Arguments Against Paul's Writings

Okay, let me, if you're used to being very silent in Sunday school, which is normal for us,

I do most of the talking, but today you're going to have to, maybe have to speak up a little bit.

Okay, let me read a section for you here, and we're actually going to,

I'm not going to answer these things initially, I'm going to allow you, the class, to interact with these things, and I think you'll see why.

Reading from a popular, recently published book within the past four months,

I think, four or five months, when I was teaching at Rutgers in the mid -1980s,

I regularly offered a course in the life and teachings of Paul. One of the textbooks for the course is a book on Paul by the conservative

British scholar F .F. Bruce. I used the book because I disagreed with just about everything in it, and I thought it would be a good idea for my students to see a different side of the story than the one

I told in class. One of the things F .F. Bruce thought about the writings of Paul was that Ephesians was the most

Pauline of all the Pauline letters. Not only did he think Paul wrote it, he thought it encapsulated better than any other letter the heart and soul of Paul's theology.

That's what I once thought, too, years earlier, when I was just starting out in my studies. Then I took a course in the

New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary with Professor J. Christian Beeker. Beeker was a formidable scholar of Paul.

In the late 1970s, he wrote a massive and influential study of Paul's theology, and one of the truly great studies ever to be published on the matter.

Beeker was thoroughly convinced that Paul had not written Ephesians, and that, in fact, Ephesians represents a serious alteration of Paul's thought.

At the time, when I took the course, I wasn't so sure, but the more I studied the matter, carefully comparing what

Ephesians says with what Paul himself says in his undisputed letters, I became increasingly convinced by the time

I was teaching at Rutgers, I was sure Paul had not written the letter. Today, the majority of biblical scholars agree

Ephesians may sound like Paul, but when you start digging a bit deeper, large differences and discrepancies appear.

If you want to be writing down what these are, feel free to do so, because I will be asking us to interact with this.

Ephesians is written to Gentile Christians to remind them that even though they were once alienated from both God and his people, the

Jews, they have now been reconciled, they have been made right with God, and the boundary that divided Jew from Gentile, the

Jewish law, has been torn down by the death of Christ. Jews and Gentiles can now live in harmony with one another in Christ and in harmony with God.

After laying out this theological set of ideas in the first three chapters, especially chapter two, the author turns to ethical issues and discusses ways that followers of Jesus might live in order to manifest the unity that we have in Christ.

The reasons for thinking Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. For one thing, the writing style is not

Paul's. Paul usually writes in short, pointed sentences. The sentences in Ephesians are long and complex.

In Greek, the opening statement of Thanksgiving, verses three through fourteen, all twelve verses is one sentence.

There's nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek, it just isn't the way Paul wrote. It's like Mark Twain and William Faulkner, they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other.

Some scholars have pointed out that in the hundred or so sentences in Ephesians, nine of them are over fifty words in length.

Compare this with Paul's own letters. Philippians, for example, has one hundred and two sentences, only one of which is over fifty words.

Galatians has one hundred and eighty -one sentences, again with only one over fifty words. The book also has an inordinate number of words that don't otherwise occur in Paul's writings, a hundred and sixteen altogether, well higher than average, fifty percent more than Philippians, for example, which is about the same length.

But the main reason for thinking that Paul didn't write Ephesians is that what the author says in places does not jive with what

Paul himself says in his own letters. Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, for example, certainly looks like Paul's writing, but just on the surface.

Here, as in Paul's authentic letters, we learn that believers were separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through his grace, not as a result of works.

But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and senses.

This doesn't sound like the Paul of the Undisputed Letters who says that he had been blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law,

Philippians 3, 4. In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from works of the law, as Paul does.

He speaks instead of salvation apart from doing good deeds. That simply was not the issue Paul addressed.

Moreover, this author indicates that believers have already been saved by the grace of God. But as it turns out, the verb saved, in Paul's authentic letters, is always used to refer to the future.

Salvation is not something people already have. It's what they will have when Jesus returns in the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers from the wrath of God.

Relatedly, and most significantly, Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had died to the powers of the world and were aligned with the enemies of God.

They had died with Christ, but they had not yet been raised with Christ. This would happen at the end of time when

Jesus returned and all people, living and dead, would be raised up to face judgment. That's why in Romans 6, 1 -4,

Paul is emphatic, those who are baptized have died with Christ and they will be raised with him at Jesus' second coming.

Paul was extremely insistent on this point, that the resurrection of believers was a future physical event, not something that had already happened.

One of the reasons he wrote 1 Corinthians was precisely because some of the Christians in that community took an opposing point of view and maintained they were already enjoying a resurrected existence with Christ now, that they already were enjoying the benefits of salvation.

Paul devotes 1 Corinthians 15 to showing that, no, the resurrection is not something that has happened yet, it is a future physical event yet to occur.

Christians have not yet been raised with Christ. But contrast this statement with what

Ephesians says, even when we are dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places,

Ephesians 2, 5 -6. Here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now.

This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letter to the Corinthians. In point after point, when you look carefully at Ephesians, it stands at odds with Paul's own work.

This book was apparently written by a later Christian in one of Paul's churches who wanted to deal with a big issue of his own day, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the church.

He did so by claiming to be Paul, knowing full well that he wasn't Paul. He accomplished his goal, that is, by producing a forgery.

So, I would imagine some of you can probably guess what book

I'm reading from and who the author is. Any guesses?

Oh, you saw the book. Well, I appreciate your honesty at that point. That's very good.

No guesses. Bart Ehrman, thank you very much. Mr. Ricketts, and his new book is called

Forged, and that's why he addresses what he's addressing, obviously.

Unfortunately, I would imagine this book will be being read by college and university students all across our land this semester.

It came out, I think, I recall April, May, somewhere around in there. I listened to all of it within a day or two of it coming out.

That's a nice thing these days. You can get it electronically and get through it very quickly. Anyways, I listened to a radio debate between Dr.

Ehrman. For those of you who do not know who Bart Ehrman is, Bart Ehrman is the James Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, I believe, but let me just read you here.

James A. Gray, Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He's written numerous books, including

Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem, and Jesus Interrupted. He is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary.

He is an apostate, having once professed the faith, but now denies the faith, and is probably the leading critic of New Testament Christianity in the

English -speaking world today. A couple of you might know I debated Dr. Ehrman back in January of 2009 on the accuracy of the transmission of the text of the

New Testament down in Florida. In listening to this particular presentation and in listening to the radio debate that I heard,

I have been struck once again by the kind of argumentation that is given just free reign in our modern world.

Dr. Ehrman is making the talk show circuits, and I'm sure that, though I haven't bothered to even look,

I'm sure he's probably been on a fresh air by now, and NPR, and all the rest of this stuff.

When we seek to present the gospel to people today, we need to realize that we no longer live in our grandparents' generation.

There is a day when you quote the Bible, and there is a general respect for the Bible in our culture.

That day is long past. If you were to, for example, quote

Ephesians chapter 2, verses 8 and 9, as to what the nature of the gospel is, to someone who has read this book, one of the initial thoughts across their mind is not that you are giving to them the word of God, but that you have been deceived into thinking that that even belongs in the

Bible. That's actually a lie. It's a forgery. So, as you were listening to the arguments, how would you respond to them?

One of the reasons I wanted to do this study this morning is that in listening to Bart Ehrman and Daryl Bach from Dallas Seminary, going back and forth on the

Unbelievable Radio program just a couple weeks ago, and there were a number of people militating to have me do that one, but you got

Dr. Bach to do that, and that's perfectly fine with me. I was really taken aback, once again, at how basic the issues really are and how we need to demythologize scholarship.

Just because a man graduated from Princeton doesn't mean he has even the slightest bit of common sense in the reading of an ancient text.

I'm sorry, it just doesn't follow. I'm one of the few people that I know in the world, to be perfectly honest with you, who's actually read his doctoral dissertation, and he's an expert on the development of the

Proto -Alexandrian text type in particular Egyptian writers. That does not make you an expert on much of anything else.

There are some people in here that have expertise in very specific areas, but I've met people who have high functionality in one little area over here that can't tie their shoe, so it just doesn't follow that having all those degrees after the name necessarily means that you can think straight at all.

And I do not think that these are issues that he has raised here, that in any way, shape, or form should cause any of us to cower in fear and close our mouths as Christians.

So let's think about, that's the entirety, I mean, he moves from there to Colossians. That's the entirety of the argument.

Now he says he's just now finished his full scholarly work on this. Well, okay, I'll get that too, but let's listen to what the arguments against Ephesians were, and demythologize this scholarship for, first of all, our own benefit, our own growth in confidence in the faith.

But when we've thought these things through, then you can try to help others to think these things. If you've not thought through them yourself, it's impossible for you to guide somebody else in that process.

So, what were the arguments? First of all, the reasons for thinking

Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. First of all is writing style.

Paul writes with nine sentences in Ephesians that are over 50 words in length, but only one in Philippians.

And only one in Galatians. Well, there you go.

Now, I immediately, one of the reasons I would have been willing to accept the invitation to do the radio program, even though it was a very short notice, it's been like two days.

One of the reasons I would have been happy to do that is I would love to point out that if you were to compare

Bart Ehrman's books with one another, it would be very easy to prove that Bart Ehrman did not write all of them. I have all of Bart Ehrman's books.

I have a shelf. I have helped to enrich the man, and he has been quite enriched. I have all of his books, and there are two distinct groups.

There's three distinct groups in his bookshelf.

A number of them are really just where he's edited ancient writings, and he's giving you quotes of all sorts of other people.

We can sort of leave them aside because he didn't write much in there. It's primarily texts from early church writers or Gnostics or so on and so forth.

So leaving them to the side, there's two groups left. There's his scholarly works like the

Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which he's doing a second edition on, which are written for scholars, and evidently this new book on forgery will be written for scholars.

And then you have these. You have Forged. They're all put out by Harper One. It's funny.

If you read the jacket copy and the promotional copy for these books, very different than what's actually in the books because Harper One, it loves to publish anti -Christian stuff.

Very strong anti -Christian bias for Harper One. I mean, they're the leading. They love to publish atheists.

Anything that's anti -Christian, they love it. And so you've got Forged, Jesus Interrupted, Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem, and the

Subject of Evil, which got panned universally by philosophers as being really bad, and it was. He's not trained as a philosopher in any way, shape, or form.

Not trained as a theologian either, for that matter. But be that as it may, these are the popular -level books, and they're the ones that are getting read.

Then you have his scholarly works, and I have, for example, a Brill compilation.

Brill is a publisher, not, oh, it's Brill. I need to translate that for those of you under 25.

And, you know, it's $169 or something like that for this one volume, just a ridiculous amount of money.

If I were to take and analyze the style of the

Orthodox description of Scripture, and the Brill compilation of all the scholarly articles, all that stuff, which

I've read, and compare it with what's in these, what would be the inevitable result?

Same author could not have written it. Just not possible. The style's totally different. He uses longer sentences.

Look at how many footnotes and endnotes this man uses in comparison to this man over here. I mean, 2 ,000 years from now, if you dug all these up, there would be a clear case to be made that there were multiple people running around claiming to be

Bart Ehrman. And so I think either he has a ghostwriter, or maybe he hasn't considered the fact that Ephesians is probably that letter mentioned in Colossians 4 .16,

which he thinks is a forgery as well, but that letter that is coming from Laodicea.

It is a circular letter. It is not personal. Have you noticed Ephesians? How long did

Paul stay in Ephesus, according to Acts? Three years.

Long time. That means he had close friends there. He was staying in people's homes. He stayed there longer than almost any place else.

But everyone know something about Ephesians? There's nothing personal in it at all. No greet this person, greet that person, because it's a circular letter.

It's meant to be read in multiple churches. It's not a personal letter. Now, if I were to write a letter, well, let's just put it this way.

I'm writing a book. I'm way behind in it, but I'm writing a book. And is there going to be a difference in the vocabulary

I use, sentence structure I use, in a book that's going to be written by a wide variety of people, in comparison to an email that I send to my wife, or my daughter, or my son, or somebody that I know?

Of course there is, because you have a different audience in mind. Ephesians has a different audience in mind.

Compare that with Galatians. Now, Dr. Ehrman believes Galatians was actually written by Paul. Dr. Ehrman believes there are seven letters written by Paul, and Galatians is one of them.

Galatians is very choppy. Its style is very different than Romans, but he accepts both of them as being written by Paul.

And yet they're vastly different on style levels. And in fact, if you were to take Galatians out of the seven genuine letters, and now redo your database and compare

Galatians with the six letters, it would be more different than Ephesians is from the seven with Galatians in it.

You see, when you hear all this stuff about, well, style, and length of sentences, and numbers of words, and stuff like that, realize something, folks.

He who creates the original sample determines the result. He who says, well,

I'm going to say that these are genuinely Pauline, and then compare everybody else to this, there's always someone who's going to come along and say, oh, but I don't think one of them is.

And I've debated one fellow, remember Dr. Price? Dr. Robert Price. He doesn't believe Paul wrote anything.

So you've got the whole spectrum to be expressed there. Who gets to say?

He who starts the discussion and says, well, notice how many times he said, well, in the genuine letters of Paul, he says this.

So what he's done is he's said, okay, I'm going to take these seven as being Paul. And I'm going to develop a theology out of these seven, and the main thing that's different than that must have been

Paul. But if you started with ten instead of seven, wouldn't your result in theology be different?

And couldn't you harmonize the ten? Well, of course you could. So when

I read this stuff, people, I just think of the poor university student who's got too much to read already anyways, reading this going, wow, sounds good to me.

And how many evangelical Christians would have anything to say other than, well,

I just trust my Bible because God gave it to me? Well, that's wonderful and fine, but don't you think it might help them to realize that the person they're reading is pulling the wool over their eyes?

Now, does he realize this? He doesn't get challenged very often. He doesn't handle it very well when he is, but he doesn't get challenged very often.

And so I would have liked to have been able to point these things out. But that wasn't the only thing that was said.

He says that there are fundamental theological differences, and this is where I want to hear back from you folks.

For example, Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, for example, certainly looks like Paul's writing, but just on the surface.

Here, as in Paul's authentic letters, we learn that believers are separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through His grace, not as a result of works.

But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and senses.

This doesn't sound like the Paul of the Undisputed Letters, who says that he had been blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law,

Philippians 3, 4. How do you respond to that?

Yes, ma 'am. Welcome home, or here, or wherever. Now, how would you back that up?

I mean, Paul does include everyone under sin.

But think of Ahriman's position. I suppose it would help you if you knew which books he considers to be

Pauline. Romans is Pauline. So think about that for just a small second, and how many references can we come up with in Romans to Paul's own testimony that it was the law that brought death to him, and thou shalt not covet, and the universal sinfulness of man in Romans 1 and Romans 3, and all of this stuff.

I mean, it just screams everywhere. And yet, you can actually confuse

Paul's talking about the fact that as to touching on the righteousness of the law, I was a

Pharisee of the Pharisees, I was blameless, I was a

Hebrew of the Hebrews, and then think that what that means is

I wasn't amongst the children of wrath? Of course not. It makes perfect sense.

There's no reason to create a contradiction here. And yet, here you have a man, graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Well, folks, today that doesn't mean a whole lot. I mean, I don't want to sound like a backwoods hick, but I think you could learn more at the

Princeton Cemetery today than at the Princeton Seminary today. And I say that because I visited the

Princeton Cemetery, and that's where Edwards is buried, and that's where B .B. Warfield is buried, and there's a lot to be learned from the

Princeton Cemetery, and not as much from the Princeton Seminary, which has gone the way of the world, and those who founded it would hiss at it and say anathema.

I mean, just almost a decade ago now, they put out a book on homosexuality where they had a debate on the subject from the members of the staff on both sides.

So they can't even figure it out anymore. So you're talking about a seminary that has long gone the way of most seminaries do, always head off to the left eventually.

Very rarely do you see them going the other direction. So there you go.

In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from the works of the law as Paul does.

He speaks instead of salvation apart from doing good deeds. That simply was not the issue

Paul addressed. Now, certainly when we talk about works of the law, there can be instances where Paul is specifically addressing the works of the

Jewish law. That's true. But is that all that that means?

And when we talk about doing good deeds in, for example, Philippians chapter 2, which

God hath before ordained that we should walk in them, what is

Paul talking about in Ephesians chapter 2? If he says God has ordained that we should walk in them, it's not by doing them that we get ourselves saved, but it is something that God has ordained us to.

Is that not completely consistent with Romans chapter 6, walking in holiness, Romans chapter 12, giving us our lives, sacrifice, so on and so forth?

Can we really say that because, and it's funny to me, he admits, who is this written to?

Gentile Christians. So why would he be writing to Gentile Christians specifically about Jewish law keeping?

As if that was an issue with them. In other words, it seems to me that Ehrman is saying, well Paul cannot recognize that there are different situations in different churches and therefore change his presentation to meet the actual needs of those churches.

He needs to say what I want him to say. And yet, so many people in our culture, because this guy has got a bunch of degrees after his name from a big name school, are afraid to even ponder that as a possibility.

Could this guy actually really be missing it on that level? The answer is, yes.

They live in a bubble. I mean, remember what one of the big arguments that Bart Ehrman used against me in our debate was?

Yeah, well, I have tea with the leading French textual critical scholars. Really?

Wow. And for him, he thinks that's important. I mean, it might have had some weight if he hadn't said the

French. I mean, come on. Really? Seriously? Honestly? Come on. I'm sorry if any of you are

French. If he had said German or something, at least it would have had a little more gravitas to it.

But you see, they live in this bubble and the rest of us just don't even have the right to think their thoughts after them.

One of the big things that struck everybody who watched our debate was just not only how dismissive he was toward me, but toward the entire audience.

I mean, one of the first things he said after I gave my presentation is, well, that was a very intelligent presentation.

Very well done, James. I'm just not sure how many people here could understand any of it. I'm just sort of like, wow, you really want to bring this group along with you, don't you?

Yeah, all right. There you go. But that reflects an attitude.

And, you know, people will say, well, how come so many in liberal schools don't even respond to our position?

Because they don't think it's worth responding to. In a liberal seminary, they won't even discuss what we believe.

In conservative seminaries, we're always discussing what they believe and responding to it, but not the other way around.

Remember, I'm a graduate of Fuller, so I know. So keep that in mind.

Then we have the now and the not yet, where he says, moreover, this author indicates that believers have already been saved by the grace of God.

As it turns out, the verb saved in Paul's authentic letters, in other words, I get to define my parameters here, is always used to refer to the future.

Salvation is not something people already have. It's what they will have when Jesus returns to the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers from the wrath of God.

Yes, sir? Well, that looks like, you know, but it's actually an active spot there.

Okay, all right. Think about it. In Romans chapter 8, when we talk about adoption as sons of God, we haven't adopted, we will be adopted.

We are in Christ, but we await his appearance. We have been, it's foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and what tense is glorified?

Past. And who wrote Romans? Paul did.

Again, when you're spending most of your time collating variant readings in Egyptian manuscripts in Greek and the

Alexandrian text type, you don't have as much time to be listening to the theology class, even if the theology class was any good back then.

And so, you should not hesitate to see these things and go, that's a basic fundamental error.

Now, I'm not suggesting what I do often see people do, where people go, well,

Bart Ehrman's wrong, so everything he says is wrong. Bart Ehrman is normally spot on with his facts. It's his conclusions that are normally way out there someplace.

He's normally spot on with his facts, because he's normally not saying anything that's overly disputable when it comes to just the factual information.

It's the conclusions that he comes to that have to be challenged. And unfortunately, a lot of conservative people just react to the man and instead of taking the time to read it and say, here's where he's missing here, here's where he's missing there, the conclusions of the follow, etc.,

etc. Relatedly and most significantly, and I want to make sure in the next ten minutes we cover all of this, because there's two more points.

Paul is emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had died to the powers of the world that were aligned with the enemies of God.

They had died with Christ. But they had not yet been raised with Christ. That would happen at the end of time when

Jesus would return and all people living in the day would be raised up to face judgment. That's why in Romans 6, 1 -4, Paul's emphatic, those who are baptized have died with Christ and they will be raised with him in Jesus' second coming.

And then he talks about 1 Corinthians, wrote all of 1 Corinthians to dispute the idea that the resurrection had happened yet.

But then, and here's his whole argument, but contrast this statement with what

Ephesians says, even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.

Here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection, he even says the right word, and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now.

This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letters to the

Corinthians. Now, we all know that's not the case.

How would you demonstrate it? How would you express to someone who says, look, how can you believe this book is written by Paul?

Because whoever wrote Ephesians is arguing directly against what

Paul wrote in the Corinthian correspondence, which Bart Ehrman accepts as having been written by Paul.

How would you explain it? This is the part where you talk.

I realize that I didn't do as much of that as I thought I was, but in fact, I'll even take a drink while you talk.

Well, what's 1 Corinthians 15 about? It should be, to you, if you've been a

Christian for more than just a few years, not only should you be memorizing Scripture, but one thing that's very, very good to do, and a lot of people don't do it, but it's very, very good to do, is become familiar with an outline of the books of the

New Testament. So, in other words, if you turn to the book of John, you have an idea of what each chapter is about.

1 Corinthians, you have an idea of what the theme of the epistle is and where to find important things.

1 Corinthians 15 is one of the most important chapters on the nature of the physical resurrection.

It's talking about the nature of the resurrection. And there is a great concern on Paul's part that people understand that that physical resurrection has not yet taken place.

Christ is the firstfruits, He's the guarantee, but the general resurrection, the reuniting of the spiritual nature of man with the body, that's what resurrection means, has not yet taken place.

That will happen in the future. And there are people asking questions in Corinth, what's the resurrection body going to be like, et cetera, et cetera.

All right? So, if you know what 1

Corinthians 15 is about, and that's a good chapter to understand for lots of reasons.

At the funeral itself, that's a text that is very frequently read, but should also be one that we can discuss and talk about and go, here's what the scriptures say, this is our hope, in the fact that all of us face death, we're all mortal.

Likewise, it's a text that's very frequently abused by various groups and sects out there that would seek to draw us away from the truth.

So, there's Paul's teaching on the physical resurrection, but even

Ehrman recognizes here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection.

Is that what 1 Corinthians 15 is about? Is 1 Corinthians 15 about our union with Christ, our relationship with Him now, the nature of that union?

No. Ephesians is talking about the fact that since we are united with Him, we are spiritually united with Him, so where He is, we are, and the certainty of the completion of that work of salvation, which is seen in Romans just as clearly, is as certain as Christ's resurrection itself is.

How is that any different than saying, have been called, have been justified, have been glorified?

Romans chapter 8, the golden chain of redemption. I don't see any difference, but obviously

Bart Ehrman does, so much so that he can say, that's exactly what Paul was arguing against.

It's not even the same subject. One's talking about the nature of the resurrection body in the future, and this is talking about our current relationship with Christ.

One is spiritual, one is physical. How in the world can he confuse these?

Thankfully, this did come up a little bit on the radio program. By the way, I'm not the only person who can listen to it.

The Unbelievable Radio Program is available on iTunes, free download. Just look up either

Unbelievable or Justin Brierley, who is the host of the program over there in London. I've been on it a number of times, and that's where I debated.

Who's the emerging guy that I debated a couple months ago? No, it wasn't Rob Bell.

It was right after Rob Bell. Brian McLaren. Gray down here is just sucking everything right out of the brain.

He can't even remember what he did a few months ago. Good program. Lots of interesting stuff.

That's where I debated Anthony Buzzard, and I've been on with Abdullah Al -Andalusi, and a number of Muslims.

It's a good program, especially over there in the UK. Okay, but anyway, Daryl Bach did challenge him on this.

I don't think as strongly, certainly as I would have. I would have spent much more time on it. But he did point out that this is all he got.

I mean, that's it, folks. That's it. It's a grand total. When you get to the actual arguments, it's one, two, it's two pages of text facing each other.

That's it. Now, will that expand in the scholarly work?

Sure. It will become 20 pages because it will be filled with footnotes, but I don't think the argument is going to be any different. And we cannot be intimidated by these people who, you know, you can, the

Internet makes it possible for you to massively inflate the boundaries of your arguments with lots and lots of references and footnotes and quotes of people who may or may not at all be relevant.

But just keep in mind that even when

I first read this, when I first read this to you, and you hear about, for example, nine sentences with more than 50 words, let's say you've never thought about that before, or you're not familiar with how comparisons are made and things like that, when you hear things like that, one of the things that bothers me, one of the reasons

I want to do this, and I would hope that it would not be the case with with folks here, but I get emails from Christians, and they've run into something they've never seen before, and they're just blblblblblblblbl you know,

I'm not sure that that translates well into tape or CD or MP3 or sermon audio or whatever, but it's just, it's just it's they're so easily swayed, like, oh, never thought about that before.

And we should be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to come to conclusions without thinking things through thoroughly.

And my concern is I, obviously doing what I do, I've met so many young people went off to university, in church, never discussed these things, never talked about these things, run to Bart Ehrman and their freshman philosophy class or history class or religion class, whatever else it is, and now they have become enlightened and discovered how silly their former faith was.

Well, that tells us something about them, but for all of us, we should be quick to hear, slow to speak, but willing to think through the issues and find out where the truth really is.

Because that's a, that's an incredibly weak argument against denying the unanimous consensus of the early church concerning the authorship of the epistles of the

Ephesians. I mean, Bart Ehrman looks at those people as if they were a bunch of morons anyways. I mean, they just weren't as enlightened as we are.

He has a massive case of modern nose in the air snobbery as far as the, as far as the ancient world was concerned.

But apart from that, those just aren't even good arguments. And you don't have to have a

PhD in ancient history to see that they aren't good arguments. And so, hopefully that will encourage you, even if something else comes up, not heard of it before, but you'll remember, yeah, well,

I've heard arguments I haven't heard of before, and when you really start thinking them through, maybe just get a small amount of data that will help to shine the light that needs to be, needs to be there to see where the holes really are.

Okay? All right. Let's close our time in order of prayer. Once again, our

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time and the freedom that we have to consider these things. And we would pray that as we are given an opportunity to proclaim your truth, that as objections are raised, as we live in a very, truly, as it has been said, post -Christian society, that we will have the words to speak, that you will give us the wisdom and insight, and we know that only by your

Spirit can anything truly eternal be accomplished. And so, we would ask that you would give us boldness,