, and, you know, we, we know that if you need these texts to both be accurate descriptions of a single event, you can force them through the square hole.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  But for anybody capable of abstract and critical thought, these very clearly contradict each other. And so I think it's funny to try to use this as evidence of something when your evidence directly refutes and contradicts your claim.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  And then the, the other references are Matthew 18:7, 26:14, 15:24, Mark 4. And these are references to Jesus basically lamenting Judas's destiny.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  And so, okay, great. You've got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all talking about Judas because they're four different tellings of the same story.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  So it's like these.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  That's a pretty, that's a pretty solid and easy thing to correlate.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's pretty low hanging fruit. That's, that's an accident of having four different tellings of the same story. Nothing's supernatural about anything yet.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  And so the fact that when I look at that one verse, I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight cross-references in the one verse. One of them's a contradiction and the others are just the same story told four different times by the four different authors. If these are your cross-references that are supposed to be manifesting the supernatural nature of this book, how dare it have 63,779 cross-references? Has any such thing ever existed before? Yeah, this is, this is nothing special.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  So I, I am, and I try to bring this up, like you, you've seen me on Twitter. I get pretty chippy.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  You have a good time.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  I have a good time.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  I, when I see this, I usually, I can't pass up the opportunity to correct it. Because it's just so silly and it's not evidence of anything. And if you think critically about it for any amount of time at all, you can see that this isn't really evidence of anything. And, but man, the pushback I get when I point out how silly this is. For folks who just, I don't know what they're thinking about when, when they're looking at this. If I bring this up and show this to them, I don't know what's going through their head, but certainly not critical thinking, which is, which is a problem.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  So this chart, as, as pretty as it is.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  And I got no complaints. The aesthetic is fine.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Uh, when you look at the, the lines across the bottom as well, uh, they're also shaded. You go from light to darker to darker to lighter to darker to lighter to darker. And, and those are the different books of the Bible.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  So Genesis is the light one on the left, and then you go all the way to the very light one towards the right. That's Matthew. And so you can, you can see the, uh, yeah, the, uh, the different books of the Bible. So like it's, it's a good little visualization of, there's a lot of data, uh, in the visualization.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  What's that really long chapter in the middle?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Uh, Psalms 129, I think. Is that the, gosh, I always forget. I'm pretty sure.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I would have guessed it was a Psalm.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It has like 150 verses in it.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Um, nope, it's not 129. Uh, somebody, somebody listening to this is going to be like, Dan, you moron.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Ah, got him. We got him, everybody. He didn't, he didn't know which one it was.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  I've been got, that is true. It is in the, it is in the one.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  We don't need to know. It's fine.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Everyone can look it up on their own. Just go through, go through Psalms until you find the one that's too annoyingly long.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  But there's something, something else that I see when people do this, when they say, oh, here's all the cross references. The, you know, the cross references claim is circulating enough to have a life of its own. When you begin to see supplementary claims, like people posting a very similar chart that has only maybe a couple dozen links, all these rainbows going across the, the horizon line. A bunch of people are sharing a very similar looking one with only a couple dozen lines. And they're labeling it cross references in the Quran.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  And I was like, what? Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  So they're claiming, like, look, our book has 6,000.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  63,000, yeah, yeah.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  63,000 and they only have got, they've only got like 42. So clearly their book is, is false and our book is real.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the, the first time I saw this, I was like, that doesn't look right. Like the Quran has an awful lot of cross references and you can even find books published on cross references in the Quran. There are a lot of them. And so I, I did something that the overwhelming majority of the people on the internet don't seem capable of. I saved the image and then did a reverse image search.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  For, for those of you out there who don't know about this, go to like tin eye.com or you can even just go to Google Images. And you plop in the image and it will tell you where this is found on the internet. Tin eye I like because it will tell you can sort them according to date. So it will give you the earliest occurrence of this image anywhere on the, on the internet. Drop it in there. I took this chart, I dropped it in there and it took me to a website called Adam Lambert Full Circle Moments and Firsts.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  What this is, is a timeline of the life of the American Idol singer Adam Lambert.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  With life events and when they like, come around again, or capitulate, or whatever. And so you can, and, and the people who say, "Cross references in the Quran," it's a, it's a fuzzy chart. You can't really tell what's going on there. You can't read anything. But if you just, you know, do a reverse image search, or you go to that website, you can see that like, the events are like, American Idol audition, San Francisco, California, July 17th, 2008. And then 2009, meeting Madonna, Madonna's home, New York City, New York, May 27th, 2009. Ring of Fire, Glam Nation Tour, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, July 7th, 2010.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Somebody found a chart that looked similar, but had significantly fewer connections, and were like, "I'm taking this." And then slapped this label on it, ensuring that the image was blurry enough that you couldn't see anything.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  And just pass this off as the cross-references of the Quran.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I, I gotta say, the way that, I assume mostly American, but maybe not ju- I don't know. I've seen Islamophobia all over the world. The way that Christians badmouth the Quran, these are people who of course have never read the Quran. They don't know what's in the Quran. They know what, you know, some very Islamophobic pastor on the internet has told them about the Quran, which is, which is all misinformation. But it's just so weird to me that like-

• 54:01Speaker 01

  The how, you know, I made a very fiery post on threads a while back. I have zero threads followers. You guys are welcome to try to follow me on threads. I don't even know what my threads handle is. But I I've did a post and I made a claim about Christianity and Islam being essentially the same thing. And all the people got mad. And, and, you know, okay, fair enough. You disagree that that with my claim that theologically they're similar. That's fine. But they didn't present theological arguments. They basically like multiple people

• 54:42Speaker 01

  were like, um, no, because they worship Satan. And I was like, really, that's, that's so like the desire to just, just full on slander Islam with no knowledge, just, just invective is amazing.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  And, and a lot of them will be outraged at anything remotely similar coming from non-Christian religions. Like, have you ever seen people who are like the Talmud says Jesus is boiling in a pot of feces for eternity? It's like, well, you just said Muslims worship Satan.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Like, on what grounds do you say what you're saying is appropriate and what this 2000 year old text said is inappropriate? And, and I don't know if anyone has noticed, but there has been an increase in Islamophobic rhetoric on the part of evangelical Christians online recently, because there's been a like, there are influencers who are like, Islam is the next mountain that we're going to conquer. We and so there is a an intentional and a concerted effort to turn everyone's sights on Islam. So there's going to be a lot, a lot of Islamophobic crap on the internet. But

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Push, push back against that, folks.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and especially if people are using like Sam Harris post 2011 Islamophobic pseudo scholarship. That's, that stuff's no good. But you know, you have like Ali Beth Stuckey coming out and saying, literally 99% of the world's terrorism is rooted in Islam. It's a, it's a uniquely and inherently violent religion. It's like, you've got more violent passages in the Bible than you do in the Quran.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  And they'll be like, well, obviously Jesus, you know, said this, that, and the other. And it's like, okay, that doesn't make those passages go away.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  That is just you renegotiating what you think the Bible is telling you. And guess what? People do the same thing with the Quran.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Which is why you have-

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Do you want us to find messages of peace and love in the Quran? Cause we can find them.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  They're there.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and they'll be like, no, no, they have to interpret it this way. And it's like, well, nobody, you, you don't think you have to interpret the Bible that way. Uh, everybody's going to engage with their texts in, in ways that make them meaningful and useful. And unfortunately, there are a lot of societies right now that don't have a lot of political stability, where the state is not considered to be legitimate, where there is a lot of ethnic conflict and stuff like that. And so if people find meaning in the more violent parts of the texts, and decide they're going to go out and do something desperate in order to try to save their people or their nation or whatever, that's gonna happen, just like it does when Christians are in those-

• 57:41Speaker 01

  To consolidate control and do, and, and, uh, you know, and, and gain power. That's also, but I mean, it, it's so funny to hear all this talk about, you know, Islam is the terrorist or, uh, religion, when the majority of terrorist acts that happen in the United States are done by Christians. Now that's just, I mean, you know, Christians are the vast-

• 58:06Speaker 00

  White supremacists too.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Christians are the vast majority here. And right now, Christianity, you know, evangelical Christianity is getting radicalized in ways that we, we've never seen really. Uh, but, but yeah, I mean- If, if we're gonna judge a religion by what the extremists in that religion do, I, I don't think Christianity comes out smelling very good.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  No, no, obviously not. And, and all the, all the folks who have like Crusader armor in their, their profile pictures and stuff like that, like you're kinda undermining your own case there.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Right?

• 58:44Speaker 00

  By talking about the Crusades.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  With his Crusade cross tattooed on his arm or whatever.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Which is like, that's the Jerusalem cross. And if you go to Jerusalem, they're all over the place. And, and in Jerusalem, like it has a very different significance. But for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News talking head, who has almost killed people numerous times because he can't throw an axe accurately and because he does all this goofy frat boy Chad stuff, when he has it, it's not for the, the uses that, that are old and historical.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  It's for right wing identity politics. And, and yeah, if, if you want to find inspiration for violence in your holy book, you can find it.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  I mean, that's.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  It's there.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. We, we see it all over the place. And, and a lot of Christian nationalists are, are trying to do that while also trying to, trying to walk this tight rope or thread this needle, if you like, of, of trying to get biblical authorization for their violence while condemning Koranic authorization for, for other people's violence.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Right. Frequently, frequently using their Bible to, to justify violence against Muslims.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Who, because of their Koranic history of violence. So, no irony there at all.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  It's identity politics all the way down. And the sooner people realize that, the sooner we can actually grow the hell up.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  And, and move on as, as a globe, as, as a world.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Move on from what? Humanity? It feels like this is a, this is a thing that we do.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  We're stuck here for, for a bit.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  This is where we're at.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  It was Psalms 119, by the way. I was off by 10. So I had two thirds of the numbers correct. I just didn't get that second position right. I was.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  All right. Well, on that note, now that we are finally come full circle and we know. Just like Adam Lambert would have liked. Yeah, praise be he. Uh, let's close it off. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. If you would like to become a part of making this show go and show some appreciation for the work that we do, we would love for you to become a patron over on patreon.com slash data over dogma. Is that what it is? I think that's what it is. Uh, you'll find it. You can search us, whatever it is. Um, thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to all of you for tuning in and we'll talk to you again next week. Bye, everybody.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

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