Daniel McClellan | |||||||||||
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Born | [1] | July 23, 1980||||||||||
Nationality | American | ||||||||||
Occupation | Biblical scholar | ||||||||||
Academic background | |||||||||||
Education | |||||||||||
Thesis | Deity and Divine Agency in the Hebrew Bible: Cognitive Perspectives (2020) | ||||||||||
Doctoral advisor | Francesca Stavrakopoulou | ||||||||||
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Daniel O. McClellan [2] is an American biblical scholar who is active on social media. [3] [4] [5] He is a public scholar of the Bible and religion and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. McClellan was the winner of the Society of Biblical Literature's 2023 Richards Award for Public Scholarship. [6]
Daniel McClellan is originally from West Virginia. [7] He was born in 1980. [8] In 2006, he was married and, as of 2024, has three daughters. [2]
Between 2013–2023, McClellan worked as scripture translation supervisor for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [2] [9] McClellan completed a bachelor's degree in ancient Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University with a minor in Classical Greek, [10] a master's degree in Jewish studies at the University of Oxford, and a master of arts in biblical studies at Trinity Western University. [2] [11]
In 2020, he received a PhD from the University of Exeter, where he wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Francesca Stavrakopoulou. [12] [11] In 2022, he published a revised version of his dissertation, titled YHWH's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. [6] [11] His formal academic areas of expertise include Second Temple Judaism, the early Israelite religion, the cognitive science of religion, and textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. [13] [7]
Since 2021, McClellan has been active on social media, confronting misinformation being shared on social media about the academic study of the Bible and religion. [11] He leads online classes, cohosts the Data Over Dogma Podcast, [14] and is also active on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. [6] On TikTok, he has become popular by "stitching" videos containing misinterpretations of the Bible. [15]
Daniel McClellan has run for office in Utah twice, though he lost both elections to incumbents. His first bid was for Utah State House of Representatives (District 52) in 2018; he received 33.5% of the vote. [16] In 2020, he ran for Utah's State Senate (District 10) and received 34.8% of the vote. [17] [18]
The Bible is a collection of religious texts or scriptures which to a certain degree are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, and other Abrahamic religions. The Bible is an anthology originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials that are accepted as part of the Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon. Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and interpret the text varies.
Yahweh was an ancient Levantine deity who was venerated in Israel and Judah. Though no consensus exists regarding his origins, scholars generally contend that he is associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. His worship reaches back to at least the Early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier. While the Israelites held him as their national god, their religion—known as Yahwism, involving the worship of Yahweh among a broader Semitic pantheon—was still essentially polytheistic or, according to some accounts, monolatristic. However, during and after the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE, the Israelite religion gradually evolved into Judaism and Samaritanism, which are both strictly monotheistic and thus regard Yahweh as God in the singular sense—that is, as the supreme being of the universe and without any equals.
The Second Book of Nephi, usually referred to as Second Nephi or 2 Nephi, is the second book of the Book of Mormon, the primary religious text of the Latter-day Saint Movement. Narrated by Nephi, son of Lehi, unlike the first Book of Nephi, 2 Nephi contains little history of the Nephite people and focuses predominately on visions and prophecies of Nephi himself and other prophets, particularly Isaiah.
Jah or Yah is a short form of the tetragrammaton יהוה (YHWH), the personal name of God: Yahweh, which the ancient Israelites used. The conventional Christian English pronunciation of Jah is, even though the letter J here transliterates the palatal approximant. The spelling Yah is designed to make the pronunciation explicit in an English-language context, especially for Christians who may not use Hebrew regularly during prayer and study.
Stephen Edward Robinson was a religious scholar and apologist, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Elohim, the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ, is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. In other verses it refers to the singular gods of other nations or to deities in the plural.
Biblical cosmology is the account of the universe and its laws in the Bible. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.
The Joseph Smith Translation (JST), also called the Inspired Version of the Holy Scriptures (IV), is a revision of the Bible by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, who said that the JST/IV was intended to restore what he described as "many important points touching the salvation of men, [that] had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled". Smith was killed before he deemed it complete, though most of his work on it was performed about a decade beforehand. The work is the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) with some significant additions and revisions. It is considered a sacred text and is part of the canon of Community of Christ (CoC), formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and other Latter Day Saint churches. Selections from the Joseph Smith Translation are also included in the footnotes and the appendix of the Latter-day Saint edition of the LDS-published King James Version of the Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' edition of the Bible includes selections from the JST in its footnotes and appendix. It has officially canonized only certain excerpts that appear in the Pearl of Great Price. These excerpts are the Book of Moses and Smith's revision of part of the Gospel of Matthew.
There are various names of God, many of which enumerate the various qualities of a Supreme Being. The English word god is used by multiple religions as a noun to refer to different deities, or specifically to the Supreme Being, as denoted in English by the capitalized and uncapitalized terms God and god. Ancient cognate equivalents for the biblical Hebrew Elohim, one of the most common names of God in the Bible, include proto-Semitic El, biblical Aramaic Elah, and Arabic ilah. The personal or proper name for God in many of these languages may either be distinguished from such attributes, or homonymic. For example, in Judaism the tetragrammaton is sometimes related to the ancient Hebrew ehyeh. It is connected to the passage in Exodus 3:14 in which God gives his name as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, where the verb may be translated most basically as "I am that I am", "I shall be what I shall be", or "I shall be what I am". In the passage, YHWH, the personal name of God, is revealed directly to Moses.
Jehovah is a Latinization of the Hebrew יְהֹוָהYəhōwā, one vocalization of the Tetragrammaton יהוה (YHWH), the proper name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. The Tetragrammaton is considered one of the seven names of God in Judaism and a form of God's name in Christianity.
In contrast to the variety of absolute or personal names of God in the Old Testament, the New Testament uses only two, according to the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia. From the 20th century onwards, "a number of scholars find various evidence for the name [YHWH or related form] in the New Testament.
View of the Hebrews is an 1823 book written by Ethan Smith, a Congregationalist minister in Vermont, who argued that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a relatively common view during the early nineteenth century. Numerous commentators on Mormon history, from LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts to Fawn M. Brodie, biographer of Joseph Smith, have noted similarities in the content of View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, which was first published in 1830, seven years after Ethan Smith's book.
Gerald "Gary" Neil Knoppers was a professor in the Department of Theology at University of Notre Dame. He wrote books and articles regarding a range of Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern topics. He is particularly renowned for his work on 1 Chronicles, writing I Chronicles 1 – 9 and I Chronicles 10 – 29, which together comprise a significant treatment of the work of the Chronicler. In May 2005 the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies granted the R. B. Y. Scott Award to Knoppers for his two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on I Chronicles
"They have pierced my hands and my feet", or "They pierced my hands and my feet" is a phrase that occurs in some English translations of Psalm 22:16.
Sacred Name Bibles are Bible translations that consistently use Hebraic forms of the God of Israel's personal name, instead of its English language translation, in both the Old and New Testaments. Some Bible versions, such as the Jerusalem Bible, employ the name Yahweh, a transliteration of the Hebrew tetragrammaton (YHWH), in the English text of the Old Testament, where traditional English versions have LORD.
The most widespread belief among archeological and historical scholars is that the origins of Judaism lie in Bronze Age polytheistic Canaanite religion. Judaism also syncretized elements of other Semitic religions such as Babylonian religion, which is reflected in the early prophetic books of the Tanakh.
Ellis Theo Rasmussen was an American professor and dean of Religious Instruction at Brigham Young University (BYU). He helped produce the edition of the Bible published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1979.
Psalm 22 of the Book of Psalms or My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? is a psalm in the Bible.
The concept of kingship of God appears in the Hebrew Bible with references to "his Kingdom" and "your Kingdom" while the term "kingdom of God" is not directly used. "Yours is the kingdom, O Lord" is used in 1Chronicles 29:10–12 and "His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom" in Daniel 4:3, for example. It is tied to Jewish understanding that through the messiah, God will restore the Kingdom of Israel, following the Davidic covenant.
Several passages in the Hebrew Bible are interpreted as referring to genocide that God commanded the Israelites commit, notably the case of Amalek, and the Canaanites. Various interpretations have been given of these passages throughout history, with some interpretations holding the commandments as necessary or allegorical. Critics of Christianity and Judaism have often cited the passages to prove that the biblical god was a malevolent being. Still others have invoked the passage to incite genocide or ethnic cleansing against religious or ethnic minorities, such as was done during the Rwandan genocide. A reference to the commandment by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israel–Hamas war was cited as proof of genocide in the Gaza strip in South Africa's genocide case against Israel. In mainstream scholarship, the passages are not seen as entirely historically accurate.