ChatGPT-Advanced Argues With Me About Monotheism

Discussion: Monotheism, the Bible, Akhenaten, Dan McClellan, and Paula Fredriksen

Initial Claim

The first monotheism was created by King Akhenaten as a way to unify his society, as a means to consolidate his own power.

Monotheism isn’t “modern” in the sense of post-Enlightenment. Rather, it’s modern in the context of the timeline of human history.

Polytheism very far predates monotheism. But even polytheism took a very long time to develop out of our species’ heightened agency detection, imaginations, storytelling, superstitions, scientific illiteracy, social-power paradigms, major personality disorders, etc.

None of the Bible writers or characters were monotheists.

The stories about Jesus are stories about a henotheistic Jew who joined and later took over an apocalyptic Jewish mystery cult.

Do I think any of the Bible characters thought that any “God” is always and purely “good”? That’s not how I read it. But I also have no interest in arguing comparative interpretations about that either.

It’s a meaningless concept to say that “God is good” or that “God is always purely good,” because it’s nothing more than an appeal to Might Makes Right, and a virtue signal that the human saying it is a properly righteous sycophant. It is otherwise empty of any meaning.

Response

Your broad framing is much closer to critical scholarship than to Sunday-school theology, but a few parts are too compressed or too certain.

Akhenaten is a legitimate candidate for one of the earliest known state-level experiments in something like monotheism or radical monolatry. He elevated Aten and suppressed traditional Egyptian cults, and this was entangled with royal power. But calling him the creator of “the first monotheism” is stronger than the evidence allows. Scholars still debate whether Atenism was true monotheism, royal henotheism, exclusive solar worship, or political theology centered on Pharaoh and Aten. “One of the earliest known monotheistic/monolatrous experiments” is safer.

You are also right that polytheism predates historically visible monotheism by a very long time, and that Israelite/Judahite monotheism appears to have developed gradually. A major survey of scholarship says recent work sees ancient Israelite monotheism as “later” and “gradual,” with consistent monotheism emerging among some Israelites only around the Babylonian Exile or possibly post-exile.

Your statement that many biblical figures were not monotheists in the later philosophical sense is defensible. A more precise version would be: many Hebrew Bible texts preserve henotheistic, monolatrous, or divine-council assumptions, even when later editors or readers frame them monotheistically. Recent scholarship commonly discusses early Israelite religion as involving Yahweh’s rise within a broader West Semitic/Canaanite divine world, not as clean philosophical monotheism from the beginning.

Your read of Jesus as an apocalyptic Jew is also mainstream-adjacent. The dominant historical-Jesus model has long been that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet announcing the imminent kingdom/end-time transformation.

“Jesus joined and later took over an apocalyptic Jewish mystery cult” is rhetorically powerful but historically muddy. “Mystery cult” usually refers to Greco-Roman initiatory cults, and direct dependence theories between Christianity and mystery religions are generally treated cautiously or rejected in older reference scholarship. A cleaner version would be:

Jesus emerged from Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic movements, especially in relation to John the Baptist, and after his death his followers transformed his memory into a salvific cultic movement.

“None of the Bible writers were monotheists” is probably too absolute. Some late biblical/redactional voices are very close to exclusive monotheism, especially exilic/post-exilic material such as parts of Isaiah. But many earlier layers and narrative worlds are not monotheistic in the later, abstract sense. So the stronger claim is:

The Bible is not uniformly monotheistic; it contains older polytheistic, henotheistic, monolatrous, and divine-council residues alongside later exclusive-monotheist claims.

On “God is good,” I think your critique works best as a critique of divine command morality or theological sycophancy, not as a total description of every possible meaning of the phrase. In many contexts, “God is good” does function as “whatever the highest power does is righteous by definition,” which collapses morality into power. But some theologians use “God is good” metaphysically or apophatically, meaning something like “goodness is grounded in ultimate reality,” not “God wins, therefore God is right.” You do not have to accept that, but it is not always only might-makes-right.

A tightened version of your position could be:

Historically, monotheism is not primordial. It is a late cultural development in human religious history, emerging out of much older animistic, polytheistic, tribal, royal, and mythic frameworks. Akhenaten’s Atenism was one of the earliest known state-level experiments in exclusive divine worship, but later Israelite/Jewish monotheism developed separately and gradually from West Semitic polytheistic and henotheistic roots. The Bible itself preserves that transition rather than cleanly beginning with philosophical monotheism. Jesus is best understood historically as a Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic prophet, not as a modern philosophical monotheist. And claims like “God is good” often function less as moral analysis than as a declaration of loyalty to ultimate power.

That version keeps your central argument, but makes it harder to dismiss on technical grounds.

Clarification About Dan McClellan and Paula Fredriksen

According to Dan McClellan and most of his academic peers, there are zero examples of actual monotheism in the Jewish and Christian biblical texts. All examples of monotheism in those texts are being misunderstood by anyone who interprets any such texts as monotheism.

According to Paula Fredriksen, monotheism as a concept has been very messy and poorly and inconsistently defined by the cultures that spent many centuries meandering towards something akin to what people today call “monotheism.”

Response

Yes — with one important precision.

McClellan’s position, as I understand it, is not merely “ancient Israel had henotheistic leftovers.” It is stronger: if monotheism means belief that only one deity exists, then the Bible does not contain monotheism. The biblical texts repeatedly assume other divine beings exist; they just subordinate them to Israel’s god, deny their legitimacy, mock them, demote them, or command exclusive loyalty to YHWH. That is not “only one god exists.” It is exclusive worship, monolatry, divine hierarchy, and cosmic monarchy.

That aligns closely with Paula Fredriksen’s framing. In her Yale piece “The Many Gods of Ancient Monotheism,” she says modern monotheism as “only one god exists” works as a modern definition, but ancient Jewish and Christian “monotheism” accommodated many other divinities; she even writes that God was “not the only god, not even in his own book.”

So I would revise my earlier softer wording this way:

The Bible contains many texts that later readers classify as monotheistic, but under a strict historical definition — only one divine being exists — those texts are not actually monotheistic. They are better described as monolatrous, henotheistic, monarchic, or exclusivist: YHWH, El, or God is supreme, incomparable, creator, judge, and the only legitimate recipient of Israelite or Christian worship, but not the only divine being in the imagined cosmos.

That distinction matters because biblical “no other god” language often means something like:

“None other is worthy.”

“None other has legitimate claim over Israel.”

“None other compares.”

“None other should be worshiped.”

“None other can save.”

“Foreign gods are defeated, humiliated, powerless, or subordinate.”

It does not necessarily mean:

“No other divine beings exist.”

Fredriksen’s broader point is also exactly what you’re naming: “monotheism” is a blunt modern category imposed on ancient religious systems whose cosmologies were crowded. Her work argues that relying on “monotheism” as a historical descriptor can actively distort ancient Jewish and Christian religion, because those people navigated a world full of gods, angels, demons, powers, rulers, heavenly beings, daimones, and national deities. The issue was often loyalty and rank, not metaphysical inventory.

So the most accurate formulation would be:

Ancient Jews and Christians were not “monotheists” in the modern popular sense that they believed only one divine being existed. They were exclusive devotees of Israel’s god within a many-powered cosmos. Their god was supreme, incomparable, creator, patron, judge, and rightful ruler, but the biblical texts do not cleanly erase the existence of other divine beings. Later theological monotheism retroactively reinterprets those texts through categories the texts themselves do not consistently use.

That is a stronger and more defensible version than “the Bible gradually becomes monotheistic.” It may be more accurate to say:

Later Jewish and Christian theology gradually learns to redescribe a populated divine cosmos as if it had always been monotheism.

Further Clarification

To be clear, I never said the Bible gradually becomes monotheistic. They didn’t. There are no characters in biblical texts who professed “monotheism” by the definition that Christians today mean by it. Nor would any 1st or 2nd century CE readers have understood those stories to convey the same notion of monotheism that Christians today RetCon back into those stories.

Response

You’re right to correct that.

The more precise formulation is:

The biblical texts do not gradually become monotheistic in the modern Christian sense. Later Jewish and Christian interpreters gradually learn to read them as if they were.

That is different.

The texts may move toward stronger exclusive-YHWH rhetoric, stronger anti-idol polemic, stronger claims of divine supremacy, and stronger claims that Israel’s god is creator, ruler, judge, and savior. But that is not the same as a character, narrator, or author professing the modern proposition:

There exists only one divine being, and all other alleged gods are ontologically unreal.

That proposition is not what the biblical texts consistently say, and according to McClellan’s framing, it is not actually present at all. His “one God rhetoric” argument is that passages later treated as monotheistic are better understood as rhetorical exclusivity, not metaphysical denial of all other gods.

Fredriksen makes the same kind of correction from another angle: ancient Jews and early Christians lived in a cosmos populated by many divine beings. She says that belief in only one god works well as a modern definition, but ancient “monotheism” accommodated many divinities; her blunt formulation is that God was “not the only god, not even in his own book.” In her 2022 Harvard Theological Review article, she argues that Philo, Herod, and Paul remained loyal to Israel’s god while also acknowledging the presence, agency, and power of foreign deities.

So yes: the cleaner statement is not “the Bible becomes monotheistic.” It is:

Biblical religion becomes increasingly exclusivist, supremacist, and loyalty-focused around Israel’s god, but not monotheistic in the modern Christian ontological sense. Later theology retrofits that modern category back onto texts whose own divine world remains populated.

And your point about 1st- and 2nd-century readers is important. A Second Temple Jew, Paul, or an early Jesus-follower could confess “one God” while still believing in angels, demons, principalities, powers, heavenly rulers, subordinate divine beings, and foreign gods. That confession was about covenantal allegiance, hierarchy, cultic legitimacy, and cosmic supremacy, not necessarily about the nonexistence of every other divine being.

So the RetCon is this:

Modern readers hear:

“There is one God.”

as:

“Only one divine being exists.”

But many ancient readers would have heard something closer to:

“Only Israel’s God is supreme, legitimate, sovereign, and worthy of worship.”

That is not a small distinction. It changes the entire history of biblical religion.

Comment About Fredriksen’s MythVision Interviews

Unfortunately, Paula Fredriksen’s interviews on MythVision Podcasts are not easily accessible by ChatGPT. Some of her more recent statements would have made a great contribution to this discussion.

However, it seems you and I have reached an agreement on the matters I have presented to you here, other than you offering that I could use wording that leaves more room for the historical debates which still remain active among qualified scholars.

Response

Yes. That is a fair summary of where we landed.

I would phrase the agreement like this:

Your core claim is historically defensible: the Jewish and Christian biblical texts do not contain “monotheism” in the modern Christian sense of “only one divine being exists.” What they contain is a shifting set of ancient claims about supremacy, hierarchy, loyalty, exclusivity of worship, anti-idol polemic, divine kingship, and cosmic administration within a still-populated divine world.

And yes, the caution I was adding is mostly about wording defensively, not about disagreeing with the substance. For example, instead of saying:

The Bible is not monotheistic.

I’d usually say:

The Bible is not monotheistic if by monotheism we mean the modern ontological claim that only one divine being exists.

That extra clause blocks the predictable objection from someone who defines “monotheism” more loosely as “exclusive worship of one supreme god.” Fredriksen’s own language points in that direction: she describes ancient “monotheism” as crowded, messy, and compatible with many divine beings, while noting that the modern definition “belief in only one god” does not map neatly onto ancient Jewish and Christian worlds. Her Yale piece puts it bluntly: Israel’s God was “not the only god, not even in his own book.”

I also found at least one indexed version of a recent-ish MythVision Fredriksen episode, titled “The Gods of Jews and Early Christians | Paula Fredriksen | MythVision.” Its description says she discusses whether Jews and early Christians thought in strictly monotheistic terms and emphasizes how flexible ancient categories of divinity were. That does seem directly relevant to the point you were making, though I agree that podcast/interview content is often much harder for me to access and verify than articles, books, or transcripts.

So the best distilled version is probably:

Ancient Jewish and Christian texts do not present monotheism in the later Christian doctrinal sense. They present Israel’s god as supreme, incomparable, uniquely worthy of loyalty, and ultimately victorious, but they do so in a cosmos still populated by other divine beings, powers, angels, demons, gods, rulers, and cosmic agents. Later Christian theology retroactively reads modern-style monotheism back into these texts, flattening an older and much messier religious imagination.

That keeps your point intact while leaving room for the active scholarly debate over what label, if any, should be used for ancient Jewish and Christian “one-god” language.

Condensed Final Thesis

The Bible is not monotheistic in the modern Christian ontological sense. Its texts do not clearly teach that only one divine being exists. Instead, they present Israel’s god as supreme, incomparable, uniquely legitimate, and worthy of exclusive worship within a cosmos still populated by many divine beings and powers. Later Jewish and Christian theology retroactively reinterpreted those ancient claims through a cleaner, later, more philosophical concept of monotheism.