Data Over Dogma
This ain't your pastor's Bible podcast. This is a deep interrogation of the book, and we're bringing receipts. Bible scholar Dr. Dan McClellan and atheist podcaster Dan Beecher team up to discover what the Bible actually says, what it decidedly doesn't say (even if everyone thinks it does), and explore the history of the most popular book of all time.
Episodes
October 5, 2026 • 63 mins
The Daily Mail says the resting place of Noah's Ark has been "100% confirmed" on a hillside in Turkey, so we're lacing up our hiking boots to check the radar scans, the fundraising pitch, and what happened the last time someone drilled into this very same formation (spoiler: bedrock).
Then, what exactly is a messiah? Long before the word meant one savior at the end of the world, it just meant someone who'd had oil poured on their...
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September 28, 2026 • 61 mins
Open an English Bible and you'll mostly see "God" and "Lord," but underneath is a whole divine vocabulary: El, Eloah, Elohim, the tetragrammaton, and a few choice insults, including gillulim, which likely comes from a word for dung (shit gods, basically). First, we sort out which plural belongs to which singular (spoiler: Elohim isn't the plural of El), why Deuteronomy uses Elohim more than any other book, and how the Shema's "your...
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September 21, 2026 • 61 mins
This week, Paul finally gets his day in court — several of them, actually, and he spends nearly all of them in custody.
We're going chapter and verse through Acts 23 to 26, where Paul lobs the word "resurrection" into a room full of Pharisees and Sadducees like a rhetorical grenade, forty-plus men swear off food and drink until they can kill him, and one well-timed nephew sets off a midnight cavalry escort to Caesarea.
Th...
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September 14, 2026 • 54 mins
This week we're taking issue with a Vice President!
JD Vance recently sat down with a very young podcaster to discuss his lifelong fascination with end-times prophecy, his suspicion that the Antichrist may already be walking among us, and his willingness to shrug if doing "God's work" happens to bring on the eschaton — so, after being fairly fair to him, we're looking at what his newly adopted church actually teaches about ...
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September 7, 2026 • 58 mins
This week, we're taking issue with Mark Driscoll, who recently explained that a wife is a garden, a husband is the gardener, and — out loud, on purpose — that the finished result is "beautiful property."
We dig into where that idea actually comes from: 1 Corinthians 11, the bride-price laws of Deuteronomy 22, ezer kenegdo, and an ancient world where a woman's social identity (and her virginity) belonged to whichever m...
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August 31, 2026 • 64 mins
In three days, the earth opens up and swallows a household whole, fire consumes 250 men, and a plague takes 14,700 more — and then the very next chapter expects us to be impressed by a dead stick growing flowers.
This week we're going chapter and verse with Numbers 16, where a rebellion that names four ringleaders forgets one of them entirely by verse two, can't keep straight which of the rest are actually standing there, a...
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August 24, 2026 • 59 mins
Get your mind out of the gutter — this week it's Aaron's rod, the staff that sprouted buds, blossoms, and ripe almonds overnight to settle once and for all who was in charge. But the text is oddly insistent that it sat in FRONT of the ark rather than inside it, which raises a fascinating possibility: was this flowering stick in the holy of holies an Asherah pole that the priestly writers needed to explain away — and did...
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August 17, 2026 • 62 mins
In 1929, a farmer in French-occupied Syria hit a rock with his plow and accidentally uncovered the lost city of Ugarit — and with it, a library of Bronze Age tablets that has been quietly reshaping how scholars read the Hebrew Bible ever since.
This week, we're diving into the Baal Cycle: an elderly patriarchal high god named El, a youthful storm-riding warrior who fights the chaotic sea (and then, memorably, drinks him), a...
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August 10, 2026 • 63 mins
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 Bib...
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August 3, 2026 • 69 mins
There isn't a single surviving original manuscript for any book of the Bible, so how do scholars decide what the earliest recoverable text actually said?
This week, it's a primer on textual criticism: why King James onlyists despise it (despite the KJV being a product of it), what Erasmus did when he ran out of Greek manuscripts for the last chapter of Revelation, and how one scribe's wandering eye can quietly delete an entire par...
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July 27, 2026 • 60 mins
This week it's a "What's That?" double feature!
First, we take on the Great Commission. Does Matthew 28 really command every believer to accost strangers on airplanes and by the baggage carousel, or is "make disciples" a whole lot narrower (and quieter) than the modern evangelists think?
Then it's time for Data After Dark, where we ask whether the
Bible has anything at all to say about masturbation. Spoiler: Onan isn't your
g...
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July 20, 2026 • 59 mins
This week, Christian nationalist Joel Webbin says the quiet
part out loud: lie to voters about your theocratic goals until you've got the
power to enact them. It's grotesque and profoundly un-American — but is
deception, weirdly, the one piece of the playbook that's actually biblical?
Then we wrestle with the baffling parable of the wedding
banquet, where a king burns a city, fills the hall with strangers, and casts
one gue...
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July 13, 2026 • 63 mins
This week we're taking on the thought-stopping cliché to end all thought-stopping clichés: "trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding." Is "reading with the Holy Spirit" a special line to God that us dirty scholars just can't access, or is it John Lennox's red Ferrari parked right next to an invisible dragon nobody else can see?
Then we wade into the online cottage industry of "secret" Hebrew letter codes—th...
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July 6, 2026 • 66 mins
This week we crack open the Epistle of James — a letter that may claim to come from none other than James the brother of Jesus — and wade into one of Christianity's oldest arguments: faith versus works. Does James contradict Paul on how a person is saved, and is that why Martin Luther dismissed the whole book as an "epistle of straw"?
Then we go monster hunting for Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth, the primordial chaos ...
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June 29, 2026 • 59 mins
This week the Dans try to count to twelve — and find that the number matters a lot more than the names. We dig into the twelve tribes of Israel: how Levi quietly drops out and Joseph splits into Ephraim and Manasseh to keep the total at twelve, why the Song of Deborah seems to remember only ten tribes (some with different names), and what it means that "Israel" may have begun as a confederation rather than one man's family tr...
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June 22, 2026 • 60 mins
Senator Mike Lee keeps accusing his opponents of sacrificing children to Moloch, so this week we ask who — or what — Moloch actually was, why abortion and child sacrifice are not the same thing, and the uncomfortable places child sacrifice really does turn up in the Hebrew Bible. Then, after the Pentagon quietly declined to list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian, we dig into the bigger questio...
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June 15, 2026 • 63 mins
The sins of the fathers! It's a phrase you've heard a thousand times, but did you know it comes straight from the Bible? This week it's Bible versus Bible, and the topic is generational punishment: God visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generation. It's in the Ten Commandments. And the other Ten Commandments. So what did those poor great-grandkids do to deserve it? And how do you square t...
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June 8, 2026 • 63 mins
What happens when you're raised to be a militant Christian nationalist Supreme Court justice, but you decide to actually study church history instead?
This week, we are thrilled to welcome social media powerhouse, educator, and musician Monte Mader to the show! You probably know her from her viral videos expertly dismantling Christian nationalist talking points, but her story starts far from the internet spotlight.
Monte shares...
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June 1, 2026 • 67 mins
Most parents think their kids are pretty great. That makes sense. But if your son is the messianic savior of the world, the bragging rights are kind of through the roof. And that's what we get in Hebrews 1. The claim here is that God told the prophets about Jesus, and now all those awesome prophesies have come true.
And Hebrews 1 seems to be bringing receipts. It quotes from all over the Hebrew Bible to point to Jesus being the ...
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May 25, 2026 • 71 mins
Beloved novelist Clive Staples Lewis (Jack to his friends)(?) went through an atheist phase in his life. But that didn't last, and when he came back to Christianity, he came back HARD! Everyone who knows his work beyond life in a wardrobe is well aware of his obsession with the Bible and Christianity.
But though he was an academic, Lewis was careful to remind people he was not a Bible scholar. He relied on the scholarship of ot...
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