- 00:00
- It wasn't just that they said this reference to the
- 00:12
- Trinity, because when they accepted it, of course it's going to make a problem, because how will you resolve this when it's clear through the
- 00:21
- Bible that God is one? How will you resolve it? Well, the influence here is coming from the government, not from the scholars so much, but the ones who were in the leadership position that the church wanted to do their best to twist things, bend things, compromise, so they could get this position.
- 00:40
- Let's don't go back to being thrown out into the lions, you know, guys, let's work with these people and we become number one, you know, number one in the best condition as a church, you know, and can spread our thing to the world, but we're going to compromise, otherwise we're back out here being eaten by lions and what's the benefit of that?
- 01:00
- So I think that was the mindset. I'm trying to give you an idea based on what information we have available today, but I think that seems logical.
- 01:11
- Once again, I have to confess to a certain level of frustration, given the double standards that we constantly face when dealing with Islamic apologists.
- 01:23
- He just said the best information we have. Reading the most basic introduction to the early church,
- 01:33
- Henry Chadwick's work on the early church, for example, just one paperback would have corrected almost everything that he has said so far.
- 01:43
- I see no evidence whatsoever of any serious study on this gentleman's part and it's very frustrating.
- 01:53
- He said that, you know, the Council of Nicaea accepting the Trinity has now made a problem.
- 02:00
- These bishops came into the Council of Nicaea firmly believing that God is one, but that the oneness of God is a oneness of being, not a oneness of person.
- 02:13
- The question was the relationship of the
- 02:19
- Father to the Son and whether, really for the Eastern churches, their concern was that in the preceding century they had to fight against something called modalism.
- 02:29
- People who were saying Jesus is the Father and the Son and the Spirit and denying the distinction of the persons.
- 02:36
- That was their biggest concern at this point in time. And so, it just shows tremendous misunderstanding of the real issues of the
- 02:46
- Council of Nicaea. And then when he says that this influence comes from the government, again, completely bogus.
- 02:54
- Completely bogus. Again, you can trace this belief, the deity of Christ, from the very earliest writings all the way up to this point in time.
- 03:04
- Ignatius of Antioch, who dies in 107 -108, over 200 years earlier, refers to Jesus Christ as God over and over again in his genuine epistles.
- 03:18
- And so, to say that the government was putting this upon the church or bringing this into the church, completely untrue.
- 03:26
- Has no basis whatsoever. That's the kind of material that's being presented here.
- 03:35
- Eddie, you can't say it that way because people didn't have Bibles. It wasn't until the time of Gutenberg, when he produced that press and started running
- 03:45
- Bibles off, that a common person could even have access. And also, it was illegal, even up until 1511, it was forbidden for anyone to translate the
- 04:01
- Bible to the English language. Even up to the time of 1511, when
- 04:07
- William Tyndale produced his whole entire Bible in English.
- 04:14
- The host had asked the question, what would someone do if they wanted to worship the one true
- 04:19
- God? This is in the context of the Council of Nicaea. And somehow we leap from the
- 04:25
- Council of Nicaea in 325, 1200 years down the road to the 1500s, and translating the
- 04:31
- Bible into the English language. More people had Bibles than you might imagine.
- 04:37
- Christians actually would hand copy things. Long before Gutenberg's press, that's why we have so many manuscripts in the
- 04:45
- New Testament. And clearly, during what would be called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, there was a great decline in literacy.
- 04:55
- But the question that the man asked was never answered by Eusephestus at all.
- 05:00
- By the way, he says that Tyndale produces his translation in 1511.
- 05:07
- Tyndale just entered school in 1511, actually his translation came out in 1526, and he was executed in 1536.
- 05:17
- So once again, these issues of numbers keep coming up. And next we're going to hear something that honestly, even though I've written a book on the
- 05:26
- King James only issue, and have debated King James only advocates, and thought
- 05:32
- I had heard everything there was to hear about the King James Bible, I had never heard this one before.
- 05:37
- This one is truly amazing. In 1611, there was a group who actually translated the
- 05:46
- Bible to English again. That's what we call King James Version. But in fact, King James didn't even know they did it till after the fact.
- 05:55
- They wrote a soliloquy in the beginning of it, praising him, worshipping him, calling him
- 06:00
- Lord, even. Hoping that he would accept and not kill them. He never authorized it, although he never killed them either, but he never officially authorized it.
- 06:13
- So they nicknamed it the authorized version. When it came to our country, it was called the
- 06:20
- King James Version. Get it? That's how that works. What can you say to this kind of thing?
- 06:33
- The King James translation was begun by King James.
- 06:41
- Shortly after his ascension to the throne, at the famous Hampton Court meeting in 1604, the
- 06:50
- Hampton Court Conference, which he arranged, he was involved in the establishment of how many people were going to be doing the translations.
- 07:02
- He even gave direct orders as to what words could be translated in certain ways, so as to diminish the influence of the
- 07:14
- Puritans. The translation was done out in the open by the leading scholars with royal money.
- 07:23
- The king was well aware of it from start to finish. You could not possibly come up with a greater assertion of pure fiction than what
- 07:38
- Yusuf Estes just said. I've never heard anything like this in my life.
- 07:44
- Honestly, I haven't. And in talking with some other folks, the only thing I can figure out is that because he's done no reading in Christian history itself, that's clear, that's obvious, he's not read any
- 07:57
- Christian works in the subject, no historical works, anything like that. I have a feeling,
- 08:03
- I could be wrong, but how do people come up with stuff like this? You can't just pull this stuff out of the air.
- 08:09
- So I have a feeling that what happened was at some point in time,
- 08:14
- Yusuf Estes heard the story about what happened with Desiderius Erasmus a century earlier, the
- 08:22
- Dutch humanist scholar, who in producing his Novum Instrumentum, the first edition, recognized, along with his printer
- 08:32
- John Froben, that Cardinal Jimenez had already produced his volumes and was waiting for the
- 08:38
- Vatican's approval. And so they tried to sort of short circuit that by going to press and publishing before Jimenez so that Erasmus' Greek New Testament was the first one to actually be available, was the first one published, though not printed.
- 08:56
- And they dedicated that volume to the Pope to try to get around that particular requirement.
- 09:06
- The only thing I can figure is that he is confusing something that took place in Basel, Switzerland, in a different language, a century earlier, with the seven -year -long translation process that was well -known to people and with the leading scholars of the day in England, in a different language.
- 09:26
- But again, it just marks the kind of utter inaccuracy that Yusuf Estes brings to all of these discussions.
- 09:34
- And I just cannot imagine how many Muslims take his words at face value, because, well, he's a former
- 09:42
- Christian minister. That's why I started this series, saying what if I claim to be a former
- 09:50
- Muslim? And yet I couldn't tell you what shahada meant. I didn't know how many times a day
- 09:56
- Muslims are supposed to pray. I don't know the difference between zakat and salat. And now you see why.
- 10:04
- You know, said Mohammed lived in the ninth century in France. Well, this is the level of accuracy of this kind of presentation, and it is truly amazing.
