Chasing Textual Criticism into BYU, then Open Phones

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00:41

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number today.

00:47

We'll be going to the calls fairly fairly soon. Go to the phones if anyone calls in.

00:53

That is 877 -753 -3341. I was, you know, one of the only reasons, quite honestly, that I stay in social media is because it helps the program.

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I mean, if you're not, I mean, you could watch Fox News all day long and you're not going to get too many meaningful theological leads on things that you can discuss.

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And so I had run across an article and I guess

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I could just follow some of these blogs and it would sort of do the same thing, but the social media sort of helps do some of that for me.

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I had run across an article that I wanted to read because it was relevant to my current doctoral work and it's on scribal habits in copies with extant exemplars.

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I read the really fascinating stuff. But let me explain what that means and you might realize that it may have a strange name, but it's relevant.

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The vast majority of manuscripts of, well, any work that we have, we don't know and we have to speculate about the nature of the manuscript from which the manuscript we possess was copied.

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We might have it somewhere, but in the vast majority of instances, we don't.

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That's the nature of antiquity. That's the nature of having ancient texts is that you don't have.

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Well, you know, did I move it? Yeah, I think I Yeah, they're down here.

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I have a bunch of editions of the

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Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin and that's because I had to check editing and changes over time when something was introduced or something was taken out, whatever it might be.

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If you've read The Potter's Freedom, you know that I tried to trace back some of Geisler's development in his thought, especially about foreknowingly predetermining and predeterminately foreknowing and strange language like that.

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And so I, even as I was writing the book, I went online and bought, which was sort of tough back then, online wasn't nearly what it is now.

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I went back and checked edits and I literally ended up with, you know, the first printing, first edition, second printing, second, you know, that whole type of thing.

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That's easy, well, relatively easy to do today, but that's all modern.

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And one of the biggest dangers in doing textual criticism and explaining textual criticism to others, that's where I get into trouble, is textual critics generally don't try to explain what they're doing to everybody else.

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They sort of let that go. But I think that's an important thing to do in these days when these issues are being brought up regularly in our witnessing encounters and things like that.

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So anyway, when you think about the vast majority of manuscripts, wouldn't it be wonderful if we, for example, had the manuscript that was the primary source of the readings of Codex Sinaiticus?

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Or were there multiple manuscripts? Obviously, Old Testament, New Testament, things like that.

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My own project with P45, one of the issues there is that it seems rather clear that the scribe had access to multiple manuscripts of differing character from which to draw in producing his own manuscript.

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And so the result of the fact that these, you know, there's been lots of wars and fires and bugs and plagues and everything else since the time of the writing of the

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New Testament, the manuscripts we have certainly more than any other work of antiquity, but still it is an interrupted transmission.

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So here's this article that comes up, Scribal Habits in Copies with Extant Exemplars.

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In other words, what if we do know what manuscript was being copied by hand?

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And if we possess both and we examine them together, what can we learn about scribal habits?

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Because, you know, in 99 % of the manuscripts, we're having to theorize what the nature of the exemplar, the thing being copied, actually was based upon our observation of scribal habits.

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Well, if you actually can find what they were copying, now you can go, hmm, what were the scribal habits?

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Not theorize, but actually go, all right, how'd they do it? How well did they do?

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And what's really interesting is there are a number of things coming up, and this is the nature, this is the proper nature, this is where, this is, this is a really interesting thing.

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This is where I have a real problem with traditionalistic individuals when it comes to the examination of the

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New Testament. Ah, just just go with the 1550s Stefanos or whatever it is. The appropriate way of approaching the growing amount of information available to us, and it is growing, even if we're not necessarily finding a bunch of new manuscripts every year, the information in the manuscripts that we've possessed for a long time is becoming more and more readily available to a wider and wider audience.

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It used to be just on microfilm, now, you know, digital copies are showing up all over the place.

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By the way, for those of you with Accordance, as I use regularly, the

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Tyndale House Greek New Testament, which we've talked about a couple times, is now available in Accordance. I had wondered when it would be, when it would be available, and it is available now, and yes,

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I have it in mind. Right now, I think it's on sale, so it was less than 20 bucks. I think

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I had a five dollar credit, so it's like 15 bucks. It's really, really, really cheap. Anyway, so what we're supposed to do is, as we have more and more information, then if that information pushes us this direction, for example, the 1881

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Westcott and Hort text was imbalanced. There was too much weight put upon Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and scholarly studies over time, not in a year, you know, real solid scholarship takes time.

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It takes time to do, it takes time for you know, popularities to be challenged and things like that.

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Over time, there's been a correction. Well, there's been more of a correction now. CBGM is challenging the very heart and soul of how

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New Testament textual criticism has been done in challenging the actual existence of text types, other than the

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Byzantine manuscript tradition. Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, whatever it might be.

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CBGM is saying, eh, not really. Exactly what's going to come of that yet, because where those are most important is in the

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Gospels, and our first Gospel that'll have CBGM consistently applied to it, at least initially applied to it, probably sometime over the next four or five years, is going to come out

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Gospel of Mark. So that's a good thing. It's an appropriate thing, and I just want to remind everyone that basically what we're, the more and more information we're getting, the more absurd the arguments of those who say the

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New Testament has been radically altered become. I mean, even radical skeptics like Bart Ehrman are like, eh, we're just tinkering around, you know?

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I mean, we pretty much know what it said. There might be a few, you know, he makes a lot of money off the few differences, but as far as the actual message, well, you know, it's sort of a, he's moved on to other things.

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So, here is interesting information, because, for example, one of the, one of the major studies from the end of last century was

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James Royce's work on singular readings in the New Testament papyri, P45 being one of them, and P75, P66, the major focus that he had.

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And one of the sort of standard rules of textual criticism is the shorter readings to be preferred because the theory was that scribes would expand rather than contract.

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They might lose something accidentally, but you had to find something in the text that would have caused that, an error of hearing, or more likely an error of sight that would cause homoeotelioton or something like that, that would cause you to skip over something and lose something accidentally.

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Otherwise, if you have two readings, the one's longer than the other, it's not a parallel passage where the parallel has that, that would be fairly obvious.

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There's nothing else. It's where the primary issue is one's longer, one's shorter. There's nothing that necessarily would have caused the scribe to have had an error of sight or hearing or memory or whatever else it might be.

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Then you prefer the shorter reading. Well, when

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Royce examined the papyri along those lines, he actually found the opposite, that the tendency was to accidentally lose stuff, not gain stuff.

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So he actually suggested that the better way would be the longer reading is to be preferred in light of the accidental skipping over of things.

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So this fellow by the name of Alan Taylor Farnes, Alan Taylor Farnes, I had never heard the name, this is going to take a weird twist, by the way, if you're falling asleep, sorry.

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But this is going to take a weird twist and it only took a weird twist in the past 45 minutes for me.

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Because I brought this article up and I was going to talk about the fact that Farnes basically looked at this and he says,

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I have found that the scribes in this study did their best at a difficult job of copying manuscripts.

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At no point did I find any example of intentional corruption for theological reasons.

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Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, did you catch that? At no point did

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I find any example of intentional corruption for theological reasons. The most blatant intentional changes found in this study were the

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Latin scribes copying 0319 and 0320 who consistently altered the wording from Claremontanus' Old Latin to update their text of the

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Vulgate. Additionally, some of the scribes in this study lost words on the whole as did

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Royce's, but other scribes broke even. None of the scribes in this study gained words on the whole, none, let me repeat that, none of the scribes in this study gained words on the whole.

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Therefore, with respect to the scribes in this study, we can reject the older canon, Lectio Brevior Patior.

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That is, choose the shorter reading. We are unable, however, to confirm

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Royce's new canon of Lectio Longior Patior, but rather I caution that length should not be used in any way to determine which reading is more original.

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Here I add my voice to Stephen Carlson's and Peter Malick's that length is not a valuable metric for determining which reading is more original.

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Well, that's, that right there is important. That right there is very interesting.

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And if you're, if you're sitting there and most of us have for example

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Metzger's commentary on the Greek New Testament in our Accordance or Logos or Bible Works or Olive Tree, I try to remember all of them because they're all great folks and I appreciate what they're doing.

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In your setup, I'm sure it's available in all of them, you will see that the committee that initially anyways put together the

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UBS text, the older Nestle -Aland text, there's a couple of places where the shorter reading prevails because the assumption was the shorter reading is more accurate.

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And these studies are saying, eh, not so fast. Which is why in any critical edition of the

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Greek New Testament, you have the textual reading and you have the footnotes with the other readings.

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Nothing's being hidden. When you produce a text that don't have those, then you are saying, you need to read it as I read it.

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But when you do a really critical text, hey, the reader can look down there and go, you know, there may have been people who prior to Nestle -Aland 28th, when they preached through Jude 5, said

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Jesus delivered a people from Egypt. And now that's what Nestle -Aland 28th says, because it was in the footnotes, had been for as far back as I've looked in the

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Nestle -Aland text. So this is important. This is important stuff in what is being said.

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Now, here's the next interesting thing. I know we're geeking out here. We'll get to the phone calls, but this is just sort of giving you an idea of something that just happened while I was prepping for the show that turned out to be really interesting.

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And you're going to see why here. He then looks at the scribes of 319, and there were two scribes, 319 -A and 319 -B.

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319 -A seemingly knew a little Greek. 319 -B didn't know

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Greek. Now, who do you think made the more accurate copy?

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The guy who didn't know Greek. Because all he's doing, it's similar to P75, where the scribe of P75 is copying letters.

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When you start copying words, and you don't really have a good knowledge of the language, you can mess the words up.

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Because you think you know how it's supposed to go, when that's not how it actually goes. And so there's another fascinating element.

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Scribes who were mechanically copying the text without knowing the original language that they're copying tended to be more accurate than people who actually had either a good or not so good knowledge of the text itself.

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Fascinating observation here documented in the way that it is being examined.

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And then they even speculate on the idea that the patron, the person paying to have the copy made, gave instructions to the scribes as to how they wanted the copy to be made.

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And that whole element is rarely a part of a discussion of the manuscripts, and of course we need to recognize there's a difference between the manuscript and the text, or the witness of the manuscript, because the manuscript's a material thing from a particular time period.

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But you may be copying from a manuscript that's 250 years earlier, so that the text within it may have been copied in such and such a century, but it represents the state of the text two and a half centuries earlier.

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Except as far as you make changes, accidental or otherwise. All of these really, really fascinating things.

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Farnes says that there are many avenues for further study. From this study, I would like to know more about the scribal habits of those copying a language with which they were unfamiliar.

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And if my hypothesis holds true, that non -native scribes will actually copy the text more accurately most of the time, but will make rare but egregious nonsensical errors.

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Because if you make an error, it's probably not going to make any sense, because you don't know the original language, and you don't know you just did something absolutely impossible.

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The person who knows the language is less likely to make the, I just made up a whole new word that has no meaning at all, type error.

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But the person who doesn't know can make all sorts of silly errors.

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All of this is fascinating. I was like, wow, this is really cool stuff, and I'll tell everybody about that, then we'll go to the calls.

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And then I went, hmm, Alan Taylor Farnes.

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And I scrolled down to the bottom of the thing, and well, actually,

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I think I went up somewhere in this.

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I noticed something that Alan Taylor Farnes teaches.

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Oh, there it is. Adjunct Instructor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University.

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BYU? BYU. BYU? Yeah.

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And I went, oh, this really makes everything really interesting now.

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Because I've always wondered, you know, one of the things I've said for decades, Mormons have never produced a meaningful exegetical commentary on Romans.

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They can't. And so I started searching on his name, and I came up with, one of the first things that popped up was an interview that he did with John W.

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Welch on the Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple. This is from 2011.

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Now, I recognize the name Welch from BYU and from the Old Farms. And he had written a book called

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The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple, London, Ashgate, 2009. And it is a whole discussion of the

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Sermon on the Mount as found in 3rd Nephi chapter 11. Now, you might go, what does the temple have to do with this?

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Well, now we're going from New Testament textual criticism. We're hanging a hard left into the

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Book of Mormon. Okay? And asking ourselves the question, what's it like to be a credentialed scholar in New Testament textual criticism and recognize that you're dealing with the

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Book of Mormon, which cannot even begin to stand up to the slightest level of scrutiny that you're using for the

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New Testament. How do you, there's cognitive dissonance here.

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And so I looked up, I brought up, and I don't even remember the last time I fired this program up on this computer, actually, but I've got a lot of LDS stuff.

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So in 3rd Nephi 11, here's the church's commentary.

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It says, So 3rd

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Nephi 11 is the beginning of Jesus. Jesus appears to the Nephites after his crucifixion in Jerusalem.

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He comes to the new world, and this happens, starts in 3rd Nephi chapter 11. And I've said for many years, if you don't want to spend the type of time to read the entirety of the

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Book of Mormon, at least read 3rd Nephi. Because that's where Jesus appears, and then you can contrast the

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Jesus of the Book of Mormon with the true Jesus. Because right prior to 3rd

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Nephi 11, you have all the, you know, wicked people being destroyed and stuff before Jesus shows up.

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So the very people that he's supposed to be preaching the gospel for get destroyed before Jesus shows up. Obviously shows some misunderstanding on the part of Joseph Smith as to what's going on.

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Then you have the further introduction in 3rd Nephi 11. This is in the modern world, somewhere in Mesoamerica, we're told, who knows.

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Now, don't have time right now, but the Book of Mormon is an absolute study in stunning ahistorical anachronism.

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Absolutely stunning ahistorical anachronism. I mean, it makes the medieval stuff that was being written that was filled with anachronism look like child's play.

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There's no way that anyone, well, of course, there's absolutely no evidence of anyone, anywhere in the

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Americas, that had been instructed in Trinitarian theology at the time of Christ, okay?

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No, no glyphs on any walls or zip, zero, nada.

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There's nothing there. Which is why Book of Mormon archaeology has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until now.

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It's, you know, probably just a few acres or something like that. We'll never find it, right? Okay, I know. So, it's so painfully obvious that the writer knew nothing about the true inhabitants of Mesoamerica.

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This is pure fiction. Absolutely pure fiction. But the whole point is that Farnes, in talking with Welch, mentions 3rd

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Nephi 11 .1, So, that's why they're calling this the

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Sermon on the Mount and the Temple, is because here it says that they were gathered around some temple in the land

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Bountiful, and that that's what is going on here. That's what the issue is.

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Now, aside from the fact that we never found the land of Bountiful, we never found any temples that would have had anything to do with Christianity, Judaism, anything like this at all.

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I was just left stunned, because here you got a guy who, on the one hand, holds to a religious system that says many plain and precious truths have been removed from the

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Bible, and he accepts the Bible to be the

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Word of God as far as it is translated correctly. Eighth Article of Faith, the Mormon Church. And yet, when he comes to the result of his own study, scribes did a great job.

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Really, really did a super job, and whenever they made a mistake, it seems to have been accidental, and yeah, the common idea of the corruption of the text and the changing of the text, yeah, the texts don't really substantiate that.

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And yet, you can turn around and seriously engage the text of the

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Book of Mormon as if it's a divine revelation and not going, hey, you know, have you noticed that everything here just really depends on someone already having a

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King James version of the Bible? I mean, the textual anachronisms that you can document in the text of the

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Book of Mormon based on the 1769 Blaney revision, not even the 1611, the 1769

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Blaney revision, of the King James version of the Bible, this is all well known. I can guarantee you it is known to to Farns.

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And yet, here you have a Mormon doing New Testament textual critical studies that seem to be enlightening and valuable, but not seeing that that very same application would mean,

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I can't really believe that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, which also explains why we've seen such a massive swing to the left in Mormon leadership over the past number of decades, is that more and more of these people as, you know,

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BYU and probably the leadership in Salt Lake decided a long time ago, we're gonna send our guys out to get

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PhDs in these other fields, not knowing that it was like putting an

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IV into the secluded veins of Utah, and the poison is resulting in the hollowing out of the very core of Mormonism.

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And the results, who knows? I have no earthly idea. I have no earthly idea what it's going to be.

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So that was what I was doing prior to the program, and it was fascinating.

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You know, I was just going to talk about, you know, if you know what a manuscript was copied from, this is brilliant idea.

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You should see what the scribes did with that, and then assume that in most instances, that's going to be applicable to other things, and that would have, you know, major implications, and how you work through textual variants.

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And then I just sort of go, who is this Farnes guy? And you start looking around like, oh, oh, this is interesting.

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Lots of stuff to look at out there. So there you go. Thank you for putting up with me patiently for that.

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Now, you may be asking two things. We're going to go to the calls. I see them there. Don't worry. A, why are we early today?

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We are early today because I am going to fire up the feed, and we may kill the feed.

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This may destroy the feed because we're advertising for it. So we're used to having a little bit more in the way of strain upon our servers than I think

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Chris is, but Chris Irons in Iron Sharpens Iron is having a debate today. And it's

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Yeah, it's going to be an interesting one. Look him up. I'm not going to get into it right now.

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Maybe we'll comment on it after it happens. But let's just say Joel McDermott versus Doug Wilson.

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Do we have any Orville Redenbacher popcorn on here? Because that would be perfect.

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Yeah, I may have to run and get some popcorn.

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Some nice, buttery, movie -style popcorn. Theater butter. Oh, man. There's something in there that's absolutely addictive.

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We all know it. But yeah, that's coming up, and we would have been competing with it if we went on our normal time.

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And I want to listen. I'm not going to listen to the replay. I want to hear it live. Look for Iron Sharpens Iron today, and it's going to be interesting.

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And one last thing before I go to the calls, please remember we are heading down to South Africa, Zambia.

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I'm going to be teaching at Votie Balcombe School down there in Zambia, doing work in South Africa.

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I'm going to be back at Antioch there in Johannesburg. I've been there many, many times before.

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Sort of an unofficial, outside -the -country member of Antioch Bible Church.

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So we're going to be doing that. And then trying, I can't get response from the folks in Belfast.

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I'm going to have to try somebody else, I guess, because I've sent the email a number of times. I'm not getting a reply. Someone said they talked to you, but they're not responding to my emails.

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So well, maybe try somebody else. But stuff to do on the way over. The point is it's a long trip, and it's an expensive trip.

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And so just to remind folks, we need your support. If you go to the donation link at aomin .org, you'll see the travel category there.

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And if you'd like to help us to get there, we very, very, very, very much appreciate that.

32:33

And it sounds pretty good. That's good. I'm glad it hasn't maybe having it up higher there helped.

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We'll find out as we go to our calls and begin with Michael.

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Hi, Michael. Hey, Rebecca White. How are you doing? Doing good. So I just wanted to let you know,

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I really appreciate your ministry. It's meant a lot to me. I actually referenced my alma mater every time we do a

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Radio Freak Amoeba. Oh, Bruton Parker? Bruton Parker. Yes, sir. And are they still chugging along down there?

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Yeah, yeah, they are. Unfortunately, the Tanner's signatures on my degree.

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Oh, well, you know, hey, you need to keep that. Frame it for other reasons.

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And somehow out of that, I still came out Calvinist. But so my question,

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I had someone bring this up to me in a Bible study, and I actually told which one, it was John 639, not 644, but my question was in John 639, you know, it says that, you know, although it probably gets me,

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I still lose none of them. And then in John 189, as Jesus is betraying him, and Jesus tells the soldiers, don't take away my disciples,

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John identifies that that is a fulfillment of what Jesus said in John 6.

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And I was just wondering, how would I have to respond to that, or is it actually a fulfillment or partial fulfillment of John 6?

34:12

Okay. Your connection is rather poor.

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It's sort of hard to hear. Maybe you're, are you driving or something? Yeah. Oh boy, that sounds a lot better.

34:27

Whatever you just did. It sounds like you're on Mars before, and now you're at least in the

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United States. So that's a lot better. So I was struggling a little bit.

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But it sounds like what you're saying is, well, in John 18,

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I told you that I am he, if you seek me, let these go their way, to fulfill the word which he spoke of those whom you have given me,

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I lost not one. And so I'm assuming that the idea is, well, so that limits the fulfillment of John 6.

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The problem is, that's probably referring back to John chapter 17, verse 12, and the high priestly prayer, and those specifically in 1712, while I was with them,

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I was keeping them in your name which you have given me, and I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition, so the scripture would be fulfilled.

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And so we know in the Lord's Prayer, and that literally is the

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Lord's Prayer of John 17, that the first section is specifically about the apostles, and then there is the transitionary statement in verse 20,

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I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, even as you,

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Father, and me, so on and so forth. And so there you have the continued ministry of the disciples, and those who are going to believe in light of their preaching, and the statement that we're all to be one, and the application.

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So the initial connection is to John 17, 12, not

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John 6. But yeah, there are those, obviously, about the only way around John chapter 6 is to try to limit the scope of what

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Jesus is speaking, either, you know, some hyper -dispensationalists will do it, that this is only in regards to that time period, and now we're in the period of the church, and so that stuff's not relevant, or others will say, you know, this is only about the disciples.

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They won't do that in John 6, or, I'm sorry, John 3, or John 5, or any place else where faith is called for anything else, that you can apply to everyone at all time.

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But in John 6, because you have the sovereignty of God, or in John 10, because you have the sovereignty of God, then that's just about the disciples.

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Evidently, it's okay for the disciples not to have had free will, but the rest of us need to have it in some way, shape, or form.

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But the problem is, John 6, 39, this is the will of the one who sent me, in order that every, of all that he has given me,

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I lose none of it, but raise it up on the last day. This is connected to that eschatological resurrection of everyone who believes in him.

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And this actually goes back to John chapter 5 as well, where the dead will hear the voice of the

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Son of God, and there's really two resurrections in John 5.

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There's one where Jesus says, the day is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear.

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And that's the spiritual life. And then later, the eschatological, those who are in the tombs, will hear and be raised to judgment, and the

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Son of Man's going to judge them, because the judgment's been given to him, and so on and so forth. So, the problem is, if you try to limit

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John 6 to just the apostles, the whole idea of resurrection, judgment, verse 40, for this is the will of my

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Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in him will have eternal life, that beholding and seeing is the same group that you had in verses 37 to 39.

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So, to try to limit that ends up producing a universal call to faith, which the

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Church has always recognized was focused upon everybody until that final hour.

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And once you limit that, then you've lost that very application. It makes the text self -contradictory.

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So, the two answers would be John 6 doesn't allow that limitation, and the actual reference in John 18 was to what had just been prayed prior to the betrayal in John 17 in the

39:14

High Priestly Prayer. Awesome. I appreciate it, Dr. White. Okay.

39:20

Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. God bless. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.

39:27

Let's talk to Jack. Hi, Jack. Hello, Dr. How you doing?

39:35

Go ahead. Thanks for taking the call, and I know it's repetition, but thank you very much for your ministry.

39:42

It's much appreciated. I'm an obvious Bible student, and so there's a lot of things that I have to catch up on,

39:50

I'm sure, but Bart Ehrman has caught up with me, and so there's some questions that I have, but one in particular, and that's regarding the nativity narratives, and specifically regarding the historical, so -called historical discrepancies regarding the census times in Herod and his son, and the general census being given by Augustus when supposedly there wasn't one given, but there's a whole series of things historically that he says just doesn't jive, and there's maybe about a 10 -year span that he's playing with, but can you help me with that?

40:36

Well, we're in the process of responding to the

40:43

Bart Ehrman -Mike Lycona debate here on the program. We've didn't do it today because we've done it pretty much every program for four or five programs in a row, and I wanted to cover some other stuff and do some more open phones, but one of the three sections or presentations that he makes, the three are from the birth of Christ, and from the ministry of Christ, and then from the death of Christ.

41:11

So, for example, on the last program, or program before last, we spent a fair amount of time looking at one of the latter examples, his assertion that the date of Jesus' crucifixion is inaccurate between the

41:28

Synoptic Gospels and John. It was fascinating that I actually had Christian apologetics ministries trying to rebut that.

41:36

It's great when they're defending the atheist. But anyway, so part of that response to Ehrman will be playing his discussion of Quirinius and census and all the rest of that stuff, but that's extremely in -depth.

41:57

It takes a tremendous amount of time to go through balancing Josephus, who is the primary and almost only source that creates the dating conflict, because the idea is you look to Josephus, Josephus says

42:13

Quirinius, governor, such and such a point, or at least you reason back from statements in Josephus, and that results in conflicts with Luke, and you automatically take

42:23

Josephus against Luke for some reason, and that's where a lot of the conflicts come from.

42:29

So we will get to that, but there's absolutely no easy way of dealing with the birth narrative issues, certainly not in a phone call length, but we will be covering that as we deal with the debate with Bart Ehrman.

42:45

It'll just be coming up. Till then, if you want to do some reading prior to us getting to that, one of the best resources that I know of is over at triablogue .com,

43:05

maybe. Anyway, Jason Engwer, E -N -G -W -E -R, has literally for years, well probably coming up on decades now, or at least decade and a half, been writing articles dealing very in -depth with the details on that particular subject.

43:29

Every holiday season, he will repost articles with what he's written in the past on the

43:39

Christmas season, the Annunciation, birth narratives, issues like that. And then around this time of year, it's

43:47

Easter, Resurrection issues, and if you go to the more recent of those articles, you'll frequently find a place where he'll have link after link after link after link to the previous stuff that he's done.

44:01

And I think if you probably went to that back in December of last year, you'd find his reposting of all the

44:11

Nativity materials, and it would probably take a number of hours just to read through everything that you'd find there chasing those links.

44:22

So that would be my suggestion until we get around to doing that. And even as we get around to doing that, that's probably still going to be something that I'll recommend to people at that time, because it would be hours and hours and hours of reading to work through those issues.

44:41

Well, I really appreciate it. Bart Ehrman's comments can be somewhat disturbing if you just begin these issues, but much more than maybe, you know, it might be anticipated that he catches me off guard, it seems a lot of the time.

44:59

To be honest with you, there's nothing new. There's almost nothing new in Ehrman. He represents pretty much the standard liberal perspective that has, you know, existed in academia for hundreds of years, has been responded to in conservative academia for hundreds of years, but he has popularized.

45:26

He's more of a preacher of it. Many of those in the past had their conclusions, but they were sort of weird guys that never went out in the public.

45:37

He's made his fortune from popularizing what we've known for a long, long time.

45:43

I mean, there is none of this material is new to anyone who was paying attention anyways in seminary, at least back when

45:52

I went to seminary. Things have changed a bit since then, but it's not that it's new or unusual.

46:01

It's just that he's making use of the platforms to make it better known.

46:08

Okay, well, I really appreciate it, and it's beautiful in Colorado today. I hope it's nice in Arizona.

46:15

Thanks a lot for taking the call. It is. Thank you very much. I look forward to getting back up there in July and climbing the mountains.

46:22

There you go. Thank you very much. All right. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.

46:31

Let's... Just a second. I need to get ready to switch my accent so that I can do translational work to talk to our next caller.

46:44

Let's talk to Kofi up in... Well, it says

46:49

Medford, Oregon, but it probably... I think it just spell -checked and was mistaken about Milwaukee.

46:56

So, Kofi, how are you? Doing okay, doc. Doing okay. Have you lost your

47:06

British accent yet? No, I'm holding on to it as best I can.

47:11

Very good. Go ahead.

47:19

Yeah, so I'm in the middle of learning Greek at the moment, about halfway through our

47:26

Greek course with the guy who's teaching me here in Oregon. It's going really well. Okay, but I've got to ask you a question.

47:32

Why would you bother learning Greek now that you have the Preacher's Bible? Because I want you to know,

47:40

I specifically... You can confirm with the head of Grace to You. I specifically contacted him, making sure you were going to get one of those.

47:52

Oh! So that was you! Not necessarily, but we'll just sort of...

47:59

I wanted to make sure... I just felt badly that, you know, you didn't get to go this year and you were just sitting there up in rainy

48:07

Oregon and, you know, just sort of watching everything online.

48:13

So it's not quite so rainy in southern Oregon like it is up north. Yeah, that's true. There are some dry parts.

48:20

But anyway, so why would you learn Greek when you have the Preacher's Bible? I mean, isn't it the standard now?

48:28

Well, it's still in English translation. You do realize that, you know,

48:34

I'm a little concerned that 100 years from now there will be a Preacher's Bible only movement. I mean, when you think about King James arguments, you know, well,

48:43

God has blessed this and look at all the great sermons that were delivered from this. I'm a little concerned that my grandchildren might be dealing with the

48:52

Preacher's Bible only movement. The PBO movement. Yes, the Preacher's Bible only movement.

48:58

Yeah. So anyway, some people have no idea what we're talking about. We're talking about the... was it

49:03

Steadfast Bibles? Is that the name? Yeah, Steadfast Bibles. Steadfast Bibles. John MacArthur designed a...

49:10

Look, the Lachlan Foundation just needs to sign the copyright for the

49:16

NASB over to Grace To You. They just need to just do it. Just let them have it. Let them do their thing with it.

49:24

But the Steadfast Bibles produced a, what is it, five and a quarter pound

49:29

New American Standard, like 1700 pages guaranteed to stop bullets and it's one of those big

49:38

Bibles just hangs over your hand and lays flat on the pulpit and is guaranteed to give you the most awesome exegetical insights ever provided.

49:52

Well, it sure hopes so. Yep. Yep. Yep. So anyway, so I was just joking a little bit that you, you know, why would you learn

50:01

Greek if you already have the the NASB, but I shouldn't do that because some people are probably going, yeah, that's a good question.

50:09

Why would you do that? So anyway, so you're learning Greek. Congratulations. It's not easily done.

50:15

No, it's a challenge, but I'm really enjoying it and the guy who is my instructor,

50:21

Daniel, does a really great job and I'm learning an absolute ton. And all things being well, we should finish what would be an equivalent to a first year

50:30

Greek in the summer. And so I'm kind of thinking about, this is just a crazy idea I've had, taking a

50:35

New Testament book and kind of just working through it, trying to, again, not do like a amazing translational job, but just to kind of sharpen my skills in that area.

50:47

And I was kind of just wondering what book you would recommend as a, for someone who's a first year Greek student trying to better understand the language and kind of sharpen their skills in terms of translating and looking at grammar and syntax, what

51:03

New Testament book you would go for first for a project like this? Well, there are second year sources, of course, and normally

51:13

Wallace's, one of the two, either the longer one, the really, really long one, or the shorter version that's been prepared is what you do in second year when you're really starting to dig into syntax and things like that.

51:25

The assumption on most materials is that you have completed 1

51:30

John and the translation of it in first year. I'm not sure if that's what you're all going to be doing, but obviously 1

51:39

John is the simplest as far as syntax, grammar, vocabulary in the

51:47

New Testament, and that's why it's almost always the first year text that's translated.

51:53

Second year tends to be books like Philippians that at least allows you to start dealing with Paul's particularities.

52:07

And interestingly enough, we didn't do that. We ended up doing, was it first Peter?

52:14

First, second Peter. I think it's first Peter. It was participial Peter. I just remember that. There were lots of participles, but you know, what you'd want to avoid until you're at least through the equivalent of second year would be anything like Luke, Acts, or Hebrews, because you'll give up on Greek.

52:36

If you try those, you'll just go, what was I learning? This isn't doing me any good. I don't understand anything that's being said here, and you'll just go, forget it, and go off to other things.

52:49

Probably like a Philippians level, that's probably like a four on the scale,

52:56

I would say, as far as complexity and difficulty goes. Once you get into Luke, Acts, Hebrews, you're up at nine and ten.

53:06

You want to go sort of through the range there, but you know, you have, back in my day,

53:15

I was doing that without computers, and so there was a excellent resource called

53:22

Sekikubo. It was a reader's Greek lexicon that would allow you to, you know, had any word that had, it assumed you had the 50 word vocabulary, all words that were used 50 or more times.

53:35

And so any words that were used less than 50 times, it would provide you in canonical order a brief meaning, so that you could just simply glance at it.

53:45

You've run into a word you've not seen before as far as its root goes. You can glance over, it could give you the meanings.

53:51

You can parse it and move on from there, and you can actually try to start getting some serious reading under your belt.

54:00

You know, if you're taking an hour to do one verse, it can be rather daunting to take on any type of serious reading, but I've always recommended, even for first -year students, that they carry their

54:14

Greek text with them. And now, of course, you can do it a little less obviously by having it on your phone or iPad or whatever you're using.

54:22

And try to follow along when the scriptures are read frequently. You know, most pastors will read a section of scripture so that you can get a context and things like that.

54:31

And try to read along, try to follow along, even if at first it's daunting.

54:37

Eventually, as your vocabulary grows, even if you get lost, you pretty much catch up eventually.

54:42

Oh, I know that word, and you can catch up. And it's exposure over time that's really very, very important along those lines.

54:51

So probably like a Philippians -type thing would be next. And probably the shorter version of Wallace's syntax would be a good thing to get hold of at that point.

55:05

I mean, it's nice to have the big one. They're all available electronically, but the shorter one is a little less daunting as far as the number of examples that you have to work through and things like that.

55:15

Yeah, sounds good. So, all right. Well, press on, brother. It's well worth going for.

55:23

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Okay. Thank you. God bless. Bye -bye. Bye -bye.

55:29

I am getting the note that I need to talk to Martin over in England.

55:36

England, indeed. Yes. We're getting all the British folks. We are. As your Paul Revere once warned, the

55:42

British are coming. Yes. Yeah, and you know how that turned out for you all.

55:48

Well, yeah, I know. Just two things, really.

55:54

One was an observation, and the second was a question. In the Zakir Hussein debate in Birmingham, I know that Zakir made a big point about Jesus' clothes, and they wouldn't have...

56:07

His garment being bartered for, or that they cast lots for his clothing, and he said that after the beating it would have been ripped.

56:16

But surely that Matthew 27, 31 and Mark 15, 20 both say that he was stripped, and then his clothes were given back to him, don't they?

56:28

Yeah. Okay. No, just an observation. I didn't get to ask him at the time. But my main point was, well, my question was, after in the car on the way back, you said you needed to address the pronoun issue, because he made a big deal about the pronouns, and Joseph Arimathea saying that it was

56:45

Joseph Arimathea who was hung upon the cross, and you kept pointing out the he, he, he, being

56:50

Joseph Arimathea. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. And in the car you said, oh,

56:55

I must address the pronoun issue. Yeah, you know, I'd have to look that up, to be honest with you.

57:02

I don't know that I did. Yeah, it was an argument that I just,

57:13

I'll be honest with you, I don't know that, I've never heard any serious scholar make it. It's one of those kinds of, obviously, that's not what

57:23

John intended, so you really have to be stretching things. But I don't, I'd have to look up what the specific argument was, but I do recall that coming up, and I just, all

57:34

I had time, because I think it was in the Q &A stuff, and by then you have, you know, what, 30 seconds to respond to what somebody else says, and I don't remember this, but it's,

57:44

I think it was one of those situations where the other guy has a minute, you have 30 seconds.

57:50

I'm not sure if that's how he did it. I can't remember exactly which part of the debate it came up in. Yeah. But I remember him saying that, you know, when

57:56

Joseph of Arimathea took the question, he did this, and he, and he was obviously connecting that to Joseph of Arimathea, but Yeah.

58:04

Making a Yeah, I would I have a misreading. I would have to go back and, well, hey, since you've made the phone call, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to go to the recording and find the timestamp for me, and that way

58:23

I can actually look at it real quick and go, ah, okay, there's the reference I can go to, because I don't know what reference he was using off the top of my head right now, so I can't go to it.

58:32

No, I can't remember either. And it's just in the car, as you said, you might need to address that, and Well, yeah,

58:39

I do recall that now. There were a number of things that, you know, they were just arguments that just don't have any scholarly value, but unfortunately, very often amongst our

58:51

Muslim friends, those are the arguments that carry the most weight, because they're not really concerned about consistency.

58:57

If we turned around, used, tried to use the same kinds of arguments since the Quran, they might be able to see it, but there you go.

59:05

Okay, so that's your job, Martin, is to fire off to Rich the timestamp, and then that way

59:14

I can try to address it. Okay, and just let you know, we've been praying for Summer after her car accident.

59:20

Yes, she got beat up a good bit, but you know, as long as everybody's still alive,

59:26

I've seen car wrecks that didn't look that bad that were fatal.

59:32

Oh, yeah. And I understand, I've never been in one, but when those car seats, those airbags go off, it's just like getting hit with a fist, except it's two feet wide.

59:45

It's pretty rough. Sound good. Yeah. All right, Martin, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks, James. Bye -bye. All right, we continue on.

59:53

We'll go to David. Hi, David. Hi, can you hear me?

59:59

Yes. First, let me just say that I love your show. Thanks. And you've been a real blessing to me.

01:00:06

And I also got one of those Preacher's Bibles from the Shepherd Conference. I was offered one.

01:00:13

I'll be perfectly honest, the folks at Grace to You are very, very kind. I was offered one, and I declined it, only because I have an

01:00:24

Allen NASB, which, if you know Uber Bibles, is just one of the best.

01:00:29

It's beautiful. But I just almost never use a paper Bible. And that's what I said. I said, you know, my

01:00:35

Allen sits in a Bible cover with this beautiful leather -bound

01:00:42

NA27. They're both blue leather. They're both beautiful. I never use them.

01:00:48

I have a 12 .9 -inch iPad with fonts,

01:00:54

Greek fonts, big enough to read from across the room. So that's what I use. So I love them.

01:01:00

They feel great. I mean, I've got my Tyndale House Greek New Testament here. And yeah, it feels sort of neat, leatherette and all the rest of that stuff.

01:01:08

But it's just, you know, anyway, go ahead. Yeah, so I'm visually impaired.

01:01:16

And at my church, we're doing a class to learn basic exegesis. And I can't really follow the class, can't really follow the book, so a lot of my learning is kind of hands -on.

01:01:28

And I just wanted to know, number one, do you know any good audio exegetical training resources, whether that's audiobooks,

01:01:35

YouTube, anything like that? And number two, are none of your books on audio at all?

01:01:41

Some are. Well, OK, no, I'll take that back. Some are in Kindle.

01:01:48

But if you mean like Audible or something like that, no, I'm a nobody. So they only put money -making stuff into Audible, you know, because it takes money to pay somebody to read it and all the rest of that stuff.

01:02:02

And so no, I really doubt anything I ever read or ever write will end up in Audible.

01:02:09

However, I convert personally almost everything

01:02:15

I get on Kindle into audio form. And it's not too difficult to do if you have the older style

01:02:27

Kindle keyboard that can read to you. As long as it can read to you and it has an earphone jack, then you just plug that baby into the computer.

01:02:39

And there's all sorts of free programs for recording audio on your computer.

01:02:45

And you start it off, run it overnight. Most books are between 6 and 12 hours in length.

01:02:53

And yeah, it's computer voice, but it's not a bad computer voice. And yeah, sometimes it makes really silly errors, but you get used to it over time.

01:03:04

I certainly have over the years. I've lost track of how many books I've done that way. So if it's available in that format or someone can put it into that format where it can be read by the

01:03:19

Kindle, there's a number of programs. All of mine, for some reason, my Macs have stopped working.

01:03:26

It's something that's extremely frustrating to me. There are all sorts of programs that will convert

01:03:33

PDF, HTML, Word documents, whatever it is, into the spoken word.

01:03:41

And so I would think that would be something that would be very useful to you.

01:03:48

It would be not Audio Notetaker. Text Speech Pro, for example, is one where you can dump an entire book into that program.

01:04:02

And out comes a, again, computer voice. But they've certainly gotten a lot better over the years reading of the text.

01:04:11

And some people can't handle that because they're not focused on hearing.

01:04:19

They're focused more on seeing. But obviously, that is just something you have to deal with as an individual.

01:04:26

I've got to deal with it already with the iPhone and everything. I use the text -to -speech on my iPhone. But as far as books that have already been done by Audible or stuff like that,

01:04:39

I'm sorry, I don't have any knowledge of that type of thing. I would imagine the best people to ask about that would be librarians at some of the larger, you know, like at the

01:04:53

Master's College. I would imagine librarians at a place like that would be a goldmine of information.

01:05:01

I was just out at the conference and I didn't even think to talk to them. And since you were there,

01:05:07

I'm sure the folks at GTY would put you in contact with them. So that's sort of what they do.

01:05:14

And so I'm sure they'd be able to help you out with that. Right. Okay. Well, I appreciate that.

01:05:19

All right. Thanks, David. Thank you. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. All right.

01:05:25

Two more calls here. Let's talk to... All right.

01:05:33

Christian Anarchist. Hello there. Hello. Can you hear me?

01:05:38

I can. All right. Just making sure that I'm driving down the road. Good to finally talk to you,

01:05:44

Dr. White. So I got a question concerning Mark chapter 16, verses 9 through 20.

01:05:52

I've seen this before. I don't know if you've ever heard of a book from a guy named Nicholas T. Lunt on the issue of Mark 16.

01:06:02

Is that a fairly new book? I'm trying to remember. Sometime within the last four to five years, it had come out,

01:06:11

I believe. I saw it mentioned in a documentary before Apologetics Ministries, and it was a new scholar that's coming up and is trying to make a case that we should...

01:06:23

Apparently, there's new evidence coming out that we should consider verses 9 through 20 to be authentic verses.

01:06:31

And I didn't know if you had read the work or what is your thoughts on it? I don't know if there's anybody else you may have encountered besides King James Only Advocates that still advocate.

01:06:43

Pretty much all your ecclesiastical texts, Texas Receptus, Byzantine folks will defend the longer ending of Mark.

01:06:54

I did see something recently. It was a fairly recent book, but no,

01:07:00

I haven't read it. I don't consider this the most important issue on the planet, to be honest with you.

01:07:06

But I don't think there's any, quote unquote, new information on the subject.

01:07:12

It's not like a new papyri has been discovered of the Gospel of Mark that contains

01:07:18

Mark 16, 9 through 20 or something that would be highly relevant like that. The arguments have been going on for a long time, and basically the issue is, well, there are some back and forth arguments about some of the earliest manuscripts that have markings around this and what those markings specifically meant, and one side will take one view and one side will take the other view.

01:07:46

Nothing that impacts my primary reason for not considering them original, which is the existence of the other endings to Mark.

01:07:59

A medium ending, no ending at all, a mixture of those, there wouldn't be any reason for those other endings if the longer ending had always been there.

01:08:13

When people are coming up with other endings because everybody senses, hey, it can't stop at verse 8, you can't stop with the women in fear, even though the resurrection has been prophesied and, in fact, has already taken place in chapter 16, you've got to have the rest of the story like Matthew and Luke has, the idea being, well,

01:08:40

I won't go into all of it, but that's the idea that people have. From my perspective, if Mark 16, 9 through 20, despite all of its weird vocabulary and quite honestly, in some places, very strange theology, if that had been original,

01:08:57

I've never heard a meaningful explanation outside of, well, maybe somebody's manuscript, the last thing fell off, and so that's all they had, and so they had to come up with something else.

01:09:09

And the problem with that is that's assuming that Mark would have existed as a sort of an isolated document.

01:09:18

There wouldn't have been any of their copies available for people or people would have recognized, oh, hey, the last page is missing.

01:09:25

The idea that someone has to come up with these other endings comes from this idea that, well, that's just not satisfying to me.

01:09:34

And if 9 through 20 were so well known and so widely accepted and hence original,

01:09:40

I just don't see where these other endings came from. I've not heard of anything that has any discoveries or anything like that that bears on that.

01:09:49

So I would assume that anything that's been written recently has just been sort of a rehashing of stuff that has been pretty well known for a long, long time.

01:10:00

I mean, you can make, you know, if you want to bring in the Latin manuscripts and stuff, it's by far the majority reading, there's no question about that, but that doesn't, in my mind, really address the real issue.

01:10:12

And that is, why is it missing in incredibly important witnesses? And then why do you have these other endings?

01:10:19

And I think that still remains pretty convincing to the vast majority of New Testament scholarship, but there will always be folks are going to argue the other side.

01:10:29

That's the nature of things. All right. Thank you for so much for that,

01:10:36

Dr. White. Okay. Thanks for your phone call. All right, bye -bye. Last phone call of the day.

01:10:41

Wow. We'll go up to, since we were talking about BYU, we'll talk with Anthony.

01:10:47

Hi, Anthony. Hi there. Hi. Yeah, I'm calling from David O.

01:10:53

McKay building on BYU campus. I'm actually a, not

01:11:00

LDS. I go to Jason Wallace's church. Oh, yeah, sure. I was there whenever you were, with my wife, we were there.

01:11:10

Last time you were out in February. Yeah. I was calling kind of to confirm some of your suspicions and also to ask you questions.

01:11:24

So, well, my impression, so I had many ideas when I was going to come into BYU about what to expect as far as Mormons go.

01:11:36

But yeah, since coming here, I'm really starting to change my mind.

01:11:43

I feel like the new religion is leftism at BYU. Really? Yeah, I've gotten in trouble in some of my classes for just voicing conservative

01:11:57

Christian opinions on same -sex marriage or whatever. In Utah. Yeah, that's great.

01:12:02

At BYU of all places. And I've had classmates tell me that they hate

01:12:09

Brigham Young and they've implied that they don't believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet. They've said

01:12:15

Mormon theology is weird and all that kind of stuff. And I'm waiting to meet that conservative

01:12:21

Orthodox Mormon. Really? You're waiting to? I'm waiting. Wow.

01:12:26

I haven't had any missionaries even come to my door. Yeah, it's a very bizarre thing, because I feel like I'm the most conservative

01:12:38

Christian person here, in many ways. Wow. And I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but it's still, you just go, this is the next generation of Mormons, and I just can't see how it's going to hold together.

01:12:58

I mean, because you still have these super conservative, you know, you go down to Manti and you're still going to find the folks that really believe, and elsewhere too.

01:13:10

I mean, obviously, I'm not saying that they're only down at Manti, but you get that type of cultural

01:13:16

Mormonism down there. And hearing you saying this,

01:13:22

I mean, I guess I shouldn't be overly surprised because I did a debate with a professor from, where was he from?

01:13:33

It wasn't U of U. It was someplace else. Potter. What was his school? It was a

01:13:38

Mormon school, but I forget what it was. Anyways, we did a debate at the U of U. I don't know.

01:13:45

That was about 15 years ago. I've forgotten when it was. Anyway.

01:13:52

Yeah, it's on Sermon Audio. But he shows up with an earring and a backpack that says, no war in Iraq.

01:14:03

And it was one of the weirdest debates I ever have. And my understanding is he no longer identifies as a male, but he was a

01:14:15

LDS philosophy professor at that time. So I guess, you know, if you extrapolate out a decade or so, then yeah, it would make sense.

01:14:27

But all the lead, I can't, I would be interested in looking at the current 12 apostles.

01:14:34

How many of them went to BYU? And if that's the case, then what does your experience say for the next 30 years, 50 years of LDS leadership?

01:14:50

I'm, well, and it's interesting because there is a noticeable difference between students and professors.

01:14:55

I've noticed in professors, you do get that conservative, I believe, on a literal spirit child of God kind of theology.

01:15:03

But from the younger people, it's, I suppose it would be spiritual.

01:15:09

But in the sort of modern sense of the term, like it's, yeah,

01:15:16

I just, I don't get, and this ties in with my question. So in one of our classes the other day, professor asked, what is truth?

01:15:25

And I answered, so Jesus. And sort of that was, which is real outside of human opinion, basically.

01:15:35

And another student who was LDS raised their hand and said, there is no truth.

01:15:40

I don't believe it's true. And I think that that was common amongst them. We're really, really bizarre to hear, given that, you know, like every

01:15:48

Sunday you'll hear that the Book of Mormon is true and that sort of thing. So yeah, even though let's always remember,

01:15:56

I think that one of the reasons that Mormonism has collapsed into a postmodern mass of goo is they've always had that lack of foundation in objective truth in the sense that if you're going to appeal to somebody and say, hey, pray about this and get a feeling, that's not a solid foundation for a meaningful epistemology of truth.

01:16:24

And so once Mormonism opened the doors of isolation in the

01:16:32

Intermountain West and started saying, there are people out to other schools to get educations and come back and teach at BYU, it's like, you know, someone getting hit with a virus that has no immune system at all.

01:16:48

The very system itself was designed to be susceptible to this very kind of thing.

01:16:55

And I think that's why we see such a massive change happening. And so, yeah, it puts you in the weird position of having to fundamentally deal with issues of epistemology and truth and postmodernism and the whole nine yards in the context of religious system that really speaks with two voices and use, well, it's always used words in a non -meaningful fashion.

01:17:26

I mean, that's just Mormonism. It's always been a redefinition of things. But now, since they've been redefining

01:17:32

Christian terms for 180 years, then they don't have a problem going ahead and doing that with their own religion, with their own words.

01:17:46

They're redefining what Bruce R. McConkie meant. I mean,

01:17:51

I'm old enough to remember what Bruce R. McConkie actually meant when he said certain words not very long ago.

01:18:00

Now they're just redefining that, too. Why not? You know, so, yeah, good luck with that.

01:18:08

Well, yeah, in terms of how to reach them, so I've been—I've read some of your books on Mormonism, trying to understand it, but I almost feel like that stuff doesn't matter anymore.

01:18:21

Because they're Orthodox. I feel like I take their theology more seriously than they do.

01:18:27

Yeah, you probably do. Well, you always have to be prepared for the ones who really do believe and then be able to step down from there and recognize the influence that those false beliefs have had upon them, even if they're not really following them super closely any longer.

01:18:48

Because they'll still redefine when you speak truth to them about grace or something like that, there's still—even if they're not convinced of the truthfulness of Mormonism, there's still that twisting of the meaning of grace from their own background that you have to be familiar with.

01:19:02

Yeah, I have—what I've found, even just for others, to be most effective is essentially preaching the

01:19:14

Gospel, preaching that it's not your righteousness, it's

01:19:21

Christ's righteousness. I've found that that tends to make them take a step back, examine themselves, ask themselves if they are in themselves worthy, whether or not they need to be dependent on Him.

01:19:38

Right. Yeah, just—that seems to be at least get a foot in the door.

01:19:46

Right. But it's hard, because you need to find—you can only do that if they already believe that truth exists and that it matters what you believe and that sort of thing.

01:20:00

Right. Yeah, that's the case on every college campus, actually.

01:20:06

Right. But it's just weird that it's BYU. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like in some ways it's—they recently just had an

01:20:15

LGBT panel give a discussion on campus and that sort of thing.

01:20:22

I feel like it's really—I don't know. As I said, I'm still waiting for that fundamentalist student.

01:20:29

I just haven't met them yet. That's amazing. Well, you know, if they had a strong leader come along to call them back to the old ways,

01:20:39

I think there'd be a lot of people that would go that way, because it just seems to me most

01:20:45

Mormons are just sort of treading water these days. They're really—there's no strong guidance.

01:20:51

It's just all the same old, same old—you know, they do their thing on Sunday because they've always done it that way, but it doesn't really impact anything more.

01:21:00

And it just seems— It seems to go in there, yeah. Yeah, it just seems to be— It just seems to be a club, like a practice, like a—

01:21:06

Culture. Yeah, yeah, culture, not a belief system. I feel like whenever I talk about their belief beyond just sort of Jesus died for your sins and that sort of thing, whenever you get into the specifics, there's just like—they don't seem to have convictions about it.

01:21:24

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes those are the hardest people to deal with, because they're just happy with their life, and they're just bopping along, and yeah.

01:21:37

Well, in every situation, you depend upon the Spirit of God to cause anybody to hear the truth.

01:21:43

But yeah, I can guarantee you it's very different today on the campus of BYU than it was 40 years ago, and there's been a massive generational change.

01:21:57

And that's the case all across the United States, but I think it is just so obvious there in Utah, where you just have two different worlds colliding, and the one is just fading away in the light of the other one.

01:22:11

It's fascinating. Well, I appreciate it, Anthony. Thanks for the insights, and keep preaching the truth there in the wilderness of Brigham Young University.

01:22:22

Thank you. The God Who Justifies the Book was really influential on me.

01:22:28

I think it was a big part of me becoming a Christian. Oh, great. That's great to hear. I appreciate that.

01:22:33

Thank you very much. That's very encouraging. All right, well, I'm gonna be back there in July, if you're gonna be around, so we'll be doing a weekend up there in the middle of July.

01:22:44

And ever climbed up to Garzman's Pass on your bike? I don't have a bike, but...

01:22:53

If you had one, would you want to do something like that? I'm curious if I'd be up for it physically, but I suppose if you are,

01:23:03

I probably should be. I'm only 25. Yeah, well, us old guys can suffer real well.

01:23:09

So I've climbed Garzman many times, and it's a killer.

01:23:14

There's no two ways about it. That last segment gets up to 10 -11 % grade, you're up near 9 ,000 feet, and yeah, it's killer.

01:23:23

But there's some beautiful Indian paintbrush flowers up there, just fields of them. I take pictures of them when

01:23:29

I'm up there. I missed it last year, but what? Yeah, well, yeah, those are dried ones.

01:23:34

But anyways, we'll hopefully see you in July. Yeah, it'll be nice to see you then.

01:23:39

All right, God bless. Bye -bye. You too, thanks, bye. All right, there we go, folks. The dividing line for the 20th of March, 2018.

01:23:48

Please remember, once again, since it's the 20th of March, that means we're less than two months out from heading over to Europe and down to South Africa.

01:23:58

So we need your assistance and your help in being able to make that trip possible, any of the debates that we're trying to arrange and lectures.

01:24:09

And of course, yes, part of my going to South Africa, meeting with my doctoral advisor, more work on PhD and textual criticism.

01:24:17

And if you think, I sort of thought the story at the beginning was interesting, especially what it ended up morphing into.

01:24:24

Very, very interesting how everything connects together like that. So don't forget, coming up on Iron Sharpens Iron, Joel McDermott and Doug Wilson debate.

01:24:36

It's going to be interesting. Got to go get some popcorn now. And maybe we'll just, you know, we haven't ordered pizza in ever.

01:24:44

You know, we ought to think about ordering pizza in and just kicking back and listening.

01:24:50

Could be a lot of fun. So we may have some comments on it come the next dividing line too.