Daniel McClellan, "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Daniel McClellan, "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025)
Host: Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Guest: Dan McClellan
Date: March 18, 2026

Theme:
This episode delves into misconceptions and debates about what the Bible truly says on controversial issues. Dan McClellan, a public biblical scholar, discusses his new book and his work demystifying scripture for a broad audience. The conversation critically examines common dogmas about biblical authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality, and explores how interpretation, translation, and cultural context shape what people believe the Bible says about major moral and social topics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dan McClellan’s Personal & Academic Journey (01:19-08:34)

• Background: Conversion to LDS Church at 20, missionary work in South America, early affinity for the Bible and apocryphal texts, academic path through BYU, Oxford, Trinity Western University, and PhD at University of Exeter, focusing on cognitive science of religion and conceptualization of deity.
• Professional Experience: Served as scripture translation supervisor for LDS Church for a decade.
• Pivot to Public Scholarship: Began engaging with misinformation about the Bible on social media platform TikTok, unexpectedly amassing a large following and making a career out of public scholarship.

"I realized that there were people who made their living studying the Bible. And I thought, wow, I think that would be about the coolest job in the world." (05:21, Dan McClellan)

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The Motto: Data Over Dogma (09:04-11:01)

• McClellan’s guiding principle emphasizes privileging scholarly data over doctrinal assumptions or identity politics.
• Strives for objectivity, even critiquing positions prevalent in his own faith community.
• Sees himself as an umpire, “there to call balls and strikes rather than, you know, bat for any team.” (09:30, Dan McClellan)

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Core Dogmas in Bible Interpretation (11:02-13:23)

• Univocality: Assumes the Bible speaks with a single, unified voice—McClellan rejects this, noting authors often held differing or even conflicting views.
• Inspiration: The belief that every word is inspired by God.
• Inerrancy: No errors exist in the Bible due to its divine origin.
• Highlights how these dogmas underpin much biblical misinformation, especially on social media.

“…if I can kind of dismantle those presuppositions and make people aware of the interpretive lenses through which they have for so long looked at the Bible, I think that can help us get to more productive discourse." (12:57, Dan McClellan)

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Why Does Accurate Understanding of the Bible Matter? (13:23-14:42)

• The Bible is frequently leveraged as rhetorical authority in both private and public life—even at highest levels of government.
• Misreadings can justify harmful policies and power structures, so equipping people to read and critique it accurately is vital.

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How Meaning Is Constructed: The Bible "Doesn't Say Anything At All" (14:42-18:22)

• Texts themselves have no inherent meaning—meaning is generated by readers through interpretive processes.
• Draws on cognitive linguistics: "The production of meaning is something that goes on in the mind of a person..." (15:41, Dan McClellan)
• Uses a story about biscuits in the UK/US to illustrate the role of interpretive frameworks.
• Emphasizes scholarly attempts to recover original authors’ and audiences’ perspectives, while acknowledging the inherent limits and uncertainty of that project.

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Metaphors for Bible Interpretation: Jigsaw Puzzles vs. Lego (18:24-22:44)

• Jigsaw Puzzle: Many treat the Bible like a puzzle with a “picture on the box” (i.e. inherited tradition) to which all texts should be conformed.
• Lego Chest: McClellan prefers this metaphor, where the Bible is a box of parts and each person “builds” meaning according to their needs, often finding what they’re already looking for.
• Warns against leveraging this constructed approach in policy or political arguments, which often justifies harmful actions.

"...what we're building is really up to us, but to the degree that we can construct from the LEGO bricks of the many different verses in the Bible, we can say, well, this is biblical..." (20:21, Dan McClellan)

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The Historical-Critical Approach (22:53-24:45)

• McClellan employs a historical-critical method—using tools from history, textual criticism, cognitive science of religion—to attempt to reconstruct what texts might have meant for original authors and audiences.
• Other interpretive approaches (feminist, liberation, trauma, disability, reception history, etc.) are valuable, but his main work sticks to this foundation.

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“The Bible”: Text, Canon, Manuscripts, and Translation (26:46-32:59)

• There is no single “Bible”—different communities have different canons, rely on different source manuscripts, and most access is through translation, which introduces further variance.
• Highlights the lack of awareness about these choices and their impact.
• Anecdote: Some treat the King James Version as the “real” Bible to the extent of “correcting” Greek manuscripts with it, indicating profound misunderstandings.

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Is the Bible Itself "Inspired"? (32:59-36:33)

• The Bible cannot declare itself inspired because today’s Bible did not exist when its texts were written.
• 2 Timothy 3:16 (“All scripture is God-breathed”) is often used as proof, but the text likely originally referred only to Jewish scripture and meant “life-giving,” not “inspired.”
• The modern understanding of inspiration is a later interpretive development.

"...the word theopneustos, which we generally take to mean inspired, doesn't seem to have meant inspired in the late first or early second century... it seems to mean something more like life-giving…" (34:13, Dan McClellan)

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Creation Ex Nihilo: Out of Nothing? (36:33-41:16)

• The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo) did not appear until the late second century CE.
• Genesis 1:1 better translates as “when God began to create the heavens and the earth…,” not “in the beginning.”
• Biblical and Jewish sources, and early philosophies (notably Aristotle), assumed pre-existent matter rather than creation from nothing.
• Changing translations reflect updated scholarship; many traditionalists dislike this.

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Slavery in the Bible (44:52-49:46)

• The Bible never prohibits slavery or questions the institution itself.
• Some passages mitigate conditions (e.g., how Israelite slaves are treated), but many permit buying, selling, and owning people, especially foreigners.
• Relevant law codes (e.g., Hammurabi) are similar; Israelite law is not systematically more just.

"There's no part of the Bible that questions, undermines, or prohibits the practice itself of, of buying, selling, and owning other human beings." (45:04, Dan McClellan)

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Abortion: What Does the Bible Say? (50:17-54:51)

• The Bible never asserts that abortion is murder.
• Only clear legal passage, Exodus 21:22-25, treats harm to a fetus as a property crime, not equivalent to murder.
• Historical Jewish and Christian interpretation only reinterpreted this as murder much later (Calvin, 16th century).
• New Testament references (e.g., John Baptist leaping in the womb) reflect different philosophical views on “ensoulment,” but none directly equate abortion with murder.

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Homosexuality in the Bible (54:51-61:32)

• Ancient and modern concepts of homosexuality differ; the Bible refers only to specific sex acts, not sexual orientation.
• Leviticus prohibits men taking the penetrative role with other men, due to social perceptions about status and masculinity—this does not address female same-sex acts at all.
• New Testament passages (e.g., Paul in Romans 1) build off prevailing Greco-Roman notions, not informed by contemporary understandings of sexuality or consent.
• McClellan critiques the selective, ahistorical application of ancient sexual ethics to modern issues, noting the documented harm caused by anti-gay interpretations.

"We reject Paul's sexual ethic when it comes to celibacy, but we want to wave the flag of Paul's sexual ethic when it comes to...same sex intercourse...[applying] his ahistorical, non-biological and kind of inaccurate take..." (60:08, Dan McClellan)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Biblical Meaning:
  "We read it and we generate meaning with the text...what we're building is really up to us..." (17:28, 20:21 – Dan McClellan)

• On Social Consequences:
  "People need to be aware that that's what's going on [the construction of biblical cases to justify actions] so they're not duped into imagining that...it actually ever was intended to be in the Bible." (22:44, Dan McClellan)

• On Scholarship vs. Dogma:
  "I'm basically just striving to make sure that I'm representing the scholarship to the best of my ability without allowing any of the dogmas to muddy the waters..." (10:53, Dan McClellan)

• On Harmful Interpretations:
  "I don't like bullies. And so I'm gonna do what I can to...get in the way of that kind of leveraging of the Bible because I don't think that's what we should be doing with those texts." (61:04, Dan McClellan)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Dan’s Academic/Professional Story: 01:19–08:34
• “Data Over Dogma” Motto: 09:04–11:01
• Dogmas (Univocality, Inspiration, Inerrancy): 11:02–13:23
• Why Accurate Understanding Matters: 13:23–14:42
• Texts Don’t Have Inherent Meaning (Cognitive Linguistics): 14:42–18:22
• Puzzle vs. Lego Metaphor: 18:24–22:44
• Historical-Critical Approach: 22:53–24:45
• Defining “the Bible”: 26:46–32:59
• Biblical Inspiration & 2 Timothy: 32:59–36:33
• Creation Ex Nihilo: 36:33–41:16
• Slavery in the Bible: 44:52–49:46
• Abortion & Personhood: 50:17–54:51
• Homosexuality: 54:51–61:32

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Summary

This episode provides a nuanced, historically rooted examination of how the Bible is interpreted on hot-button social issues, exposing how much is dependent on later tradition, translation, and interpretive frameworks—rather than the words of the texts themselves. Dan McClellan dispels common misconceptions and asserts the importance of informed, critical scholarship when invoking the Bible in public life, all while advocating for humility and transparency in discussions about scripture. If you want to understand what the Bible actually says—and how we arrive at those conclusions—this is an essential listen.

Transcript

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[Dan McClellan]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman Neufeld. The Bible is arguably the most influential book, but do we really know what it says? Every day across social media and in homes, businesses and public spaces, people try to cut debate short by claiming that the Bible says so. However, they commonly disagree about what it is, actually does and doesn't say, particularly when it comes to socially significant issues in the Bible Says what we Get Right and Wrong about Scripture's Most Controversial issues. Published by St. Martin's Essentials in 2025, Dan McClellan lays out what the data indicate the Bible does and doesn't say about a wide range of issues. Dan McClellan is an award winning public scholar of the Bible. He has over 1 million followers on social media and is a host on the Data Over Dogma podcast. Dan received his PhD from the University of Exeter and is currently an honorary fellow at Birmingham University's Cadbury center for the Public Understanding of Religion. I'm so glad Dan's new book has brought him to our program. Welcome.

[Dan McClellan]

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

So, to get started, could you tell us please, a little bit about your background and what attracted you to this project?

[Dan McClellan]

Oh, I have a. I have a sordid past. But when I was, When I was

20 years old, I joined the LDS Church. And a year later I spent two years in South America serving a proselytizing mission.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

So the LDS is the Church of Latter Day Saints, commonly referred to as the Mormon Church.

[Dan McClellan]

Exactly.

And in that year, between getting baptized and leaving for my mission, I realized, ah, I haven't read the Bible, I

haven't read Latter Day Saints scripture, which includes the Book of Mormon and some other texts.

And so I realized I needed to get cracking. So I decided I would read through the entire Bible and then all of

Latter Day Saint scripture within that year. And I did it. And it was, it was a slog.

It was incredibly difficult, but I just fell in love with, with reading the Bible and particularly some of the historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. And when I was in, in South America, someone gave me a translation of

the Bible into Spanish that had the Apocrypha. So I started reading the Apocrypha as well. First and Second Maccabees.

These stories just fascinated me and I just wanted to know as much as

I could about the language, the literature, the cultures, the, the people, all of this.

And I discovered that there were people who made their living studying the Bible.

And I thought, wow, I think that would be about the coolest job in the world.

And I had already been kicked out

of one university, the University of Northern Colorado.

And so I didn't really have hopes of getting back into another university, but I figured, hey, I'm a convert. Returned missionary.

BYU's got to have something for me.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Young University in Brigham Young University.

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah.

And so I applied while I was

still living down in South America.

And I'm sure they got a good chuckle from my application, but I was given in no uncertain terms, no. And so I had to come back home and do some.

I took some tests to test out of a bunch of credits in Spanish and did a semester at a community college.

But I managed to work my way

into BYU's ancient Near Eastern Studies program where I emphasized Biblical Hebrew and I did a minor in Classical Greek.

And then after that went away to the University of Oxford to do a Master's degree there in Jewish Studies, where I got to know you and your wife Jenny a little bit and had a wonderful time there in Oxford at

the Oxford center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at good old Yarnton Manor.

And after that I went and did another Master's degree in Biblical Studies at

Trinity Western University and Evangelical University just outside of Langley, British Columbia.

That was a lot of fun there. And then with a friend that I

made along the way named Francesca Stavrockopoulou. She was a scholar at the University of Exeter.

I connected with her to do my

PhD through the university of Exeter where I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the cognitive science of religion, cognitive linguistics and the conceptualization of deity and divine agency in the Hebrew Bible.

And I have always, well, ever since falling in love with studying the Bible,

I've just been fascinated by all the aspects of the world behind the Bible.

And I've also been concerned with the spread of misinformation that has, has always

come along with the public discourse related to the Bible.

So I, I spent 10 years working

as a scripture translation supervisor for the LDS Church. This is the full time job I had while I was working on my

PhD and during the pandemic I started

seeing people sharing videos from TikTok on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and these were videos that were talking about the Bible. And I thought TikTok was just for

kids dancing and then Korean teenagers disrupting Republican presidential campaigns. And I was happy to let them have it, but I saw people were

talking about the Bible over there and

I wanted to see what the discourse was like.

And so I went over and checked

it out and, and realized that there were a lot of different communities over there. Faith communities, anti faith communities, there were apologetic communities, there were anti apologetic counter

apologetic communities, there were conspiracy theorists, there were all kinds of different groups.

But I didn't see any credentialed experts entering the fray. And I thought, well, I might as

well add TikTok to the, to the list of social media platforms where I go and shake my fist at the, at the clouds in the sky.

And to, to my surprise my work

started getting some attention on TikTok and,

and it began to grow into something

pretty significant to the point that within a couple of years of, of being on TikTok, I was able to monetize

and I was actually making more money on social media than I was in

my full time job. And I, I left my full time job in January of 2023 and I've been doing content creation and public scholarship ever since as my, as my full time work.

And it's been, it's just been exciting,

it's been fast paced, it's been hectic and stressful.

But, but I, I think I, the, the hope that I had when, when I realized that I could maybe study

the Bible for a living when I was living down in, in South America has been realized to some degree.

So I have to say, I. I think I was prescient and I was correct when I said it's about the

coolest job in the world, because in my opinion, it is.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

All right. Well, that's fantastic and quite an adventure. All of the ins and outs and the kind of circuitous route that has led you to this moment and to your public engagement with the Bible and religion on social media and now also in book form. And this is a tremendous contribution to the public discourse.

[Dan McClellan]

Oh, thank you.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

So, speaking of which, you write that your motto is data over dogma. What do you mean by that? Could you tell us a little more?

[Dan McClellan]

It's kind of an aspirational motto. It came out one day in a video where I was doing an intro video introducing myself, and I just. That kind of just came out as. As something that I am always striving for because one of my goals was

to try to position myself as a bit of an umpire, just there to

call balls and strikes rather than, you

know, bat for any team.

And to. Whether or not I've been successful at that is, you know, that's up for the.

The audience to decide. And some people will.

Will be a little more skeptical about that than others. But what I am trying to do is trying to share the data to the degree that I can access it without allowing the dogmas of my identity politics or even my livelihood to influence

the conclusions I arrive at and the positions that I share. I want to try, to the degree possible, and I acknowledge that it's not possible to be entirely objective about any

given issue, but I want to try, to the best of my ability to

put the data ahead of the dogma, even if it means endorsing positions that go directly against my own faith community, which I do pretty much every day, or positions that.

That I disagree with, or positions personally or positions that might undermine, like I said, my.

My own livelihood or

I. So I'm. I'm basically just striving to make sure that I'm representing the scholarship to the

best of my ability without allowing any of the dogmas to. To muddy the waters and get in the way of what I'm sharing on social media.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

And you write that quote, three very widespread and deeply embedded dogmas that I frequently run across when I talk with Bible believers who are inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality. Could you please tell us a little bit about these three dogmas?

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, I think they. A lot of people might be surprised just how pervasive the presupposition of univocality

is this is the idea that the

Bible speaks from one single, unified and

consistent perspective and with one single unified and consistent voice, which means that the Bible cannot disagree with itself.

So frequently in debates about the Bible you get, well, this passage over here says this, and somebody will say, well,

this other passage over here says this other thing.

And even between believers and non believers,

there's this kind of agreed upon standard

that we're going to allow the Bible

to be consistent throughout.

And I think that presupposition is problematic because the data really don't support the

notion that all the authors of the biblical texts shared the exact same perspectives on everything. The biblical texts frequently conflict with themselves.

And I think the, the presupposition of

univocality is an outgrowth of the presupposition of inspiration. That every word of the Bible is,

is, you know, inspired by God. And then inerrancy is, is a similar

outgrowth from that, that because it's inspired by God, there cannot be error. And there are varying degrees of.

Of in perspectives on inerrancy.

But these three things I see undergirding so much of the misinformation that gets spread on, particularly on social media and in the public discourse related to the

Bible that I, and I, I haven't commonly seen people calling it out for what it is. And so that's one of the things I focus on on my channel, is

making sure people are aware of just what presuppositions are propping up a lot of the conventional wisdom regarding what the Bible is. And if I can kind of dismantle those presuppositions and make people aware of the interpretive lenses through which they have for so long looked at the Bible, I think that can help us get to more productive discourse about what's going on in the Bible.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Yeah. And before we get too deep into the Bible just to kind of set the stage a drop, I why is it so important to understand what the Bible really says?

[Dan McClellan]

I think that because the Bible is

held up as an authority by so many folks, as an unassailable authority by

so many folks, it frequently gets leveraged

as kind of a rhetorical trump card in a lot of different areas of public discourse, up to and including at the levers of government, like we're seeing now, people who are in positions of significant power appealing to certain perspectives about the Bible and about Christianity, about religion, making policy decisions based on these things, making legislation based on these things.

And so I think it is incredibly

Important that everybody be equipped to think

and speak accurately and. And critically about what is actually in the Bible so that, you know, we can push back in an effective way

against particular readings and attempts to leverage the Bible to structure power and values and boundaries that are incredibly harmful, as they so frequently are these days.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And speaking of what the Bible says, you note that the Bible simply doesn't say anything at all. The Bible is a collection of texts, and texts do not have inherent meaning. What do you mean by that?

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, that's. That's one of the. The counterintuitive parts of, of what I'm talking about. Because when we. If we're just reading the words on the page, I guess you could say

that's what the Bible says.

But the instant we try to interpret that, the instance we try to say what that means is this. That's us imposing our own interpretive lenses on the text in order to draw out more significance than is actually in

those squiggles on that page.

And I did one of my master's

theses and then my doctoral dissertation on cognitive linguistics, and one of the things that, that we understand from cognitive linguistics is that texts don't have inherent meaning.

The production of meaning is something that goes on in the mind of a person who is reading, seeing, touching, or hearing linguistic expressions. And it's a process of encoding conceptual content using these symbols, and then somebody

on the other end decoding the conceptual

content that they think was most likely

intended by those symbols.

And, and that process can. Can go a lot of different ways, and it's not always accurate. It tends to be accurate enough.

But we frequently have misunderstandings. And I share a story about my first week at Oxford. I was on Corn Market street downtown,

and I saw kfc, and I thought,

awesome, I could really go for a biscuit right now.

And went in and asked the guy behind the counter for a biscuit. And he just blinked and stared at me like, why on earth would. Would we have biscuits? And. And then I. I remember. Oh, yeah, that's right, we're in the uk.

[New Books Network Announcer]

The.

[Dan McClellan]

The symbol that is the word biscuit is keyed to an entirely different concept than in the United States. And then I realized I. I didn't know what words to string together to try to get this guy to conjure up in his mind an image of

that buttery, flaky goodness that I was after.

And I got frustrated and had to leave and go across the street to

Burger King because

I realized that I didn't have the words because we had Entirely different experiences about what kinds of

conceptual content were being keyed to specific linguistic expressions.

And so in that sense, the Bible's not saying anything at all.

We read it and we generate meaning with the text.

And so I talk frequently about this

being a process of negotiation where we're bringing our experiences, our interpretive lenses to

the text, and then in a kind

of back and forth, we're generating meaning.

And that can frequently lead to very

different interpretations of the text. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is say, hey, here's our best attempt to try to recover

what we imagine the authors and earliest

audiences would have understood by this. But this is an imperfect endeavor.

We, we can never get it exactly right. But, but here's our, our best guess

at what's going on in these texts. And there are times in the book where it's really kind of up in the air. We're not sure. It could be a couple of different things.

And, and, and, you know, often we

can't do much better than say, well, it could be this or it could

be that, and we don't really know for sure.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And you talk about two different approaches to the Bible using two different kind of metaphors. One of them is looking at approaching the Bible as a jigsaw puzzle, and the other is as a toy chest full of Lego blocks. What's the difference between these two approaches?

[Dan McClellan]

I came up with that metaphor because I had so frequently been talking with people about, about, you know, how this

passage means this, this other passage means the other thing. And people would say to me, well, it's like a puzzle.

You just have to look at the

picture on the box. And that just baffled me because I

was like, there's no, there's no box. There's no picture. And, and I realized that what they mean was like the, the holistic idea of what the Bible is that they have inherited from their tradition is the

picture on the box. And so what they're doing is they're subordinating the B, and then they're being

told they should interpret the Bible to make it match up with that holistic

picture that their tradition gives them.

And that's just not how Bible reading works. All that's doing is dictating to you

what the Bible is and is not allowed to say.

And I realized that that's not an

accurate metaphor for how people make meaning with the Bible. And I came up with the Lego

bricks metaphor because I think this, this much more accurately conveys the, the act

of construction that we are engaged in when we are interpreting the Bible.

And the idea is, think of the Bible as, as a, a toy chest

or box full of LEGO bricks.

And there are a bunch of different sets in there and a bunch of, you know, stray pieces.

And some of those sets are complete,

some of them are incomplete.

We don't have any, any picture on the box. We don't have any instructions or anything like that.

And really what we're doing is we're

setting to work building something.

And what we're building is really up to us, but to the degree that we can construct from the LEGO bricks

of the many different verses in the

Bible, we can say, well, this is biblical. If you want to construct the notion

that the Bible says abortion is murder,

you have enough pieces to, to cobble together something that, that approximates that idea.

And as long as those pieces are

all coming from the box that has

the label Bible on it, you can think of that as biblical.

But that's not going to be anything

that was ever intended by any of the folks who put those sets together.

And so I, I think that better communicates the fact that we're doing an awful lot of the construction of meaning.

Ourselves and our, our needs and our

goals guide how we configure the text to, to create the meaning that we

want to create a lot more so

than, than I think we're aware. And, and that was the main point is that frequently what we, when we come to the Bible, we're bringing presuppositions

to it, we're bringing goals. We want to find this in the

text, and we will frequently find exactly

what we're looking for, not because it was in there to begin with, but because we are engaged in a, in a project of construction with the text.

And this is one of my big

concerns with folks leveraging the Bible, particularly to inform political debate and policy, is

that we're going to find what we

want to find in the Bible. And, and far too often people find,

you know, right now, people, we, we have war that is, that is, has broken out, and we have people justifying

it on the grounds that, oh, maybe

this is how we're going to catalyze

the second coming of Jesus, and this

is going to unfold this final eschatological

battle of Armageddon and then Jesus will return.

And, and that kind of, that kind

of leveraging of the Bible to endorse what is ultimately just going to ruin and end countless lives around the world just, it's just horrifying to me.

So I think people need to be

aware that that's what's going on.

So they're not, they're not duped into imagining that because people say, well, this

is in the Bible, that it actually ever was intended to be in the Bible.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And speaking of your approach, you note that when you approach the Bible, your approach is a historical critical one. What exactly does that mean?

[Dan McClellan]

So I point out that there are a lot of different ways to approach the Bible, and in no sense am

I suggesting that the historical critical one is the only or the best approach. But a historical critical approach is one

where I'm trying to use all the

tools that are available to us as historians, as textual critics, as cognitive scientists of religion. All these methodologies I'm trying to bring

to bear to try to understand what

the text would have meant for the authors and the earliest audiences.

And that's just one approach of many. And a lot of other approaches are

looking at reception history. How have the text been used ever since those earliest audiences? How are they used today?

There are a lot of approaches that try to understand well through a lens of, of trauma or a lens of

disability or a lens of liberation.

What can the Bible mean? I think those are very valuable approaches, but my goal is to just kind of use a, a historical critical approach

to say, to the degree anyone is

interested in trying to understand what we think these texts would have meant to

the authors and the original audiences, let's,

let's do that work so that can then be there as a tool. So if, if someone wants to build

on the foundation of what the original authors and audiences understood, that can be there.

And, and I think that's a, that's

a useful jumping off point for a lot of other approaches to the text.

But, but yeah, I have decided to stick with my work to the historical critical approach.

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[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

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[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

And we've been talking about the Bible and you focus on in your work on the Bible. But what do we really mean when we refer to the Bible? What exactly, what texts exactly are we talking about?

[Dan McClellan]

That depends on what what somebody understands by the Bible. Because one of the things I point out in the in the first chapter is that there's not really any such

thing as the Bible, just like there's not really any such thing as the dictionary. There are a lot of different dictionaries and there are a lot of different Bibles.

Because I'm, you know, in, in the religious communities that you run in the Bible means something very different from what it means in the religious communities that I run in. And there are, you know, you can go to Mount Gerizim and the Bible

means something even different from, from that.

I, I don't remember how much detail

I get into in the book, but I frequently talk about a series of, of questions you have to answer before you can even figure out what you're talking about when it comes to the Bible. And that includes the canon.

What, what is your biblical canon?

It includes the manuscripts that you're going to rely on.

Because even if you decide, okay, we're going to use, you know, an orthodox canon or a Christian orthodox canon, great,

are we going to use the Septuagint, Are we going to use the Masoretic

text and then the, the apocryphal manuscripts that we have you got a lot

of different manuscripts that you can use. Are we going to use a diplomatic edition where it's just one manuscript is authoritative, or are we going to cobble together our source text from a variety of different manuscripts?

And then you've got a bunch of different translations that you can use.

Most people who are engaging the Bible are doing so in translation and then

you've got a bunch of different editions

of those translations that you can pick. So the Bible is really a pretty squishy thing to talk about.

And in the book, because I'm engaging

mainly the public discourse related to the Bible, particularly within Protestant Christianity, I say I'm, I'm talking about a Protestant canon.

I'm talking about, and, and I talk

about some of the different manuscripts just to, to demonstrate how things can change. If you're relying on the Septuagint or the Masoretic text or some of the Dead Sea Scrolls or things like that. And for the most part, I'm translating the stuff myself.

So, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's a squishy thing to, to talk about. But I think that's one of the things that people need to be aware

of because an awful lot of folks think that there is the Bible and they may not know exactly all of the decisions that are being made for them behind the scenes before what, what is the Bible actually gets to them.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Right. So as you point out, there's questions of sort of which, like books of the Bible, which sections of the Bible, so to speak, are included in a person's understanding of the Bible. And then there's the questions of which manuscripts of those particular, let's say books of the Bible are going to be considered valid or Most valid. And then there's a question of the translation of those manuscripts into whatever language people are accessing the Bible in. And just on the translation point, I remember hearing once that there was some Christian pastor or something who said, well, if English was good enough for Jesus, you know, it's good enough for me. And this idea that he seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that obviously Jesus didn't speak English and certainly the original texts of the Bible were not. The Christian Bible were not written in English.

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, yeah.

And there are even folks who will

say that they use the King James Version to correct the Greek, which is,

yeah, just a ludicrous misunderstanding of how Bible translation works and also how, you

know, the relationship of the King James Version to what we can reconstruct regarding the Bible today.

So, yeah, there are a lot of

dogmas that go into why people will prefer one version of the Bible over another and assert that it is the Bible.

And I think it's helpful to be open about the fact that, hey, we're giving preference to certain answers to certain

questions when we endorse one Bible over another. And let's at least be transparent about that.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

All right. And obviously, in a public debate,

[Interviewer/Host]

if

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

one side says, well, we're going to give preference to this particular Bible or this particular edition of the Bible, in a sense, they're kind of stacking the deck and in their favor, potentially.

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things that people need to be aware of. They don't have to give up those

decisions to the folks on the other side of the aisle in these debates.

And certainly they shouldn't just acquiesce when people say, well, There are only 66 books in the Bible. I think there's value in pushing back

against that and expecting people to substantiate their claims. If they're going to say this is the Bible, they should at very least be aware of some of the decisions that are being made under the hood before we even get to what the Bible is.

And I don't think an awful lot

of people who engage in that public discourse can really drill down to the bedrock of those questions and those decisions in a very informed way.

I think a lot of times folks

are happy to just kind of punt to, well, this is the tradition that

I was raised in.

This is the tradition to which I adhere, and this is the Bible for that tradition. And so I'm going to use it.

And again, the more people are aware

of these decisions being made behind the scenes, I think the better equipped they are to engage the discussions in an informed way and maybe bring to the surface all these different considerations.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Yeah, well, speaking of bringing things to the surface. So let's jump into this. Does the Bible say that the Bible is inspired?

[Dan McClellan]

I would have to say that the

Bible can't say the Bible is inspired because whatever Bible you are deciding on, it didn't exist when the texts of the Bible were being written.

And so you are presupposing that these

authors have something in mind when they talk about, and particularly this is 2 Timothy 3, 16, where all scripture is theopne, God breathed. And that is usually understood to refer to the scriptures of the Bible as inspired. But the author of two Timothy certainly had no concept of the Bible as we understand it today, and was probably not even referring to Christian Scripture, was probably just referring to Jewish Scripture.

And that would have been, in that

time period, probably still a relatively unbound category. There were probably an awful lot of texts that were considered Scripture by the author of two Timothy that are not really considered Scripture by the majority of Jewish and Christian folks today.

And then also in that chapter of

the book, I make a point about the fact that the word theopneustos, which we generally take to mean inspired, doesn't seem to have meant inspired in the late first or early second century when 2 Timothy was written. We can look at other texts that use that word. And the word is used in reference to streams of water and sandals and even ointments that are used to prepare dead bodies.

And there's a wonderful book by a

scholar named Jauncy Poirier called the Invention of the Inspired Text. And the case that Poirier makes there is that in the earliest periods, theopnestos meant God breathed in the sense of God breathed the breath of life into the first human.

And so this is life giving rather

than inspired, because there's another word in Greek for inspired. It's entheos. If they wanted to say inspired as we understand it today in this time period, they could have just used entheos. But theopneus, though, seems to mean something more like life giving. And so it wasn't until origin of Alexandria in the third century CE that we kind of have this lexical pivot where now theopnefstos is being used more specifically to as a synonym for entheos to mean inspired.

And. And I think the Poirier makes a

very good case in his book.

And so the chapter is just kind

of raising a bunch of observations about the appeal to that scripture as kind of a proof text for the inspiration of every word of the Bible to show not only does that not really delineate the Bible as we know it, it also doesn't even seem to refer to the text of the Bible as inspired. It seems to refer to them as life giving.

And so I, that was, that was my attempt to kind of muddy the waters of that proof text that is

so frequently appealed to in a bit of circular reasoning as well. Because a lot of people say, well, second Timothy 3:16 says the Bible is inspired.

Well, how do you know second Timothy 3:16 is accurate? And well, it's part of the Bible and the Bible is inspired. So there's a bit of circular reasoning

that goes into the leveraging of that passage as a proof text for the inspiration of the Bible as well.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And does the Bible say that God created the universe out of nothing?

[Dan McClellan]

I don't think so.

And here's where a lot of people don't like that. I point out that the majority of scholars don't seem to think so either because we don't have the doctrine of

creation ex nihilo creation out of nothing until the late second century, around 171 AD when we first get the articulation of this notion of creation out of nothingness.

And prior to that the, the Greco

Roman period, Jewish conventional wisdom was the same as the, the Greek conventional wisdom that out of nothing nothing comes. And so there must have been this eternal matter, this eternal material substrate out of which God created all that is.

And, and I address everything from Genesis

1:1 to second Maccabees 7:28 and, and other passages that people have held up as proof text for creation out of nothing. And, and I try to show that the, the scholarly consensus is that these passages really are not referring to creation out of nothing. It's just after that doctrine developed, that kind of became the main interpretive lens. And if you spent your entire life looking through that lens at these passages, it's a little disruptive to consider that these passages might not mean those things.

And so that's a point I enjoy

bringing up on my social media channels

from time to time just to kind of needle people a little bit and just point out, hey, this, and the

majority of scholars agree that this is not something that's going on anywhere in the Bible.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

So could you speak a drop about the passage in Genesis that people feel says something like in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth?

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, that, that I think is such a fascinating little translation thing because more

and more These days, new translations of Genesis are actually translating in it in a different way.

It doesn't say in the beginning God

created the heavens and the earth.

These days we see that passage being

translated when God began to create the heavens and the earth. And so it's a temporal clause. And then verse two where it says the earth was tohu vavohu. It was without form and void, as the King James Version says, or. Or welter and waste and, or something like that.

And.

And there was darkness over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the. Over the, the abyss.

That would be.

With the temporal clause reading.

That would be describing the state of

affairs when God began their creative activity, which would have started in verse three with the statement, let there be light.

And, and this is based on something that, you know, as far back as Rashi, people have observed that doesn't really

seem to be in the absolute state. It doesn't really seem to mean in the beginning. Rashi says that should be Barishana.

And it seems to be in the

construct stated seems to mean in the beginning of something. In the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth, or more idiomatically in English, when God began to create the heavens and the earth. And the updated edition of the new Revised Standard Version renders it that way. From what I recall, the JPS Tanakh renders it that way. We have a variety of translations from the last several decades that are rendering Genesis 1:1 now according to that understanding.

And that annoys a lot of people.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Yeah, yeah, sure. Just very briefly for folks who are not so familiar with all of this. Rashi is a medieval French rabbinical scholar who wrote a commentary on the Bible that dealt with lots of issues, but especially kind of the quote unquote, basic understanding of texts to deal with language issues, grammar, things that, you know, would make it difficult to understand a particular passage. And the Tanakh is a Hebrew word for the Jewish Bible. Just to put that out there. Okay, thank you.

[Dan McClellan]

That's. That's what on, on my podcast, my, my co host Dan Beecher is kind of there to, to be like, wait, stop. Can you explain what that word means? Because I, I try hard to. To not just blaze right through the, the, the jargony stuff, but, but have somebody there.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

It's all good. Oh, and one other thing, just because, you know, I mean, for, for someone who grew up in the ultra Orthodox Jewish community and understood the Bible in a very particular way, I mean, all of this is fascinating, but certainly issues about the creation of the world, you know, out of nothing is definitely a big issue in the community that I grew up in. I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about how Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy comes into this story, about the development of this idea of using the Bible or these biblical verses to imply that God created the world out of nothing.

[Dan McClellan]

Yeah, there's a.

According to some of the early Greek

philosophers, and particularly Aristotle, their matter could

occupy either the realm of being or a realm of non being.

And if it occupied the realm of non being, it was, it was unformed,

it lacked form and function. It was just kind of undifferentiated matter. And then when you impose form and

function on it, you move it from

the realm of non being to the realm of being.

And there's a, there's a passage in Aristotle where he, he talks about imposing form and function, that to create something

is to move it from non being to being. And then to destroy something is to move it from being to non being.

And so this doesn't. Doesn't mean that the non being is nothingness.

It means it doesn't have form and function. And so there are some passages in the New Testament, and probably the one that comes up Most frequently is second Maccabees 7:28, where the mother of the seven sons, and this is a famous story within early Judaism of Antiochus Epiphanes

the fourth, torturing and then killing seven brothers in a row because they won't disobey Jewish law.

And the mother exhorts them to. To remain faithful as they're being tortured to death.

And she says to one of them that look to the.

The heavens, to the sun, the move

and the stars and realize that God made them ex uc Anton out of non being. And just like he made the human race. And that has long been held up

as an expression of creation out of nothing, because it is out of non being.

But within the first second century bce,

this would have been a pretty stereotypical expression of that Aristotelian notion of a material substrate from which creation occurs. And you see a very similar phrase being used in Xenophon and other writers where they talk about how parents create children Ek UK Anton or Ex Uganton out of. Out of non being.

And so it's not really creation out of nothing. It's just been when the doctrine developed in the late second century ce that

then became an interpretive lens that could then be imposed on those texts that were talking about that and they could be reinterpreted to be reflections of creation out of nothing, when in reality, in those earlier time periods, it was just a standard kind of reflection of the conventional Aristotelian wisdom regarding how things move from lacking form and function to having form and function.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Yeah. So, shifting gears a bit, does the

[Interviewer/Host]

Bible say that slavery is wrong?

[Dan McClellan]

I don't think the Bible ever says any such thing whatsoever. That's been a point that I've been

making for a while, that there's.

There's no part of the Bible that

questions, undermines, or prohibits the practice itself of, of buying, selling, and owning other human beings. And while the Bible does suggest that

God doesn't like to see Israel enslaved

to other nations, the legislation in the Bible is certainly perfectly happy to have Israelites enslaved, at least temporarily, to other Israelites, and is perfectly happy to enslave non Israelites to Israelites. And, and this is chattel slavery, as we see in, in Leviticus 25, verses 44 through 46, where there's a distinction made between how you're supposed to treat or Israelite debt slaves more like hired laborers than like enslaved people. And then it goes on and says,

but you can get your slaves from

the non Israelites that are around you or that are dwelling among you, and you can buy them, sell them, you can pass them on as inheritance, and you can treat them as enslaved people.

And you don't really see that overturned

anywhere in the Bible.

There are little changes here and there,

and there are certainly criticisms of the abuses of the slave trade, particularly when we get to the New Testament.

But we don't really find anything anywhere

in the Bible that suggests the basic practice of buying, selling, and owning other human beings is fundamentally immoral. That's something that we won't see for, you know, 1500 years after the New Testament is complete.

So I don't buy the arguments that Paul was, you know, sneaking this, this kind of abolitionist secret code into his

text senate, and it just took 1500 years for people to figure out that's what was going on. I don't think that was going on at all. I think Paul, just like the way Jesus is represented in the New Testament, just like the way slavery is represented throughout the entire Bible, just accepted it as something that was just part of the cultural fabric and they were not questioning it.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Is there any

[Interviewer/Host]

evidence that the slavery practiced by the ancient Israelites was more just than the system of slavery of the other nations around the Israelites?

[Dan McClellan]

That's something that a lot of people. It's an argument a lot of people make that God was kind of incrementally

trying to improve conditions.

And if you go and look at

all of the legislation on slavery in the Hebrew Bible and compare it to the legislation we find in the laws of Hammurabi or in other law codes from around ancient West Asia, I think

most of the law codes are going

to be more or less the same.

And I think you have a few

laws that could be considered more just, and then a few laws that can be considered less just. So, for instance, there is a law

in Deuteronomy that suggests that you should

not return a runaway slave to their master, but you should let them live among you.

And a lot of people think this

overturns this expectation that slaves are supposed to be returned to masters and they're supposed to obey the law.

But a lot of scholars have pointed

out the language of this passage is structured. It seems to be referring to slaves who have escaped from other nations and have come into Israel, rather than slaves within Israel escaping an Israelite master and running to somebody else. Because I. I think it would rather

nuke the practice of slavery to be like, just run next door and, you know, cry out sanctuary, and then you're.

You're freed from, from enslavement.

That.

That doesn't make much sense. So.

But I do think there is a

degree to which that is a more just approach to enslavement.

And then on the other hand, when we look at Exodus 21 and elsewhere in the Pentateuch debt, slavery was to

last for six years. The slave goes free in the seventh year. In the laws of Hammurabi, debt slavery only lasted three years. It lasted half as long as it did.

So there are some ways that the Bible is less just.

There are some ways the Bible is more just.

Most of the time, though, it's awash. And so I would suggest that that

is just kind of standard sociocultural variability rather than any kind of systematic improvement of conditions.

It's certainly not representing Israel as unilaterally

more just, even if just incrementally. I think it's. It's just showing that Israel is a different nation that has a slightly different approach that is mostly just the same.

[Interviewer/Host]

All right,

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[Interviewer/Host]

only offer a different issue of does the Bible say that abortion is murder?

[Dan McClellan]

I don't think the Bible says any such thing whatsoever. In fact, I think the the only passage that in the Bible that I

think directly comments on the personhood of

a fetus would go the other direction.

This is Exodus 21, verses 22 through 25, where we have this legislation about what to do should two men who are fighting injure a pregnant woman. And there are two outcomes that are described. One is the injury causes the woman to miscarry her child, in which case

the penalty is that the husband, the

father, assesses a fine and it seems to be arbitrated to ensure that it's not exorbitant.

And the other outcome is that the

injury causes permanent injury or death to

the woman, in which case talionic justice,

retributive justice, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for life is activated.

And so what that suggests to, in my opinion, the majority of scholars is that the fetus is not being treated

as a full moral and legal person. The fetus is being treated as property,

that is, you know, its destruction is penalized with a fine, whereas the woman and and this might be a little

unusual for the Pentateuch is treated as a full legal and moral person. And where their injury, their death results in in talionic justice.

And there are arguments that try to suggest that no, actually the two different

outcomes that are described are one, premature birth, where there's no harm to the child, and then the other is miscarriage. And that's what merits the death penalty.

And that's just an argument I don't think holds water. And I don't point it out in the book.

But the first time I find in the historical record anyone who interprets that passage is a reference to premature birth or miscarriage is 1563 with Calvin.

And it's because Calvin says, well, if we understand it this way, that would

mean that the fetus is not a person. And I reject that. So it has to be read this other way.

And then I I don't I think

the first Jewish scholar I can find that endorses that reading is Umberto Cassuto. And in like 1951, like it is

not that that reading is a pretty late reading. But I I go through some details in the book.

Why I don't think that reading makes much sense.

And so throughout the Hebrew Bible it

seems to me that a fetus is treated more as property than as person. And, and we can look in early Halakic and Rabbinic literature and that seems to be the position that is taken there as well. Even though within the New Testament, this story of John the Baptist leaping within his mother's womb is suggestive of a notion of personhood by the time of the quickening.

And this is actually one of three positions that were being endorsed by the

philosophers of the day.

You had the Epicureans and the Pythagoreans

said that the spirit entered the body, the soul entered the body at conception.

You had the Aristotelians who said it

entered the body once the fetus was fully formed and the quickening was the evidence that now the soul had entered the body. And then you have the Stoics who said that it didn't enter the body until birth and the baby made contact with the outside air.

And so I think the best you can do in the New Testament is

suggest that, well, this story in Luke 1 where John the Baptist leaps inside Elizabeth's womb, at best that's evidence of an Aristotelian position on insoulment, that John the Baptist had his soul within him by the time of the quickening.

And so I don't really think that

the Bible addresses abortion specifically anywhere.

But when it comes to the debates

about abortion and how we talk about when a fetus becomes a person and when personhood is achieved, I think we do have some passages that suggest there is change. There is development between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. But throughout all of the biblical texts, there is a perception that at least at some point in gestation, the fetus is more property than person.

[Interviewer/Host]

Moving on to another kind of very sensitive topic where the Bible often shows up, the question of homosexuality. Does the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination?

[Dan McClellan]

I think we, the, I think the semantic domains of how we talk about homosexuality today and how the Bible talks

about same sex intercourse, I think there's

some overlap, but they're not the exact same thing. And I think a lot of people

do the Bible an injustice when they try to retroject into the Bible a notion of a homosexual orientation, which is

something that we really haven't had. We, we think about a homosexual orientation

today in very, very different terms from how they would have thought about what was motivating the pursuit of same sex intercourse in the ancient world.

And in the ancient World sex was not an activity that two equal agents engaged in mutually. Sex was something that an active sexual agent did to a passive sexual object. And the agency and the consent of

that passive sexual object was usually just not relevant.

And we see in Leviticus 18 and

Leviticus 20 this prohibition on a man taking the insertive role in an act of same sex intercourse. I think that's the most likely reading of what's going on in those passages.

And before we just say, okay, well that ends the discussion, I think we need to understand what exactly is being

addressed here and why.

Because what's definitely not being addressed here

is female same sex intercourse.

And so it's not just a simple

question of, oh, they must have thought

any same sex intercourse was inappropriate because it, it just is. There obviously was something different about male

same sex intercourse versus female same sex intercourse.

And I think it has to do with the fact that they considered male

same sex intercourse inappropriate because

the man, the, the receptive partner was being made into

the passive sexual object. They were being penetrated sexually by another man. And that violated their position at the apex of this socially conventionalized hierarchy of domination and penetration.

And so I think the, and I'm trying to represent, as best I can

what seems to me to be the consensus view of scholars on this. This is not my idiosyncratic position. This is what the majority of the scholars I can find who talk about sex in the ancient world say.

And so the prohibition in Leviticus seems to be about saying, don't violate a

man's position that way. Don't emasculate him, don't feminize him. And it doesn't really take into account the agency or consent of a man who might be in the receptive role. It basically says the one taking the insertive role is violating the status of the other.

And that's why female same sex intercourse

isn't even in view because there is no penetration going on ostensibly, there's no penis in play.

And so it's not really sex. And so I don't think there's, there's

any kind of actual concern for, for that they probably would have thought, nah, who cares?

When we get into the New Testament,

we get into Romans 1 and some other passages, I think Paul is representing

a position that was fairly common among

the more conservative ends of, of society

in that time period where the, the

kind of standard notion that a young boy was, was an appropriate object of sexual activity on the part of older citizen men.

I think Paul doesn't like that and is trying to explain it away as

an outcome of God's punishment. In Romans 1, Paul appeals to this

idea of natural theology that just from the way the universe works, we can

decode the nature of God. We can discover how God wants to be worshiped. And so the folks who worship the created rather than the Creator, they're, they're,

you know, rejecting God and they're in

violation of God's standards.

And so God will kind of remove

the governor on sexual desire and allow sexual desire to run wild. And that results in men seeking out intercourse with other men, women seeking out intercourse with other women, according to what I think that these texts are most likely saying. And, and Paul condemns that, but his rationale I don't think is very good.

So I wouldn't go so far as

to say that the Bible doesn't condemn same sex intercourse. I think it does.

But when we look at the rationale

for it and what's going on there,

we've long ago outgrown the, those kind of parochial and very scientifically uninformed notions

of, of the nature and the function of sexual. And we know better.

And one of the things I find

so disconcerting about people who appeal to Paul as a proof text regarding how sex ought to operate today is that

they reject the rest of Paul's sexual ethic because Paul wanted everybody to be celibate. Paul was probably himself a celibate, if

not an asexual man.

And so we reject Paul's sexual ethic when it comes to celibacy, but we want to wave the flag of Paul's sexual ethic when it comes to his, his ahistorical, is his non biological and kind of inaccurate take on, on why

same sex intercourse is bad.

I, I just think it's, it's a rather silly thing to try to import

from the ancient world into today without, without any real critical analysis.

And in the end, I think it is, it is harmful and it is

something that's going to result in a lot of suffering and has, and results even in death in, in people taking other people's lives, people taking their own lives as a result of, of demonizing folks who, who are attracted to members of the same sex. I, I think that's just hateful and

harmful and, and I don't like bullies.

And so I'm gonna do what I

can to, to, to get in the way of that kind of leveraging of the Bible because I, I don't think

that's what we should be doing with those texts.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

Well, I think especially the last point

[Interviewer/Host]

you were just making really encapsulates very beautifully your approach to the Bible. And I think you do a tremendous job in demystifying and contextualizing the Bible so that people today could understand it in a much more nuanced and thoughtful way. There's so much more that we could talk about, but we have run out of time.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

I want to thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.

[Dan McClellan]

Well, thank you so much for your time.

I appreciate it and I appreciate the very kind words.

[Schneer Zalman Neufeld]

That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.

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