Composed, Not Corrupted:

What Dan McClellan’s Scholarship Means for the Restoration

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | November 5, 2026

In October, Joe Rogan hosted Dan McClellan on The Joe Rogan Experience (episode #2562). McClellan is a biblical scholar with three advanced degrees in the field, the host of the Data Over Dogma podcast, and a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Close watchers of the church told the Washington Post that he was the first practicing Latter-day Saint to sit in Rogan’s chair, and the episode became “the talk of the week” among Mormons. Some felt it was a historic validation. Some wished he had spoken about his faith. Some wished he had not gone at all.

What McClellan said, in substance, was this: the Bible is not a single, unchanging document handed down from God. Different authors wrote and edited it over centuries for different purposes. The Hebrew Bible was composed largely between the eighth and fifth centuries before Christ. Later additions include passages such as Mark 16:9–20. The canon was never fixed in antiquity, and different regions decided differently. The idea of hell as eternal conscious torment took its settled form after the biblical period.

When I first read the coverage, it sounded like the familiar story every Mormon missionary tells: the Bible has been corrupted, so a restoration was necessary. We have answered that story at length in earlier essays on this site — on whether apostolic Christianity ever perished, on what Mormonism claims to have restored, and on the history of the canon. I will not repeat those arguments here.

On reflection, though, McClellan was not telling the missionary’s story. He was telling a different one, and the difference is worth an essay. The claim he made, followed honestly, does not support the Restoration. It removes the ground the Restoration stands on — and it does more damage to the Book of Mormon than to the Bible.

I. Two Claims That Sound Alike

There are two quite different things a person can mean when he says “the Bible has been changed.”

The first is the corruption claim. It says there was once a complete, pure text — the gospel as the apostles delivered it — and that afterward, men damaged it. The Book of Mormon states this claim precisely. An angel shows Nephi a book that, “when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord,” and then tells him that “they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious” (1 Nephi 13:24, 26). The church’s eighth Article of Faith carries the same idea: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.” Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible, the Joseph Smith Translation, was offered as the repair — the restoration of what had been removed.

The second is the composition claim. It says the biblical books came into being gradually: sources gathered, edited, expanded, and arranged by scribes over many generations, long before any church existed to corrupt them. This is the claim of the historical-critical method, the approach that dominates university biblical studies, and it is the claim McClellan made on Rogan’s show.

The difference is easy to miss, so let me state it plainly.

The corruption claim says a finished thing was damaged.
The composition claim says the thing was never finished in the way the corruption claim imagines.
The corruption claim needs a pristine original, a later villain, and a loss.
The composition claim has no pristine original, places the shaping before the church, and describes growth rather than loss.

These are not two versions of the same complaint. They are rival accounts. The more seriously one takes the second, the less room there is for the first.

II. Why Composition Cannot Carry the Restoration

The Restoration is a repair claim. Something was lost, and God sent a prophet to put it back. For a repair claim to make sense, three things must be true: there was an original fullness, it was lost after the apostles, and the restorer recovered it.

The composition account cuts the first link. If the books were shaped over centuries by many hands, there is no single moment at which the text “contained the fulness of the gospel” and from which a later church subtracted. There is only a long, public process of writing and editing. One can believe in inspiration working through that process — I do, and I will come back to it — but one cannot point to the pristine edition that the “great and abominable church” of 1 Nephi 13 is said to have mutilated, because on this account it never existed as a separate thing.

A thoughtful Latter-day Saint may answer: Both can be true. The texts were composed over centuries, and then, after the apostles, they were damaged as well. The Restoration supplies what neither process preserved. This is the strongest form of the reply, and it deserves a direct answer.

If both are true, then the corruption claim must stand on its own evidence. It cannot borrow the authority of McClellan’s scholarship, because his scholarship is about composition. And the one discipline that can actually test whether a text was damaged in transmission — textual criticism, the comparison of manuscripts — is exactly the discipline that tells against it. That brings us to the record.

III. What the Transmission Record Shows

The corruption story is a claim about transmission: what happened to the text after it was written. Transmission is precisely where the Bible’s evidence is strongest.

For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed our manuscript evidence back roughly a thousand years. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, copied around the second century before Christ, is a complete Isaiah about a millennium older than the medieval Masoretic manuscripts on which our Hebrew Bibles had relied. It has real variants — differences in spelling, wording, and occasionally a line — but it is recognizably the same book. A thousand years of copying did not produce a different Isaiah.

For the New Testament, scholars have catalogued roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, some fragments dating to the second and third centuries, along with early translations into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic and thousands of quotations in the writings of the early church. No other ancient text comes close.

Now look at the examples McClellan himself gave. The longer ending of Mark and Matthew 17:21 are not secrets that scholars dug out against the church’s resistance. They are printed in brackets or footnotes in nearly every modern English Bible, with a note explaining that the earliest manuscripts lack them. That is the opposite of a cover-up. The variants are catalogued, published, and placed in front of every reader who looks at the bottom of the page. This is the point our August essay on the canon made about the “removed books”: sunlight is the rebuttal.

And notice what the record does not contain. No manuscript family, in any language, preserves a fuller gospel of the kind 1 Nephi describes — a version rich in the “plain and precious” things that a later church cut out. The Joseph Smith Translation offers a test case. In Genesis 50, Joseph Smith’s revision adds a prophecy in which the patriarch Joseph foretells a latter-day seer: “his name shall be called Joseph, and it shall be after the name of his father” (JST Genesis 50:33). If that passage had been removed by a corrupt church, we might hope to find it in some manuscript that escaped the corruptors — in the Hebrew, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, or a scroll. It appears in none of them. Every “restored” passage of this kind is supported by exactly one witness: the man who restored it.

This is the structural point that runs through all our writing on this subject. The corruption claim is the necessary first move of any system that intends to seat a new revelator: the existing standard must be discredited before the replacement can be installed. What McClellan’s appearance shows is that the scholarly tools often brought in to discredit the standard do not, in fact, deliver the verdict the restorationist needs.

IV. The Same Light on the Book of Mormon

Here the argument turns. If a Latter-day Saint welcomes the historical-critical method when it is applied to the Bible, he must allow it to be applied to his own scripture. Under that light the Book of Mormon fares much worse than the Bible does.

Isaiah on the brass plates. The Book of Mormon says Lehi’s family left Jerusalem around 600 BC, carrying brass plates with the writings of the prophets. Nephi then reads long passages of Isaiah to his people from those plates, including Isaiah 48–49 (1 Nephi 20–21) and Isaiah 50–52 (2 Nephi 7–8). The same historical-critical scholarship that McClellan presented dates Isaiah 40–55 to the Babylonian exile — decades after Lehi left — because it names Cyrus, speaks of Babylon’s fall as present, and reflects exilic Hebrew. I do not accept that dating; I believe Isaiah wrote Isaiah. But a Latter-day Saint who applies the method to Genesis and Daniel cannot exempt Nephi’s plates from it. On the method’s own terms, Nephi is reading chapters that had not yet been written.

King James English. Where the Book of Mormon quotes the Bible, it follows the wording of the 1611 King James Version very closely — in Isaiah, in the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi 12–14, and elsewhere — including many of the words that the King James translators supplied in italics because they have no counterpart in the Hebrew or Greek. A text translated from ancient plates should not carry the fingerprints of a particular seventeenth-century English committee.

The later additions McClellan named. McClellan told Rogan that Mark 16:9–20 is a later addition to Mark. The Book of Mormon has the risen Christ, speaking to the Nephites, give the commission of that very passage in nearly the King James words: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature; and he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned; and these signs shall follow them that believe…” (Mormon 9:22–24; compare Mark 16:15–18). Likewise, the Nephite Lord’s Prayer closes with “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen” (3 Nephi 13:13) — the doxology that the earliest manuscripts of Matthew lack and that most textual critics regard as a liturgical addition.

Latter-day Saint scholars have answered these points, and they should be heard fairly. They argue that Joseph Smith rendered familiar biblical passages in the biblical English his readers knew; that the longer ending of Mark, even if not original to Mark, may preserve authentic early teaching of the risen Christ, so that the Book of Mormon could be an independent witness to the same words; and that we know too little about how “inspired translation” works to rule anything out. McClellan himself has suggested reading the Book of Mormon as nineteenth-century literature — written in nineteenth-century English for a nineteenth-century audience — while noting that this need not settle the question of its origins.

But consider what these answers concede. They concede that at precisely the points where the Book of Mormon could be checked against independent evidence, the text in our hands follows the English Bible on Joseph Smith’s shelf, including its later additions. The appeal to “loose translation” protects the claim of ancient origin only by moving it out of reach of evidence. That is the very move the critical scholar refuses to allow the Christian when he defends the Bible.

V. The Dilemma

So the Latter-day Saint who heard McClellan with pride faces a choice, and it is worth stating plainly.

If he accepts the historical-critical method, he gains a Bible that grew over centuries, but he loses the pristine original the corruption story requires, and he must turn the same method on the Book of Mormon, where it finds exilic Isaiah on pre-exilic plates and King James English, later additions included, in the mouth of the risen Christ.

If he rejects the method, he keeps his Book of Mormon safe from it, but he can no longer use the scholars’ findings as evidence that the Bible was corrupted, and he is left with what the manuscripts actually show: a text transmitted with remarkable faithfulness, its variants published for all to see.

Here is the practical test. Apply one tool, with one standard, to both books. The Bible comes out as an ancient text with an extraordinarily well-documented history. The Book of Mormon comes out as a text whose biblical portions follow a seventeenth-century English translation. Whatever one makes of that, it is not the result the Restoration needs.

VI. What the Method Cannot See

There is one more thing to say about Data Over Dogma, and it applies to the method as a whole rather than to Mormonism.

The historical-critical method, as practiced in the university, sets aside the possibility that God acts in history. It does not discover that God is absent; it begins by excluding Him from its explanations. That is a defensible rule for a seminar, but it is a starting assumption, not a conclusion drawn from the data. A method that rules out prophecy cannot then report, as a finding, that there was no prophecy. When it dates Isaiah 40–55 to the exile because the chapters name Cyrus, it is not weighing evidence against prediction; it has decided in advance that prediction is impossible. Everyone stands on something he has not proven. The question is whether he says so.

Nor does Scripture need to fear the idea of sources and compilation. Luke tells us at the outset that he gathered and ordered the accounts of eyewitnesses: “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order” (Luke 1:3). Inspiration that works through a careful historian, or through generations of faithful scribes, is still inspiration: “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). Composition is not corruption. A building raised by many hands over many years is not a ruin.

Here I will say what I believe about this at the deepest level. I hold that God does not watch human life from a distance. He lives each life from within; we are, in a real sense, His experience of the world. The physics I have spent forty years developing, which I call Conscious Point Physics, is my attempt to describe what that means at the level of reality itself: that the substance of the universe is God’s sustaining thought, so that “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) is a description and not a metaphor. If that is true, then God was present at every scribe’s desk, in every scriptorium, at every lamp where a monk copied the Gospels through the night. The Great Apostasy story requires a God who left His people without His word for seventeen centuries and then returned. I find no such God in Scripture, and I find no such gap in the manuscripts. The God who promised “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20) was there, inside the lives of the people who carried His word, the whole time.

VII. A Brief Word on Hell

McClellan also told Rogan that the New Testament contains several views of final punishment — annihilation, temporary suffering, and eternal torment — and that the doctrine of hell as universal eternal torment took its settled form with Augustine and the medieval church.

This deserves its own essay, and I will only mark two things here. First, the question of whether the lost are finally destroyed or endure conscious punishment is genuinely debated among Bible-believing Christians; John Stott, one of the twentieth century’s most respected evangelical leaders, leaned toward conditional immortality. Second, the New Testament’s warnings are not a medieval invention. Jesus Himself set the two destinies side by side in a single sentence: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46). Whatever one concludes about the nature of that punishment, the seriousness of the warning belongs to the Lord, not to Augustine. It is also worth noticing that a softened hell fits Latter-day Saint cosmology well, since in the doctrine of the three degrees of glory nearly everyone receives a kingdom of some glory. An argument that suits a listener’s theology should be examined with extra care for that very reason.

VIII. On the Closet

When Rogan asked McClellan how he holds his faith together with his scholarship, McClellan declined to discuss it, citing Jesus: “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Rogan called the answer admirable, and I understand why. Rogan’s complaint is against religion worn “like a shield of virtue,” and that is a fair complaint. There are good professional reasons to keep a scholarly platform distinct from personal testimony, and I do not question McClellan’s sincerity.

But I want to say, gently, that the verse does not fit the use. Matthew 6 is about prayer and almsgiving performed to be seen by men. It is not about whether a man will say whom he follows. On that question the Lord spoke in the opposite direction: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32). Humility forbids performing one’s faith. It does not forbid naming one’s Lord. Eleven million people were listening.

IX. Why This Matters

I write this not to score a point against a scholar, and not to embarrass Latter-day Saints, many of whom live with a discipline and devotion that put many Christians to shame. They are not our enemies. They are our neighbors, and in this matter I believe they have been held by a story that is not true: that the word of God was lost, and that a nineteenth-century prophet found it.

I stand on the side of the Bible’s reliability, and I stand there without needing to deny anything the manuscripts show. The texts have a history. Scribes made errors, and scholars have found and published them. The canon was recognized over time, not dropped from heaven bound in leather. None of that is a threat. What would be a threat is a lost original, a corrupted transmission, and a single modern witness supplying the missing pieces — and that is the story the evidence does not support.

When a Latter-day Saint friend tells you that scholars have shown the Bible to be corrupted, do not argue with the scholars. Ask him which claim he means. Ask whether he will apply the same method to the Book of Mormon. Then point him to a verse from the very section of Isaiah that the critics assign to the exile — a verse whose meaning does not depend on who is right about its date:

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” (Isaiah 40:8)

That is the bet I am making. The word was not lost. It does not need to be restored. It needs to be read.

Sources and Their Limits

“Joe Rogan hosted a Mormon who debunks biblical literalism. Here’s how it went,” Washington Post, October 2026 (republished at dnyuz.com).
“LDS scholar Dan McClellan appears on Joe Rogan,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 10, 2026, sltrib.com.
Episode summary, The Joe Rogan Experience #2562 (Dan McClellan), Shortform.
Scripture Central, “Why Does Part of the Long Ending of Mark Show Up in the Book of Mormon?” KnoWhy #522, scripturecentral.org.
FAIR, “KJV italicized text in the Book of Mormon,” fairlatterdaysaints.org; Stan Spencer, “Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith as an Unlearned Reader,” Interpreter 38 (2020).
B. H. Roberts Foundation, “LDS Discussions discusses the problem of Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon,” bhroberts.org, summarizing the critical case and the responses of FAIR, Sidney Sperry, and Grant Hardy.
On McClellan’s suggestion to read the Book of Mormon as nineteenth-century literature: A Careful Examination, quoting McClellan.
Prior essays on this site: “What Mormonism Claims to Have Restored” (May 2026); “The Restoration That Was Not Needed” (April 2026); “The Canon, the Back Door, and the Trust Chain” (August 2026).

Limits. I have not heard the full three-hour episode. My account of what McClellan said rests on the Washington Post and Salt Lake Tribune reports and a published summary, so the wording of his claims is theirs, not his. Where I describe Latter-day Saint responses, I have drawn on their own apologetic organizations (FAIR, Scripture Central, Interpreter) so that they speak for themselves; there is a larger literature on each point than I could survey here. The manuscript figures — the date of the Great Isaiah Scroll and the count of New Testament manuscripts — are the standard published figures and will shift slightly as new manuscripts are catalogued.

261105 – The Bible and the Restoration