1.1 What Is This Podcast About?

Welcome to the very first episode of “The Bible Unthumped”. My name is David K, and this podcast was born out of a small Facebook group that I put together in early 2022. I called the group “The Bible Unthumped”, and every week, I just shared some interesting trivia and scholarship about the Bible that an audience of mostly Christians had never heard before. There were about 200 people in this Facebook group, mostly friends and acquaintances of mine and a few of their friends. 

When I started the group, I really didn’t know what sort of reaction I’d get, but it ended up striking a real chord for quite a few of the participants. Their feedback and interest encouraged me to start this podcast, which I’m also calling “The Bible Unthumped.”

The focus of this podcast will be the Bible, the holy book of Christianity. It won’t be a podcast about faith nearly so much as about the story behind the stories in the books that were collected into THE book that became known as The Bible. Dealing with the Bible means also talking about ancient Judaism and its context and about God and Jesus and lots of history, but the intention is to focus directly on the book.

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So, why start this podcast? Very honestly, and in the first place, it’s because the more I have studied the Bible, the more I’ve become frustrated with the Bible Thumpers. Many Christians are very confident about the Bible—dogmatic, moralistic, lacking any curiosity, quick to weaponize Bible verses when someone disagrees with them. They often buy peevish bumper stickers and certainly don’t like to hear anyone expressing doubts. Just believe what God wrote. But, when you get down to it, they really don’t have a lot of knowledge about the Bible they are thumping. And, I know this posture first-hand because I used to be one of those people, myself. 

Bible Thumpers are not the only source of my frustration. I am also frustrated by mainstream Bible scholarship. It’s not the scholarship itself, though. There is fascinating, in-depth, multidisciplinary work being done among historians, linguists, archaeologists, and so forth to better understand the biblical texts. I love this work and I spend a lot of time reading it. It’s not only interesting, but convincing and has re-shaped the way I engage with the Bible. 

So, the issue I have is that so little of the insightful work that’s been done has trickled out from the scholarly conversations and into the pulpits and Sunday school classrooms and everyday conversations among practicing Christians. Scholars tend to talk to other scholars, but their work should resonate with lots of people who read and use the Bible but who are not scholars themselves. I think they’d find the information beneficial, too, just like I have. 

The bottom line is that both Bible thumpers and Bible scholars tend to live inside echo chambers. In each group, conversation circulates around and around among its own membership. The scholars don’t share enough, and the thumpers don’t hear enough. I hope this podcast helps bridge that gap.

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I should make it clear here that I am not a Bible scholar, myself. I am not a scholar of anything, in fact. My academic and career backgrounds have nothing to do with the Bible. They have more to do with city development and real estate, actually, but I have never not been deeply engaged with the scriptures, even though I am merely a lay person. 

As far as my faith background, I’ve alternated between mainline churches and evangelical churches, and for decades, I identified as an Evangelical Calvinist. I went to Christian schools growing up, was in church pretty much every week, attended vacation bible schools, participated in dozens of bible studies over the years, and I have spent loads of time in the Bible, reading it, but until about a decade ago, had thought very little about the Bible. 

I finally confronted some things that had just never added up, and the more I felt the freedom to ask questions, the more I actually discovered answers. Lo and behold! They were not the answers I’d have gotten by just listening to my Sunday school teachers, to be sure, but they made much more sense and were based on evidence, and that ultimately made my brain feel better. My heart, too. All of that said, I still think the Bible is a really fascinating, relevant book.

I have a feeling some of you, too, have spent a lot of time with the Bible and find it deeply important but just don’t know much about it. I hope this podcast helps, no matter where you find yourself on the spectrum of belief. Maybe you are a committed Bible-believer, and maybe you subscribe to no faith at all. Whether you are someone who thumps it or not, the Bible shapes the lives of many of us, our families and friends, and our society. 

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So, what is this book? Where does it come from? How was it written and used by our religious ancestors who have lived over the last few thousand years? What are the stories behind the stories we read in the Bible, and how did this one book get to be so important? These are the kinds of questions The Bible Unthumped will try to address. 

A few notes that might be helpful to listeners off the bat:

First, I hope this podcast is accessible to everyone. If you already have some knowledge of the Bible and ancient middle eastern history, though, you’ll have a bit of a leg up understanding some of the content. 

Second, scholars often debate, and recognizing this is important for presenting scholarship objectively, as I hope to do. There will be many times when there is a consensus among scholars on a topic, but there will be other times when different scholars still have different ideas or explanations for things, and in those cases, I will note that conversation among the experts is ongoing.   

Third point, there will be lots of history in this podcast, of course. Scholars use BCE and CE (before the common era and common era) for ancient dates instead of BC and AD. But, I will use BC and AD, which I assume is more familiar to most of you listening. 

Final point I want to make is that evangelical, fundamentalist, biblicist, traditionalist, born again, Bible-believer, and Bible thumper are all terms that get thrown together in people’s conversations, sometimes pejoratively, even though they are not all exactly synonyms. Among these terms, the one that I will plan use to refer to those people who approach the Bible as the literal word of God will be Biblicist. I think it’s the most accurate word for our purposes here. Though, I can’t promise I won’t also use the word evangelical from time to time. 

So, my plan, which is totally subject to change, is to organize this podcast in something like related arcs of six or seven episodes and maybe throw in an occasional Q&A episode. I am going to start with some episodes covering basics that relate to the whole scope of the Bible, but eventually we will get down into the weeds. I hope to keep all of the episodes bite-sized, each one lasting maybe ten minutes or so.

By the time you hear this, maybe, there will be a website at thebibleunthumped.com. As I am recording this, that website doesn’t exist yet, but the plan is that I will post occasional resources and shownotes there. 

So, let me end today by asking you to subscribe to The Bible Unthumped, and to tell your friends and family to do the same. Maybe there will ultimately only be a few dozen listeners, and that would be fine, but I think this podcast will be relevant to many, many people who have unanswered questions about the scriptures.   

In the next episode, we’ll start this whole podcast off by talking about the number of books in the Bible. You may think you know how many there are, but there’s more to the story than you might realize. 

Less thumping. More understanding. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.