LDS TikTok star debunks Bible conspiracies, misinformation

[SeekingUnderstanding]

14 minutes ago, JLHPROF said:

He also posts here sometimes.

https://www.mormondialogue.org/profile/33625-dan-mcclellan/

 

And previously https://www.mormondialogue.org/profile/3610-maklelan/

Edited December 13, 2022 by SeekingUnderstanding

[carbon dioxide]

2 hours ago, RevTestament said:

I can actually understand that, but from what I have seen thus far, it is the blind leading the blind, while making a mint. I actually do have a facebook account, although to date I haven't used it much. I believe Musk's plan is to grow Twitter into an all/everything app, which will be available on his phone, and used around the world through his satellites - even outdoing Facebook and TikTok combined - we shall see. If that happens, I will probably be using that. At present I actually kind of like Musk, but time will tell. Power and wealth typically corrupt. Maybe he will get something going before that happens...

Maybe or he could collapse Twitter completely.   He is going to have a problem with governments who demand censorship of various things. 

[RevTestament]

42 minutes ago, carbon dioxide said:

Maybe or he could collapse Twitter completely.   He is going to have a problem with governments who demand censorship of various things. 

Well, as I see it, he saved it from inevitable doom as a progressive, left echo chamber.... kinda like CNN. I think he will manage to save Twitter if it doesn't get sued into oblivion...

He is at least presently headed in the right direction against the tide. In "news" circles Fox has managed to do that, although  I don't see any of the large networks relaying  reliable news anymore. They are all like a dash of events with opinionated mega-phones. I believe there are enough people interested in reality to keep Twitter afloat. I agree about he government thing. Right now  I see Twitter being limited to democracies. It would be cool though, to hop on Twitter and talk to anyone around the world with instant translation  about anything. I'm thinking it is going to happen sooner than later...more interesting than the "metaverse." 

Edited December 13, 2022 by RevTestament

[Dan McClellan]

20 hours ago, Peppermint Patty said:

Dan McClellan doesn’t strike me as the type  that would change his beliefs or behavior for anyone. I just signed up for his upcoming online class. When I signed up it looks like I am the 13,147th person. Registration was $25 to $50 and that means Dan will be making a minimum of $328,000 for his class. This is his second class taught this year. It’s not h unreasonable to assume he is making around 1 million dollars per year from just his online classes. 

I wish I was doing those numbers! I have not had anywhere near 13,000 people sign up for my upcoming class. I've had a grand total of about 2,000 people sign up across all three of the online classes that I've offered since July. While registration has a "recommended donation" of $25, the minimum donation is only $1. My average donation is about $12.90. That's still enough money to make the time commitment worth it for me and my family, but I'm not making anywhere near your estimate.

[Eschaton]

18 hours ago, RevTestament said:

Christ Himself inferred David had written a certain Psalm, and many Psalms are attributed to him. Although perhaps not all. I beg to differ from you. I believe David is responsible for "writing" the Torah. Before him, it was oral, and the alphabet  was not concrete enough. David was the first who had the willingness and the means to hire scribes to do it, and noted it in the Torah, in Deut which states it is the duty of the King to write the law. The scriptures attribute many of the Psalms to David, and they are written that way. Clearly, David would not have allowed something to get written and kept which was not properly attributed to him. BTW nice dodge... but no cigar. 

From How to Read the Bible (James Kugel): "Some psalms use, like 1 or 119 or 145, used terms or expressions that were simply not found in the earlier parts of the Bible, but existed in abundance in latest datable books". Kugel points out that there is quite a lot of northern Israelite language and places. "In short, the great chronological and geographical span indicated by the Psalms' language ruled out a single author or even a single period: the Psalms were written in different places over a long span of time"

Kugel says, "Instead it now seemed most likely that the authors of most of the Psalms were people directly connected to the Temple setting--priests or Levites who worked there."

[Dan McClellan]

22 hours ago, RevTestament said:

McClellan couldn't have picked a worse medium to work on since TikTok is the worst, and he won't be getting me on there to discuss this stuff, 

Sounds like I picked the perfect medium, because you don't know what you're talking about.

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but YHWH was not a storm diety from the south.

This is partly correct, because YHWH didn't adopt the storm deity profile until coming into the northern hilly country, like from further inland in the Arabian peninsula. 

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El was not an individual god, but is a generic semitic title, much like the English word "god."

El is both the generic word for "god" and the personal name of the patriarchal high deity in the Northwest Semitic pantheon.

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It meant something like "the power" and was in many titles and names.

The "power" etymology was rejected by scholars 75 years ago. The only people who still think that's what it means are folks who use the open-access commentaries and lexicons from the 19th century that are freely available on the internet.

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It predated the Hebrew language which was a form that came out of Israel's isolation and stay in Egypt.

There are no linguistic data that support the notion the Hebrew language developed from or as a result of any group's stay in Egypt. The influence of the Egyptian language on early Hebrew is easily accounted for by the observation that Egyptian hegemony was common in the regions of Canaan.

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As the Caananites were semitic, you see El used in their word Ba el which appears in the Bible as Bael or  Baal.

The name Baal is utterly unrelated, etymologically, to the word El. There is no aleph in its spelling, it's just beth-ayin-lamed, and it is another generic word that can also function as a divine name. It means "lord," "master," or even "husband." 

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In the Bible YHVH is called El Shaddai, El Gibbor, El Elyon or Elyon the Most High Power. These are actually two different beings, which the early Romanized Christianity and perhaps the disciples themselves did not realize. YHVH was not a storm god, but was a name actually born out of the Hebrew language. The letters of the early Hebrew were actually born out of the Egyptian hieroglyph system, and are still represented in our English alphabet today - for instance the letter A, which was the Hebrew aleph, which became the Greek Alpha. The Hebrew beit became the Greek bet. We still use the Greek names in the word Alphabet, but then we go on to teach our kids new names for each letter. We can actually credit the Hebrews for our own alphabet, as God used them to give us a superior writing system.

The alphabet was created by Phoenicians and just borrowed by Hebrew speakers.

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The invention of the alphabet spread to the Phoenicians and Greeks, and eventually all the Mideast, and then Europe.

The invention of the alphabet started with the Phoenicians. That's simply not up for debate.

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As I said each of the Hebrew letters had a name and meaning.

Each letter had a name, but assigning a semantic load to each letter is a post-biblical innovation of mystical traditions within Judaism.

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The letters of YHVH mean Behold/look the hand, behold/look the nail.

They mean absolutely no such thing whatsoever. The he does not mean "behold," it originated in a pictograph of a person with arms uplifted in greeting, based on the word "ho!" a type of greeting. The vav represented a peg or hook, not a nail. The yod began as a pictograph of an arm, and the word yad means "hand."

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This was not some foreign name adopted by Israel. The name of God is embedded in the very language of Hebrew, and is unique to them in ancient languages - and by the way it is not Yahweh. It is Yehovah.

Yehovah is an artificial pronunciation created in the Middle Ages by the combination of the vowels from the Hebrew word for Lord, adonai (a longtime substitute used in place of the Tetragrammaton), and the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. It has no relationship to the pronunciation of the divine name prior to the Middle Ages.

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The German spelling was Jehovah because they would pronounce the J with our Y sound. The Hebrew had no hard J sound. There is no ancient Hebrew spelling Yahweh. Once the Hebrews adopted diacritical marks they had developed a custom of not pronouncing the name, but Karaite Jews did not follow that custom, and would often write the name as Yehovah, which even appears in the oldest Masoretic texts penned by Karaites by the way,

Very few scholars agree with the theory that the Masoretes were Karaites, and that vocalization of the divine name is actually just the imposition of the vowels from adonai, sometimes with the holem, but usually without. 

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and many other Hebrew works, which is how we ended up with the Jehovah spelling in the German works. Myth busted. Enjoy.

That's a lot of mythmaking on your part, but that's the nature of dogmatism.

[Eschaton]

On 12/13/2022 at 12:01 PM, Eschaton said:

We don't have any writings from David. Psalms is a collection of poems and hymns from various sources and time periods. As Dan would say, the Bible doesn't have univocity - it's a collection of many texts from many sources with many different beliefs. 

For some reason I can't edit this - the term is "univocality." I shouldn't type with sleep brain activated. 😛 

[Damien the Leper]

I love how this thread went silent after Daniel's response. Kudos to him.

[Stargazer]

On 12/12/2022 at 8:24 PM, InCognitus said:

Nice article, thanks for bringing that to our attention.

I know some non-LDS Christians that buy in to a lot of those conspiracy theories and Bible misconceptions, and unfortunately their same mindset will also dismiss Dan's videos simply because he is a Latter-day Saint.  

I, on the other hand, dismiss Dan's videos simply because he's Dan McClellan.

[Navidad]

On 12/12/2022 at 12:24 PM, InCognitus said:

Nice article, thanks for bringing that to our attention.

I know some non-LDS Christians that buy in to a lot of those conspiracy theories and Bible misconceptions, and unfortunately their same mindset will also dismiss Dan's videos simply because he is a Latter-day Saint.  

Hi my friend. I am glad you said "some," I know "some" Latter-day Saints who will dismiss videos, posts, or writings simply because the author is not a Latter-day Saint! I guess there are close-minded folks everywhere and in every group, culture, and organization. Right?

Edited December 15, 2022 by Navidad

[Navidad]

On 12/13/2022 at 8:57 AM, RevTestament said:

The OT is filled with poetic allusions about God. Picking just one out to prove He was a storm God is silly. I can agree that Yehovah was a heavenly God, so is depicted with heavenly allusions such as "rider on the clouds." We have to deal with the fairly small vocabulary of the Hebrew language, which doesn't even really have a word for spirit, but pictures the spirit in the form of wind... thus, all the allusions to nature depicted in the wind splintering the cedars of Lebanon, blowing the waters, etc. Unlike Caananite gods, Yehovah never allowed the people to depict Him in His House, exactly because He was not a storm god, nor a god of any of those aspects of nature. If anything, the closest He comes to describing Himself is as the sun. And thus Christ is as the brightness of the Sun, but He is not the Sun, and does not want us worshipping the sun. He is as the Sun, in that He gives us life. Many other religions have sun gods because Satan is always trying to steal Christ's glory, but Christ never asked us to worship the sun despite the many biblical allusions to Him as the sun, including His own. Confusing Biblical allusions with pagan ideas is faulty scholarship.

 

You go my friend! Well said!

[Navidad]

On 12/13/2022 at 9:01 AM, Peppermint Patty said:

Dan McClellan doesn’t strike me as the type  that would change his beliefs or behavior for anyone. I just signed up for his upcoming online class. When I signed up it looks like I am the 13,147th person. Registration was $25 to $50 and that means Dan will be making a minimum of $328,000 for his class. This is his second class taught this year. It’s not h unreasonable to assume he is making around 1 million dollars per year from just his online classes. 
 

I guess my point is that Dan probably isn’t too concerned about his job. I’m proud of Dan for building such a large audience. His audience and influence for good will continue to grow. I don’t think the LDS Church has every seen an apologist have this much success and influence before. Welcome to the digital age.

I am a bit confused. Is he a Biblical scholar or an apologist? If the latter, for what does he argue or make an apology?

 

[CA Steve]

2 hours ago, Navidad said:

I am a bit confused. Is he a Biblical scholar or an apologist? If the latter, for what does he argue or make an apology?

 

Are they mutually exclusive? 

[bluebell]

9 minutes ago, CA Steve said:

Are they mutually exclusive? 

Some people believe that a scholar is someone who is not biased towards their subject matter but an apologist is obviously biased towards theirs.  That could be why some have brought it up in this thread.

[Navidad]

2 hours ago, CA Steve said:

Are they mutually exclusive? 

What Bluebell said. Obviously some bias is inevitable, yet the purpose of the scholar goes beyond defending, protecting, or validating their own turf. Their certainty is tempered by the knowledge that in almost every case their field of study of morphogeneic. It will change over time, just as has the viewpoint known as the Documentary Hypothesis I studied fifty years ago.

[Eschaton]

10 minutes ago, bluebell said:

Some people believe that a scholar is someone who is not biased towards their subject matter but an apologist is obviously biased towards theirs.  That could be why some have brought it up in this thread.

The same person could do both things individually, but not both things simultaneously. Like you could be a medical doctor and also an accomplished bungee jump instructor. But you can't do both at once!  

[CA Steve]

5 minutes ago, Navidad said:

What Bluebell said. Obviously some bias is inevitable, yet the purpose of the scholar goes beyond defending, protecting, or validating their own turf. Their certainty is tempered by the knowledge that in almost every case their field of study of morphogeneic. It will change over time, just as has the viewpoint known as the Documentary Hypothesis I studied fifty years ago.

So are they exclusive or not?

[Stargazer]

36 minutes ago, Eschaton said:

The same person could do both things individually, but not both things simultaneously. Like you could be a medical doctor and also an accomplished bungee jump instructor. But you can't do both at once!  

Made me laugh!

Well, maybe you could do both at once, if your patient was on the same cord as you, and the drop was long enough to make a diagnosis! As your patient, I think I would prefer to wait until you got hauled back up, however.

Sounds like a great idea for a reality TV show!

[Stargazer]

3 hours ago, Navidad said:

I am a bit confused. Is he a Biblical scholar or an apologist? If the latter, for what does he argue or make an apology?

 

He's a translator employed by the Church, if I remember correctly.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, CA Steve said:

So are they exclusive or not?

Well Dan would say (and has), that he engages in *critical biblical scholarship. And yes *critical biblical scholarship and apologetics are mutually exclusive in the way they approach a text, but that doesn’t mean they come to opposite conclusions  all the time. For instance almost all critical biblical scholars believe that Jesus son of Joseph existed and preached in the first century. So do apologists!

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, Eschaton said:

The same person could do both things individually, but not both things simultaneously. Like you could be a medical doctor and also an accomplished bungee jump instructor. But you can't do both at once!  

I don’t know that people stop being bible scholars when they act in an apologetic roles (just like someone doesn’t stop being a medical doctor when they are bungee jumping). But maybe they do.

@Dan McClellan, thoughts?  Is it impossible for you to be a bible scholar and an apologist at the same time?

[Eschaton]

8 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I don’t know that people stop being bible scholars when they act in an apologetic roles (just like someone doesn’t stop being a medical doctor when they are bungee jumping). But maybe they do.

 

I don't mean they can't have both identities at once. It's just they are two very different disciplines, with two very different (incompatible) sets of rules. Some very conservative scholars do kind of try to walk the line between them both. 

A good critical scholar could still be an apologist, he or she would just have very different work outputs between each "side."  Dale Martin could do that if he wanted I think - he's a good critical scholar but his personal beliefs I think go far beyond what he would be willing to say with his historian hat on. 

Edited December 15, 2022 by Eschaton

[SeekingUnderstanding]

Start at 2:40 for how Dan talks about critical biblical scholarship vs statement of faith: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRVVba26/

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, Eschaton said:

I don't mean they can't have both identities at once. It's just they are two very different disciplines, with two very different (incompatible) sets of rules. Some very conservative scholars do kind of try to walk the line between them both. 

A good critical scholar could still be an apologist, he or she would just have very different work outputs between each "side."  Dale Martin could do that if he wanted I think - he's a good critical scholar but his personal beliefs I think go far beyond what he would be willing to say with his historian hat on. 

I have a degree in history (just a regular degree, nothing fancy) and one of the main things our professors drilled into us was how often good historians disagreed with each other (especially when it came to really ancient history), and in more than one class we were asked to "defend" a certain historian's conclusions against another group assigned to defend the historian/s that disagreed with him.  And then usually, after everyone was yelling really loudly and things were starting to get heated, we'd have to switch and defend the opposing side just to keep it interesting.

That could be why I struggle to see "scholar" as being synonymous with unbiased and separate from apologist.   

[InCognitus]

6 hours ago, Navidad said:

Hi my friend. I am glad you said "some," I know "some" Latter-day Saints who will dismiss videos, posts, or writings simply because the author is not a Latter-day Saint! I guess there are close-minded folks everywhere and in every group, culture, and organization. Right?

Of course.  Closed-mindedness is everywhere.

But, in my original post, I was thinking of some of Dan's videos about end times prophecy (like the one he made against the idea that Amazon's contactless payment system is a computer chip that is the mark of the beast, etc..).  I know some Christians that believe those very things, and I hope that there are no Latter-day Saints that believe such things (but I wouldn't count on that).  But the Christians I know that believe that Amazon (or Bill Gates, or Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or fill in the blanks based on this week's popular news story) is the source of the mark of the beast also believe that "Mormonism" is of the devil, and wouldn't even watch Dan's videos simply because he is a Latter-day Saint. 

To be totally clear, I had some specific people in mind when I made that comment, and I wasn't trying to imply in even the slightest way that that way of thinking is wide spread in all of Christianity, or even limited to non-LDS Christians.

Edited December 16, 2022 by InCognitus