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Hello there and welcome to Explain Apologetics. We are in day two of a series of debates we are having on the Texas Receptors versus the critical text. Yesterday, last night to be more precise for those of you living close to the U .S., we had an exciting debate on the longer ending of Mark, where Dr. James White defended the resolution that the longer ending of Mark does not belong in the canon.
It's not canonical. It wasn't written by Mark. And today we'll be going to the second part of the debate, the debates that we had on Ephesians chapter three, verse nine. We are going to skip the introduction.
For those of you who won the introduction, you can go to the first debate to hear both these speakers introduced and the work that they've done. So for this debate, the format will be the same as yesterday.
We'll be having 20 minutes opening statement followed by a 10 minute rebuttal from both sides and a cross examination where we'll begin with Dr. Jeff Riddle cross examining Dr. White. Following that, we have a response and a closing statement of 10 minutes before we get to the Q &A, which is supposed to be 20 minutes.
Yesterday, of course, we had a slightly longer, we had, I believe, 24, 25 minutes Q &A. We'll try and keep it to the 20 minutes. Priorities will be given to the superchats, but today, unlike yesterday, we'll be alternating the questions so that even if they are both superchats for one particular speaker, we'll still alternate between the speakers so that both of them will be able to, yeah, both of them will be able to answer.
And if a speaker says something about another speaker, we'll give the other speaker a chance to respond in the Q &A section. So with that, I'll just introduce the topic, the resolution for this debate.
It's going to be on Efficience 3 .9. As I said, the resolution is the TR or the Texas Receptors Reading of Efficience 3 .9 is original and inspired and should be received as the word of God. Defending that resolution, we have Dr. Jeff Riddle and Dr. Jeff Riddle will be going first for his 10 minute opening statement.
And the time starts whenever you're ready, Dr. Jeff.
Great. Greetings. Once again, I want to express my thanks to Samuel Naysan of Explain Apologetics for his invitation to participate in this two-part debate on the text of scripture. Let me begin as I did in the first debate, for those who may not have listened to that, by noting that I am here representing the confessional text position, also known as the traditional text position or the received text position, the Texas Receptors position.
I believe that the proper text of the Bible is that found in the printed editions of the Old and New Testaments of the Reformation era. Whereas modern critical text, the modern critical text method is based on an enlightenment influenced reconstruction or restoration model.
The confessional text position is based on a pre-critical preservation model. This position, again, is well summarized in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, chapter one, paragraph eight, which affirms that scripture has not only been immediately inspired by God in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek, but it has also been kept pure in all ages by God's singular care and providence.
My view holds that the scriptures were faithfully preserved by God throughout the process of copying and transmission, and with the technological revolution of the invention of the printing press, the true text in God's providence was then firmly fixed in a stable and printed form, which could become the basis for uniform translations of the making of confessions, preaching, teaching, worship, and scholarly study.
John Owen in 1659 expressed this view in an essay in which he wrote, let it be remembered that the vulgar copy we use was the public possession of many generations, that upon the invention of printing, it was in actual authority throughout the world with them that used and understood that language.
And then he says, let that then pass for the standard, which is confessedly, it's right and due. So this debate is not about versions, but about the Greek New Testament text itself. And I will be defending the text of the Reformation, the Textus Receptus, the received text.
This text, again, is an eclectic text. That means it's not taken from any single manuscript, but chosen, it was chosen or selected by scholars who compiled it from the extant witnesses that were available to them.
In this process, God was also keeping his promise to preserve his word. Therefore, we might call their methodology providential eclecticism. Most of the time, the readings and the received text, the traditional texts, are supported by the vast majority of extant manuscripts.
But sometimes the editors recognized an authentic reading from a minority tradition, and they incorporated it into the text. In the opening debate, we looked at a text, the ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20, that is more typical of the received text in that it is one supported by the vast majority of extant witnesses.
Over 99 of the witnesses support the traditional ending of Mark. In this debate, however, we will be examining a much shorter passage, a single verse, Ephesians 3, 9, that is supported in the received text in a few places by only a minority of extant witnesses.
Remember, our approach is not based on a reconstruction model. We do not believe it is possible merely to examine the extant empirical evidence in order to reconstruct the text, but we believe one must also consider the providential work of God in history to preserve his word.
So with that, let's move now to the substance, to Ephesians 3, 9. Our topic is this, resolve the Texas receptus or received text reading of Ephesians 3, 9 is original and inspired and should be received as the word of God.
It's my privilege today to defend this proposition today, this resolution. In our negotiations for this debate, I made the offer that if my opponent would be willing to debate the traditional ending of Mark as a representative of the traditional text that is supported by the majority of tradition, I would be willing to debate a text of his choosing that is supported only by a minority tradition.
There are a handful of these in the received texts that are often discussed, including acts 8 37, where the Ethiopian eunuch makes his confession. I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God or the three heavenly witnesses passage in 1st John 5, 7 and 8.
My opponent chose Ephesians 3, 9, a passage that actually has not been very often discussed, rarely debated upon. And so it's interesting to have this opportunity today. What are the issues in Ephesians 3, 9?
Let me read it to you in an English translation based on the traditional text. Ephesians 3, 9 reads and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ.
Now let me compare that verse in a modern translation. I'll read it. The previous one was from the authorized version. I'll read it now from the English standard version, which is based on the modern critical text.
It reads, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things. When we compare these translations, we discover that there are at least two significant differences.
First, the traditional text reads the fellowship of the mystery, while the modern text reads the plan of the mystery. Second, the traditional text reads at the very end, by Jesus Christ, whereas the modern text omits this phrase altogether.
Of these two variants, the first, the fellowship of the mystery or the plan of the mystery, is an example of a place where the received text follows the minority tradition, the fellowship of the mystery.
The second example, the phrase by Jesus Christ, is more typical of the text's receptus in that it represents the reading of the text that is found in the vast majority of extant manuscripts. The second example is also typical of the modern critical text in that it rejects this reading and it omits it, not because it's not present in the vast number of manuscripts, but because it's missing in some of the so-called earliest witnesses, like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
Most attention has been focused on this verse, on the difference between the TRs, the fellowship of the mystery, which in Greek is hei koinonia to mysterio, and the critical text translation, the plan of the mystery, which is from the underlying Greek, hei oikonomia to mysterio.
Should it be koinonia, fellowship, or oikonomia, plan? When it comes down to it, this question is about one word, koinonia or oikonomia, fellowship or plan? We can immediately see that the Greek words here are very similar in form to one another, and we can see that there might easily have been very early on scribal confusion between these two words, which led to a transcriptional error.
Both are feminine singular nouns ending in iota alpha, I-A. Both have an omicron iota at the very beginning. One has eight letters, the other has nine letters. Every letter in koinonia appears in oikonomia, except for there's an omega in koinonia.
According to my opponent, to accept the received text reading of Ephesians 3 -9 is dangerous. It is irrational. In fact, he has said that to accept the TR reading of this verse would be to embrace an anti-apologetic that would not allow one to do apologetics in the real world.
In it, it is, he writes, an argument without historical or logical content. Well, friends, it's going to be up to you to consider whether my opponent's claims are true, or if they're more than a little bit over the top.
You might even be convinced by listening to this that perhaps it is the modern critical text advocates who pose the greater risk to the undermining of the epistemological foundations of Christianity by undermining the authority and stability of scripture by attacking the received text.
My defense of the traditional reading of Ephesians 3 -9 will focus on three key points, much as the defense of Mark 16, 9 -20 did. We're going to look at the external evidence, we're going to get the internal evidence, and we're going to look at the doctrinal evidence, the doctrinal significance.
So first of all, let's start with the external evidence. And let's look at what are the available early Greek witnesses to Ephesians 3 -9. Let me begin by noting that it's been pointed out most recently in the Myth and Mistakes book edited by Hickson and Gurry that there are many well-meaning apologists who have overstated the number and the significance of the extant manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, that bear witness to the New Testament.
Some people will say, we have 5 ,800 manuscripts, or we have 6 ,000 manuscripts. In that book, one of the authors, Peterson, says it's safer to say we have about 5 ,100 to 5 ,300, and he points out that what is often not stated is that many of these, particularly the earliest ones, are but fragments, just a verse or two, and the vast majority of that 5 ,100, 5 ,300 are very, very late.
In fact, we have very little extant evidence for the New Testament in general, and we have even less for Ephesians 3 -9. Let's look at the external evidence, and when we look at the INTF Lista in Munster for Ephesians 3 -9, it reveals that there are, in fact, only six ancient Greek manuscripts that are before the year 800 that bear witness to Ephesians 3 -9.
They are Papyrus 46, which is dated by them to the 3rd century, they say between 200 and 225. Next is Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus, and Codex De Claro Montanus, and so there are only six manuscripts pre -800 that give us any witness to Ephesians 3 -9, and I will admit to you that all of those read Oikonomia.
All of them support the plan of the mystery. Let me add that there was a very vigorous discussion that took place on my blog, JeffRiddle .net, back in October of last year about P46, and as I and several other people pointed out, when you look at P46, it actually doesn't read Oikonomia, it only reads Kanomia.
The first two letters, the Omicron Iota, have, looks like perhaps been worn off, but we don't know. As it stands now, P46 is not actually an absolutely undisputed witness to Oikonomia, and so that would reduce the number of witnesses from six to five.
Well, what supports the traditional reading? What supports the reading Koinonia? There aren't any manuscripts in the first 800 years that support it, but what evidence do we have? Well, the place we would start with is Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary, 2nd edition, 1994, in which he notes that there are a scattering of late minuscules, as he puts it, that support the reading Koinonia.
Unfortunately, Metzger did not identify that scattering of late minuscules by name or by number, and so we were discussing that. Well, enter onto the scene this anonymous commentator on my blog posting under the name CC.
I later discovered that his name is Luke Carpenter. He is a very sharp young man who is a student at Cedarville University. He gave me permission to share his identity, and Luke discovered and made known to us that actually there's a minuscule, minuscule 2817, that provides a double witness to the reading Koinonia in Ephesians 3 .9.
It's found in the text, and it's also found in a commentary on the same page in 2817. 2817 is dated by the INTF to about the year 1000. It's located in the University Library in Basel, Switzerland, and this may well have been, we don't know for sure, but it may well have been one of the manuscripts that Erasmus consulted in preparing his Greek New Testament of 1516.
In recent weeks, CC, Luke Carpenter, has struck again. He discovered yet another minuscule, 1921, also dated to the 11th century, which appears to bear witness to the Koinonia reading, although some scribe attempted to correct it in green ink and change it to Oikonomia.
So now we have at least two minuscule manuscripts with three references, two in 2817, one in 1921, to Koinonia among the extant Greek manuscripts. Luke and several others have also pointed me in the direction of yet another intriguing discovery.
Although Metzger confidently asserted that the true reading appeared in all patristic quotations, in Book 4, Chapter 5 of his work Against Marcion, Tertullian describes believers as those who are in the fellowship of the mystery.
He uses the phrase in Latin, de societate sacramenti. Later in that same work, in Book 5, Chapter 28, he twice uses the phrase dispensatio sacramenti, the dispensation or plan of the mystery, and in another place he uses the phrase dispensationem sui sacramentum, which is the dispensation of his own mystery or plan.
This may indicate that Tertullian knew both readings in Ephesians 3 .9 or that he used a translation or he had reference to translating the same word by two different Latin terms. Nevertheless, his use of de societate sacramenti raises the real possibility that he knew the received text reading, the fellowship of the mystery.
In Ephesians 3 .9, as referring specifically to fellowship among believers, Tertullian lived from 160 to 225 and he would have written Against Marcion probably around the year 200. So in the first 300 years of Christianity, what do we have?
We have one extant manuscript, P46, that most likely bears witness to the reading oikonomia, but it currently reads konomia, and we have one reference from an early ecclesiastical writer, Tertullian, which seems to bear witness to koinonia.
That's the external evidence. Let's move on secondly to the internal evidence. My opponent has written that the traditional reading, the fellowship of the mystery, makes very little sense in this context, he says, and in fact it distracts from the centrality of the plan and purpose of God, Paul's point, and moves the focus to some kind of fellowship or experience of the mystery of Jews and Gentiles in one body.
So he says it doesn't work internally. Funny, however, that Protestant preachers in many cultures and languages have had absolutely no difficulty over the years in preaching and teaching the traditional text.
Koinonia is a quintessentially Pauline concept. It appears in 13 other verses in the Pauline epistles and Hebrews, and outside of that, the term only appears in four other places in the New Testament, once in Acts and three times in 1 John.
It's a quintessentially Pauline concept, koinonia. It's often used to express a sense of fellowship among the Christian brethren, and so my suggestion is that it fits perfectly well in the context of Ephesians, which is about the bringing together of Gentiles and Jews.
As Paul will say in Ephesians 3 .6, the mystery is that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs and of the same body and partakers of his promise by the gospel. Finally, let's move on to the doctrinal significance.
External evidence, internal evidence, doctrinal significance. Although koinonia is a minority reading in the currently extant Greek witnesses to Ephesians 3 .9, this was the reading that was incorporated into the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament.
It is often pointed out that Erasmus was more interested in his Latin translation than he was in his Greek text. Surely he would have known that the Vulgate actually read like the modern critical text, dispensatio sacramenti, but Erasmus instead chose communio mysterii, and in his Greek text he chose the fellowship of the mystery.
Despite the fact that the complotention polyglot in the same period followed the Vulgate reading, he chose this unique reading. In fact, we could call this, as it was embraced by the later Protestant editors of the Greek New Testament, we could call this the Protestant reading of Ephesians 3 .9.
When Calvin wrote his commentary on Ephesians 3 .9, he wrote, the publication of the gospel is called a fellowship because it is the will of God that his purpose, which had formerly been hidden, shall now be shared by men.
We can be sure that Calvin knew that his text was not the same as the Latin Vulgate. He preferred the fellowship of the gospel in Ephesians 3 .9 as opposed to the plan of the gospel. And so, in conclusion, the external evidence reveals that the reading of the received text is admittedly in a minority tradition, but there are witnesses to it.
The term the fellowship of the mystery is there in Tertullian. It's there in scattered minuscules. The internal evidence tells us that the received text is consistent with Pauline usage, and the doctrinal significance is that this is the Protestant text.
Is this dangerous? Is this irrational? Is it ahistorical? Is it anti-apologetic? No, it's not.
Well, with that, again, sorry to cut you off, Dr. Riddle, but the 20 minutes is up, and I just want to thank Dr. Riddle for that wonderful opening statement. We now go to Dr. James White for his 20-minute opening statement.
Dr. White, the time starts at your first word.
Thank you very much. What this particular text allows us to do is to really recognize the circularity and irrationality of the TR-only position. Dr. Riddle will not use the arguments he used in the last portion of our debate, in this particular portion of our debate.
He cannot because of the fact that the evidence for the reading of Koinonia in Ephesians 3 -9 is almost non-existent, almost non-existent. And so last night, you hear, oh, the overwhelming external evidence.
Today, the overwhelming external evidence is against that reading, and it won't make any difference. And in fact, even if you could not find 2817 or another minuscule that has been cited today, even if they weren't there, it would not matter to Dr. Riddle because this is his standard.
All the rest of this stuff is just, it's wallpaper. It really, really, really does not matter at all. From my side, I want to know what the apostles wrote. So what is the external evidence? There is no evidence whatsoever for a thousand years.
The reference is in Latin. There are no Latin manuscripts that substantiate that. Dr. Riddle just admitted that. He just said what the Latin reading was. So to assume that a passing reference where there's no reference made to Ephesians, no citation given, and that the Greek original would have been Koinonia is pure speculation, just absolutely.
Yesterday, he was talking about speculation on our part. You want speculation? There's speculation right there. There is nothing in the first thousand years that substantiates the reading, the TR. Nothing.
There's nothing. We do have the great unsealed texts. They all say the same thing. And I can put this up on the screen later on if we want to. It is a horrific abuse of history to question the reading of P46.
I've examined P46 in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and P46 is very clear in its reading. Every papyrologist in the world that has ever transcribed it has transcribed it in the same way. Its reading is a certainty.
And so you have the third century papyri, P46, perfectly consistent not only with the later unseals and all other texts of the first millennium, but you have John Chrysostom preaching through Ephesians 3.
What does he talk about? He talks about the dispensation, the plan. There is nothing for a thousand years. And then even after that point in time, 99 or more of all the Greek manuscripts that you hear TR-only people always referring to, the Byzantine text, majority text, whatever it is, they all say the exact same thing.
They say the same thing. So we have more than the exact reverse in this situation that we have of Mark 16. So who's being consistent? I want to know what the apostles wrote. And so I am going to examine that material, and I'm going to examine each reading based upon internal evidence, external evidence, manuscripts.
And therefore, last night, earliest manuscripts don't have it. All these other different endings, all the statements from Jerome, Eusebius, where are the statements from anyone the first thousand years talking about this?
Dr. Riddle talked a lot about, well, for 300 years, there's no disputation. How about for over a thousand years, there's no disputation? If his argument last night was valid, why isn't my argument today that for a thousand years, there's no disputation, three times more powerful?
The reason is TR-onlyism is not a textual critical position. It is not something to where you're taking manuscripts and creating a text that represents what the apostles wrote. You already have your conclusions.
And so you use whatever form of argumentation you want. Now, for example, 2817 was cited, a Katina manuscript, it's not even a free-flowing manuscript, that is in Switzerland, may have been utilized by Erasmus in the production of his text.
Only a few verses later, or is it earlier? I was looking at it just a couple days ago, earlier or later, that manuscript does not have an article that the TR has. Should we change the TR? Of course not.
That manuscript's testimony is irrelevant to the actual readings of the TR. The only reason 2817 has even been dragged into the light of day is because you're defending an already established text. And so in reality, there's no way to debate this position because there is a disavowal on the part of the other side of using any kind of consistent historical argumentation or analysis.
You can point out that Erasmus, over and over again, in his written works as he talked about these things, talked about the fact that he would look at a textual variant and he would go, well, I'm going to put this, it could be that, I leave it up to the reader.
He plainly does not see himself as being providentially guided, providential eclecticism, whatever that means. Since eclecticism talks about making decisions, evidently Erasmus, a Roman Catholic priest, is being providentially guided as to the selections that he makes, except where Stephanus Urbeza changed it later on and that becomes adopted by Scrivener.
This is the position that's being presented, but there's no way to debate it because there is no consistency in it outside of just simply saying, this is our text, it's our final authority. If there were a set of principles, see, we could have a debate.
Well, we wouldn't be having debate. With any Byzantine priority person, majority text person, there would be the only people on the planet that would defend the reading of Koinonia in Ephesians 3 .9, are TR only and King James only as people.
They're the only people. All the people that they would work with in defending the longer ending of Mark or the Percipate adultery, leave them at this point and go, no, no, you're no longer dealing with history at this point.
You're no longer dealing with the reality of how it is that the Texas Receptus came into existence in the first place. Instead, they would say, no, obviously it's the ancient reading. It's the medieval reading.
It's the reading of all of the manuscript tradition. It's the reading of the patristics. Oh, and do I really need to mention in passing? It's the reading of every single translational version in all of history.
There isn't any question on this. It is indefensible to try to say that the apostolic reading that when Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, his initial word was Koinonia because that would mean that you have zero evidence of any Christian for a thousand years that had ever seen that reading.
And you have tiny bit of evidence that for the next 500 years, anyone had seen that reading. The vast majority of others, including all those reading the Latin Vulgate, have something completely different.
How is this keeping God's word pure in the way it's being used by tier only us throughout every age? How does that work? It doesn't work. That's the point. That's the issue. And so Dr. Riddle is right.
I've called this dangerous. It is dangerous, for example, to diminish the value, the historical value, and the textual value of the papyri as Dr. Riddle has done over and over and over again. He calls them the vaunted papyri.
And he made reference to it. Have you noticed? I'm not sure if anyone's noticed this. Once in passing, and I think mistakenly yesterday, Dr. Riddle actually used my name. But otherwise, I'm just the opponent or a popular internet apologist in his writing.
And it's in that very same context that it will talk about the vaunted papyri. Because as an apologist who actually debates other perspectives, I am very often pointed to the primitive witness of the papyri and how important that is in refuting the accusations made by world religions or by cults within what's called Christianity, that there was this early alteration of the text, insertions of doctrines, taking out of doctrines and things like that.
It is dangerous when you not only misrepresent, grossly misrepresent, what is in the papyri itself. I can demonstrate that. I've done that. I did almost an hour on that subject on the Dividing Line broadcast, where I brought up the papyri.
And I can do it right here. We can do it during the rebuttal if it is necessary to do so. And demonstrated that it is not koinonia, it is konomia, and that the first two letters were at the end of the previous line.
There is a very clear margin in P46. And if Omicron Iota was not there in the margin, that would be a huge cutting into the margin. No one, I do not know of anyone outside of the TR Only group of any religion, any perspective on the planet that has made this argument.
So why are they making this argument? Because they have to. Because they have to. Because this is not a textual critical position. If all modern printed text, digital text, et cetera, et cetera, were wiped out, and we had to start over again, and we had to create from the manuscript evidence a printed edition of the Greek New Testament, which side could do so?
I submit to you that despite all the differences that exist within the academy, both believers and unbelievers, there are believers and unbelievers within the academy. There's no question about it. Let's just talk about believing textual critical scholars.
Would we be able to reproduce the modern eclectic text that we have today, given the principles that we have laid out? Yes, we would. Yes, we would. There's no question about that. Now, will there be differences?
Well, you look at the Tyndale Greek New Testament. The Tyndale Greek New Testament, the reading has to appear in the first 500 years, okay? And so others would say, no, there might be some readings from the second half of the first millennium that need to be considered in this way, and so on and so forth.
And so there might be small differences. But one thing is absolutely positively certain beyond question. You could never reproduce the Textus Receptus from the current textual data. It would be impossible.
Because of the unique history of that particular document, and the fact that this is not a Greek New Testament. This is a Greek New Testament based upon the choices made by the King James translators, which was based upon the printed editions of the Greek New Testament that came before that.
Specifically, the works of Erasmus, the works of Stephanus, and the works of Beza. Here is Stephanus's 1550 Greek New Testament. It is not identical to this. And what's interesting is, it even has variant readings in the margins, some of which are accurate, some of which are not.
Beza misunderstood some of them. We could get into all those things. The point is, the TR has a history. And that history has created inconsistencies. Ephesians 3 .9 is one of those inconsistencies. Everyone must need to understand that when we hold up a modern Greek New Testament with all of that information, all those manuscripts, where they're found, what library they're in, and now we can actually go online.
It's interesting. People are ransacking these manuscripts. How can they do that? There has never been a time in history, today, we've only been able to do what's being done in looking for these manuscripts for the past 10 years.
For the past 10 years. And having collations of manuscripts, listings of manuscripts, what those manuscripts contain, what they read, that's only existed for 50, 60, 70 years. So Erasmus could not possibly know what the entire manuscript tradition read at Ephesians 3 .9.
That's why it is so anachronistic and so dishonest to try to say, well, they would have said this because they did not have access to the information that we have today. They just did not have it. And it's hard for modern people to recognize that we are living in a very unique age that allows us to see things and to have information that no one before us had.
Now, Dr. Riddle has said, well, he's just over the top saying this is dangerous. Let me tell you why it's dangerous. Not only does it diminish the witness of the first thousand years of the papyri and the great unseals and so on and so forth.
It is indefensible apologetically. Because what it's saying is everybody just needs to start here. This is just where I start. And I'm not going to worry about its history. I'm not going to worry about what Erasmus said.
I'm not going to worry about what manuscripts he had. I'm not going to worry about Stephanos. I'm not going to worry about the fact that, for example, Erasmus was so unconcerned with the specifics of his Greek text that when he did his second edition, he's told his parents, go get that Alden version that has come out since I did mine and fix Revelation.
He didn't even want to deal with Revelation. He had such a low view of it. And just make mine fit what they did with theirs. And he thought that that would fix everything. And he never bothered to check.
The problem was they had used his first edition. And so the errors, the many errors that he knew were in his edition of Revelation. Revelation 16 .5 would probably be one of them. Well, it couldn't be one because he read it correctly.
So it wouldn't be 16 .5. 14 .1 probably be the one. Beza changed that one later on. He didn't care. He didn't care. It was like, just go do that. And they went and got it and said, well, it all says the same thing.
And so for hundreds of years, the exact same readings exist that go against all known manuscripts. And so this has a history. We have to recognize that history. But once you elevate it to the autograph, and that's what Dr. Riddle has done.
This is the autograph. This is what the apostles wrote. So what do you do when this disagrees with the Greek manuscripts? Well, you adopt whatever argument has to be adopted. So what you've listened to already in these two debates, one set of argumentations, the long ending remark, now completely different.
If Dr. Riddle followed his own arguments from last night, he would have to read Oikonomia at Ephesians 3 .9. He doesn't because these arguments don't really matter. The manuscripts don't really matter to this perspective at all because this has been removed from history.
And so why is that dangerous? Once this becomes removed from history, you can no longer defend it against any other position. So the Muslim comes along, and that's what the Muslim has done with the Quran.
The person who believes the Uthmanic version of the Quran is exactly the 1924 Cairo edition that a lot of people in the West have, that Arabic Quran, that's the autograph. And so if there's variance, then you use whatever arguments you need to use to deal with the variant because this is the autograph.
That's what the believing Mormon does, the Book of Mormon. Oh, there's been changes. Well, but, you know, we've got a prophet. This is what God's given to us, and so we'll defend it any way we need to defend it.
And if we as Christians have done the same thing, said, well, there it is, there's the autograph, then we've removed our text from history. And folks, here's the problem. God gave us the scriptures in history, in history.
The New Testament's use of the Old Testament recognizes that God gave us that scripture in history. So we are not following in the apostles' footsteps. When we go, oh, no, no, we need to have an absolute, there are no footnotes.
Yeah, but the apostles quoted variant readings from the Greek Septuagint. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. We need to have no marginal notes, some manuscripts say this. Yeah, it was in the King James Version, but no, we need to have something that's, boom, just no questions to be asked about it.
That's what we're seeing right here. And the harder we push, Dr. Riddle has to try to be consistent. So he has to be consistently inconsistent. So the only consistent position, honestly, for the TR only person here is to say, God providentially guided Erasmus to that one manuscript and therefore restored the reading, which is what Paul originally wrote, but which we have no evidence of for over a thousand years, it was a re-inspiration.
That's the consistent position to take. That is the consistent position to take. To try to say, well, you know, there's this, you know, there's one manuscript over there and maybe Tertullian in Latin was actually referring, but we don't really know.
And he didn't say, that is not the kind of argumentation that would have been accepted last night on my part, yet it's now being presented by Dr. Riddle. So what do we see here? Why is this dangerous?
Because it is the end of meaningful apologetical defense of the New Testament or criticism of the perspective of anyone else. It diminishes what God has given to us. The great treasure God has given to us in these early manuscripts that we now have right at the very time the people like Bart Ehrman and others are raising such skepticism.
And it is circular. It is not to be laid at the feet of the framers of the Westminster Confession of the London Baptist Confession of Faith. That is not what they were teaching. That is a misrepresentation of their perspective.
And.
That's why this is so important. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Dr. White, for that opening statement. You stopped seven seconds short of your 20 minutes. So that with that, ladies and gentlemen, we have passed the opening statements from both speakers.
We will now go to the rebuttal periods. And Dr. Jeff Riddle, you would have 10 minutes to make a rebuttal against Dr. James White's opening statement. Your 10 minutes starts at your first words. All right.
Thank you for this.
Opportunity to respond. The traditional text position, confessional text position is not a reconstruction model. Why can't we do reconstruction? Because we don't have as many manuscripts as would be necessary to do a reconstruction.
And we don't have the ability to use modern scientific criticism to reconstruct the text. My opponent has suggested if we wiped out all the manuscripts, they couldn't reproduce the text. But listen, you've had the extant manuscripts for all these years, and we're now on Nestle Elan 28th edition, and we'll soon have a 29th edition.
And as he pointed out, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament has Mark 16, 9 through 20 without brackets. The NA28 has it with brackets. The modern scientific method has failed to reconstruct the text.
The more winsome alternative is to have the text that is stable, that is fixed. The text that was affirmed within history providentially at the most significant time, a time of revival, a time of reformation.
And so that's the text that we prefer. Again, there's not enough extant evidence. There are 139 papyri in existence. Most of them are fragmentary. There are only six witnesses to Ephesians 3, 9 pre -800.
There is not enough extant evidence in order to do a scientific reconstruction of the text. Why don't we have very many texts? God in his providence has allowed this. We know that one reason why we don't have many texts is because in early persecution, many manuscripts were destroyed.
In the Diocletian persecution, there were probably hundreds, thousands of manuscripts that were burned. That's why we have these big gaps in the early years that make the possibility of reconstruction impossible.
This is why modern scholars who are using postmodern text criticism have completely given up on the idea of reconstructing the original. Instead, they'll only talk about now trying to reconstruct the initial text that existed maybe around the year 300.
The only way to hold to a text that is stable, that will be a foundation for the preaching and teaching of the text in history. The reading, the fellowship of the mystery was the one that was affirmed at the time of the reformation.
Isn't that historically and providentially significant? Well, we could talk a little bit about the manuscripts and how did Erasmus, and not just Erasmus, he referred to Erasmus as a Roman Catholic scholar.
Well, everyone was Roman Catholic in 1516 in Europe. The reformation didn't start until 1517. What's significant for us is that the Protestant scholars picked this up. Stephanus, the Elseviers, Beza, and they were the ones who embraced these traditional readings.
It's very likely that Erasmus, and Stephanus, and Beza had access to manuscripts that we no longer have access to. There's a very interesting chapter, again, in the Myth and Mistakes book that recently came out, in which the author talks about the number of manuscripts that have been lost just among the manuscripts that are listed in Munster.
So he says, for example, that there were manuscripts that were lost through natural causes such as fires, floods, and insects. There were some that were lost by accident. There were some illegal selling of them.
He says manuscripts 1257 and 1259 from a school in Izmir in Turkey are listed as burnt. Manuscripts like 241 and 2039 were damaged or destroyed in the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II. The author of that article says numerous early manuscripts such as 062 cataloged in Damascus, Syria are listed as owner unknown.
There are 136 manuscripts that are listed among those manuscripts in Munster that are besitzer unbekannt, or owner unknown. They had access to many manuscripts that we likely do not have access to, and so we don't know all the manuscripts that in God's providence that those early men, whether it was Erasmus or the later Protestant editors, had access to.
In the end, we can only be sure that in the providence of God, the reading, the fellowship of the mystery was that which was preserved. It was the Greek text that became the basis for the Protestant translations of Europe that brought the Reformed faith to the masses.
It was the text studied, taught, and preached in the Reformation and post Reformation eras, and it remains the preferred text of Scripture that is embraced by countless thousands of faithful churches and Christians today.
Let's talk a little bit about Papyri 46, which has become a sort of a bone of contention. This papyri is one of the Chester Beatty papyri. Now take note of this. It wasn't published until 1933. It wasn't published until 1933.
In fact, this papyrus did not factor into the modern critical text deciding to jettison koinonia and embrace oikonomia. That was done in the 19th century. Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament came out in 1881, 50 years before P46 was ever discovered.
The key factor was not the discovery of papyri. It was the weight that was given to the two unsealed manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and so we have to acknowledge this. This hasn't come about because of reconstruction of the papyri.
In fact, Stanley Porter, in his book How We Got the New Testament, calls attention to, quote, the minimal role that the papyri have played in the development of the critical text, end quote, page 73. My opponent's beef is with Stanley Porter, not with me, when it comes to my saying what others agree, that the papyri haven't greatly affected the modern critical text.
Let me talk a little bit about method. We have already conceded that in the case of Ephesians 3 -9, unlike that of the ending of Mark, the received reading is based on a minority tradition. The textus receptus is an eclectic text.
It doesn't depend on a single manuscript. So, for example, when he says, well, we've got this passage in 2817 that doesn't have an article, it's an eclectic text. It's not dependent upon any single manuscript, and so it's been an old adage of text criticism, reasoned eclecticism, that manuscripts are to be weighed, not counted, that sometimes later ones are better than earlier ones.
J .K. Eliot, a leading advocate of what is known as thoroughgoing eclecticism, has written this. He says, sometimes the correct original text may be found in an occasional minuscule or unique majuscule.
He says the text can be found in a single minuscule manuscript. It can be found in a single majuscule manuscript. Peter Gurry says it only takes one text. Well, we're simply taking that principle that's used in reasoned eclecticism and applying it in providential eclecticism.
The editors of the Nessalon 28th edition certainly used this. Look at 2 Peter 3 .10. Using the CBGM, they have come up with a reading in 2 Peter 3 .10 that inserts the negative Greek particle uc that is supported by no extant Greek manuscripts.
Look at Revelation 5 .9 in the Nessalon 28th edition. Instead of reading redeemed to God us as in the majority text, which includes Sinaiticus, or redeem us to God as appeared in the church fathers Hippolytus and Cyprian, the NA28 reads simply redeem to God based on a reading found in one manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus.
So, eclecticism in the modern critical text is used sometimes to select a reading supported only by one manuscript, or in 2 Peter 3 .10's case, by no manuscripts. Why then would someone howl against us because we prefer a reading that has support only in a minority tradition?
I might add that my opponent has not addressed yet the other textual variation, the very end of the passage by Jesus Christ. He's told us that we should go with the majority of extant manuscripts, but he doesn't follow the majority in Ephesians 3 .9 by including by Jesus Christ.
And by the way, when it comes to the ending of Mark, he bases his beliefs on the witness basically of two manuscripts. He doesn't go with the majority there. Is he a majority text advocate? I would say that he's using an inconsistent methodology.
And again, let me just close, ask you one more time. Is accepting fellowship of the mystery illogical, irrational? I don't think it is. Thank you. On the dot there,.
Dr. Jeff Riddle, thank you for that rebuttal. We now go to Dr. James White for his 10-minute rebuttal.
Time starts when he starts speaking. I'm fairly astounded that Dr. Riddle just said I was using majority text position. Anyone who has read the King James Only Controversy knows I'm not a majority text advocate.
I have never argued that in this debate, presented that in this debate, I've been very, very consistent in methodology. I would simply like to point out the number of, well, there were a number of errors of what was just mentioned.
For example, I mentioned the rest of this is Roman Catholic priest. I didn't say it was Roman Catholic scholars. It was Roman Catholic priest. He was. He wrote a book in defense of transubstantiation.
That just happens to be the reality. Let's look at a couple of things that were brought up. For example, well, you have multiple Greek New Testaments. Yes, we do, because we want to continue the study of the text.
We want to continue to allow for the information that's coming in. And instead, we're told that we want to have the more winsome alternative is to have a stable text, which, of course, is exactly the argument that was used against Erasmus when Erasmus dared to touch the Latin Vulgate.
It was the exact argument that was used when Jerome translated the Latin Vulgate in the first place at the beginning of the fifth century, because that was replacing the Greek Septuagint. Again, this is the motivation of TR-onlyism.
It's the motivation of King James-onlyism. We don't want to have any footnotes. We don't want to worry about any new manuscripts that are found. We don't want to have to continue doing that work. There is no reason from the TR-only position to even be concerned about manuscripts.
There really isn't. The only reason would be, well, we can use it to defend the TR reading, except we're not really defending the TR reading because we're not reconstructing anything. We have our providentially preserved text, and it doesn't have any connection with history.
So there's the problem. But I hope you all heard the real danger in what we just heard. I hope every Christian recognizes the danger in what Dr. Riddle just said. Dr. Riddle just exercised extreme skepticism, extreme skepticism from his perspective.
What he just said, he said we do not have enough manuscripts to reconstruct the text. We have more manuscripts of the Greek New Testament than any work of antiquity, which means Dr. Riddle has just told us we can know nothing about the ancient world.
We can't reconstruct anything. We can't know anything about the ancient world. That's the level of skepticism that was just promoted by someone who is then saying, but we can take 12 to 15 manuscripts at the end of that process, 1 ,500 years later, that were not being compared with one another, put them through a process of three different individuals who don't have much in the way, well, two of them didn't have any communication with the third, and what comes out the other end then gets run through an English translation process at the beginning of the 17th century, and then you translate that back into Greek, there's the autograph.
That's what we were just told. We can't reconstruct anything in history, but that's how you get the autograph. Follow the logic there. That is indefensible, utterly indefensible, and it's dangerous. That level skepticism is absolutely dangerous.
I'm glad there's a 29th edition of the Nessean coming out. That is a good thing, and that's because it has all sorts of information at the bottom of the page that allows you to make decisions and more information than any generation before us has ever had, and I am thankful for that.
Christians are open about their texts. Christians are not the people who go, hey, you just, we tell you. That's what Sixtus did. Remember Pope Sixtus? Pope Sixtus came along and said, the Vulgate is infallible, and I as the Vicar of Christ will provide you with the providentially preserved Vulgate.
It lasted a couple years, had a bunch of errors in it, and was sort of just put away quietly after Sixtus, that particular Sixtus, died. People have done that down through the ages. The Septuagint was viewed that way.
The Vulgate was viewed that way. That kind of authoritative establishment of a fixed text is nothing new. That's what Uthman did with the Quran. Hey, here's the aversion, burn anything else you have. That's what even the Muslim sources say took place.
We Christians don't have that. God gave us a text in history. He transmitted it through history, and in Ephesians 3 -9, we know what every Christian for a thousand years was reading at that point, and that at least 99 .9 of all Christians after that point read, all the way up to the point where Erasmus, who did complain, by the way, historically, he moved to Basel, Switzerland to do this work, thought that the library there would have all the manuscripts he could want, and they didn't, and he was very disappointed in the range and quality of manuscripts that were available, but he had to get to it.
So maybe he got hold of 2817. That's how this reading came into existence, but to then turn around and decide that the church for 1 ,500 years had had it all wrong, is to turn what we say in the London Baptist Confession of Faith on its head.
How can you actually look at people and say, yes, we believe that it's been kept pure in every age. However, at this point, we can only give you this particular manuscript for a thousand years, and then it was just mentioned, and I think this is extremely important, when it talked about the Reformation is the most significant time, the most significant time.
Well, look, I've been teaching church history since the 90s, and the Reformation is a fantastic period. It's wonderful, but to make it the most significant time so that some text that comes out of it becomes the standard is to fundamentally, fundamentally deny the importance of so many more important things.
For example, isn't it more important to know who Jesus is first? Isn't that foundational to what we have in the Reformation? And so isn't the text that would have been used at the Council of Nicaea absolutely central?
What text did they have? There is zero evidence, zero evidence whatsoever that they had the reading of the TR at the Council of Nicaea. And so how do you just dismiss the ecumenical councils? How do you dismiss the Christological controversies?
How do you dismiss Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism? Why does nobody today even know what those things are? Because they have been banished, but they were very, very dangerous teachings at the time that would have fundamentally destroyed the foundation upon which you could even understand justification by faith.
So to say, so to promote skepticism, to say, ah, those papyri, they don't mean anything. Look, folks, when P75 and Vaticanus joined together, that gives us the reading of no later than 125 AD. Did Erasmus have anything like that?
Nope, he didn't. That's insignificant. That doesn't matter. Of course it does. It's vitally important, vitally important. And so to diminish the importance of the first thousand years of the church and to say, well, what they had doesn't matter.
Reformation's a more important thing. We want to have a winsome text. We want to have a stable text. We want to have something where there's no questions, where we don't have any recognition of the history that gave us our text.
I get it. The King James onlyists are that way. The TR onlyists are that way. The Muslims are that way with the Quran. The Mormons are that way with the Book of Mormon. And I'm sure there's a bunch of other books we could throw in there where everybody let's not worry about history.
Let's not have anything in the margins. By the way, I want to mention, because it keeps getting thrown out, 2 Peter 3 .10. I reject it. The vast majority of people I know reject it. But there's still at least one versional manuscript, one translational manuscript in the first thousand years that reads the way that they would suggest it be read.
There's none of that for Ephesians 3 .9. None of that. So let's keep that in mind. And then we have, well, they may have had manuscripts we don't have. Why should we believe that the manuscripts they had that we don't have read differently than manuscripts we continue to have and that we've discovered that existed for a thousand years before them?
See how that's being used? Well, they may have had manuscripts, and that means they might have had readings in them that we want to have in there. Very, very, very dangerous grounds to be standing on.
What have we seen? If you're TR only, you'll use whatever argument substantiates the TR. No consistency required in the arguments whatsoever. That is indefensible. That is not how Christian people should be arguing, and that is why TR-only-ism must be rejected.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you for that, Dr. James White and Dr. Jeff Riddle. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we have crossed the opening statements and the rebuttal period, and now we'll be headed towards the cross-examination.
But before we do go there, I need to remind you that for the question, the Q &A period that will be happening after the response and closing statements of both speakers, you can start submitting your questions now.
I know some of you have already, but it's always best to wait till after the cross-examination so that you've had enough time to hear both sides. Otherwise, they may have already answered your questions in the cross-examination.
Now, you can submit questions by either putting the name of the speaker that your question is addressed to, in all caps, or the initial. Please do not send questions to both because we have limited time, only 20 minutes.
So, send your questions to one particular person, one particular speaker. Put the initials or the names in front so that our team will be able to pick them up and send them to me. And also, do remember that priority will be given to the Super Chat.
So, with that, ladies and gentlemen, we go to the cross-examination. We begin with Dr. Jeff Riddle questioning Dr. James White. He will only be raising questions, and Dr. James White will be answering without dodging, deflecting, or answering with a question.
We also stated before the debate that the one cross-examining will give the other person sufficient time to answer the question and not unfairly interrupt in between. With that, Dr.
Jeff Riddle, your 10 minutes starts now. Okay. So, yesterday, you noted in our debate that if there were papyri discovered which contained Mark 16, 9 through 20, then you would embrace it. And I assume that you would say the same for Ephesians 3, 9.
If there were a cache of documents, early documents that supported the traditional reading that was uncovered, you would embrace it. So, my question is, does this mean that you are ultimately not completely sure about whether or not it is right to reject the authenticity of the received text?
I don't know how anyone could make that connection. I'll be perfectly honest with you, because there are so many category problems there. When I say that I will follow the evidence and that I'm open to new evidence, I'm placing myself together with all Christians down to the ages, because that's what every single Christian who wrote about the text of Scripture for a thousand years, that's what they had to do.
That was what everybody had to do before a printing press. So, I'm just simply in the great tradition of the church in dealing with the manuscripts that God provides to us at that point in time, always wanting to know what the apostles wrote.
That has nothing to do with saying, well, yeah, I suppose it might be right, because it has nothing. The Textus Receptus is a Greek text created from an English translation based upon printed Greek.
Text 1 ,600 years after the apostles. But based on your method, if there were a discovery of ancient documents that most scholars agreed what makes this the earliest reading, you would be willing to change your position on any text within the New Testament based on evidence that might be uncovered.
Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So, does that mean, or can I ask, is there any text in the New Testament about which you have.
100 certainty, or is every text up for grabs? I'm sorry, I can't allow that complete misrepresentation of the entire system of textual analysis. Well, it's a false question. Dr. Riddle, it's a false question, and I will demonstrate why it's a false question.
You have just presented the idea that either you have an absolute stable text that you can never examine, or you don't know anything whatsoever. And everyone who works in the field knows that that's absurd.
Even Bart Ehrman, even Bart Ehrman, the skeptic, recognizes that the vast majority of the text in the New Testament is already established, and as he puts it, we're just tinkering around with a few particulars.
Even he recognizes that. So, you must, as a Christian scholar, recognize that what you and I are debating about is a tiny percentage of the New Testament.
Let's move on, because let's move on to some other things. But I will finish this statement.
The vast majority of the text of the New Testament is absolutely without question.
So, which parts are without question? Can you tell me? The vast majority of the text, sir.
Anyone who actually analyzes textual variation with regularity recognizes that the vast majority of words do not have any variation whatsoever. You look at the book of Hebrews, wonderfully transmitted over time.
You can look at entire sections where there's hardly any variations to be found whatsoever. So, there is absolutely no reason to believe that there's going to be any reason to question those things in the future.
Absolutely none.
Would you say it's true that if one were to say, you know, based on past experience, there will not be fantastical discoveries, but your method theoretically makes it possible, hypothetically, your method makes it possible that there can be discoveries that would change any verse within the New Testament based on evidence that might be uncovered?
No, I didn't say that. Actually, the reality is the discovery of papyri have shed light upon variations that were already known. And so, there might be light shed upon Mark 1 -1. I'd love to find a papyri that has the beginning of Mark.
That would be fine, because there's a variant, it would shed light upon that. But the idea of removing chapters or completely, no, that's not possible. That's not possible in light of the widespread distribution of the text in the New Testament.
That's just not a possibility. And I do not know of anyone.
So hyper skeptical as to even suggest it. You said last night, you know, you talked about the fact that the long range of Mark and the Prick of Adultery are the two longest ones, and you said the other ones are just a word here and there, a verse here and there and so forth.
But can't we agree that there actually are a number of very significant variations beyond the ending of Mark and the Prick of Adultery? And wouldn't you agree that the establishment of the text of Scripture is very important doctrinally with respect to the canon, with respect to the sufficiency of Scripture, with respect to preservation?
Isn't the study of the text actually highly charged and very doctrinally significant for.
The church? Except that every single thing you just mentioned are in separate categories, and serious study of those things recognizes the separateness of those categories. You keep conflating those things together.
You conflate canon with text, not recognizing the fundamental differences that exist between them. You just talked about sufficiency of Scripture. You conflate that together in with textual criticism, and it is my opinion that careful scholars do not do that.
But we might have a logical dispute about that because I believe canon.
And text are not in two different categories, but they're in the same category. Let me go on and ask you some other questions. You've attacked the Texas receptance of Ephesians 3 -9 because it is based on a minority tradition, which we admit.
We admit that. But in the previous debate, you rejected the traditional ending of Mark based on a minority witness to extant manuscripts over against 99 of the extant evidence. Are you being inconsistent when you criticize the TR.
Position? Obviously not. And I hope everybody can see that the very asking of the question is really problematic. It's not just two, it's three. I don't know why you ignore 304, but it's a minuscule that is more important than 2817 is.
But it doesn't have it either. You just keep ignoring it and say there's only two. There's not only two. There's three. So let's make sure that third one's there. What are the first two? The earliest manuscripts we have.
Are they supported by other evidence, transversal evidence? They are. Were there people like Jerome and Eusebius who likewise were? They are. Show me anything like this regarding 2817. There's nothing, absolutely nothing.
So I am being very consistent, very clear.
Okay. Let's move on to your comments about meaningful apologetics. Do you really think that a person is not able to do meaningful apologetics in the real world who embraces the traditional text? What about people like my friend, Pouyon Mershai, who's a pastor in England, who has a ministry to Persian speaking people and who confidently holds to the traditional text?
Do you think that my friend is unable to do meaningful ministry because he holds to the traditional text? And in that case, could you be a modern text onlyist?
Let's just let Dr. Riddle finish the question. Yeah, go ahead, Dr. Riddle.
Anyway, in that case, granted, it's a collection of questions. We could take them one by one. Sorry to overload them. And then the final point would be, does that make you a modern critical text onlyist or an enlightenment text onlyist?
The last question, I think,.
Is difficult to address because it's difficult for me to take it seriously, but I'll answer the first two very, very clearly. Yes, I am saying that the gentleman you mentioned would be easily refuted by Islamic apologists if he attempted to utilize that methodology while at the same time seeking to criticize the methodology the Muslims use in substantiating the text of the Quran.
Yes, because you're both making the same presuppositions. So yes, in that context, there is going to be a severe problem. And when I say meaningful apologetics, I mean that as a Christian that is truthful, consistent, not able to be refuted.
And so yes, I am saying that if you make the same presuppositions that are used to defend the Uthmanic recension of the Quran by establishing the TR as the final text, you will not be able to meaningfully engage in Islamic apologetics on that subject.
No question.
About it. Let me ask a related question. My time's about to run out. Do you ever think that perhaps Muslim apologists may be eager to invite you to enter into debates and discussions with them because they see your teaching is actually confirming their belief that the Bible is.
Corrupt in its transmission? Yes, of course, because they're wrong about that. And then when we debate it, I'm able to demonstrate to them the error of their assumptions because they're making the exact same erroneous assumptions that you are.
Right. With that, ladies and gentlemen,.
We've come to the end of Dr. Riddle's cross-examination. We now go to Dr. White, who will cross-examine Dr. Riddle. Once again, I'll just ask both speakers to allow the one question to control the time and to finish the question, and the person answering will answer without dodging, deflecting.
And with that, Dr. James White, your 10 minutes starts right now.
Dr. Riddle, you quoted John Owen saying the vulgar copy we use was the public possession of many generations. Does this mean, sir, if you believe what Owen said, that you should adopt the ancient reading of Ephesians 3 .9, which was the public possession of every generation up to the 15th.
Century? Well, one of the questions about this is that by keeping the word pure in all ages doesn't mean that the traditional text was ubiquitously available. Right now, this is why we can't reconstruct the manuscripts.
If we look at the ending of Mark, for example, as we pointed out, there are no extant manuscripts from the first 300 years. The earliest we have are the Patristic citations. With respect to Ephesians 3 .9, in the first 225 years of the Christian movement, we have no extant witness to Ephesians 3 .9 until we have P46, which is David 200.
And we only have 225. And we only have six extant manuscripts pre -800. So, I think when he said that he was depending upon the vulgar copies, he was talking about the copies that were traditionally used, the Bible as it was understood, as it had been preached and as it had been taught.
And as those Protestant scholars of the Reformation era, when there was a providential convergence of circumstances, there was the invention of the printing press, there was the fall of Constantinople, there were manuscripts that were coming into Western Europe.
Dr. Riddle, you're going on.
Way, way too long. He had a context. He said the vulgar copy we use was the public possession of many generations. Is not Oikonomia the public possession of many generations up to 1 ,000 and after 1 ,000?
Was it not the reading of the Greek and the Latin manuscripts in the public possession,.
Yes or no? Well, we have evidence that it was used, yes. We have evidence that it was used. We have six copies that are from the first 800 years of early Christianity that say that it was, and we have a handful of references.
There's a big difference with this passage. We're talking about one verse as opposed to Mark 16, 9 through 20, 12 verses. And we're talking about really one word and one prepositional phrase. And so it's unsurprising that we have less information in general about this.
I mean, you chose the passage. We could have dealt with, you know, Acts 8, 37 or something more significant, but we're dealing with are substantial. They're all significant. Every word in the scriptures is significant, but we're talking about a very, you know, we're talking about a word here.
And so what was affirmed providentially by God was that the reading, the fellowship of the ministry and Owen would have agreed with this was that reading, which had been the public possession of God's people that was there in the copy.
Okay. So even though all the manuscripts we possess up to 2817 and then 99 .9, the manuscripts we have up to the time of the Reformation all have the same reading, we should adopt a different reading because of what happened hundreds of years later.
Is that correct? On the basis of the fact.
That God worked providentially to establish this reading as the reading that was basically the Protestant reading that was there in the printed editions of the received texts and the Reformation here that became the basis for all the Protestant translations.
Yes, I would say God worked in.
History to affirm that this was the proper reading. Okay. So any reading of the TR, God worked in history, that's it. The data and information, why are we even discussing it? Because you just said, even though 99 .9 of all the manuscripts, all the references, all the sermons said the same thing, we go with something else because God did it.
So isn't the ultimate answer then for every single question about the TR, God did it?
Well, I'm surprised by that because we are Christians and we are supernaturalists and we believe in God and we believe in a God who works in history and the confession also talks about the providence of God.
We're not approaching the text of scripture from a purely naturalistic perspective like people in the academy do, who can hold it at arm's length and say, I'm just objectively looking at this and I'm just going to let the chips fall where they may.
But again, even those people in the end, they cannot come up with a text. This is why we have NA -29 and we're going to have NA -28 and we're going to have NA -29 and we're going to have NA -30 and we're going to have NA -31 for the Lord Terry.
And we're saying, let's get off that merry go.
That is what you're saying. Did Tertullian cite Ephesians when he speaks of the fellowship.
Of the mystery and the citation you gave in your opening statement? I have not done extensive study of Against Marcion, but actually he does make reference to it. The context obviously is Marcion and you may well know at the very beginning of the five books against Marcion, he talks about Marcion as that pontic mouse who is always gnawing at the gospels.
And the context I read, the context in which he says the fellowship of the mystery, he's talking about Marcion and Marcion's followers who had mutilated the gospel of Luke. And so it's a very interesting passage and it shows that there was controversy over the text of scripture.
But does Tertullian.
Cite Ephesians when he speaks of the fellowship of the mystery? That's a yes or no question.
Again, I don't have it in front of me. He does make reference. He definitely does make reference to Ephesians 3 -9 within Contra Marcion. It's not a key focal point, but he does make reference. But in that text?
I don't think in that chapter, no.
Okay. Are you sure the Latin represents?
I never argued that it was an explicit, there's an explicit reference to Ephesians 3 -9. You can go back and review what I said. I simply said that he uses the term De Socaetate Sacramente. He uses a term in Latin that would be the translation, the fellowship of the mystery.
Okay. This is from Ephesians. Of course, there was no chapter and verse for him. He doesn't say this is the reading in Ephesians.
Dr. White, just control the time. Go ahead, Dr. White.
Are you sure the Latin represents Koinonia?
I'm not, no, I said, I said, this is the Latin we can assume. The reason that I, the reason that I deduce that is because later he does use the phrase that would be the phrase that's found in the Vulgate.
And that he uses Dispensatio Sacramente.
You said that we do not have a sufficient manuscript tradition to establish the text of the New Testament, right?
We do not have enough extent evidence to use reason, the eclecticism to reconstruct the New Testament. That's self-evident by virtue of the fact that for over 150 years, modern academia has not been able to produce it.
So, and that's the view of the early church, right?
Well, that's an anachronistic question, isn't it? I mean, they didn't have the, they didn't have a reason to eclecticism. They were, they were approaching scriptures in a pre-critical manner. It's anachronistic for you, for example, to talk about Erasmus reconstructing the text or Jerome or origin.
They weren't driven by, they were, they were working with a pre-critical framework. They weren't influenced by the Enlightenment, for example.
They were not, so. Is it your position, Dr. Riddle? Is it your position that Erasmus did not utilize textual canons to determine readings, such as shorter readings, longer readings? When we tell you, Todd, he didn't talk about any of those things in his annotations and in stuff.
He did not use modern reason to eclecticism. This is self-evident. Who would, who would oppose this? You should read Brantley McConnell's recent book on the Coma Ioaneum, where he points out the difference between those early men who had what he calls a pre-critical episteme and modern men who have a modern episteme.
He did not approach the text of scripture in the way that.
Someone in Munster approaches it. So from your perspective, then, we cannot re-establish the text of Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Suetonius, any, any work of antiquity at all, right?
I'm not an expert in secular literature. I'm talking about sacred literature,.
And I'm not going to, I'm not going to... So you're only skeptical about sacred literature,.
Not secular literature? I'm not going to apply the standards of secular literature to sacred literature because I'm a Christian, and I want to approach the scriptures as that which is God-breathed. Plato and his writings are not God-breathed, nor did God promise providentially.
To preserve them. All right, we're on the dot there with 10 minutes. Thank you, Dr. White and Dr. Riddle for that cross-examination. We now go to the final phase of the formal moderated debate, and that would be the response period and the closing statements, both at once.
10 minutes each. Before that, just a reminder for those of you in the live chat, you can start submitting your questions now. Please remember to put the name of the speaker your question is directed to or the initial in all caps so that our team will be able to pick them up.
With that,.
Dr. Riddle, your 10-minute closing statement starts now. It is only in the modern era that Reformed and Evangelical men have abandoned the traditional text for the modern reconstructed text. In so doing, they have embraced a religious epistemology that abandons stability, continuity, and consistency.
As my friend A .J. McDonald recently put it in an email, the key issue in these debates about the text is tradition versus progressivism, closed textual borders versus open textual borders, fixed text versus ever-changing text.
Their open textism is their weakest point. Borders matter for nations, for genders, and for biblical texts. We do not believe in the end that it is irrational or irreligious or irresponsible to embrace the traditional Protestant texts of the Christian scriptures rather than the ever-changing, ever-evolving modern critical text based on an empirical method with its origins in the Enlightenment, Enlightenment text-only-ism.
We've seen it on display today. Let's give a summary of some of the things we've talked about related to Ephesians 3 .9. The received text is admittedly an eclectic text and is not based merely on the reading of the earliest or the majority of the extant Greek manuscripts.
Therefore, the fact that texts like Ephesians 3 .9 are based on a later minority reading is not necessarily a defeater for the received text position. It is inconsistent for those who promote the modern critical text, which is based on reasoned eclecticism, to attack the received text because it embraces texts which it recognizes as authentic, which are only based on a minority tradition in the extant, currently available manuscripts.
There is, in fact, very little early Greek manuscript evidence for the New Testament, for the Pauline Epistles, for the Book of Ephesians, and especially for Ephesians 3 .9. The confessional text position rejects the reconstructionist method of modern text criticism in part because there is not enough extant Greek manuscript evidence to justify this approach, nor do we have the knowledge and wisdom to do so.
My opponent in previous contexts has compared the modern reconstruction of the text to being like trying to put together disparate pieces of a puzzle. It's time we confess that we just don't have the evidence and the knowledge to do this.
The dead end of modern text criticism is the best proof of that. The texts of the scriptures cannot be comprehended by natural means. God preserved it in history through supernatural means. Reformed pastors and scholars of the Reformation era, based on evidence and reasoning that may not be always available or discernible to us, providentially affirmed the fellowship of the mystery in Ephesians 3 .9, as well as by Jesus Christ, as the fitting reading in the received text.
The printed editions of the TR may serve as witnesses to Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that are no longer available to us. There is no compelling reason to abandon the received text in our times, and many convincing reasons as to why it should continue to be affirmed by faithful Christians instead of the Enlightenment text.
We can continue, as men of old have done, to preach, to teach, to catechize from the traditional text in the tradition of those who have gone before us. Matthew Henry had no problem receiving it. He wrote of Ephesians 3 .9, with respect to all men, his business and employment were to make all men see, to publish, and make known to the whole world what is the fellowship of the mystery, that the Gentiles, who have hitherto been strangers to the church, shall be admitted into communion with it.
And therefore no wonder that he says the Gentiles as well as the Jews, for he is the common creator of them both. And we may conclude that he is able to perform the work of their redemption, seeing he was able to accomplish the great work of creation.
Nor did Matthew Poole, who wrote that the fellowship of the mystery concerns the salvation of the Gentiles without circumcision, or the works of the law, which God now made known by Paul's ministry, contrary to what the Jews believe.
Poole later adds, as God created all things at first, and so both Jews and Gentiles, and gave them their being by Christ, so he recreates, regenerates, and gives them a new being by Christ, that they may be of the same body under him.
Does this sound like these men were confused or hindered in their preaching and teaching of the gospel by their embracing of the received text and proclaiming the significance of Paul's teaching about the fellowship of the mystery?
God forbid. I recently read a book by a Lutheran theologian, Robert W. Jensen. He's a liberal, was a liberal, he's deceased now, a Bardian. The book, though, is interesting. It's titled Canon and Creed.
At the very beginning of that book, Jensen makes some observations about the phenomenology of religion, how religions work based on observation of them, in which he said the following. He said, quote, a religious community scripture is a body of literature that is fixed in some medium that preserves it.
Now, again, that's not an inspired observation, but a human observation, but it has the ring of truth to it. In order to thrive, we need a stable text of scripture. The received text has played that role for us.
Brevard Childs, another person who's definitely not a TR-onlyist, in an excursus on text criticism in his book, The New Testament as Canon, wrote the following. He said, textual analysis begins within the parameters established by the textus receptus.
To be more precise, by the Koine text as the best representative of the common tradition. The textus receptus, the best representative of the common tradition. I called the Protestant Reformation a key era.
It's not at odds with the days of early Christianity. Read chapter two. It incorporates all the learnings from the ecumenical creeds and the doctrine of God and in the chapter on Christ, all the learnings of the Chalcedonian statement.
It's not at odds, but it's a development and it's a renewal and getting back to apostolic Christianity. Don't we believe that as Protestant believers? Wouldn't we think it would be important, the scriptures that would be affirmed during that period?
I mean, we have, again, a liberal, Brevard Childs, basically acknowledging that the textus receptus is the standard of the common tradition. This week on the Evangelical Text Criticism blog, an article was posted noting the release in 2022 of NA -29 and soon after that, the UBS -6 edition.
And it was noted that in the UBS -6 edition, there will be more text differences to the textus receptus that will be documented because they are often important for translation and exegesis. Isn't it odd?
Even though the textus receptus has been rejected, toppled, set aside, it's still the standard that people look to, even in the academy. Why is that? We live in an age when men are tearing down monuments from the past, in part because they want to overturn our society, make it something that it is not.
Well, the received text is a literary, religious, and spiritual monument, and we must not tear it down. In a speech in 1986, Ronald Reagan said, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
We might paraphrase that saying to say that the most terrifying words for the church to hear are, I'm from the academy and I'm here to help you with your scriptures. We dare not give custody of our scriptures over to the academy.
Is it dangerous? Irrational? Irresponsible? Ahistorical to embrace Ephesians 3 .19 is the word of God, 3 .9 rather is the word of God. God forbid. It is original, having Pauline and apostolic flavor. It is tenacious.
It is inspired, theonoustos. It is self-authenticating, altopistos, and it can be gladly and confidently received by God's people. My friend Pouyan Mershahi doesn't go out to try to have an intellectual argument with Muslims.
He goes out to preach the gospel to them, to evangelize them, and he can do that very well with the received text. Thank you. Oh thank you very much.
Dr. Jeff Riddle for that. You stopped five minutes, five seconds short of the 10-minute mark, ending on a high note there. Now we do go to Dr. James White for your response and your closing statement.
You would have 10 minutes. Your time starts right now. You're muted. So Dr. White, you're muted. We're going to restart the clock again at your first word. Thank you very much. I.
Just hurry to point out the fact that Erasmus, Stephanos, and Beza were the academy of their day. They were the academy, and they utilized textual critical principles to derive their text. The very same principles we use today, and it is simply to ignore the history of the TR and to remove it from history, to recognize that that's where it came from, because to turn around and then say we can't keep doing it, we did it then, that's it, no more.
The authors themselves would have found this to be utterly unacceptable, indeed even laughable, but that's the situation we face today. Now by the way, just in passing, it was never my intention to debate the final variant in Ephesians 3 -9.
It was obviously from the beginning the issue of Koinonia versus Oikonomia, because that is where the TR stands against all majority texts, Byzantine priority texts, everything along those lines. So that was never something we were going to be doing.
Now simply identifying a particular text that arose from history, such as the TR, as the autographs, simply saying, well I'm just going to do that. Well what authority do you have to do that? What church council did that?
What church council would ever have the authority to do that? That doesn't make it quote-unquote received. That was an advertising blurb. Received by whom? When? On what basis? By what authority? This is a modernistic idea that has only come about in the modern period as a reaction to quote-unquote higher criticism.
Textual criticism, lower criticism, isn't the higher form criticism and all the other things that that I would oppose just as Dr. Riddle would. It's a modern theory being promoted by a tiny fraction of men today, based upon the conflation of categories that absolutely must be distinguished if we are going to have any kind of meaningful defense of the text of the New Testament.
I am very thankful to say all of the New Testament manuscript tradition is not only earlier, better, and fuller than any other work of antiquity. That is our manuscript tradition. The skepticism, I am so thankful that Dr. Riddle has made it very clear that his position is just as skeptical as Bart Ehrman about the manuscript.
In fact, more so. Ehrman believes you can. Just a few little things here and there, but yep, we know what the New Testament originally said. You just heard Dr. Riddle say, we can't reconstruct the text in the New Testament or any of these other works.
I am so thankful that the vast majority of Christian scholarship does not embrace the skepticism and gives a full-throated and valid defense of the manuscript tradition that is the gift that God has given to us and that every generation of the church has counted precious.
Especially since it was the only thing that the early church had, they counted it especially precious. That is extremely important. We must recognize when I debated Bart Ehrman, I got him to say something that I never expected him to say.
I asked him a question during cross-examination and he said, we have far earlier evidence for the text of the New Testament than for any other work of antiquity. He is exactly right. I encourage all believers to look into this and to not accept this dreadful, dreary, we can't do anything.
There's just not enough manuscripts to do anything. That is a level of skepticism that I am so thankful you will not find at any reform, well you shouldn't find, at any reform seminary anywhere in the world.
Now, Ephesians 3 .9, the reading of fellowship rather than in context. Read any of the modern commentaries on the subject that recognize the flow of thought. Paul is talking about the ordering of what God has done and that he has been a minister of that.
That's why it's oikonomia, not koinonia. It has nothing to do with fellowship. That is by far the internal reading that should be adopted and by far the reading of the external evidences as well. And so what we have when we see an error such as that in Ephesians 3 .9 in the TR demonstrates that those that promote TR-onlinism cannot in any way, shape, or form deal with their text as it came to us in history.
They have to separate it from history and make it this object of inspiration. I mean, if you're going to call it the autographs and you're going to say it has readings in it that no one in that day had seen until that particular point in time, then that's a re-inspiration.
That's a new inspiration of the text. And of course, there's no way to refute that because, you know, it's like when I debated Gail Ripplinger and I pointed out that her acrostic algebra called the, that throughout her book she talked about the NASV, but to make acrostic algebra work she called it the NASV.
I said, why did you change it? And she said, that's what God calls it. Well, if you know what God calls it, then there's really no basis for being able to debate you. And so basically what we've heard today is all the manuscripts say this and the early church fathers said this, but we should say that because God inspired it.
And we want to have a stable text. And we don't want to have a footnote there that says that there's a difference in any manuscripts at all. So God inspired it. It's been providentially, that's why this whole idea of providential eclecticism, if you think about what eclecticism is, eclecticism is choosing between sources and making decisions.
That's what Erasmus was doing. That's what we're continuing to do today. So providential eclecticism would be God guiding your choices. So that is a supernatural re-inspiration. It is a recreation of the text, but it's being done supernaturally, not on the basis of the consistent application of rules, because there were differences between Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza, especially between Erasmus and Beza, as to the exact type of thinking that they would present.
And so here you have it. It is very, very clear, very, very straightforward. The arguments that Jeffrey Riddle uses to defend the Kamiohanium, Long-Raining Mark, Percopaea Adultery, Ephesians 3 .9, Revelation 16 .5, will be completely contradictory to each other.
They have to be, because of his ultimate commitment to the TR as the autographer. And that should be enough for anyone to step back and go, wait a minute, if you have to use all sorts of different arguments, your position's irrational.
It cannot be defended, and it cannot be. I want to close by emphasizing this one thing. If you have either of these texts, this is the Tyndale Greek New Testament, this is the Texas Receptus. These both present the same God, the same Jesus Christ, the same gospel.
If you apply the same set of hermeneutics to either one of these texts, will you have a slight difference in Ephesians 3 .9? Yes. But is that the only place where that's discussed in Scripture? No. So the message of the gospel, who Jesus Christ is, the resurrection, the gospel itself, justification by faith, the resurrection, sanctification, the atonement, these present the same gospel when you are consistent in the application of the same sets of hermeneutics.
It's that consistency that is the key. Where is the difference then? Why do I think this is important? Because I do debate Bart Ehrman, and I do debate Muslim scholars, and I do debate Mormons, and Jehovah, well, we did one Jehovah's Witness.
They don't like to do much debate. But we engage these groups, and I have to say use the same standard in the defense of my text that I use in criticizing theirs. The TR-only advocate cannot do this.
And I submit to you that is why it must be rejected. If I have to use different sets of standards to defend my side that I use in then criticizing the other side, game over, apologetics finished, that's it.
I have made a mistake. I have made an error. And so that's the issue in this situation. Ephesians 3 .9 in comparison to the longer ending of Mark proves this, demonstrates it with clarity, and I am so thankful to Sam for arranging this, all the time he put into doing it, and to all of you for taking the time to watch all of this so you can come to the same conclusion.
Thank you.
Very much. Well, thank you Dr. White, and thank you also Dr. Jeff Riddle for this debate. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the end of the debate. Now is the time we hear from you. Once again, you can still submit questions until the 10 minute mark of the Q &A, where we'll close the questions coming in, because we already have a lot of questions coming in.
So with that, we do have a fair number of super chats, both for Dr. White and for Dr. Riddle. Before that, we did have a super chat from someone from Luxembourg, who just sent his greetings. I just wanted to tell you thank you for that.
Right, the first super chat for Dr. White, it's from Nintendonot. He says, if the model critical position is the key to debating Muslims, why do Muslims use the fluctuating nature of the modern critical text as a weapon against the text?
Well, because of the fact that they're ignorant of the history of the Quran. They don't recognize that the study, the critical study of the Quran is in its infancy. The vast majority of Muslims actually believe that the, whether it be the 1924 Cairo edition, is exactly what Uthman had, and they don't have what we have.
I mean, literally, it is in its infancy, the putting together of the variants and things like that. So they're functioning on the assumption that Dr. Riddle has concerning the Quran, that they have an autographer.
And so since they have an autographer that's never changed, it has, then they contrast that with the truth about the New Testament. So what I have to do is introduce them to the truth about the Quran, and then demonstrate, as I have in two debates, you can go watch them and see how this works.
One, a debate with Yusuf Ismail at Northwest University in Pochassoun, South Africa. The other in London with Adnan Rashid, the difference between a free transmission of the text and a controlled transmission of the text, and the fact that the free transmission of the New Testament is superior to the controlled.
Transmission of the Quran. Well, thank you for that, Dr. James White. This first question, this next question for Dr. Jeff Riddle, and thank you, Josh, for that super chat. He's asking, Dr. Riddle, you argued that many copies have been destroyed in history.
Isn't that using the argument from silence to uphold the TR position? You've been muted. Yeah, let me unmute myself first.
So thanks for the question. First of all, it was sort of posed, the question was sort of posed, I think, a little bit hypothetically. If you're saying that these manuscripts, I mean, it's a fact that these manuscripts, that there were manuscripts have been destroyed.
I mean, you can look at the scholarly article that was written by this fellow in the Myth and Mistakes book, and he's just talking, again, only about the manuscripts that are listed. This doesn't even include those that we don't know about that are lost.
I mean, so there are many manuscripts that are lost. In Revelation 16 .5, Beza makes reference to the fact that his text there reads according to an ancient handwritten manuscript, but there was no, you know, Gregory Alon numbering system, and we don't know what that manuscript was, and maybe it'll be recovered sometime that will affirm the reading that's found in the King James Version of Revelation 16 .5.
So there definitely were manuscripts that were lost. Is it an argument from silence? Well, I mean, we know in Erasmus' 1516 Greek New Testament, he incorporated the reading, you know, He Quintinia to Mysterio, and on what basis did he do that?
Well, we know, thanks to Luke Carpenter now, that there was at least one manuscript, 2817, in the University Library, and it's now in the University Library in Basel, Switzerland, that he may well have seen, but we don't know if he saw others.
In his annotations, he doesn't tell us, and so he may have had access to other ones. So what verifies it is the fact that the reading was used on some basis. On what basis did they choose it? And I think that one is also particularly interesting, as I said, because he knew what the reading of the Latin Vulgate was.
He also got his hands on the Complicitigen Polyglot, came out at about the same time as his first edition of the Greek New Testament, and he used the Complicitigen Polyglot to review and edit later editions of his Greek New Testament, and in the Complicitigen Polyglot, it read the plan of the mystery, but he didn't edit, he didn't change Ephesians 3 .9.
Why didn't he? Was it because he was too busy, didn't have time, didn't think it was important? Perhaps. Was it because he had access to information? I mean, this man had traveled all over Europe. He knew scholars.
He had visited libraries. He had accumulated information. He had accumulated notes from which he was making judgments, and so we don't know. We don't know, but we know the evidence is that's the text that he affirmed, and he could have had the opportunity to change it, opportunity to make it conform to the Vulgate, for example, but he didn't, and so that's why I think it gives us some reason to affirm the reading.
It doesn't make it an irrational judgment to say this is a reading that can be affirmed.
Thank you, Dr. Riddle. Now, Josh, yeah, so, right, Josh has asked Dr. White, and you reject Chris Pinto's argument on the basis that they were speculative. Is your argument for the short evangelistic reading of Mark speculative?
Certainly not on the same basis. I'm not sure which of Chris Pinto's many wild conspiracy theories is being referred to there. Maybe it was the fact that he's trying to argue that Sinaiticus is a 18th century fraud based on Simonides, but no, there's a vast difference between asking the question, why might that particular text have ended the way that it did with dealing with a conspiracy theory about the 18th century and a later manuscript?
There's no.
There's no logical connection between the two. Thank you, Dr. White. Next super chat for Dr. Jeff Riddle from Bill Hardacre. Thank you for your super chat. He asked, did providential eclecticism end with Scrivener?
Could there be an updated TR, and how do you reconcile the variance within the TR? Yeah, well, certainly God's providence.
Hasn't ended. I mean, God is the creator and he is the sustainer. And it says in Hebrews, he upholds all things by the word of his power. And so providence applies to every area of our lives. And again, it applies to all historical actions.
You know, I was talking about Erasmus a few minutes earlier about why didn't he change Ephesians 3, 9 to comply with the polyglot? Was he just busy? Well, you know, the Lord is in charge of that too. And the Lord did not allow that text to be altered, but it remained the same through all the various editions of Erasmus.
And so God is providentially at work. So God's providence is at work, but there's no need to reproduce the Greek New Testament. Once in history, it has been providentially printed. It's been established in a stable and fixed form.
And so it can't be changed now. It doesn't need to be changed. There are no deficiencies in it. Just as we don't need to go back, neither do we need to go back and revisit the Council of Chalcedon and rethink whether the Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man.
And so the scriptures are not up for grabs by every generation. Now, God's providence is at work as we study it, as we preach it, as we catechize. That's where we look for God's providential interventions in our understanding and application of the scriptures, but we don't need to do spade work to reestablish it.
Now the work is to preach it and teach it and proclaim it.
Thank you. The next question for Dr. White, also from Bill, he asks, with the constant updates of the Nessie-Allen text, is it not problematic to say that the Bible or Christianity has no subtle text?
I think I've kind of answered that question in the debate, but.
Yeah, please do go ahead. Well, and I want to be able to address it. It's an important question because it's a false accusation. The reality, for example, at one point Dr. Riddle mentioned my repetition of Rob Bowman's argument, but he took it out of the context in which it was being used.
I've said that the situation we face and look at New Testament textual criticism is having a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, and we have 1100 pieces. And my point was, is that textual variations tended to expand over time.
They expanded titles, names, things like that. That's very, very common in later, in the later manuscripts. That was presented as if I was saying, oh, well, you know, it's just a jigsaw puzzle. We have no idea what it's actually talking about.
That's not the case at all. As I've said, I believe in the tenacity of the text. We have all the original readings and the newer editions that are coming out are due to the application of CBGM to the text, which is just another tool.
We don't have to accept that reading. The wonderful thing about our critical editions, whether it's the ECM or Nessie Olin 29th will be coming out, or UBS 6, is that you have the text notes. We can examine them ourselves.
We are wide open about this. And so this would be a dream fulfilled for an Origen or an Augustine or a Jerome. They would have loved to have had this. And they would be looking at us going, what are you people arguing about?
You should just simply be dancing in the streets, praising God for what you've been given, that we wish we could have had. And so, no, all those editions are simply saying work continues. And what is that work toward?
Understanding what the apostles wrote. That's always got to be the goal. And once you abandon that goal for the goal of, I just want something that will never change, you'll lose this goal. You'll lose the goal of the apostolic testimony, and that's dangerous.
Well, thank you, Dr. White. And now we've crossed the 10 minute mark. In fact, we've crossed the 11th minute mark. The questions coming in have just closed. We have just under nine minutes left for the Q &A.
Next question for Dr. Jeff Riddle. How is your position practically different from Roman Catholics claiming the authority of the canon and sacred tradition?
Well, I think it's very different. I mean, obviously, when the Protestant Reformation was taking part, there was a battle for the Bible, and that involved a battle and controversy over the text. And in fact, it was the Roman Catholic Church that was stressing the many variants that were found in the hand-copied manuscripts.
And they were saying, listen, there's so many variants in the hand-copied manuscripts that you Protestants can't say sola scriptura. You need mother church. You need the magisterium to discern this for you.
And it was the Protestants who said, no, scripture is inspired. It is theonoustos. It is self-authenticating. It is autopistos. And we can have the scriptures in a fixed and stable form, and we can stand by sola scriptura.
So you can look at the writings of John Owen. I mentioned the essay the other day in the second volume of his collected works. He wrote the second of those essays in response to there was an Anglican scholar named Brian Walton who produced one of the early versions of what we might call modern text criticism when he issued the London Polyglot.
And Owen was writing his essay to say, no, we don't need to get mired in the examination and comparison of all these variants because that's what Rome wants us to do so that they can say, listen, mother church needs to step in.
And that's why he said we need to hold to the vulgar copy that has now been established in the printed form as the standard. So what we have today, unfortunately, is in the Roman Catholic church, we have the Roman church telling people what the scriptures are.
In Protestantism and in many evangelical circles, we have people saying we need the academy. The academy is the new magisterium that tells us what it's possible for us to believe about the scriptures.
And, you know, my opponent said earlier, where was the council? When we say that the text of scripture was affirmed by the church, obviously we don't mean there was a church council, but it was affirmed organically.
It was affirmed by the usage in the churches, by the receiving of it. It's called the received text. That's not just a blurb. It's a description of a text that was acknowledged, affirmed, and received.
And that was true from the time of the Reformation period until the 19th century. And this is when the declension really began in earnest, the attack upon this text.
Thank you, Dr. Riddle. Next question for Dr. White. He asks, what is your objective universal and absolute standard by which you evaluate Greek manuscripts and their variants?
Please be specific. Well, there is no such thing, obviously. What you do, of course, is you have certain sets of standards that you utilize in looking at the date, the quality of the manuscript, its completeness, and then you look at each variant as a unit.
And so, for example, and this is difficult for those who don't work in the field to really understand, but one of the reasons that I'm doing doctoral work on P45 is that scholars recognized that P45, which is an extremely unusual manuscript because it contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.
It's the only manuscript we have that does that. It seemed to have different, it was drawing from different exemplars that had differing textual flavors and backgrounds to them. And so, what that would mean is that you can identify its textual flavor in Acts.
That is, it lines up with P74 this number of times and Vaticanus this number of times, but the Byzantine text this number of times. But it's going to be different in John. It's going to be different in Mark, especially Mark's the key one where it really seems to line up a lot with Codex Washingtonianus.
So, the point is that you don't just take a stiff set of rules and just clomp it down on everything. You look at it and go, what can we learn from this? And my doctoral advisor and I, he did his PhD under Metzger.
We were looking at this as an opportunity to shine light back into the very earliest period of time, the transmission of the text of the New Testament, in light of what sources the scribe of P45 would have.
And so, therefore, you're looking at different texts, you're looking at different characters of texts, and then you are applying certain canons. And of course, the whole issue of eclecticism is you have people who will emphasize more strongly internal issues and others who emphasize external issues.
I'm more of an externalist as far as that is concerned, but everyone looks at all of those issues, as did Erasmus, as did Beza. This is not some postmodern Kafka-esque stuff. That's just absurd. This is how everyone through church history has done this.
This is how Jerome did it. This is how Origen did it. This is how everybody has done it, because it's how you have to do it. You have to look at the manuscripts. You have to let them speak to each individual variant that you're examining.
Thank you, Dr. White. We just have slightly above two minutes before we wrap up. So, I'm going to ask our speakers to keep the answer within a minute, because we only have two questions left. Next question for Dr. Jeff Riddle.
It's from Undisputed. By the way, thank you, Chris Thomas, for your Super Chat, and also Undisputed. His question to Dr. Riddle is, do those that have the Peshitta as their Bible, do they not have the Word of God,.
Since the Peshitta as critical text renderings? Well, according to Chapter 1, Paragraph 8 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, we believe that the were immediately inspired in the original languages.
So, the Peshitta was a translation, it's a version. And so, that's a different discussion. And I would say that they would have a faithful translation to the degree that it corresponds with and faithfully relays the information in the immediately inspired Hebrew and Greek.
Now, maybe a more pertinent question for us would be, if someone had a modern English translation based on the modern critical text, can they read the Bible? And the same standard applies. To the degree that it properly reflects the immediately inspired Hebrew and Greek, then they are reading the scriptures.
Thank you. Thank you. Just under a minute. Thank you very much. Final question to Dr. James White. It's from ConspiracyCuber. Thank you for your super chat. He asks, since Pantas is bracketed in 3 -9 in Nessie Island 28, can you list the manuscripts that agree with the Nessie Island 28 in all three places?
Dr. White, you're muted. Sorry. Yeah, the rest of the question, I don't.
Even know what that's about. In all three places, I'm not sure what three places are being discussed because you have, in Ephesians 3 -9, you have Pantas, which is deleted in the original hand of Sinaiticus in Alexanderus 6, 1739 -1881.
1739 -1881 are later miniscules that are clearly taken from second or third century exemplars, as well as Ambrosiaster and Augustine. And then the text is read by P46, so on and so forth. So what are the other three?
If the other three includes the undocumented reading, as far as the Nessie Island 28 is considered, Oikonomia, then there would be none because 28 -17 is not even a regularly cited reference. So I don't know what the person is attempting to communicate at that particular point in time.
It doesn't make.
Any sense. Well, unfortunately, thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. James White for that. Now, we do have some other responses coming in, but we are out of time. We've just hit the 20-minute mark, and unfortunately, we do have to close here.
I have a request to respond to that one, Samuel. Can I just say something about that? Sure thing. Real quick. Sure thing. Go ahead. Yeah. The.
Question, and that comes from CC, I'm assuming that's Luke Carpenter. So he's making the point that in the NA -28 of Ephesians 3 -9, there's another variant that we didn't even talk about, and that's Pontos.
And he's making the point that in the NA -28, as I understand it, what he's saying is the NA -28 reading of Ephesians 3 -9 doesn't actually represent any currently extant Greek manuscript. And he's making the point that no one had this.
No one had this reconstructed modern critical text at the time of Chrysostom or at the time of Athanasius or at the time of the Nicene Creed. He's pointing out the fact that the NA -28 doesn't represent a reading that's found in any extant manuscript, if that makes sense.
I think that's his point. Okay. And I will now respond to that, obviously. And the reading of Ephesians 3 -9 in the Texas Receptus was unknown to any of these sources. And Chrysostom did not have this.
See how that works? But the issue is when we look at Pontos, you're not taking it over here at the end, sir. Dr. Riddle, I use your name. You refuse to use mine. That's just an amazing thing to me. But the point is that Ambrosiaster and Augustine did not have it.
We need to know that. That needs to be taken in consideration. Why does the original Hand of Sinaiticus not have this? These are key issues that are completely wiped out when you use this because there are no notes.
You don't even know it. That's the issue. Okay. So don't hold this up and say, well, he didn't have this because Augustine had something different. Ambrosiaster had something different. And the point is the TR only position doesn't care whether they did or didn't.
As long as it's in here, it's the autographer. I'll leave it to the people who are listening and watching.
This to make their own judgment as to what they think is whether they think that your standards.
Here are consistent. That's right. Thank you very much, gentlemen. I'm glad we ended on a high note there. And I'm so sorry to have to cut off both speakers because you can tell there's a lot more going on here.
And once again, thank you so much to both Dr. Jeff Riddle for your time in doing this. Not one debate, but two. Thank you so much to Dr. James White also for doing both these debates. I can tell you both of them made a lot of compromises and it took months for us to arrange this debate, two to three months to be precise, but it was all worth it.
And for the sake of these two gentlemen who are both believers in Christ, just as I am, I would sincerely ask all of you who are Christians, you consider yourself believers, to please refrain from brutal personal attacks in the comment section.
It is free. You have the liberty to do that. But you do remember as a Christian that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, use your liberty not to offend one another. So I do encourage you to respect both of them in the comment section.
But with that, I also want to thank all of you who have contributed to the super chats and in the live chats. Unfortunately, we were not able to get to all the questions. Thank you for following us for the past two days.
We'll be back again tonight, 9 p .m. Eastern with Dr. Stephen Boyce and Jonathan Sheffield for a brief summary, a review of how these two debates went. Hope you can join us for that. And also on April 30th, we'll be having Dr. Bart Ehrman, whose name got mentioned over and over again today.
He'll be here on April 30th to be debating Jonathan Sheffield on the ecclesiastical text. Until next time. Oh, before that, special thanks to the guys who are behind the crew. I thank the speakers. I should have thanked the guys who are behind, working in the background.
Thank you to Marcus Lee for hosting, doing a lot of the work in the live chat. It was not me. It was Marcus. And also to Rubina, who was helping out in the questions as well. And to Sarah Abraham, who was helping out in the questions yesterday.
We really appreciate all you guys. Until next time. If you haven't subscribed, please do subscribe until next time. I'm Samuel Nason. And on behalf of everyone, all the speakers and the crew in Explain Apologetics, thank you for watching.
God bless you. Bye for now.