The Bible Says So

Dr. Dan McClellan is a scholar of religion with an education in Biblical Hebrew and Greek, among other things. In this book, he challenges some assumptions roaming our collective discourse about what the Bible supposedly says. We learn about what Biblical authors thought about hot-button issues of their day and today, such as monotheism, hell, abortion, slavery, homosexuality, any many more. In general, there is two kinds of myths McClellan takes on in this book.

The first, modern Christian readers of the Bible would like the Bible to have clear opinions on the culture war hot points of our day, such as abortion and eternal damnation to hell. McClellan investigates these claims according to what we have been able to reconstruct about the beliefs and rhetorical goals of the individual Biblical authors. For example, he finds that abortion is not unambiguously condemned in the Biblical text and talks about how abortion became such a divisive subject in the modern day as a means to structure political power into the Christian Right of today.

He also talks about the history of the conceptualization of divine punishment, which slowly over time shifted from punishment in life to punishment after death, as ancient Jewish and Christian people sought to explain how their persecutors clearly went unpunished in life.

The second myth he investigates is, when the Bible clearly endorses behaviors that are today considered evil, such as slavery and genocide. He speaks out against people trying to ignore the plain reading of the text that describes slavery as good and natural. He entirely dispels the myth that God somehow laid the "seeds" to the abolition of slavery over 2000 years before it actually happened.

The main thesis of his book is, then, that it is wrong to understand the Bible in terms of the dogmas of inerrancy, inspiration and univocality (the belief that the entire Bible was written in a non-contradicting way and speaks with a unified voice). We learn, among other things, how king Josiah's program of cult centralization formed the foundation of what was much later combined under the conceptional package of monotheism. We also learn that Paul's sexual ethics mostly consist of that people should be celibate like him.

The lesson is that what we find in the Biblical text isn't independent from the circumstances of the people who wrote it. There is no Biblical author, there are only Biblical authors, plural, and they wrote in many different time periods to achieve different rhetorical goals. Thus, anybody who wants to wield the authority of the Bible as a bludgeon to win a moral argument today has to ignore parts in favor of highlighting other parts - they have to negotiate with the text.

Throughout his book, McClellan clearly condemns using the Bible and its horrifically outdated ideas about sexual morality and other things as a way to asset power and ruin the lives of marginalized people today. While we might find inspiration on some of the betters parts today, reading the Bible teaches us one thing and one thing only: how the individual authors of the Bible thought about issues back in their day. And while that is incredibly fascinating, those views are entirely irrelevant today.