Episode 332: Pete Ruins Everything with Dale Allison
In this week’s episode of Pete Ruins Everything, Pete talks with Dale Allison about the strengths and limits of biblical scholarship. They explore what historical research can and cannot tell us about Jesus, the Bible, and the ancient world, while reflecting on the value of expertise, intellectual humility, and the challenges of interpreting the past. Together, they discuss why scholars often disagree, how new evidence and perspectives can change long-held conclusions, and why faith and curiosity can coexist with uncertainty. Throughout the conversation, they invite listeners to embrace the complexity of history and theology with honesty, openness, and humility.
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: “Is The Bible Inspired?” with John Poirier
Book: Historical tradition in the fourth gospel by c.h. Dodd
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
-
Pete: What if we got 2 Timothy 3:16 wrong?
Jared: For generations, Christians have built an entire view of the Bible on 2 Timothy 3:16. This verse was proof that Scripture is “God-breathed” and therefore inerrant. But what if that famous translation misses the point?
Jared: Our July class will help answer that question. We’ve invited biblical scholar John Poirier, to teach our July class to look at one word: the word behind “God-Breathed.” Sound boring? It’s not. So mark your calendars for Tuesday, July 28th from 8-9:30pm ET.
Pete: John will look at the ancient Greek context for the word behind “God-breathed” and suggest that it has been mistranslated, and therefore misunderstood, for centuries. Together, we'll trace how this interpretation was lost, why it matters, and how it could reshape one of Christianity’s most important conversations about the Bible.
Jared: Again, the class is taking place on Tuesday, July 28th from 8-9:30pm ET. Go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/inspired to sign up today! As always, the class will be recorded so you can watch it back later if you can’t make it to the live session. The cost is Pay What You Can: 1, 5, 10, 15, or 25 dollars until the class ends.
Or even better, join our online community, the Society of Normal People for $12/month to get all of our classes at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Pete: This is Pete Ruins Everything, where assumptions come to die and nobody leaves happy. I'm Pete Enns.
This is Pete Ruins the News. So I recently watched some clips from the Rededicate 250 event in Washington, and this is part of the run-up to America's 250th birthday in 2026. And speakers included JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth, with a video message from Donald Trump. The basic message was that America needs to be spiritually rededicated to God.
Now, before I say anything else, let me make something clear. I have no objection to people talking about God in public life. I do it all the time. I have no objection to politicians being religious. I have no objection to prayer, faith, or moral conviction shaping how people see the world. What interests me is the theology of it all, because whenever I hear language like America needs to return to God, or America has a special calling, or God has uniquely blessed this nation, my biblical radar starts going off.
And the reason's simple. The Bible actually does know what a covenant nation looks like, and it's ancient Israel. It's not the United States. America has a constitution. Israel had a covenant with God. You can't just swap those out. And one thing I noticed in these speeches is language that sounds very familiar to anyone who has spent time reading the Old Testament, words like blessing or judgment or national destiny, returning to God, special purpose, divine favor.
These are all themes tied to Israel's story. And here's the thing that's really confusing to me. Many conservative Christians are very careful to insist that the church has not replaced Israel. Fair enough. But then they often talk about America as though America has replaced Israel by using the same language.
America becomes the chosen nation. America becomes the people in covenant with God. America becomes the vehicle of God's purposes in history. You know, at some point, it's worth asking whether we're playing fast and loose with the biblical story by trying to swap out one nation for another. And then there's the providence language.
You'll hear people say things like, "God guided America from the beginning." All right, maybe, but how exactly do we know that? Providence is a funny thing. It's, it's one of those things that's very easy to identify after the fact. Every nation can tell a story about divine favor after the fact. That is part of every empire's political rhetoric.
"Look, God chose us." Why do we keep falling for that? Now, here's an interesting point. The biblical writers themselves often disagreed about how to interpret history. They didn't assume military success automatically meant divine approval. They didn't assume national prosperity meant God was smiling on them.
In fact, some of the prophets spent their entire careers telling people that their confidence in God's blessing was precisely the problem. America, are you listening? And then there's the word rededicate. Whenever I hear that word, I get a little bit nervous. I wonder to myself, rededicate ourselves to what exactly?
Which version of America are we trying to make great again? The America with slavery? The America where women couldn't vote? The America where Catholics were viewed with suspicion? The America where Jews faced quotas and exclusion? The appeal to a golden age is powerful, but the moment you start naming actual periods in American history, things get complicated quick.
And maybe that's what strikes me most as a biblical scholar. You see, Paul lived in the center of the most powerful empire on Earth. Yet when I read his letters, I don't see a strategy for reclaiming Rome for God. I don't see a campaign to restore Rome's covenant relationship with God. I don't see a movement to make Rome officially Christian.
What I see are communities trying to embody faithfulness, justice, generosity, and love within an empire they neither controlled nor expected to control. The earliest Christians weren't trying to save the empire. They were trying to follow Jesus. Now, all of that raises an interesting question. When political leaders and religious leaders gather to talk about America's spiritual future, how much of that actually reflects what Americans themselves want?
Politicians like to tell us what Americans want, but what do they actually want? Now, conveniently, we have some fresh data on that because while one group is talking about rededicating America under God, the Pew Research Center just released a survey asking Americans what they actually think about religion's role in public life, and the results are rather enlightening.
The first one is almost funny. 40% of Americans have never even heard the term Christian nationalism. Now, think about that for a second. If you've spent any time on social media, listening to podcasts, reading religious journalism, or following political debates over the last several years, you would think Christian nationalism is the only thing anyone's talking about.
And I have to admit, I thought that too, but it's not true. Four out of ten Americans are basically saying, "Wait, what? What are you talking about?" That's a useful reminder that people who live online often mistake their own urgent conversations For the country's conversations, we tend to project. Another revealing finding, only 17% of Americans support making Christianity the official religion of the United States.
Now, depending on your perspective, you might think, wow, 17% is a lot, and maybe it is. But the more important number is 83%, because it means that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including many Christians, do not want an officially Christian nation. Apparently, people can value Christianity without wanting some version of it to run the government.
Imagine that. But the statistic that really jumped out at me was this one. Nearly eight in ten Americans believe churches, listen to this, folks, believe churches should not endorse political candidates. That ain't close, folks. Eight out of ten, that's a landslide. It seems many Americans are making a distinction that religious leaders sometimes fail to make.
People may want religion to shape public morality. They may want religious voices in public discussions. They may value faith or spirituality and moral conviction, but that doesn't mean they want churches functioning as political organizations telling you whom God wants to see elected. And I wonder whether churches sometimes underestimate how many people are exhausted by the, the awkward fusion of faith and partisan politics.
And you know, the irony is very hard to miss here. At the very moment some leaders are calling for America to be rededicated to God, most Americans seem to be saying something quite different. They're not asking for less faith. They're asking to stop the blurring of the line between church and state.
They're not saying religion has no place in public life. They're saying churches shouldn't become campaign headquarters. The debate isn't simply whether God belongs in American public life. The deeper question is whether Christianity is most faithful when it seeks influence through political power, or, this is Ryland, where it offers a distinctive and inspiring moral and spiritual vision regardless of who happens to be in power.
And that is what the biblical prophetic tradition lays out for us. The question of faith and political power is one Christians have been wrestling with since the days of the Apostle Paul. But listening to some of these speeches, I'm not sure we're wrestling anymore. It sounds more like we've made up our minds.
But Christians have been down this road before again and again, and every time the church becomes convinced that political power is the key to national spiritual renewal, the result is not renewal. It's triumphalism and manipulation. Now, about today's interview. Dale Allison is one of the most respected New Testament scholars in the world, and my favorite writer of New Testament scholarship.
He's written extensively on things like the historical Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the relationship between history and faith, and the role of mystical experiences in the life of faith. But what I find so refreshing about Dale's work is that he has spent decades thinking carefully about the limits of his own discipline.
What can historical research actually tell us? What questions can it answer? And just as importantly, what questions can it never answer? So I asked Dale to sit down with me to talk about what biblical scholarship can tell us and what it can't. I hope you like it.
Well, first of all, Dale, welcome again back to our little podcast. It's great to have you here.
Dale: Lovely to be back.
Pete: Great. Well, okay, so let's talk about a topic that I've actually been thinking about for a few years, and it probably has to do with social media. And, I'm sure you spend all your time on TikTok and, and all those things, right?
Dale: Uh-huh.
Pete: Yeah. But, there has been a lot of, I would say, animosity is not too strong a word toward academics, and academics just always think they know what they're talking about, and, and we don't have to listen to them. We can read the Bible for ourselves, and it's the demise of expertise, and if somebody says they're an expert, they're clearly not, that kind of thing.
That happens a lot, and, sometimes I just roll my eyes, but other times I think maybe they're onto something, that, maybe they're so used to hearing scholars talk with such great confidence about complex things that maybe they feel a little bit, alienated, and so maybe this is somewhat legitimate.
Dale: So I think maybe, maybe it is to some extent because there's a lot of vanity in the academy, right? But, um- I get lots of emails from people, and in many of these emails I'll be asked a question that takes the form, "What do scholars think about?"
Pete: Yes.
Dale: What do they think about X? What do scholars think about the authorship of Mark? And what I always have to do is say that there is no scholarly consensus. But once you say there's no scholarly consensus, then you can just infer, "Well, what's the point of being an authority or an expert if they don't agree among themselves?” So I might as well just think on my own.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: But that's always the case, it seems to me, with every important subject. the experts, no matter what it is,disagree, but, from my point of view, that's no reason to pay no attention to experts. You just have to understand what an expert is, and that on any subject, that's important or any subject in the humanities, you're going to find well-informed,well-meaning people who don't agree on things.
Mm-hmm.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: Right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: So people have different evaluations of Abraham Lincoln. It's just a fact, and you can't ask, "What do scholars think about Abraham Lincoln?" Or, "What do they think about Martin Luther?" Or whatever. It just doesn't work. but there's also the vanity side.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: So, you know, you spend years to get a PhD. You gotta get a bachelor's, then you gotta get a master's, you gotta get a PhD. You know, in my field, you gotta learn a bunch of languages. I mean, maybe you're somebody like me who hates languages, and I had to learn like 10 of them. Right? And, you know, once you're done with that, you feel proud of yourself for making it through, and it has to have some payoff.
Yeah. You can't just say, "I just spent 10 years of my life learning all this stuff, and it doesn't really matter. And, you know, my lovely wife's opinion about who wrote Matthew is just as good as mine." Yeah, you can't do that.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: But, but I understand people who want this to be simple. There's also a religious aspect to this I think. So the world is very complicated. Everything is a mess, and I think we often want religion to be the one thing that's clear, and it's just as messy and yucky as everything else.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: So that's a fact. But if you don't wanna face the fact, then maybe you're going to ignore the experts.
But I don't know what you do. The internet is just, as you know, or social media, whatever, is full of horrific, ill-informed opinions about everything important.
Pete: That's right, yeah. And, you know, this is so messy. You said the study of the past and of scripture. Maybe that is the very thing that people don't like, like you said, right?
They want a sense of stability. I always sometimes think of college students who, you know, they come to Eastern University, a Christian college, and, you know, they've never done their laundry before. They don't know what to do if their glasses break. But the one thing they can hold onto is the faith they've always had and what they know is right, and you start messing with that, and it, it, it upsets people, and I understand that.
You know? I,that's not a ridiculous thing to do at that point, but still.
Dale: No, not at all, especially if, as is true for most of these people that you're talking about, God or religion or Christianity is the most important thing in their lives. Yeah. It's the center of things, right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: You and I are theists of some sort, so we think God's important, right?
And we want people to take God seriously. The big problem as I see it, is that we've really learned a lot about the Bible in the last few centuries, especially the last two and a half centuries or so, and some of the things we have learned don't fit easily with what a lot of people have traditionally thought or what a lot of people, think today, and that's just a fact. I can't make it go away, but it's a fact, and if, if you're not gonna run from facts or run from the truth, you just have to pay attention and evaluate things that have been going on since the Enlightenment or a little before. You just have to.
Pete: Well, you know, there are people, and, I mean, you've heard this before.
Maybe you've used the term yourself. I've shied away from it, but the assured results of biblical criticism. And that's, that's a very, I think, an old term. That's probably something we might have heard maybe earlier in the first half of the 20th century or something. But do you think there is anything like an assured result of Biblical criticism? I'd say yes. Here's one. There's no way in heaven or Earth that one person wrote the Torah. It's impossible when you read the text. It doesn't make any sense. That's my opinion, but I've earned the right to sort of say that, and I'm not trying to dismiss the Bible when I do.
Mm-hmm. So how about you? And please feel free to stick to New Testament because that's, you know, that's your area. That's not mine. Are there any things there that you would say are things scholars have come across that maybe Calvin didn't know or Augustine didn't know, but we know now, and it makes a big difference?
Dale: So yeah, a couple of things come to mind. So first of all, I don't like the term, assured results of criticism, right?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: And I teach my students never to use the word consensus because it's an excuse not to think.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Right? But I do believe that the sort of old-fashioned harmonization,which you, you have a lot of right after the, um- A reformation, and which goes back to the early church and to people like Augustine who want to iron out all the differences between the Gospels and show that they perfectly harmonize.
They just don't. They sometimes disagree with each other about certain things. Exactly what Jesus said or, the nature of some event or when exactly it happened. And even Augustine, who wants to iron all this out, will say in his Harmony of the Gospels at a couple of points, "Well, they just remembered it differently."
Uh-huh. You know, at points, he just has to give up. And, from the viewpoint of a critical scholar, I think David Friedrich Strauss in the middle of the 19th century is the end of the old-fashioned harmonization. He just skews the harmonizers.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: And I don't think there's any recovery for that.
The other thing is that I think it likely, and I'm being very cautious there, that not all of the books in the New Testament were written by the people whose names are attached to them.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Right? So I am pretty sure, I wouldn't bet my soul, but I wouldn't bet my soul on anything. I'm pretty sure that the Apostle Matthew didn't write this text in its present form.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: I'm also pretty sure that Peter didn't write 2 Peter, and that whoever wrote 1 Peter couldn't have written 2 Peter. Actually, when I look back, on my own history in high school, my first higher critical conclusion was Peter didn't write 2 Peter.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: And I just think it's very close to assured.
Pete: Well, and Calvin even said that. I mean, Calvin was quite clear. He says he, Peter didn't write 2 Peter.
Dale: Yeah. There's also, I'm not gonna remember his name, but one of Calvin's friends didn't think Moses wrote all of the Pentateuch, because it relates Moses's death at the end.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: And so he said, "Well, it looks like Joshua must have gone through and added some things," right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: Right. So that's already 16th century, that there's a little source criticism going on there, and you admit that there's not one author. But there's another problem here. So, the diversity of opinion is truly large, and people can get the opinion that if you're a critical scholar, then you're going to entertain such notions as there was no historical Jesus of Nazareth, for example.
Mm-hmm. Right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: Or the Gospels were all just put together by Constantine, you know, for political purposes,in the fourth century. Yeah. That kind of nonsense, which is really out there. I mean, it's out there.
Pete: Oh, yeah. It sure is. It's there.
Dale: Or,that, I can't remember who it was. Was it Nero?
Or, anyway, one of the, Roman emperors had the Gospels written. I don't quite remember what the explanation of this is, but the problem is if people perceive of scholarly or academic work as necessarily leading to the most radical conclusions of all, then, they're gonna be scared of it, or they're just gonna stay away.
Pete: Yeah, yeah.
Dale: and, you know, this also doesn't just take place abstractly. So one of my friends is Bart Ehrman.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Bart has a particular agenda, and he is a good historian. But he uses his agenda in a certain way that makes evangelicals very uncomfortable, right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: And if people just floating in and out of social media think that Bart Ehrman represents critical scholarship or the assured results of critical scholarship, then they're not gonna want that, right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: So, they'll go off and listen to some apologist with very conservative opinions, but the point is that even though there's a diversity of opinion and, there are extreme views everywhere, that's no excuse not to think and to try to figure things out. And I agree with you.
We have learned some things.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Right? Yeah. And, we need to take that really seriously .
Pete: Well, it's like learning about outer space and things like that as we, things have been uncovered. We have a historical consciousness, and we've had a lot of things to pay attention to historically over the past few centuries, and it's like you can't avoid it, you know?
Dale: Yeah, well, so that's true of every single field of human study, isn't it?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: Right? How can this be different than everything else, that we have truly learned some new things in recent times? Right. There's no other field of study where that isn't the case.
Pete: Yeah. So, maybe one thing, you know, that I think is becoming more questioned recently in your field, which is the authorship of the Gospels themselves and whether we can be so certain that we're looking at, you know, Mark's around 70, you know, Matthew's around 80, Luke's around 90, and John's around 100.
And, you know, this isn't my field, but I have been reading some things in the past few years that people are sort of calling that into question. So, would you agree that's one of those things that maybe, scholars were too confident about at some point, but now they're being more epistemological humility?
Dale: Well, so you can be less confident without changing your mind.
Pete: That's right.
Dale: So I still think that Mark is the first gospel.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: And it's written, I think it's written probably shortly before 70, but it could be during 70 or, or shortly after.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: I also think that Matthew and Luke are written, I don't know, maybe about 85.
I think about the same time, because I am not convinced they knew each other. Okay. And I'm unrepentant in that I think John is the last. And this is a change of opinion. And this is the kind of thing that makes me feel good, so- I got into this field in part because when I was a teenager, I read a book by a man named C.H. Dodd, and it was History and Tradition in the Fourth Gospel. And of course, I was a teenager, and I didn't know how to disagree with this, learned scholar, but he convinced me that John is independent of the Synoptics. I went off to Duke, and I studied with W.D. Davies, who was a good friend of Dodd and agreed with him on this, and another scholar named D. Moody Smith, who spent his life arguing about John and the Synoptics and was strongly inclined to think that they were independent. So for 35 years, I've been confident that John represents independent tradition. And in the last 15 years, I've changed my mind. I've decided I overlooked certain things.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: And I had to change my mind. And I think I changed my mind not because I wanted to, I didn't want to, but because I saw certain facts and finally was able to say, "Okay, I have to let this go even though I've argued to the contrary in who knows how many publications." Yeah. It was also almost, I don't know if there is a word for killing your grandfather, but,some kind of, patricide because, I was a student of WD, and WD was a student of C.H. Dodd, so I always thought of him as my academic grandfather.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: And I agreed with him. And then all of a sudden, no, he's wrong. The book that started me down this path, and that I used as a, almost as a Bible for, for a while, I've decided it's wrong about all sorts of things. Now, that should encourage people. Right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: Because, you know, we're all victims of confirmation bias, so I've decided that I was a victim of confirmation bias until recently when I finally saw some things that I hadn't seen before and could admit them to myself.
Pete: Right.
Dale: So, I think John did know the Synoptics, and that's, uh, something that's changing in the field.
So if you look at the last half of the 20th century, the dominant view was that John is independent, especially in the English-speaking world. The pendulum is swinging back, and I'm part of that.
Pete: Yeah. I think we're dealing with the complexities of history, you know, which are hard to nail down to say the least.
And, I think this is just an obstacle we have to expect if we're claiming this is a historical faith, and then you have to look at things historically. So I think one question, I sometimes hear people conflating two things that I think are not the same thing, and that is that, okay, history can't verify something, and then jumping rather quickly to this therefore did not happen.
So, for example, Moses, right? That's the grand example in the Hebrew Bible. Like, did Moses ever live? Well, there's no historical evidence for Moses living apart from this story, and therefore the conclusion is not I'm not sure. The conclusion is, well, therefore he didn't exist. So how do you handle that kind of reasoning?
Dale: Well, you just have to admit, first of all, most things in history were not recorded, and most of them are gone. So people are always trying to recover the lost years of Jesus, but you can't say anything about Jesus at 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20.
Now I am pretty sure, this is a safe inference. Jesus had some kind of education, into the Torah and Jewish scripture. We have no clue as to what that looked like.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Was there some kind of synagogue in the neighborhood where the boys could go and study? Was Joseph, you know, some sort of semi-learned guy, and he taught his kids some?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: We just don't know anything about that, right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: But we know that it happened. That, that's it. So, actually, most of history is like that, isn't it?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: And even when something is recorded, that doesn't mean you could show that it happened. So my favorite illustration is always the pigs running off the cliff in Mark 5.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: Okay. Now, maybe it happened. My question then would be, show it. Prove it. Demonstrate it. How many good, solid reasons can you give me for thinking that around the year 30 some pigs ran off a cliff?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: Right?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: And with Jesus in the vicinity. You can't say anything other than, "Well, it's in Mark, and I trust Mark," or-
Pete: Mm-hmm
Dale: "Mark is scripture," or something like that. But there are no arguments for that.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: So, that's the case with a lot of things, and it's one of the reasons, some people think I've become too skeptical, but when I write about Jesus these days, I always start with repeating themes and motifs. I don't start with a saying that I can authenticate or an event that I can authenticate.
I look for patterns in the sources and argue that this pattern reflects something about Jesus. But that's because after all my decades of trying to authenticate all these sayings or authenticate these events or prove that Jesus didn't say that or that didn't happen, I just realized that, most of my conclusions, did not follow from overwhelming evidence, and things could have gone this way, as well as the other way.
So, you know, I've been trying something new. But that, that's just-
Pete: The way.
Dale: It is ... that's just most of Pete's history is gone.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: I'm sure you were wearing a shirt February 3rd, 2003, but, nobody's ever gonna get it. I don't know what it was. If you didn't take a picture of yourself on that day or write down in your journal, it's gone, and that's actually most of the past. Yeah. It's just a ghost. It's all gone.
Pete: It's all memory, right? It's all memory we construct, and, and not only that, but it's, it's making things up because we have to if we're gonna talk about the past.
Dale: Well, I think so. Some people think I'm a little too skeptical here, but I've spent a lot of time in the last 20 years listening to my family talk about events that we experienced in common. And I've had so many disagreements with my wife about this, that, and the other thing, even when it's something that happened yesterday or last week. And these things have happened so often, and I've heard so many false tales about me that I just think this is how things work.
Pete: Right.
Dale: And I don't see any really strong reason to think that people in the first century didn't sometimes fill in gaps or exaggerate or unconsciously elaborate.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: It just seems to me to be what we do because memories are imperfect. Again, another reason for me looking at repeating themes and, and patterns rather than, "Oh, I can show this event actually happened as recorded," or, "He actually said these six words". Yeah, something like that. That's really hard to do. Just think about it. How do you prove that a guy who lived in AD 30 and was in Galilee and has this sentence attributed to him actually said it? It's really tough.
Pete: Well, it seems impossible. I mean, am I being too skeptical? Well, good for you. I mean, it seems to me to be impossible unless you, like you said before, call upon the authority of the Biblical text.
But that doesn't settle it either, because who's to say that authority, is worked out in historical perfection?
Dale: Yeah, that's a big problem. I think there's, I think there are other things that, that go on here. So we all have, after we read the Bible, sort of a subjective impression of who Jesus was.
You have a, an impression of, you know, your relatives and friends and all the rest of it. What more do you have than that?
Pete: Yeah. We're subjective creatures. I mean, we want objective knowledge, but we're subjective creatures, and even the pursuit of objectivity is a subjective undertaking.
And, that's how I see it. I mean, you can tell me I'm crazy, but I don't see a way around having some sort of methodological humility and a willingness to change, and not just because we're talking about God, but because we're just talking about the past.
Dale: Yeah. I agree completely.
You can't bring the past into a lab, and you can't have independent experiments run on it. So, the best you can do is have free discussions where people have debates and they throw out arguments, right?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: And so at the end of the day, at least for me, what I always tell people is, "I don't care what the consensus is.
I don't care who said what. At the end of the day, I just want to look at the arguments and see if they're sufficient for any conclusions." Mm-hmm. Right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: What else do you have?
Pete: Even if those conclusions are, let's say, working hypotheses at some point, they're not, you're not saying, "I will die on this hill."
But I think a lot of the history of biblical scholarship has sort of given that vibe off that people might be reacting to. Like, you know, we're the experts. We're, we're the white European males doing this stuff, and we know it, and that's all there is to it, and you don't. Just listen to us.
Dale: So I don't wanna insult my German friends, but they're really, . .
You, you know, Pete, you've read old German monographs, where people just say things, and you wonder on what authority. Well, that was the professor who was in front reading the manuscript.
Pete: Right.
Dale: And, you know, that's how it goes.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale:But there's also, again, the fact that religion is involved here, and so people are often very much motivated to be for or against something.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: A lot of people are highly motivated to,uh, to conclude that the tomb of Jesus was not empty, and an equal number of people are highly motivated to show that it was empty, right?
Pete: Right.
Dale: So what you have to do is you have to peel away the personalities and the agendas, and look at the arguments, and maybe you can come up with something that satisfies you.
But you have to recognize that this is religion, and there are agendas all over the place. So the best thing you can do is just be aware of other people's agendas and your agenda, whatever it might be, and, and then do your best. You have, have nothing else.
Pete: Right. Yeah. And it's hard to do that. I mean, it's hard to, peel away the personalities and the agendas and just sort of look at the facts because even our looking at the facts, there's a subjective element in our own psyches for doing that. And, I, personally, I, I wouldn't have said this, you know, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, but I say it now. I'm strangely comforted by that. The more I think of my field and the more I work in it, the more I write, the more I talk, the more I realize I don't know if I know what I'm talking about really, but I have some ideas that I think makes sense to me. And, and I've been presenting it more like, "This is what makes sense to me right now. Here's how I see this issue." And rather than putting a barrier up between myself and others saying, "Well, I'm the professor. I'm gonna come speak in your church, and this is what it is, you know, and if you don't get it, there's something wrong with you," I think people have been reacting against that kind of a mentality.
Maybe just the lack of, you know, humility really on the part of scholars, which is easy if you know a lot.
Dale: Well, maybe you and I are like-minded here. Maybe I'm gonna regret saying this because my memory is human, but I don't tend to defend my own books or articles. I just think of them as, "Here's what I was thinking when I wrote this, and now I'm going on to the next thing."
And people, if they want to, if anyone cares, can think about this, agree or disagree. If they disagree,they're never gonna get more than a sentence in a footnote. Yeah. You know, I'm not persuaded or something like that. But I would never spend my time trying to defend my past because, um-
Pete: You've changed
Dale: I, well, yeah, I change. And by the way, I'm really proud of the fact that I've changed, and I'm proud of the fact that I've come to some conclusions that were painful to come to at the time. That again encourages me to think that it's not just pure prejudice, right? There is a past there, right?
And I can't just say anything about it that I want to. I am keenly aware of the plasticity of texts and the infinite readings that a text can give to. But I know that readers of John in all times and places come away with different thoughts than readers of 1 Chronicles.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: There's something about these books that is speaking, that is saying something. It's not just we have two lumps of clay and you can do whatever you want to with them. Right, right. That's not what texts are, right? Yeah. So, that's also not what history is, and I like to think that we can from time to time even conclude, even draw conclusions that we're not fond of, right?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: Look, I'd like to know as much about Jesus as possible. I think it would be great if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels and John was from an eyewitness and Richard Bauckham was right about everything. I just don't think it.
Pete: Yeah, right. And that's okay. I think the trick is helping others to see that it's okay to not be sure and to have differences of opinion.
Well, you started by saying the vanity of some scholars, not all. I mean, I know plenty of deeply humble scholars who are brilliant, but I also know a few who are unable to admit when they may have made a mistake, and I think that's a shame. I think, we don't do the tradition a service that way.
And, for those of us who like to think about God, I don't think we're impressing the author of the multiverse at this point when we're sort of stuck in our ruts. But on the other hand, I'm thinking of experiences in teaching or in speaking places where I think I have something valuable to say that I don't know if they're ready for, but I wanna put it in such a way that sort of brings them into the conversation rather than the other extreme.
One extreme is I know everything and you don't, or we're all just the same, there's no difference between us here in terms of understanding the Bible. I think finding that balance, I think, is crucial for having a vibrant, academic and spiritual and interpersonal life.
Dale: I would agree, but isn't it odd?
Nobody would do this with any other field.
Pete: That's right.
Dale: It's sort of a strange thing that this academic field, which biblical studies has become, kind of a strange thought that, that it somehow doesn't matter or hasn't learned anything.
You brought up God. So,you know, I'm old enough now that I don't care what people think, so I can speak what I'm really thinking. But I am some sort of theist, and I am, for whatever reason, good or bad, I really do think that 1 John got it right, and despite all appearances and everything else, I think God is love.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: That, if I really think that, it gives me the freedom to do everything. Mm-hmm. Because if God is love, I'm gonna be forgiven for whatever intellectual mistakes I make and all sorts of other errors and so on, right? So it's not as though my eternal fate hinges on, you know, what I'm gonna decide about the authorship of Luke, Acts, or the historicity of the pigs and the cliff.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Dale: I just think God's love transcends that.
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: Right?
Pete: Well, I sometimes think that, I've used the analogy of a child, like a two-year-old drawing a picture with a crayon and showing it to his mother, and, she doesn't know what it is. She just says, "Oh, that's a wonderful cow."
"It's not a cow, it's a sailboat." "Oh, that's beautiful. I'm gonna put it on the fridge." I sort of think of our theology that way. You know, we're just fumbling along here. Even the most brilliant of us, I mean, this is the Christian tradition too, the apophatic tradition, we can't put this into words what we're talking about.
And now we're talking about the vagaries of history. It's this wonderful mess we get to sort of dive into. And, I'm about to maybe contradict myself. I think some people have a handle on that mess in ways that others may not, and they don't even see the mess.
Dale: Yeah.
Pete: That's the big obstacle. They don't see the problem of a, let's say, simplistic inerrantist, God wrote the Bible sort of approach to things.
Dale: Or, or an old-fashioned systematic theology, a reformed systematic theology from the 1700s, which really does have all the questions and all the answers and the scripture verses for them.
By the way, this really just happened last month, my five-year-old son drew a picture of his house.
Pete: You mean grandson.
Dale: I'm sorry, grandson. And if you look at it and work at it, you can see what he's doing, right? Yeah, right. You can sort of make out the house. And I really did tell my family, looking at this, I said, "That's what we do when we do theology."
Uh-huh. We hope that there's some sort of correlation between this picture and the reality, but it's really rough, right?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: It's really rough. So, I did the same thing.
Pete: Yeah. Amazing stuff. Well, listen, we have a little bit of time left, not much, maybe just a couple of minutes. One thing, we were talking about this before, maybe this is the last thing we can talk about.
Dale: Okay.
Pete: Okay, understanding Jesus in context. We want to understand Jesus in context. That obligates us to reconstruct some sort of a context for Jesus. And so I guess what I'm after, and please, you know, riff on this a little bit, it's not that simple to say, "Oh, we're just reading. We have to... Remember, you have to read the Bible in its historical context."
Oh, really? That's all I have to do? That's ex- Yeah ... that's the, that's the hard part. It's, it's understanding the context and the impact that context has had on the individual biblical writer
Dale: Now, this is obvious in most of the commentaries written in the last maybe 300 years on, on the Gospels. They are constantly quoting from the rabbis or from the Hebrew Bible or Intertestamental literature, say, "Oh, this is like that," or he's addressing people who would've thought along these lines and, and so on.it's just the case everywhere. And, and I got into this field not just because I read C.H. Dodd's book, but because I realized in order to understand these texts, I am going to, to spend my life learning about the world in which they rose, the Jewish world and the Greco-Roman world.
Also, this is true. Somebody asked me when I was about 20, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I said, "I wanna be a first-century Jew." That's what I wanna be because otherwise I'm not gonna be able to understand these texts. Yeah, right. So from one point of view, that's what I've tried to be my whole life.
Yeah. And if you look over here, it's just a pile of Jewish texts, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. There's my Jerusalem Talmud and, you know, everything else is right over there because, you know, that's what I study to understand these, these texts.
Pete: Yeah, and, and those things help us, to go back to the crayon analogy, they help us to draw a portrait that has more semblance, let's say, to give us more of a sense of that history, and that's what I value about our field as well. I like understanding what was a Pharisee. That's important to understand if you're gonna understand the New Testament, if you're gonna understand Jesus.
I, you know, what were they hoping eschatologically? How do they understand resurrection? All those things are so important, and it is delightfully complicated, and, for me, it's a sigh of relief.
I cannot possibly know all this, and I'm fine with that. I'm genuinely at peace with that. I'm not just faking it. I'm genuinely at peace with having the freedom to explore and to be curious and to see how the tumblers can fall into place.
Dale: I don't know why we're kindred spirits. Maybe it has something to do with our mothers or how we were raised or, or something, but I certainly know people who, who don't think like this at all, and they'll use the word certain or certainty, and it's really important to them that they have everything there. But on the historical thing, just pick almost any paragraph in the Gospels, and it doesn't make sense without a little local history, right? I mean, what was the temple? What do they do there?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: What do people think about it?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: How did they bury people, you know? What's a stone in front of a tomb?
Pete: Yeah.
Dale: You know, it just goes on and on and on.
Pete: Yeah. Right.
Dale: What the heck are magi? Who is Herod? Which Herod?
Pete: Yeah, which Herod? When was Jesus born? I mean, all these kinds of questions. Yeah. Well, Dale, you know, we could, honestly, I would love to talk with you about this for hours.
We'll have to do it again sometime, but I think for today we're gonna have to call it quits, and, let people take a bathroom break or whatever they have to do at this point. How does that sound? Okay. All right?
Dale: Okay. Great to talk to you.
Pete: Good to talk with you, Dale.
And now it's time for You Ask, Pete Answers
Casey: Hi, Pete. I recently heard an opinion that the NIV was essentially conservative capital R Reformed propaganda, and certain things were translated in a way to promote a certain sociopolitical interpretation. I think the fact that they unreleased their inclusive language edition after some people got mad supports this assertion.
I was wondering your take on this and what you know about the formation of this translation, and if you have any further reading on translation agendas. Thanks. Love the show.
Pete: Great question. Excellent question. First, let's ruin one idea: that Bible translations can achieve neutrality. They can't.
Translation is not a matter of swapping Hebrew and Greek words for English words like replacing tiles in a bathroom. Languages don't work that way. Every translator who has ever lived has had to make a lot of decisions, both consciously and also unconsciously, about meaning or context or, or grammar or what these idioms mean, or style.
Also, don't forget, these are dead languages from a culture we simply can't identify with. We will not achieve neutrality. So the question isn't whether a translation has a perspective or a bias; well, they all do. The question is whether that bias is driving the translational work. Now, the questioner asks about the NIV, so let's talk about that a little bit.
The NIV was produced by the Committee on Bible Translation, which is an evangelical group that wanted a translation that was academically credible but also acceptable for conservative Protestant churches. Now, that doesn't mean they sat around a table plotting propaganda. The translators included very respected scholars, but they were working within a broadly evangelical theological framework, and that framework inevitably shapes translation choices, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously.
One quick nerdy example concerns the order of creation in the Book of Genesis. According to chapter one, on day six, God created all land creatures, and afterwards, as a crowning achievement, God created humans, male and female. So day six, first the animals were created, and then the humans were created In chapter two, however, we read that God first created the man, Adam, then the animals, and then the first woman, Eve, by taking from the side of Adam.
Now, that sequence is rather obvious when you read it, but because it contradicts the order of creation in Genesis 1, the NIV does a little intentional fiddling with the text, specifically Genesis 2:19. The conventional translation, such as we see in the New Revised Standard Version, translates verse 19 sequentially.
After God created Adam out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. So God created Adam, and then God formed the animals for him to name.
The NIV, however, translates God formed every animal as God had formed every animal. Hang with me, folks. This makes a simple past verb, formed, into a pluperfect verb, had formed. So what? Well, that places the forming of the animals before the man was created. God had already formed them previously. This aligns the sequences of the two stories, but there is absolutely no linguistic justification for this move.
It is consciously ideologically driven to keep the Bible free of contradiction. But let's leave nerdiness aside and talk about a much bigger issue we all know about: gender and Bible translation. The first major controversy was over the NIVI, the NIV Inclusive Language edition, which appeared in the middle 1990s in the UK.
And that edition incorporated a number of gender-inclusive readings. Now, when news of it reached the United States, guess what? A firestorm erupted among conservative evangelicals. The resulting backlash led to a summit of sorts in Colorado Springs, which produced the so-called Colorado Springs guidelines.
The second episode was the Today's New International Version, the TNIV, which was published partially in 2002 and then completely in 2005. The TNIV was essentially the successor to the NIVI, which we just looked at, and incorporated many of the same translation principles. It, too, generated, again, guess what?
Intense controversy, with critics charging that it had gone too far in adopting gender-inclusive language. Then came what was called the 2011 NIV, which replaced both the original 1984 NIV and the TNIV. Is this getting confusing? Yes, of course it is. Now, this is the important part. Many of the gender language decisions that critics objected to in the TNIV from 2002 to 2005, well, they survived into the 2011 NIV.
In hindsight, the 2011 NIV can be seen as a compromise that moves significantly in the TNIV's direction while avoiding the TNIV label, which had become politically toxic. This story is so fascinating. It wasn't simply a fight over translation for the sake of it. It was a fight over who gets to define evangelical identity in late 20th and early 21st century America.
The translation became a proxy for broader cultural anxieties about biblical authority being threatened by gender and social change. You know, people argue about words like this because they are arguing about what Christianity should look like. Now, the questioner says that some refer to the NIV as, quote, "Reformed propaganda, Calvinism."
But I think that's too simplistic, and it might be unfair to the scholars involved. But is it shaped by a conservative evangelical outlook? Yes, of course it is. The larger lesson is that no translation is just the Bible. Every translation is a tricky negotiation between ancient words and ancient context of the Bible and our own contemporary moment, a conversation between the ancient context of scripture and our own.
Now, for further reading, I'd recommend several books if you're interested, The Bible in Translation, In Discordance with the Scriptures, American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible, Truth in Translation, The Challenge of Bible Translation. Boy, all these titles sound the same, don't they? But honestly, just comparing translations side by side in your Bible Gateway app is often more illuminating than reading arguments about translation bias.
Well, the so-what moment for me in all this is the following: If your faith depends on finding the one translation that has no ideologically driven interpretive angle, you're out of luck. The better question is whether a translation, and I'm gonna put it this way, whether a translation helps you on your path to knowing God while also remaining aware that the very translation you are reading is the product of a fallible human endeavor marked by subjectivity, cultural pressures, and ideological preferences.
That's not a problem to be solved. It's simply unavoidable. And once you accept that, Bible translations become much more interesting and less something to fight over. All right, folks. Well, thanks for being here for another episode of Pete Ruins Everything, and I'll see you again in our next episode.
Right, honest moment here, folks. We've been making this podcast for 10 years, and one thing that's hard is hearing from our listeners that they don't have anyone to talk to about it. The podcast goes out to thousands of people, millions over the years, but then there isn't often a place to process and talk about it.
Jared: That's why we built the Society of Normal People, because we wanted there to be a place where the conversation doesn't just stop.
Pete: There are about 1,500 people in the society already who didn't want the conversation to stop either. We hope you'll join them.
Jared: The link is in our show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
