Chasing Textual Criticism into BYU, then Open Phones

Welcome to The Dividing Line, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number today, we'll be going to the calls fairly soon, go to the phones if anyone calls in, 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.

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. And so I had run across an article, and I guess 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.

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. 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.

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

That's the nature of antiquity. That's the nature of having ancient texts is that you don't have, well, you know, did I move it? Yeah, I think I, yeah, they're down here. I have a bunch of editions of The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin, and that's because I had to check editing and changes over time when something was introduced, just something was taken out, whatever it might be.

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.

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

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

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

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

So here's this article that comes up, Scribal Habits in Copies with Extant Exemplars. In other words, what if we do know what manuscript was being copied by hand? And if we possess both and we examine them together, what can we learn about Scribal Habits?

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. Well, if you actually can find what they were copying, now you can go, hmm, what were the Scribal Habits?

Not theorize, but actually go, all right, how'd they do it? How well did they do? 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 a really interesting thing.

This is where I have a real problem with traditionalistic individuals when it comes to the examination of the New Testament. Ah, just go with the 1550 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.

It used to be just on microfilm, now digital copies are showing up all over the place. By the way, for those of you with accordants, as I use regularly, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, which we've talked about a couple times, is now available in accordants.

I had wondered when it would be available, and it is available now, and yes, I have it in mind. Right now, I think it's on sale, so it's less than $20. I think I had a $5 credit, so it's like $15, so 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 Westcott and Hort text was imbalanced. There was too much weight put upon Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

Scholarly studies, over time, not in a year, real solid scholarship takes time. It takes time to do. It takes time for, you know, popularities to be challenged and things like that. 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 New Testament textual criticism has been done in challenging the actual existence of text types. Other than the Byzantine manuscript tradition, Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, whatever it might be, CBGM is saying, eh, not really.

Exactly what's going to come of that yet, because where those are most important is in the 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, the Gospel of Mark.

So that's a good thing. It's an appropriate thing, and I just want to remind everyone that basically the more and more information we're getting, the more absurd the arguments of those who say the 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? 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, it's sort of a, he's moved on to other things. So here is interesting information, because, for example, one of the major studies from the end of last century was 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.

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

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. 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. Then you prefer the shorter reading. Well, when Royce examined the papyri along those lines, he actually found the opposite, that the tendency was to accidentally lose stuff, not gain stuff.

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. 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. But this is going to take a weird twist. And it only took a weird twist in the past 45 minutes for me. Because I brought this article up and I was going to talk about the fact that Farnes basically looked at this and he says, I have found that the scribes in this study did their best at a difficult job of copying manuscripts.

At no point did I find any example of intentional corruption for theological reasons. Did you catch that? At no point did I find any example of intentional corruption for theological reasons. The most blatant intentional changes found in this study were the Latin scribes copying 0319 and 0320, who consistently altered the wording from Claremontanus' Old Latin to update their text, the Vulgate.

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

Therefore, with respect to the scribes in this study, we can reject the older canon, Lectio Brevior Patior, that is, choose the shorter reading. We are unable, however, to confirm 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.

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. Well, that right there is important, that right there is very interesting, and if you're sitting there, and most of us have, for example, 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.

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 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, and these studies are saying, eh, not so fast, which is why in any critical edition of the Greek New Testament you have the textual reading and you have the footnotes with the other readings, 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, but when you do a really critical text, hey, the reader can look down there and go, hmm, you know, there may have been people who prior to Nestle-Aland 28, when they preached through Jude 5, said Jesus delivered a people from Egypt, and now that's what Nestle-Aland 28 says, because it was in the footnotes, had been for as far back as I've looked in the Nestle-Aland text.

So this is important stuff in what is being said. 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, and you're going to see why here.

He then looks at the scribes of 319, and there were two scribes, 319A and 319B. 319A seemingly knew a little Greek. 319B didn't know Greek. Now, who do you think made the more accurate copy? 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.

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

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

And that whole element is rarely a part of a discussion of the manuscripts. And of course, we need to recognize the 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.

But you may be copying from a manuscript that's 250 years earlier. So 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, except as far as you make changes, accidental or otherwise.

All of these really, really fascinating things. 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, 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.

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. The person who knows the language is less likely to make the, whoop, I just made up a whole new word that has no meaning at all type error, but the person who doesn't know can make all sorts of silly errors.

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. And then I went, hmm, Alan Taylor Farnes, and I scrolled down to the bottom of the thing, and well, actually, I think I went up somewhere in this.

I noticed something that Alan Taylor Farnes teaches, oh, there it is, adjunct instructor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, BYU, BYU, BYU, yeah. And I went, oh, this really makes everything really interesting now.

Because I've always wondered, one of the things I've said for decades, Mormons have never produced a meaningful exegetical commentary on Romans. 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. Welch on the Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple.

This is from 2011. Now, I recognize the name Welch from BYU and from the Old Farms. And he had written a book called The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple, London, Ashgate, 2009. And it is a whole discussion of the Sermon on the Mount as found in 3 Nephi chapter 11.

Now, you might go, what does the temple have to do with this? Well, now we're going from New Testament textual criticism, we're hanging a hard left into the 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 Book of Mormon, which cannot even begin to stand up to the slightest level of scrutiny that you're using for the New Testament?

How do you... there's cognitive dissonance here. 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.

So in 3 Nephi 11, here's the church's commentary. It says, "...Jesus Christ did show himself unto the people of Nephi, as the multitude were gathered together in the land bountiful, and did minister unto them.

And on this wise did he show himself unto them, comprising chapters 11 to 26 inclusive.". So 3 Nephi 11 is the beginning of... Jesus appears to the Nephites after his crucifixion in Jerusalem. He comes to the New World, and this happens, starts in 3 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 Book of Mormon, at least read 3 Nephi, because that's where Jesus appears. And then you can contrast the Jesus of the Book of Mormon with the true Jesus, because right prior to 3 Nephi 11, you have all the wicked people being destroyed and stuff before Jesus shows up.

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. Then you have the further introduction in 3 Nephi 11.

"...The Father testifies of his beloved Son. Christ appears and proclaims his atonement. The people feel the wound marks in his hands and feet, and sigh. They cry, Hosanna This is in the modern world, somewhere in Mesoamerica, we're told, who knows.

"...He sets forth the mode and manner of baptism. The spirit of contention is of the devil. Christ's doctrine is that men should believe and be baptized and receive the Holy Ghost.". Date, AD 34. Now, don't have time right now, but the Book of Mormon is an absolute study in stunning ahistorical anachronism.

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. There's no way that anyone—well, of course, there's absolutely no evidence of anyone, anywhere in the Americas, that had been instructed in Trinitarian theology at the time of Christ, okay?

No, no glyphs on any walls or—zip, zero, nada. There's nothing there. Which is why Book of Mormon archaeology has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until now it's probably just a few acres or something like that, we'll never find it.

Right, okay. Anyway. So, it's so painfully obvious that the writer knew nothing about the true inhabitants of Mesoamerica. This is pure fiction. Absolutely pure fiction. But, the whole point is that Farnes, in talking with Welch, mentions 3 Nephi 11 .1,.

So, that's why they're calling this the Sermon on the Mount and the Temple is because here it says that they were gathered around some temple in the land Bountiful and that that's what is going on here.

That's what the issue is. Now, aside from the fact that they never found the land of Bountiful, never found any temples that would have had anything to do with Christianity, Judaism, anything like this at all.

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 Bible and he accepts the Bible to be the 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, the scribes did a great job. Really, really did a super job. 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. And yet, you can turn around and seriously engage the text of the 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 King James version of the Bible?

I mean, the textual anachronisms that you can document in the text of the Book of Mormon based on the 1769 Blaney revision, not even the 1611, the 1769 Blaney revision of the King James version of the Bible, this is all well known.

I can guarantee you it is known to farns. And yet, here you have a Mormon doing New Testament textual critical studies that seems to be enlightening and valuable, but not seeing that that very same application would mean, 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 to the left, swing to the left in Mormon leadership over the past number of decades is that more and more of these people as, you know, BYU and private leadership in Salt Lake decided a long time ago, we're going to send our guys out to get PhDs in these other fields, not knowing that it was like putting an IV into the secluded veins of Utah.

And the poison is resulting in the hollowing out of the very core of Mormonism. And the results, who knows? I have no earthly idea. I have no earthly idea what it's going to be. So that was what I was doing prior to the program.

And it was fascinating. You know, I was just going to talk about, you know, if you know what a manuscript was copied from, this is a brilliant idea. 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 variance. And then I just sort of go, who is this Farnes guy? And you start looking around like, oh, oh, this is interesting.

Lots of stuff to look at out there. So there you go. Thank you for putting up with me patiently for that. 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? We are early today because I am going to fire up the feed. And we may kill the feed. 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 Chris is.

But Chris Irons in Iron Sharpens Iron is having a debate today. And it's, yeah, it's going to be an interesting one. Look him up. I'm not going to get into it right now. Maybe we'll comment on it after it happens.

But let's just say Joel McDermott versus Doug Wilson. Do we have any Orville Redenbacher popcorn on here? Because that would be perfect. Yeah, I may have to run and get some popcorn. Some nice, buttery, movie-style popcorn.

Theater butter. Theater butter. Oh, man. There's something in there that's absolutely addictive. We all know it. But, yeah, that's coming up. And that would have been, we would have been competing with it if we went on our normal time.

And I want to listen. I'm not going to listen to the replay. I want to hear it live. And so look for Iron Sharpens Iron today. And it's going to be interesting. And one last thing. Before I go to the calls, please remember we are heading down to South Africa, Zambia.

I'm going to be teaching at Vody Baucom School down there in Zambia, doing work in South Africa. I'm going to be back at Antioch there in Johannesburg. Been there many, many times before. Sort of an unofficial, outside-the-country member of Antioch Bible Church.

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

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

And it sounds pretty good. That's good. I'm glad it hasn't, maybe having it up higher there, helped. We'll find out as we go to our calls. And begin with Michael. Hi, Michael. Doing good. Oh, Bruton Parker.

Are they still chugging along down there? No.

Oh, well, you know, hey, you need to keep that. Frame it for other reasons. Somehow out of that, I still...

Okay. Your connection is rather poor. It's sort of hard to hear. Maybe you're, are you driving or something? Yeah. Oh, boy, that sounds a lot better. Whatever you just did. It sounded like you were on Mars before, and now you're at least in the United States.

So that's a lot better. So I was struggling a little bit. But it sounds like what you're saying is, well, in John chapter 18, 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, I lost not one. And so I'm assuming that the idea is, well, so that limits the fulfillment of John 6. 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, 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.

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

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, 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.

So the initial connection is to John 17, 12, not 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 Jesus is speaking. Either some hyper-dispensationalist 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. 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.

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. 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.

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, 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.

And this actually goes back to John 5 as well, where the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and there's really two resurrections in John 5. There's one where Jesus says the day is coming, and now is when the dead will hear, 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 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 John 6 to just the apostles, the whole idea of resurrection, judgment, verse 40, this is the will of my 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. So to try to limit that ends up producing a universal call to faith, which the Church has always recognized was focused upon everybody until that final hour.

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

Awesome. I appreciate it, Dr. White. Okay, thank you very much. All right, thank you.

God bless. Bye-bye. 877 -753 -3341, let's talk to Jack. Hi, Jack. How you doing? Go ahead.

Thanks for taking the call, and I know it's repetition, but thank you very much. Appreciate it. I'm a novice Bible student, and so there's a lot of things that I have to catch up on, 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 so-called historical discrepancies regarding the census times and 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 ten-year span that he's playing with, but can you help me with that?

Well, we're in the process of responding to the Bart Ehrman-Mike Licona debate here on the program. We 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.

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 Synoptic Gospels and John.

It was fascinating that I actually had Christian apologetics ministries trying to rebut that. 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.

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

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.

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, T-R-I-A-B-L-O-G-U-E, I think, .com maybe.

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

Every holiday season, he will repost articles with what he's written in the past on the Christmas season, the Annunciation, birth narratives, issues like that. And then around this time of year, it's 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. And I think if you probably went to that back in December of last year, you'd find his reposting of all the nativity materials.

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

Bart Ehrman's comments can be somewhat disturbing, much more than maybe it might be anticipated.

Well, 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 existed in academia for hundreds of years, has been responded to in conservative academia for hundreds of years.

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

I mean, none of this material is new to anyone who was paying attention anyways in seminary, at least back when I went to seminary. Things have changed a bit since then. But it's not that it's new or unusual.

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

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

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

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. Let's talk to Kofi up in, well, it says Medford, Oregon, but I think it just spellchecked and was mistaken about Milwaukee.

So, Kofi, how are you? Doing okay, Doc. Doing okay. Have you lost your British accent yet? I'm holding on to it as best I can. Very good. Very good.

Go ahead. Yes. So, I'm in the middle of learning Greek at the moment, about halfway through our 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. Why would you bother learning Greek now that you have the preacher's Bible? Because I want you to know, I specifically, you can confirm with the head of Grace2U, I specifically contacted him making sure you were going to get one of those.

Not necessarily, but we'll just sort of, 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 Oregon and, you know, just sort of watching everything online.

Well, it's actually really sunny, so it's not quite so rainy in southern Oregon like it is up north.

Yeah, that's true. There are some dry parts. But anyway, so why would you learn Greek when you have the preacher's Bible? I mean, isn't it the standard now?

Well, it's still in English translation.

You do realize that, you know, 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, 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 preacher's Bible only movement. The PBO movement. Yes, the preacher's Bible only movement. So anyway, some people have no idea what we're talking about.

We're talking about the, was it Steadfast Bibles? Is that the name? Yes, Steadfast Bibles. Steadfast Bibles, John MacArthur designed a, Look, the Lachman Foundation just needs to sign the copyright for the 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. But the Steadfast Bibles produced a, what is it? Five and a quarter pound, New American Standard, like 1 ,700 pages guaranteed to stop bullets.

And it's one of those big 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. Well, let's hope so. Yep, yep, yep.