Dr. James White vs. Steven Anderson

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listen to what he has to say here. Here we go. Okay, he said this is not a meaningful difference. Now, by the way, he's talking about 1

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John 3 .1, and I do believe it's a meaningful difference. But it doesn't change a doctrine so much.

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No, it doesn't change doctrine, because our being adopted as sons and daughters of God is plainly laid out in in passages of Scripture, there's no textual variation.

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But anyway. Okay, 1 John 3 .1. King James, behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.

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Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. The ESV says, see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God.

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And so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. First of all, the

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ESV sounds lame, but it also adds this phrase, and so... You're gonna, over the next couple of chapters, you're gonna get sick and tired of hearing that utterly subjective, irrelevant, sounds lame, doesn't sound right.

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I mean, honestly, the argumentation for the next couple chapters is so shallow, I was stunned.

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I mean, it really gives you an idea of just how utterly without merit the

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King James only position is as enunciated by Anderson, because that just sounds dumb. Oh, that's nice.

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There's all sorts of passages in the King James you can say sound dumb, that doesn't mean anything at all.

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And I also discovered pretty clearly that Anderson knows when he doesn't have an argument, and that's when he starts getting abusive.

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When he starts using terms like stupid, dumb, ridiculous, that's when he knows what he's saying is easily challengeable and could never be defended.

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And so what he's doing is he, you know, it's the old argument week here, you know, yell louder, or type louder, or put in all caps, or do something.

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It is illustrated over and over and over again over the next couple chapters in this material.

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We are. So the King James said that we should be called the sons of God, the ESV says that we should be called the children of God, and so we are.

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Okay. Now, obviously the ESV is the one that's wrong here. You say, why is that?

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Well, because the King James is the standard. Yeah, so the circularity, we've already seen it, and he embraces it, and he claims it's given by the

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Holy Spirit. So this is the Book of Mormon argumentation for the King James Version only position, because every

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Mormon missionary, well, the Holy Spirit told me the Book of Mormon is the Word of God, so it is. And so the King James is the standard, so it is.

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So let's not worry. So why are we even talking about this? Why do we care about the manuscripts?

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Why do we care about the—because some of us recognize that the Bible has a significantly greater foundation in history and reality than the

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Holy Spirit told me so argument. And we recognize that Stephen Anderson's argumentation and the

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Mormon missionaries' argumentation cannot survive cross -examination. They cannot be a foundation for apologetics.

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And that's one of the main reasons. Yes. Well, it says in verse 2,

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Beloved, now are we the sons of God. So you already get that from verse 2 anyway, that we're not just called the sons of God, but we are the sons of God, you get from verse 2.

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So what does that have to do with verse 1? It doesn't have anything to do with verse 1, if your goal is to know what

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John wrote. If you, you know, because I can point to, you know, there's dozens of places, all over the place, when

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Anderson says, they took this out because they didn't like this, and they took that out, what's in the next verse? That doesn't matter, you don't want to mess with the

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Word of God. So the inconsistency, Anderson, you know, King James -only -ism is a study in utter inconsistency.

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It just, just is stunning. But he's saying, you know, that this addition in the ESV is—

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Notice, addition in the ESV. A meaningful addition. And I would say that, you know, it doesn't change any doctrine.

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This particular example doesn't change any doctrine or affect anything, but it's still adding something to the text that shouldn't be there.

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And the Bible says, "...add thou not unto his words, lest ye reprove thee, and thou be found a liar." So even though this is not—

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Which has nothing whatsoever to do with what that text was about, or with the examination of 1

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John 3 wanting to ask the question, what did John originally write? I want to know what the Apostle wrote, not what scribes did or thought a thousand years later.

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Meaningful, according to him. I would say it is meaningful because it does change the meaning because it added a phrase. It doesn't affect doctrine, but I would call that a meaningful change because he added a sentence that isn't in the original, so it does change the meaning.

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Now, catch that. That isn't in the original. How do you know that? Well, because I take the

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King James as standard. So you forget about history. Forget about everything that came before the

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King James. It's an irrational position. It is indefensible for anyone who is interested in truth.

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But let's use this as an opportunity to illustrate something.

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And those of you who've seen my New Testament presentation know that I utilize this particular text, and here is that particular page, where I was talking about what's called homoeteluton, which is similar endings.

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Similar endings. And 1 John 3, 1 is an example where something was accidentally deleted and removed from the text by homoeteluton.

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And so here you have the unsealed text, or at least I think we're gonna have the unsealed text.

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I'm waiting for Rich to stop texting somebody and put it up on the screen. There we go.

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No one's listening to me anyways, and neither is he. So there you go.

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So you all don't know what goes on, what I have to put up with here. So here is the

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Greek text as it would have appeared in the early days of the New Testament.

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And so, to us, ha pater, the father, in order that, tecna, theu, which is the nomenosacra, clathomen, we might be called, chi, esmen, and we are, dia, tuta, for this reason, ha, and then it goes on, cosmos, the world does not know us.

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So here is, let me illustrate it through the use of color.

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So you see there that the verb clathomen, that we might be called, ends with mu epsilon nu.

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And so does esmen, and we are. And so both end with the same grammatical termination, mu epsilon nu.

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And so you write down clathomen, and then your eye goes back to what you're copying, and you see mu epsilon nu, and so you pick up there and write dia tuta, and now inadvertently, not purposely, not because you were trying to change teachings or don't like the concept of adoption, the family of God or whatever else, but simply because, and this is easier to explain in English, it's like having ing, tion, es, the standard grammatical terminations of words.

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And when you've been copying for a few hours, you've already written these terminations for words over and over and over again.

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And so you write clathomen, you put mu epsilon nu, you look back, you see the mu epsilon nu at the end of esmen.

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Now this is on the, it might have been on the same line, it might have been on a different line. Sometimes the deletions are longer because you wrote mu epsilon nu, and there's a mu epsilon nu right below it in the next line, you pick up on that line instead.

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This isn't as easy a thing to explain today, because most copying you're doing from sources you're doing electronically now.

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Cut and paste. I remember the first time I learned cut and paste, I was like, whoa. But back in the olden days, you didn't have cut and paste, you had to do it manually.

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And you ended up making common errors. And that's what happens at first John 3 .1.

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When you have a variant that clearly falls into the category of homoeoteluton, then you do have to ask the question, is there any reason why it might have been added at a time in the past?

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Or you go with, you know, Occam's razor, the, the simplest explanation is probably the best explanation.

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And when we recognize common scribal errors, and by the way, this was Erasmus's argument over and over again as well, when you have the clear opportunity of a recognized, often committed scribal error, such as homoeoteluton, right there in the text, then that's what you go with.

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And that's why the modern Greek text has Kai Asimov, the Greek texts from which, especially the primary

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Greek text of first John, from which Erasmus worked, was from a minority stream,

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I think, if I recall correctly, in the Byzantine family. It doesn't have it.

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Or at least one, it may not have been the minority stream, but it did not have this particular, this particular phrase in it.

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But we can see where this error came from. And homoeoteluton,

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I'll go ahead and pull that down, homoeoteluton is a, you'll run into it over and over and over again in, in the discussions that Erasmus has, and that anyone has to have if they are going to originate a

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Greek text. And again, let me just point out, if you reject the concept of textual critical study, you have no

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New Testament. Don't, do not run around and call this the ecclesiastical text, when what you're saying is everyone who worked on this was violating

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Scripture to produce it. Because this came about through the practice of textual criticism.

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So, if you're gonna reject the modern text, you're gonna reject this, too. That's all there is to it. I mean, if you're gonna be consistent.

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877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.

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I'm not sure if we're, we're up and down, up and down, huh? So, right now we're up.

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Well, people may have given up on us. So, 8, let me put it this way, 877 -753 -3341, if we get calls, we'll take them.

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Otherwise, I'll just continue on with Steven Anderson, and then we'll post this and we'll do calls at the time when the internet is working, which

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I don't understand, because we got a new modem and all the rest that stuff, and so it's not supposed to be doing this stuff. But, yeah, that's just how it works.

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877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. I will put this over here and I'll just sort of watch and see if anyone's actually listening, and we'll go from there.

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And don't get mad at us if you wanted to call in, but didn't know we were taking calls just because, you know, we live in an area where there's obviously internet issues, and that's just just how it works.

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Okay, let's continue on with Mr. Anderson's comments. But then he quotes this great scholar who's so intimate with the

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Greek. His 1 ,454 -page book proves it. Now, by the way, when he does his voices, that's also an indication of when he realizes he's way out of his league.

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You can't see it from here, but normally when you look right over there, in the far corner of my bookshelf, he's talking about A .T.

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Robertson. And he earlier had mocked A .T. Robertson. I didn't bother to play this section because it just wasn't relevant, but this is where he's mocking

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A .T. Robertson. And it is a 1 ,454 -page book on the grammar of the

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Greek New Testament. Now, obviously, we saw on the last program that Steven Anderson claims to read the

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Greek New Testament like cover to cover and all the rest of this stuff. I don't believe it for a moment, but I can guarantee you one thing in comparison to the 1 ,454 pages that A .T.

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Robertson produced, as far as serious scholarship of the Greek New Testament, Steven Anderson could produce a sentence in comparison to the 1 ,454 pages here.

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He knows the same thing, and that's why he does the voices and stuff like that when he's addressing this stuff, because it's a defense mechanism.

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He knows he's weighing over his head. He knows he could never defend himself, but that's why he uses this type of voice right now.

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This guy claims, oh no, the real concern is only a thousandth part of the text. Well, that's not three percent, that would be 0 .1

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percent. So this guy's claiming that only one thousandth of the text is really important. Okay, so what he was trying to do here was he was arguing, he's trying to argue that the percentage of variants, that we're giving different percentages of variants, they all fall within the same simple range.

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The point that Robertson is making, and Robertson is writing, you know, the papyri are just starting to be discovered primarily during that period of time, but doesn't really have access to all the materials we have today.

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But still, his focus is upon grammar, not so much this particular subject.

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But the point that he and everybody else that I quoted in that particular chapter is, is that the