The Bible Says So

Dan McClellan, a biblical scholar and active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, writes as a public academic who combats misinformation about the Bible on social media. His stated methodology prioritizes "data over dogma," where a dogma is a belief people accept because their social identity requires or incentivizes it rather than because evidence supports it. He argues that his scholarly positions overwhelmingly conflict with Latter-day Saint theology.

McClellan identifies three widespread dogmas he considers unsupported by evidence: inspiration (the belief that the biblical texts are the "word of God"), inerrancy (the belief that the texts as originally written are free from error), and univocality (the belief that all biblical texts speak with a unified voice and never contradict one another). He argues that many common claims about the Bible's meaning collapse when these presuppositions are removed. He further contends that texts have no inherent meaning; meaning is generated in the reader's mind based on experience with linguistic conventions, always shaped by the reader's own context.

The book opens by clarifying what "the Bible" refers to, since different religious traditions recognize different canons, the official collections of books each tradition treats as scripture. McClellan surveys how these texts were composed and compiled, from poetic fragments possibly circulating before 1000 BCE through scribal traditions and the Deuteronomistic History—a scholarly term for the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—shaped under King Josiah (c. 640–609 BCE). The Priestly source, a strand emphasizing priestly authority and ritual purity, was composed during or after the Babylonian exile, when Judahites were forcibly relocated to Babylon in the sixth century BCE. These and other sources were eventually combined into the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. New Testament texts followed, from Paul's letters in the 40s and 50s CE through the Gospels and Revelation in the late first century. The Gospels circulated anonymously and received their traditional authorships only decades later. Canonization was gradual, formalized by church councils from the fourth through the sixteenth centuries CE.

McClellan examines the claim that 2 Timothy 3:16 establishes the Bible as divinely inspired, identifying the appeal as circular since it requires accepting 2 Timothy itself as inspired. He presents the scholarly consensus that the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were pseudonymous, written decades after Paul's death. Drawing on John Poirier's 2021 book The Invention of the Inspired Text, he argues that the Greek word theopneustos, usually translated "inspired," meant "life-giving" until the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria innovated the modern interpretation.

Turning to Genesis, McClellan argues that neither creation account presents creation out of nothing. Genesis 1:1–2, properly translated, describes God beginning to create when dark, murky waters already existed. He traces traditions throughout the Hebrew Bible in which Yahweh, the personal name of Israel's god, subdues chaotic waters associated with a sea monster called Leviathan, linking these to earlier Ugaritic literature, texts from ancient Syria that predate the Bible by centuries. The doctrine of creation out of nothing, he argues, originated in second-century CE debates between Christians and Greek philosophers.

Several chapters address ethical and legal questions. McClellan argues that multiple passages portray God engaging in deception, including an unfulfilled threat to Adam in Genesis 2:17 and the scene in 1 Kings 22 where Yahweh commissions a lying spirit to deceive King Ahab. On slavery, he demonstrates that the Bible's legislation was comparable to, and sometimes harsher than, surrounding nations' laws, that passages cited as prohibiting the slave trade actually address only kidnapping, and that the institution of slavery is never questioned in any biblical text. He also argues that the book of Proverbs explicitly endorses corporal punishment of children, showing that the Hebrew word shevet ("rod") consistently refers to a cane used for beating rather than a shepherd's staff.

On abortion, McClellan examines Exodus 21:22–25, the only passage that directly addresses the legal status of a fetus: If men fighting cause a pregnant woman to miscarry, only a fine is imposed, but if the woman herself is harmed, retaliatory justice applies. He argues this indicates the biblical authors did not grant a fetus the same legal personhood as a born person. The early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo held that abortion became homicide only after the fetus was "formed," a view that remained the Christian consensus for over a millennium. On rape, McClellan argues that Deuteronomy 22:28–29 does describe rape but treats sexual assault as a property crime against the father rather than a crime against the woman.

McClellan presents archaeological evidence that the goddess Asherah was worshipped alongside Yahweh in early Israel, citing inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud (c. 800–770 BCE) that refer to "Yahweh and his asherah." He argues that all negative biblical references to Asherah date to or after Josiah's campaign to centralize worship at the Jerusalem temple. He also argues that Exodus 22:29 likely preserves an early commandment to sacrifice firstborn children, subsequently renegotiated by later authors through animal substitution, priestly service, or outright denial.

On theological claims, McClellan argues that the Bible consistently recognizes the existence of other gods, citing Deuteronomy 32:8–9 and Psalm 82, and contends that rhetoric like "there is no other" in Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55) functions as a statement of incomparability rather than philosophical monotheism. He traces Satan from a generic Hebrew noun meaning "adversary" to a personalized enemy of God, arguing this consolidation occurred in the first century CE. He further argues that biblical authors understood God to possess a corporeal, anthropomorphic body, and that belief in God's incorporeality developed later under Greek philosophical influence. On the afterlife, he argues that the Hebrew word sheol refers to the undifferentiated abode of all the dead rather than a place of punishment, and that the modern concept of hell synthesizes distinct, inconsistent traditions, including the fiery valley of Gehenna, the Greek-influenced Hades, and Tartarus.

McClellan argues that Isaiah 7:14 was not a prophecy about a virgin birth, demonstrating that the Hebrew word almah means "young woman" rather than "virgin" and that the passage addressed an immediate political crisis facing King Ahaz. The virgin birth tradition, he contends, developed in the late first century CE under Greco-Roman cultural influence. On the identity of Jesus, he argues that no biblical passage identifies Jesus as God in the trinitarian sense, a philosophical framework formalized at churchwide councils convened to settle doctrine in the fourth and fifth centuries. He traces instead a divine agency Christology, a view of Jesus as God's chief authorized agent rather than God himself, rooted in Jewish traditions of name-bearing mediatory figures.

McClellan argues that the Bible cannot condemn homosexuality as a sexual orientation because that concept did not exist in the ancient world; the relevant passages target specific sexual acts understood within an ancient hierarchy of domination. He contends that passages invoked to police women's dress actually address displays of wealth and social subordination rather than skin exposure. On Revelation, he argues that 666 is a coded reference to the Roman emperor Nero using gematria, a system assigning numerical values to letters, and that the book exhorted first-century Christians to resist the Roman Empire rather than prophesying future events.

In his conclusion, McClellan argues that the Bible's authority is not inherent but conferred by collective consensus, pointing to the abolition of slavery as precedent for overruling what the Bible endorses. He advocates for believers to openly acknowledge harmful biblical ideologies and transparently renegotiate their interpretation, contending that extending this process to issues affecting women and the LGBTQ+ community would cost nothing but the harmful positions themselves.