Show Notes
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 paragraph from Samuel.
Then it's chapter and verse on Zephaniah — three short chapters of unrelenting doom that promise to sweep humans, animals, birds, and fish off the face of the earth, before pivoting rather abruptly to "sing aloud, O daughter Zion."
Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:
https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma
Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store:
https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/
Watch every episode on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma
Follow us:
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod
TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod
Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod
X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod
Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So:
https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Data Over Dogma
In the beginning was the Word, but what if the Word was Wisdom all along?
It's the most spookiest time of the year, so we're debuting a brand-new segment: Hexegesis!
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).
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 God" quietly assumes other gods are out there.
This week, Paul finally gets his day in court — several of them, actually, and he spends nearly all of them in custody.