Data Over Dogma: A Guest Post by Dan McClellan

I didn’t grow up reading the Bible or learning about early Judaism or Christianity, but when I was twenty years old, I was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and left a year later to serve a two-year proselytizing mission in Uruguay. In addition to learning Castellano, I read the entire Bible multiple times and spent every single day talking to people across the spectrum of belief and non-belief about the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and early Judaism and Christianity. During that time, I fell in love with reading the New Testament, and particularly the Gospels. I was fascinated by the languages, the cultures, and the history (or lack thereof) behind these stories. As I contemplated what I would try to do with my life once I returned home to the States, making a living out of studying the Bible seemed like it would be about the coolest thing in the world.

It turned out trying to get back into college after already being kicked out of one university with a 0.29 GPA was easier said than done. It took me quite some time to work my way back into the good graces of higher education, but after gathering up the requisite number of credits—and a massage therapy degree for good measure—I managed to transfer into an ancient Near Eastern studies program at Brigham Young University, which then led to master’s degrees at the University of Oxford and Trinity Western University, and finally a PhD with the University of Exeter.

Because I had not been raised or conditioned to think in particularly dogmatic ways about the Bible and about early Judaism and Christianity, I was really a sponge in these programs, trying to learn all I could without worrying about how to reconcile things with my theological or ecclesiastical commitments. I wanted to produce scholarship that had significance beyond the boundaries of my own faith community and its social and theological parochialism.

It turns out such worries can be rather common among graduate students in biblical studies, particularly if they come from conservative undergraduate programs. I recall long and impassioned discussions with other graduate students about how wide the gulf was that separated the way the Bible was understood and discussed in more public and devotional spaces from the way it was understood and discussed in more strictly academic spaces. Rather than shy away from the latter, however, these students were more concerned with how to share what we had the privilege of learning with a wider audience—how to bridge that gulf and help folks in the pews and on the street understand the Bible in more informed and critical ways. 

As the Bible becomes more and more salient in public discourse and even within the halls of power, bridging that gulf seems to me to be a growing imperative. This is a big part of the reason I began posting content on social media that confronted misinformation about the Bible and religion, and it’s also a big part of the reason I wrote The Bible Says So. The Bible is a fascinating and a profound collection of texts, and it only becomes more fascinating and more profound as we seek to understand it on its own terms, rather than subordinate it to whatever theological or social terms we bring to it. For me, that’s what it means to put data over dogma.