In this episode we speak with Bible scholar Dan McClellan about one of Christianity’s most foundational claims: the divinity of Jesus.
Drawing from his deep engagement with biblical scholarship, Dan invites us to consider whether the Bible actually presents Jesus as God in the way later doctrine insists. He explores how early Christian texts reflect diverse and competing understandings of Jesus’s nature, and how ideas about divinity were shaped as much by evolving theology and politics as by the biblical text itself.
Following the interview, Nomad hosts Tim Nash and Anna Robinson reflect on their own relationship with Jesus’s divinity, and what it means to engage these questions with both intellectual honesty and spiritual openness.
Interview starts at 15m 22s
If you’d like to sponsor Tim on his 165 Mito Miles in May Challenge, go to his GoFundMe page.
WEBSITE
SOCIALS
BOOKS
The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues
YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach
BOOKS MENTIONED
The Invention of the Inspired Text by John C. Poirier
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths – John Barton
The Anchor Yale Bible Commentary Series
International Critical Commentary
God’s Stories as told by God’s Children
QUOTES
“Most of what I had heard about it came to me secondhand, and now I was getting a first-hand look at the Bible and I was like, this is not the way everybody represents it.”
“Whatever the nature of this oneness [shared by Jesus and the Father], it is communicable. It is something that Jesus suggests is intended to ultimately be extended to cover his followers, the disciples.”
“To see a divine image is to see the deity that it indexes. And so to see Jesus is to see the deity that Jesus indexes.”
