The Manosphere Goes to Bible Study

Joe Rogan was about 14 minutes into his latest Bible lesson when his guest pulled out an unusual gift: a replica of a 2,800-year-old piece of pottery that appeared to suggest the God of the Bible once had a wife.

Rogan was fascinated.

The ancient inscription mentions Yahweh, the God of Israel, alongside a mysterious figure called Asherah. Some scholars believe it offers evidence that early Israelites worshipped a goddess alongside the deity who would eventually become the one God of Judaism and Christianity.

This was hardly the only surprise awaiting Rogan during his October 7 episode with biblical scholar Dan McClellan. Rogan's show is frequently ranked as the most-listened-to podcast across the English-speaking world, a unique platform for Bible Study.

During the conversation, they explored evidence that familiar Bible stories borrowed from older religions, that some New Testament letters weren't written by their supposed authors, and that Christianity's teachings about marriage and hell changed over time.

"I don't think all of it is fiction, but I don't think all of it is literal," Rogan observed.

Millions of listeners tuned in to receive a crash course in biblical history from the former Fear Factor host that might make their Sunday school teachers uncomfortable.

Wait, God Has a Wife?

The pottery was discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud, an archaeological site in the Sinai Peninsula, and dates to approximately 800 BCE. Its inscription invokes Yahweh and "his Asherah." Nearby are drawings of figures that some researchers have associated with ancient deities.

Asherah was a goddess worshipped in the ancient Near East. In Canaanite religion, she was the consort of El, the chief god. As ancient Israelite religion developed, Yahweh came to occupy El's supreme position, and some scholars believe Asherah was worshipped as Yahweh's partner by at least some Israelites.

That sounds pretty incompatible with modern Judaism and Christianity, which teach that God is one and has no divine wife. But ancient Israelite religion wasn't always monotheistic in the way we understand it today.

The Bible repeatedly condemns Israelites for worshipping other gods. In 2 Kings 23, King Josiah orders an image of Asherah removed from the Temple in Jerusalem.

There is a catch: scholars disagree about the inscription. "His Asherah" might refer to a goddess or a sacred object associated with her worship. The drawings may not even represent Yahweh and Asherah.

Did the Bible Borrow Its Stories From Other Religions?

Rogan was particularly interested in the similarities between biblical narratives and older stories from the ancient world.

Consider Moses. According to Exodus, his mother places him in a waterproof basket on the Nile to save him from Pharaoh's order to kill Hebrew baby boys. Pharaoh's daughter discovers him and raises him in the royal household.

A strikingly similar Mesopotamian legend tells of Sargon of Akkad, a ruler who lived in the third millennium BCE. His mother secretly gives birth, places him in a basket sealed with bitumen, and sends him down a river. He is rescued and eventually becomes king. Sound familiar?

The surviving Sargon birth legend was written down long after the king lived, so the exact relationship between the accounts remains uncertain. But the parallels are difficult to miss.

Then there's Noah's Ark. In Genesis, God sends a devastating flood. Noah builds a boat, saves his family and animals, survives the waters, and offers a sacrifice.

But in the older Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, a man named Utnapishtim also receives warning of a divine flood, builds a boat, preserves life, survives, and offers a sacrifice. He even sends out birds to see whether the waters have receded. The British Museum preserves ancient clay tablets containing the Mesopotamian story, which circulated long before the Hebrew Bible reached its final form.

To modern readers, these similarities can look suspiciously like plagiarism. But ancient writers routinely adapted familiar stories to express new religious ideas. Biblical authors could have used existing narratives to communicate their own understanding of God.

That doesn't mean biblical authors simply copied the work of other peoples, or that a familiar story has no spiritual meaning. It does complicate the idea that these narratives emerged independently of the cultures surrounding their authors.

Did Paul Really Write All Those Rules About Sex and Marriage?

One might call the Apostle Paul the original manosphere podcaster... after all, he was an unmarried man with very strong opinions and no qualms about sharing them. His letters were partly an exercise in long-distance problem-solving: congregations he had helped establish sent him questions, reports of disputes reached him, and he responded with instructions on everything from worship to marriage. Some of the advice was requested. Other times, he could sound like quite the busybody.

And of course, sex. Paul was hardly a live-and-let-live kind of guy when it came to coitus; he had plenty of opinions about what Christians should and shouldn't do in the bedroom. His writings have influenced Christian teachings about sexuality and gender roles for nearly two thousand years.

But what if some of those instructions weren't actually written by Paul?

Scholars generally accept seven New Testament letters as authentically Pauline. Many believe three others, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, were written by later Christians using his name. These are called the Pastoral Epistles because they address church leadership.

In 1 Corinthians 7, which scholars agree Paul wrote, he favors remaining unmarried and celibate, partly because he expects the world to end soon. Why arrange marriages and establish families when Jesus is coming back any minute now?

Paul's sundial may have been running fast...

His guidance presented a problem for later Christians still stranded on Earth. How could they establish families, leadership, and lasting institutions when the end hadn't arrived?

Suddenly, the instructions attributed to Paul began to look rather different.

In 1 Timothy 2, women are instructed not to teach or exercise authority over men. Verse 15 states that a woman will be saved through childbearing, provided she continues in faith and holiness. That's a striking contrast with Paul's preference for celibacy in 1 Corinthians, and with the participation of women mentioned in his undisputed letters. McClellan suggested the shift reflects Christianity's adaptation to the delayed Second Coming.

Traditional Christian scholars dispute the claim that Paul didn't write these letters, but their contested authorship presents an awkward question for those invoking them as timeless rules about marriage and gender. How timeless are rules that may have changed with the circumstances?

Did Jesus Really Teach That Everyone Else Goes to Hell?

Rogan also expressed discomfort with the idea that otherwise decent people could suffer eternal punishment simply because they don't believe in Jesus.

McClellan explained that the Bible offers differing ideas about punishment after death: destruction, punishment that some interpret as temporary, and passages traditionally understood to describe eternal suffering. The hell familiar to modern Christians developed through centuries of interpretation.

We've previously explored the surprisingly complicated biblical history of hell, including Sheol, Gehenna, and later Christian understandings of eternal punishment.

For Rogan, the question was simple: what kind of God would condemn someone forever for believing the wrong thing?

Is the Manosphere Ready for This Version of the Bible?

Rogan's interest in scripture arrives as Christianity gains traction among some male-oriented podcasters and online influencers. The controversial podcaster Jordan Peterson interprets biblical stories through psychology and mythology, while others promote Christianity as a defense of traditional masculinity and family hierarchies.

Rogan himself said in 2025 that he'd begun attending church. That January, he hosted Christian apologist Wesley Huff, who defended the Bible's historical reliability. Christianity Today reported that Huff's audience surged afterward, with listeners saying they'd started reading scripture or going to church.

Are young men actually becoming more religious? Gallup found that 42% of American men ages 18 to 29 considered religion very important in 2024–2025, up from 28% in 2022–2023. Monthly religious attendance among young men reached 40%. But Pew's December 2025 research found no clear evidence of a nationwide revival among young adults. And neither survey tells us whether podcasts are sending men into the pews.

Some figures take the connection between Christianity and masculine authority considerably further. In September, Religion News Service reported on a fringe group of Reformed Christian influencers - sometimes called "Theo-bros" promoting patriarchy, antisemitism, and even racial segregation under a religious banner. They aren't representative of Rogan's guests, but they're part of a wider online fight over who gets to define Christian manhood.

Take Arizona pastor Dale Partridge, who preaches what he calls "biblical patriarchy." He argues that husbands should represent their households before God, church, and state, and has called for repealing women's right to vote. Fellow Christian nationalist Joel Webbon has said his wife votes the way he tells her to because she's submissive. Both appeal to a biblical order in which men lead their families. But that's quite a leap from ancient instructions about marriage to deciding that women shouldn't have an independent voice in a modern democracy.

And it's a rather selective reading of scripture. Ephesians 5 tells wives to submit to their husbands, but the preceding verse calls on believers to submit to one another, and the passage instructs husbands to love their wives sacrificially. Meanwhile, in Romans 16, a letter scholars agree Paul actually wrote, he praises Phoebe as a minister and names Junia as prominent among the apostles. Christians disagree about what these passages mean for gender roles today, but they certainly complicate the idea that the Bible provides an unambiguous mandate for male domination.

It is one thing to declare that the Bible says men should lead and women should follow. It is another to discover that the relevant books may have been written by different people, in different centuries, responding to problems their predecessors never imagined.

A podcaster can make a confident claim about what God wants from men and women. A biblical scholar can spend three hours explaining why the evidence isn't so tidy.

If the manosphere is so interested in what the Bible has to say about men and women, is it really searching for divine truth, or just looking for a few convenient verses to tell women what to do?