66 Books, 40 Authors, Zero Contradictions?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Dan McClellan (0:44)

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?

Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:00)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:01)

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?

Dan Beecher (1:13)

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

Dan McClellan (1:16)

I almost got it wrong.

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

Dan Beecher (1:25)

But we're back in the back in the saddle and ready to rock and roll. And I'm excited. We got a couple of fun topics that we're going to get into. We're going to do it 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 to 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. Yeah, this is the idea that 66 books written by 40 different people.

Anyway, it's a whole big thing. Yeah, we'll get into it when we do the thing. But yeah, it's a big claim and 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.

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

Okay, so the thing we're taking issue with, I'll just read the whole thing.

This is a quote or a partial quote from something that was posted on a thread of mine. So it came into my backyard, but I've seen it a lot on social media and everywhere.

Dan McClellan (3:12)

You know how nimby you can get.

Dan Beecher (3:14)

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.

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

Dan McClellan (3:45)

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

Dan Beecher (3:51)

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 had 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. I, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how there's only one canon of the Bible.

Dan McClellan (4:39)

Yeah, 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 preferences more than anything else. And they're preferences of different groups of different sizes. So, 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 if you went back to the King James Version, or even Martin Luther, they might say different numbers.