A Ton of Important Stuff But Too Long for a Title!

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings, welcome back to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We have a lot to get to today.

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Homeschooling parents, you're gonna get a lot out of this one. You'll be able to use it for lots and lots of different lessons.

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So keep it bookmarked and should be should be helpful to you, but we do have a ton of stuff.

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We begin rejoicing that there's one topic we'll never have to talk about again, and that is the social justice movement.

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It doesn't exist. I'm so thankful that Thabiti Anyawele has has demonstrated for us on his blog just today that there is no evangelical social justice movement.

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So all the videos that you've seen, the preaching and teaching and all that intersectionality and critical theory stuff, irrelevant.

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It's not there. It is as move along, nothing to see here, nothing to see here.

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No, as Josh Bice said when he responded to it on Twitter, hashtag eyes eyes wide shut.

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But yeah, so this is what he said.

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To be honest, the anti -social justice side, so now it's the anti -social justice side. So this seems to be the new thing.

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It's always good to identify a side as anti -something. Anti -something, it sounds good. That helps to marginalize them, you see.

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So the anti -social justice side bears many more markings of a movement than anything or anyone they criticize among Christians.

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They have produced a statement and written a good number of posts expositing the statement. They have called others to join their cause by signing the statement.

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They have held conferences and meetings expounding their concerns and goals. They've spawned hours of podcasts and sermon series.

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They've developed their own lexicon replete with pejoratives and hashtags to mark out their perspective and the people who share it.

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They sometimes sought to bring pressure on people and institutions. That is a movement, but it's a movement built on conspiracy theories rather than compelling evidence.

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So everything you've seen there, folks, when you hear people, there's a video popped up over the weekend of a black woman preaching, teaching, doing something in a church.

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She's up front. Messing with the doctrine of original sin, as if federal headship in Romans 5 can be transferred wholesale to nations.

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So you have the original sin of America now. That's just supposed to be taken as a theological parallel.

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All of the critical theory, intersectionality, everything that comes with that, all of the identification of people as racists, if they disagree with you about anything, it doesn't exist.

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That's not amongst evangelicals. There's just no evidence of it at all. That's what we're being told.

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As he says, there is no evangelical social justice movement. So there you go.

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So we don't have to worry about it anymore. And as soon as he tweeted that, then, of course,

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Kyle James Howard jumped in and was in full agreement.

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The funny thing was, he had not long ago, I think this was yesterday.

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No, 27th of August. 27th of August. This was a few days ago. 27th of August. I had written a thread that I wanted to look at just briefly.

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There's much more important things yet, too. I realize that. So, today he's saying there's no social justice movement.

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Then, on August 27th, Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism.

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Now, remember, a certain fellow at King's College also really detests

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Reformed Baptists. And there's, you know, talk about broad -brushing. But Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism has an insecurity problem.

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Now, just think with me for a moment. How can you even defend yourself against this kind of rhetoric?

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A multitude of men in culture are profoundly insecure.

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Projection. And find a sense of self -confidence in imagining themselves as, all caps, defenders of the faith.

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So, they mask their insecurities by attacking other men and even women online. Oh, what terrible people.

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We don't want to talk about this, though. We don't want to talk about the cognitive dissonance within tradition as men obsess over masculinity despite embodying a version of it that their own movement would call cowardice.

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Real men protect women, but attack them in online blog posts. I think that has something to do with pointing out that Beth Moore has edited her books and removed stuff on homosexuality and won't explain it.

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But, anyway, at least not meaningfully. Then, oh, here's another term.

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Oh, by the way, have you started catching some of the terms here? So, we already have the masculinity thing coming in here.

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Now, hyper complementarianism. Hyper complementarianism.

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Have you heard this one before? You know, it's like when people go, well, you believe in all five points?

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That must make you a hyper Calvinist. Ah, so if you actually are a complementarian, then you're a hyper complementarian, so that people who actually aren't complementarian can call themselves soft complementarians, which is another way of saying egalitarians.

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It just, it's 1984 all over the place. It's just, just play with the words.

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Don't worry about what they mean. Just play with the words. Play with the words. Hyper complementarianism massages the egos of such insecure men.

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Men who are not confident of their own identity and masculinity need to feel superior to someone.

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Why not women? So, entire theologies are created to give men power to abuse and be puffed up.

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So, there you go. There's hyper complementarity. He even links to one of his own articles.

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Nothing like citing yourself. Hyper complementarity and domestic abuse.

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There you go. There is a reason why the same crowd that embraces hyper complementarianism is also a crowd that is antagonistic towards saints of color who speak against racism.

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Toni Morrison both spoke about the pathology of racism. It comforts profound insecurity.

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If you want ethnic reconciliation and ethnic harmony within evangelicalism, you're going to have to deal with the pathological insecurities of many evangelical men.

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Talk about just throwing the paint out there and don't matter where it splatters. If you want to end misogyny in evangelical spaces.

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Remember, this is the same guy retweeting Thabiti's thing. There is no ecumenical social justice movement.

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And his whole thread is filled with terms like misogyny and he's basing all this stuff on intersectionality and critical thinking.

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He doesn't even realize it. He can't even separate himself from it. It's amazing. If you want to end misogyny in evangelical spaces, you'll have to deal with it as well, but no one is talking about it.

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Well, there's a reason why no one is talking about Kyle J. Howard's rants and raves.

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Ranting and raving. But there you go. So we won't have to talk about this anymore.

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It's done. There is no evangelical social justice movement. At least until the next time they pop up promoting critical theory and critical race theory and critical gender theory and everything else in the process.

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And then we'll probably have to go back and talk about that. Next I want to briefly and in hopefully a constructive manner, interact with a post from this morning by Bassam Zawadi.

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Most of you probably wouldn't know Bassam Zawadi. Wow, what year was that?

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I don't remember what year I debated Bassam at Trinity Chapel there in Wandsworth, but we had a debate.

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I think it's the only time we debated, wasn't it? I think we've only done the one debate. I'm not sure.

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It's the one that I recall most clearly anyways. He has...

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2011. So it was about eight years ago. You can find that online.

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We debate whether the Quran accurately represents Christianity. There's a link to the video on my bio page.

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Okay. Okay. Anyway, so I follow

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Bassam on Facebook. He had sort of disappeared for a while. He's back and reading

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Bassam's stuff, we agree on so many things socially. It's sort of like reading

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Patrick Madrid. We're agreeing on something that all of a sudden, there's a left turn, there's a right turn because of the worldview differences that obviously exist between us.

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There's also a tremendous amount, I complained about this in a recent article that I commented on.

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Huge amount of very specific terminology and especially acronyms. Oh my goodness.

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I don't, you know, I suppose when you look at all the various Presbyterian denominations, you'll get acronym fatigue, but the

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Muslims have a lot of a lot of acronyms as well. Anyway, I caught this article.

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He says, if it were up to me, studying the events which led to the Enlightenment should be compulsory learning for Islamic religious figures, students of knowledge, imams, scholars, etc.

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Muslim pedagogues should learn from Christian errors which drove many to despise religion and Islamic institutions should also quiz them on it and make them think about what practical measures should be taken to ensure the safeguarding of the reputation and credibility of the

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Islamic scholarly establishment in order to prevent Islam from undergoing its own Enlightenment period.

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Deism derived its strengths and perceived and or actual immorality of the church. Disgraceful Christian representation of religion played a vital role in facilitating the emergence of the

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Enlightenment which planted the seeds for the eventual spread of secularism and all its accompanying ills.

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Representatives of Islam are duty -bound to not only abstain from being immoral but also ensure that they are not perceived as such, for their reputation has a substantial impact on the feeble

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Iman, that's faith, of tens of millions around the world. I fear that if the perceived immorality of many shuyukh, putting aside whether it's warranted or not, continues to cultivate, then

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Muslims, similar to many Christians, will grow antipathetic to religion. Most Western Christians today ignorantly think that Western democracies should be indebted to Christianity for supposedly reshaping the political and religious thinking of their ancestors.

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On the contrary, it was deism and other ideological revulsions of religion, particularly mainstream

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Christianity, to which modern Western nations should be indebted. It was the tyranny and backwardness of the church from which people flocked from, not to.

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Unlike Christians, Muslims are not haunted by such a horrid and disappointing history. Yes, Muslims today shouldn't exaggerate their past glories, but comparing past Islamic empires with their

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Christian counterparts is a false equivalency. Moreover, Allah has not burdened Muslims with a religion riddled with intellectual obstacles similar to the

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Trinity, divine incarnation, incoherent doctrines of scriptural inspiration, etc. Muslims today are already in a much better place without having done anything.

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Nevertheless, it's possible to throw all this down the gutter if we are not too careful.

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So, a couple of things I wanted to respond to there. And, first,

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I understand why many Muslims struggle with making distinctions, just as many

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Christians struggle to make distinctions, for example, between Sunnis and Shia, between the various groups amongst the

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Sunnis. There's all sorts of different groups amongst the Sunnis. And most Christians have no idea what the reasons for those things are, what the backgrounds of those things are.

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I get it. And so it goes both directions. And so, it is very, very common for me to be held accountable by Muslims for activities and actions of the papacy and of the

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Roman Catholic Church in the medieval period. I would personally date the rise of Roman Catholicism.

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I would say that the church in 1215 that dogmatically defined transubstantiation would be a thoroughly clear example of Roman Catholicism.

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Now, that doesn't mean that there has not been doctrinal development since then. There has, especially in Meriolatry. Most of the dogmas that have been defined over the past, well, since 1215, have been clearly unbiblical and clearly based upon concepts of tradition, which we would reject as Bible -believing

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Christians. But anyway, the point is I'm often held accountable. Your average

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Muslim from a non -Western country is just going to function with the idea that the

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Pope represents everybody. And I fully understand why many of those

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Muslims, they've never had a conversation with a Christian. And even if they come to a

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Western country, there's not a whole lot of Christians that are going to give them a really solid explanation of what completely distinguishes the papal system from a biblical system.

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There is truth, obviously, in the idea that there were aspects of Christian religion, both

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Roman Catholic and Protestant, against which Enlightenment intellectuals rebelled.

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But this is where a couple things come into play. The papacy and ensacralism, as well as the large difference that exists between us, between Muslims and Christians, when it comes to anthropology and our understanding of how man deals with divine truth.

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While Islam... So, I already talked about the papacy. The papacy is an unbiblical concept.

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It is a fundamental rejection of biblical authority and so much of the scandalous activities of what's called

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Christianity in the medieval period up into the Enlightenment period, which is a misnomer as it is, but anyway, can be traced directly to that grossly unbiblical institution.

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Related to that is the concept of sacralism. Sacralism is earlier. It is the state church.

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It is the intertwining of government and church. So that, at some times, the government, in essence, uses the church to its ends, and then other times vice versa, and frequently it's somewhat of an incestuous relationship.

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In any case, sacralism continued on, even after the Reformation. The early reformers were themselves sacralists, but the

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Reformation did sow the seeds for the destruction of sacralism, and the argument would then be made that that's what then sowed the seeds of secularism.

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There's a bit of a leap there, but I understand the argumentation, even though I don't think it would have been inevitable to go the direction that it did.

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But that takes us really to the issue of anthropology and the doctrine of sin. While Islam has a doctrine of sin, it does not have a doctrine of depravity.

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Any person is able to repent. Well, unless it's been written for them that they won't.

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That's a whole other issue. Even amongst those Muslims who would say that Allah decrees that this person is going to go into the fire, and that there's nothing they can do about it.

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That's different than the idea that there is a utter corruption of nature.

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There is no— that there's almost no evidence of a meaningful understanding of a relationship to Adam on the basis of nature, on the basis of the

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Fall. The idea of being blinded and incapable of doing what is right before God in the doctrine of total depravity, it's just not there in that way.

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And so, when we look at history, and we look at how man has behaved in history, we look in different ways.

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And so, the Muslim is tending to look at, well, you know, if you all just had better arguments, if you had had a better representation of religion, whatever else it might be, and we're like, no, actually, there was plenty of light, and men hate the light, and they run from the light, and when they run from the light,

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God judges their culture. That kind of a— there's just—we just look at the world in a very, very, very, very, very different way.

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And, of course, I'm speaking as a Reformed Christian here. There are lots of non -Reformed Christians who, likewise,

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I think, have a much less than biblical understanding of these particular things.

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And so, when you look at the first part of this assertion, if you have a culture that is under the wrath of God— and this is important because of the fact that we do have to—we do have to recognize that in Western cultures as a whole, we are looking at a situation where, in China, Christians and Uyghur Muslims are both ending up in concentration camps, and China doesn't care which one you are.

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You have a commitment that violates their demand of total commitment to the state.

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The state wants to be the ultimate authority, and the Uyghur Muslim can't do that, and the

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Christian can't do that, but for very different reasons, and for very different claims.

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But since we're all facing this, then, like right now, for example, in our own country, or in Canada, or in the

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UK, wherever else it might be, the utilization of the educational system to promote rabidly anti -Christian concepts of marriage and sexuality, which both

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Muslims and Christians object to, force us into a dialogue as to how we can work together in surviving this secular onslaught.

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The problem is, almost nobody on our side, and almost nobody on their side, has given any thought to this particular theological aspect of why we so often talk right past each other.

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And so, I think it's vitally important to consider these things, and to recognize those aspects of things.

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Now, of course, Bassam also says that Allah has not burdened

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Muslims with a religion riddled with intellectual obstacles similar to the Trinity. Well, you know, just did a debate with a

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Muslim use of Ismail in South Africa about the eternality of the

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Quran, where the Quran is uncreated. I'm seeing a lot of Sunni Muslims just going, doesn't really matter.

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I mean, you had the first Muslim Inquisition was over this very issue.

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But now, it doesn't really matter. I think it's rather important. And I don't...

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I can see how ignorance of the Trinity is an obstacle, but not the Trinity itself.

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Divine Incarnation, again, it's part and parcel of our text, and while that is a presuppositionally rejected concept within Islam, that does not in of itself mean anything.

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I mean, this list seems to me, at least those first two, to substantiate my assertion that what you have is you've got

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Judaism, you have the fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ, as he himself taught, you know,

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Luke chapter 24, places like that. You have the fulfillment of these things, and you have

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Judaism refusing to accept those things, and then Islam doing a

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U -turn and going back to where Judaism is and saying, yeah, we're not going to accept those things either. That seems to be the the reality there, but we've obviously debated that issue a number of times.

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But this was interesting, Incoherent Doctrines of Scriptural Inspiration. Now, this is really interesting, because I would be the one that would suggest that just the opposite is true.

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I think that when you, and this is interesting because this is what's developing amongst

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Muslim academics in the West, is a desire to examine the text of the

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Quran in its historical context and to abandon the concept of Muhammad basically being a dictation machine.

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There are more and more Muslim scholars who are asking the question, doesn't

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Muhammad's level of knowledge have anything to do with this? And in fact, in the debate with Yusuf Ismail, he quoted a

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Muslim scholar who said the Quran, I'm going to have to listen to it, it's been posted, I'm going to play a section of it here, but not that particular part, but the

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Quran is a response to Muhammad's mind. Now, that's a completely different way of viewing the

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Quran than I've heard from any Muslim, except for maybe a few in London. But that's a huge, huge, huge change, and I don't know a lot of Muslims who understand a fully biblical and Reformed understanding of inspiration, and how deep it is.

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I've seen a lot of misunderstandings of it, but I— incoherent doctrines of scriptural inspiration.

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Is he saying we have differing views amongst people who call themselves Christians? Well, yeah, that's— that's a given.

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There's a whole lot of that, but as far as historically or biblically, the idea that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit, God isn't—isn't big enough to give us his exact word, yet to do so in the language of mankind.

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I'm not sure how that's incoherent. So, there would be a lot of—a lot of things there.

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But it is—it is really interesting to me to read Bassam and to see how many times he's responding to the same concerns about what's happening in Western culture.

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But then we go different directions, because we have to. We have to. We can't pretend that, you know, we see the same dangers, but we respond to them in—in different ways, as we—as we must—we must do so.

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So, with that in mind, I mentioned— I—I mentioned on the last program that I had an interesting conversation, and we posted some pictures.

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If you go back on my Facebook feed, my Twitter feed, you'll see especially a picture of me and this gentleman in conversation after the debate at my table.

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I am gesturing toward him, because I went after him.

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He comes up to me after the debate— you'll see why here in a second—and he's—he's holding a

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Good News Bible, as if it's somehow relevant, and he's looking at a footnote about the

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Kamiohanium at 1 John 5 -7. And so I—I—I shut him down.

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I said, look, you're not getting—you're reading a footnote in a lousy translation of the

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Bible. Let me tell you the whole story. I've written a bit on this subject, dealt with it for a long, long time.

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Let me tell you—just—just hush now, and let me tell you the whole story. And so I go through it, manuscript names, dates, the whole nine yards about the

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Kamiohanium. Now, there's a group around us. So he gets done. He says, but—but you just need to listen to me.

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And he repeats. He read—rereads the—the footnote that says, this text does not appear before—in manuscripts for the 16th century.

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And I just—I was very frustrated, and I just—I just rolled my eyes.

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I looked at the people around, including Muslims. And I said, isn't that what I just told him?

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And all the Muslims are like, yeah. So when the other Muslims are like, yeah, you did, then that sort of helped a little bit.

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And eventually he talked with Rudolph, got his—his contact information. And I told him—I told him in front of everybody else, if you'll read

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The Forgotten Trinity— actually, read my book— the next time I come to Durban, I'll take you out to dinner, and we can talk about it.

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And then I complimented him on his hat, because I still think that's one of the coolest hats that I've—I want a—I want a hat like that.

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So you're gonna see it here in a second. I want—I want—I want a hat like that. So we left on good terms, but I called him out during the debate, and since the discussion afterwards—I can only describe it for you, it wasn't recorded— you know, we can't watch that.

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We can watch what happened that started it. And so I just wanted to play that one section for you, and it would help again if I would get it all plugged in here.

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So here's—here's the question, and here's—here's how it went. My name is Bakri. I'm from DUT. I'm a very quick one.

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Muslims, Christians, and Jews share a lot of commonalities. We have so many things in common. But when you look at—when you, like, look deeper between Muslims and Christians, one core difference between us is our concept of God.

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But when you look at it so closely, nowhere in the Old Testament would you find a concept of Trinity developed.

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There's no verse in the Bible— now I'm making a referral to the

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Greek manuscripts—where you have the concept of Trinity defined before the 16th century. In fact, when you look at most of the commentaries and things, especially—I'm making a referral to 1

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John, chapter 5, verses 7 to 8, whereby, when you check the footnotes, it says nowhere— no—no—no— this wasn't found in the original

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Greek manuscripts. That's the only verse in the New Testament that actually promotes the concept of Trinity.

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So when you look at it so closely, Old Testament— So when you look at it so closely, you see that the

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Old Testament itself doesn't, like, promote or advocate the concept of Trinity, as Isaiah, Moses, the rest of them were always saying one

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God, one God, one God. Why was it that it was until after the 16th century the

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Trinity concept was advocated, and why was it that when you look at it closely, the prophets of the

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Bible themselves didn't really promote Trinity? That's a long 30 seconds. You're preaching over there, brother, and you left the truth a long time ago.

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Let me help you out here. The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the

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Holy Spirit. It takes place between the Old and New Testaments. You cannot make heads or tails out of the

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New Testament if you don't understand the doctrine of the Trinity. It makes no sense. You cannot understand how Jesus can be called Jehovah.

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You cannot understand how he can be the exalted Son of God who gives his life. The New Testament is a

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Trinitarian document from beginning to end. It was not the 16th century before someone started believing that.

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The earliest Christians, some of the earliest Christian writings after the New Testament are thoroughly Trinitarian.

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Ignatius of Antioch has numerous references that are plainly Trinitarian. So, historically, you're just wrong, and the

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Kamiohonium in 1 John 5 -7 has nothing to do with it. Every Christian scholar knows that that's a later edition.

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It came from the Latin tradition, probably from the time of Cyprian, and came into the Greek tradition in the 14th century. So, the reality is that we believe in the doctrine of the

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Trinity because the Bible teaches there is only one true God. The Bible then teaches that there are three divine persons that it distinguishes from one another.

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The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. And then here's the key issue. It teaches the equality of those persons.

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Not the sameness. They take different roles, but identifies each one as Yahweh. Identifies him as God.

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Identifies him as the Creator, etc, etc, etc. That is the testimony of the entirety of the

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New Testament from Matthew to Revelation. And so, to try to say that that's something that develops at a later time is just simply misrepresentation.

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And it's interesting, when I answer your question, you're not listening to a word that I'm saying because you are not interested in what the doctrine of the

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Trinity is. You have a position. You're just simply going to keep repeating it, even when it is a misrepresentation.

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And that's the difference between you and I. When I represent the Quran, I represent it accurately.

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I want to because that's a sign of respect for the Muslim people and for truth as a whole. You're not even listening to what

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I'm saying. I was watching you talking to your friend. Right? I'm sorry. I'm putting you on the spot, but this is an important issue.

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I didn't come here just simply to, you know, waste my breath. So I care for you, but you need to listen to the responses because your facts are wrong.

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Yeah, so come to my debate, and I'm going to watch what you're doing when you get done with your question.

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And if you start talking to the guy next to you and clearly demonstrating that you don't care what the answer to your question is,

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I'm going to call you out. And most of the time, especially there in South Africa, when

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I've done that, it's resulted in better conversations afterwards with the same person. They respect it.

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I remember there was this guy in the mosque in Lanasia a number of years ago who had an

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FBI hat on. Seriously. In South Africa. Had an

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FBI hat on. And during the audience

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Q &A, he just decided to get a little uppity. And so, you know,

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I don't always respond. I don't always do it the same way. But there was something about his manners that I just punched straight back at him and got in his face.

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And not only did he smile about it and talk to me about it afterwards, but a couple days later, it may have been the next night or a fairly short time,

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I did a debate at the University of Johannesburg. And afterwards, that's when

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I was talking to that beautiful young lady, a little 13, 14 -year -old girl that was just with tears in her eyes saying, don't say three, don't say three.

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And other people were talking over her and interrupting her, and I was telling them, wait, I'm talking to her.

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And all of a sudden, this voice says, hey, shut up. Let him talk to the girl. And it's the guy in the

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FBI hat that I had taken on rather boldly during the Q &A. So I don't know if part of it's just because I'm getting old and grudgy or just what.

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Look, you know what? The older I get, it's sort of like, I don't care. I mean, you know, especially in situations like this.

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Hey, with the debate coming up in Salt Lake City, that will be number 170. I've done a few of these.

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I don't have anything to prove anymore. I really don't. I mean, once you've done that many debates, seriously.

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So it's just sort of like, I don't have any reason to allow the truth get trampled on here or something.

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I'm just going to say what I need to say. So anyways, once I saw that was out,

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I was like, let's play the clip of that so you can sort of see what had happened during the conversation.

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Now that was in an Anglican church, as I said before, where I think the

35:24

Muslims liked me more than the Anglicans did, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, I'm serious. There was one lady. It was very plain to me that the

35:32

Muslims had significantly more respect for me than this Anglican lady did, because she's just so far to the left that I'm like a space alien to her.

35:43

I mean, just yeah. Anyway, that was I'll never forget that particular conversation.

35:52

So anyhow, so having said all of that, I finally now have the opportunity to get to the main event today.

36:05

Oh, that is way too small. Oh, I can zoom in a little bit. All right. That'll help.

36:12

The main event today, the main material that I wanted to get to, I heard about this guy, and I was going to talk to Jason Wallace up in Salt Lake.

36:28

He's doing all the work and setting up the debate that Jeff and I are doing with two atheists up there, one of whom

36:36

I will be listening to a full two -hour presentation he made. But I started listening like the first 20 minutes.

36:41

I'm like, whoa, this is going to be interesting. He's one of those atheists.

36:50

It's going to be interesting. No two ways about it. But anyway, I was going to contact

36:58

Jason because I'm sure he'd probably give me more background to this. But this fellow by the name of Lee Baker.

37:05

What? Oh, you're reading it? Oh, OK. Yeah, you can see what's on my screen.

37:14

Lee Baker is a former, I guess, bishop in the

37:20

Mormon Church who has left Mormonism to become... My recollection is left

37:29

Mormonism, got involved with the ex -Mormon movement, and then has now become a

37:35

Jew, has joined Judaism. Hence denies the resurrection, deity of Christ, so on and so forth.

37:46

And so if I'm wrong about that, someone let me know. But that's my recollection. Anyhow, I don't know how

37:53

I ran across this. I think somebody tweeted it to me, showed up my feed.

38:00

I don't even know how I got it. But this is from August 27th, so that's not all that long ago. And I started looking through this list.

38:13

How many are there? Fifteen. Fifteen assertions that he posted on Facebook to his

38:23

Christian friends. And I know the vast majority of people in this audience already know why this is an error, where he's wrong.

38:38

I get it. But we have new listeners all the time, and very frequently it's helpful to work through these things.

38:49

And he also said he wants to set up a discussion of how reliable the Bible is, and things like that.

38:56

So it's sort of like he went from Mormonism, which of course believes the

39:02

Bible is the word of God as far as it's translated correctly, right back into that same level of skepticism.

39:08

Because a lot of these objections would be stuff that a Mormon would use, or a Muslim would use. And a lot of the

39:15

New Testament ones he's getting from anti -missionary

39:21

Jewish sources. But it's a mishmash of weird sources that are being utilized here.

39:29

There's no two ways about it. So he says, But please keep them biblical and not your own opinion.

39:36

That is to say, if you actually believe that the Christian Bible you and your family use today, in English, German, French, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, or whatever, is the word of God and your understanding of that authority extends to whatever version, 57 in print today, you use, it's a whole lot more than that, and covers or excuses or justifies the well -documented additions, deletions, and alterations from both the

39:59

Hebrew and Greek. One of the reasons I'm going to cover this is, it's just a tremendous amount of factually absurd information on the internet.

40:14

But since it is about languages that the vast majority of Christians cannot read, the result is that we tend to shy away from a discussion in that area.

40:29

And so, that can be an effective way of shutting things down. And the result is, you end up with all these arguments from all sorts of people that can't go to any original source to find out what in the world this is all about, one way or the other.

40:46

So that's one of the reasons to address it. Then I would like to hear from you on how that authority has worked through the many editors, monks, church fathers, and scribes that made those changes.

40:59

Were they done under the hand of God? And so, there's confusion already, because are these deletions, alterations, additions from both the

41:13

Hebrew and Greek? So, are these changes to the Hebrew and Greek? So, how do you know that?

41:19

How do you know there were changes? How do you know there were additions? What is your physical evidence of this?

41:25

What is your manuscript evidence of this? Some of these are just texts where, well,

41:32

I don't agree with what this person said, so it must have been added later. That's not how you do textual criticism.

41:38

That's not how you determine an original text. There's nothing in this list that shows that Lee Baker has himself examined manuscripts or knows anything about the process of textual criticism or anything else.

41:57

But this is, unfortunately, the kind of stuff that a lot of people run into.

42:02

And one of the things we do in this program is we try to prepare you to respond to these kinds of things.

42:10

And the only way to do that is to respond to things like this. And so, there's 15 of them. I'll try to be brief as best

42:18

I can. I'm not going to get done before the top of the hour, but we're going to try to be as brief as possible.

42:25

So, number one, how can the Christian Bible be trusted when a principal scripture of the

42:30

Trinity, 1 John 5, 7 through 8, was deceitfully added by an unknown person to suggest the concept of the

42:39

Trinity was valid? Is this really the Word of God? Now, as soon as anyone mentions the

42:45

Kamiohonium, which is 1 John 5, 7, in the King James Version of the

42:50

Bible, 5, 7, 8, I know we're not talking about a person who has serious understanding of what the doctrine of the

42:56

Trinity is in the first place, and certainly does not have any meaningful idea of how the early

43:02

Church discussed the issue, talked about the issue. You will not find the

43:08

Kamiohonium as the central verse that was being used, the

43:14

Council of Nicaea or anything else like that, to try to establish Trinitarian dogma.

43:20

As I mentioned to the Muslim, this is probably a marginal reading that originated in the

43:32

Latin manuscripts and became a part of the Latin text, but did not become a part of the

43:40

Greek manuscript tradition until well over, well, at the earliest of the 14th century.

43:47

And even then, it's never become a part of the Greek manuscript tradition, unless you decide to turn the

43:55

TR, or whatever version of the TR you want, into some inspired translation, and then you might as well just throw all the rest of this discussion out, because you're no longer dealing with history.

44:06

You're dealing with a modern development and some type of theological argument you're going to have to come up with to explain all that.

44:13

So, this is not a principal scripture of the Trinity. You would not be able to demonstrate that from reading, just use

44:21

Athanasius. Athanasius was the Bishop of Alexandria, he was the primary defender of the

44:28

Council of Nicaea. See how central it was to him, and you'll see that it was not. So, deceitfully added.

44:37

Well, in all probability, it was a marginal note that a scribe, when you copy someone else's manuscript, if they're not around for you to ask them about marginal notes, the tendency of scribes was to include marginal notes in the text.

44:51

Because when you were copying a text, if you missed something, if you skipped something accidentally, and then you're proofreading, you go, oh, no,

44:58

I missed it. You didn't go out and kill another cow to get some more parchment, you wrote it in the margin.

45:05

Well, if you can't ask the original scribe whether what was in the margin was supposed to be there or not, there was a conservative tendency amongst

45:14

Christian scribes, and so you have the addition, just as you have in John chapter 5, the insertion of what was a marginal note into the text itself in later manuscripts.

45:25

That's probably where 1 John 5 came from, so you don't know that it was deceitfully added by anyone.

45:32

You don't know what their reasons were. You seem to think that you do to suggest the concept of the

45:39

Trinity was valid. That's nice. How did you gain this capacity of reading people's minds who you don't know, who died thousands of years before you were born?

45:48

May I question the validity of that particular process of yours? Yeah, I will question the validity of that process.

45:55

The fact is we know that it's not original. It's not central to the doctrine of the

46:01

Trinity, and there you go. So, number one. Number two, how can the

46:09

Christian Bible be trusted when the kind -hearted words of Jesus himself in the totally imaginary story of an adulterous woman,

46:18

John 8, 1 through 11, were deceitfully added by an unknown person? Is this really the word of God?

46:24

Again, we're going to see this repeatedly, the deceitfully added line, and let's just get rid of it right now.

46:35

You have no way of knowing what anyone's motivation was for any textual variant in the

46:42

New Testament. You can guess. You can speculate, but you don't know it. The Perikope Adulterae, John 7, 53 through 8, 11, that you just made reference to, does not appear in any known

46:58

Greek manuscript that we have found to this date until the 5th century. And the first example we have of it in a manuscript is

47:09

Codex Bezae Cantabrogensis, Codex D, which is a notoriously unreliable manuscript, which is also a diglot, by the way.

47:22

It's a Greek -Latin diglot. Now, we've discussed this before. I'm not going to go into, like I said, trying to be brief here, but the assumption of this list is that the people that you're talking to are ignorant of the history of the

47:43

Bible, and that's most everybody. Now, we've been dealing with these issues for decades and debating these issues for decades, and no one who has any serious training in the history of the

48:00

New Testament is unaware of these realities, but they're thrown out there as if they're some kind of terrible, horrible thing that no one had ever thought of before, ever discussed before.

48:12

These things have been discussed literally for millennia. And so you throw in words like, deceitfully, and then, is this really the

48:22

Word of God? The Parchambe Adultery has significantly less manuscript evidence behind it than the

48:32

Longer Ending of Mark does, and so I would not preach it in the context of the

48:39

Church as the authoritative Word of God. There are those people who would think otherwise.

48:48

Unfortunately, their argumentation will require the acceptance of some kind of ecclesiastical theory that has one major problem.

48:59

It assumes that the Ecclesia, the Church, has actually addressed these issues when the

49:06

Ecclesia has not. There has been no Protestant Synod Council that has pretended to determine the textual history of the

49:19

Parchambe Adultery or the Kamiohaneum, either one. So, as I said, there are some others, but can the

49:29

Christian Bible be trusted? Yes, because we happen to know that that's not original. We have the manuscript evidence.

49:35

If all we had was what you might get from Joseph Smith or something like that, then there'd be no way of knowing because you can just always change it.

49:46

But we have manuscripts that predate the earliest manuscripts that contain the

49:52

Parchambe Adultery. And so, yes, we can trust those scriptures, and that's why we engage in textual criticism.

49:59

Number three, how can the Christian Bible be trusted when a principal scripture of the Messiah, this is 1

50:06

Corinthians 15, 3 -4, was deceitfully added by Paul? Well, at least now you have the idea that this accusation of deceitfulness can be specifically attributed to Paul.

50:21

So somehow, even though you've never met Paul, somehow you know that he was deceitful. "...was deceitfully added by Paul to suggest that the

50:28

Old Testament had some reference that the Christ would die for our sins or be raised from the dead after three days.

50:34

Is this really the word of God?" So what this convoluted, and most of these are incredibly convoluted, there's no consistency.

50:43

It's just, it's throw everything but the kitchen sink at the New Testament just for the fun of it. Might be deceitfully included?

50:53

That is a, I wonder how many, I didn't do a word search, but yeah,

50:58

I think deceitfully is found in every single one of these. So yeah, it could be projection.

51:06

There is a lot of projection on the internet. So, now this is, the problem is, the first two were about actual textual variants.

51:20

This one isn't. But it sounds like it is. And that's where confusion comes in, probably on the part of the person who put this together.

51:32

But there is no textual variant to be dealing with in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Now what you have is the utilization of anti -missionary

51:45

Jewish sources. And what the objection is, is in, now we all know the text, 1

51:54

Corinthians 15, beginning of verse 1, I make known to you, brethren, the gospel that I proclaim to you.

52:03

And so you have this very, very early deliverance of the early tradition.

52:12

I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised the third day according to the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, then to the

52:20

Twelve, after that he appeared to more than 500 brethren, at one time, most of whom remained until now, but some have fallen asleep.

52:25

And so the idea is, well, if I'm Jewish, there is nothing in the scriptures that say the

52:33

Messiah is to die. Other than the entirety of Isaiah 53. But anyway, there is, believe me, there's always some way of staying in your head to get around that one too.

52:46

So, you know, the issue of three days, there's an interpretation, you know, what was that supposed to mean?

52:55

That he was buried, that he was raised to the dead according to the scriptures, third day according to the scriptures. And so the assertion is, oh, these are specific elements that specifically say the

53:06

Messiah is going to die and three days later he's going to rise from the dead. Well, when you look at all of the

53:12

Old Testament passages that are utilized throughout the New Testament, and there are hundreds of them, you discover that that's not the kind of argumentation that they're using.

53:23

Let me just mention this before I forget it. A lot of this material, you can go into much more depth.

53:32

Let me recommend my friend Michael Brown's five, six, how many volumes is it now?

53:39

This is volume four. Multi -volume set answering

53:45

Jewish objections. Jesus volume four is New Testament objections, so there's going to be one a little bit down below. I'll refer to this again.

53:54

There's just nothing else like it. Track it down, utilize it, make sure it's in your library. It'd be very helpful to you.

54:02

But the text of 1 Corinthians chapter 15, no textual variation.

54:07

It's considered incredibly primitive and early by the vast majority of scholarship.

54:14

So the objection here is, I don't like what Paul says here, and that's nothing more.

54:21

That doesn't mean it was deceitfully added or anything else. I mean, it's just horrific form of argumentation at this particular point.

54:29

Is this really a word of God? Yes, it most assuredly is. And the

54:36

Old Testament does speak of that suffering servant. Now the third day thing, have anything to do with the offering of Isaac possibly?

54:49

Remember what Abram says as they're leaving back on the third day? It's a possibility.

54:55

But I don't think that's what Paul is attempting to assert, is that the specific number is used. It's that Christ died according to scriptures.

55:03

And that is plainly laid out for us in texts like Isaiah 53. Okay, hopefully you go a little bit faster as we lay out some of these basic concepts, and then we don't have to repeat them over and over again.

55:18

How can the Christian Bible be trusted when a false prophecy of Jesus in John 1 .45 was deceitfully added by an unknown person?

55:26

Is this really the word of God? I guess it was a sort of cut and paste that at the end of each one. So John 1 .45,

55:37

Philip found Nathanael and said to him, We have found him of whom Moses and Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

55:44

So false prophecy of Jesus? What? All this is is recognition on the part of Philip that there was clearly a tremendous amount of Messianic fervor in Second Temple Judaism and at the time of Jesus' birth, which is why

56:07

Jesus has to keep... Let's not use that Messiah phrase right now. But there's a tremendous amount of fervor, and when

56:15

Philip sees Jesus and what Jesus' teaching is, he puts two and two together, and the only way you could know who the

56:24

Messiah was is in this way. Him of whom Moses and the Law and also the prophets wrote.

56:30

How is that a false prophecy? I mean, you're not even utilizing language in a meaningful fashion at this point.

56:35

It's not a false prophecy. You don't agree with what Philip said. It doesn't make it a false prophecy. That's what he says to Nathanael, and Nathanael is actually skeptical about it, which is what's interesting, what comes after that.

56:53

Luke chapter 24 is another... I had all these queued up, but I discovered that my system will only go back so many verses.

57:04

How can the Christian Bible be trusted when the words of Jesus, which boasts of a false prophecy about himself, Luke 24, 46, 47, is not found anywhere in the

57:11

Old Testament, was deceitfully added by an unknown person? Is this really a word of God? It gets a little old. Luke 24, 46,

57:18

And he said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem, you are witnesses of these things.

57:30

And so this is, interestingly enough, skipped what came before.

57:38

Go back to verse 44, it's fairly clear. Now, he said to them, These are my words which

57:43

I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.

57:50

Now, obviously, if this guy's becoming a Jew, he doesn't believe any of this. Doesn't make it a false prophecy. He just rejects

57:56

Jesus' own teaching that everything written about me in the law of Moses and prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.

58:05

Which, of course, becomes the very essence of the apostolic preaching once you get to Book of Acts. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them,

58:15

Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day. So upon having their minds supernaturally opened to see these things, these are then the words.

58:25

How is this deceitfully added by an unknown person?

58:30

I mean, by repeating that over and over again, the author is just demonstrating he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about as far as the process of the transmission of the text.

58:40

Just really lay your argument out in a better way. This is not good.

58:48

There is no textual variant involved there either. Now, this one I don't get.

58:55

How can the Christian Bible trust when the words of Jesus himself, Luke 9, 55 -56, are deceitfully taken out from the

59:00

NIV from the KJV by an unknown person? Is this really a word of God? I looked up Luke 9, 55 -56.

59:06

I looked up in the NIV. It's there. King James. I don't see what it is. Don't see what it is.

59:12

Don't get it. Don't see any major variant versus whatever. I just think maybe something was typed wrong or something.

59:20

I don't know. It happens. Number seven, how can the Christian Bible trust when a totally invented requirement for Mary and Joseph to return to their city of lineage,

59:29

Bethlehem, as part of a real and historical tax census, Luke 2, 1 -7, was deceitfully added by an unknown person?

59:36

Is this really a word of God? So the objection, and by the way, putting that was added by a deceitful person, you keep making it sound like it's a variant when it's not.

59:50

That's deceitful if you keep doing it. Upon being corrected, if you stop doing it, great.

59:57

But if you keep doing that, that itself is deceitful. Just thought you might want to recognize that. This is an objection based upon all of the census debate, and there are entire books on this particular subject.

01:00:13

But it reminds me, sorry, it reminds a little bit of our president right now because, woke you up, because does this not sound like Trump?

01:00:30

Especially this word. How can the Christian Bible have trusted, I'm sorry, how can the Christian Bible have trusted when a totally invented requirement for Mary, isn't that Trump?

01:00:41

Totally. Totally, man. I mean, we are totally the best nation. I mean, we're the best.

01:00:47

Totally. We've got this Dorian thing handled. Totally. And that's,

01:00:53

I'm not saying, I don't want anyone to get this wrong, I'm not saying that President Trump wrote any of this.

01:00:59

I'm just saying, yeah. So, totally invented requirement. So in other words, the assumption is being made that you know something that historians don't know.

01:01:12

Much of the criticism of the census stuff is based upon the idea that in this instance, even though there's all sorts of other things in the

01:01:25

New Testament where the New Testament is our primary source, there's just only so much history of that time period.

01:01:35

I mean, literally, there's, you've got Josephus, and you know,

01:01:40

Josephus is not always accurate about everything. He's pretty good, but not always accurate about everything.

01:01:48

The thinking is that the New Testament somehow has to be subjected to all these other, because so often it does interface perfectly with material around it, with other sources.

01:02:01

But the idea here is that it's totally invented, because we don't have anything other than Luke's recording of this.

01:02:11

But why doesn't Luke get the benefit of the doubt when he is addressing something that's not recorded anyplace else?

01:02:17

When he does address things we know, he's very accurate, so why would he be inaccurate here, really becomes the question.

01:02:24

But you can see the presubposition. Totally invented. Well, I'm sorry, I don't believe you.

01:02:30

Do you want to try to give me something a little bit more than just totally invented? When President Trump does that,

01:02:37

I'm not overimpressed either. Number eight, how can the Christian Bible be trusted when the very first and most important documentation of the resurrection of Jesus, the foundation of Christianity, was deceitfully added by an unknown person?

01:02:50

Is this really a real God? Mark 16, 9 through 20. No longer ending in Mark. Again, this assumes that we know the order of the writings of the books of the

01:03:00

New Testament, which we do not. There are many people who believe that Paul's writings, including the 1

01:03:05

Corinthians 15 text that was already addressed, would be earlier than Mark. Now, I don't know.

01:03:12

Nobody knows. I would put Mark around the same time as 1 Thessalonians and Galatians.

01:03:20

Paul's plainly teaching the same message at that point that he then mentions to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15, so it could be contemporaneous.

01:03:27

But anyway, longer ending of Mark, much earlier documentation than the

01:03:34

Priccape Adultery, the story of the woman taking adultery. But still, it's not just the longer ending of Mark.

01:03:39

You've got the medium ending of Mark. You've got the amalgamated ending of Mark. You've got the short ending of Mark. And the whole point is, since you've got a bunch of different endings of Mark, that's the best reason to be skeptical about any of them being the proper ending of Mark.

01:03:55

But the point is that Matthew, Luke, John, all of Paul, Hebrews, there's no question about the

01:04:09

Resurrection. If the longer ending is not included, there's no question about the Resurrection.

01:04:15

Jesus prophesied it in Mark. There's no question about the Resurrection. Nothing whatsoever.

01:04:23

How can the Christian Bible be trusted when a totally invented tradition of Rome, the releasing of one prisoner during the

01:04:33

Passover Feast, much less a murderer from an insurrection, Mark 15, 6 -11, was deceitfully advent a unknown person, blah, blah, blah.

01:04:40

Again, not a textual variant. Here the accusation is that there is no evidence for the tradition referred to in regards to the releasing of Barabbas.

01:04:56

Once again, we have almost nothing outside of the

01:05:02

Gospels themselves that gives us almost any first century insight into what was going on in Jerusalem at this time at all, especially in regards to the actions of Pilate.

01:05:15

So, this is just simply saying, well, I don't accept what Mark has to say and there's no other evidence for it, so therefore

01:05:21

I reject it. That's all it is. That's the essence of this. Which would mean you have to reject almost every historical reference in the

01:05:29

Old Testament because we're talking about a much more ancient record, and hence you have less and less and less corresponding evidence outside of that because the farther back in time you go, the less you've got of recorded documents.

01:05:42

That's why you have to do so much archaeology, but you have to interpret archaeology, etc., etc. Number 10.

01:05:49

How can the Christian Bible be trusted when the very words of Jesus himself, Mark 12, 26, have been deceitfully removed by an unknown person out of the

01:05:57

NIV from the KJV, which is, I think this is the one I said earlier, or was that Luke 9, 5, 1?

01:06:07

Let me see if... Let me check this one. There's one of them

01:06:12

I could not find. I thought it was Luke 9, 5, 1. Yeah, no, I think this is the one.

01:06:18

Maybe I should go back to the 9, 5, 1. Don't have time for it now. Yeah, I saw...

01:06:23

Yeah, this is the one. So I see... I checked the NIV study Bible. There's nothing there.

01:06:31

There's nothing there. So I don't get it. I don't get it. So maybe it is the...

01:06:37

Let me go back to Luke 9, 5, 5. Because one of the two. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:06:42

Okay. Luke 9, 5, 1. Sorry. There is a text for variant Luke 9, 5, 5. Yay! There's finally one there. And Luke 9, 5, 1 is the...

01:06:57

Here's what it is in the NASB. But he turned and rebuked them, now lengthy edition in some manuscripts, later

01:07:06

Byzantine manuscripts, and said, You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them, continuing on, and they went on to another village.

01:07:16

So that section, and said, You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them, is found in Family 1.

01:07:30

Basically, looking at this, this is Family 1 and 13. This is a specific portion of what we would historically call the

01:07:42

Byzantine manuscripts. There are only a couple of unseals, K, Gamma, Theta, that have

01:07:49

Families 1 and 13. A few others, there's a couple of versions of the Vulgate, like the

01:07:56

Clementine, Syriac, Heraclean, Boheric, part of the

01:08:01

Boheric, so there's a couple early translations, relatively early translations. But it's a fairly narrow spectrum on the manuscripts.

01:08:10

There's no early papyri support or anything in the major unseals, as far as that is concerned.

01:08:16

So, it's a textual variant. So, I suppose the argument is if there are textual variants, you can't trust the

01:08:23

Bible. We've been through that one enough times to have responded to it many, many times. So, there's the

01:08:28

Mark 12, 26 one. I don't even know what they're referring to, so maybe it's been mistyped.

01:08:35

Just a couple more. How can the Christian Bible be trusted when the very words of Jesus Himself, Matthew 6, 13, second half, were deceitfully added by that now famous deceitful unknown person?

01:08:49

Sorry, it does get a little old. What? Deceitful unknown person?

01:08:55

Yeah, I think so. What he's referring to here is the long epigraph or blessing found on the

01:09:06

Lord's prayer in Matthew 6, and then you have in the

01:09:14

Byzantine manuscript, and Luke doesn't have that, and the

01:09:21

Nesseon 28th edition also does not have the, and even though I'm well aware of that textual variant, when we quote the

01:09:32

Lord's prayer, we still use it anyways because it's nice. But again, it has nothing to do with being deceitful or anything else.

01:09:41

It's a textual variant. Real quickly here,

01:09:52

Matthew 2, 23, I'm just not going to bother to read them anymore because it's all the same thing about deceitful people.

01:09:59

This is the He Shall Be Called Nazarene thing. A couple pages that you might read in Michael Brown's material on this particular subject, any commentary is going to discuss the term

01:10:14

Nazarene branch. Does it have to do with Isaiah 11? The branch shall come forth. You really have to deal with Matthew's Pesher interpretation methodology and things like that to deal with that.

01:10:26

But again, nothing has been added or deleted. There's no textual variant at that particular point.

01:10:37

Then you've got Hebrews 8, 9. The New Covenant was deceitfully misquoted by an unknown person to suggest that God had turned from or rejected the

01:10:48

Jews. And this is the quotation of though I did not care for them versus though I was a husband to them.

01:10:55

This actually exists in the Hebrew manuscripts. Evidently this person is unaware of that reality. This is the difference between Baal and Gaal, the difference between Beit and Gimel.

01:11:07

They're formed differently, but they can still be confused with one another. And the

01:11:13

New Testament is quoting from the Greek Septuagint at that point, which has did not care for them over against the reading of Baal in most of the

01:11:25

Masoretic manuscripts. Number 14. Oh, the 30 pieces of silver.

01:11:34

Okay, Matthew 27, 9. Here, was deceitfully added by an unknown person specific to the 30 pieces of silver supposedly noted by the prophet

01:11:42

Jeremiah when in fact there is nothing in the book of Jeremiah about any 30 pieces of silver. This is one, again, we have talked about before, but this could be useful to folks, so if you've tuned out, wake up for just a second because I've only got one after this anyways.

01:11:59

And that is, then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled and they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel and they gave them for the potter's field as the

01:12:11

Lord directed me. And so what you have in this particular citation is from Zechariah chapter 11 and in all probability what this is is a difference in the mechanism of citation when people were using scrolls.

01:12:30

You cited the major prophet in the particular scroll that was being used not the minor prophets.

01:12:37

And so it was probably just a different way. We assume people had codex style books like we have and each book was freestanding and had thumb indexing and didn't have any of that kind of stuff.

01:12:47

And so this is a there are a number of places in the New Testament where major prophets are cited rather than minor prophets.

01:12:58

It's not like anyone didn't know how to find Zechariah eventually, but this is a citation differentiation.

01:13:06

And the last one is, how can the Christian Bible be trusted when a principal scripture of salvation by faith in Jesus 2

01:13:13

Timothy 3 .15 was deceitfully added to suggest that the Old Testament and Sacred Writings were to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

01:13:20

Now this one was transparently a real obvious example of someone simply going,

01:13:28

I don't like what the New Testament says and so anything I don't like was deceitfully added.

01:13:36

Zero level of scholarship to any of that at all. But you're familiar with the text, Paul is saying to Timothy but you remain convinced of the things you've learned from your youth and those from when you learned it and that you know the sacred scriptures which are able to make you wise through faith which is in Christ Jesus and give you eternal life.

01:13:57

And so they don't like this, they don't like the idea that the scriptures which was referring to the

01:14:02

Old Testament scriptures would be able to do this, which is of course the preaching of all the Christians, that's what all the

01:14:08

Christians are preaching and so it is interesting that, well, but that can't be so it must have been deceitfully added.

01:14:18

That kind of argumentation I sure hope it does not represent the kind of stuff that this gentleman has found to be compelling in abandoning well, look

01:14:33

I have a serious problem with how we deal with most of the people who come out of cults and isms do not need to be thrown into a position of leadership.

01:14:49

If you've come out of a cult, you're already damaged as it is it's going to take a long time for you to get your feet under the ground and get grounded in the truth and get rid of all the bad filters of interpretation that you've inherited from your former system.

01:15:05

So you don't put these people out there in leadership. Unfortunately, I see so many of these ex -Mormons groups that just automatically start running people around from church to church to talk about the

01:15:16

Mormon church. It should never happen it should just not happen. If you've been out for 20 years and you've got your feet underneath you and you're grounded great, but this ain't the first guy

01:15:27

I've seen who's been in one of these ex -Mormons stuff that has gone off into Wackyville when it comes to theology.

01:15:35

I remember a guy that spoke at a number of things here in the

01:15:40

Valley and then he ran into Paine's book, Age of Reason became an atheist.

01:15:48

Just boom! Met with him in someone's home. He was stunned stunned that there were books in the

01:15:55

Bible he didn't know who had written them. Yeah? So? What do you mean?

01:16:02

I thought we knew. No? What were you doing going out and speaking in churches if you have so little knowledge of the background of the

01:16:10

Bible in the first place? And, you know, ruined him. Ruined him. Don't know what ever happened with him but there you go.

01:16:19

So you've got to be you've got to be concerned concerned about those types of things.

01:16:26

Have I forgotten something? Let me just look here.

01:16:34

No? Respond to that. Didn't respond to that. We'll do that some other time. Eh. I guess.

01:16:42

I sort of thought it would take even longer than that. I tried to go as quick as I could but there you go.

01:16:49

So, again, Answering Jewish Objections, Jesus it's available in electronic format.

01:16:55

I think it's in Logos. Might be. I'm not sure if they have it in accordance. I think so.

01:17:00

I'm not sure. Should be. Good stuff. Make sure you have it. It's a good go -to source.

01:17:07

It really, really really is. So, with that now, before we go sort of contradictory to cover these two things in this way but that's how we got to do it.

01:17:23

Don't forget the cruise in 2020. It's going to be tremendous.

01:17:29

I realize the vast majority of folks in our audience can't pick up and leave for two weeks and go to Europe but it is a absolute bucket list type of thing and so please keep that in mind if you have not looked at the information, go to our website and click on the banner ad.

01:17:49

Yes? The banner ad is at the top of the website. I got an email from last week's show when you mentioned this and the fella couldn't find the link to it.

01:17:59

The banner ad has always been at the top of the website. But that's where you're looking. The only two ads going in there and the banner ad for the cruise is there.

01:18:08

Click on the banner ad and it'll take you to where you need to go. Right. Yep. First thing that comes up right at the top of the page.

01:18:15

Which is the opposite of the search box which is at the bottom of the page. That's all going to be changing.

01:18:21

Anyway, so that's the one thing. Secondly, we are going to this week need to be booking flights to Australia.

01:18:36

We have a really important debate lined out that I hope will have as much usefulness for as many years as other debates we've done down there would have.

01:18:48

I'm hoping, I can't announce this yet, but I'm hoping that the subject that we're talking about is what we will debate because it's never been debated before.

01:18:56

At least not by me and not by anybody that I know of in any meaningful fashion anyways.

01:19:02

At least fair scholarly fashion. But we're going to Sydney and Melbourne while we're down there in Australia.

01:19:12

Then very shortly after that London and the two -on -two debate in London with myself and Michael Brown and then coming back through Atlanta.

01:19:25

So you said it's Georgia Tech is where this is taking place? Near Georgia Tech. We're going to be having a debate in Atlanta.

01:19:33

I'm going to, Lord willing, be debating in London on the 11th of November, flying on the 12th of November and then debating

01:19:40

Shibirale on the 13th of November in Atlanta. So prayer is needed for health for all of that but that's a lot of flying, a lot of travel so there is a link in the support us section for the travel fund and if you want to keep seeing the debates that you saw the straightforward interaction we played earlier from Durban, South Africa if you've seen the debate that we did with Graham Codrington that we talked about last week that he responded to in such a negative fashion if you've seen that and you were helped by that we get to do this because I get to travel to these places where I can meet these people and engage these subjects which we need to continue doing while we still have the freedom to do so and so this audience has always been extremely supportive in providing for that travel fund that's how we get where we're going and I don't have anyone who travels with me so we have to do it in a certain way that allows me to take care of all of that that's why

01:20:54

I'll travel and people will say, how come you don't have any books? Because I can't carry any books it's getting tough enough with just my suitcases and yes they roll of course they do

01:21:08

I've gotten rather efficient with that but it's still just me, myself and I we don't have the extra cost of other people and stuff like that so you helped make all that happen and so we need you to support us in that way because I've still got a lot of flying to do between now and the end of the year oceans to get to look out at actually just try to sleep over them that's the best way of doing it but lots of travel to do looking forward to being down under in Australia and the things going on there as well that's coming up very very quickly right before I go to Australia is

01:21:49

Salt Lake City and the atheist debate that Jeff and I are going to be doing together that's going to be a real honor to get to do that prayer for all of that and then support us in that work very very needed.

01:22:03

Thank you for considering that thank you for listening to the program today Lord willing we'll be back on Thursday God bless.