all right dan mcclellan thank you very much for coming down here and doing the podcast man

thank you for having me i appreciate it uh as i was just talking to you off off camera this is uh i'm

very very new to this world of the classical world and Christianity and the history of religion.

And I've come to realize a lot of people have very different views and opinions of what was

going on back in the day.

Yeah, yeah, there's kind of a standard deviation and then you got some people reaching out

a little further than that. But yeah, there are a wide variety of views.

So for people who aren't familiar with you, can you give me a background of your education and what you talk about in your YouTube channel and what you do?

So my first degree was in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. I was at Brigham Young University, and I emphasized Biblical Hebrew, but I did a minor in classical Greek, then went away to the University of Oxford, where I did a master's degree in Jewish studies, and I wrote my master's thesis there on textual criticism of the Septuagint. Then I went and did another master's degree at a university up in Canada called Trinity Western University.

That was in biblical studies where I started working on cognitive linguistics and wrote my thesis there on the conceptualization of deity in the Hebrew Bible.

So when they talked and thought about gods anciently, what exactly were they thinking about. And then I did my doctoral dissertation

under the watchful eye of Professor Francesca Stavri Capulah at the University of Exeter,

and that was on concepts of deity and divine agency. So now I'm looking at what is a God,

but also what is a divine image, and how does, like, an idol, how does that work?

What was the logic they were using for how this could be both the deity and not the deity?

And then I looked at how we can better understand some features in the Bible related to divine presence associated with that.

And during the COVID lockdowns, I was at home with not a

ton to do, and I started seeing people posting TikTok videos on Facebook and Instagram and elsewhere

where people were talking about religion in the Bible, and I kind of was wondering,

who's in charge over there? So got an account and went and checked out TikTok and saw that there wasn't really,

there were not a lot of credentialed experts who were commenting,

but there was a lot of discussion going on about religion and the Bible and stuff.

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