# Dan McClellan — "Jesus in the Old Testament Is Beyond Dispute" **Summary.** A stitch-reply video (published 2026-07-12) in which [[Dan McClellan]] answers a content creator claiming that Jesus is demonstrably present throughout the Hebrew Bible and that only spiritual blindness explains Jewish, Muslim, and atheist disagreement. McClellan's counter-thesis is *retrojection*: nobody read these texts as being about Jesus until after Jesus died and resurrection stories began circulating, and the New Testament authors then wrote their narratives so as to produce the correspondences now offered as proof. The video's most transferable move is its analysis of the "spiritual reason" framing as a social-identity mechanism for shutting down inquiry. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Jesus in the Old Testament Is Beyond Dispute|Jesus in the Old Testament Is Beyond Dispute]]) --- ## Key Claims 1. **The "spiritual reason" framing is a disincentive, not an explanation.** The opening claim — that there is a spiritual cause behind why Jews, Muslims, and atheists deny Jesus in the Old Testament — gets read as identity policing. Dividing the world into influenced-by-the-spirit-of-God versus influenced-by-the-spirit-of-the-devil means anyone who wants standing in the community "will shy away from trying to follow the logic," because following it marks them as the wrong kind of person. The stated function: "that way, you shore up the holes in your dogmas." (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Jesus in the Old Testament is beyond dispute|Jesus in the Old Testament is beyond dispute]]) 2. **No Hebrew Bible author had Jesus in mind.** The core historical claim. Messianic readings are later impositions, and frequently the passages "had nothing to do with the rhetorical goals of the authors themselves" — many were never messianic in the first place, let alone about Jesus. 3. **Genesis 3:15 is an etiology, not a protoevangelium.** The first two entries on the "351 fulfilled prophecies" list get the sharpest treatment: seed-of-the-woman versus seed-of-the-serpent, with the same verb used for both actions, "just means hey, the offspring of humans and the offspring of snakes will not like each other." It explains why people dislike snakes — "like an Aesop's fable" — and was reinterpreted as the proto-gospel only by later Christians. If the list's first items are not prophecies at all, fulfillment proves nothing. 4. **Matthew edited Mark to manufacture fulfillment.** The compositional claim that carries the argument: the New Testament authors knew the Hebrew Bible connections they wanted and "consciously told their stories, intentionally told their stories so as to draw connections." Matthew takes a story present in Mark and retells it differently so he can then say it fulfilled a passage. Correspondence is therefore evidence of *authorial intent*, not of prediction. 5. **The apologetic is circular.** Presupposing inspiration, inerrancy, univocality, and historicity and then finding them confirmed is named as assuming the conclusion: "when we presuppose our conclusions, we arrive at our conclusions." 6. **The 2 Corinthians 3 veil passage is a tautology.** Citing Paul's "the same veil remains unlifted" to prove that Jewish readers got it wrong is pointing at a passage asserting *we are right and they are wrong* and treating the assertion as its own proof. 7. **Two load-bearing proof-texts are mistranslations.** Psalm 22 does not say "they have pierced my hands and my feet," and Isaiah 7:14 is not a reference to a virgin. McClellan adds a competence argument: the creator cannot read Greek or Hebrew, so is "appealing to misinterpretations and mistranslations as evidence for the misinterpretations and the mistranslations." 8. **Isaiah 53's suffering servant does not die — and is identified as Israel.** Second Isaiah repeatedly and explicitly names the servant as Israel; the figure is "a personification and extension of Israel," a proxy for national suffering. The dying-messiah reading arrives only after Jesus's death, when readers went back looking for a suffering, dying messiah. 9. **The Mark 4 parables text is about parables.** The "to you has been given the secret of the kingdom… for those outside, everything is in parables" passage is about Jesus's own teaching method in the New Testament — it says nothing about the Hebrew Bible. 10. **Dunning-Kruger, named directly.** The closing diagnosis: the creator sits on "Mount Stupid," lacking the languages, the literature, the manuscripts, and the paleography needed to assess the arguments they repeat — and lacking the metacognition to know it. The conviction is attributed to "feelings and identity politics," not evidence. > [!quote] > "You can read Jesus into the Hebrew Bible all you want, but nobody ever did that until at the very earliest Jesus's ministry, but most commonly after his death and then after stories of his resurrection began to circulate." — Dan McClellan > [!quote] > "You literally can make that up because people made it up when they were writing the stories about Jesus. They wrote them so as to make Jesus' story fulfill what they were reading in the Hebrew Bible, what they had renegotiated and reinterpreted as prophecy even when it wasn't prophecy at all." — Dan McClellan --- ## Analysis for this wiki The tenth [[Dan McClellan]] source, and the wiki's first dedicated treatment of **typology and messianic prophecy** — the argumentative engine behind an enormous amount of popular apologetics, and one the wiki had not yet documented from the critical side. **Why the retrojection argument matters here.** Most of the McClellan corpus in this wiki applies the historical-critical lens to a *text* (the doublets, the twelve tribes, the divine council). This one applies it to a *method*. The claim is not that a given verse means something else; it is that the entire practice of finding Jesus in the Hebrew Bible runs backwards, and that its apparent success is a function of the New Testament authors having already done the work deliberately. That is a more portable tool than any single exegetical correction. **The identity-policing analysis pairs with the wiki's rhetoric material.** "You disagree because you have the wrong spirit" is the same class of move the wiki files under [[DARVO]] and the [[NAR Fallacy Taxonomy]] — an unfalsifiable attribution that makes inquiry itself evidence of corruption. It sits close to the code-word mechanism in [[2026-05-24-unbelief-evangelical-code-words-steele|Evangelical Code Words — Jeremy Steele (Unbelief podcast)]], where spiritual vocabulary carries a system beneath a devotional surface. **Translation as authority move.** The Psalm 22 / Isaiah 7:14 material connects to [[2026-06-26-mcclellan-kjv-not-all-that-good|Dan McClellan — Is the Most Famous Bible Translation Really All That Good?]] on translation and prestige, and — from the opposite direction — to [[The Passion Translation]], where invented renderings are sold as recovered depth. Compare [[2026-07-14-remnant-radio-cracking-the-time-code|The Remnant Radio — Exposing \"Cracking the Time Code\" (Candice Smithyman)]], which documents the same "here is what your English Bible really says" maneuver in a word-of-faith book. Three sources, three traditions, one rhetorical pattern. **DEIB lens.** The target of the veil rhetoric is Jewish readers, and the video defends the coherence of a Jewish reading of the Jewish scriptures against a supersessionist frame — the claim that the Hebrew Bible's real meaning is inaccessible to the people whose scripture it is. That is a harm the wiki has not yet documented as its own node. > [!note] Tradition / source-caution > Academic critical scholarship, delivered as a combative stitch-reply to an unnamed content creator. The register is polemical and the mockery is sustained ("Mount Stupid," "you don't have the foggiest clue"), which is a rhetorical choice worth noticing even where the underlying claims are mainstream. The substantive positions — Isaiah 53's servant as Israel, Isaiah 7:14's *almah*, the Psalm 22 verbal root, Matthew's redaction of Mark — are standard historical-critical readings, but they are asserted here rather than argued, with one referral to another video and no citations. The Dunning-Kruger diagnosis is applied to a person, not a claim, and is an ad hominem even where the competence point stands. Treat as a well-grounded popular statement of the critical consensus, not as scholarship. > [!question] Concept-page candidates surfaced > Two nodes emerge from this source. **Messianic prophecy / typology / retrojective hermeneutics** — arguably the strongest single-source case the wiki has for a new concept page, since it names a *method* used across NAR, evangelical, and word-of-faith material alike, and nothing currently covers it. **Supersessionism** — the "veil over their hearts" rhetoric and its effect on Jewish readers; a genuine gap given the wiki's DEIB commitment, with a second data point available in the Christian-nationalism cluster's America-as-Israel material. Both held for a directed pass; folded into [[Dan McClellan]] and [[Deconstruction]] for now.