Fake Bible Scholars Are Going Viral. Real Scholars Need to Step Up Child sacrifice, God's wife, & how Bible editors "fixed" them

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I sat down with Dan McClellan — one of the most followed actual biblical scholars online — to talk about how we got here, why it matters, and what real scholarship looks like when it finally shows up to the fight.

We cover:

→ Why "biblical" is a political term, not a scholarly one→ How apologists learned to sound credentialed without being credentialed

→ Why real scholars abandoned the public square — and what it cost us→ The identity politics engine driving Bible misinformation

→ What it looks like when actual scholarship pushes back

→ Dan's new book "The Bible Says So" — and what it gets right that apologists get wrong

Find Dan McClellan on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram

Book: "The Bible Says So" (Affiliate Link)

Podcast: Data Over Dogma

In this interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Teresa Morgan (Oxford) about her landmark book Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (2015).

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We explore how the Greek word pistis and Latin fides — both rooted in the concept of trust — were used across the ancient Mediterranean world, and how early Christians gradually transformed this everyday language into the rich, complex concept of "faith" we have today. Topics range from Augustine's influential (but limiting) definition of faith, to Paul's "cascade of trust," to the Council of Nicaea's pivotal shift toward propositional belief. Enjoy!

Dr. Morgan's books (affiliate links)📖 Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford University Press, 2015)📖 Trust in Atonement - God, Creation, an Reconciliation (Eerdmans, 2024

For John, Jesus divine. And makes his followers divineWhat does the Gospel of John actually claim about Jesus — and about everyone else?

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In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Hugo Mendez (UNC Chapel Hill) to talk about his new book The Gospel of John: A New History (Oxford University Press), and the result is one of the most genuinely surprising readings of John I've encountered.Most readers know John as the gospel that "makes Jesus divine." That's half the story. The other half — the one Mendez argues we've been missing for centuries — is that John's Jesus extends that same divinity to his followers. The logos becomes flesh, yes. But the logos also draws human beings into oneness with God, gives them the glory he had with the Father, and even tells them in John 10, "you are gods."We get into:- Why John is almost certainly the work of a single author (and where chapter 21 gives itself away as a later addition)- How John knew and creatively reworked Mark, Matthew, and Luke — the Lazarus story is a wild example- John's Philonic logos theology and why it isn't yet 4th-century Trinitarian thought- The deification of believers — what scholars have missed about John 10 and John 17- Mendez's argument that humans in John may also be angelified (John 1:51 and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man)- Why Mendez calls John the first apocryphal gospel — and how it pioneered the eyewitness-claim playbook later used by Thomas, Mary, and the Protevangelium of James- The Beloved Disciple as a literary device, not John son of Zebedee- How the Johannine epistles and even Revelation may belong to a wider tradition of works imitating the Gospel of John.

Dr. Mendez's books (affiliate links)📘 The Gospel of John: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2025) 📘 The Epistles of John: Origins, Authorship, Purpose (Cambridge University Press, 2026)