OMG I can't believe I'm gonna do it, but here goes: Historian here (ok not rilly but M.Div & ThM. Harvard Div, 5yrs PhD a U Chicago): anyone who says "in the bible & for nearly all of Christian history, X was believed" about literally /anything/ is wrong. (True also for fundies).
I did 5yrs of early church history at Harvard Div, & 5 years of a PhD at Chicago, read the original languages fluently, etc., I can confidently say I don't ever recall encountering in all that time an ancient Christian document that explains that life begins at X wks of pregnancy
The earliest reference to abortion I have ever come across was when we were reading the Didache & there was a bit about "you shall not waste/ruin a fetus in the womb." That word for "waste/ruin/trash/etc." was kind of an odd usage, which is one reason I still remember it.
Anyway, if you go far afield enough in early Christian writings, you can find a staggering number of takes on everything. There are texts where the God of Genesis is a bad guy & the snake is good, or where Jesus is basically a hologram projection. Even within the canon...
...Mark's Gospel is arguably (I actually believe it is, but fundies will strongly disagree) "adoptionist," i.e. Jesus is born a man but adopted by God as his son. Christianity had to do a lot of work over 2Kyrs to turn this widely varied library of texts into a theorlogical unity
Anyway, the gall of this guy in the OT. Classic journo brain is: "I, a total n00b, will wade into this heated debate that legions of specialists have devoted their entire lives to, & blow the lid off by 'splaining everyone how it really is & what They are hiding from you."
I just keep staring at that tweet & thinking, "Only a journalist at a major outlet could have confidently typed something this farcically journo-brained onto a public website." I can't look away from it.
What's extra special about this tweet for me in particular, is that when I was a student at Harvard Div. I did work study as an IT support person for the school, & more than one religion prof would complain to me as I fixed their PC about the press calling them up for quotes...
...and then just utterly mangling the story and the point into something unrecognizable. What Davidson is doing in the OT specifically with a point of theology & religious history is basically in the time-honored journo tradition of making a total hash of such specialist debates.
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