Why "Christians" Hate Dan McClellan

[gentle music] Let's just get right into it.

People often talk about the Bible.

They say that the Bible says this, they say the Bible says that, but they don't have much thought about what goes into the books that actually made the Bible.

Can you tell me what the Bible actually is?

Well, i- it's a difficult question.

It's kind of like, uh, asking what the dictionary is.

There's no such thing as the dictionary.

There are dictionaries, just like there's no such thing as the Bible.

There are Bibles because there ...

Uh, and I think in the book I talk about three main questions that you have to answer before you even get to what your Bible is.

One of them has to do with what, which canon you are preferring.

If you're Jewish, your canon is the, uh, what's called the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi'im, the Ketuvim.

This is basically the Christian Old Testament, but in a slightly different order, and usually with a slightly different textual background.

If you're a Samaritan, your Bible is just the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, or the Torah.

If you're a Catholic, you have the Apocrypha as your deuterocanon.

If you're Protestant, you don't.

If you're a part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, you have a significantly expanded canon.

If you're Armenian, it's different.

If you're Greek Orthodox, your canon is different.

So lots of different canons.

Then we get into what manuscripts you're, uh, using, 'cause you have a lot of different manuscripts for any given text from the Bible, whether it's from the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, and then what translation you're using.

There are a lot of differences between the different translations, and a lot of people these days, on social media at least, seem horrified to discover that most modern translations of the New Testament omit usually around 15 or 16 verses from the New Testament, where, for instance, if you go look in Matthew 17, it will go verses 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, and skip over verse 21.

And a lot of people are like, "What, what happened to this verse in my Bible?" And we know now from hundreds of years of examining manuscripts that that passage wasn't originally a part of the Gospel of Matthew.

Somebody added it in later, and so we've just taken it out, and that drives some people up the wall.

So, uh, when it comes to canon, when it comes to manuscripts, when it comes to translations, you have to answer those questions before you can even get to a version of the Bible.