A lot of people have asked me to do a video responding to Dan McClellan, a popular biblical scholar on TikTok and YouTube.

And it helped me do that, I asked Dan to review the script for today's episode to make sure that it's fair and accurately represents his views.

Now, Dan has over 2,000 videos on his YouTube channel, so I can't comprehensively examine his work.

But I have watched three or four dozen of his videos, and I read excerpts of his new book,

The Bible Says So.

I'm not going to engage the tone Dan uses in his videos because while it can be blunt or snarky,

it's not beyond the boundaries of civil discourse.

You just don't have the first clue what you're talking about.

We might not agree on how to address those we disagree with, even on extremely important

issues related to human flourishing, but at least we can agree on the awesomeness of comic

book t-shirts that Dan often sports in his videos.

So here are my overall thoughts on Dan McClellan and my advice for how Christians should

interact with his work in arguments.

First, Dan's work

shows why Christians need to be aware of biblical scholarship and shouldn't be anti-intellectual.

Some people think scholarship is identical with polemics or arguments against Christianity,

which isn't true because some scholarship, even critical scholarship, supports key elements

of the Christian faith. For example,

as Bart Erman notes in his book, Did Jesus Exist? It's the opinion of virtually every expert on

the planet that Jesus existed. Now, many of these experts deny Jesus was God or deny certain

historical aspects of his life, but they at least agree Christianity's origins lie with an itinerant

preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. Mythicism, in contrast, is a fringe view, which says Jesus never

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