Biblical scholar Dan McClellan invites readers to reconsider the idea that the Bible speaks for itself in his new book, The Bible Says So. Driven by a love for the ancient text, McClellan works to make scholarship more accessible, both through his writing and his “data over dogma” approach on social media. In this interview, he explains why the Bible’s meaning depends on interpretation, how authority is understood, and how readers sometimes bring their own assumptions to the text.
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How does love for the Bible shape your scholarship?
The first thing it does is motivate my scholarship. There’s always more to learn about the Bible, where it came from, and how it has been and can be interpreted and rhetorically deployed. I find all of that endlessly fascinating.
I think my love for the Bible also generates concern for the way it is represented in public discourse and the way it has been and can be weaponized by those wielding it. Despite all the good I think it has contributed, it has also been a source of untold suffering and harm, and I think we need to be open and honest about the parts of the Bible that are hateful and harmful, rather than try to rehabilitate them through reinterpretation.
I want to see it represented for what it is—good, bad, and everything in between.
What are your credentials as a biblical scholar?
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, a master’s degree in Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford, a second master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University, and a PhD in Theology and Religion from the University of Exeter.
What does it mean to put “data over dogma”?
“Data over dogma” has always been an aspirational motto of mine. It means I will always try to represent views and positions that prioritize data and a data-based approach to interpretation over those that one might hold due to authority, membership in a specific group, or other rhetorical goals.
Why do some resist the idea that the Bible doesn’t speak for itself?
It’s a position that directly conflicts with the more intuitive ways we have always thought and communicated about speech and reading.
We’re always going to be protective of our closely held intuitions, so a position that directly contradicts one of them will be perceived as at least unworthy of serious consideration—and at most a direct threat to our sense of self.
As a result, unless someone is motivated to invest the cognitive effort into thinking critically about the evidence for the position and risking the potential abandonment of those intuitions, they will be motivated to reject the position.
Why do inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality still shape how people view the Bible?
These ideas persist primarily because they endow the scriptures with supernatural authority, allowing the curators of the scriptural tradition and its interpretation to leverage that authority in ways that serve their interests.
These principles were not arrived at inductively. Rather, they were developed over time as groups and their thought leaders contemplated ways to think about the nature and role of scripture.
Univocality is particularly useful because it means every last verse of the Bible has to agree. This allows you to leverage texts you agree with to overrule texts you don’t.
However, it also allows you to argue that there are answers for scenarios and circumstances that were never dreamed of by any of the biblical authors.
That’s because passages can be combined and configured in all kinds of different ways to arrive at new readings that can then be asserted to have been there all along.
What’s wrong with cherry-picking the Bible?
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with cherry-picking the Bible since it’s inevitable. Because the Bible is not univocal, if we want to derive principles to live by, we must negotiate with the text.
However, I think it can be wrong to do so without knowing or acknowledging that’s what you’re doing. Cherry-picking scripture in this way is almost always done to structure power by trying to leverage the transcendent authority of the Bible over and against others who would read it a different way.
When those “others” are minoritized, marginalized, or oppressed groups, I think that’s particularly harmful and wrong. If we’re acknowledging that we’re negotiating with the Bible, however, and we’re trying to structure power over and against vulnerable groups, I think that can be perfectly fine.
What does the Bible say about hell?
The Hebrew Bible doesn’t really talk about hell, since for early Israelite, Judahite, and Judean worldviews, all of the dead—good, bad, and everything in between—went to the same place after death: Sheol, the abode of the dead.
This was a murky and not clearly defined existence, mostly thought to be located in the underworld. But it wasn’t really a place of reward or punishment. It was just a place nobody really looked forward to.
A concept more closely related to what we understand as hell begins to develop in the traditions created during the Greco-Roman period Judaism, particularly the traditions associated with 1 Enoch.
Postmortem divine reward and punishment seemed to have developed to account for the observation that good people who suffered greatly in life often died without any sense of divine reward, and wicked people who caused great suffering often died without any sense of divine punishment.
In early Judaism and the New Testament, we see three broad concepts of postmortem divine punishment:
- Annihilationism, or the idea that the wicked just ceased to exist.
- Temporary conscious torment followed by either annihilation or salvation.
- Eternal conscious torment.
It wouldn’t be until after the New Testament that the last one (eternal conscious torment) became the authoritative conceptualization of hell.
Does the Bible condemn homosexuality the way many claim?
The Bible certainly condemns same-sex intercourse in a couple of different ways and places. Still, it never addresses homosexuality as a reference to a sexual orientation—at least not in any way remotely approximating how we understand sexual orientations today, a framework that has only been developing since the 19th century.
In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, male same-sex intercourse seems to be prohibited, but the passages expressly prohibit the man who takes the insertive role.
There are probably two reasons for that.
The agency of the man who takes the receptive role isn’t really considered, and there are probably two reasons for that.
First, sex in the ancient world wasn’t an activity mutually engaged in by two equal and consenting partners. It was something that an active sexual agent did to a passive sexual object. The agency and consent of the “sexual object” weren’t really relevant.
Second, while in the ancient world, they could conceive of a reason why a man might want to sexually penetrate another body, even if it weren’t a woman’s, they couldn’t really conceive of a reason a man might want to take the receptive role.
That was usually rationalized either as some kind of “feminizing” pathology or as the victimization of whoever was in the receptive role. They certainly didn’t have a concept of a “versatile” role in male same-sex intercourse.
They also seem to explain the harm of these acts as the production of some metaphysical contamination that could pollute the land, resulting in the expulsion of the people (the land “vomiting out” the people) if that contamination became too acute. The execution of both parties seems to be the act they understood to purge the land of that contamination most effectively.
In the New Testament, and specifically Romans 1, Paul seems to understand same-sex intercourse on the part of men and women as an aberration that is only found among Gentile groups because they refuse to properly acknowledge and worship God, who then removes the restraints that are naturally placed on human sexual desire, allowing Gentile sexual activity to run amuck.
Jewish folks are not subjected to that unrestrained sexual desire because they properly worship God. As with the rationalizations in Leviticus, Paul’s sexual ethic derives from socially conventionalized hierarchies of domination and penetration, and isn’t remotely relevant to—much less authoritative over—our understanding today of human sexuality or same-sex orientations.
What’s an example where the Bible presents two conflicting perspectives?
One example is whether or not God can lie. Passages like Numbers 23:19 rather conclusively assert that “God is not a human being that he should lie, nor a mortal that he should change his mind.” And yet, we find several instances in the Hebrew Bible where God deceives humans to achieve a divine purpose.
In 1 Kings 22, for instance, the Israelite king Ahab seeks to determine whether he should engage in battle at Ramoth-gilead. His court prophets tell him YHWH will give him victory, but the Judahite king Jehoshaphat wants a second opinion, so they call in Micaiah, whom Ahad doesn’t like, because he never prophesies good things for the king.
The story is pretty clearly narrating God’s use of a lie.
Initially, Micaiah agrees with the court prophets, but when Ahad presses him, he suggests that Ahab will be killed if he goes to battle. Then, he reports a vision in which he says he saw the whole host of heaven around the divine throne and heard God call for a volunteer who could entice Ahab to his death.
The Spirit of God comes forth and offers to be a lying spirit in the mouths of Ahab’s court prophets so that he will be enticed to battle and be killed. God authorizes the deception on the part of the very Spirit of God itself, and Ahab goes up to battle and is killed.
There have been a lot of attempts on the part of apologists to try to weasel out of acknowledging God used deception to kill someone, but the story is pretty clearly narrating God’s use of a lie to deceive the king to his death.
What’s the most harmful way the Bible is misused today?
I think the most harmful way the Bible is misused today is as authorization for genocide, war, and nationalism.
That results in just untold suffering and death, but even more commonly, it is used as authorization for the dehumanization, marginalization, and oppression of vulnerable groups, whether because of their race, religion, or sexual identity or orientation.
Some lawmakers argue that the Bible should influence public policy. What’s the biggest problem with that?
I would suggest the biggest problem—at least in the United States—is that it is flatly precluded by our nation’s founding principles and the refinement of those principles since our founding.
More broadly, though, the Bible is full of hateful, harmful, and immoral policies that are relics of long-abandoned worldviews that have no business being resurrected.
It becomes a divine rubber stamp for whoever happens to be in power.
Additionally, because the Bible is not univocal and only has meaning to the degree we negotiate meaning with it, it can be made to serve whatever rhetorical goals are held by the authorities, leveraging it to shape that policy.
In that sense, it becomes merely a divine rubber stamp for the identity politics of whoever happens to be in power.
You warn that biblical interpretation is often about power, not truth. What’s the biggest example of that today?
I would point to Speaker Mike Johnson’s insistence around the time he was confirmed as Speaker of the House that if you want to know his worldview on any given issue, open the Bible and read.
That’s profoundly disingenuous, since the Bible endorses genocide, slavery, sexual violence, polygamy, and all kinds of other practices that Speaker Johnson would—and has—vehemently rejected.
Still, it is also a demonstration that subjugation to the Bible is an identity marker that is being leveraged right now in the service of Christian nationalist attempts to structure power and values.
Because the Bible can “mean” whatever someone needs it to mean, Speaker Johnson and others like him aren’t really subordinating their own needs and interests to any clear and consistent message from the Bible—they’re leveraging the Bible as divine authorization precisely of their own needs and interests, which are nationalistic, ethnocentric, racist, sexist, and phenomenally dangerous.
If readers remember just one thing from The Bible Says So, what should it be?
I would say that I want readers to acknowledge that the Bible has no inherent meaning, and that any meaning we derive from it is the result of our negotiations with it.
If we’re not approaching that process of negotiation consciously and critically, we’re just going to end up reading our identity politics in the Bible and then imagining that God has endorsed and authorized those identity politics.
That process has long been the source of an awful lot of suffering and even death in the world.
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About the Interview Participant
Daniel O. McClellan is a Latter-day Saint scholar of the Bible and ancient religion. He holds masters’ degrees in Jewish Studies (University of Oxford) and Biblical Studies (Trinity Western University) and a PhD in Theology and Religion from the University of Exeter. A former scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, McClellan now combats Biblical misinformation using a “data over dogma” approach on podcasts and social media outlets like TikTok and YouTube. In 2025, he published The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues.
Further Reading
- What Does It Mean to Be Anointed in the Bible?
- Were the Pharisees Bad People?
- Who Was Mary Magdalene?
- How Did Apostles Die?
- How Do Latter-day Saints Approach Biblical Theology?
Dan McClellan Religion Resources
- The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin’s Essentials)
- Data Over Dogma (Podcast)
- YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach (Society of Biblical Literature)
- Why We Can’t Cherry-Pick the Bible—A Conversation with Dan McClellan (Faith Matters)
- Biblical Scholar Dan McCLellan Fights Misinformation About the Bible on Social Media (Texas Public Radio)
2 replies on ““The Bible Says So”: An Interview with Dan McClellan”
The Bible can be a source if inspiration, it can be a source source of learning. Most importantly it requires the reader to think about what it is what they are reading and what they can gain from the Bible.
This was great, thanks for sharing! I’ve enjoying learning more about the Bible through Dan the past 9-12 months and I’ve come away realizing that the Bible/God will never be proven nor disproven, so I now make more of an effort to build a spiritual relationship with the Bible and scriptures to help shape what I personally believe, instead of merely believing because the Bible says so