Get A Deep Seat in the Saddle, Ma!

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday. We have a lot to get to today, but I want to start off. I argued with myself a lot as to whether I felt this was something that needed to be addressed.

But since Doug Wilson did comment upon a part of this, I felt it would be good to address before we get to some of the other very important stuff on today's program. And so over the past number of months, a couple of times, I have seen tweets from a young man by the name of Jacob Brunton, who on November 3rd, so this would be yesterday, addressed Doug Wilson, myself, and Tom Askall and said this in a tweet.

Please call for Mueller to resign and for Matthew Allwhite's racist haul. And Jarvis, I'm marginalized because I'm Black Williams to be fired. Actually, I'm sorry, back up. It's will Douglas Wilson, myself, and Tom Askall, please call for Mueller to resign, da, da, da, because that's why it ends with a question mark.

If not, why not? If CRT is as dangerous as you men say, then act like it. Now, this is not the first time that Jacob Brunton has put out a tweet like this. It's, I would call it bullying. It's, I'm going to throw this stuff out here and I'm going to stir up the pot.

And I'm not going to care what's going on in the background. I'm not going to care whether you're a Southern Baptist or not. Interestingly enough, two of the three people addressed are not even Southern Baptists and hence, really, honestly, don't have anything to do with, say, the trustees of organizations, of schools, or anything else.

But I remember about a year and a half ago, I'm guessing, Doug Wilson did address this particular issue. And basically, what he said was, I hesitate to do these things. I hesitate to stick myself in the middle of what's going on in other situations, basically because I know how complex these things are in my own experience.

In other words, he is very much involved with New St. Andrews. And anyone who knows anything about Doug Wilson knows that there are many, many, many people who suffer from Doug Wilson derangement syndrome, just as there are people who suffer from James White derangement syndrome.

Though he has legions more of his adoring followers in that realm than I do, I would say. I'm a close second. Anyway, and basically, what he said was, I recognize the complexities. And when I read his comments, I had to think of them, first and foremost, pastorally.

Anyone who has been involved with a church of any size for any period of time knows that every church has their former members, unless your church doesn't ever do discipline. If your church, I suppose, there are a lot of churches that don't have, for example, membership and things like that.

So if you never guard the table, if you don't engage in discipline for fornication or abandonment or any number of other things, even spreading of gossip, for crying out loud, there are a few people that actually do that.

The Bible does call it a sin. Anyways, if you don't do any of those things, then you're not really standing for anything. And so you may avoid having that former member syndrome. But if you do, then you have former members.

And you know the situation you face when they start making public charges. Because you know that pastorally, there are only certain things you can say without damaging other people, because it is simply inappropriate to address certain things outside the context of the fellowship of the church.

And you just know how this works. You know what people can get away with. You know that from the outside, people can say, well, this means this, this, and this. And that person thinks that. And that should happen to this person.

And you know the actual facts. And you know maybe even the character of the people involved. But there's only so much you can do about it. You learn to pray and to hand it over to God for his eventual vindication.

And you have to just live with the reality that maybe, just maybe, in this life, vindication won't take place. It will take place in that great day. And that is a great encouragement to everyone, I think, to recognize there is that great day coming.

So here's the situation. There is, let's talk about Matt Hall's comments. I don't believe for a second that someone who could make the comments that he did could change his perspective overnight, first of all, maybe in one or two conversations with a higher up.

If you, if he meant the things that he said when he said them, then the only way I could ever believe that he doesn't still believe those things is either he never believed in the first place. He was just going with a movement.

Or if he did believe him then, the only way I could believe that he no longer believes them is if he would come straight out and absolutely not only repudiate the statements, but demonstrate that he now understands why those statements were completely fallacious.

Now, the problem with that is if you come out as a leader and say, as a leader, I said these things and I was completely wrong and I had no idea what I was talking about and had embraced a completely foreign epistemology and perspective and everything else, that sort of makes it hard for people then to follow your lead after that.

When you say, I've now come to understand these, well, actually rather basic truths, that's a bit of a problem for me. But I don't know the man. Never met him, don't know him, but I'm concerned about what he said and why he said the things he said.

As to Jarvis Williams, there is zero question. Anyone who listens to even the... There was a video that popped out I don't know, about six months ago that I think it was 2018, I think it was from around 2018.

So a few things were coming out, but a lot of the terminology was not yet fully understood. Plainly, clearly presenting the standard perspective that would be considered commensurate with CRT today. Obviously, an amalgamation of Christian theology with very, very foreign elements in it, but very much the same perspective that is leading to all the divisiveness and division today, not understanding the true nature of reconciliation, not racial reconciliation, reconciliation itself, what that means in the body.

And so problematic in both instances. So the idea from Jacob Brunton basically is, evidently, that he thinks that Al Mohler is king at Southern Seminary. And there's a lot of people that would probably say that.

The problem is Al Mohler, I don't think is king at Southern Seminary. Now, I know Dr. Mohler, I've met him. We've talked a few times, but we're not buddy buddies. There's, let's put it this way. I recognize how much I don't know about what goes on behind the scenes, about who knows what, about whom, about the role of politics and everything else.

There's a lot of people that think they've got all of that figured out. Well, okay, you're a whole lot smarter than me. Maybe, well, Jacob is the head of the new Christian intellectuals and the new Christian intellectual movement.

And so, obviously, very, very smart man by his own self-profession. And so maybe he does know all the background stuff, but you know what? I just sort of doubt it. I think it's far more likely that he thinks he knows it than that he actually does.

And so as a result, it's taking a position where I go, okay, there are no possibilities of any complexities whatsoever in the deeply political world of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is why I could not function there, would not want to function there.

I don't want the politics. I'm thankful that, you know, I had to deal with some politics today. I had to deal with some politics today. I came in and Rich had moved the podium, okay? And he moved that thing forward and he moved the podium.

And so we had some political stuff to deal with. That's about the level at which I can function, okay? Really beyond that, it just starts weighing too much on me. So I just go, no, I don't want to do that.

So, yeah, I don't know all of the, reasons, but I have to admit that there are quite possible reasons why Al Mohler cannot simply deal with Matthew Hall and Jarvis Williams the way that the rest of us think would be the obvious way to deal with those things.

And then you have the questions of why were people let go last year that seemed to be on the other side of things? And doesn't that mean that there is, does that mean that he is actually trying to do this?

Well, there's a lot of theories. There's a lot of people running around with a lot of different perspectives out there. And I'll just be perfectly honest with you. I got no way of knowing. I'm not really sure how they've got all this inside knowledge, but they have it.

And so they want people to act based upon their knowledge. And I would just point out, let's say that they got rid of Al Mohler. Let's say that certainly you can see over the past number of years that there has been a major shift in the perspectives of the presidents of the various Southern Baptist seminaries.

And even though Paige Patterson was deeply anti-reformed, there was a sense in which he was an ally on a lot of issues with Al Mohler. Well, he's gone. And we're talking, when you take your, when you take a guy's stained glass window out of his chapel, he's gone.

That's just how the seller is to it. Now, there never should have been a stained glass window in that chapel, I can assure you of that. But be that as it may, the movement, the direction of the leadership of the Southern Baptist schools is very obvious.

So is it possible that Dr. Mohler views himself as the last general of the last fort, as the forces of destruction and degradation are coming over the last hill, and he's the last one there, and that he views himself just trying to hold on to the last vestiges as long as possible?

I don't know, but I have to recognize the possibility. And so certain people seemingly think that, oh, no, there's no complexities here. You just take it and run with it. And this is the simple thing to do.

And I go, well, I'm sorry, I don't think it's all that simple. And I think there's a whole lot more complexities there. And I would love to see Dr. Mohler have the freedom to very directly and openly say this is wrong, and I will not have it being taught in my school.

I'll be honest with you. I'll be absolutely honest with you. I am stunned at how many of the people who attack me and attack any response to critical theory in all of its forms and to wokeism in all of its forms.

I'm really surprised at how many of them come from Boyce College and Southern Seminary. That's just been... No, because coming from Southeastern and now Southwestern or New Orleans, that was what you expected.

That was a given. But how many now come from Southern is very, very surprising to me. And so with all that said, I simply am not gonna be bullied by young men who think they know everything. And my response to Mr. Brunton was, I'm looking forward to the day when you mature enough, Jacob, to stop obscuring what wisdom you proclaim by your arrogance and bullying.

Maybe taking time to do actual pastoral work might help, just a suggestion. That was my response to him. And you now know I referred to pastoral work. When you actually get involved on that level and start dealing with things in that way, sort of changes your perspective because you realize just how complex things can be.

But hey, some folks have it all figured out. By the way, I just wanted to make sure I didn't forget this because I didn't have it on my list. There was a tweet a couple hours ago from Reuters, time has come for US farms to cut methane emissions.

From the agriculture secretary, which of course means the agriculture secretary of the Biden regime. And I want you to think about what this means. So your farm animals produce methane because they don't have access to gas X and things like that.

And so it's a natural process. And in fact, mankind figured out a long time ago that if you take what comes out of your farm animals and put it back on the ground, you get more food growing the next year.

And that led Luther, for example, to have some very interesting analogies and illustrations of various things. And because he was a good German peasant guy out in the farm fields. And so anyway, what I want you to think about, aside from just the insanity of what just happened in Glasgow and the hysteria, which has been around for a long time, but everybody was saying, hey, the submission that the pandemic movement has gotten will now, that energy will now be shifted over to the environment.

You've got people scared to death. They're driving down the car, down the road in their car with two masks on, they're alone. That kind of person is the kind of person who's also going to believe that we only have now 11 years left, according to AOC, who of course, just leading experts on everything in the world.

And so now we're going to be able to get done what we've wanted to get done, which we haven't been able to get done up to this point in time. Now, obviously we know that the only way to achieve the goals these people want is to get rid of at least half the people living on the planet, first of all.

And then the rest of us need to live in huts without air conditioning and without the ability to travel, eating a diet of basically crickets and green leafy vegetables. That's the only way to do this.

Now, the elites will still have their jets and we'll still have their air conditioning and their houses, and we'll be able to jet around the world to all the conferences where they can congratulate themselves and everything's done.

But the rest of us who become enslaved to this system, we just get to do what we're told to do, and that's how it works. But there has to be about half of us. And so the real impact here, aside from the destruction of farms and farming economy and all the rest of that stuff, the real impact here is in the third world.

And that's already happening. People who were on the margins, who were dependent upon primarily American economic activity, they are already in starvation mode. And people just have a hard time recognizing that the people on the left do not mind killing people.

They killed 120 million of them in the last century. And if they have to use a gun, that's expensive. You have to make ammunition and it's very messy. And then you have to have bodies. Do it like you did in Ukraine, in the Holodomor.

Starve them to death. Starve them. They die on their own. They frequently bury their own and then bury themselves basically. Hey, it's nice, clean, easy. You can deny you had anything to do with it. Why not?

These people do not want the marginalized alive because they take the resources they want for themselves. And so agriculture secretary, time has come for the US farms to cut methane emissions. We feed so much of the world.

We send our excess food all over the place. So you cut back on what we're producing, who's going to suffer most? Oh yeah, you may pull up at McDonald's and it says, we don't have anything. Oh, okay. But what about the people that were dependent upon the economic activity that came from all that?

They got nothing and they got no options. They got no options. And these people, that's what they want. That's where they're going. And it's just like, people just don't get the idea as to how evil the left actually is.

They just can't, they can't, for some reason that happened in the past. Yeah, that's not now. Okay, well, some of us have been trying to tell you for a long time what's going on there. Early on in 2020, I know this gentleman from Speaking Churches on Long Island.

Banugati is, for example, some of you do know this name because he is a sponsor on Iron Sharpens Iron. And so if you listen to Chris Arnzen, a lot of our folks do and help support Chris. Banugati is one of the sponsors.

He has a PhD in pharmacology. He has, I think, three pharmacies on Long Island. And he's an elder in one of the churches I've spoken at on Long Island as well. And so I've met him there and we've talked and he's a really, really bright guy.

And I just remember early on in 2020, he was one of the first people to come out and say, hey, we are having tremendous success dealing with this stuff with vitamin D3. And he's not the only one who said this, but he was one of the first people that I heard this, saying this.

And so he's been on top of this stuff for a long, long time. And he pointed to an article that I linked to on social media yesterday. Here's the title. SARS-CoV -2 spike impairs DNA damage repair and inhibits VDJ recombination in vitro.

Yeah, obviously they want this to be read by the widest possible audience. No, it's a scientific paper. And so this is from the Department of Molecular Biosciences, the Vennergren Institute, Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden.

And this is published in Viruses 2021. This was received 20 August, revised 8 September, accepted 8 October, published 13 October of 2021. All right. So what is all of this about? To make it to just extremely complex, and again, all sorts of stuff about the relationship of the spike protein, the fact that we have produced these Joe Biden cookies, we should call them Camela crackers.

How's that? Instead of Joe Biden cookies, we've got Camela crackers. Or is it Camela? Who knows? Camela crackers. Isn't it amazing that we can't, we literally cannot talk about scientific papers because big tech will close you down.

You can't even discuss it. You're not allowed to. But everybody's, but that has, oh, that has nothing to do with anything. Well, it's just coincidence. All right, okay. The method of dealing with this problem that has been forced upon us, even though it's completely different than anything we've done in the past, and violates every protocol we've ever used in the past, not only the speed, but the approach, all of it is completely new.

This particular methodology has focused upon what is called the spike protein. I can't discuss this without using some of that terminology, unfortunately. And there are numerous papers now documenting that this spike protein is pathogenic.

It damages the body in a number of different ways. And the problem is the therapeutic cookies, the Camela crackers, spread the same stuff through the body. And Banu said that this was the most frightening paper he had seen, and he's reading all the papers.

And to boil it all down, this study, quote, hereby using an in vitro cell line, we report that SARS-CoV -2 spike protein significantly inhibits DNA damage repair, which was required for effective VDJ recombination in adaptive immunity.

Let me translate that. These things destroy your immune system. And specifically the genetic mechanisms that especially are related to cancers. Now, in any other world, at any other time, prior to 2020, this would have been enough to put the brakes on everything.

It will not be discussed. I don't even know if people in government, read enough in these things to bring this to the fore. But my experience is we don't have journalists anymore, or the few journalists we have left have already been banned from every possible way of getting their word out.

But this comes out at the very same time that the FDA says, yeah, let's give Camela crackers to five-year-olds. And then the FDA or the CDC, they're all sound like KGB anymore to me. They're all three letter things, it means the same thing.

I think it was the CDC came out with commercials promoting the Camela crackers to kids. So that if you get your Camela crackers, you can get superpowers. If there is any justice someday, we will have Nuremberg-like trials about what's going on right now.

I don't expect that to happen, but if there was true justice, that's where we'd be. I posted it. And if you go to the, let me see here. Oh, wow. Yeah, that URL is not something. It can be found at mdpi .com, but maybe there's a search engine there that would be able to pull it out for you.

I don't know, but it's in the viruses 2021. So maybe if we put viruses 2021 into the search engine at mdpi .com, probably be able to pull it up that way. If you don't have, if you don't follow me on social media or whatever, I did post it, whether it's still there or not, who knows?

I've been ghost banned forever on Twitter. So maybe a lot of people didn't see it, but you should read it. And I say to parents, oh, parents, please. On the last program, we had, I read that thread of the woman and there's, what has happened to people in Western culture?

I don't know. I don't know. All right, let's shift gears. We're about half hour in here. I wanted to respond briefly to, and I linked again this morning. It's not up on the screen yet. We'll be using the screen for something a little bit later on.

To an article that appeared in the Aquila Report. A lot of us in the reformed realm will look at what's in Aquila Report. This is from an OPC minister. The TR only movement, which we have addressed many times.

I, for example, talked about the upcoming thing next month. Well, actually this month in London. Jeff Riddle's behind most of this, but there is a strong contingent in the reformed community, the Presbyterian community as well, of the ecclesiastical text movement, whatever you want to call this.

And so it's a short article and it appeared October 29th called Slightly Imperfect Bibles. And I wanted to interact with it briefly before we move on to the next topic. It says, would you purchase a Bible that was missing an entire page?

Not many would, I suppose, but when compared to the Bibles, but I just have to stop for a second and point out, it is funny that the TR is based upon Erasmus' work and the one manuscript he had of Revelation was missing the last page.

It's sort of funny. And he had to translate from Latin into Greek and came up with readings that are still in the TR today. And these guys would defend as being representational of the original when there is zero chance, absolutely zero chance that they are what John actually wrote.

But the problem is, as soon as you admit that any kind of revision has to be made in the TR, then you have to present a system, a consistent system that taking the manuscripts will result in the TR. The application of these principles to the manuscripts result in the TR.

There is no such system. They know that, they are well aware of that. Jeff Riddle is well aware of the fact that he has to use one set of arguments over here and one set of arguments. And these two sets of arguments can be 180 degree opposite.

It can be completely contradictory, but he'll use two different sets of arguments for two different readings because the reading has already been determined by the text of Receptus. So you use whatever arguments you need to use.

So anyways, I think it's fascinating. 12 verses from the New Mark's Gospel are missing. Missing, notice that. An additional 12 verses from John's Gospel are missing. 16 other verses are usually found missing and several more words and verses have either been deleted or noted as questionable.

And so just as whenever we are dealing with King James-only-ism, when dealing with TR-only-ism, while the TR-only position sounds much more respectable because you're dealing with at least the original languages, the thinking and the argumentation is the same.

And the end goal is the same one way or the other. And so all these folks will use missing, deleted, et cetera, et cetera, because their standard is not our standard. And that's why I wanted to address this is I simply have to say to all the readers of the Aquila Report that the vast majority of reformed scholarship, which does not make it right, but I just mention it, believes that the goal that we should have should be the same goal as every generation in the church before us.

So in the second century, Justin began making reference to variations between the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text. And the issue had to be, well, what did Moses write? What did David write?

Not what did a tradition develop about what they wrote? We want to know what they wrote. And so you get into the third century and now you're starting to talk about differences between New Testament manuscripts.

Fourth and fifth century, you get to Jerome. It's become much more complex. Origin complicated it, but I was also quite aware of it. And the issue is always what was originally written? Until you start getting, I've actually read one paragraph of this, until you start getting traditions developing.

So the early church adopts the Greek Septuagint because that's the language they're reading and speaking. And so when Jerome comes along with Latin Vulgate and renders anything differently than what you have in the Greek Septuagint, there is resistance because you've become accustomed.

Now, Jerome was right, for example, to question the Septuagint's rendering of things. He didn't just simply take it as the final word. And he actually looked back into the Hebrew and well, the Hebrew manuscripts available to him said this and the Greek Septuagint said that.

And so he would go with the Hebrew and that caused people problems because they were used to something. They would have made the same arguments against Jerome by saying, but it's in the Greek Septuagint.

Why isn't it in the Latin Vulgate? Because they have created a tradition and they've enshrined that tradition. The question should be what most accurately represents what was written. Now, up until the modern period, that was a very difficult question to answer for one very, very, very, very obvious reason.

All the way through the 16th century, the primary mechanism of the transmission of the text in New Testament was handwritten manuscripts. Even after printing, still printing presses didn't just, Kinko's didn't just pop up the day after, you know, Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

And so handwritten copies are still primary for a great period of time. And handwritten copies of necessity have textual variance in them because they're produced by human beings, not by photocopiers.

And especially when you go farther and farther back, the relationship between manuscripts is next to impossible to establish. Now, once you get in the modern period, you can go, oh, this one was copied from that one.

It might even say that, but for the first 1400 years, you just don't have that kind of information. And hence creating a genealogical list or line is next to impossible. That's what CBGM tries to do as best as it can is to overcome some of those issues.

But the point is, in the days where the, what's called the Texas Receptus was developed, the work of Erasmus and Stephanus and Beza, no one knew, no one knew who had which manuscripts. There were no catalogs.

There were no microfiche. Today, you can go online and any manuscript that is cited in a modern Greek manual, whether it's the ECM or the SCR, you can go online and you can find out where that is. You can find out what museum it's in.

And thanks to CSNTM, more and more of these manuscripts are now available to us online. We can look these things up ourselves and verify. That has never existed before. And hence to have collations of manuscripts, that is where you take manuscripts and you take a standard and you then have the information, this manuscript varies from the standard at this reading and this reading and this reading.

And now to have all those in databases as we have with the ECM and CBGM, never had anything like this before, ever, ever. And if the ecclesiastical text guys are right, we have completely wasted our time in doing all of this.

It's irrelevant, completely irrelevant. It does not matter that we now have more information about the readings of the texts of New Testament we've ever had before, irrelevant, waste of time, waste of money.

There's no reason to study textual criticism because you have it, you have it in the TR, it's all done. There you go. This is the position. Just look, just go back, since the folks at MetTab directed folks to the debates I did with Jeff Riddle, go watch them.

Go listen. I think any person who hasn't already started buying into the methodology who just sits back and wants to hear, is there a consistency here? We'll be able to see very, very clearly that the argumentation to defend Ephesians 3 .9, the argumentation to defend Mark 16, 9, 20, completely different, utterly different.

And that's the whole point. So anyway, we now have the ability to know what these texts say versus those texts say. They did not have that ability in the 16th century. And I'll give you an example. I wish I had, yeah, go get me Stefanoff.

You know where it is. I'm not gonna, what do you mean you don't know where it is? It's in the, it's behind me when I'm sitting in the studio. It's down on top of Codex Sinaiticus. You know where it is.

Let me have Rich grab Stefanos for us for a second. And I will wet the whistle while Rich is doing his thing. I love when I get one of those little ice chips, you know? Hmm. It's still warm here in Phoenix.

I know I'm wearing my Coogee, I'm sorry. There are only so many months out of the year where you can do it. And so we've got the air running here and blowing on me. And yes, yes, ah, ah, we got Rich's arm into the shot.

Yes, this is, I'm not doing this just to make all the TR Only guys jealous and angry and mad, but they are jealous and angry and mad. Doug Wilson's drooling. Doug Wilson's drooling. And by the way, Doug, just today, we were talking about Swear to Us Dialogues again.

Doug, I promise that when I come up in April, we are supposed to be doing a debate in April. Finally, we pretty much have this nailed down to debate paedo-communion. And I want to debate this issue because Doug and I have done a book on it, but we haven't done a live debate.

We've done a written debate in Credenda Agenda back in late 90s, I think. And then we did a written debate, but I want to do a real debate for, I'd love to do it for new St. Andrews. Let's do it for new St. Andrews.

I think it's important. But I'll bring this because this is the version that Doug said, there's my standard, 1550s fun. I'll bring this with me, but only if we do the debate. I won't, there's, now it also returns with me.

I just want you to know it's not good if somehow find itself in the library at new St. Andrews or something like that. But this is a genuine, this is not a copy. This is not a reproduction. This is a 1550 Stephanus.

It is 471 years old. As you can see, year before last, I would say, we had Jeffrey Rice, we had Jeffrey Rice rebind the front. And you might say, well, there goes all its value. Well, the reason that we got this, the reason it was given to us was for the text, for what's in the text and the text needed to be protected.

And so that was most important. The front cover had fallen off. So had to be protected. Jeffrey Rice did an awesome job. Look at it, it says Stephanus on the front. He used archival leather. It's rich and oh, it's just beautiful.

So I can actually use it. I can actually take it places and do things like that. This is the Stephanus text of 1550. This is the last text before verse numbers were inserted into the New Testament by Stephanus.

So the 1551, you might go, well, why wouldn't that one be more popular than the 1550? Because of its size and its print. The 1551 was much smaller. And just think about how many people back then would have trouble reading because this font was smaller.

You didn't have LASIK, you didn't have reading glasses, all sorts of stuff. So this one remained extremely popular. Why do I point this out? Why is this important to this situation? Real simple. In 1598, Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor at Geneva, put out the primary one of his texts.

And he had utilized a manuscript that we call today Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis, Codex D. And Codex D, as he himself said, was more useful to be stored than to be studied. And it's a very strange manuscript.

It contains all sorts of incredibly unique readings. I've often pointed out that when Peter was freed by the angel from jail, it tells us how many steps Peter went down to the street. It has some odd readings.

It's the first manuscript in history to contain John 7 .53 through 8 .11, the woman taken in adultery. It's not in any of the manuscripts that precede it. And so Beza had it, and he did utilize it, but he also didn't trust it all that much, unless it had the same reading as other manuscripts, which is a wise thing to do.

So in other words, Beza was using textual critical principles, just like we do today, which produced the TR, but now if you hold the TR, you shouldn't use textual critical principles. It's just part of the absolute incoherence of this position.

It just does not make any sense. Anyhow, so Beza had Stephanus, of course, and in Stephanus on the sides here, right here, there is a real basic set of readings from a small number of manuscripts that Stephanus had available to him.

And his beta manuscript, B in our alphabet, his B manuscript, which he cites in the text. Beza didn't know what that manuscript was, but what he should have known in hindsight, I mean, he wouldn't have had any way to know it, but which would have impacted his readings.

What Beza didn't know is that Stephanus had Codex Bezae Canterburgiensis before him. Stephanus had it years before he had it. So before it was given to Beza, it was in Stephanus' possession, and that's his beta manuscript.

So Beza's looking at Stephanus, he's looking at Bezae Canterburgiensis, and then he notices, oh, Stephanus' beta reads the same way. That gives it more weight, but it's the same manuscript, and he didn't know.

Okay, so here's, so the point is, there is an example of where it's vitally important to have real catalogs of which manuscripts are which, and we've only had that in recent generations. And fully accessible on your handheld device in the past decade, vitally important, extremely important.

So all that background, which we've covered, I know, many, many times before, just so that we can look at what's said here. I recently received a catalog from a book distributor that included a discount section titled Slightly Imperfect, and yes, there were several Bibles listed.

Obviously, the phrase slightly imperfect was intended as a reference to cosmetic defects, but it got me thinking about more substantive imperfections that no publishers dare acknowledge while advertising their Bibles.

By the way, this particular author organized a big conference last year with Jeff Riddles, so this is, it's the same group. It's the same ecclesiastical text group. Would you purchase the Bible as missing an entire page?

Not many would, I suppose, but when compared to the Bibles published in Reformation times, most modern versions are actually missing about that much content. 12 verses at the end of Mark's Gospel are missing an additional 12 verses from John's Gospel are missing.

16 other verses are usually found missing, and several more words and verses have either been deleted or noted as questionable. Many seek to minimize these discrepancies by speaking only in terms of the percentage of material missing.

The 40 verses references above constitute less than 1 1⁄4 of the whole. However, if you compare the amount of missing material to the length of some books in Scripture, the discrepancy appears as more significant.

Now, I just stopped for a second. What Reformed theology, what Reformed doctrine is based upon any of the parallel verses in the Gospels? Because that's what he's referring to. There are numbers of places where Matthew has a verse and Mark won't.

And so there'll be manuscripts that'll put Matthew's verse in where it should be in Mark, if Matthew and Mark were supposed to be photocopies of each other, which they're not. In the woman taken to adultery, and especially the longer ending of Mark, which Reformed doctrines, is it predestination that's dependent upon them?

How is any Reformed doctrine impacted by any of them? I would say none, absolutely positively none. But 40 missing verses contain 854 words. That's more than the prophecy of Obadiah. That's more than the epistle of Jude.