Shabir Ally Post-Debate Discussion

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Studio Setup, Upcoming Appearances, and Time Change Banter

So did Steve just hiccup there or just what? I've never heard that before. What? You clicked on something and it, did you lose your microphone in there? Oh, you still got it. Okay. You just weren't saying anything.

So I just sort of wondered what that was all about. What would you like me to say? I don't know. Normally you grab it and say something. It doesn't look like it's in really good shape there though. It's sort of falling over and stuff, but you'll...

Well, it's in the same shape it's always been. Just because you've got a nice brand new tree of microphones in there. Oh, I've got a whole tree of microphones in there. It looks like a real radio studio.

Except we're not on radio. Yes, but it looks like a real radio studio. It looks like a real radio studio.

It looks like a real broadcasting studio. Broadcasting, webcasting. Webcasting studio. Yes, it does. In fact, those who are accessing the not really quite streaming but sort of webcam thing that someday will be streaming but isn't now can see that things have changed here in the studio.

I'm feeling really, I don't know, out of balance. The microphone's on the wrong side of me now. No, it's on the right side. Well, it's on my right side, but it's on your left side. Everything's changed, and part of the reason that we've always wanted to do this, we just finally got around to it.

Most of the stuff that you now see in front of me has been laying on the floor out of view of the webcam about a year. About a year. About a year. Yeah, about a year. That's about how long it's been there.

But now it's mounted in place. One of the reasons was yesterday morning my daughter, Summer, and I were interviewed by Gary DeMar on his American Vision program, which I think will air on about 20 radio stations.

Those are radio stations. That's where radio wave's going out. You can drive in your car and hear it, things like that. Anyway, that'll be this weekend. We were talking about her interesting experiences as a college student with a philosophy professor who clearly not only hates Christianity but also suffers from a very, very bad case of Bush derangement syndrome.

And he would do really well on that local station, man. I'm going to tell you something. He would be a hero on our local progressive talk radio station, where today they were freaking Rich out by talking about how the secret police from Blackwater are taking away all the liberals.

They're running around shooting citizens and everything. Oh, man. I'll tell you. You had to tell me about this about, what, four weeks ago? I shouldn't have done that. You had to take about 10 minutes and listen to this thing.

It's kind of funny. I shouldn't have done that. Oh, man. You just got to turn it off, man. What I need to do is balance it out and listen to Art Bell in the middle of the night.

Oh, good. Wonderful. Wonderful. That's great. Well, anyway, good to have you all with us on The Dividing Line today. Next Tuesday, Summer and I are scheduled to be on Iron Sharpens Iron with Chris Arnzen as well.

So if you don't get a chance to hear the American Vision program, which I forgot to check, is probably available online, I would assume.

That would make sense. Is there any chance we can get her on for The Dividing Line before ISI? I don't know. See, I wanted some sound bites from her. I'd really love to have that sound bite where Gary asks her about being prepared with her upbringing for these kinds of things.

Yeah, weren't you prepared for this?

When she started off saying, no, I really wasn't prepared for it, I was sort of like, uh-oh, what are you saying? And she goes, no, I really wasn't prepared for it because I'm used to learning from rational men.

Well, she's got a real good timing. Deadpan. She's deadpan. And she goes, you know, I was raised and learned to speak with rational people.

Yeah, he was laughing. He realized that this was not someone he would want to debate, actually. So anyway, well, I don't know because I'll have to check on that. You know, her work schedule and class schedule and stuff like that gets in the way.

But that's next week on Iron Sharpens Iron. On Tuesday, we're supposed to be doing that. That's going to be a little bit tricky, though, because they can't handle our phone system or our microphones, remember?

So we're going to have to do it somehow over the phone, and I'm not really sure how.

Well, we may just have to use the telephone system and throw it in a conference call. Yeah. Have her on one phone, you on the other, and clear at the other end of the building so that there's no, you know, potential feedback.

Maybe. I don't know.

I don't know. That's a shame, too, because we'd sound a whole lot better going through this thing. But they're a 1961 vintage.

No, I think it's more like 1945. No, no, I've been there. It's about 1961. It's older now. They knew what mixed minus was in 1961, though, so. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm not sure about that. It's pretty bad. So anyway, anyway, that's going to be next week. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. I have this odd thought that we were in the middle of something last time, but I don't remember what it was.

I can't remember exactly what we were supposed to be talking about last time. So we didn't even get the blog article up with the dividing line until this morning. So that's not good. Oh, and by the way, this weekend, in fact, I think it's tonight, the rest of the world plays their clocks.

And that means that for. Now, I will give the Progressive Station kudos on one point, and that is that they had a commercial today where they were talking about how Arizona doesn't play with its clocks.

Yes. Because the rest of the country is afraid of the dark. That's good. I like that, yeah. I don't mind mocking. Talking about keeping all their programs live, and they don't play with the clock. So they're going to have to play with their schedule because we don't.

Everybody else does, too. Because Arizonans are not afraid of the dark like the rest of the country. That's right. I like that. That's true. That's true.

And this poor fellow in Channel, I was trying to explain to him. He's from up in Canada, and he's obviously gotten used to being coddled by the government, have everything taken care of for you. And it really just rips the heart out of you.

You're not a man that stands on your own two feet. And I was talking about the fact that simply turning the hands on a clock does not change time. And he kept saying, well, we have more time during the day.

No, you don't. Yes, we do. No, you don't. That time is either stolen from you, quote-unquote, or given back to you by the largesse of the government. But you're forced to do this. And moving the hands on a clock does not make any difference.

Are you saying this is taxation? It's time taxation. It's time taxation.

It's time control. It's time taxation. Yep. That's what it is. Of course, having listened to that station all day, I'm very much susceptible to conspiracies.

Any kind of conspiracy theory that comes along. Speaking of conspiracy theories, we are dealing on the blog right now with some of the responses provided by Shabir Ali. Shabir's been busy. Even though he had a debate with Tony Costa, in fact, a couple of them, they're calling them dialogues.

I'm always worried when we're trying to arrange a debate and the people putting it on go, Well, we'd sort of like to avoid the term debate. We'd rather call it a dialogue. And I just know right then and there that even if this goes off, that when it's over with, we're going to hear about, Well, we're very thankful that you came, but it just seems that Dr. White is so straightforward.

And we were just looking more for a sharing time where everyone would feel safe in sharing their individual journeys. And that's the last time I'll be on that stage. I can guarantee you that. So I always get a little bit worried when folks start talking about dialogues.

But anyway, he's been pretty busy and cranking out a couple articles, I guess three so far. And what I want to do, it's not difficult to respond to this stuff. In fact, a lot of it's just going back over what we did in debate.

But it does take a while to type all this stuff up. So I'm going to respond to some of it here on the dividing line and some of it on the blog as time allows. I am falling behind on some other preparation that I need to be doing.

So we'll just see how that goes. One of the things I did want to address, but that I definitely am going to need to address in a blog, because it's easier to examine, shall we say, on the blog because you have to type things out.

By the way, if you're wondering where he's been doing all this, you just go to, I believe, in fact, I'm pulling it up here as we speak, unless, of course, Firefox comes up and says, I want to install some sort of an update or something like that.

I'm going to go, no, don't do it. Www .shabirali .com, I think, is, yep, there you go. And you will see under the articles, comments on dividing line of October 23rd, part two. And then there's conversing with a caller on the dividing line of October 23rd, 2007.

I haven't even seen that one yet. We click on it. Oh, there's the story of Akin. Yes, that's, wasn't Paul's religion easy on the Gentiles? Did Peter write the second letter of Peter? Oh, good, I need to throw these in here too.

Against the hypothesis that Peter and Paul were at odds with each other is the second letter of Peter, which ostensibly is from Peter. Why is the subject of the second letter of Peter against this thesis?

This is what drives me nuts about those who take a controversy that is based on a book written 600 years later and read it back into the New Testament. This is, you know, it would be so easy to create all sorts of controversies between, well, there were controversies in the early Islamic period.

There's documentation of controversies in the early Islamic period. That's not really much of an issue, but it would be so easy to come up with theories that you, of course, can't document or demonstrate, but if you get enough people talking about them, you can say, well, scholars say, and scholars say this, and scholars say that.

So what you want to do is you have the people who, again, in modern scholarship, have decided that the New Testament is a jigsaw puzzle, and we can chop it up into all sorts of little pieces, and we can take whatever pieces we want and fit them together into new puzzles based upon what we want to say was actually going on, and we can get published by doing this.

Now, whether we could ever actually make any meaningful argumentation that this is actually what took place doesn't matter because what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to pick and choose from the New Testament what we do want to accept and what we don't want to accept.

So when Paul himself talks about going to Jerusalem and interviewing Hysterasi, Peter, and when he talks about the right-handed fellowship, we just dismiss all that because that would blow away most of our theories.

So we just throw that out, and we just say, well, that's later. That's just Paul, and he's deceptive, and we're not going to worry about that. And so we can create all sorts of controversies, and really they're conspiracies.

We're going to create a conspiracy that this person was against that person and all the rest of this stuff. So here you have this idea about Peter and Paul. And so allegedly 2 Peter is all about how Peter and Paul aren't opposed to each other, but actually if you've read it, it doesn't have anything to do with it at all.

The reason this comes out is because in passing, it's not the main point of the letter. It's not the climax of the letter. It's in passing the letter mentions the writings of Paul as Scripture. And so Shabir Ali writes here, Against the hypothesis that Peter and Paul were at odds with each other in the second letter of Peter, which ostensibly is from Peter, the letter regards Paul as a brother and his writings as Scripture.

Well, is that somehow shocking? If Paul was an apostle, is there some theological reason why his writings could not be Scripture? Well, no, unless you start with the presupposition of Islam and then read this back 600 years into history, and you've got Islamic anachronistic eisegesis, which is what we have over and over in these situations.

But Christian scholars, both ancient and modern, generally hold that this is not an authentic letter of Peter. I'd like to know who the ancient quote-unquote scholars are who held this view. This means that someone wrote it using Peter's name in order to lend it greater authority and to show that Paul is acceptable to Peter.

First of all, that's not the thesis of the letter, and that's not the argumentation of the letter. So that's just not true. There are lots and lots of scholars today who reject Petrine authorship for 2 Peter.

But the question I wanted to ask Shabir during the debate was, why? And it's real simple. They come up with a theory about what they believe the early church was like and what they believe was going on in the early church, and then they fit the New Testament to their theory, which is exactly what a lot of people do in regards to the life of Muhammad and the Quran and the development of early Islam.

And every bit of it, Shabir Ali rejects. So again, we have the double standard. The one standard on one side, well, I will accept anything that liberal scholars come up with. Any theory they come up with, hey, as long as they do that and then they get other people to believe their theories, then that's fine.

Then I'll accept that. But when it comes to the Quran, I'm not going to go there. And this is a direct violation of Shabir Ali's own standards, which he announced in his debate with Robert Mori, where he criticized Robert Mori for utilizing the very kinds of sources that he himself rejects, but that he uses in regards to New Testament Christianity.

It is that double standard that for, I think, the vast majority of people, results in a rejection of Shabir Ali's credibility on this issue because he just uncritically will accept almost any of these theories, as long as it is supportive of some element of Islamic apologetics, but then turns around and uses a completely different standard in evaluating his own materials, his own sacred scriptures.

So why is 2 Peter? Well, you see, 2 Peter and Judah are alike, and the theory is these were issues in the later church, and so they must have come along later, once Peter's already gone, so this couldn't possibly be his writing.

So what's the fundamental theory here? Well, these were issues in later church. How do you know that? Well, because we have this general idea of how things develop and evolve over time, and of course, this is the very same type of thinking that goes into saying, well, John, for example, must be very, very, very late, because it has such a highly developed Christology.

In fact, there was a period of time before discovery of more New Testament manuscripts blew this out of the water. There was a period of time where there were people who were suggesting that John was written in the 2nd or even into the 3rd century.

Why? Because of an evolutionary theory. The view that it has of Jesus is so high, and we know, and here's the key, folks, we know Jesus wasn't like that. We know Jesus was just an illiterate peasant, and so if there's something that has this high view of Jesus, it must have come a long, long ways down the road, because, well, we know that whatever the Bible says he was, he couldn't have been that.

And so you start with that, and then you create a theory as to what the early church was like and what the controversies of the early church was like, and then you fit the New Testament in, and hey, if it doesn't fit your mold, you know what you do?

You just cut out the parts that don't fit your mold. You just, well, there are later accretion, or this is clearly the, you know, and then you start, the neat thing is you then start to get to do ancient psychoanalysis, which is lots of fun.

I mean, you can write all sorts of doctoral dissertations about ancient psychoanalysis. It doesn't mean anything, but you can really become very popular if you do these things. And so you start reading into people's intentions, and well, very clearly, and here Shabir Ali does this, well, very clearly this was written to try to make it appear that Paul and Peter were getting along, as if that was somehow the real big controversy of the day, which it wasn't.

But if it becomes the controversy later, 600 years later or 2 ,000 years later or whatever else, well, then that becomes the controversy that we want to talk about, see, and that's when we read it back into those contexts.

And I'm sorry, but again, when someone says, yeah, but there's a lot of scholars who say that. Well, you know what? There's a lot of scholars who accept a lot of things that they're just given. They're just told this is the way it is, and this great scholar believed that.

And I'm just not one of those folks that just goes bowing down and go, well, okay, well, if Albert Schweitzer believed it and he was brilliant, then that must mean it's great. And if Karl Barth said it, then, well, that's just a fantastic thing.

It must be true. And I'm sorry, a stick in the mud here, but I sort of want to critically analyze these things and ask the question, really what's at the foundation of this entire approach to the scriptures?

And over and over and over again, it's a real simple thing. The Bible can't possibly be what we always thought it was. And this is one of the major problems with the Christian Academy, is that when you buy into the world's view that scholarship is always coming up with something new.

To get your doctorate, you've got to add to the knowledge base. Well, that really is a problem when you believe that God has actually made a revelation that is complete in and of itself. And it discourages the restatement and clarification of Orthodox belief, and it encourages the dissemination of non-Orthodox perspectives.

And if you want an example of this, just look at almost every single theological seminary founded over the past 200 years. What always happens? Look at Princeton today. Compare it to how it started. See a difference?

Which direction does it go? Does it go toward Orthodoxy? Does it go toward an ever deeper commitment to the scriptures? Or does it move away from that because it wants to bow the knee to humanistic scholarship and be accepted by humanistic scholarship rather than accept the scandal of Christian scholarship, which should start with bowing to the foolishness of the cross, to use Paul's own terminology from 1 Corinthians 1 and 2.

Well, anyway, when I examine these perspectives and the arguments that are put forward, and I went to Fuller Theological Seminary, so I got to do that firsthand, it keeps coming back to what's the foundation here?

Well, we start with the presupposition that whatever it is, it can't be what Christians have always believed it to be. And so Jesus could not have been the Jesus of Orthodoxy, and the Bible could not be the Bible of Orthodoxy.

And so we start with the presupposition that's wrong. Therefore, what will we do with this text? And that's when you start hacking it up, even though you can't find, you know, Shabir talks about the, well, here we've got this gospel, and there were three different redactors in five different stages.

Have we found anywhere a manuscript that supports this? No. Have we found any early church writings? No, we haven't. So it's this wonderful theory, and that's why they keep pushing the dates back on the gospels.

Of course, they can only go so far because you smack right up into documentary evidence of how early the New Testament text was, but you push it as far back as you can because you need to have this time for all this massive amount of redaction.

And then somehow all the evidence of that redaction has to go poof, has to disappear. None of it can hang around, stick around, it's all going poof, got to disappear, because our theories demand that it was there, but we can't find any of it, so it just all goes bye-bye.

So anyway, that's what's behind these particular things. And so when I was asking him what really is the whole idea behind making 2 Peter and 1 Peter, they can't be Petrine, I know the vast differences between the grammar and the syntax of 1 and 2 Peter.

I've translated both of them. They were assignments many years ago in seminary when I not only minored in Greek in college, but then continued that in seminary, took far more Greek than was offered. I had to keep petitioning to take these classes and so on and so forth.

And I know that there is a vast difference between these two. I am not a naive person. And I know that it would be very, very difficult for someone to prove that these two books were written by the same person as far as the person actually writing the book.

But this is what I tried to point out. The book says that. Every time I read these discussions about authorship of books, when you read Paul, for example, he's using an amanuensis, a scribe. And Peter, it says, through or by the means of Silvanus, there is a scribe that is being used.

And we don't know the mechanism. Did Peter speak in Aramaic and Silvanus is translating? And therefore, that's why in that particular instance, it is a very classical form of Greek. Whereas the other isn't.

I mean, we don't have MP3 players running along to tell us exactly when these things were recorded and who did it and things like that. And what people go on is they fail to recognize the difference between possibilities and probabilities when we talk about ancient histories and ancient texts.

That is, people go, well, it's possible that this happened. And it's possible that that happened. Well, on that level, it's possible that the Enterprise is going to come back. And what really happened is the Enterprise went through a time warp and beamed somebody down or maybe it was Voyager coming back.

And Neelix wrote 1 Peter. And that's why it has the grammar and syntax that it has. I mean, it's possible. Art Bell would think so. You know, I mean, and people will go, well, if you admit that's possible, then you're just admitting we can't know at all.

And people don't don't recognize the difference between possibilities and probabilities. Not every possibility has any probability at all. And when you're constantly, constantly are beginning with the assumption guilty until proven innocent, that might indicate you've got a bit of a bias going on.

And that's not just Muslims that have that bias, but liberal quote unquote Christians. In fact, I love the constant utilization by Islamic scholars, by Islamic apologists of the term Christian scholars.

How do you define a Christian scholar? I mean, that's sort of like Bart Ehrman talking about Christian Gnostics. We might as well talk about Christian Buddhists and Christian Muslims. I mean, everyone's laughing about the woman up in up in the Pacific Northwest who calls herself a Christian Muslim.

Most of us recognize those are contradictory concepts. They can't be put together. Neither can there be such a thing as a Gnostic Christian. Just because Gnostics talked about Jesus does not make them Gnostic Christians.

I know it's used in scholarship. I find it ridiculous. It muddies the waters and it does not communicate anything. I find it to be simply ridiculous. I don't care how many people use it. If the phrase itself presupposes a bias that results in the inability of anyone to say this is Christianity and that isn't, then it's not really an overly useful term.

Unless, of course, that's exactly what you're trying to do is promote that kind of bias and prejudice against Christianity. And so there's all sorts of terms and positions represented within what's called Christian scholarship today.

But unfortunately, the reality is there are not nearly as many Christian scholars as there are people who call themselves Christians involved in quote unquote Christian scholarship. I mean, if we can at least agree that repentance from sin and faith in Jesus Christ as having risen from the dead and that that faith in Christ is necessary for the obtaining of eternal life, if that's at least semi-definitional of Christianity, that just cut out about 60 of what's called Christian scholarship today, didn't it?

Didn't it? It did. Because the vast majority of these folks go, well, resurrection. In fact, I almost fired up a audio portion today. I was listening while lifting this morning to Dawkins and Alistair McGrath.

They had a dialogue slash debate. It's just five minutes, five minutes back and forth. And they're British. So he says also, prim and proper. And they use big words and they have the proper pausing and stuff like that.

But Dawkins, his oh, this man hates God. Oh, my goodness. He has no idea how totally bigoted and prejudiced he is against the Christian faith. He can't hear his own language. I mean, one of his responses to Alistair McGrath was nothing but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Except it was done a British accent with big words. But it really substance wise was nothing more than yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the level of dialogue at that point on the part of Dawkins. He just couldn't he can't possibly utilize any kind of of of semi unbiased examination.

One of the things he did is McGrath. I was unaware of this, but has a background like molecular biology or something like that as an atheist. And that's one of the reasons that he was having this dialogue.

And one of the things he did was he just in a mocking tone. I can't believe that a man of science could possibly believe in something like the virgin birth. And of course, I'm sitting back going. Earlier in the dialogue, he had mocked the people who had said, you know what? Dawkins doesn't know much about theology.

He clearly misrepresents things all the time. He hasn't done any study in this field. And he mocked them with a story about the emperors not having clothes and and mocking people who think that he should be reading all these books about the emperors clothes because they didn't have any clothes.

And that's what's so foolish and so on. But he makes such simplistic errors based on his own ignorance. And he is unwilling to do anything to get rid of that that ignorance whatsoever. But but to hear him say, I can't believe that anyone who's a man of science could possibly these things.

And you go, well, wait a minute. Time out. If you believe God exists. And of course, he keeps calling miracles capricious violations of natural law. They're not capricious. They're purposeful. They have a purpose to communicate something to man about God.

But again, he has doesn't read those books, doesn't doesn't think he needs to. So he doesn't get that point. But anyway, the mockery that someone could possibly have a supernatural viewpoint. Sadly, sadly, that comes into play in the Christian academy as well.

And many today would fall in that category of being totally unwilling within the academy to affirm as a fundamental foundational belief, the resurrection of Jesus Christ and in fact, a supernaturalistic worldview.

That's the scandal of the cross. And that's why so much of the Christian academy is only Christian in name, not in not in function. If if you are unwilling or unable to confess the very fundamentals of the faith, then that's not the Christian academy.

That's just I'm sorry. Call it what you will. But it is not the Christian academy. All this takes us back to the issue of first and second Peter and things like that. And I tried to point out, do you know what the reasons are in a scholarly debate?

It shouldn't be. Well, my scholars say this and your scholars say that. How about going to the point of asking why they say what they say? Let's get into the actual data itself, the actual material itself.

And if they're if their assertions are based upon differences in syntax and grammar. Well, let's talk about that. If if they're if it's based on. Well, I, I view the issues being addressed by Peter in this particular book to be a later thing.

Well, let's find out why you believe that. What is your evidence that the early church did not have the problems that Peter addresses at the time Peter would have been alive? What's your evidence of that?

And that's when things get deathly quiet. Those were questions. I was the guy in the seminary class going, um, how about this? It gets really quiet when you ask these kinds of questions. And that's what you're trying to do in a meaningful scholarly debate is is bring these things up.

And so, again, I fully understand why Shabir Ali wants to completely dismiss the Petrine material. Why? Because he will at least admit it's first century and it is not supportive of his thesis. And so for the Muslim mindset.

Well, if this says it was written by Peter, but it wasn't, we can dismiss it. It's irrelevant. It's a demonstration of another person trying to promote the false idea of the crucifixion. See how it works?

Now, again, would Shabir Ali allow that kind of reasoning to be used in regards to Muhammad, the Koran, the memorization of the Koran, the collection of the Koran, Uthmanic revision, any of that stuff?

No, of course not. Why not? Well, there is a fundamental presuppositional problem at that point in his system. And the inconsistency is the refutation of the utilization of those dual standards. And so, anyway, I will add this particular one to the list of things to look at.

The reason I was bringing that up, I'm sorry, I believe that not all of that was really only secondary. I'm looking for the discussion of, here it is. This is in part two of the response to the October 23rd dividing line.

Did Jesus really say, do this in remembrance of me? Now, listen to this. Did Jesus really say, do this in remembrance of me? These words are attributed, I'm reading now, these words are attributed to Jesus in the Bible, in Luke's Gospel, Luke 22, verses 19b through 20.

And if you all don't mind, here just a moment, I'm going to increase the text size in Firefox. Man, he uses small text size. That is not easy to read in any way, shape, or form. So we scroll back down.

These words are attributed to Jesus in the Bible, in Luke's Gospel, Luke 22, verses 19b through 20. Do this in remembrance of me. In this way we learn, Jesus instituted the regular observance of the Eucharist, the use of bread to symbolize the eating of Jesus' flesh, and wine to symbolize drinking of his blood.

I pointed out in the debate that these words are missing from some very important early manuscripts. And for this reason, many scholars deem the later edition. Hence, this cannot be taken as reliable proof that Jesus said these words.

If he said that these words are missing from some very important early manuscripts, I never heard him say it. I have not had the time. Rich has not had the time to go through the debate yet. He's gotten the feed into the computer.

What you've got to do is you've got to take these two cameras, you've got to feed them into the computer, then you've got to put it all together, and blah, blah, blah. It's a long process. It takes a lot of work.

It really does. People don't seem to realize how much work it takes. And so I have not had the opportunity of, and you can imagine how long it would take anyways, but I may get around to it if I can find the time to do it.

Of going back, all I remember, and I was taking notes as quickly as I possibly could, all I remember was his saying, scholars feel this is a later edition. Now when Shabir says that, he's almost always referring to redaction criticism.

He's talking to that which does not have any documented evidence behind it. It is all based on theoretical examinations of theoretical sources, and it's not hard criticism. It is criticism based upon theoretical reconstructions.

I took him to be making, again, a redaction criticism statement. If I had heard anything about manuscripts, it would catch my attention because that's my area. That's going to, if anything's going to catch my attention, if I had heard it's not in earliest manuscripts, you would have seen me reaching for my Greek New Testament like that, which is over to my left, and it would have been flying open to Luke chapter 22, and I would have been checking the critical edition of the Nelson Yolen text to see what he was making reference to, and trying to continue listening while making a note as to the textual evidence that is something that I might have 15 seconds to comment on, and might have all of 30 seconds before I'm going to get up and comment on these things.

So it's one of the things that debates is, they're challenging, but very enjoyable to do. So I didn't hear that. And so when he says, James seems to have forgotten what the point was. Well, if the point was that it was a textual variant, I never heard anything about a textual variant.

If he said there was a textual variant, then that was my error. On the DLE asserts that I reject these words simply because they disagree with chronic teaching. He then uses the starting point to launch an attack on the Prophet Muhammad.

I don't remember what quote-unquote prophet, I have a feeling that what he's referring to there, I'm thinking back now to the commentary, I think I have a feeling what he's referring to there was, I pointed out that again, if he's using redaction criticism, which he has to admit he does very, very often, that on the same level he would have to question the memory of the companions of the Prophet, and things like that, and putting together with monic revision and stuff like that.

Notice the language, attack upon the Prophet Muhammad. So notice, if you raise textual or critical issues of Muhammad, that's an attack upon him, but he's not attacking the New Testament? I mean, if he's going to say, I'm attacking the New Testament, and put that in the same context as attacking Muhammad, okay, fine, that's at least fair, but at least be open, because I've never heard him talk about attacking the New Testament.