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
April 21, 2025 • 56 mins
The way many people talk about immigration in the United States, you'd assume that it was an apocalyptic event. And actually, many of the most extreme voices in our society are literally saying as much. But this is not the first time American immigration has been linked to Biblical apocalypse.
This week, we're bringing in Dr. Yii-Jan Lin, whose new book Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigr...
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April 14, 2025 • 60 mins
It's a sin so egregious that Christians weren't allowed to do it, BY LAW, for centuries! But now? Totally fine. Everybody participates. No big deal at all!
The next time you meet a Bible literalist who is certain that you have to follow the laws of the Bible to the letter, but who is also pretty excited about capitalism, ask them about usury, and watch them fall all over themselves to pretend like it's fine. Because MAN, the Bibl...
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April 7, 2025 • 65 mins
Anybody want to take a long walk in the desert? Well, this week we've brought in Angela Roskop Erisman to guide us through the wilderness! In her new book, The Wilderness Narratives: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation, Dr Erisman discusses the exodus as you may not have heard it discussed before.
Far from being the actual writings of a literal Moses, Dr Erisman uses genre analysis to propose a far more allegorical exp...
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March 31, 2025 • 66 mins
This week, we don't want to make it bad, so we're going to take a sad song and make it better. The book of Jude may only be one chapter, but it's jam-packed with stuff for this show to talk about. Who wrote it, and when? Who was it written to? What grumblers is it mad about? We'll attempt to answer all these questions and more.
Then, speaking of grumblers, we have some of our own to deal with! Whenever Dr. Dan says that the Bible ...
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March 24, 2025 • 71 mins
This week we welcome "deep skeptic" pastor Jeremy Steele to the show. Jeremy has spent recent years building an online congregation of people who don't feel seen or understood by the traditional church. He's here to tell us about life as a pastor, how he gathered his flock, and why people who are deconstructing the theologies they were raised with might still need a community like his.
You can find Jeremy on TikTok here:
https://w...
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March 17, 2025 • 58 mins
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big fight! In the red corner: personal finance guru and guy who makes millions by making poorer people feel bad about their debt, Dave "how's your retirement fund looking?" Ramsey. And in the blue corner: with a much lighter pocketbook but much heavier t-shirt collection, Dan "alright let's see it" McClellan.
What could a Bible scholarship show possibly have to say about a personal finance guy...
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March 10, 2025 • 64 mins
Christians have had a missionary zeal since the beginning. From the dawn of Christianity, the mandate to share the "good news" has been a central theme of Christian life. But what is a Christian to do when it is clear that the audience they want to share the gospel with would react poorly to much of what's in the Bible? Well, at least in one case, the solution was just redact the heck out of it.
On this week's show, we're talking ...
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March 3, 2025 • 62 mins
Come celebrate round numbers with us as we embark on our 100th episode of Data Over Dogma! And what, you might ask, are we doing to mark this grand event? Have we carefully crafted a clips show looking back on the best moments of the last 100 weeks? Have we mindfully chosen topics that relate to the number 100? Well, no. No we haven't. It's just a regular show. Sorry.
That said, it's an interesting one! First, we're covering a ver...
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February 24, 2025 • 63 mins
If you think you had it rough living in your sibling's shadow, just imagine how James, the brother of Jesus must've felt! Well, today James gets his due. We'll discuss who he was, what he did, and what it might mean theologically, that Jesus wasn't an only child.
Then, if you listened to this show for more than a few episodes, you're likely to have heard Dan McClellan mention "the Masoretic text". Well... what the heck is that? Ne...
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February 17, 2025 • 60 mins
Jesus went to hell! Briefly. He gave the place a look-see after he died, and then left to go be resurrected. Or at least that's the claim that some theologies make.
Where did the idea that Jesus visited hell come from? Is it Biblical? I mean, it would have to be, wouldn't it? People wouldn't just make up something like that long after the Bible had been written just because, right? Right?
And speaking of hell, not every part of ...
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February 10, 2025 • 61 mins
Would you be mine, could you be mine, won't you be my neighbor? If you know that song, then you know that at least one person understood Jesus' answer to the lawyer. Far fewer seem to now. But that's in the second half of our show!
First, we're exploring some imaginative pretending that would almost be cute if so many people hadn't taken it seriously. It's the amazing amateur (read: fake) archeology of Ron Wyatt. We've encountered...
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February 3, 2025 • 57 mins
This week we're talking government on the Data Over Dogma show, and woof! It's a doozy!
First, we're going into the belly of the beast and talking to and actual, honest-to-goodness United States congressperson. Eric Swalwell has a D next to his name, which, if you ask some in our country, means he's a godless communist. In fact, he's a professed Christian who is nevertheless concerned about the dangerous rise of Christian National...
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January 27, 2025 • 58 mins
"Hey- it sure is raining a lot, do you have a boat?" "No, but I *Noah* guy."
That's right, on this week's episode of Data Over Dogma, we're going diluvian all up in here. It's the story of Noah and the great... vinyard? Here's the twist: It seems that the account of Noah we get in our version of Genesis may not be exactly what we were told it was!
Then, call Richard Wagner, because we're talking about the power of a strong horns...
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January 20, 2025 • 63 mins
Sometimes on this show, big ten-dollar words show up like apotropaic or etiology or deuterocanonical, where, unless you're pretty well-versed in this stuff, you may not know what we're talking about (ok fine- you may not know what Dan M is talking about). This week we're tackling two ten-dollar concepts in one show, so buckle in and bust out twenty bucks!
First, we're diving into Gnosticism. We've glanced off this topic several ti...
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January 13, 2025 • 70 mins
Better get a lawyer, because Data Over Dogma is getting all kinds of legalistic! There are many who claim that all modern law has a direct lineage back to biblical law. This week, we're going to show several reasons why that probably isn't the case, not the least of which being that biblical law... it's really bad.
We'll start by talking about the covenant code. This is the set of laws laid out in Exodus that were meant to govern ...
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January 6, 2025 • 63 mins
Genesis has no shortage of confusing, misleading, and bizarre stories, but this week we're tackling two separate stories that share a particularly ugly history. First, we tell a story in third person. Or rather, a story about the third person. It's Adam and Eve's firstborn, Cain, who killed his brother and was cursed by God. But God also gave him a mark of protection- something on his person that everyone could see, and would ensur...
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December 30, 2024 • 64 mins
When you hear the phrase "Christian Nationalism," what do you think of? A harmful set of ideologies that threaten democracy? A buzzword phrase used by bad people to demonize good Christians?
April Ajoy has had a journey of conscience from being a full-throated Christian Nationalist to someone fighting against the damage she now sees in that set of dogmas. The real trick of it was that at the time, she didn't know that phrase, or wh...
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December 23, 2024 • 66 mins
Did NASA confirm the date of the birth of Christ? Are most translations of the Bible wrong about the order of the creation? Will Dan M ever be able to say the word smorgasbord?
This week on the Data Over Dogma show, we're honoring the Bible by shredding some bad apologetics! As we say every week on the show, one of our goals is to combat misinformation. Sometimes that means that we combat bad attempts to refute the Bible, and somet...
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December 16, 2024 • 56 mins
Does the Bible really say that parents should beat their children? Yes. Yes it does. AH! But couldn't that verse in Proverbs mean something else? Something a little less abuse-y? Something about a shepherd guiding their sheep? On this week's episode, we'll look at what the author of Proverbs REALLY meant when they said that a parent who spares the rod hates their child.
Then, what is Satan's job? Is it to enact the eternal torment ...
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December 9, 2024 • 60 mins
When you think cults, chances are you're imagining a documentary series you streamed recently where a shockingly non-dynamic person has somehow managed to convince a group of reasonably intelligent followers that they are the smartest person in the world, and now controls their lives in terrifying ways. So when we talk about "cult centralization," you could be forgiven for not immediately understanding what we're talking about. But...
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