How Lady Wisdom Became Flesh with Dustin Smith

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Dustin Smith (1:17)

They don't get it. I joke with the students. That's why they're called the disciples. They just don't get it sometimes.

SPEAKER_1 (1:21)

Okay?

Dustin Smith (1:22)

You can steal that.

SPEAKER_1 (1:29)

Hey, everybody.

Dan McClellan (1:30)

I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:31)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:32)

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. And in a shocking twist of events, we've got a good one for you all today.

Dan Beecher (1:48)

Who's ever heard of that?

Dan McClellan (1:51)

We have a guest with us today. This is a friend of mine named Dustin Smith. Welcome to Data Over Dogma, Dustin. Thank you for being here.

Dustin Smith (2:00)

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dan McClellan (2:02)

We really appreciate your time. And Dustin is Scholar of New Testament at Spartanburg Methodist College in South Carolina, and probably Spartanburg South Carolina. And Dustin is also the host of the Biblical Unitarian Podcast, which as we discussed in our pre-game, our exclusive content that we do for members of our Patreon, was featured in an episode discussing a straw poll I took at a conference that Dustin and I attended together in Rome. So, good times. If you want to hear about that story, you can go over to Patreon and check that out.

Dan Beecher (2:42)

Yeah, Dan really raked the muck over there in Rome, so you'll want to hear that story because that was actually a really fun one.

Dan McClellan (2:53)

Yeah, and I was gonna say, I should bring up this interesting little fact.

Unitarianism is a fascinating tradition. When I was doing research for a paper, I've got a couple of papers on this actually. In fact, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, I have the entry on monotheism in that, and I discussed this in there as well. When dictionaries first started including entries for the word monotheism, they started in the early 1700s, and between the early 1700s and Webster's in 1828, every last dictionary that had an entry for the word monotheism defined it as the doctrine of the Unitarians. And the idea that it means belief in only one God is not in any dictionary until 1828, when they, I guess they were just like, we're done with the Unitarian thing, it's time to move on. We're doing this now.

Dan Beecher (3:50)

To be clear, because I'm the guy that has to translate for us less in the know, folks. Unitarianism in this case does not mean Unitarian Universalism. It's not just the nice people who won't say the name of Jesus when they're doing their Christmas hymns or whatever. It's Unitarian.

Dan McClellan (4:13)

Why don't we let the host of the Biblical Unitarian Podcast explain to us what the word we can't pronounce actually means.

Dustin Smith (4:21)

Yeah. So Unitarianism is just the belief that the God of Israel is only one person, the father alone, in the same way that you, Dan, are only one person and you, Dan, you're only one person and I'm only one person. So the idea is that the early Christians and the writers of the Hebrew Bible understood the God of Israel to be the father alone and contrast deliberately to Trinitarianism, which teaches that the God of Israel is actually three persons.