February 11, 2025 Show: “An Open Conversation with Dr. James R. White”

Iron Sharpens Iron Opens With Proverbs 27:17 and Matthew Henry

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own.

Questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 11th day of February 2025.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have my dear longtime friend going back to 1996, Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries back on the program today. He is co-founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries and one of four pastors of Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona, host of the Dividing Line webcast, globally renowned theologian, New Testament Greek scholar, apologist, debater, and prolific writer.

And today we're just basically having an open conversation. When I asked James if he had any specific ideas for a topic, this was his response. Yes. I said, let's not.

Break the Internet. And I was gonna say, how did you get this number? I'll have to wait for that for next year. So when we do something next year, we'll be celebrating 30 years of this kind of stuff. That was the actual response I first got from you.

That's right. We've talked about that before and, you know, your longtime listeners have heard those stories before. But yeah, no, it's good to be back with you. I'm glad to see you in a vertical position.

That's good.

I can even tell hearing my own voice in my headphones that my voice is far more robust and lively and haven't been in a weakened state with that congestive heart failure in the previous weeks. Yeah, well, I won't.

Disabuse you of your self-deception. We'll just go on from there. Anyway, that's what I would have said, you know, when I was a staunch, stuffy, humorless Reformed Baptist when you first met me. And I scared you to death.

But you had been around a lot of humorless Reformed Baptists before, so I wasn't the first one you had encountered. But no, it's good to be with you. And, you know, there's just so much stuff going on.

I'm really struggling. Both of us, look, let's be honest, we probably sit around and talk with other folks our age far more about our physical problems, our most recent surgeries, medications and stuff like that than we ever thought we would.

In fact, it doesn't seem like it was all that long ago that I would hear older people doing that kind of stuff. I'm like, oh, man, come on. I'll never do that. And then it's now I'm doing that. And it's just sort of how life, life goes on.

And both of us are running into stuff. I mean, I remember when we'd go hit the gym when I was back there on the island and, you know, pump iron and all that kind of stuff. And the arthritis ain't letting me do that much anymore.

I can guarantee you that. Though I'm still riding. I'm still I'm still on track for about I did 7500 miles last year. I'm trying to do more climbing this year than last year. So we'll see. But most of it's being done indoors now.

It's a lot safer. And part of that's just simply the degradation of Phoenix. Sadly, a lot of the routes I used to take to get out of the city and get to safer areas are now inhabited by homeless people, drugs, needles, all sorts of fun stuff like that that sort of keep me from going those directions.

But a lot has changed over the years, to be sure. But there's just so much happening, both in the nation as well as within the church, that I at times just feel like getting away for a while and shutting it all off.

Because I've said many times on The Dividing Line, it just seems to me that God never really designed us to have this amount of information flying at us at the speed with which it does now. I have Twitter up on one of my two screens here.

And while that really helps you to keep up with stuff, I mean, when the helicopter and the American Airlines plane crashed in Washington a couple weeks ago, I first saw that and heard about it on Twitter.

I had just gotten on Twitter back in 2010 -2011 when the Japanese tsunami took place. And again, the first images I saw, the first notification I had was through Twitter. But that stuff comes at you so fast and from so many different angles.

And I just think, for me, one of the dangers is you get up first thing in the morning, and if that's the first stuff you hear, it sort of sets the tone for the whole rest of the day, which may be positive.

I mean, there's positive things happening online. I get positive messages from people all the time, and that is a good thing. But let's be honest, most of what we encounter is not in accordance with Christian worldview, to put it in a mild way.

And it can really sort of start the day off with your mindset on things that will leave you at the end of the day wondering, where'd all that time go? What did I actually do that was positive? Stuff like that.

So just one really positive thing, I'm not sure if you talked about it, have you had—you know who Wes Hough is, have you had any contact with him?

Only a one-way thing, where I contacted him, asking him to be my guest,.

And I never heard back from him. Well, I would imagine right now. He did tell me at one point that, you know, I did not know him before all this happened. I would have known him—he had spoken at an Ezra Institute thing up in Canada with Joe Boot.

And I hadn't gone up to that one. Jeff Durbin spoke at it. And so Jeff had met him at that, but I had never actually had personal contact with Wes. And so once everything exploded, first of all, when he did such a wonderful job with that conspiracy theory guy.

I mean, I know what the guy's name is.

Joe Rogan?

No, no, no, no, no. The black fellow that talks about space aliens and all the rest of the stuff. That's how Wes got on Joe Rogan, was Joe Rogan's people saw him doing this—they called it a debate. It wasn't a debate.

It was a webcast where this guy who denies that Jesus died on a cross and stuff like that. Wes came on and just obliterated him. I mean, and nicely, much more nicely than I would have.

Oh, I think I know who you're talking about. He's a guy who claims to be a Christian, but denies the deity of Christ.

No, no, no. I don't think he claims to be a Christian. No, the host of the webcast claims to be a Christian. I don't believe that he is. But no, this guy sells books and talks about space aliens and weird stuff like that.

I'm sorry, I don't remember his name. Like I said, people had sent me some clips of his, and I was just like, this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. This is horrible. Maybe I should play some of this stuff on the divine line.

I never got around to it. So Wes goes on with this guy. And just to give you an example, this guy was saying right at the beginning, well, you know, the Sinai Bible doesn't have the crucifixion and resurrection in it.

And the Sinai Bible is older than the King James. Now, when someone says that, I know, and I think most Christians should know, that this is someone who has no earthly idea what they're talking about.

There's no Sinai Bible. He was talking about Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest complete Bible that we own from around between 325 and 350. It's in Greek, all of it's in Greek, including the Old Testament.

And of course, the King James was published in 1611. So you're talking 1300 years between these. They're in different languages. One is a translation of the scriptures. The other is, at least in the New Testament, is the same language as the original writings.

And so there's just no comparison between the two. So why anyone would even make a statement like that doesn't make any sense. So it didn't take Wes Hough very long. In fact, the guy left after about an hour.

He just walked off. And then the amazing thing was, he face-planted so badly that he then threatened Wes and the webcast host, who was a friend of his. This guy had attended his wedding. And he threatened to sue both of them for a million dollars for what they did to him on that webcast.

So that's what got Rogan's people's attention. And that's why Wes got the opportunity to do what he did. And I just think that's fantastic. It's super to see the next generation coming up. And to know that Wes has told me that when he was in his undergraduate work, my debates were playing nonstop whenever he was working out or doing whatever.

So we've had a positive influence there. And of course, his background is fascinating with his parents being overseas and being exposed to multiple languages and things like that. For apologists, I've said this many, many times, I do not understand why apologists, in general, are ignorant of the biblical languages.

I think that's one of the greatest weaknesses of apologists, is they don't do exegesis and that kind of stuff. It would be really good if they knew church history too, two topics that I've taught for years and years.

But Wes has that kind of stuff going for him. So it's been really fascinating to see the response to Wes Hough, because there is an atheist in the UK who basically, here's the story, was Wes mentioned the great Isaiah school.

And I think it's important to the audience. I hope everybody sort of tunes in here for a second, because I would assume you've seen my debate with Bart Ehrman from 2009.

Yes, it was excellent.

And in the audience questions at the end, and you know how much I love audience questions, I can always count for the Chris Arnzen laugh track to back me up when I've just said something ironic or humorous.

I can't even count the number of times people have said that they saw some conference on video on YouTube and said, I know you were there, I heard your laugh.

I heard you laughing, that's right. It's true. But anyway, what happened at the debate with Bart Ehrman is this kind, I'm sure very well-intentioned, elderly fellow, older than I was at the time anyways, probably about the age I am now, gets up and he says, you know, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they found the great Isaiah scroll.

And as soon as he said that, I was like, oh boy, here we go. Because he goes on to say, and the text, it was a thousand years earlier than the oldest text we had, and yet it's the same book. It hadn't changed.

It's almost identical. And I knew exactly what was about to happen. Ehrman did not dispute that. He accepted that as a true statement. And then he did exactly what I knew he was going to do. And he responded and said, however, have you ever looked at the Jeremiah scroll?

And of course the guy hadn't, because this is just simply, let's be honest, it's a part of conservative Christian lore that the Isaiah scroll demonstrates that there is no inherent reason for corruption to take place, even over a thousand years of hand copying.

Because if you read the Isaiah scroll from the first cave of Qumran, and you read the Leningrad Codex from around 900 years after Christ, you're reading the same book, everything. And so we've all heard that.

I think I first heard that from Josh McDowell when I was a senior in high school. So it's been going around for a long, long time. You've heard it. I've heard it. Everybody's heard it. And so I knew how Ehrman was going to respond because the Jeremiah scroll is about one third shorter than the Hebrew scroll from the Masoretic tradition.

Now there's a reason for that. If you read the book of Jeremiah, at one point the king takes his scrolls and cuts them up in front of him, and then kicks him out. And so there are multiple versions of Jeremiah's prophecy because he was taken down to Egypt.

And so there'd be stuff written down there that wouldn't be written up in Israel. And Jeremiah's text itself explains why you might have a scroll of Jeremiah that's considerably shorter because of what happened very early on when it was actually being written.

But since people don't know that, then it's an incredibly highly effective means of disputing the point. And that's what Ehrman did. And of course, I didn't really have a chance to comment on any of that at that particular point in time.

So what happened on Rogan is—now look, this is over three hours long. It's unscripted. With Joe Rogan, you don't have any idea where in the world you're going to end up. He could ask you a question that you've never even thought of before in your life.

It's a high-pressure type situation to be in when you don't know what's going to be thrown at you. I've been there. I've done three-hour Bible-answer-man broadcasts of a similar nature in years past.

So the Isaiah scroll came up, not from Joe, but from Wes. Now, I understand why he said this. But basically, Wes—the exact terminology—he described it like an exact copy or something along those lines.

And I know what he was talking about amongst textual critics, textual critics, for example, will talk about Byzantine manuscripts in the New Testament and refer to them as reduplications or copies or things like that because they're so very, very similar.

The fact is, there are variants between the Isaiah scroll and the Masoretic text of a thousand years later. They are very minor. The vast majority of them are the due to the fact that the spelling in the first century before Christ, the spelling was being standardized in a different way than what came down to the Masoretic text, the stream of tradition that they utilized and produced 900 years after Christ.

So some words are spelled differently and things like that. And of course, they didn't have vowel pointing yet. That was a later addition from the Masoretes as well, which is extremely important. Most modern Israelis can read Hebrew without vowel pointing.

They provide it via context. I couldn't read that if my life depended on it. Vowel pointing is important to me. So this atheist went after Wes Huff for the way he said it. And Wes said, well, you're right.

On a technical level, I would have said this out of the other thing, but I was just talking to Joe, things like that. And so all of a sudden now there's this huge conversation going on about the Isaiah scroll, which I think is good.

I think people need to know. I did have, I've only been to Israel once and I'll probably never get to go there again, but I did visit Qumran and I did get to give a lecture standing right outside. I mean, right over my shoulder was cave one of the Qumran's caves.

And lots of important stuff has been found in Qumran now coming up on 70 years ago. But those caves, so the great Isaiah scroll is 1Q Isaiah A. So 1Q is the cave, first Qumran cave. Isaiah is the identification of the scroll.

And A, there are other Isaiah fragments that were also found in that cave. And this is the one that's been assigned that. This was pretty much, however, a almost complete text of Isaiah. It's damaged in some places, so there's a little bit of material that's missing, but you can tell that the prophecy of Isaiah as we have it today, it existed as a single scroll in the first century before Christ.

And what's important about that is what that means is every Messianic prophecy, Isaiah 9, Isaiah 7, Isaiah 53, they're all there in all their glory in a manuscript that was written 100 years before Jesus was born.

Now, does that prove that those prophecies had been given 700 years before Christ was born? Because that's when Isaiah would be ministering. Well, no, it doesn't. But what it does do is demonstrate that these prophetic scriptures preexisted their fulfillment in Christ.

Whether it's 100 years or 700 years really doesn't matter at that point. The naturalistic worldview just doesn't have an explanation for how you can have prophecy. And sadly, a lot of biblical theology that is in most of our schools today can't figure that part out either, and doesn't really believe it either.

So anyway, this gave us an opportunity—in fact, I was on Apology Radio the week before last to talk about the Great Isaiah Scroll, the nature of the textual variance within it, and just how incredibly valuable it is to us, and just what a great gift it is.

Because you got to realize, up until the middle of the last century, the oldest manuscripts we had of the Old Testament were from 900 years after Christ. And look, the mosaic material is ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient.

So it's not that it's surprising that that would be the case. The vast majority of what was written in the ancient world has long since passed away, unless it was chiseled on a rock someplace. And we're still finding stuff like that.

I think it's fascinating that just less than two years ago, I think it was, we found a—was it a copper scroll, or was it actually in rock? I'm trying to remember. We found an inscription on Mount Ebel, so if you remember Deuteronomy 28 -29, blessings and cursings, and it's a section from that, the cursing section, from like, I don't know, 500 -600 years before Christ.

So again, the the historical picture that we can use to defend the Scriptures has gotten clearer and clearer, and we have more and more available to us today than we've ever had in the past, which is, it's a blessing.

I think that should be something that Christians spend more time on and think about, certainly more time than thinking about the Super Bowl or other silly stuff like that. But it takes sometimes controversy to get people to, you know, look at this stuff and to go, you know, learn something about the history of the text itself.

Now there's—I could go on from there, but I just want to make sure you're still breathing. Well, one thing I don't want you to.

Forget to do, or I don't want myself to forget to ask you to say, there is a very powerful segment or portion of that debate with Bart Ehrman that you had during the cross-examination, I believe, where you kind of cornered him and got him to admit that the evidence that we have for the authenticity of the New Testament even exceeds that of comparable secular literature and age that everybody takes for granted is authentic, and it's actually involving the number of so-called errors.

You know what I'm speaking of? Yeah, yeah, what happened,.

And this is interesting, we've not had a discussion about this before, at least on the program, but what is really interesting is I almost cut him off before he got to say that really, really important section.

I just actually opened one of my presentations to see if I could find this for you and even play it, and the one that opened up didn't contain it, but I almost cut him off. When you're doing cross-examination with somebody, you don't want them to go on and on and on, and so I almost stopped him from saying this.

Let me see if this would…. Let me turn my volume up here, and we'll see if this comes across. Let's see if this works. On the Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years.

You described this time period as enormous. That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?

Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it. The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity.

There. Wow, that came across loud and clear. I was shocked.

Oh, well, you know, this is called modern tech. You still live in the wonderment of childhood. When facing that kind of thing, it's great.

Well, if you hold on a minute, I've got to put more gasoline in my computer engine.

That's right. Yeah, Eric is undoubtedly one of the most patient men on the planet. Anyway.

That's my webmaster, folks, for those of you who have no idea who Eric is.

Well, I knew long before you did. But anyway, so you could almost hear me at that point. I started to say something, and he actually just kept speaking. I'm so glad he did, because I never expected in all of that debate to have Bart Ehrman, the leading English-speaking critic of the New Testament in America today, and even back then in 2009, to say we have far earlier evidence in the New Testament than for any other work of antiquity.

But people do need to understand that, that we do. He knows that. It's fascinating that in his scholarly stuff, he's far more conservative than in his popular stuff, misquoting Jesus and all the rest of the popular stuff that's made him wealthy.

His scholarly stuff, he knows that he's going to be up against people that can go, hey, now, wait a minute, look at this, look at that. He has said he's no longer even working in the field of New Testament textual criticism anymore.

He says, we know what the original New Testament looked like, what it read like. We're just simply playing around with variant readings now. It doesn't really affect anything. But then, in our debate, you can go, well, it depends on which manuscript you're reading.

He doesn't do that amongst scholars. He does that out amongst people he can't challenge about that kind of thing. But that statement that I just played for you, Christians need to understand that. Of all the works of antiquity—and, of course, antiquity, at that point, we're talking primarily 200 years before Christ, 200 years after Christ, that particular timeframe—we have more and earlier New Testament data than any other work of antiquity, by a long shot.

And I was appreciative of the fact that he was willing to make that kind of a statement. So, what that leads to is, I made some comments about the Isaiah Scroll on Twitter.

In fact, could you pick up about the Isaiah Scroll when we come back from our first commercial break?

Sure.

Okay. And don't go away, folks. We'll be right back after these messages.

I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's Word for the edification of the lost and the glory of our triune God.

We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of Scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ. In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every Sunday.

We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org. That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.

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Greetings. This is Brian McLaughlin, President of the SecureComm Group and supporter of Chris Arnzen's Iron Shopping Zion radio program. SecureComm provides the highest level of security systems for residential buildings, municipalities, churches, commercial properties, and much more.

We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com. But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist.

Church on Long Island. Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to the Radio Ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.

He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God. He sensed that same God-given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God. That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a Savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area, or Queens, or Brooklyn, or the Bronx, in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672. That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word, and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

I'm Pastor Bill Shishko of The Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac,.

Long Island. I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program hosted by my long-time friend and brother Chris Arnzen in the highest esteem, and I'm thrilled that you're listening today. I'm also delighted that Iron Sharpens Iron is partnering with one of my favorite resources for Reformed Christian literature for decades now, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

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On Iron Sharpens Iron radio. Here at Iron Sharpens Iron radio, praise God for the generous monthly.

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So go to royaldiadem .com, mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And by the way, since I was reminded after hearing the ad in the first break for Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which happens to be the church where I am a member, Dr. James R. White, God willing, will be speaking there in September.

We do not have a date yet. He needs to coordinate that with Pastor Jeffrey Rice in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and other folks that he's having conferences with. So hopefully we will have a concrete date for you soon.

We just know it's not going to be September 28th because my pastor, Simon O'Maney, will be away, but it will be either, God willing, in late September or early October. And hopefully, we will also be able to have James speak at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon the Thursday before or after that.

So just put a big circle around late September and early October on your calendar and keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for further updates. And before we go back to the Isaiah scroll where we left off, you had mentioned early on in our conversation that the old days when we used to go to a gym in Amityville when you'd be visiting, did you know that the owner of that gym, his wife had hired a hitman to kill him, and the guy accidentally killed his partner because he looked almost exactly like the owner and drove the same color car, parked in the same area of the parking lot of the gym?

And I believe they may even made a movie about it or something, but I don't know if I ever told you that, but that was back in 2004, over 20 years ago. It's just amazing how time flies. But anyway, pick up where you left off on the Isaiah scroll.

Are you even there? Okay.

I'm here. I unmuted the mic. Yeah, that's a great story, Chris. It's so depressing. Thank you.

Well, is there anything newsworthy connected to you that isn't depressing lately? Oh, how? Oh, I'm not saying that you're the fault of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's too many steroids involved in that situation. But anyways, so we were talking about the Isaiah scroll a little bit and what had happened with Westhoff and stuff like that.

I don't remember exactly how this happened. I think I came home a week ago, Sunday night, and there was this big, long blast at me from Corey Moller. Now, Corey Moller is an excommunicated Lutheran individual who, together with another fellow, are the primary people in a webcast called The Stone Choir.

I call it The Stone Choir Cult.

Did they ever explain the name? Is that about the stones will cry out? Is that like a takeoff on.

That? Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. And so they are a neo-Nazi group. They are Hitler apologists. They are deeply anti-Jewish, anti-Black. They're white supremacists. The number of vile statements, very often, sadly, also providing the Lord's name and things like that and the promotion of their vile teachings are legion.

But they put out a high-quality webcast. They know a whole lot more about technology than you do.

Well, that's kind of a low bar, though, to say that it's so high quality.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

You've got to have a thick skin to have you on a program, I tell you.

When we've known each other for 29 years, you've got a lot of material to work with. So anyway, I get home and here's this lengthy thing. One of the things they like to accuse people of is being a Judaizer.

So basically, if you know Marcion in the early church, the Gnostic heretic Marcion, that's the new thing today. I guess he had seen me talking about the Isaiah scroll and the relationship to the Greek Septuagint and stuff like that.

And so here's this long thing. And basically, what he came down to was his assertion is that God destroyed the Hebrew language and the Hebrew scriptures and that the Christian scriptures are all in Greek.

And so he believes that the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that was done bits and pieces. It wasn't done all at one time. It seems fairly obvious that 200, 250 years before Christ, there was a well-done translation of the Pentateuch, the works of Moses, that's highly accurate and in the vast majority of instances is based upon the textual tradition, the Hebrew textual tradition that would become the Masoretic text.

But there are other portions of the Greek Septuagint that are much less accurate, weren't done by as good scholars. But it had started circulating prior to the time of Christ, and it should be noted that the Greek Septuagint was the Bible of the early church.

And before there was a New Testament, as the gospel went out from Israel into the rest of the world, the vast majority of people outside of Jerusalem in that area do not read Hebrew, and outside of that part of the world don't read Aramaic.