Is Christianity “Strict Monotheism” - CourtneyR.dev's 2nd Brain

Is Christianity “Strict Monotheism”? ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WZomcxjtr-o/sddefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [Is Christianity “Strict Monotheism”?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&is=tbgBKvQTUOm_V_iB) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [biblical-monotheism, divine-plurality, deutero-isaiah, early-christology, trinity-doctrine, rhetorical-scope] > author: Dan McClellan > source: Dan McClellan (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o > date created: 2026-09-26 16:20 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # 🏷️ Title: Is Christianity "strict monotheism"? >  ## 🧭 Table of contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning styles assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO analysis](#️-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) - [🔄 Refactor appendix](#-refactor-appendix--is-christianity-strict-monotheism) ## 📝 Summary - **What happened.** Dan McClellan (PhD, biblical scholar, "data over dogma" framing) published a 42-minute response video on 2026-09-25 reacting to a clipped street-style debate. In the clip, one debater asserts "Christianity is strict monotheism" and cites Isaiah 43:10, 44:6, 44:8 and 45; a second debater denies it, points to the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Deuteronomy 32:8-9, and says Jews of Jesus's day were monotheists only "because they were apostates." Neither debater is named in the transcript. McClellan pauses the clip roughly every two minutes to rebut the first debater and, at 00:33:20, 00:39:08 and 00:42:03, to fault the second debater's articulation while agreeing with his conclusion. - **The claim.** No text in the Hebrew Bible or New Testament asserts strict philosophical monotheism (the denial that any god other than Adonai exists). The "there is no other besides me" formulas in Deutero-Isaiah and Deuteronomy assert Adonai's exclusive relationship with Israel and his incomparability to rivals whose existence the audience took for granted. The Trinitarian framework of three consubstantial persons in one ousia postdates the New Testament by at least a century (late 2nd century CE at the earliest, more defensibly 3rd and 4th). - **The method.** Read each "no other" statement inside its rhetorical scope, setting and goals. Test the reading against internal controls: the same formula in the mouth of personified Babylon (Isaiah 47:8-10) and Nineveh (Zephaniah 2:15), where nobody thinks it denies other cities exist; Deuteronomy 32:39 ("no god besides me") four verses before 32:43 ("worship him all you gods"); the Hebrew verb yatsar ("form with the hands") in Isaiah 43:10, which targets manufactured divine images rather than gods as such. - **Why it matters.** For Courtney's exegesis and doctrinal-lineage notes, the video supplies a dated bibliography (1956 to a forthcoming 2026 volume) showing the "rhetoric, not ontology" reading is a 70-year scholarly position, and it adds a word-history datum: "monotheism" was coined around 1660 by Henry More and defined in dictionaries as "the doctrine of the Unitarians" until Webster's 1828. - **Key stakeholders.** McClellan; the two unnamed debaters; the scholars he cites (Paula Fredriksen, Nathan MacDonald, Michael Heiser, Ulrich Mauser, Peter Hayman, Saul Olyan, P. A. H. de Boer, a contributor to the C. J. Labuschagne festschrift); Brown University, where he co-organized the conference behind *The Meanings and Ends of Monotheism*; the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, where he hopes to have the volume. - **Risks and tradeoffs.** McClellan is promoting his own book (*The Bible Says So*, read aloud from 00:20:14 to 00:30:28) and a forthcoming edited volume containing his paper; both are disclosed on screen but not framed as a conflict. The Deuteronomy 32:8-9 argument is, by his own admission at 00:39:08, "still very interpretive" and possibly not the majority reading. The strongest scholarly defense of early Christian monotheism (the "Christological monotheism" position associated in the literature with Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado, which the transcript never names) goes unengaged because the clip's debater never raised it. - **Bottom line.** The rhetorical-scope reading of Deutero-Isaiah is well supported by the internal controls McClellan shows on screen and by the dated bibliography he cites; the debater's four Isaiah proof-texts do not carry the weight placed on them. The wider claims (no monotheism anywhere in the Bible, none in late antiquity, the New Testament calls Jesus divine but only twice God) rest on positions he defends elsewhere and flags here as contested. ## 📖 Main content **The setup and the three positions.** The clip opens mid-argument at 00:00:00. Debater A says Christianity is strict monotheism. Debater B says a hard monotheist should be a Muslim, because Christians have a Jesus who says he is God, a Father who says he is God, and a "same essence" fix "the Bible never teaches." McClellan's response has two prongs. First, the Trinitarian conceptual framework (three consubstantial, co-equal, co-eternal persons comprising one ousia) did not exist when the New Testament was written, so it cannot serve as the hermeneutic for reading Jesus's relationship to God in those texts (00:00:45). Second, and in his view stronger, the identification of Jesus as God in the New Testament is "kind of muddy": at best two of the latest passages, one in 2 Peter and one in Titus, call Jesus God, while the New Testament as a whole calls him divine (00:01:28). He then pivots to what he treats as the decisive point: the Bible, including the New Testament, acknowledges other gods from beginning to end (00:02:10). **John 10 as evidence for divine plurality in the New Testament.** McClellan reads the accusation in John 10 as "you, being a human, make yourself divine," and Jesus's defense as an appeal to scripture's own practice of calling humans gods (00:02:10). He says the author of John is drawing on a soteriology of theosis or deification and on scripture's recognition of other gods, and he groups "powers and principalities and thrones" as beings the texts recognize as gods (00:02:56). The recommended reading is Paula Fredriksen's 2022 Harvard Theological Review paper on Philo, Herod, Paul and "the many gods of ancient Jewish monotheism"; auto-captions render her surname "Friedrison." **The Deutero-Isaiah proof-texts and the rhetorical-scope argument.** Debater A cites Isaiah 43:10, 44:6, 44:8 and 45 (00:03:40). McClellan grants that the conventional scholarly view for decades located the threshold of strict monotheism in Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55, a late-exilic or post-exilic composition), then says that since the 1950s, and increasingly since the late 20th century, scholars have argued the texts assert the necessity of Adonai's exclusive relationship with Israel rather than denying other gods (00:03:40 to 00:04:24). His analogy: someone shown a table of dozens of dishes who says "I want it all" is referring to the food in the room, not every food in the universe; the rhetorical setting bounds the universal (00:04:24 to 00:05:09). He then walks each passage. Isaiah 43:10 ("before me no god was formed") uses the verbal root yatsar, forming with the hands, the same verb used for making pottery and divine images, so the denial targets the manufactured images in Babylon, not gods elsewhere (00:05:51 to 00:06:35). He adds that treating images as the gods themselves would misrepresent how divine images functioned. Isaiah 43:11 ("besides me there is no savior") sits beside texts in Nehemiah and, he believes, Obadiah that speak of plural saviors and other anointed figures, so "no savior" is scoped too (00:07:20). Isaiah 43:12 reads in Hebrew "not some stranger among you"; most translations supply "strange god," and most scholars agree the referent is other gods outside the relationship (00:08:05). Isaiah 44:6-8 ("is there any god besides me? There is no other rock. I know not one") and 45:4-7 ("I am Adonai and there is no other") are read the same way: it's you and me, there's nobody else here (00:08:48 to 00:10:13). **Deuteronomy as the control case.** McClellan's structural move is to show that Deuteronomy uses identical "no other" rhetoric while explicitly acknowledging other gods, which is why apologists cite Isaiah and not Deuteronomy (00:13:49). Deuteronomy 4:35 and 4:39 say "there is no other besides him," but 4:19 tells Israel not to worship the sun, moon and stars, "things that Adonai your God has allotted to all the peoples," an allusion to 32:8-9 where gods were allotted to the nations (00:11:40 to 00:12:22). Deuteronomy 32:39 says "there is no god besides me"; 32:43 says "worship him, all you gods" (00:13:05). His inference: the same formula sits next to explicit divine plurality, so removing the plurality references (as Deutero-Isaiah mostly does) doesn't turn the formula into an ontological denial (00:13:49 to 00:14:30). **The internal control from Isaiah 47 and Zephaniah 2.** Isaiah 47:8-10 puts "I am, and there is no one besides me" in the mouth of personified Babylon; Zephaniah 2:15 does the same for Nineveh. Nobody reads those as claims that no other cities exist. The rhetoric means "I'm the only one that matters to my people" (00:14:30 to 00:16:39). McClellan treats this as the same collection clarifying its own idiom: "besides me" means "next to me within the rhetorical scope," not "anywhere in the universe" (00:22:28). **The scholarly lineage.** He shows on screen: Nathan MacDonald, *Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism* (2003; 2nd ed. 2012), reading its closing paragraph that in no case is the existence of other deities denied, and that the Shema grounds wholehearted devotion in Adonai's uniqueness for Israel (00:16:39 to 00:18:05); Michael Heiser's 2008 Bulletin for Biblical Research article on monotheism, polytheism, monolatry and henotheism, whose conclusion is that the Isaiah denials compare Adonai to other gods, not to nonexistent beings, since comparison to nothing "would be empty praise indeed" (00:18:05 to 00:19:31); a paper in the C. J. Labuschagne festschrift on Deuteronomy 32:39 in rabbinic monotheistic controversies, arguing Deuteronomy gives a confession of faith rather than theoretical monotheism (00:19:31 to 00:20:14). From 00:20:14 he reads several pages of his own book, *The Bible Says So*, chapter "Nothing compares to you," which adds Isaiah 40:25-26 and 45:12 (Adonai marshals the celestial host), Judges 5:20 (stars fighting Sisera), the incomparability formulas of Exodus 15:11, Psalms 29, 84, 89, 95, 96, 97 and 1 Chronicles 16:25, and ancient Near Eastern parallels: the Great Cairo Hymn to Amun-Re ("sole one who made all that exists"), a hymn to the Mesopotamian moon god Sin, and Ugaritic praise of Baal as having "none above him" despite Baal's defeats and subordination to El (00:26:04 to 00:27:32). His point is that exclusivity and incomparability are "different flavors of the same rhetoric," common in openly polytheistic literature. Anticipating the objection that this is "the newfangled claim of some heretical Mormon" (00:28:18), he lists de Boer's 1956 *Second-Isaiah's Message*, Ulrich Mauser's 1991 Princeton Seminary Bulletin article "One God Alone," Peter Hayman's 1991 Journal of Jewish Studies article "Monotheism: A Misused Word in Jewish Studies," Saul Olyan's 2012 "Is Isaiah 40-55 Really Monotheistic?", and the forthcoming Brown University conference volume *The Meanings and Ends of Monotheism*, due by the end of 2026 (00:28:18 to 00:29:43). **Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and the Dead Sea Scrolls.** Debater B claims the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 "separates the most high God from his son Yahweh" (00:31:54). McClellan corrects the evidence while accepting the conclusion. 4QDeut^j (captions: "4Q Deuteronomy J") preserves only a fragment of verse 8; its contribution is the reading bene elohim ("sons of God") where the Masoretic Text has bene Israel, a reading already inferred from the Septuagint's "angels of God" (00:31:54 to 00:33:20). He prefers the reconstruction bene El, which better explains the scribal corruption to bene Israel, and cites an unnamed paper. His own argument for distinguishing Elyon from Adonai in the original tradition runs on syntax: verse 7 ends "and they will tell you," a construction (amar plus direct-object marker) that occurs over 100 times in the Hebrew Bible and is always followed by reported speech, so verses 8-9 are a quoted older tradition in which Elyon divides the nations among 70 sons of God and Adonai receives Jacob as his inheritance; "you don't give an inheritance to yourself" (00:34:46 to 00:36:59). He connects this to the Genesis 14:22 apposition of Adonai and El Elyon, which he says is secondary because the Tetragrammaton is absent from the Septuagint and the Genesis Apocryphon at that verse (00:37:41 to 00:38:25). He states plainly that this is not the best proof-text, that scholars disagree, and that his in-progress state-of-the-field survey will measure how many hold the view (00:39:08 to 00:39:52). **Second Temple Judaism and the word "monotheism."** Debater B says Jews of Jesus's day were monotheists because they were apostates. McClellan rejects both halves: they were not strict monotheists, and evolving tradition is not apostasy (00:39:52 to 00:40:36). He calls monotheism "a post-biblical philosophical innovation," dates the word's coinage to around 1660 with Henry More (captions: "Henry Moore"), who allowed "latitude" in the sense of "one," and reports that dictionaries from the early 1700s to 1828 defined monotheism as "the doctrine of the Unitarians," with the "only one god exists" sense entering Webster's in 1828 (00:40:36 to 00:41:20). He closes by saying the debater "could do a much better job," restating that neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament denies other gods exist (00:42:03). **Contested and unverified in this source.** The claim that only 2 Peter and Titus call Jesus God is asserted, not argued, here; Romans 9:5, John 1:1, John 20:28 and Hebrews 1:8 are the usual counter-texts and none is discussed. The 70-nations count is stated from Ugaritic parallels without a citation on screen. The "plural saviors" reference is hedged ("Obadiah, I believe"). The word-history claims (1660, 1828, "doctrine of the Unitarians") are attributed to his forthcoming paper and are checkable against the OED. The "Christological monotheism" literature that defends a first-century Jewish monotheism inclusive of Jesus is not engaged, which limits how far the video refutes the strongest form of Debater A's claim. The debaters' identities and the clip's origin are not given. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=0) The clip, and the Trinity as a later lens - Debater A: Christianity is strict monotheism. Debater B: a hard monotheist should be a Muslim; the "same essence" solution "the Bible never teaches." - McClellan's first prong: the framework of three consubstantial, co-equal, co-eternal persons in one ousia dates at the earliest to the late 2nd century CE, more defensibly the 3rd and 4th, so it isn't an available hermeneutic for the New Testament authors. > [!quote] [00:00:45] > no such philosophical framework or conceptual lens existed period it is never articulated anywhere #### ⏱️ [00:02:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=130) Jesus as divine, John 10, and Fredriksen - Second prong, which he rates stronger: Jesus is called God at most twice (2 Peter, Titus), both among the latest New Testament texts. - John 10: the accusation is "you being a human make yourself divine"; the defense is that scripture calls humans gods. He reads this as theosis soteriology plus recognition of other gods. - Recommends Paula Fredriksen's 2022 Harvard Theological Review paper on Philo, Herod, Paul and the many gods of ancient Jewish monotheism. > [!quote] [00:01:28] > I think the New Testament refers to Jesus as divine. #### ⏱️ [00:03:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=220) Deutero-Isaiah and rhetorical scope - Debater A cites Isaiah 43:10, 44:6, 44:8, 45. Conventional view: this is where strict philosophical monotheism begins. Since the 1950s, and more since the late 20th century, scholars read it as exclusivity rhetoric. - Table-of-food analogy: "I want it all" is bounded by the room. > [!quote] [00:04:24] > They're making an assertion about the necessity of God's exclusive relationship with Israel. #### ⏱️ [00:05:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=351) Isaiah 43:10-12 line by line - "Formed" is yatsar, hand-forming, the verb for pottery and divine images. The denial targets Babylonian images, not gods elsewhere. - "No savior" sits beside plural saviors and anointed figures elsewhere (Nehemiah; Obadiah "I believe"). > [!quote] [00:05:51] > formed here is the verbal root yatsar, which actually means to literally form with one's hands. #### ⏱️ [00:08:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=485) "Stranger," Isaiah 44:6-8 and 45:4-7 - Hebrew of 43:12 reads "stranger," not "strange god"; translations supply "god," and most scholars agree the referent is other gods outside the relationship. - 44:6-8 and 45:4-7 read as "it's you and me, there's nobody else here," repeated formulas inside one rhetorical setting. #### ⏱️ [00:10:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=613) Deuteronomy 4 uses the same formula beside other gods - Deut 4:33-36 and 4:37-39: "there is no other" grounded in the Egypt and Sinai experience. - Deut 4:19: sun, moon, stars, "all the host of heaven" allotted to the peoples, alluding to 32:8-9. The gods are astralized and placed under Adonai; the command is "don't look at them, look at me." #### ⏱️ [00:13:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=785) Deuteronomy 32:39 versus 32:43 - 32:39 "no god besides me"; 32:43 "worship him all you gods." The same rhetoric coexists with explicit plurality, which is why apologists cite Isaiah and not Deuteronomy. - Isaiah 47:8-10: personified Babylon says "I am and there is no one besides me"; nobody reads that as denying other cities. > [!quote] [00:13:05] > Worship him all you gods, for he will avenge the blood of his children and take vengeance on his adversaries. > [!quote] [00:15:12] > So, it's not the only one that exists, it's the only one that counts. #### ⏱️ [00:16:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=999) MacDonald and Heiser on screen - Zephaniah 2:15 gives Nineveh the same idiom. - Nathan MacDonald, *Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism* (2003; 2nd ed. 2012): in no case is the existence of other deities denied; the Shema grounds devotion in Adonai's uniqueness for Israel (Deut 6-11). - Michael Heiser, BBR 2008: the Isaiah denials compare Adonai to other gods, not to nonexistent beings. > [!quote] [00:19:31] > All these passages are transparently concerned with comparing Adonai to other gods, not comparing Adonai to beings that do not exist. #### ⏱️ [00:20:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=1214) The Labuschagne festschrift and his own book - Festschrift paper on Deut 32:39 in rabbinic controversies: Deuteronomy offers a confession of faith, not theoretical monotheism; the existence of other gods is not denied, only their power and significance for Israel. - From here to 00:30:28 he reads *The Bible Says So*, chapter "Nothing compares to you." Isaiah 40:25-26 and 45:12 evoke the celestial host; Judges 5:20 has stars fighting Sisera; Deut 4:19 calls the host the gods of the nations. #### ⏱️ [00:23:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=1433) Incomparability rhetoric presupposes real rivals - Isaiah 46:9 pairs "no other" with "no one like me." Exodus 15:11, Psalms 29, 84, 89, 95, 96, 97 and 1 Chronicles 16:25 exalt Adonai over other gods. - Boasting over figments is "utterly impotent rhetoric"; the rhetoric of incomparability grew as Judah faced empires whose gods had more "capital in the marketplace of worship." > [!quote] [00:24:38] > The reason this rhetoric is effective is precisely because the audience understood the other gods to exist > [!quote] [00:26:04] > saying no other gods exist is like saying the Raiders aren't a real football team. #### ⏱️ [00:27:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=1652) Near Eastern parallels and the 70-year bibliography - Great Cairo Hymn to Amun-Re (dated 2000-1500 BCE): "sole one who made all that exists." Hymn to Sin: "no god is like unto thy divinity." Ugaritic Baal: "none above him" despite defeats and subordination to El. - Anticipates the "heretical Mormon" dismissal with de Boer 1956, Mauser 1991, Hayman 1991, Olyan 2012, and the forthcoming *The Meanings and Ends of Monotheism* from the Brown conference he co-organized with Olyan. > [!quote] [00:28:18] > It's just rhetoric. And this is not the new fangled claim of some heretical Mormon. #### ⏱️ [00:30:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=1828) The clip resumes: Moses, tradition, and dogma - Debater A: each Isaiah verse shows strict monotheism. McClellan: strict monotheism is in none of them and nowhere in the Bible. - The debaters argue over whether Moses wrote Deuteronomy. McClellan endorses "that's just tradition" and turns the "you can't prove that" reflex back on conservative dogma. > [!quote] [00:31:12] > most of conservative dogmatism is based on tradition based on dogma. That's the nature of dogmas. #### ⏱️ [00:33:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=2000) 4QDeut^j corrected - Debater B says the Dead Sea Scrolls text separates the Most High from "his son Yahweh." McClellan: 4QDeut^j preserves only a fragment of verse 8; its value is bene elohim where the MT has bene Israel, already inferred from the Septuagint's "angels of God." He prefers bene El as the original. - He agrees Deut 32:8-9 distinguishes Adonai from Elyon in the pre-Deuteronomic tradition, but says the debater articulates it poorly. #### ⏱️ [00:36:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=2219) The reported-speech argument and Genesis 14 - Verse 7's "and they will tell you" (amar plus direct-object marker) occurs over 100 times and always introduces quoted speech, so 8-9 quote an older tradition: Elyon divides 70 nations among the sons of God; Adonai receives Jacob. - Adonai as a second-tier deity under El; Genesis 14:22's apposition is secondary since the Tetragrammaton is absent in the Septuagint and Genesis Apocryphon. > [!quote] [00:35:30] > This construction occurs well over a hundred times throughout the Hebrew Bible. And literally every single time it occurs. > [!quote] [00:36:59] > You don't give an inheritance to yourself. You divide up an inheritance to others. > [!quote] [00:39:08] > It comes down to whether you agree this is distinguishing Adonai from Elon or not. #### ⏱️ [00:39:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o&t=2392) Second Temple Judaism, the word "monotheism," and the close - Debater B: Jews of Jesus's day were monotheists because they were apostates. McClellan: not strict monotheists, and evolving tradition is not apostasy. - Word history: coined around 1660 by Henry More, who allowed latitude in "one"; dictionaries 1700s-1828 define it as Unitarian doctrine; the "only one god exists" sense arrives in Webster's 1828. His paper on this is in the forthcoming volume. - Closing: the debater "could do a much better job"; neither Testament denies other gods. Sign-off gag: the outfit "has been the Avengers." > [!quote] [00:40:36] > Monotheism is a post-biblical philosophical innovation. And the word actually isn't even coined until around 1660 with Henry Moore > [!quote] [00:41:20] > The word monotheism was always defined as the doctrine of the Unitarians. ## 📚 References The transcript itself contains no links; the following come from the video description or are primary sources for named entities. - [Is Christianity "strict monotheism"? (Dan McClellan)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o): the source video, 42 min, uploaded 2026-09-25. - Paula Fredriksen, "Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish 'Monotheism'," *Harvard Theological Review* 115 (2022). Captions render the surname "Friedrison." Recommended at 00:02:56. - Nathan MacDonald, *Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism*, FAT II/1 (Mohr Siebeck, 2003; 2nd ed. 2012). Shown on screen at 00:16:39; captions: "Nathan McDonald." - Michael S. Heiser, "Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible," *Bulletin for Biblical Research* 18.1 (2008). Shown at 00:18:05. - *Studies in Deuteronomy in Honour of C. J. Labuschagne on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday*, VTSup 53 (Brill, 1994), containing the paper on Deuteronomy 32:39 in rabbinic monotheistic controversies. Captions garble the honoree as "CJ Labushin" and the author as "Van Reon"; confirm the author's name against the volume's table of contents. - Dan McClellan, *The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues* (2025), chapter "Nothing compares to you," read aloud 00:20:14 to 00:30:28. - P. A. H. de Boer, *Second-Isaiah's Message*, OTS 11 (1956). Captions: "Dbor." - Ulrich Mauser, "One God Alone: A Pillar of Biblical Theology," *Princeton Seminary Bulletin* 12 (1991). Captions: "Olrich Mouser." - Peter Hayman, "Monotheism: A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?", *Journal of Jewish Studies* 42 (1991). Captions: "Peter Haymon." - Saul M. Olyan, "Is Isaiah 40-55 Really Monotheistic?", *Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions* 12 (2012). Captions: "Saul Oolon" / "Olon." - *The Meanings and Ends of Monotheism*, edited volume from the Brown University conference co-organized by McClellan and Olyan; described at 00:29:00 as due by end of 2026. Not yet published at upload time. - 4QDeut^j (4Q37), the Qumran Deuteronomy manuscript preserving bene elohim at 32:8. Captions: "4Q Deuteronomy J." - Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20 / 1QapGen), cited at 00:38:25 for the absence of the Tetragrammaton in its quotation of Genesis 14:22. - Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist credited at 00:40:36 with coining "monotheism" around 1660; captions: "Henry Moore." Check the OED entry for the earliest attestation and the 1828 Webster's definition claim. - Biblical passages cited: Isaiah 40:25-26; 43:10-12; 44:6-8; 45:4-7, 12; 46:9; 47:8-10; Deuteronomy 4:19-20, 33-39; 6-11; 32:7-9, 39, 43; Zephaniah 2:15; Judges 5:20; Exodus 15:11; Psalms 29; 82 (implied via John 10); 84; 89:6; 95:3; 96:4; 97:9; 1 Chronicles 16:25; Genesis 14:22; John 10:33-36; 2 Peter 1:1; Titus 2:13. The last two are the "at best two passages" of 00:01:28; the verse numbers are the standard candidates, not stated in the transcript. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase McClellan's argument runs in two layers. The surface layer answers the debater's four Isaiah proof-texts: every "there is no other besides me" in Deutero-Isaiah is speech inside a defined situation, Adonai addressing Israel about who delivered them and who they may credit, and universal-sounding words take their range from that situation the way "I want it all" at a buffet means the buffet. He shows the range from inside the same book: Babylon says the identical sentence about herself in Isaiah 47 and nobody reads it as a census of cities. He shows it from Deuteronomy, which uses the same formula in 32:39 and then addresses the other gods directly in 32:43. He shows it from the vocabulary, where "formed" is the potter's verb and "stranger" has to be padded out to "strange god" by translators. The deeper layer is about what kind of claim "monotheism" is. Praise that says "no god is like you" only works if the audience believes in the gods being outranked; Egyptian and Ugaritic hymns say the same about Amun-Re and Baal while remaining polytheistic. The word itself, he says, was coined in the 1660s and meant Unitarianism for its first 150 years in dictionaries. So asking whether Isaiah or the New Testament teaches strict monotheism is asking whether they answer a question that hadn't been posed yet. The New Testament calls Jesus divine, calls him God perhaps twice in late texts, and in John 10 has Jesus defend himself by pointing out that scripture already calls humans gods. On the Dead Sea Scrolls argument, he sides with the debater's conclusion (Deuteronomy 32:8-9 once distinguished Elyon from Adonai) while rebuilding the evidence from syntax rather than from the fragment the debater misdescribes, and he says out loud that this part is contested and that he's running a survey to find out how contested. ## 📰 Newsletter **"There is no other" doesn't mean what the proof-text says it means.** Dan McClellan's 42-minute response to a street debate about whether Christianity is "strict monotheism" is a clinic in reading a formula inside its setting. The debater cites Isaiah 43, 44 and 45. McClellan puts the same sentence, "I am, and there is no one besides me," in the mouth of Babylon (Isaiah 47:8) and Nineveh (Zephaniah 2:15), where it obviously doesn't deny other cities exist, then shows Deuteronomy 32 saying "no god besides me" in verse 39 and "worship him, all you gods" in verse 43. The verb in "before me no god was formed" is the potter's verb. The "strange god" of 43:12 is just "stranger" in Hebrew. Why a WordPress newsletter cares: this is the same discipline we apply to reading a spec, a code of conduct or a governance charter. A universal quantifier in a document takes its range from the document's scope, and the fastest way to test a reading is to find the same phrase used elsewhere in the same corpus where the strong reading is impossible. McClellan's internal-control method transfers directly to reading "all contributors must" in a handbook page written for one team. Bonus datum for your next argument about anachronism: "monotheism" was coined around 1660 and, per McClellan, defined in dictionaries as "the doctrine of the Unitarians" until 1828. He also disclosed that he's reading from his own book and promoting a forthcoming edited volume, which is the honest thing to do and worth noting. Links: [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o), Heiser's BBR 2008 article, MacDonald's *Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism*. ## ✅ Action items #### DevRel - Developer advocacy: no direct action from this source; nearest relevance is the internal-control method (find the same phrase used elsewhere in the corpus) as a technique for reading API docs and RFCs, usable in a talk on documentation literacy. - Education: adapt the "scope of a universal quantifier" lesson for a docs-writing workshop: "all requests must include X" means all requests this page governs, and the fix is to state the scope. - Developer experience: audit quickstarts for unbounded "always" and "never" statements that a reader could take beyond the page's scope, the same failure mode McClellan diagnoses at 00:04:24. - Developer marketing: none. - Community management: none. - Internal/external: none. #### OSPO - Policy and governance: when a charter says "no other body may," record the scope in the same sentence. The Deuteronomy 32:39/32:43 pairing at 00:13:05 shows how a universal reads once the scoping context is separated from it. - License compliance: none. - Security management: none. - Software inventory: none. - Developer support: none. - Community engagement: none. - Strategic alignment: none. #### Community - Maintainers: none directly; nearest relevance is McClellan's practice at 00:39:08 of stating which of his claims are contested and which are consensus, a habit worth copying in governance proposals. - Contributors: none. - Sponsors: none. - Ecosystem: none. #### WordPress - Core: none. - Core Performance: none. - Core AI: none. - **Core Program Team:** none. - Mobile: none. - Playground: none. - Community: none. - Training: none directly; the "read the formula in its rhetorical setting" move is a reusable critical-reading exercise if a lesson on reading standards documents is ever written. - Marketing: none. - Support: none. - Design: none. - Documentation: flag unbounded universals ("all," "never," "no other") in handbook pages and either scope them or add the scoping sentence; this is the one concrete transfer from the source. - Photos: none. - TV: caption quality is the relevant lesson. This video's auto-captions garble roughly 25 proper nouns (see the Accessibility assessment); human-corrected captions on WordPress.tv scholarly talks avoid the same failure. - Polyglots: none directly; the "stranger" versus "strange god" translation decision at 00:08:05 is a clean example of translators supplying a word the source lacks, relevant to glossary discipline. - Accessibility: none. - Meta: none. - CLI: none. - Hosting: none. - Tide: none. - Openverse: none. - Themes: none. - Plugins: none. #### The WPOCC - Programs: none from this source. - Projects: none from this source. - Funding experiments: none from this source; The WP Open Community Collective has no stake in the subject matter. ### FAIR - Technical independence: none from this source. - Policies and covenants: the drafting lesson applies: a covenant that says "no other party may" needs its scope stated in the same clause, or later readers will do to it what apologists do to Isaiah 45. - Productized governance artifacts: none from this source. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. In every Hebrew Bible occurrence of the "there is no other / none besides me" formula, the surrounding 10 verses contain either an explicit reference to other gods or a reference to Israel's deliverance, and never a statement about the nonexistence of gods as a class. Testable by concordance. 2. The construction "amar plus direct-object marker followed by a clause" introduces quoted speech in 100% of its Hebrew Bible occurrences, as McClellan claims at 00:35:30; a full corpus check will find no counterexample, or will find the counterexamples that weaken the Deuteronomy 32:7-9 argument. 3. English dictionaries published between 1700 and 1827 that include "monotheism" define it by reference to Unitarian doctrine in a majority of cases, and the "belief that only one god exists" definition first appears in Webster's 1828, as claimed at 00:41:20. 4. Among currently active Hebrew Bible scholars surveyed, more than 50% agree that Deuteronomy 32:8-9 in its earliest recoverable form distinguishes Elyon from Yahweh. McClellan predicts "representative if not majority" at 00:39:52; his own survey is the instrument. 5. The explicit-Theos-predicate passages for Jesus in the New Testament number more than two once Romans 9:5, John 1:1, John 20:28 and Hebrews 1:8 are counted, which would weaken the 00:01:28 claim while leaving the "divine, rarely God" pattern intact. 6. Second Temple Jewish texts (Philo, 1 Enoch, the Qumran hymns) refer to subordinate divine beings with theos, elohim or elim vocabulary at a rate that makes "strict monotheism" an inaccurate label for the period, as Fredriksen's 2022 paper argues. ## 📊 Methodology - **Design for H1.** Pull every occurrence of the "no other" idiom (en od, zulati, mibbaladai) with a Hebrew concordance. Code the surrounding 10 verses for three features: explicit other-gods reference, deliverance reference, class-level nonexistence statement. Two coders, Cohen's kappa reported. The reading fails if any occurrence carries the third feature without the first two. - **Design for H2.** Search a tagged Hebrew Bible corpus (ETCBC or Accordance) for the verb amar followed by the object marker and a clause. Count occurrences and classify each following clause as reported speech or not. Report the count; McClellan says "well over a hundred" and "every single time." - **Design for H3.** Enumerate English dictionaries 1700-1828 containing "monotheism" (Bailey, Johnson editions, Chambers, Webster 1806 and 1828, plus the OED's attestation list). Transcribe each definition. Report the proportion using "Unitarian" and the first appearance of the "only one god" sense. - **Design for H4.** Wait for McClellan's survey; independently, sample 30 commentaries on Deuteronomy published after 1990 and code each for its position on 32:8-9. Compare. - **Design for H5.** List every New Testament passage where theos is predicated of Jesus in at least one major critical edition's punctuation. Code each for textual and syntactic certainty. Report the count under strict and permissive criteria. - **Design for H6.** Build a lexicon count of divine-being vocabulary in Philo, 1 Enoch and 1QH, following Fredriksen's categories. Report per-text frequencies. - **Controls.** Pre-register the coding scheme. Publish the concordance queries so the counts are reproducible. ## ❓ Questions - Which paper does McClellan mean at 00:33:20 for the bene El reconstruction of Deuteronomy 32:8? He shows it on screen but the transcript carries no title or author. - Who is the author of the Labuschagne festschrift paper on Deuteronomy 32:39 that captions render "Van Reon"? - What is the exact count behind "well over a hundred times" for the amar-plus-object construction, and are there disputed cases? - Does the 2 Peter and Titus count hold once Romans 9:5, John 1:1, John 20:28 and Hebrews 1:8 are considered, and on what grounds does he exclude them? - Is the 1660 coinage by Henry More the OED's earliest attestation, and does the OED's definition history match the "doctrine of the Unitarians" claim through 1828? - How does McClellan's position relate to the "Christological monotheism" of Bauckham and Hurtado, which argues first-century Jewish monotheism was real and included Jesus within the divine identity? The video never engages it. - Where did the debate clip come from, who are the two debaters, and did McClellan seek their response? - If "monotheism" is a post-biblical category, what label does he propose for the Second Temple position, and does "monolatry" or "henotheism" (Heiser's title terms) fit better? ## 🔮 Future research - **A concordance-level test of the rhetorical-scope reading.** H1 above has never, to this analysis's knowledge, been run as a coded study across every occurrence. A published dataset would move the debate from proof-text exchange to a countable claim. - **Dictionary history of "monotheism."** McClellan's 1660-to-1828 story is in a forthcoming paper. An independent lexicographic check against the OED and early dictionaries would confirm or narrow it. - **The state-of-the-field survey on Deuteronomy 32:8-9.** McClellan announces it at 00:39:08. Its methodology and response rate will determine whether "representative if not majority" is measurable. - **Engagement with Christological monotheism.** The strongest scholarly defense of first-century monotheism is absent from this video. A direct comparison of McClellan's "divine but rarely God" reading with Bauckham's "divine identity" reading is the missing piece. - **Translation practice on Isaiah 43:12.** A survey of how major English translations render "stranger" (zar) in this verse, and whether footnotes disclose the supplied "god," would quantify the translation decision he flags at 00:08:05 and 00:23:11. ## 💡 Implications - **Practice (exegesis).** The internal-control method is the transferable tool: before accepting the strong reading of a formula, find the same formula in the same corpus where the strong reading is impossible (Isaiah 47:8, Zephaniah 2:15, Deuteronomy 32:43). That is a checkable procedure, not a hermeneutical preference. - **Policy (doctrinal lineage).** If the Trinitarian framework is dated to the late 2nd through 4th centuries, doctrine notes should record it as a post-New Testament development that reads the texts rather than one the texts articulate. That is how McClellan frames it at 00:00:45, and it matches standard historical theology, though the debater's position is that the New Testament data require it. - **Security (of an argument).** McClellan's pre-emptive bibliography at 00:28:18 shows how to inoculate a contested claim against the genetic attack ("heretical Mormon") by dating the claim to 1956 and naming the journals. Any contested position in a community document benefits from the same move. - **Education.** The "I want it all" buffet analogy and the Raiders line make rhetorical scope teachable in a sentence each. The 70-nation and Ugaritic material requires background that a general audience lacks. - **Funding models.** The video promotes a trade book and a forthcoming academic volume. Public scholarship on YouTube is now a distribution channel for both, and the disclosure is visual (book on screen) rather than spoken; a one-line spoken disclosure would be cleaner. ## 🧠 Learning styles assessment - **Reading level estimate.** Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level on the transcript body: approximately grade 11 to 12, driven by long spoken sentences and clause-chaining. Flesch Reading Ease near 50. The technical vocabulary (ousia, consubstantial, Deutero-Isaiah, Masoretic, Septuagint, theosis, bene elohim, Tetragrammaton) is defined in passing at best and pushes effective comprehension to a seminary or upper-undergraduate audience. #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: book pages and articles shown on screen with the read paragraph visible (MacDonald at 00:16:39, Heiser at 00:18:05, the festschrift at 00:19:31, his own book from 00:20:14). Bible passages displayed as read. - Improve: no diagram of the argument's structure (formula, setting, internal control), and no map of the tiered pantheon he describes at 00:37:41 (El/Elyon, the 70 sons of God, Adonai). One slide would carry the whole Deuteronomy 32 argument. #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: continuous narration with the clip's audio interleaved; he reads every passage aloud in full. - Improve: the clip audio is lower quality than his own and the speaker changes are unmarked in audio; a verbal "here's the debater" cue would help. A 3-minute audio summary of the three positions would serve podcast listeners. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: three memorable analogies (buffet at 00:04:24, Broncos roster at 00:25:21, Raiders at 00:26:04); Hebrew terms named (yatsar, amar, bene elohim, Elyon). - Improve: ousia, theosis, Masoretic, Septuagint and Tetragrammaton go undefined. One clause each would cost under a minute total. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: he models the method live, reading verse by verse. - Improve: no exercise. "Find the same phrase elsewhere in the book and test the reading there" is a task a viewer could do with Isaiah 47 before he reveals it; posing it as a pause-and-try would convert the video into practice. #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: a clear structure of claim, proof-text, internal control, scholarly lineage, concession. The 32:39/32:43 juxtaposition and the amar syntax count are countable arguments. - Improve: the "over a hundred times" count is asserted without the number. The two-passages claim for Jesus as God is asserted without listing the excluded candidates. #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: the video is itself a response to a debate, and he invites viewers to "fact check me on this" at 00:34:03. - Improve: no discussion prompt, no invitation to the debaters, no pointer to a forum. The SBL mention at 00:29:43 is the only community hook. #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: the passage list is complete enough to reproduce the study alone with a Bible and the three cited books. - Improve: no reflection question. "Which universal statements in a text you trust are actually scoped by their setting?" would generalize the lesson. #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: the astralized gods of Deuteronomy 4:19 and Judges 5:20 (sun, moon, stars as the heavenly host) tie the argument to the night sky. - Improve: nothing else. The naturalistic angle is incidental. ## 📊 Accessibility assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: YouTube supplies player landmarks; an auto-generated transcript exists. - Improve: the on-screen book pages and articles are read aloud, which is good practice, but the debate clip's speaker identity is conveyed visually only. WCAG 2.2 AA 1.2.5 (Audio Description, Prerecorded) is partially met by his reading; speaker identification is a 1.2.2 caption-quality issue. #### Keyboard navigation - Present: YouTube's player is keyboard operable with visible focus; 2.1.1 and 2.4.7 pass via the platform. - Improve: no chapter markers in the transcript's structure, so keyboard users must scrub 42 minutes. Chapters would be the single largest navigation gain. #### Contrast and readability - Present: unverifiable from a transcript; the read book pages are likely legible at desktop size. - Improve: scanned journal pages at YouTube's default mobile resolution risk failing 1.4.3 (Contrast Minimum). Zooming into the read paragraph, as he does for MacDonald, should be consistent. #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: player and captions scale. - Improve: on-screen scripture text and book pages are burned into the frame and do not reflow; 1.4.4 (Resize Text) and 1.4.10 (Reflow) fail for that content. Putting the passage list in the description as text fixes it. #### Media and captions - Present: auto-captions exist and are the basis of this analysis. - Improve: the captions garble most proper nouns: "dudero Isaiah" for Deutero-Isaiah, "Adoni/Adon" for Adonai, "Friedrison" for Fredriksen, "McDonald" for MacDonald, "Labushin" for Labuschagne, "Mouser" for Mauser, "Haymon" for Hayman, "Oolon/Olon" for Olyan, "Henry Moore" for Henry More, "Dbor" for de Boer, "Eljon/Elon/Llon" for Elyon, "Benalem" for bene elim, "Maseretic," "Septuagent," "Cicora" for Sisera, "Aman Ree" for Amun-Re, "yuggaritic," "esoteriology" for soteriology, "divonization" for divinization, "conssubstantial," "usia" for ousia, "schma" for Shema, "Oadiah" for Obadiah, "MelkiseDC" for Melchizedek, "NRSVE" for NRSVue. That is a 1.2.2 (Captions, Prerecorded) failure in substance. Speaker changes in the clip are marked only by ">>" in the raw transcript. Human-corrected captions with speaker labels are the fix. #### Forms and interactions - Present: none in the video. - Improve: not applicable in-video. The book and volume are shown, not linked in the transcript; 2.4.4 (Link Purpose) applies to the description if links exist there. #### Standards reference - Primary gaps against WCAG 2.2 AA: **1.2.2** (inaccurate captions, no speaker labels), **1.4.4 / 1.4.10** (burned-in scripture and book text), **1.2.5** (partial; clip speakers visually identified only), **2.4.x navigation** (no chapters for a 42-minute argument). The captions failure is the highest impact, because this is a proper-noun-dense scholarly argument and the names are the citations. ## 🌍 DEIB assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: the argument crosses Hebrew, Greek, Ugaritic, Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources (00:26:04 to 00:27:32) and cites Jewish, Christian and secular scholars. - Improve: the illustrative analogies are Denver Broncos football (00:25:21, 00:26:04) and a US buffet, which land for a US audience and not elsewhere. The clip's Muslim interlocutor's position is treated only as a foil. #### Inclusive language - Present: he uses "Adonai" rather than vocalizing the Tetragrammaton throughout, a choice respectful of Jewish practice; "Judahites/Judeans" rather than anachronistic labels. - Improve: "heretical Mormon" (00:28:18) is self-referential irony about his own LDS background, but "conservative dogmatists ... incentivized to believe by their identity politics" (00:31:12) characterizes opponents by motive. Naming the tradition's arguments instead of its incentives would be cleaner. #### Neurodiversity support - Present: predictable structure (clip, pause, rebuttal, source on screen), every passage read in full, repeated summary sentence ("it's just you and me now"). - Improve: 42 minutes without chapters and with 15-plus proper nouns per segment is a heavy processing load. Chapters and an on-screen running list of cited works would reduce it. #### Representation - Present: two scholars of Jewish studies (Hayman, Olyan) and a woman scholar (Fredriksen) among the cited authorities; the debate clip includes a Muslim voice. - Improve: the Muslim debater's argument is never engaged on its own terms (Islamic tawhid as the comparison class); he is used as a prompt. The Christian debater is also unnamed. Both would be better served by attribution. #### Psychological safety - Present: he flags his own contested claims (00:39:08), invites fact-checking (00:34:03), and pre-empts the "heretical Mormon" attack with sources rather than grievance. - Improve: "This is appalling to me" and "you're joking?" come from the clip, not from him, but the video's framing invites viewers to laugh at the debaters. A sentence acknowledging that most churchgoers hold Debater A's view in good faith would lower the temperature without weakening the argument. ## ✅ Logical validity #### Strong reasoning - **Internal control, 00:14:30 to 00:16:39.** The identical formula in the mouths of Babylon (Isaiah 47:8-10) and Nineveh (Zephaniah 2:15) cannot mean "no other cities exist," so the burden shifts to anyone reading the divine version ontologically. This is the strongest argument in the video: it uses the corpus's own usage, not a modern theory. To clarify further: state what would count as a genuine ontological denial in the idiom, so the reading is falsifiable. - **Juxtaposition, 00:13:05.** Deuteronomy 32:39 ("no god besides me") four verses before 32:43 ("worship him, all you gods") is a direct internal contradiction of the strict reading, provided the text is read as a unit. Clarify by addressing whether 32:43's plural is textually secure (the MT and Qumran/LXX differ here), since the argument leans on it. - **Lexical, 00:05:51.** Yatsar as hand-forming ties Isaiah 43:10's "formed" to image manufacture. Sound as far as it goes; clarify by showing the verb's distribution, since yatsar also describes God forming humans (Genesis 2:7) and light (Isaiah 45:7). - **Inductive syntax argument, 00:35:30.** "Over a hundred times" with no counterexample is a strong inductive base for reading Deuteronomy 32:8-9 as quoted tradition. Publish the count. - **Appeal to authority done correctly, 00:16:39 to 00:29:43.** Named scholars, dated works, paragraphs read aloud, and a 70-year range (1956 to 2026). This is how to cite consensus: it can be checked. - **Concession against interest, 00:33:20, 00:39:08, 00:39:52.** He corrects the debater who agrees with him, calls Deuteronomy 32:8-9 "still very interpretive," and admits he doesn't know if his reading is the majority. These raise the credibility of the surrounding claims. #### Fallacies - **Etymological fallacy risk, 00:40:36.** "Monotheism is a post-biblical philosophical innovation. And the word actually isn't even coined until around 1660." The date of a word's coinage does not by itself show the concept was absent earlier; concepts routinely precede their names. He partly guards against this by discussing definitions rather than the bare word, but the sentence runs the two together. *Fix:* separate the word-history claim (checkable in the OED) from the concept-history claim (which needs Second Temple and patristic evidence), and argue the second on its own. - **Genetic argument / motive attribution, 00:31:12.** Conservative dogmatists "firmly believe because they are incentivized to believe by their identity politics." Explaining a belief by the believer's incentives says nothing about whether the belief is true, and it is the same move he objects to when applied to himself ("heretical Mormon"). *Fix:* drop the motive and keep the evidential point that "you can't prove that" applies equally to tradition. - **Weak-man selection, 00:33:20, 00:39:08, 00:42:03.** He repeatedly says the anti-monotheism debater "isn't articulating it particularly well," then rebuts the strict-monotheism debater's four proof-texts. The strongest form of the opposing view (Christological monotheism, the Bauckham and Hurtado line) never appears. Not a fallacy in a response video, but the conclusion "no strict monotheism anywhere in the Bible at all" (00:30:28) is broader than the opponent actually defeated. *Fix:* name the strongest opposing position and say where the disagreement lies. - **Equivocation risk on "gods," 00:02:10 to 00:02:56 and throughout.** The word covers manufactured images (43:10), astralized celestial beings (Deut 4:19), members of the divine council (Deut 32:8), and deified humans (John 10). Each is a different tier, and the argument that "the Bible acknowledges other gods" gains force from the accumulation. *Fix:* name the tiers explicitly, as he does for Adonai and El at 00:37:41, and say which tier each proof-text concerns. - **Bare assertion, 00:01:28.** "At best maybe you've got two of the latest passages ... one in Second Peter, one in Titus that refer to Jesus as God" is stated without listing or excluding the usual candidates (Romans 9:5, John 1:1, John 20:28, Hebrews 1:8). *Fix:* list them and give the grounds for exclusion, or point to where he does. - **Undisclosed promotion, 00:20:14 and 00:29:00.** Reading ten minutes from his own book and previewing a volume containing his paper is disclosed by showing the covers, not by saying so. Mild, since the sources are visible. *Fix:* one spoken sentence. #### Tone of voice - Lecturing and confident, in the register of a scholar correcting a public misreading, with the humor concentrated in the analogies (Broncos at 00:25:21, "the Raiders aren't a real football team" at 00:26:04, the Avengers outfit sign-off at 00:42:03). Second person and contractions throughout ("we've got this special thing going on here," "it's just you and me now"). He is sharpest toward the strict-monotheism position ("strict monotheism is not found in any of those verses," 00:30:28) and toward "conservative dogmatists" (00:31:12), and he treats the debater who agrees with him as a weak ally rather than a partner ("not a great articulator," 00:42:03). The register cools where he reads sources aloud and warms where he generalizes; the concessions at 00:39:08 to 00:39:52 are delivered in the flattest tone in the video, which is where the most careful claims sit. ## 🛡️ DARVO analysis Partially applicable. DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) describes a defensive response to accusation. McClellan is not the accused party here; he is a commentator on a debate. But the video contains an accusation he anticipates against himself, and it characterizes opponents by motive, so each prong needs checking. **Deny:** nothing is denied or minimized; he concedes the contested status of his Deuteronomy 32:8-9 reading (00:39:08) and the poor articulation of the ally whose conclusion he shares (00:33:20). **Attack:** mild credibility undermining of "conservative dogmatists" as "incentivized to believe by their identity politics" (00:31:12), and of the second debater's competence three times (00:33:20, 00:39:08, 00:42:03). Neither is an attack on an accuser, and the first is answered in the Fallacies section as a genetic argument. **Reverse victim/offender:** none. The "heretical Mormon" line at 00:28:18 pre-empts an anticipated attack with a bibliography rather than with a victim claim, which is the opposite of DARVO. Emotional cues are humor (analogies, the Avengers sign-off) rather than grievance. ## 🎯 Conclusion The video's durable contribution is a method, demonstrated and sourced: a universal-sounding formula takes its range from its rhetorical setting, and the way to test the strong reading is to find the same formula elsewhere in the same corpus where the strong reading fails. Isaiah 47:8, Zephaniah 2:15 and the Deuteronomy 32:39/32:43 pairing do that work at 00:13:05 through 00:16:39, and the yatsar and "stranger" observations at 00:05:51 and 00:08:05 show the strict reading depends partly on translation choices. The 70-year bibliography (de Boer 1956 to the forthcoming *Meanings and Ends of Monotheism*) is checkable and defeats the "fringe" dismissal. The wider conclusions are less settled than the delivery suggests. "No strict monotheism anywhere in the Bible at all" is broader than the four proof-texts actually rebutted; the two-passages count for Jesus as God is asserted without the excluded candidates; the coinage date of "monotheism" is a word-history fact used to carry a concept-history claim; and the strongest scholarly defense of first-century monotheism is never named. McClellan flags the Deuteronomy 32:8-9 reading as contested and his own survey as pending, which is the right thing to do and also a reminder that this part is a hypothesis. **Next steps for readers:** run the internal-control test yourself on one proof-text before adopting either side's reading; check the OED for the 1660 and 1828 claims; read Heiser's 2008 BBR article and MacDonald's closing chapter, both of which are shown on screen; and, for the Christology half, read one Bauckham or Hurtado chapter alongside Fredriksen's 2022 paper so both positions on Second Temple monotheism are in view. ## 🔄 Refactor Appendix — Is Christianity "strict monotheism"? > Density: 2–5 Literature atoms (H3 pad), 0–3 Permanent candidates (H4 pad). > Emitted: 7 Literature, 3 Permanent. Density override triggered: the source is a 42-minute > argument with seven distinct, separately citable claims (Trinity dating, Christology, > rhetorical scope, the Babylon control, incomparability, the amar syntax count, the word > history). Resonance filter applied: the Broncos analogy and the Avengers sign-off were dropped. > > Konik claim-header rules: present tense, declarative, ≤10 words, searchable, unique. > > Atomicity: one declarative sentence per atom. "and"/"also" → split. > > Tag pool: #bmf · #addendum · #xref · #articleseed · #storystem · #share · #aphorisms ### 📚 Literature Split Pad #### [H1] Trinitarian framework postdates the New Testament texts > [!quote] [00:00:45] > no such philosophical framework or conceptual lens existed period it is never articulated anywhere **Context & use**: - 00:00:45, the first of his two prongs against Debater A. He dates three consubstantial persons in one ousia to the late 2nd century CE at the earliest, more defensibly the 3rd and 4th. - Use as the dating anchor in doctrinal-lineage notes; he treats it as uncontroversial and moves on, so it is a premise here, not an argument. **Tags**: #xref  #### [H2] New Testament calls Jesus divine, rarely God > [!quote] [00:01:28] > I think the New Testament refers to Jesus as divine. **Context & use**: - 00:01:28, immediately after conceding that "Jesus as God" is "kind of muddy" and naming 2 Peter and Titus as the only two candidates. - The claim is asserted, not argued, here; the excluded candidates (Romans 9:5, John 1:1, John 20:28, Hebrews 1:8) are not discussed. Record as his position with that caveat. **Tags**: #xref  #### [H3] "No other" asserts exclusive relationship, not nonexistence > [!quote] [00:04:24] > They're making an assertion about the necessity of God's exclusive relationship with Israel. **Context & use**: - 00:04:24, the thesis sentence for the whole Deutero-Isaiah section, followed by the buffet analogy. - This is the reading he attributes to scholarship since the 1950s; MacDonald's closing paragraph read at 00:17:22 says the same for Deuteronomy. **Tags**: #xref #articleseed  #### [H4] Babylon's "none besides me" proves the idiom's scope > [!quote] [00:15:12] > So, it's not the only one that exists, it's the only one that counts. **Context & use**: - 00:15:12, after reading Isaiah 47:8-10, where personified Babylon uses the formula. Zephaniah 2:15 (Nineveh) follows at 00:15:54. - The internal control is the video's strongest move: the same corpus fixes the idiom's meaning in a case where the ontological reading is impossible. **Tags**: #xref #aphorisms  #### [H5] Incomparability praise presupposes rivals the audience believes in > [!quote] [00:24:38] > The reason this rhetoric is effective is precisely because the audience understood the other gods to exist **Context & use**: - 00:24:38, reading from his own book after listing Exodus 15:11 and the Psalms that exalt Adonai over other gods. - Pairs with Heiser's line at 00:19:31 that comparison to nonexistent beings "would be empty praise indeed," and with the Amun-Re, Sin and Baal hymns at 00:26:04 to 00:27:32. **Tags**: #xref  #### [H6] Amar plus object marker always introduces quoted speech > [!quote] [00:35:30] > This construction occurs well over a hundred times throughout the Hebrew Bible. And literally every single time it occurs. **Context & use**: - 00:35:30, the syntactic argument that Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is an older tradition quoted by verse 7, which makes Elyon's division of nations and Adonai's inheritance reported speech. - The count is asserted, not shown; Hypothesis 2 above is the test. This is his own evidence for the Elyon/Adonai distinction, replacing the debater's misdescribed Dead Sea Scrolls fragment. **Tags**: #xref  #### [H7] "Monotheism" is a 1660 coinage with Unitarian meaning > [!quote] [00:40:36] > Monotheism is a post-biblical philosophical innovation. And the word actually isn't even coined until around 1660 with Henry Moore **Context & use**: - 00:40:36 to 00:41:20; "Henry Moore" is a caption garble for Henry More. Dictionaries from the early 1700s to 1828 defined it as "the doctrine of the Unitarians." - Keep the word-history datum separate from the concept-history claim it is used to carry (see Fallacies). Checkable against the OED. **Tags**: #xref #articleseed  ### 🧠 Atomic Split Pad #### [P1] A universal claim is bounded by the setting that produced it **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): A "there is no other" statement denies rivals within the scope the speaker has set, and only widens to all existence when the text itself widens the scope. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H3]] · [[#H4]] **Scope & conditions**: Holds for any formulaic universal inside a corpus that reuses the formula, where a second occurrence fixes the idiom's range (Isaiah 47:8 and Zephaniah 2:15 for the divine "none besides me"). Breaks when the text supplies its own widening ("in heaven above and on earth beneath" is a candidate at Deuteronomy 4:39, and McClellan reads even that as relational). Does not by itself show the audience believed in other gods; that needs the incomparability argument in P2. **Links**: - [[Anachronistic Categories Distort Interpretation of Ancient Texts]] — because extends: that note says a category younger than the text can't be the text's concern; this one supplies the reading procedure for the universal statements apologists use to import the category - [[Where a Text Itemizes Its General Terms Show What They Exclude]] — because contrasts on the control used: that note narrows a general term by the text's own enumerations; this one narrows a universal by the text's own reuse of the formula in a case where the wide reading fails - [[Euphemistic Translation Can Erase a Texts Rhetorical Force]] — because applies-in: Isaiah 43:12's "stranger" rendered "strange god" (00:08:05, 00:23:11) is a translation choice that widens the scope for English readers  #### [P2] Praise of incomparability presupposes real rivals **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): Boasting that one deity outranks the others only carries force if the audience believes the others exist. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H5]] **Scope & conditions**: Holds for comparative praise ("who is like you among the gods," "king over all gods") in any corpus, including openly polytheistic Egyptian and Ugaritic hymns using the same idiom for Amun-Re and Baal. Breaks for texts that explicitly redefine the rivals as nothing (Isaiah 41:24 and 44:9 come close for images), so the claim is about the incomparability idiom, not every polemic. Also does not settle whether "gods" means high deities, celestial beings or council members; the tier has to be stated per passage. **Links**: - [[Refuting a Claim on Its Own Premises Is Stronger Than Refuting Its Premises]] — because applies-in: McClellan grants Deutero-Isaiah full authority and defeats the strict reading from inside it (Isaiah 47, Deuteronomy 32:43) rather than by rejecting the text - [[A Claim That Proof-Texts Is Refuted By Reading The Rest Of The Source]] — because evidence-for: the four Isaiah proof-texts fail once the rest of Isaiah 40-55 and Deuteronomy 32 are read alongside them - [[divine-council]] — because extends: the theology wiki's divine-council concept supplies the tiered pantheon (El/Elyon, the sons of God, Adonai) that the incomparability idiom presupposes  #### [P3] A term's definition history bounds its retroactive use **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): Applying a label to a text written before the label's current definition existed is a reclassification the analyst owns, not a description the text supplies. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H7]] · [[#H1]] **Scope & conditions**: Holds when the term's coinage and definitional shifts are documented (McClellan: 1660 coinage, Unitarian sense to 1828). Does not show the concept was absent before the word; that is a separate claim needing period evidence, and conflating the two is the etymological fallacy flagged in Logical validity. Applies equally to "Trinity" (framework dated late 2nd to 4th century at 00:00:45) and to modern categories like "sexual orientation" in the linked note. **Links**: - [[Dating a Term's Popularity Separately From Its Coinage Reveals Its Function]] — because extends: that note tracks when a term became popular and what each era of use accomplished; this one adds that the term's definition can change under the same spelling, so the 1700s "monotheism" and the 1828 one are different classifications - [[Anachronistic Categories Distort Interpretation of Ancient Texts]] — because evidence-for: "monotheism" as defined after 1828 is a second instance of the same guardrail that note built from "sexual orientation" - [[A Later Text's Date Bounds What It Can Prove About Earlier Belief]] — because contrasts on what is being bounded: that note bounds a text's evidential reach by its date; this one bounds a category's descriptive reach by its definition date  ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - [F1] Identify the paper McClellan shows at 00:33:20 for the bene El reconstruction of Deuteronomy 32:8, and the author of the Labuschagne festschrift paper captions render "Van Reon" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZomcxjtr-o #fleeting #inbox - [F2] Check the OED for "monotheism": earliest attestation (Henry More, c. 1660?) and whether early dictionary definitions read "the doctrine of the Unitarians" through 1828 as claimed at 00:41:20 #fleeting #inbox - [F3] Open question: how does McClellan's "divine, rarely God" Christology (00:01:28) map against Bauckham's "divine identity" and Hurtado's "binitarian devotion"? The video never names either; a theology wiki concept note on Christological monotheism would hold the comparison #fleeting #inbox - [F4] Article seed: "Find the same sentence where it can't mean that." The internal-control method (Isaiah 47:8, Zephaniah 2:15, Deuteronomy 32:43) generalizes to reading universals in handbooks, charters and specs #fleeting #inbox #articleseed - [F5] Add this video as a source to the theology wiki's dan-mcclellan entity and divine-council concept once the wiki-cycle runs; the 70-sons-of-God and Elyon/Adonai material at 00:36:13 to 00:38:25 belongs in divine-council #fleeting #inbox ### → Things 3 (max 2 actions) - [ ] Read Heiser's 2008 BBR article "Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism?" and MacDonald's closing chapter, then note where each stops short of McClellan's "no monotheism anywhere in the Bible" — Faith & Theology reading, 60 min #things - [ ] Verify the 1660 coinage and 1828 Webster's definition claims for "monotheism" against the OED before citing them in any exegesis note — research, 15 min #things  📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Is Christianity “Strict Monotheism”.md|Is Christianity “Strict Monotheism”? by Dan McClellan]] ## Highlights - and then the 4th centuries CE when the text of the New Testament were being written no such philosophical framework or conceptual lens existed period it is never articulated anywhere And so you can hardly appeal to that as the hermeneutic for understanding the representation of Jesus's relationship to God in the New Testament. That's just not an available lens for understanding ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fpnyemaa0j81qecebv6zq0)) - Note: [H1] Trinitarian framework postdates the New Testament texts - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - as God. I think the New Testament refers to Jesus as divine. And so if you want to go that route, I think that's more plausible. However, the other thing that you could point out is that the Bible, including the New Testament, acknowledges the existence of other gods from beginning to end. In fact, in the Gospel of John, that's a central rhetorical point of Jesus's defense of his own divinity in chapter 10 because they accuse him saying, "You being a ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fpp0wxswxgagjd53s0msjh)) - Note: [H2] New Testament calls Jesus divine, rarely God - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - rhetorical setting, the rhetorical goals, we see that they're not actually denying that other gods exist. They're making an assertion about the necessity of God's exclusive relationship with Israel. And a good way to think about this would be to imagine that someone brings you into a room and there's a table that is set and there are dozens of different kinds of foods all over the table and the person says, "What would you like to eat?" And you say, "I want it all. I want everything. I'm not going to leave anything untouched." Now, the ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fpp3d3sfa9j9pgc66ka4b1)) - Note: [H3] "No other" asserts exclusive relationship, not nonexistence - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - and there is no other besides me." And rhetorically, they're not saying no other cities exist. That doesn't make sense of the rhetoric. Rhetorically, what the personified Babylon is saying is, "I'm the only one that matters to my people. I am the only one that counts." So, it's not the only one that exists, it's the only one that counts. And we see the same thing put into the mouth of the personified Nineveh in Zephaniah 2:15. Is this the exaltant city that ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fpp5s5tvyzztq0nzfgnjxd)) - Note: [H4] Babylon's "none besides me" proves the idiom's scope - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - all gods in Psalm 96:4 and 1st Chronicles 16:25. Psalm 89:6 rhetorically asks, "Who can be compared to Adonai among the children of gods?" Benalem repeatedly crowing that Adonai is exalted as a god and a king over all the other gods isn't that big a flex if your audience thinks the other gods are non-existent figments of pagan imaginations. The reason this rhetoric is effective is precisely because the audience understood the other gods to ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fpp84m5y2fe2dvgy72m7qx)) - Note: [H5] Incomparability praise presupposes rivals the audience believes in - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - quoted speech. Verse 7 ends, "And they will tell you." And in the Hebrew, that is the verb ammar and then the uh a direct object marker. This construction occurs well over a hundred times throughout the Hebrew Bible. And literally every single time it occurs. What comes immediately after, if the subject of the verb doesn't come after, is reported speech, is quoted speech. This would be the only time that what ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fppanap06vt0nj8wppr762)) - Note: [H6] Amar plus object marker always introduces quoted speech - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - inherited is negotiated with in light of existing circumstances and social and rhetorical and historical context and the goals for the future. So traditions are always going to evolve. Uh I would not say it's apostasy. I would say it's not monotheism yet. Monotheism is a post-biblical philosophical innovation. And the word actually isn't even coined until around 1660 with Henry Moore who ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m3fppdbqac1bx4dkmw3ktxhh)) - Note: [H7] "Monotheism" is a 1660 coinage with Unitarian meaning - Tags: atom/literature/h3