Matthew 28:19 with Vocab Malone in Response to Ron Shields

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00:37

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, one of the last programs of 2017, not like that's going to make much of a difference.

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We're just blasting on through here, and we're doing two programs here right at the end of the year because we didn't do any right after the

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Christmas holiday. And today we're doing something a little bit different.

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I forget exactly how it was sent to me or just what it was, but sometime over the past number of weeks

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I saw a comment on Facebook in regards to a textual critical issue, and specifically the textual critical issue had to do with Matthew chapter 28.

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And really, to be honest with you, it's not a textual critical issue. If you make proper distinctions in recognizing the difference between what's called lower textual criticism, which deals with manuscripts, factual evidence, versus redaction criticism or form criticism, where you speculate about the forms that ancient texts took before the form that we have it in the manuscript traditions.

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So if an ancient poet wrote a lengthy epic, but it went through multiple versions, there could be speculation concerning earlier versions than what we have in the manuscript history, for example.

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When that's applied to the New Testament, this generally requires a much lower view of the nature of the

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New Testament. But to get published in most denominations today, you have to hold these views.

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And so there's many, many books where you have individuals who will—well, great example.

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If any of you saw the debate I did with Shabir Ali in London a number of years ago on Muhammad, whether Muhammad was prophesied in the

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Bible, we did two debates. Shabir wanted to do it this way. The first was whether Jesus as Messiah was prophesied in the

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Old Testament, and then whether Muhammad is prophesied in the Bible. That wasn't a bad way to go, because it allows you to compare and contrast messianic prophecies of Jesus with the couple of texts that—well, actually, some

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Muslims have adduced much more than a couple of texts—but the texts that are adduced by Muslims in regards to Muhammad.

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And if you recall what Shabir did with the Parakletas texts in John 14 and 16, the helper, the advocate, the comforter, he engaged in a form or redaction -criticism -type presentation where he quoted sources, none of which would have agreed with his conclusions, but he quoted sources that speculated that John 14 through 16 was a later addendum to the

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Gospel of John. And so he was able to cut the text up because of the fact that there's a bunch of stuff in John 14 through 16 that does not fit

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Muhammad. So once you start speculating, well, this section came from here and this section came from there, as if Muhammad had any idea of any of this, as if that could be even slightly relevant to what the

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Qur 'an is actually saying when it says, in your own scriptures you find these things. But that's what he did.

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And it's extremely common in liberalism to engage in this kind of redaction -form criticism because it doesn't require any physical evidence.

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You can just simply say, well, before the manuscript tradition starts, this could have happened.

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And I would say, of course, given the nature of the manuscripts as we possess them today, you would have to provide evidence because we have such a superior manuscript tradition in the original language of Greek for the

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New Testament that there'd have to be some evidence of this kind of thing when you come up with these kinds of theories.

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Well, anyway, when we talk about textual criticism, we're talking about lower criticism.

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We're talking about criticism that actually deals with factual material. So those of you who've been following my discussion of CBGM, Coherence -Based

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Genealogical Method, and the doctoral work I'm doing on P45 and stuff like that, then we're dealing with the actual manuscripts and when they're written and what they contain and the difference between a text and a witness and a manuscript and a witness and things like that.

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We're dealing with stuff where you can pick up a Greek New Testament and say, see, here's who cites what.

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It's in this manuscript and things like that, over against speculation where you're theorizing but you don't have to come up with any physical evidence.

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You're saying, well, this happened before the manuscript tradition. The problem with the New Testament is our manuscript tradition goes back so far and so close to the original that the time frame in which you have to cram this stuff is extremely small, and that is highly problematic.

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The liberalism that really flourished back in the 1800s regarding theorizing about the origination of the

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New Testament was before we had the papyri. The papyri pushed the New Testament dating back so far that it's really,

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I think, myth -making to do a lot of the speculation, but it's still done.

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It's still done in a lot of corners. So with all that as background,

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I saw this comment about Matthew 28 -19.

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Now, if you've dealt with Oneness Pentecostalism before, then you know that non -Trinitarian groups will question the validity of the reading of Matthew 28 -19, specifically,

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Go therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them. And the key issue is baptizing them in the name, singular, literally, eis ta onma, into the name of the

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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's not the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

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There's a chi in between each one. Then it goes on, teaching them to observe all things

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I've commanded you, and behold, I'm with you always, even in an age. So this is the very end of the Gospel of Matthew.

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And so Oneness Pentecostals have been known down through the years to try to put together an argument against this, because they're known as the

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Jesus -only groups, baptizing in Jesus' name only. And they'll point to the book of Acts, well, in the book of Acts, it's baptized in the name of Jesus.

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It wasn't baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As if Acts is giving us a specific baptismal formula over against Matthew, etc.,

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etc. And so I've seen these things before. I've seen these types of arguments before. But this was in the context of black

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Hebrew -Israelism, sort of, I guess, whatever that means. We'll talk about it a little bit more.

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And so there was a little bit of jumping back and forth. I think I commented twice, if I recall correctly, fairly briefly on the subject.

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And so I was directed to, I forget how, but I was directed to a four -and -a -half -hour response from this gentleman.

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And I'm like, I don't care how fast I play this. I'm not listening to four -and -a -half hours of anything from anybody.

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A little bit too long, but I was specifically mentioned in it.

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And so I pulled the audio, and I guess there were 80 -some -odd slides or something in this thing.

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And so I pulled the audio, and I listened to the first hour -and -a -half -ish of it on a long ride on,

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I think it was on Saturday. And so the first hour or so wasn't aimed directly at me, it was aimed at this guy that's just become such a troublemaker.

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I mean, man, I'll tell you, he's living rent -free in the heads of so many people all around the world these days, that I thought, you know, let's make this a learnable moment.

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And so I went ahead and got in touch with — that's pretty tough to do, because this guy lives in a secret bunker now, and he's surrounded by all these people that take care of everything for him and things like that.

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But anyways, I got hold of that vocab Malone guy and said, hey,

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I heard you getting accused of all sorts of things on this stuff that I was just listening to, and it might be worthwhile to address this stuff.

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And so somehow, right here in the middle of the holiday season, we managed to get a special landing permit for his

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Learjet at Sky Harbor and got the man himself in studio.

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And so I brought a coogee for him, but I just didn't have the heart to force him to try to do it.

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And I have the same hat, too, by the way. I'm sorry, the coogee, in my mind, has been typecast.

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You know how actors get typecast? Yeah, yeah. I was wearing coogees before they were. Typecast as a fat guy

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New York thing. Well, thanks a lot. I'm not a fat guy, so it doesn't fit for me. So I've got my coogee blue vest on, that's coogee blue's vest on today, so I'm good.

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Hey, I had my first coogee in the 1990s, so that was long before it got —

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I don't know, Biggie Smalls was rocking them in 94. You guys might be neck and neck.

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You have to go back and do the timeline. Who wore first? Well, look — Who wore better? This is Australia, man, we're talking about.

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So anyway, it doesn't have anything to do with any of that kind of stuff. But yeah, see, there's some guy in the chat channel going,

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Biggie wore coogees, vocab, yep. See? I don't even know who Biggie is, so. He's dead now.

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Well, okay, then the argument is over, okay? I'm not going to attack a guy who's no longer with us, but anyway.

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So, thankfully, you've put together a bunch of stuff here for us, because, man, I wouldn't have not had the time to put any of this stuff together.

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But let's — give us — try to bring us up to speed here. This isn't easy to do, because I was trying to think of a historical analogy to the

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Black Hebrew Israelite movement, and of course, we do have an author in the studio. We have vocabulon,

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Barack Obama vs. the Black Hebrew Israelites. I do not understand the title. I do not pretend to understand the title, but you can understand the title if you read the book,

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I suppose. But — Give me 20 seconds, I can explain it. And you look on the back here, and I think you're trying to hide from the light in that picture, because it's really dark.

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I mean, it's like, where is he in there? I didn't design all of that. Yeah, go ahead.

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You've got 20 seconds. This is a Netflix movie that came out in 2016, and it's about young Obama when he's 21 years old, and he has to live in Harlem while he's going to Columbia, which is in New York.

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And he's walking on the street in one of the scenes, and it shows him debating a Hebrew Israelite camp.

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And so I take that scene. No one knows if it happened or not, but the things said are very real things that very likely could have been said, and his path would have totally allowed him to run into them as well.

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We kind of mapped it out with some friends that live there. And this little miniature debate is perfect to have it act as a launching pad, a jumping off point to explain

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Hebrew Israelism. And it's a catchy title that's been very controversial, as you can imagine. Yeah, yeah,

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I imagine it has. Has the former president commented at all on the book?

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No, he has not. I've got to bug out. I'm trying to get an endorsement for the second edition from him.

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I'm not sure if that would be an endorsement or a death knell. But anyway, so,

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OK, so there you go. So what's the background here? What brought this particular subject?

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Wait a minute. I forgot what I was going to say. I was going to say this movement is so diverse.

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And the leaders in it are so willing to come up with their own stuff.

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I got some clips on that, that it reminds me a little bit of the

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Anabaptists in the sense that the only thing that held the Anabaptists together was a particular form of baptism, not even a particular belief about what baptism was.

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And hence, you had all sorts of different beliefs parading under the name

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Anabaptist. And so it isn't an overly useful phrase.

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And so when you've got Messianic Hebrew Israelites and you've got non -Messianic

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Hebrew Israelites, you've got people coming up with their own canons of scripture. How do you even hold it all in one realm?

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That's why on page 22, my book has a chart and it does some categorization of them.

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Now, one of the Hebrewsites recently called it a hit list. Wow. A hit list.

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Now, it's not a hit list. The reason why I'm doing that is so you can know who is who. It's almost like the denominational charts that Christians have been making of each other for hundreds of years.

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This is nothing new. Just we're only doing with Hebrewsites or that people do with Islam according to the school of jurisprudence that they hold to.

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So what I do is show here's one West type camps. That means that means the type of Hebrewsite who comes out of the ideas that were there in Harlem at 1

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West 125th Street in the late 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s until the school split.

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But there's camps who clearly are influenced by them. For example, if they use Yehawashai for Jesus, that's a telltale sign.

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They embrace Lashawan Kodosh, which means they're one West influence. In fact, I've got a great title for this episode.

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It's Merry Christmas with the Hebrewsites. Ho, ho, ho, Yehawashai. So anyways, anyways, but so that's one

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West type Hebrew -Israelism, for example, the Edomite doctrine, the white people equals Edomites or whatever.

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That's a one West thing. Not all Hebrewsite told that. The 12 tribes chart, that's a one West thing. Not all Hebrewsite told to that.

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However, the transatlantic slave trade equivalency thesis, which is you getting transported to the

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Western Hemisphere via slavery or some other form of oppression equals you being highly likely to be an

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Israelite, basically. But really, it's broader than that, because if you hold to the 12 tribes chart as a one Western, then it's basically if your ancestors were oppressed by colonial powers.

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That's the essence of it. But the non -one West Hebrew Israelites still hold to some form of that transatlantic slave trade equivalency thesis.

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So Zion Lex, you had his book last time I came in here. He's not a

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New Testament guy. He's Tanakh only. He's not a one Wester. He criticizes their fake Hebrew because he knows real

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Hebrew. Yet his book heavily focuses on Deuteronomy 28. Heavily.

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In fact, he even does Gematria on Deuteronomy 28. Yeah. So so that's something that holds them together.

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And here's what's up. These guys will form debate crews or coalitions together, even if one is

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Tanakh only and one is not. What that shows you is this, the unifying principle thesis for them in their mind is whether you consider yourself a descendant of Jacob, not whether you hold

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Christ as Messiah, because they will work together and say, brother, and mean it almost not just in an ethnic sense, but almost more like in a religious sense, it seems.

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Yeah, but some of those one West groups go after each other like I don't know what. Yes, they do. They're they're vying for who is the real one

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West type influence school. And ISUPK, in my opinion, wins that battle. But that doesn't mean they're winning.

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The movement IUC is up to 5000 members. They're clearly winning the movement as far as numbers and organization.

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They're now in a missionary phase. They're going into Ghana. Since we last spoke, they've made heavy inroads into Ghana.

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So we're talking a whole nother a whole nother level, even in the last year from when we spoke.

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In fact, last time we spoke, their school was at 31st and Indian School in a tiny little suite I called.

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It was very cheap rent. Now they're at 19th Avenue and Dunlap in a nice big suite. I went and visited.

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Parking lot was full to the brim. People had to park down the block for four or five hours in a row.

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By the way, I went there and dropped off a book with my phone number in it and said, give this to Nathaniel because I knew Nathaniel was in town. I don't know if that's going to happen.

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19th Avenue and Dunlap, so near the train station. Yeah, a little bit further north up from it.

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By the way, shout out to Abu. He gave me the address on that. Near Taco Bell. Yeah, OK. But it's big and they're there for a long time.

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OK, so, but this specific, our specific conversation today is about a guy named

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Ron Shields, or Divine Prospect is the term that he uses. Give us some background here.

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He says he used to be a Christian apologist. He says he used to follow you. Yeah, he said that.

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Although he says he never agreed with your Trinitarianism. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, hard to figure that one. Followed you, though, the entire basis of everything you do.

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I didn't agree with him. He came to be known through videos where he would interact with a well -known kind of underground media channel in New York with a guy named

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Sa Netter. And there's a TV show that they do. And what he did is he kind of went to bat for the

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Hebrew Israelite community against the Kemetic Conscious community. And so what? The Kemetic Conscious community.

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These are folks who believe they're descendants of ancient Egyptians, and they believe that Egypt is the foundation for all modern sciences and things of that nature through the gods, which are really principles of reality, not actual deities.

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Although some do kind of get into the mysticism side as well. And they're kind of the they're vying for the same demographic in modern urban America.

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And so they're constantly battling each other. And so he is was seen as a champion against the

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Kemet guys who are constantly attacking the validity of the Old Testament and things of that nature.

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And so he went to bat. And so he became well -known by all Hebrew Israelites because he was much more well than the well -read than the average

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Hebrew Israelite. And a lot of people kind of let him get away with a lot as far as doctrinal innovation because they kind of need his scholarship so they don't call him out for disagreeing with all kinds of things.

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They give him a pass. And so guys that really shouldn't agree with him, like Captain Tizariac, who's a true blue one,

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Wester, if there ever was one, gives divine prospect a pass and allowing him and not calling him out on, you know, creating his own canon.

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Maybe we'll play that clip later and other fallacious things that even one Wester's view is very unorthodox.

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So he is really doing his own thing in Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia, called Kingdom Harbinger Ministries that mixes

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Hebrew roots with consciousness, with Pan -Africanism, with nationalism, with Hebrew Israelism and with liberal mainstream scholarship, believe it or not.

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And some elements of what you might call the traditional or historic church as well, even though they bag on it, they have elements of that even in their church down there, their congregation in Atlanta.

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And it's a polygamous community. I asked him in the interview. Technically, it's not polygamous.

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It's polygynous because it's only men with women. It's not everybody being able to be polygamous. He helps regulate these marriages, he says, and he he'll defend polygyny and debates with other

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Hebrews lights. For example, there's some discussions he's had with women and he has a very high opinion of himself.

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He believes that I'm not built to handle him. And so that's why supposedly, according to his recollection, reached out to you, even though I just saw it on the opposite is true.

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Yeah, yeah. The opposite is what actually happened. But he seems to invent a narrative about himself.

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And so even before this discussion happened, he sent out a text that said they're going to be talking about me. Apparently, my work is garnering attention, all considered a victory.

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Right. And so you see this sort of, you know, he almost broke his arm, patting himself on the back, this self adulation and all this.

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And it reigns supreme in the community. But he's one of the best exemplars of it. And he can kind of get away with it because most of the other

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Hebrews lights haven't basically read as many books as he has. Right, right, right. He can out talk him,

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I guess. Certainly. Well, so 4 .5 hours, if need be. No kidding. That'll out talk anybody.

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So I, you're just on my Facebook feed. I saw what you had posted something about Matthew 20, 9 to 20.

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I just commented. Right. You didn't, you didn't contact me. I was just sort of like, oh, great. In fact, I was sitting in here when

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I saw it. And I remember typing something up like, oh, there's nothing new under the sun. You know, here we go again.

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Anti -Trinitarian questioning Matthew 28, 19 to 20. And then if I recall correctly, you responded to that or something.

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And I wrote something a little bit longer. And I think both that ended up in the film, in the video he put together.

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So I'm like, must have spent, he's got a whole lot more time than I do. Obviously, he does not have grandkids. I made a 3 .5

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minute video about Matthew 20, 19 to him because he wouldn't debate it with me. And he said, that's what he was playing.

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I think, yes, 3 .5 minutes. And that resulted in the 4 .5. So if this broadcast is two, an hour and a half, two hours, we could do the math.

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Yeah. You could figure out this week, a couple of days, you might get 24 hours worth of broadcasting from divine prospect. Well, I ain't listening to 24 hours, but, uh, uh, need to need to learn to be concise.

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So obviously my interest was, is purely textual critical. Uh, obviously theologically, uh,

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I see a lot of people who approach textual criticism with a theological axe to grind.

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And as a result, adopt methodologies that would result in the utter destruction of any meaningful reconstruction of the

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New Testament text. And they're never consistent. They can't be, they can't be consistent. Uh, if they were to apply the methodologies that they use on a single, their, their single pet verse to the entirety of the

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New Testament, it would be a complete mess. What we wouldn't have a clue as to what in the world the New Testament originally said. So I see that.

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And I, I don't just see it from, um, in this case, a Hebrew Israelite or a mixture of Hebrew Israelite.

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Um, but you get that from the oneness folks. And sadly you get it from Christians who have, you know, the

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King James only still do it. The ecclesiastical text guys will do it. Um, once you get this idea that this is the text that must be defended, then you start cherry picking the facts to make it fit your particular, uh, perspective.

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And so I wanted to listen to it for that. And like I said, uh, I knew from, I don't think it,

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I'm not sure it was you sent you. I thought somebody else did, but somebody gave me a timestamp when he started talking about me, but I didn't have time to edit it.

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So it, I had to listen. The first major portion was just about your little video and then transitioned into, you had to go running off to get

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James White or something along those lines, which is not what happened. Um, so you put together a little something, you wanted me to play, uh, something here that would, um, give us some background, uh, to this gentleman and what he's, what he's saying, which

25:20

I certainly didn't have when I first listened to the, to the material. Um, so we're just gonna play a little bit of this here and, uh, this is you, you did some type of a, was this some type of, you do all these online programs, dude.

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I mean, it's like, uh, the way you, um, operate, if you're going to talk to Hebrew Israelites is you can go out and speak to them on the street and that's one thing to do.

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Another way is you set up these online debates and discussions. Uh, it doesn't happen really through literature.

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You know, there's not blogging back and forth. It's not like the atheist community where there's blogs and counter blogs. That's not really their currency.

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Their currency is these online debate videos like Facebook live, things like that, a blog talk radio.

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You got an, it's almost like understanding the, the medias that they travel in. You need to go there.

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The street, of course, is a place Camelback and 19th, which is right down the street from my house, uh, where they congregate.

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And that's one of three places. There's three camps that set up every Saturday here in Phoenix. And then the other way to, uh, speak with them, of course, is, uh, there's

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Facebook discussion groups. Oh, there's something else that I was trying to mention about how we, how you need to talk to them, but I forgot what it was, but basically, basically, uh,

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I just got, I was going somewhere. I forgot the other place, but, but you got to kind of find the venues and go there.

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And, uh, this is one of them where I'm asking him questions and he asks me questions. Okay. And on this, for example, the very first clip

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I say, what's your cannon basically is the question. And he has his own cannon. I asked him what books are authoritative.

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Is that how he got there? And he remains with only 10 of the 27 new Testament books with exceptions to two of them.

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So really only eight unfiltered. And then even when one of the ones he says he accepts, Matthew, he's willing to make emendations based upon nothing.

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And so, uh, he has his own, he's like a modern day Marcion that way. That's as extreme as Marcion.

27:13

And that's interesting because that doesn't, that didn't come out in what I listened to in the four and a half hour thing.

27:19

And nobody that he cites would agree with that. No, of course not. He says he does it by stripping away all presuppositions.

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That's what he, that's what he really, he's presupposition less. He has, uh, watched a lot of videos by Christian apologists.

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And what he does is he'll adopt their language and attempt to preempt the Christian apologist. And often he doesn't really understand what's being said.

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And so he misuses it. I definitely could tell that in the video. He does that with presuppositionalism frequently. He also does it with the concept of reasoned eclecticism.

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And so reasoned eclecticism of course is sort of standard new Testament textual criticism methodology.

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I think it's changing now with computers and all that. But, uh, that has a certain technical meaning.

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What he does is he, he talks about himself frequently as someone who's eclectic and we're not, we're stuck in a box, he says.

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So when he heard eclecticism in the textual critical realm, he thought it was an affirmation of his epistemology.

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And you can see that because in his video, he reads a slide where he says, let's define eclecticism.

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And the part of the video you screen, the second part of it is from like a textual critical book or something like that.

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It's about, you know, weighing manuscripts, all this stuff. The very first line, though, is from the eclecticism entry in Wikipedia.

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I tracked it down and found out. So he mixed and matched the definition for eclecticism as an epistemological approach to sciences with reasoned eclecticism from TC issues and didn't tell anyone.

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And later on the video says, don't cite Wikipedia as a source. And yet I tracked down a source, his source was

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Wikipedia and he's mixing and matching the definitions. So whenever he hears eclecticism and a textual critical concept, he thinks it's affirmation of his epistemology.

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So it's a fallacy of equivocation. Yeah. And in fact, at one point when he's talking about Codex Washingtonianus, he says,

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Washingtonianus, he says that it's, he's quoting someone who's saying it's an eclectic text and he goes, whoa, you hear that?

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And I'm just sitting like, what do you think that means? It's just so obvious. He has no idea what the author meant by that.

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And what's interesting is P45 that I'm working on is likewise eclectic in the sense that what that means is the scribe had access to a wide variety of manuscript family sources in his exemplars.

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And so one of the key issues is why is P45 different in its textual flavor and mark than it is in Acts?

29:56

That's, that's what I'm working on. And Washingtonianus, sometimes there's called mixed texts.

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Washingtonianus will have Alexandrian sections, then it'll have Byzantine sections and so on and so forth. That's what makes it eclectic.

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But I could just tell he was doing this thing. And I'm like, what, what do you, you obviously think that means something that those of us that work in the field realize it don't mean.

30:19

But then it's funny later on because he picks up on the fact that Washingtonianus had probably been used multiple sources, as you mentioned, and some people theorize because Diocletian destroyed a bunch of them and maybe that's what they had left and they're putting it together.

30:33

Who knows? We don't know that, right? Well, I get that because it's post, it's post the peace of the church.

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P45 is 130 years earlier than that. So, but in that he mocks

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Washingtonianus and calls it a Frankenstein text. And he says, I don't know why vocab picked this one.

30:55

He must've thought I'm not going to look into it. He shouldn't even use this. He says that about W, which is the world's third oldest

31:02

Bible. Yeah, it's definitely one of the most important and useful manuscript texts that we have.

31:09

And I don't know of any serious textual critical scholar that would call it a Frankenstein text like that. I mean, if you're going to use that kind of language, you have to do the same thing with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and everybody else in the process.

31:20

So anyway, so before we get into all that, so here's Ron Shields, aka

31:27

Divine Prospect, this is just some quotes just to give you some context here.

31:33

You got it ready to go? Okay. Which one are you playing first? ...to knock in his day and quoted from it as if it was God's word.

31:39

Do you believe he was mistaken? I'm not a hundred percent sure, only because I don't know what manuscript that he would have been using at that time.

31:48

If it was a Septuagint, we have various variants of the Septuagint. If it was something, let's say it was the Peshitta, we have variants of the

31:54

Peshitta as well. It would depend on what he had in front of him at that time. So you asked him about Jesus, could

32:03

Jesus have made mistakes because of the sources he was using? Because he was, I asked him at a certain point, once I started realizing his view of the text, how problematic it was,

32:12

I said, when you make an argument from the text of scripture, then are all your arguments provisional arguments?

32:19

Meaning an argument that could be altered because it's not a real solid foundation, basically.

32:24

There's a technical term for provisional, look it up. And he basically says, yes. So I said, well, then Jesus utilized things that he had access to in his day.

32:32

Could he have made mistaken arguments by using these mistaken takes? And he says, well, I'm not sure he could have. So Jesus could have been making a mistake.

32:40

Yeah, he at one point went after you, or was it me?

32:46

I forget who it was, in regards to the Greek Septuagint. And like, well, there are differences as if we don't realize that there are different readings in the

32:54

Greek Septuagint and don't, I mean, I have the Goettingen Greek Septuagint on my system.

33:01

I mean, it's the currently most extensive critical text of the Septuagint. We've talked about variant readings in the

33:07

Septuagint tradition here on the program. I just don't get the feeling that he actually does textual criticism.

33:15

No, he is able to read digital books from his bedroom and that's what happens.

33:20

And then he makes videos afterwards. The reason he said that, because he was trying to use that as a counterargument against us, because he took us as saying that the

33:30

Syriac palimpsest that he pointed to was not useful in textual criticism.

33:37

That's why he was trying to use that as a counterargument. He was saying, well, what about the Septuagint? Right, right, right, right, right, right. That was what he was attempting to do.

33:43

Except there's no parallel because the Greek Septuagint pre -exists the New Testament, cited in the New Testament, whereas the

33:49

Syriac comes long afterwards and is a translation thereof. Right. It's sometimes hard to follow where the argument is, because, as he himself says, he says, you know,

33:59

I haven't gone to Bible college or seminary. That's why you all need me. You need to have these fresh perspectives. Well, you know, it's not that there aren't people that can't come up with fresh perspectives, but there are also basic fundamental things that you need to understand.

34:13

And it's that education thing where you learn, oh, I shouldn't have gone there because that's really, basically,

34:20

I missed the point type of a situation. And I ran into that a lot in what I was listening to.

34:25

So, OK, now this one you put in here, and it doesn't have anything to do with textual criticism, but it is rather interesting.

34:33

So here we go. So do you believe that Molech has an actual metaphysical ontology, that he actually is an ontological being in some way,

34:42

Molech? Yes. OK, do you believe it is appropriate for any culture,

34:49

I'm not talking about Israelites, is it appropriate for certain cultures to pay him homage and worship him? Is that appropriate?

34:55

Yes, yes. OK, do you believe that if Molech prescribes child sacrifice as part of the ritual worship, since it is appropriate for other cultures to worship him, that child sacrifice should be part of the worship?

35:12

According to a certain period of time in which it was allowed, yes. So there was a time in which for certain ethnicities, or certain nations or people groups, within the groups of people called the

35:25

Canaanites, some of them, it was appropriate for them to, as part of the worship during that time, offer children to Molech, correct?

35:34

It would be appropriate, as long as the Mosai did not give them any instruction to do otherwise. Earlier in the discussion, you said you could not objectively say that it was wrong at the time for the worshippers of Molech, of other nations, to do things such as present children as sacrifices to Molech.

35:50

But then later on in the discussion, you talked about the Israelites got entangled with, quote, customs that were detestable to the

35:58

Most High, end quote. And you talked about how the prophets would come correct them. This was in relationship to the question

36:03

I asked you, please define the Gospel. Now, here's the question. If these customs, such as child sacrifice to Molech, are detestable to the

36:11

Most High, are they not objectively detestable, or is it just he doesn't like them? Because once you say they're detestable to the

36:18

Most High, that means they're objectively wrong. So I'm sensing a contradiction.

36:24

Are they detestable to the Most High? If they are, they're objectively wrong. How could they not be objectively wrong if they're detestable to God, who is the standard of holiness?

36:31

I don't understand those two things that you said. Please help me understand. All right, cool. So if people go back and listen,

36:38

I also say it's a neutral position, because I said it cannot be objective, because we're looking at the literature from the lens of one culture and how they view another culture.

36:49

The Israelites were penalized if they adopted the culture, customs, and practices of nations who

36:55

Yah did not enter covenant with. He had to give them things that were distinct to set them apart from the other nations, so that way when the other nations see

37:04

Israel, they know whose power they are. So I'm saying in regards to child sacrifice, the way that it was being offered from those children unto

37:13

Molech, the Most High did not want the Israelites to offer children to the god

37:18

Molech, because Molech was not the god that had a covenant with Israel. Now, did the Most High Yah require child sacrifice as well?

37:26

Yes, he did. In certain cases, he required child sacrifice. I did a whole entire lecture on it that I would encourage you to go back and watch, called

37:33

Capital Punishment, and it says the human sacrifice for the atonement of sins in the Bible. So we got to look at it from the cultural perspective of who's writing the literature and who's the one saying what's right and what's wrong.

37:44

So if people come under the God of Israel, quote, quote, God of Israel, and they're following this literature, then anything that we see in the literature that deems it to be raw or evil or wrong, then they should sway away from it.

37:55

But if they are not cleaving unto the God of Israel, then they're going to adhere to the customs, practice, and tradition that they are being told is right or what is wrong.

38:04

Thank you. Okay, so you want to expand on that?

38:12

He goes from the counsel of God's concept, and he gets really big into this concept of patron deities.

38:21

And he goes to Jepheth's speech in Judges, where, by the way, he mistakenly refers to one people group as having

38:31

Chemosh as their God, I believe. I think it's Judges 11. Anyways, Jepheth names the wrong

38:36

God. So it's clear it's not an errant God. It's Jepheth's misunderstanding of theology.

38:41

And he says, did not your God? I think you might say Molech in there. You have to look it up.

38:47

But he says, did not your God give you this land? And, you know, our God gave us ours. He uses that as a proof text to show that there are actual powers, elves, gods over the nations.

39:01

And that's why it's not wrong for that people group, such as someone who would worship

39:07

Molech, to have sacrificed children as part of their worship because that God was prescribing it to them.

39:13

They were not in covenant with the patron deity of Israel. And so he would not say in the conversation that it was objectively wrong.

39:21

So he's, it's, I mean, you heard it. I mean, it's a pretty shocking. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the biblical message is not only that these guys don't exist, but that that action is so inhumane that by its very nature, it is condemnatory.

39:42

I don't know how anybody can miss that. But I guess once you have an overarching perspective of things, that's that's what you do with these texts.

39:49

But so, yeah, that's that's interesting.

39:56

Oh, here it is. Judges 11, 24, Jephetheth says the Lord God of Israel has now driven out the

40:01

Amorites before his people, Israel. And would you now force us out? Isn't it true that you can have whatever your God, Chemosh, conquers for you and we can have whatever the

40:09

Lord, our God conquers for us? So that's what he says there. And he uses that to say that. So, for example,

40:14

Chemosh is the real God. But it's interesting. The wrong, Jephetheth names the wrong God of that people group. It's a different God.

40:20

It's not Chemosh. I actually went to an ETS little conference with David Rowe and some other

40:25

Old Testament scholars, and they brought this up because there's someone trying to talk about this as proof text. And he said, that's the that's the wrong patron deity for those people anyway.

40:33

So anyways, but he tries to use that as well as, you know, Psalm 82, things of that nature.

40:39

But it leads him to this relativistic position. And so it's not really considered immoral for non -Israelites to do child sacrifice because they were never in covenant with YAH in the first place.

40:55

So he can't say it's wrong, objectively. OK. All right.

41:00

So got some interesting theology, strange canon. OK, we got all that, got all that put together.

41:08

But you missed about the part where he's neutral on the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Oh, OK. Well, that's because we've already gone 40 minutes.

41:15

So we haven't even started things here. So we're not going to get anything done. But he's neutral on the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

41:22

So the idea being that at some point in this the four and a half hour video, he makes the claim that you've poisoned my mind against him and stuff like that, as if all that wouldn't have been enough as far as questioning the individual's orthodoxy.

41:39

Someone who believes things like that shouldn't be trying to pretend to be orthodox in the first place. But with that said, let's at least get into what is said here on the textual critical material, because that's the main thing

41:50

I want to get into. This is a different video. These are each one's introduced.

41:56

So we'll break at each point as we as we hit this material here. OK. We already mentioned that.

42:05

Yes. OK. So what you're looking through now is this.

42:11

These are sort of heretical highlights from his four point five hour response to me.

42:17

So what you're saying is this this this line up here is is from a different... It's from Wikipedia.

42:22

The first line is from Wikipedia. And then the rest of this is TC material. Yes. And so he mishmashed them together to justify his epistemology.

42:30

And later on says you shouldn't quote Wikipedia. But he doesn't tell anyone. That's where he got the first line of his definition for eclecticism.

42:37

That's exact. It reads exactly that. Or you just type eclecticism in Wikipedia. And that's the first thing that comes up.

42:43

So he's using... We have to really keep this in mind as we go throughout this presentation. This is one of the most important terms next to textual criticism, which is the umbrella term that this falls under that I need you to understand.

43:00

And I need you to hold on to as we progress through this presentation. All right. So eclecticism is a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single paradigm or set of assumptions, but instead draws upon multiple theories, styles or ideas to gain complementary insights into a subject.

43:17

Ding. Wikipedia. Eclecticism refers to... Yeah, but he goes straight into... He mixes something that's from a textual critical textbook afterwards.

43:25

He mixes two different definitions and he doesn't tell everyone. The first one's from Wikipedia. Everyone right now should stop.

43:30

Go on Wikipedia, type in eclecticism and look at the first line. It's going to match what's on your screen. But then after that, it's actual things about textual critical.

43:37

Yeah. Which is a technical use of eclecticism. Yeah. Yeah. When I when I first heard him say that, because I was listening to the audio,

43:44

I was like, that is the weirdest definition. The rest of the definition made sense. Yeah. But the first part didn't make any sense at all.

43:51

Now, now we know why. OK. All right. OK. Practice of consulting a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original.

44:02

OK. Which he then says... But you don't quote Wikipedia. You go to the footnotes in Wikipedia.

44:08

You click on the sources and you skim through it and decipher it to make sure that it's from a valid source.

44:15

And then you cite the source that Wikipedia cited from. Well, even that's not correct, to be perfectly honest with you.

44:21

I mean, you can you can look that, you know, Wikipedia is a nice, easy, quick way and stuff. Maybe you've not studied before or something like that.

44:28

And but the references are going to be very, very limited to whoever's done the editing on that particular text.

44:33

And then going and reading those sources. Do you check the dates? Do you consider, you know, there's all sorts of folks who will use stuff from the from the 19th century in textual criticism.

44:44

That's just basically no longer relevant in light of the discovery of the papyri and things like that. That's not how you do it.

44:50

Do it there either. But OK. And from Wikipedia itself, unless you're using it generally to explain something,

44:57

OK, which we all do, which I do at times as well. Maybe that'd be his fallback. OK, so there's where what happened is the first thing we played,

45:08

Dr. White, was from the discussion where I asked him questions and he asked me questions. And then there was some back and forth because I said, let's debate

45:14

Matthew 2019. He said, I won't. Yet he made a four point five hour video. And this is these clips are all from the four point five hour video.

45:21

But in the meantime, there was some Facebook back and forth before he blocked me for trolling, he says, which is ironic because the only time

45:27

I would come around is when he mentioned me, which he did frequently. He made several videos before this four point five hour one.

45:33

So I said, why is Ron Shields Divine Prospect using as evidence for excluding Matthew twenty nineteen, the

45:42

Syriac palimpsest, which doesn't even include the whole pericope of Matthew twenty eight?

45:48

That's what I asked. And I basically said because he doesn't know what he's doing. That's right. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that.

45:54

And it's interesting, by the way, even in that Syriac palimpsest, I looked up the synoptic gospels, what they contain.

46:01

And this is interesting in that Syriac palimpsest that he points to to say, well, look, since it's missing here because the whole end of Matthew twenty eight almost is missing.

46:09

But does he ever mention what a palimpsest is? He does explain what a palimpsest is. Yes. OK. But it's interesting in that old

46:16

Syriac palimpsest when Luke ends, it says at the end of Luke, the gospel of Luke.

46:23

And when Mark ends, it actually says in the Syriac, because I looked up some articles about what the text contains.

46:28

It actually says the gospel of Mark is ended. My point by saying that is with the other synoptics in the

46:35

Syriac palimpsest, when they're done, it actually says it that whoever translated actually did that.

46:40

The Syriac palimpsest is pretty much the world's oldest translation, probably out of the Greek.

46:46

That's true. It's a really old translation, but it's still a translation. But we don't have all of Matthew.

46:51

And if it was going to be consistent with the other synoptics, it probably also would say the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of Matthew is ended.

46:58

But it doesn't. So just to show that he was trying to act like maybe that's really all that really was there in Matthew.

47:05

That's what he was trying to say. Now, I would love to see an image of that folio leaf of the end of Matthew 28 in that Syriac palimpsest, because if it's ripped or whatever,

47:17

I don't. The thing is, there's not images of that online that I was able to find yet. For example, the Dan's Wallace, they don't have it.

47:23

It's not readily accessible. There's only a couple leaves here and there. For example, he pulled up one from Matthew one because I said, do you have the actual leaves?

47:31

Do you have images or do you just have this printed text edition? He said, oh, I have it. But he did something for Matthew one because he found one of the readily available images that are out there of the

47:40

Syriac palimpsest, because there are some. But he didn't pull it from Matthew 28, because I don't think that's available that I can see online.

47:47

All right, well, here's here's here's what he said. And then he puts another question.

47:56

Which manuscript of Matthew? Answer. Those which include the ending of Matthew, since that is a section where the verse on this scrutiny is.

48:03

Now, that's very interesting that he's saying that. But again, he's limiting Tetra criticism to a singular approach, and he's not looking at the eclectic approach that I take.

48:13

OK, now, I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense. OK, and I guess this is a good place.

48:21

There's going to be more to more opportunities to reiterate this. But if everybody who has a desire to to chip off disciples, to follow after them, has found one of the ways to do that is to question biblical texts and the accuracy of the biblical texts.

48:47

There's nothing new about this. You've got Joseph Smith's inspired translation. You've got the much more fancy way of mistranslating things in the

48:55

New World Translation. But but but if you're going to get a following, you need to have some new stuff.

49:02

And one of the best ways to do that is to question the validity of the text. What you have here, if you and anybody can do that,

49:11

I mean, every group on the planet, you can find somebody somewhere that said something that you can isolate, normally take out of its context and apply to your your pet text.

49:21

Because we're talking about a text. Now, it's a whole lot easier to do this with the Old Testament. Right. Because you're talking about an extremely ancient text, some of the most ancient writings that we possess.

49:33

But even with the New Testament, you're you're able to do this despite the huge manuscript tradition.

49:41

The point is that the first thing that a serious textual critical scholar wants to do is to produce as close to the original in the original language.

49:56

Now, my understanding is I got I got to the point where he started explaining, well, you know, my view is I favor the

50:02

Eastern text. In other words, he's going to translations. Right. Before going to the original.

50:07

This is this is not how you produce the New Testament. And your comments were based upon what would be you know, he would say is just simply the tradition that is common within New Testament textual scholarship.

50:21

And that is the primacy of the original language. Well, right. If someone were to want to recreate the writings of Ron Shields 300 years from now, does anyone seriously suggest the way to do that would be to start with the

50:40

French translations or go to the English, which was his original tongue?

50:47

Any time that you engage in translation into another language, the question of the accuracy of the translation, the accuracy of what the person possessed when they did the translations is one of the first things that has to come into mind.

51:02

And so when we look at Matthew 28, 19, he even reads a number of times, as I recall, statements saying all extant manuscripts,

51:15

Greek manuscripts of that contain the ending of the Gospel of Matthew contain

51:20

Matthew chapter 28, verse 19. Now, there are manuscripts of Matthew that are partial.

51:27

Right. I keep calling it my manuscript as if I own it. I don't. But a P45 contains a relatively small portion of Matthew in the middle chapters.

51:40

But it doesn't have Matthew 28, 19. Doesn't have Matthew 28 or 27 or 26.

51:45

Right. But no serious scholar suggests that the fact that you have a partial manuscript that only has fragments from the middle portion of a book means the beginning and the end wasn't there originally.

51:58

If you then find later manuscripts that consistently contain the same material all the way through, no one will seriously suggest.

52:08

And I'm saying seriously here. In other words, if you're actually trying to be fair in recreating the original text, no one's going to seriously suggest that those earlier partial manuscripts mean that what's missing was missing for them.

52:24

They're just simply partial manuscripts. And I did see when he summarized at one point his arguments, one of the points of the argument was a lack of material prior to 300.

52:41

Papyri wise, well, that would get rid of the majority of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, because, for example, for Mark, the only serious papyri evidence that we have at the moment is

52:53

P45. John, by far, has the earliest papyri attestation, but even that's fragmentary.

53:03

And so, you know, Matthew and Mark both suffer there. We've got a lot of Luke and John, but that's just because of the nature of papyrus manuscripts.

53:12

And in comparison to any other work of antiquity, we still come far closer to the original.

53:18

The gap is way smaller. What did Bart Ehrman say in your debate? You asked him a question about that. The New Testament is by far the most early attested text of antiquity.

53:25

Right. Yeah, there's no question about it. I think that's on a coffee cup or something like that. I put on a shirt actually once just right after the debate.

53:32

So this book by the Alans, which almost everyone has as an intro text, he has it and he's using this palimpsest in Syriac to try to overturn what's in the

53:42

Greek almost, but he should have read No. 5. These are the 12 basic rules for textual criticism on page 280 of this edition.

53:51

No. 5 says this, The primary authority for a critical textual decision lies with the

53:57

Greek manuscript tradition, with the versions and fathers serving no more than a supplementary and corroborative function, particularly in passages where their underlying

54:08

Greek text cannot be constructed with absolute certainty. And that's important because as I looked into this,

54:14

I saw Metzger say, and I thought this was important, that the Syriac cannot distinguish between the

54:20

Greek aorist and perfect tense. So that means when they translate and they wanted to be faithful, and that's part of what

54:26

I understand why these early translations are important. Partially it shows missionary activity.

54:32

It also shows sort of the philosophy of the word of God as they try to translate faithfully, we see. But the

54:37

Syriac translators, because of the linguistics of the matter, could not distinguish because Syriac can't between Greek aorist and Greek perfect tense.

54:45

That means there's certain aspects of the Greek text you couldn't even reconstruct in detail if you wanted to do.

54:51

We have to remember, and if you've sort of tuned us out at this point, you might want to tune back in here, you have to remember that when you're looking at the sources that we have to reconstruct the

55:03

New Testament text, the Greek manuscripts have to be primary for a couple reasons.

55:08

What other sources do we have? Well, we do have the other translations. We have Old Latin, Syriac, the

55:14

Peshitta, Boheric, Coptic. We have early translations. We also have the early church fathers.

55:21

So what would be called patristic sources. But those are always secondary, as the

55:26

Alans emphasize there, for a number of reasons. If you have a translation, that translation can, as you just noted, in certain languages will not be able to tell you what the original

55:41

Greek was. Those would be in grammatical issues where the variant has to do with whether it's an aorist or something like that.

55:47

But they can tell you whether a verse was there or not. So that could be relevant at that point.

55:53

But the problem is, if it is a translation, how much material did the original translator have access to?

56:04

So in other words, the translation cannot be any better than the Greek manuscripts, script or scripts, which we don't know, from which the original translation was made.

56:17

Even then, how far back do our manuscripts go of that translation?

56:24

Because we find variations within translations. Anybody who has, I keep forgetting to do this.

56:31

Remind me when the program's over to grab one of my UBS texts and drag it in here so I can show it to folks.

56:40

Especially when you use UBS 5, which is the current edition, there will be in the textual footnotes extensive citations of the fathers.

56:50

But you'll notice it'll say things like Jerome 1 slash 3, which means one out of the three times that Jerome cites this, it reads this way.

57:01

That means two out of the three times, it reads the other way. Or maybe if it's a really complicated variant, it might be once he does it this way, once he does it that way, once it's that way, and then he does something else over there.

57:12

It can be extremely, extremely difficult. And that's because the early church fathers are frequently quoting from memory.

57:21

Just as we do when we preach or we write, we sometimes don't bother to look something up. It's easier for us to look something up faster now than it was for somebody back then.

57:28

Even in Hebrews, it says somewhere. Somewhere it says. Somewhere it says. Yeah, exactly.

57:34

So you have that kind of thing going on. And so there are necessary limitations to what patristic citations and translational material can provide to us.

57:46

It doesn't mean they can be ignored. But to make them primary and not even, you know, maybe someplace he has, not what

57:53

I heard, was there any argumentation put forward as to why in the world you would make a translation primary over the original language?

58:05

It's like I said, if two, 300 years from now or 2000 years from now, someone's doing a

58:11

PhD on Ron Shields, which would make him feel really, really good. Even after 2000 years, I'm sure.

58:17

Mission accomplished. Exactly. Victory lap. And they decided to not use

58:23

Ron Shields' writings in English, but in translation into French.

58:31

Or if they translated it, say, into Lashawan Quiddash. Wow, that would be really difficult to come up with.

58:37

Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to do that kind of thing. Obviously, you go to the original language.

58:44

That's going to be the determinant of everything else. And you judge the translations based upon the original language.

58:50

And that's why modern scholarship does not have any questions about Matthew 28, 19.

58:58

And that's because the primary source for the book of Matthew is the

59:04

Greek Matthew. There's people who theorize that Matthew is originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic and all the rest of that.

59:09

So we don't have any manuscripts of that. And what is very clear in light of the grammar and syntax is that the

59:17

Matthew we possess today was written in Greek. Right. The individual who wrote it in Greek knew

59:23

Aramaic, because there are Aramaisms in it. But it was itself originally written in Greek.

59:31

And any, all the speculations, and there's a lot of speculation. If you want to get a paper published, you got to come up with some new angle.

59:37

And so you speculate about what the original would have read, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't have any of those things.

59:43

They're all speculation. And the reason that there's no question is not because we are just missing

59:49

Ron Shield's insights into textual criticism. It is because of the fact that when you have a text that is consistently found in every witness of the book in the original language back to the earliest manuscripts, then you have to have a mountainous reason to overthrow that primary evidence.

01:00:12

And there is no mountainous reason. It's conjectural inundation without any literature. Exactly. To validate it.

01:00:18

And, you know, miniature bibliography, Peter J. Williams, foremost preeminent textual critic, has an article called, and so if someone wants to look more into this, to understand this truth,

01:00:30

Google this, find this article, Some Problems in Determining the Vorlage of Early Syriac Versions of the

01:00:37

NT. Vorlage means the text before the translator. It's that original one. Look that article up.

01:00:43

It's from 2001. And one more by Sebastian Brock, Limitations of Syriac in Representing Greek.

01:00:50

And that's in the early versions of the New Testament edited by Metzger from 1977. So there's books that actually even specifically explain the limitations of what you can get to in the

01:01:01

Greek using Syriac. And so this is something that people should look into before they jump to the

01:01:09

Syriac to try to overthrow the Greek. Yeah, it's fascinating to me because Syriac is definitely extremely important in Quranic studies.

01:01:21

In what was available to Muhammad or to whoever the author of the

01:01:26

Quran was. Published by Brill on that subject entirely by George somebody. There's a bunch of discussion of those earlier languages and the influence they have on the language of the

01:01:39

Quran. And so there's the early Bible translations into Syriac and their impact upon the

01:01:45

Christians in what would be Saudi Arabia today, the Arabian Peninsula. So it's fascinating.

01:01:53

And I guess, I didn't get to this, but you told me that he questions whether I was even aware of these manuscripts. Yeah, that's on the clip if you want to play it.

01:02:01

Well, yeah. Well, we should probably get back to this. We're only a minute and 35 in.

01:02:06

We're obviously not gonna get through all this. But he confuses my emphasis upon the necessary textual critical reality of the primacy of the

01:02:19

Greek with the fact that, yes, I'm quite aware of the

01:02:25

Coptic, Boheric, Sahitic, all the other translations that are necessary to cite.

01:02:31

But again, they're secondary material. They're not primary material. I think it might be clip 14, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, well, let's stick with what we got here.

01:02:40

But there's the primary thing. And that is, when someone questions Matthew 28, 19, they cannot do it based upon any meaningful textual critical theory which must take as its primary source the

01:02:56

Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. That's the language in which the New Testament was written. They can't do so.

01:03:02

And so they either have to, as he quotes Coney Beer and some others, they have to engage in redaction criticism, form criticism, depending on whether you're talking about redacting the text later on or the form that the text originally possessed.

01:03:18

And those two end up frequently coalescing in liberalism. But he is utilizing forms of liberalism in its approach.

01:03:30

The problem with that is there are no rules. Right. Because if he wants to use it there, then someone else could come along and use it on his favorite texts.

01:03:40

And that's been the dead end of the liberal approach to Scripture, is that you end up with nothing.

01:03:47

There's nothing left to even have a conversation about because I can dismiss, theoretically, your favorite texts and you turn around and dismiss mine.

01:03:55

I think his is Psalm 82. Well, you know, and the funny thing is there is really absolutely no question that as far as the distance between original writing and first documentation, we have better documentation of Matthew 28 than we have for Psalm 82.

01:04:12

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, just time -wise, just because of the way in which the

01:04:18

Old and New Testaments are transmitted. But if he applies the kind of liberalism that he used in Matthew 28, the

01:04:25

Old Testament's dead meat. Right. I mean... That's why I asked him about Jesus' use of the

01:04:30

New Testament for that exact reason. I mean, I don't even... How do you even come up with a meaningful text of the

01:04:35

Old Testament from that perspective? You can't go to the Syriac or something for that. Right. Now you're really going so far down the road from the original writing that it's ridiculous.

01:04:47

An article, I'd also recommend one more from Jett's 1977 journal, Journal of Evangelical Theological Society, is by Grant Osborne, an article entitled this,

01:04:57

Redaction Criticism and the Great Commission, a Case Study Toward a Biblical Understanding of Inerrancy.

01:05:03

And he deals specifically with Matthew 28 and really the whole surrounding verses 18, 19, 20, which are sometimes called into question, really based upon a bias in the theological presuppositions, not on literary or physical grounds, upon theological presuppositions about supposed development of Christian theology.

01:05:23

That's where it comes from. It comes from a presupposition about church history, really, and about the clarity of what happened during Christ's lifetime and the church's understanding of that, not anything physically rooted.

01:05:34

It's almost like a blind faith type of, well, we believe this about this, so we'll overthrow the physical evidence.

01:05:43

Well, unfortunately, that is the essence of liberal biblical scholarship today. When you ask

01:05:49

Bart Ehrman why he does not accept Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles, he'll point to differences in terminology and lexicography and vocabulary.

01:06:03

That's primary. And secondly, he has a theory of what the early church looked like, and it doesn't fit that.

01:06:09

So where does he get his theory? What sources is he using to develop his theory of what the early church looked like?

01:06:17

It's extremely circular. And unfortunately, many people today don't have the critical thinking skills to be able to challenge what they find being quoted regularly on CNN.

01:06:29

That's because the people at CNN don't have the same critical thinking skills to be able to actually question the scholars that they're quoting either.

01:06:36

So it's very, very strange for me to hear someone, on the one hand, utilizing methodology that would then turn to the other side, would destroy the very foundations of the text that they themselves use.

01:06:49

He does a similar thing about understanding of church history with the Ebionites. He believes they're the true heirs of what

01:06:56

Christ taught. That's what the Muslims say. He thinks the Ebionites are the go -to. Unfortunately, the only thing we know about the

01:07:01

Ebionites is passed on to us through Christian sources. Yeah, we know very little. Very little.

01:07:07

The same thing with the group sometimes called the Nazarenes. Right, right, right. So you see that move as a strategy is common in the

01:07:15

Hebrew Roots Movement, which is not an ethnic thing in the same way, but the Hebrew Roots Movement, which is probably bigger than Hebrew -Israelism.

01:07:23

The Hebrew Roots Movement, which kind of comes out of messianic Judaism -type Christianity. So yeah.

01:07:29

Yeah, you know, just today, somebody sent me, actually sent a link to Michael Brown and I, and when

01:07:38

I was looking in your book here, yeah, I think it was to Straightway Truth.

01:07:44

Oh, Pastor Dow. Yeah, he wants to debate the date. Pastor Dow. He's got his AR -15 in the background.

01:07:50

He wants to debate somebody on the Trinity. Yeah, that's him. He's an ex -Pentecostal preacher who retains belief in tongues and casting out demons and is now a

01:07:59

Hebrew -Israelite pastor. And his congregation, believe it or not, is a mixed, it's a multi -ethnic congregation.

01:08:05

Yeah, that's what it was. And he's definitely got his own thing going on down there. He's sort of like maybe what

01:08:12

Divine Prospect aspires to in the future, except to do it in Atlanta instead of Tennessee. Because he's doing his own thing at Straightway Ministries.

01:08:20

But what we've seen happen, not just the growth of the camps and not just the moderates becoming more vocal, we've seen an increase in quasi -looking

01:08:30

Christian ministries take on Hebrew -Israelism and become bigger promulgators of it.

01:08:36

We've also seen that. We've even seen a few churches flip. There's a video, now granted it's a smaller church, but it's still disturbing to watch, where the pastor explains how wrong he was, hands over his keys to the men of ISUPK.

01:08:50

Those are the guys who wear all black with the fatigues and the combat boots and the stars and the studs and the leather bands.

01:08:57

Hands over the keys. And at the end of the video, basically swears his allegiance to commanding

01:09:02

General Yohanna. And of course, that's their moment of triumph.

01:09:08

Similar to the One West groups, their moment of triumph that their favorite thing is whenever they get a video of someone kissing their feet or kissing their shoes on the street.

01:09:16

I don't know if you've ever seen those videos. These are like moments of triumph for them. But the moderates don't go to that type of stuff as much because they're sort of embarrassed by it in a way.

01:09:27

It is embarrassing, yeah. They go towards, for example, some clip of Divine Prospect supposedly shellacking or schooling us on textual criticism.

01:09:36

Those are their moments of triumph, they think. And who are the purple Power Rangers again? You're talking about the guys who are

01:09:44

Israel United Christ. Those are the ones who are up to 5 ,000 members. But are they still wearing the purple with the looks like aluminum foil?

01:09:53

They look more like there's historically black colleges, universities, HBCU. There's a group

01:10:01

I believe called the Q Dogs or the Q Balls. And they're like a step group. And they actually look similar.

01:10:06

So a lot of times when they're on the street, people say, are you guys part of the Q? Sometimes people ask them if they're like overzealous

01:10:12

Laker fans. But I mean, that's their uniform. Because their thing is those are the colors of majesty and royalty.

01:10:19

So that's why. And their thing is we need order and design. And so they mock GMS. They call them the he -brums or the he -bums.

01:10:27

Because GMS just throws on a smock and says, I'm a prophet. Whereas they have a uniform.

01:10:32

And your ranking actually determines the type of uniform you're able to have. Oh. They're very specific.

01:10:40

You said they were extremely organized. Yeah, I know, I know. They are on message.

01:10:45

They're doing mission trips to Ghana. It's unbelievable what they're...

01:10:50

Now, the thing is, though, I predict a few things are going to happen within Hebrew -Israelism. Now, we're talking about One West.

01:10:56

We're not talking about divine prospect style Hebrew -Israelism. Even though they really do have a common cause. There's going to be some corruption scandals are going to happen because they're growing big.

01:11:05

That's going to happen. That means there's money. Yes. And what I'm predicting, there's going to be some corruption scandals that are going to come of light that not would have been possible 10 years ago.

01:11:14

Because they didn't have the same type of resources. You're going to see that happen. They're going to start to look like some of the corrupt churches they criticize.

01:11:22

I guarantee this is one thing. Another thing you're going to see happen is they're going to either become more rabid in their response to Christian apologetics.

01:11:32

Because since we were on, there's a whole crew now. I got something called the Shield Squad. Shout out to everyone on Shield Squad.

01:11:38

There's a group called the Soldiers of God. And there's churches doing conferences. And the response by Hebrew Israelites has been abysmal.

01:11:47

It's been absolutely... But isn't the normal response to put up a dozen videos of whoever you're criticizing wearing horns in flames of hell?

01:11:57

That's more the GMS style. IUIC's strategy is ignore them. We're building a nation.

01:12:02

Only debate old weak pastors. That's IUIC's strategy. That's their strategy. They regularly do that.

01:12:10

ISUPK's and some of the other groups' strategy is to only debate if you can do it with all your home territory at your advantage so you can always claim victory and make memes immediately afterwards.

01:12:20

That's an ISUPK -Sakari strategy. Each one has a response, but it's not going to work long -term.

01:12:25

Divine Prospect's strategy is to do a snow flurry of information that it's irrelevant. He is the king.

01:12:31

He's the king of irrelevant thesis. There is so much information he was throwing out there that I... It's a snow job.

01:12:37

I can see how none of this is relevant, but if you want to believe what he's saying, then it's like...

01:12:43

There's a lesser known fallacy people don't often talk about. It's called the fallacy of irrelevant thesis. Ron Shield's Divine Prospect gets the crown in regards to committing the fallacy of irrelevant thesis.

01:12:54

You're going to see changes in responses. After this, there's going to be hundreds of videos made.

01:13:00

You're going to have new stuff. YouTube's going to crash four times over the next week.

01:13:05

So what they need to do though is, they're going to have to put on their big boy pants and actually start to deal with the apologetic challenges because we're playing basketball with them, and they still got five guys out there.

01:13:18

We still only have a couple guys on the court. Once the whole team gets on the court, it's not going to go well for them.

01:13:25

No. Because just with two guys... And I say two, not literally. I'm saying two as a number compared to what they have.

01:13:31

So they've got to realize practice time is over. It's really starting to happen. And so their responses have not been well.

01:13:38

And I think Divine Prospect realizes it. That's why he's trying to engage on a Hebrew -Israelite apologetic project to show a model, but he's not doing a good job.

01:13:46

And that's what we're evidencing here today. Well, we're not getting very far here either.

01:13:51

So let's try to get something more here. Or that's going to be part of the criticism, is that it didn't give him enough chance to speak for himself.

01:13:58

So let's press on. So his next question is, so why would Ron Shields ask where Matthew 20, 19 is in manuscripts which do not even contain the ending of Matthew?

01:14:07

Answer, because he has no idea what he's talking about. That's why.

01:14:13

It's like asking where California Love is on 2pocalypse. It's not on that album. You need to look somewhere else.

01:14:20

I don't get that illustration. Contextual apologetics. You got to let us flow. Contextual apologetics.

01:14:27

You're leaving us old folks just completely. If I utilized a Star Trek original series analogy.

01:14:34

I'm sorry. A Star Trek original series analogy. Did you hear that? They would get lost. Cut his mic.

01:14:39

I actually watch Star Trek original series, just so you know. It's not a track. I got you. I got you.

01:14:44

Oh my goodness. Live long and prosper. Okay. Anyways. Ready to force feed with you?

01:14:52

Yeah. He's saying that there's no interpolations in there. Now, did you ever say there were...

01:14:57

Does he know what an interpolation is? And how it's different than textual variation? I don't think so.

01:15:04

I'm not sure. Or is he just simply throwing it out there and not being careful? Hard to tell. So now we're talking about Washingtonianus.

01:15:11

And oops, I just did it. Washingtonianus. I just said it like how he says it. Oh no. Okay. Sorry about that.

01:15:18

It's not the easiest. But just remember Washington. And then lengthen the O. Anus. So Washingtonianus.

01:15:26

I did it right the other times. And now I just said it the way he says it. Yes. Okay. Yes. So let's just call it W. Yeah. Codex W.

01:15:32

We're talking about W here, which ties in with California love, by the way. Can you do this? That's...

01:15:38

I don't need... That ties in with California love. Okay. Somebody would make a meme out of that that I don't want to have made. Well, you could do this.

01:15:44

You said... Okay. You could do that. Yeah. Live long and prosper. All right. So anyways, we're talking about this because I said, here's an example of Matthew 28, 19 in a very old text.

01:15:52

Right. And I pointed to W. And so he's criticizing W, basically, as its validity.

01:15:58

Just because that's what you chose. Yes. And I chose it because I didn't want to choose Vaticanus because I knew Hebrew Israelites would have a problem with the term

01:16:04

Vatican. And I didn't choose Sinaiticus because I wanted to save my best for last if we were going to go there.

01:16:09

So I chose the third oldest. And he's saying, does he not realize there's variants in it? Which...

01:16:15

Well, every manuscript has. And it has the Freer Logion in it. He made a big deal. Oh, yeah.

01:16:20

Made a huge, huge deal out of that. But the reality is when it... Again, what?

01:16:30

What? He wants the mic closer to you. Oh, I thought he meant you.

01:16:36

OK. Oh, hey, I will do what I want to do over here. What are you talking about? Must be a

01:16:42

Coogee. No, that's just how we've done this for years and years and years. The reality is, and I've said it many, many times before, if you take

01:16:52

Washingtonianus or if you take Vaticanus or Sinaiticus or the best 14th century

01:17:00

Byzantine minuscule and you apply the same rules of exegesis and interpretation to each one, there is going to be absolutely, positively no difference.

01:17:12

The deity of Christ is going to be found in every single one of them. Washingtonianus is no more corrupt as far as the translation is concerned than any other manuscript.

01:17:26

I mean, certainly when it comes to pre -1000 AD manuscripts, it is a very, very consistent text.

01:17:37

So he did go through pretty much every possible interesting variant at some point.

01:17:44

All but he could have gone on 10 times longer in Sinaiticus than Washingtonianus.

01:17:53

He could have done it in Vaticanus as well, which only shows either he's just trying to go after you and is imbalanced in his response against you, or he doesn't realize that everything he said about W would be just as easily said in, categorically speaking, of any of the other unsealed manuscripts of the first nine centuries.

01:18:18

So what that shows me is you have someone who is reading secondary literature about textual criticism, but doesn't do textual criticism.

01:18:28

Because when you collate manuscripts, when you go in -depth in the analysis, not of just the big variants, but of your standard variants.

01:18:39

When you're preaching through a book, and when I went through Hebrews, a number of times brought up variant issues.

01:18:49

When you're looking at it in that way, and you're actually looking at the manuscripts as a whole, what he said, and then his conclusion,

01:18:59

Frankenstein manuscript, was grossly imbalanced from any meaningful scholarly perspective.

01:19:06

Even from his own sources that Divine Prospect pulled up, Michael Holmes describes it as intrinsically valuable, because of what you're describing, because I heard earlier it is.

01:19:16

And Craig Evans, in Divine Prospect's own sources, describes it as being in rarefied company.

01:19:24

And in the textual critical apparatus, it's cited as a first order witness, meaning a high quality witness.

01:19:30

So to downplay it, just to try to do something, to try to say, let's get rid of Matthew 20 and 19, to try to diss

01:19:37

W that way, it's just, it shows how unbalanced he is, that he'll go to great lengths to try to throw shade.

01:19:44

That's what the young people say these days. I, you know, I knew that. Throw shade. Oh, okay. I heard that term. All right.

01:19:50

He's trying to throw shade. Yeah, he's trying to throw shade on W, but it's like, you can't throw shade on the dub.

01:19:58

You can't throw shade on the dub. That's a, that's a new meme coming up. Okay, all right.

01:20:03

So an addendum in reference to Matthew 20 to 19, but he chooses a very weak codex to prove his point.

01:20:12

So what he's trying to do is show that there's no interpolations, but he chose a bad reference.

01:20:18

Let's watch, family. Well, he's setting it up because you weren't trying to say there are not textual variants in W, and he's using interpolation in multiple meanings here.

01:20:29

So he's setting up a straw man here. I mean, here, here, here we go. Here's our, here's our, for, just for, for Ron Shields, here's your, your straw man award for setting up a straw man here.

01:20:43

And I'm sure it made it look good to your, your followers. But, you know, there's going to be a meme of you saying you believe in voodoo, right?

01:20:50

No, no, I said nothing. I'm just straw man. I didn't poke any pants in him. I'm just telling you. I don't,

01:20:55

I don't have, I don't have, I don't have the, the bick that we normally have to hold dangerously close to him, because I don't think we have a fire alarm in here.

01:21:06

So that would be a bad thing. So anyway, we press on. Oh, here we go.

01:21:13

Yeah, that's where he says, right. It's an important part of biblical scholarship. 90 % of our surviving biblical manuscripts are from the 10th century or later.

01:21:22

This is where you get the majority text type. Keep this in mind, family, okay? Who's the family? So me and some of my, so Adam Coleman and Ron, and my man,

01:21:32

LeBron Campbell, GCon, we are starting to describe Divine Prospect as the family guy.

01:21:38

And somebody who's an illustrator needs to take Peter Griffin and put Divine Prospect's head over him and do a whole intro of the family guy, because as a filler, he always says family.

01:21:50

And so he's like, vocab is not built for this family. He doesn't understand family, family, family, family.

01:21:56

Let's keep it moving. Let's keep it moving, family. So family is referring to the - I didn't know if there was a specific meaning, or is this simply his way of referring to his followers?

01:22:04

It's his way of referring to his followers. Okay, I didn't know if there was a theological content to it, or just quite dedicated.

01:22:12

I would imagine so, yeah. Michael Holmes, a biblical scholar at Beth -El University in St.

01:22:18

Paul, Minnesota. So anything that comes from earlier is intrinsically valuable. There are only two other complete texts of the

01:22:24

Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that are older, added Craig Evans, a biblical scholar at Cater University in Nova Scotia.

01:22:32

They are the Codex Vaticanus, which is held in the Vatican, and the Codex Sinaticus, most of which is held at the

01:22:38

British Library in London. They're both 4th century, said Evans, somewhere between 330 and 340.

01:22:44

And the Codex Washingtonianus is in rarefied company, because now this

01:22:51

Codex W can now be added to Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaticus, and we also have

01:22:57

Codex Alexandrinus, as one of the earliest extant Greek manuscript codices that we have today.

01:23:04

And remember, there's... Okay, yeah. He just spent reading about how high its pedigree is and saying,

01:23:11

I chose the wrong text. It's like, does he not understand what he just read?

01:23:17

Or does he not recognize that both, what's called Oliph and B, Vaticanus and...

01:23:23

Sinaticus and Vaticanus, likewise contain Matthew 28, 19, and that therefore, on a textual critical basis, you have to provide a massive amount of argumentation and documentation to overthrow the consistent testimony to the text that's found in the earliest extant manuscripts of that section.

01:23:42

The big three agree. The big three agree, and what you need to keep in mind is you say, yeah, but wouldn't it be nice to have papyri there?

01:23:51

Well, it would be. We have papyri of the beginning of all these gospels, for example. And I guess he made some argument against me.

01:24:00

He said you didn't understand what you were talking about because you were claiming it was a single book.

01:24:05

A single book. What he doesn't understand is that any translation is going to be made...

01:24:12

I suppose a translation could be made from a collected manuscript of the gospels, even though the

01:24:21

Syriac would be so early. Well, here's the problem. Like Codex Washingtonianus.

01:24:30

He gets all excited when it's called eclectic. Is that on here? Yeah, but I forget which clip it is.

01:24:36

Okay, we might get it. He goes, what? Yeah. The scribe that created

01:24:42

W and the scribe that made P45 hundreds of years earlier had multiple single book manuscripts in front of him.

01:24:54

So in other words, he had a single manuscript of Mark and a single manuscript of, say,

01:25:01

Luke Axe. So originally those books circulated as single documents.

01:25:08

And then those were used to create the compilations later on. What you're looking at in the

01:25:15

Syriac Palimpsest, somebody had to have taken at some point single manuscripts and combined them together.

01:25:22

That's where you can lose endings. And we have a modern example of this.

01:25:28

I hadn't even thought about that until I was watching you smirking at me right now. You smirk a lot. And the hat makes it even more smirkable.

01:25:36

You didn't say smirkable. Or smirfable. I was about to say, or smirfable. Especially the color. That's right. Very smirfy there.

01:25:43

And I'm wearing a coogee and people are going, but here's an example. Rich is getting ready to turn the...

01:25:52

Were you about to turn the microphones off or just saying we're crashing? Nosedive. Nosedive, right there. Okay. Here's the example.

01:25:59

In the 16th century, we have an example of this very thing happening. And you know it.

01:26:06

You know the story. You've heard me tell it a million times. Erasmus is under time pressure to finish.

01:26:11

Oh yeah. Translating backwards. And so he can't even find a single full manuscript of the book of Revelation.

01:26:19

He has to extract the text from a Latin commentary on the book of Revelation.

01:26:26

And even then, guess what's missing? Not the beginning of the book. The end of the book is missing. The last few leaves.

01:26:32

And that's where he has to back translate from Latin into Greek. So if that can happen in the 16th century, the early 16th century, it clearly happened in the very, very earliest periods.

01:26:46

And so I guess he accuses me of not understanding the form of the book or something. What I'm accusing him in response is not understanding how those books came into existence in the first place.

01:26:56

Yeah. When he first came across the word, he was saying codexes. And eventually he realized it was codices.

01:27:02

Eventually he realized that. But, you know, no one is doubting that he's bright or able to retain information or articulate or passionate.

01:27:14

I haven't run into any others that are doing the reading. Yeah. It's just so sad that he's reading stuff with such a thick lens on that he doesn't see that a lot of the stuff he's reading, if he's reading

01:27:25

Metzger and Alonso. He's reading some actually decent resources. It's really some good stuff, but he's not hearing what it's saying.

01:27:30

It's a real shame. It's a real shame because he actually has access. I'm like, hey, that's a really good book. He'll like pull out some book.

01:27:36

I'm like, some of the stuff he's recommending, it's not, it's not all. Every now and then he'll dip into some, some loony stuff.

01:27:43

Like he dipped into an anti -baptism book kind of to try to justify, but it wasn't a textual book.

01:27:50

And so when he pointed that out, I was like, that's not a book on textual criticism. That's a book on baptism in Christian history. He needs to get, what he needs to do on there is get the old one,

01:27:58

Baptism in the New, is it Beale? It's Murray, Beasley Murray. Beasley Murray. That's what, that's a book to kind of counter that.

01:28:05

But a lot of the resources are, are decent resources, which is what, it's how he - It's the lens through which he's looking at them.

01:28:11

Yeah, so it's a real shame because he actually could be a good balancing act to the rest of Hebrew -Israelism if it was done different.

01:28:21

But you know. He's, he's got, once you have a goal that you're getting to, you're going to see what you need to see and you're going to get there that way.

01:28:28

So. Confirmation bias. That's what they call it. The codex is cited as consistently cited witness of the first order and the critical apparatus of the

01:28:40

Novum Testamentum Gracie or Greece. Greggy. The codex was apparently copied from several different manuscripts and is the work of two scribes.

01:28:54

The text type is eclectic. What? There we go.

01:29:00

What? That's what I was waiting for right there. The text type is eclectic. What? And then you have a breakdown.

01:29:07

So you have Matthew 1 through 28, Luke 8, 13 through 24, 53,

01:29:13

Byzantine, Mark 1, 1, 5, 30, Western with some similar to old Latin versions,

01:29:19

Mark 5, 31, 16, 20, Caesarean, which some people notice near to P45.

01:29:25

That's why, that's one of the reasons I know as much as I do about W is because the fact that as I've been working on W, its relationship in Mark to W is very interesting.

01:29:36

One of the things I have to now deal with, unfortunately, is apply CBGM material processes to that to see if that actually ends up panning out because...

01:29:48

Could you do a subtitle of one of the chapters in your dissertation? Don't throw shade on the dub. That'd be awesome.

01:29:54

But you know, I heard you're meeting Dr. Peter over there. I saw him present at ETS this year. That was wild because he presented some of this, but he was more doing, he mentioned some of this, but he's mainly doing, and I think you heard about this, fallacious arguments.

01:30:08

Yeah, I heard it. It was really amazing to just be there in that room with all those guys. I listened to that whole segment.

01:30:16

I bought the audios because I wasn't there. But yeah, we are going to get together because I think it's extremely important.

01:30:23

And then Luke and John, Alexandrian text types, which is fascinating because that has parallels to p45.

01:30:31

Hundreds of years separating them, but interesting parallels. When it says the text type is eclectic, it has nothing to do with his eclecticism.

01:30:40

It has to do with the fact that the scribe had multiple singular sources in front of him that are not all from the same text type.

01:30:49

Now, the whole issue of text types is now up in the air in New Testament textual criticism.

01:30:57

And Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're coming out over the next number of years, and there's going to be a lot of work being done once those collations are available and the computer stuff comes online, you can start doing things.

01:31:14

And we'll be able to confirm or disconfirm some of these observations.

01:31:20

But when he goes, what? He's not understanding what the source he's quoting is.

01:31:27

Well, in another instance, he's basically dissing something that had an eclectic text, W, an eclectic underlying thing that it was copied from.

01:31:35

You know what I mean? When he calls it Frankenstein text. I mean, that's what he's talking about right here, is W, it's eclectic.

01:31:42

But what that simply means is that the scribe had access to a wide variety of sources.

01:31:49

Could you play, I don't know where you're trying to go, but can you go to clip 16? Because that's where he actually makes the claim to say it's not there, and no one can magically put it there, in reference to Matthew 28, 19.

01:32:02

It's probably difficult to find. Well, it's number 16 towards the end.

01:32:11

It's about, let me see how many minutes it is. That's 27. It's about eight minutes, eight minutes, 10 seconds on my summoning

01:32:20

James White. You see that? There is clip number 16. Yeah, this. Because he's, at this point, saying we can't find

01:32:28

Matthew 28, 19, basically. He's referring to the Syriac, I believe. It's wild the way his argument shifts into overblown confidence.

01:32:37

Okay, let's see what it says. I said, on that note, there's nothing to debunk.

01:32:43

The text does not include those verses, and no one can magically put them in there. Who's going to logically argue with this post?

01:32:51

Okay, that went too fast for me. It's in reference to the Palimpsest, but he was saying he didn't want to debate me because there was no need, because Matthew 28, 19 is not there.

01:33:02

As if the Syriac Palimpsest proved the point, the debate was over. I see, okay. Who's going to logically argue with that post,

01:33:10

Dr. White? Anybody who actually recognizes that Matthew wasn't written in Syriac, maybe?

01:33:16

Possibly, I suppose. Who will stand in the gap? I don't know.

01:33:22

I don't know. I don't know. Well, since you have the list there, what do you feel like we need to...

01:33:29

Well, I'll blame the titles. Clip 17 is where I put it in your mind that he was a heretic, so you guys won't talk.

01:33:34

18, right after that, which is 9 minutes 25 seconds, is where he says you're not familiar with the Eastern manuscripts.

01:33:41

Okay, let's do 17 first. He's throwing insults at me, which is unfortunate, because I would have loved to dialogue with him in regards to my position on this had vocab not got involved.

01:33:53

Now, vocab is the one that put the false notion that we are heretical in the mind of James White so that I couldn't even have a dialogue discussion with him on this, because now he already has a presuppositional idea on who

01:34:08

I am and where I stand, and automatically in his mind, there's already a wall up, so he's not even going to take in anything that I'm saying, which makes it very difficult to have a constructive discussion with him because of vocab.

01:34:21

And this is what vocab is doing. He's tainting various Christian platforms so that way our community can never have an honest objective and truthful voice in conveying where we stand.

01:34:36

And this is the work of vocab, causing confusion and discord. This is what he does, right? That's my job description.

01:34:42

Wow, you are one powerful dude. Vulcan mind meld, I put it into your mind.

01:34:50

Like I said, now, all I was doing, you know, it's sad that people today think that if you point out their common errors, and all

01:35:05

I said, and it was on the screen there, you can see what I said. All I said was, you know, not the first one to come up with this argument.

01:35:11

You know, this is common for anti -Trinitarians. It's a tough text for them to deal with, and if it's original to Matthew, if it's in the words of Jesus, that's problematic.

01:35:22

For us, especially when you put together with everything else we have in the Gospels, and Paul, and so on and so forth.

01:35:29

The idea that I would have assumed some type of orthodoxy on the part of someone involved with the

01:35:37

Hebrew -Israelite movement, I haven't. Now, the other guy that you asked me to listen to.

01:35:44

Oh, oh, Zadok ben Israel. Yes. Seems like a really nice guy that's just confused.

01:35:52

I do look forward, is it going to happen? Well, I hope so. We're working on a dialogue between you two, because he is, he's respectful, he's well -read, he's humble, he's a super,

01:36:06

I mean, not that this is on your, he's a dope emcee, you know. A dope emcee.

01:36:12

He raps really well, right? Did you, did he? You know,

01:36:18

I look through the window at Rich there, all of a sudden, because I can see my reflection, and I can see him, and I see two really old guys.

01:36:29

He is a very good dialogue partner, because he listens well. He's articulate with what he believes.

01:36:36

Now, we have big differences, him and I, but in a manner of speaking, he's the best of the best.

01:36:44

Well, I don't want to leave this, but as I was listening to what you asked me to listen to, someone called in, one of the callers called in, and presented the

01:36:55

Isaiah 6, John 12 thing. Yes. And they did a pretty good job.

01:37:02

They didn't nail it the way they needed to nail it, because he actually took the normal way out of that.

01:37:08

And that is, well, but that Isaiah 53 thing is, where they didn't bring up what's the textual variant in the Greek Septuagint, saw his glory.

01:37:14

The only place where Yahweh's glory is seen is in Isaiah 6. There's no way around that in John 12 41.

01:37:21

So whoever it was that called in, I think they probably heard it on this program, so maybe they're listening.

01:37:27

You've got to make sure to close that door before someone takes that back door out, which is what he did.

01:37:34

But it didn't strike me that he was actually overly familiar with that. And so it just, but he was like, but I'm open to, you know,

01:37:42

I'm open to changing, you know. And it just, he just struck me as someone who's just, just hasn't been discipled properly.

01:37:54

He was mainly discipled by Israel of God. They're out of Chicago, not one

01:38:01

West, and probably the biggest Hebrew Israelite group in the world, probably. They have out in a suburb of Chicago, a mega church that seats 6 ,000 people.

01:38:12

They've invited me to visit. There's one right on McDowell. So I've been there with them. Now they're still Hebrew Israelites.

01:38:18

They still have a softer, kinder, gentler ethnic hierarchy, but they do have one.

01:38:23

But they'll actually call someone they perceive as a Gentile. They don't do the whole Edomite thing, a brother. And they, and they really,

01:38:29

I think, mean it, you know, the Israel of God. He was schooled by them. Now he's not currently in Israel of God. He has disagreements with them.

01:38:35

For example, about eschatology. He has some disagreements with them. I couldn't even imagine what Hebrew Israelite eschatology is.

01:38:41

Well, this is Israel of God's eschatology, which looks different than GMS eschatology, which GMS eschatology is like the nuclear showdown type of thing.

01:38:50

But Israel of God is different. It's maybe closer to Seventh -day Adventist type, you know. But Zadok has a community in Buffalo, New York, and they're doing something different.

01:39:01

You know, it's different than really the other groups are doing. And that's why

01:39:06

I would love to hear you guys talking, another man from his congregation. Now we have big issues, and I spoke about some of them on that program, nonetheless.

01:39:14

But yeah, he's different. Yeah, there was just tremendous confusion about who God is, what the word

01:39:20

God means, the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, all those things. That's why I'd love to hear the conversation with you guys.

01:39:27

Well, yeah, hopefully we can make that happen. But it was just very different than this. Yes, it is. And very different than Elder Akah, too.

01:39:34

So, I mean, it's like dealing with three different, very, very, very, very, very different approaches.

01:39:39

I don't know how you keep them all straight. I'll put it this way. Divine Prospect speaks of himself sometimes in the third person. I don't ever picture

01:39:44

Zadok doing that. Right, right, right, right. To boil it down in mid -air speaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:50

There you go. There you go. Okay, what's this next one here? Let's see. Oh, there we go.

01:39:56

Yep, you want to hear this one. Okay. Now, remember he said, anybody that knows anything about textual criticism, and then he goes to say, a text that contains only one book.

01:40:07

That's interesting. Because I start to see that I don't believe he's familiar with these

01:40:13

Eastern text type versions, all right? Because this is not just...

01:40:19

Okay, let me just clarify his error. What he's talking about is when

01:40:24

I talked about the ending of Gospels.

01:40:30

For example, last year, Muslim Ijaz Ahmed, or maybe it was even the year before now,

01:40:37

I can't remember. I saw that clip, yeah. Where we were talking about John 2028. And he says, well, see,

01:40:43

P66 doesn't have my Lord and my God in it. That's because it's fragmentary.

01:40:49

That part of the papyrus is missing. And now Codex W has

01:40:56

Matthew, Mark, John, Acts, it goes on, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, those later manuscripts.

01:41:03

But John wasn't written as a part of a continuous Matthew, Mark, Luke. You know,

01:41:09

Luke gets done. He passes it off to John. John writes. John passes it off, gives it back to Luke, who puts in Acts or something like that.

01:41:15

These were all written as singular books. And so that's also during the period of persecution.

01:41:24

And so when I talked about the beginning and ending of books being the primary victims of time, look at my own

01:41:36

P45. There's no beginning or end of any one of those books. It's the internal pages that have survived the ravages of that transmissional process.

01:41:45

And even in that case, it was a continuous book. It had the ending of Matthew was in P45.

01:41:53

It's not there anymore. That doesn't mean it was cut out. It's just not extant any longer.

01:41:59

A book without end in which only the internal pages have survived the ravages of time.

01:42:05

Thank you very much. You know, you're really losing Rich a little bit in there. He's much older than I am.

01:42:12

So I'm at least able to sort of get a little hip. But Rich doesn't do the hip thing at all.

01:42:20

Well, actually, his left hip has been hurting. Yeah, so there's great confusion of categories there because he's talking about it like it's a text type.

01:42:29

We're talking about translations. Yeah, right. So it's multiple confusion of categories that he's even bringing up.

01:42:35

But in the process, accusing me of being confused. One book. The Syriac Sinaiticus Apollenses has all four gospels.

01:42:45

All right. So P45. He just made a reference to it as if it was only one book, which it's not.

01:42:52

Which I was referring to the fact that anything that it was translated from had originally been transmitted as a singular book.

01:43:00

And that's where many of the variants and destruction of manuscripts came from. OK, so there's actually four books, four gospels that's contained in there.

01:43:07

But let's keep watching. Let's keep watching. We don't operate that way.

01:43:14

The eclectic method allows me to look at everything and then make a judgment. That's how

01:43:20

I operate it. I've not been to seminary school, have not been to theology school. So I'm not wired to think in an orthodox fashion like they are.

01:43:29

You need people like me who are innovative to bring this subject matter to the table so that everybody can see what we're working with and they can make their own decisions.

01:43:39

Now, that sounds really good. It sounds really good. You know, you need fresh insights and things like that.

01:43:45

He's the gadfly in the TC ointment. But the point is the people that are going to bring you fresh insights, first of all, know the whole field.

01:43:56

And they've done their basic homework. That's why you have to go to school first. And that's where the problem lies here, is it's real easy if you've not had to bounce your ideas off of equals and peers.

01:44:14

If you think you're the top dog all along and there's nobody can go, yeah, but what about this?

01:44:20

If you apply it over here, then it's going to totally mess this up. And then we're not going to know what this said. And that's why there's a community that does this.

01:44:28

That's why you write papers and they're reviewed and stuff like that.

01:44:35

And you don't come up with just your own canon or even your canons of textual criticism or whatever else it might be.

01:44:45

Those types of insights probably aren't going to be valuable because they're going to contain so many flaws in the basic methodology that the person presenting them might think they're just wonderful until someone who actually has to do the work.

01:45:01

Because it's work. I wrote a book this past year with Doug Wilson debating the issue of text types and things like that.

01:45:15

And as I point out in there, it sounds really good to promote the ecclesiastical text theory until you then have to take it and actually produce a text.

01:45:24

It's one thing to already have a text and then anachronistically defend it. It's another thing to actually take your theories, apply it to the raw data, and come out with something meaningful on the other end.

01:45:39

And that's where people really struggle. Yeah, he's definitely the best basketballer in Buffalo, but he needs to come to the blacktop courts on the streets of New York and play some ball.

01:45:52

He's a big fish in a small pond. We just,

01:46:00

Rich, we just need to allow him to talk to the people in his crib. If he's got a crib.

01:46:07

I'm not sure if that's a crib or not. I don't know. Yeah, I live in a townhouse. You live in a townhouse. Okay, all right. But I thought that was important as well.

01:46:17

And then he has two questions for you. Yes, yes. Since the Syriac Sinaiticus is a compilation of the Gospels, why did you imply that it only contained the book of Matthew and therefore a time foul pages are missing since chapter one at the end of the book?

01:46:27

Can you elaborate? Just did. It had to be translated from something. Matthew was originally transmitted as the book of Matthew and not anything else.

01:46:35

You mentioned that the Syriac Sinaiticus palimpsest is a translation of Greek manuscript. Can you demonstrate this to us?

01:46:42

If unreliable, then where does that leave the septuagint in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrus? It was also quoted by Yahusha and Shaul.

01:46:51

Boy, there's some major category of confusion here. Any of the

01:46:59

Syriac translations, Coptic, Boheric, any of those early

01:47:06

Eastern language translations, I'm not aware of anybody.

01:47:12

Well, I suppose there might be some theories that some of the smaller translations were actually based upon other translations themselves originally.

01:47:20

That's a possibility. But originally they are from Greek. I don't think there is any question that the original language of the

01:47:32

New Testament was Greek, including Matthew. That's been argued, but I think pretty much settled as well.

01:47:44

So can you demonstrate this? Well, where did it come from? Are you saying it's a secondary translation?

01:47:51

That's a translation of a translation? The original is of Matthew. I'm assuming the Syriac is a translation from the original, not a translation from a secondary translation.

01:48:00

In other words, not a translation from the old Latin or something along those lines. Not seen any evidence of that. So everyone that I know in the field views it as at least a first generation translation from the

01:48:13

Greek. And then it says, if unreliable, and I'm assuming he means if the

01:48:19

Syriac Sinaiticus Palimpsest is unreliable. I think so. Then where does that leave the

01:48:26

Septuagint in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexanderus? I don't even see the connection. I don't even see a logical, rational connection because the

01:48:34

Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament.

01:48:39

There is no one single Greek Septuagint. Scholars believe that the

01:48:46

Septuagint developed over about a century, that there were numerous different translation efforts that brought it about.

01:48:56

Clearly the Pentateuch, for example, was done at a different time than the prophets were because there's varying levels of quality depending on which

01:49:07

Septuagint you're looking at. But these are ancient translations of the

01:49:13

Hebrew, which was the most popular translation amongst the people to whom the gospel came, which is why the

01:49:23

New Testament writers quote from it so often. And yet when it says it was also quoted by Jesus and Paul, well, if Paul's writing to the

01:49:34

Church of Colossae, which is 98 .9 % Greek speakers, what else is he going to quote?

01:49:42

He's not going to quote a Hebrew text they can't read. Right. He's going to quote the translation that's available to them. So I'm not, it sounds like in his mind that there is a connection here to his theory about turning the

01:49:59

Eastern texts into the primary source, maybe. I think he's saying they're on equal footing, maybe.

01:50:07

It's a little confusing because he puts them all together. Like, I'm not sure. I mean,

01:50:13

I think that's what he's saying. He'll probably explain it after this. Well, I'm assuming, well, yeah,

01:50:19

I'm sure. I'm assuming that what he's saying is that translations can still be accurate because the

01:50:25

Septuagint was accurate. Okay, that's fine. But we're talking here about what sources you use to recreate the original.

01:50:33

And the first and foremost is the original language itself. Now there's even a difference here when looking at Old Testament textual criticism because you might say, well, that always means the

01:50:48

Masoretic text should take precedence over the Septuagint. Well, now you're talking about how far back those two streams of transmission go.

01:50:55

And there's no question that the Greek stream of transmission in the New Testament goes earlier than anything else.

01:51:02

So it seems like the questions themselves demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding on his part.

01:51:11

Well, so there's a part, I don't necessarily think we have to play this part, but let me give it background. I think it's important.

01:51:17

He says he collated all the Methian P fragments. Now what he actually did because I saw the image he puts up on the screen, he simply went to the back of this book and just looked for the places where Matthew appears in the

01:51:32

P fragments. He didn't collate anything. He just utilized this in the back of the Elan book because that's what he puts up on the screen basically is an image of this with coloration.

01:51:41

But he says, I collated all the Methian P fragments. So he's just pointing out that none of them contain chapter 27.

01:51:47

Yes, but he didn't collate anything. It's just in the back of the book. Collation is a massive. Yeah. Okay.

01:51:52

So he says they didn't know divine prospect has these P fragments or something like that.

01:51:58

But yeah. Okay. So here's the question for divine prospect. If you have collated all of the papyrus fragments for the

01:52:11

Gospel of Matthew, then please tell us what you collated them against and give us some examples of these collations from some of the middle sections of Matthew.

01:52:31

If you'd like, I could come up with some specific interesting textual variants that are contained in the papyri.

01:52:37

I'd like to see your collations against your standardized text and what you used as your standardized text. If you don't know what

01:52:43

I'm asking, that means you don't know anything about collation. So that would be.

01:52:50

Well, can you play a clip in relationship to what you just asked? I'm sure. 1956, it's clip 26.

01:52:56

And I think you could just play these two right in a row because he talks about divine prospect has the

01:53:01

P fragments and then right after that, he says he can use his first year Greek to translate them himself. So I find both these clips interesting.

01:53:09

First year Greek. Into his scholastic methodology, as well as perhaps psychology. Examples of some of the

01:53:17

Gregory Allen papyri fragments. Well, wouldn't you know that divine prospect has a transcription of all of these

01:53:26

P fragments. I have them. Anybody with Logos has them.

01:53:32

What are you talking about? Over the Greek in them and look at the addition that they made to complete the fragments.

01:53:39

And I can go and see here how they translate it in English. And maybe go back to the Greek and say, well, they didn't really translate this area to appropriately and go do my own translation.

01:53:49

I actually have all of the all transcriptions and direct word translation of all these

01:53:55

P fragments. So I can examine them for myself, family. Isn't that great?

01:54:00

Isn't that awesome? I think that's wonderful. So here's where he says how he can do his own translation, which is how they translated as well.

01:54:09

And I can go back myself from my first year Greek understanding and the tools that I have to actually go and interpret this for myself to compare it with their translation.

01:54:20

But again, family, all I'm saying to you is that I have a transcription and direct word translation of all the

01:54:25

P fragments, all right? So I can go over it myself. Okay. Now what, Dr. White?

01:54:31

What are you going to do with that? I missed the significance of this to Matthew 28.

01:54:37

I mean, other than the fact that, okay, we have papyrus fragments of middle portions of the

01:54:46

Gospel of Matthew that match Codex Washingtonianus Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

01:54:52

Therefore, the presumption of all scholarship, fair scholarship is, they would have contained

01:55:00

Matthew 28, 19 as well. Now you can't prove that, but if you're trying to reject what is found in the consistent witnesses in the original language, you have to give us something more than what you're giving.

01:55:15

I pointed out those tree marking clips. That's what I described them as, because really what - Tree marking clips?

01:55:20

Yeah. You know, like a dog goes around and pees on the trees to show that he's trying to establish his authority. Wow. Hey, Rich, did you catch that?

01:55:29

So like, did you understand it? Are you just, you're just, I point those out because it's amazing.

01:55:35

He's bragging to his audience about having something that's in the back of an appendix or something that you have on Logos that everyone has.

01:55:43

And then the audacity to think you could do your own translation with first year Greek. Right.

01:55:49

It's just, it's unbelievable to me. The only person who would say that is a person who didn't take second year.

01:55:56

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, the next clip is relevant to what you just said, because then he says, since it's not there, he has good reason to reject it.

01:56:05

Between 28, 29 of those two clips is where he kind of gets into his argument in relation to the

01:56:11

Syriac. Okay, real quick. So we're going to see something very interesting here. Okay. For those of my family and friends who read the

01:56:17

Syriac, you'll see that I've highlighted something right here. Okay.

01:56:24

Now, mind you, this part of verse seven is complete from here going all the way here.

01:56:30

It's complete from here to here. It is complete. So that means that there's no fragmentary issues with what we can read.

01:56:42

Now, what now afterwards, verse seven cuts off. You don't have the rest of verse seven, but verse eight and on, we can assume that it's there, but you can also assume that maybe it wasn't there.

01:56:52

Maybe it's not that verse seven. Okay. Yeah, no, listen, this connects to that part.

01:56:58

But now the people who's writing this, who's transcribing this, right? They actually noticed this.

01:57:05

They said, wow, this is interesting right there. And they called it an omission. So family, if there's a noted omission in this manuscript, could it also be possible that further on in this manuscript, there may be other so -called omissions?

01:57:23

Like, I don't know, maybe Matthew 20, 19. Maybe it was in a shortened version. Maybe it's in a short version.

01:57:29

Maybe it's the long form version. Maybe it's not there at all. Remember, all I'm doing is taking a scoop out the jar of jelly, and I'm letting you know the composite nature of the work.

01:57:38

And I'm saying to you, guess what, family? More than likely, it probably wasn't even there. And I wouldn't be wrong for assuming that, or even speculating on that.

01:57:47

What do you mean more than likely? Again, given the original language testimony, why is it more than likely?

01:57:56

I've not heard any meaningful... Look, it's an obvious theological bias.

01:58:03

Yeah, that's all it is. I'm going to deal with the theology by getting rid of the text. So I found a translation, and it's based upon a manuscript that ended at verse 7, and therefore all that's been added on later on, even though it's in all the original language manuscripts, and it's in all these other...

01:58:22

In fact, it's even in other versions of the Syriac. I guess he didn't mention that. Oh, you're talking about the

01:58:27

Curatonian or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's there? Yeah, so I mean... And also remember that Luke and Mark, when they're done at the end, it says they're finished.

01:58:40

And so meaning it's highly likely that we really don't have all of Matthew because you don't have that there. The last clip, if you're interested, is where he tells everyone not to ask him again if he can read

01:58:50

Syriac, which I find fascinating. This is the level of study that I do on these manuscripts, all right?

01:59:01

So when people try to say, well, so Devon, do you know Syriac, Devon? That's what vocab says.

01:59:07

Do I know Syriac? I'm like, I can read Syriac. I can read Syriac. I'm not as fluent in it as I would like to be, but I can make my way through it, and I have tools to assist me with it, and I know other people who speak it fluently that I can also pull on to assist me with it.

01:59:24

So I have, from my knowledge of knowing, as much as I know, and from the resources that I have,

01:59:30

I can parse my way through any Syriac text. It can be done. So don't ask me again if I can read

01:59:36

Syriac or if I can break it down. Well, I can't spell Sinaiticus up at the top of the screen, but anyway.

01:59:42

So he says he can, he says he knows people who speak Syriac fluently. The only people I know who do that are like the old

01:59:49

Assyrian church leaders who have to do the liturgy in old Assyriac or something like that, speak. Yeah, it's not living language in that sense.

01:59:56

Yeah, no. So, I mean, I thought that was all good to point out because what you get is you get a lot of bluffing, and it would be helpful if we could just talk about what he actually does know and just do with that, instead of all the extra stuff about, you know, all this extra stuff makes it difficult to wade through the actual argumentation.

02:00:14

Yeah, but without the extra stuff, you don't get four and a half hours. Right. So it's like when people pad their resume, he does that.

02:00:21

But we could actually deal with the argument that'd be more advantageous. Well, I think the most important thing to do, we need to wrap up.

02:00:27

We've been going for two hours now, and everybody's, Rich has fallen asleep. I'm gonna have to go wake him up to turn on the ending to the program, the

02:00:34

Holy Nards. But the important thing, we've done almost half of his own.

02:00:41

So if four minutes made four and a half hours, this is over a day. It's a long time, family. It's gonna be a long one.

02:00:49

But the important thing, hopefully the takeaway here at the end, is it is possible to absolutely abuse textual criticism to promote a particular theological perspective.

02:01:04

And it's been done, especially about Matthew 28, 19, by many people. The fact is that no one has ever, outside of using redaction criticism or form criticism, theoretical ideas of either how the text came into existence or what was done to it before the first manuscripts without any physical evidence.

02:01:26

No one's ever mounted a meaningful argument based upon the evidence that actually exists against the originality in the original language.

02:01:36

And even if we wanted to go to Eastern languages, when you combine them with the

02:01:43

Greek testimony, I'm sorry, there is a presuppositional bias operating here with Mr.

02:01:51

Shields. And that is, if he's not a Trinitarian, he's trying to find a way around that particular issue.

02:01:58

Yeah, and the interesting thing was the question began with, I'm just asking him if they baptize in the name of the

02:02:04

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at Kingdom Harbinger Ministries. I'm not actually sure if they baptize at all, because similar relating to liturgy, when

02:02:11

I asked him if they practice communion, he said, I can observe communion as part of the

02:02:17

Passover or something like that, which was kind of like a no, basically. And so I was trying to see what his particular community believes and what they do, because none of the

02:02:29

One West camps do water baptism, except for GOCC, and none of them, to my understanding, do communion.

02:02:34

And so I was trying to see where he's at as a non -One Wester. He's not a One Wester, just so everyone knows. I think it's clear by listening to that.

02:02:42

But that's where it came from, and it developed into this textual criticism thing. And then what happened is you and I had to throw in our life vest because we saw there was a toddler swimming in the deep end.

02:02:53

And that's what today happened. We're trying to jump in and pull the toddler out of the deep end.

02:02:59

But I... Now you really want to make sure he does something, don't you? I don't know if... I think the toddlers...

02:03:04

I don't think he's going to listen. He's just swimming, but I just... I'm saying goodbye. What would have to be done if you really wanted to try to convince him to change his perspective?

02:03:18

Well, it doesn't seem like there is a ultimate authority for him other than him.

02:03:25

And so he's not going to listen to me. He's not going to listen to you. And so you're going to deal with the facts the way you need to deal with them to maintain your own ultimate authority.

02:03:36

But the real question is, does he want to do serious textual critical study?

02:03:42

And if so, then you have to be consistent in your methodology, not simply use what evidence you can find to promote a particular theory.

02:03:52

And that's... When I was listening to this, I'm going, man, I know Christians that do this. Not for the reason of denying the

02:04:00

Trinity, but for traditional reasons. And once you start seeing that, then you recognize and go, I need to be careful

02:04:06

I don't do the same thing. And we need to be careful we don't do the same things either. So yeah, that's good. All right, man.

02:04:12

Well, thank you very much for flying in. And I know you got to... There's a lot of time to have in the plane parked at the airport before you fly back to wherever you hide out.

02:04:28

And I wish I had known about the hat, man. I could have worn... I almost put mine on before I came. And so we would have looked...

02:04:34

I would have looked dope. Ah, nice. All right. There's another clip.

02:04:39

The problem is in my days, it would have been, I would have looked like a dope. That's a completely different meaning.

02:04:47

Hey, real quick. We got to do this. Shout out to Adam Coleman, Tony Ray of Hazzakeem, G -Man,

02:04:52

Sister Cherry, my man, Nissan Cran. Shout out to G -Con. Shout out to So Real. Shout out to Abu, Raquel, Kadash.

02:05:00

Shout out to Damon Richardson. Shout out to Jordan Ortiz. Hey, there's some others, I won't do everybody right now.

02:05:07

But shout out to Brother J, Social God. Is this sort of a necessary thing now?

02:05:14

Is this just cultural? No, but this is in all seriousness. Since we met last year, there's been a boom.

02:05:21

Maybe you could say a boon in urban apologetics. And it's beautiful to be part of.

02:05:27

And it's just getting started. And so I love what's happening. And so there's people that I can say that.

02:05:33

And I'm leaving people out. Last year at this time, the energy and the momentum weren't there. And so, you know, we prayed about some of this stuff last year that you would see a response by the church, a contextual response.

02:05:47

And it's starting to happen. There's starting to be some legitimate conferences. Pastors are, there's pastors that are becoming aware of some of these issues because I mentioned the

02:05:57

Kemetic and the Egyptologist and the Conscious. They're on the other side coming in and ravaging. And now the new trend is for a pastor to make some video sitting down in his car, a 15 minute

02:06:08

Facebook rant that goes viral, just hating on the historic black church. And then leading this whole

02:06:15

GoFundMe thing where he's the new like critic of Christianity. And they start doing things like sharing videos by Bart Ehrman.

02:06:22

It becomes their thing. The ex pastor who finally speaks out now he's hashtag woke.

02:06:28

That's the thing. And so, but we're finally seeing a response. It's not complete. But the reason

02:06:33

I do that in all seriousness is because that we're starting to finally see, and it is beautiful to see. I have optimism, despite all the wild stuff that's happening that we're talking about.

02:06:43

There's great optimism because I see the church, I see some response happening. So it's good to see.

02:06:49

Good, good. Excellent. Well, thanks for coming in, brother. I hope it was useful to you as well. And at least we got to do a little textual critical stuff.

02:06:57

Folks, we will be back tomorrow. We're going to sort of do a year end wrap up. And then next

02:07:05

Tuesday, the next program that we're scheduled anyways,

02:07:11

Michael Brown's going to join me. And we're going to be talking about a lot of the hit pieces on him. And I'm sure it's going to be one of our more listened to and watched programs.