The Epistle from the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth with Stephen Boyce

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We're back here in the big studio. We haven't come up with a name for it yet. If we knew how to fundraise, we would do what all the basketball arenas and baseball fields do, and we'd sell the name of the studio to somebody, highest bidder, highest donor, I don't know, something like that, but we don't do that type of thing, so we're not gonna do that.

We have a special guest today, but before we do that, I just want to mention what's coming up. On Thursday, we will be joined, assuming, of course, that this all works today, and that no fires are started, explosions, things like that.

Assuming everything goes well, then on Thursday, I'm going to be joined by my good friend, and sometimes you use that type of terminology from people that you barely know, but John Cooper is my good friend, and I think he'd say the same of me, and we talk to each other pretty much every day, and so John Cooper, lead singer for Skillet, author of a new book, Awakened Alive to Truth, which, though it breaks my heart, I still don't own a copy of it because he keeps forgetting to send me one, but I still love him despite all of that, and I still have the uncorrected word documents for the book, so I can always hold that over his head, so he will eventually get me a copy, but he's going to be joining me at this time on Thursday to talk about the book and some other issues, and so I hope you will join in with us at that particular point in time.

One other thing, and I'm sure that our guest will appreciate this, too, when we get together here in a second, but we want to continue to pray for Pastor James up in Canada, James Coates up there, who languishes in prison because he will not do what the English demanded of Bunyan.

Bunyan could have been released from prison, too, if he had just signed a document saying he would stop preaching, and he would always tell the judge, if you release me, I will preach tomorrow, and that is the situation we're facing up there.

Really, literally, around the world, the high-speed dive faceplant into governmental totalitarianism is truly an astonishing thing to observe and see happening around us, but we need to pray for Pastor Coates and his wife and his church and everyone, I would say, up there in Canada, but we're facing a lot of similar situations in Australia, in Germany, in the United States.

Pray for all faithful pastors who are seeking to shepherd the flock in the midst of Caesar, deciding that he is in control of all things, and so we need to definitely be praying for him. Being isolated like that from your family and your friends, very, very difficult, far more difficult than any of us really can know unless we have experienced something like that, so I ask you to pray for him and for his church and for anyone else who finds themselves in that situation.

We know his name, at least, but there are many others in China and other places like that. We do not know their names, will not know their names until eternity itself, but we pray for them. So today on the program, our second sacrificial guinea pig, I mean, special guest, electronic guest, Dr. Stephen Boyce is the overseeing elder at City Light Church.

Now this says Asheville, North Carolina, but is Asheville near the border or something? Because I see you talking about being in South Carolina, so how can the church be in North Carolina and you're in South Carolina unless it's right near the border or something?

It is, I can get to Asheville in about 45 minutes. We're right on the North Carolina, we're in the foothills of South Carolina, which is off the mountain of North Carolina.

Okay, I had a feeling, I was gonna take a look at the map, but I got a little bit too busy this morning. I had a feeling it was just a border issue situation, but now City Light Church is actually based on the other side of the country initially, wasn't it?

And you've also got one down, I think in the Philippines or someplace. So what's the situation there?

Yeah, so Jonathan Beasley had a vision to start a church out in Seattle, Washington a few years back, a very needy city of the gospel, of course. And when he went out there, he wanted to start a ministry that not only had a church plant, but an apologetics attached to it, given the fact that they're going to be going and dealing with these problems of not agnostic views, atheistic views.

And so he built an apologetics ministry with it. And the goal was always to be a church planting church. And so most of his supporters are over here on the East Coast, because we all came from here and most of them moved out there from this side of the country.

And through connections, we built a team pretty quickly. We have six elders at the church here. And then after that, and you and I were on Samuel Neeson's program together. He's the church planter at the one in Malaysia, in the country of Malaysia.

So he's got a whole team built and he's taking off. Actually, they're doing very, very well, even in lockdown circumstances from COVID. So we have three city light churches right now and an apologetics ministry attached that represents all three of those churches.

Okay, great, excellent. So that's, I feel sorry for everybody who moved from the East to Seattle right in time for everything to fall apart up there. I hope they brought their bulletproof vests and things like that along with them because you sort of need that in Seattle.

But you're back in what used to be really conservative areas not so much any longer. Things are changing all around the United States. But doing apologetics, I've heard some of your debates. You seem to have a focus on textual critical issues and that has a little bit to do with your background, I guess.

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I, by default, ended up moving my field of study into canon and text, which I've really enjoyed. Textual criticism's hectic. And sometimes I'd rather just talk about canon.

But I grew up TR. I grew up believing that TR was the perfect, inerrant, infallible, inspired. It was the direct replica of the original autographs, word for word. I never really believed that about the King James.

I was, King James preferred more so than King James only. As a pastor who started doing exposition, I started pastoring at 22. And when I began to, I was the lead pastor at 22, I should say. And I started changing my philosophy to be gospel centered.

And my focus became more on let's preach the text. I was a vehement hater of you. I did not, we were taught not to like you. We were taught not to listen to you. We were taught that you were the enemy of the Bible.

And then actually did the smart thing and listened to you instead of listening to people and what they said. So over time, you grew on me a little bit. And then after a while, I read your book, King James Only Controversy.

And it was like more of a scratch your head, like, hmm, maybe I'm not getting the whole story. And then as I did exposition, just going through the TR and the King James, I saw them not line up at times.

And I was like, you know, there's probably more to the story here than I've been told. And after that, it was over. And then I was kicked out of that movement altogether. And they don't like me. I've mended a lot of friendships over there.

Although I don't believe in any way I left in a wrong attitude. I wanted to keep brotherhood with them. They just didn't want it with me. So, and that's okay. And that's all right. But it opened a whole new field.

I got really interested in the Gnostic Gospels very early. And I've done a lot of research on, I've done my own translation of the Gospel of Peter. I've done work on the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot.

I've released written works on those that became very important to me to study them. I did a discussion with Dr. Price, Robert Price on the Gospel of Thomas and Peter. It was actually a very good conversation.

But most of my work has been in doing textual criticism or Canon. And I actually enjoy Canon more. It's less controversial, except for when you're doing discussions with more of the atheistic crowd and Gnostic.

Right. Well, I'm glad that you had to be taught.

To dislike me and to hate me, that it wasn't just a natural thing. You did say you were taught to, so I figure, well, that's a good thing. We'll go with having to be taught that. But I understand that, I get it.

And so, for example, when I had the debate back in December on the TR, you were one of the folks that was on to discuss the, I don't know, you've called that an after debate show or just, I guess that's become popular now that you've got YouTube and all this stuff.

I'm old school, you know? So, I'm thinking back to my first debate with Jerry Matitix at a Roman Catholic church, and that was long before the internet came along. So, the only post-debate shows you did then is if you went to Denny's after the debate or something like that.

That would be about the extent of that. So, but, and of course, you've engaged a few folks on the TR issue itself, which I remember very clearly listening to the debate you did with the Texas Receptus guy.

I mean, that's his name on Twitter, is Texas Receptus. Is it, what is it, Ray? What's the name? Know who I'm talking about? The guy who you debated on the TR. You especially talked I debated Nick Sayers.

Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick. Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, okay. I was about to say the guy that talks about the, who was and is and is to come. That's the best way to I think he secretly likes you.

He talks about you more than anybody, so.

Well, anyway, yes, I remember listening to that debate in the dark during the summer on a ride up in the north part of the valley. I remember which roads I was taking when I was out there. So, that's how I remember those things.

But anyway, today is an unusual topic. We are going to dive into one of the earliest writings outside of the New Testament called, well, you'll normally find it called First Clement, except the name Clement is only a traditional attribution.

It's not found anywhere in the text of the letter itself. It is an epistle written from the church at Rome, the church at Corinth. And so, Clement's name was attached to it early on, but it is really one church remonstrating with another church in light of the fact that, evidently, the church at Corinth, there was factionalism, there had been a division, and the elders had basically been kicked out by a group that took control, in essence, is what happens.

So, in other words, we have clear evidence that an apostle can write you at least two letters, maybe three letters, and you're still a mess. So, I mean, that is just what you discover from reading what happens here.

Corinth was a mess, and yet it was a church of Christ. And that, for me, is something that always pops into my head because if you've been in church life for any period of time at all, you have, you know, I have to write a letter today as a pastor about a difficult situation and trying to keep people going the same direction.

And it's hard, it's difficult, and the Corinthian correspondence actually encourages me along those lines. But you've been doing specific work. Is this, this was part of a particular project, or what brought you to specifically spending the time to dive into Clement?

Well, it's actually a pretty incredible journey. When I was doing, when I just finished up my PhD dissertation at the end of the year, and Dr. Ehrman, Bart Ehrman, is actually the one that did courses on the early fathers that I had to listen to in my classes.

And he actually turned me on to study them. And actually, I think it works against his position the more I studied them, but nonetheless, it brought the interest. And my dean and I had talked about a manuscript in Jerusalem called Codex H.

It's 1056, the date's actually in there once you translate it out. It's 1056 AD. It contained quite a bit of the early fathers, first Clement, Epistle of Barnabas, Seven Letters of Ignatius, Didache, various works were in this manuscript.

Little work was done on it. So I decided to do a work on some of those books in there in my dissertation. First Clement was most of the work in my dissertation, studying his specifically, how did he view the Old and New Testament?

How did he quote the New and Old Testament? And then comparing his quotes, both from the Septuagint and from his whatever Greek texts he had, comparing it to our Byzantine majority texts and our critical editions of the New Testament today and seeing how far off his citations were from the original letterings and letters of Paul or the prophets and how they were translated in the Septuagint.

And then actually doing the textual critical data of is it what we're quoting today? Is he quoting the same canon and is he quoting the same way that we do? And obviously he quoted it, sometimes more of just giving, he would just give a phrase or he would paraphrase it or something like that, but how close is he to the word of God back then that we are today?

So that was the goal in the dissertation. Is there any information concerning the source that this manuscript itself utilized in 1056? How ancient that would be? Any theories as to, was this a copy of an eighth century manuscript?

Is this a copy of a third century manuscript? Have there been a lot of steps of transmission or is it just completely unknown?

I would say it was pretty close. The scribe, people doubt the date because the style of the manuscript, and I hate, I hated reading through that manuscript. He abbreviated everything, those Greek, because he was trying to fit multi volumes in a codex.

So he would write very brief and then it was very sloppy and it was very close together. And I'd have to sit there and zoom in on just like three or four words at a time. And sometimes I would screenshot it on my computer, zoom in even farther, circle things and say, okay, that looks like an alpha to me.

And it was annoying to read and there's no really good transmitted texts of it out there, it's hard to get access to. I had to talk to people in Washington State, I had to talk to somebody in Texas, I talked to somebody in Germany to get closer up, zoom ins on it.

It was annoying, but I would say that this guy named Leo is the scribe. He was trying to put together a multi-volume work that would represent the earliest stage of the fathers and fit it into one giant section.

Now in doing that, I personally think the manuscript that he was quoting from would have been not long after Codex A because Alexandrinus has the oldest witness of First Clement, fifth century. And it's not far off in its wording from that.

So it must be somewhere close in the transmission, either somewhere in the middle between 1056 and Alexandrinus or pretty close to Alexandrinus. He had earlier copy as I would say.

Okay, well, that's important in knowing as far as looking at the Byzantine texts and things like that. So you're looking at this particular manuscript, you're looking primarily at Clement. Now, a lot of folks might be a little confused as to why you would be concerned about issues of the canon because the assumption is, well, okay, you just open up the Bible and you check.

And obviously he had the 27 books in the New Testament that we have. And he had Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, da, da, da, da. A lot of people really struggle with the idea of the development of the recognition of the canon in different places at different times.

In other words, obviously in Rome, you're gonna have certain books that are well-known there over against other books that may not be as well-known there. And it's hard for a lot of people to realize that when we're reading Ignatius, Clement, the Epistle to Diognetus, we're looking at the Didache, we're looking at those early writings all the way into Justin Martyr into the middle of the second century that they didn't have the internet, they didn't have publishing houses, they did not have a postal service.

And there were even books that were very popular in certain areas of the Mediterranean that might not be popular someplace else. So for example, the Shepherd of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, popular around Rome, they might not be someplace else.

Hebrews, I was very interested to see in what you sent me, a number of references in the graphic that you sent me to Hebrews from Clement because there were places where Hebrews, Revelation, where both those two books struggled.

They weren't as well-known as they were in other places. And a lot of Christians struggle with this because they've just always had a leather-bound, gilded-edged, thumb-indexed, all this stuff's in the past, I don't have to worry about it, copy of the Bible.

And it seems to me that people like Ehrman and his minions love to utilize the development over time as a means of unsettling, especially young believers. We don't know who wrote Hebrews, and of course, Ehrman's big stuff about pseudo-Pauline epistles and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And I think as pastors in the churches, and it sounds to me like City of Light has a lot of the same type of ideas that Apologia has as far as the necessity for apologetics and church planning. Half the eldership right now is in Kauai where we're trying to plant a church in Kauai, and it's extremely, extremely hard.

I did not realize that that particular island had the kind of spiritual darkness, and I mean spiritual darkness, that exists in that place. Just oppressive, oppressive. Tremendous amount of suicides, things like that.

You would think, who's going to commit suicide? You live in paradise. Well, no, it doesn't work that way. Anyway, so we have similar attitudes toward that. And so I know that we want our people to understand the foundational issues of how they got their Bible so they will not be subject to that kind of deception on the part of people, just simply using even historical facts.

I mean, Ehrman is normally pretty good on his facts. It's the interpretation that is the problem with Bart Ehrman, not so much his acolytes and his followers. They don't necessarily get the facts quite straight.

But anyway, so we try to help people understand. But when I encourage people to read the early fathers, in the back of my mind, this is an issue always, because they will encounter the fact that, well, you know, why wouldn't they quote this text?

Or why wouldn't they quote that text? And we can't always know exactly what they had access to. But what's interesting is if Clement is, well, let's go back to an even more basic question first before I go into this.

Where would you, how would you date Clement? Because I've actually seen some argumentation that places Clement in the apostolic period that early. Where would you place Clement?

I placed Clement at the end of the first century, around 96, 98, right after Demetian. There's a couple of reasons for that. I know that there's good arguments for an earlier before 70 AD, but he does describe persecution in the book.

They were about to go through it, but I don't think it was Nero's persecution as much as it was Demetian's, which was not as, it was a big deal, but it wasn't as big as what Nero was able to accomplish.

I know that Wellborn has the theory of Demetian's reign. I hold that as well. He mentions, I think it's important to note, he mentions Paul and Peter's executions in the letter. So it's going to be sometime after Paul and Peter were martyred.

Right, right. And if Peter was martyred just a couple of years after Paul, which seems to be the case, I think it's after 70 AD. I would label it at the end of the first century.

Okay, so obviously the question then, depending on where you place it as far as the date goes, then the question becomes, well, what is already in circulation? What is already known of the Gospels, of Acts, of the Epistles, especially some of the smaller letters, and of course, I'm not sure if you ever did a word search to see how exactly long, how many words is in Clement.

It's substantive, but it's not huge. It's probably, I guess it would be fairly close, wouldn't it, to the seven epistles of Ignatius as far as length goes. It's probably fairly close to each other as far as the body of material is concerned.

But that's still just one letter, and it's still being written in one context. And so you would not expect in any one sermon that we might preach today, that someone's gonna quote from all 66 books of the Bible in that process.

And so if you find that there are books that are not quoted from, that doesn't mean that the author was unaware of them, viewed them as non-canonical, any of these types of things. Really, you must have looked at the terminology that was used by Clement that would indicate a belief in the inspiration or scriptural status of a book.

Is he pretty much following the same New Testament examples of it stands written, gegreptai, the graphe, the holy writings? Are those the standard terminologies that he uses as well?

Yes, it is written, the Holy Scripture, Holy Spirit moved this man to write this. He had a high respect for the apostolic authority too. And that needs to be noted. I mean, we're talking about, I would say it's epistles a little bit shorter than Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

Not much, it's not much far in length from it. And he quotes the scripture Old and New Testament alone over 100 times. So when we say, well, man, I wish you would have quoted all 66 books. It's extraordinary how much half his vocabulary was scripture.

He did not rely on himself as an authority, although he was a Bishop. He relied on Paul's authority quite a bit. You mentioned Hebrews. I think it's interesting. That's the most quoted New Testament book he uses.

And the only place that Hebrews was really disputed later in history was in Rome. Rome is the one that disputed it. And it's like, go backward here. Let's go back to your first earliest, attestation of Bishop leadership.

And he was quoting Hebrews clearly and very succinct. When we talk about him in looking at Paul's writings, he mentions the writings of Paul. And this is where I think Dr. Ehrman really misses these books.

I think he thinks they're weapons against the New Testament, but they're actually tools to help. In chapter 47 of 1 Clement, he tells the Corinthians who are struggling with division to take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle in chapter 47 verse one.

And then this is what he says. What did he write to you in the beginning of the gospel? So he's assuming two things, Dr. White. He's assuming they still have the letter of Paul and that they can just put their hands on it and start reading it.

And then he can question them on the material from within it. And he says, of a truth, he charged you in the spirit. So he links this writing, which is 1 Corinthians, and I'll read the rest and you'll see exactly where in 1 Corinthians.

He says, you can go grab this letter, pick it up, read it. I can question you from the material in it. And he charged you in the truth by the Holy Spirit concerning himself with Cephas and Apollos because even then you had made parties.

We're obviously talking about 1 Corinthians chapter one where Paul rebuked them for having divisions over him, Apollos and Peter. And so here's Clement, I believe about 30 years after the fact, assuming the church at Corinth still has the original letter, still is able to read it, still able to get the theology, the teaching and the doctrines from it and go back and use it as their authority to stop being divided.

I think that's an incredible truth that we can just easily read over in just going to 1 Clement chapter 47 and say, oh, that's not a big deal. That's a huge deal what he just said.

There's a lot of things he's assuming. Yeah, so I have it up here on the screen now. And so you can see where he says, take up the epistle of the blessed Paul, the apostle. So on Elabate, obviously that would be a standard term that would be used, the epistle of the blessed Paul.

So they're not gonna be going, oh, we don't know what you're talking about there clearly they know what this is. And then what wrote he first unto you in the beginning of the gospel? That's interesting.

Did you look at all at the use of to you on Galileo in that context? I mean, that sort of sounds like he's connecting. It's almost like he's got the epistle to the Romans as a gospel in his terminology at that point.

I think he's using 1 Corinthians as a term. I think there's two things. One, 1 Corinthians gives a major layout of what the gospel is. I mean, by the time you get to chapter 15, there's no question what the gospel is.

But he talks about their divisiveness is not according to the gospel. It's actually working against the gospel. And chapter one of 1 Corinthians, he gives a clear presentation of who Jesus is in the gospel.

I also think it's possible, and I have no proof of this, it's just a theory. A lot of times these fathers that quoted guys like Paul, they used Luke's gospel quite a bit. So I wonder how much of Luke's gospel was attached to some of the letters that Paul was circulating in these Gentile churches.

Luke's gospel seemed to be a circulated gospel. And I know that the early fathers would hold to the position that when Paul said, according to my gospel, he was talking about the gospel of Luke. And when he quotes in 1 Timothy phrases of Jesus, Paul used Luke's gospel over Matthew's, for example, or Mark's when he's quoting from that.

But I think that what he's saying there specifically could be that he's talking about the gospel message as a whole. He did not see, they didn't have like division of genre, gospels, epistles, and stuff like that.

He obviously recognized it as a writing from Paul. He says, take up the epistle. So he made a distinction that it was a letter written to them similar to what he was doing. But the message of that epistle was as equal to the gospels.

And I do think that's the point because there is, if there's a book that we can go to outside of Romans, that is clear. And he's being smart. He's using a letter that they would have known, certainly had and held dear.

I'm not saying that they didn't have Romans in Corinth, but think about it. If this is a church 30 years after Paul, and they had his original letter or a close copy of it, they would have taken pride in that letter.

So he's kind of using it against them. Like, hey, you've got the letter, pick it up and read it. What you're doing is what you got rebuked for 30 years ago. And it's not gospel. The way you're acting is not gospel.

I think that may be the indication there.

I don't know if you have any thoughts, but that's fine. Well, it's also interesting that out of the truth, he charged you in the spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos. There's one or two, you got to take that one of two ways.

Either he's saying what was said to a previous generation is still true to you, or that could be taken as a very early argument for an even earlier date for Corinthians. I mean, he could literally be saying, you're the same people that were making the divisions and he already told you this.

You'd have to interpret it one of those two ways, but certainly charged you in the spirit. He charged, this is a spiritual undertaking in this writing. And I don't know, I follow a few leftists on Twitter just simply to remind me of going to seminary.

And this idea of the spiritual nature of scripture, they're trying to make that some later development that only we've come up with in the recent decades and things like that. But it's there from the beginning, this idea that this is an epistle of Paul, but it is spiritual in its nature.

It was, he charged you in the spirit to do these things. So yeah, definitely, definitely.

And this crowd may have been a part of that original audience because it's only about 30 years later, or 30, 40 years later, Corinthians would have been earlier in the fifties. But I do think that there's an aspect where this is where it is used for an earlier date.

Also earlier in the book, he mentions that they had seen the sufferings of Jesus. So there's also argument there that some of these people actually had experienced or his sufferings were before your eyes, I think is the phrase.

There could be implications of that. They're not as literal. But even then it's not unrealistic to think, even if it was a later date, there could be people 30, 40 years later who were still alive that were part of the original group there that wrote to.

But it's interesting for sure, to say the least. And I'm okay with an earlier date. It doesn't bother me.

I'm fine with either. Well, yeah, yeah. It's just interesting that that might be an aspect of it. But so before we look at specific, maybe some of your specific favorite texts, just on the issue of canonicity and what you've concluded, how much of the canon is he familiar with?

Is there good evidence that he may have had some books that we would not consider to be canonical that he did?

Yes. And that's the incredible thing is how many other works he didn't quote in there. You don't see any of the Gnostic Gospels being quoted by these guys. There's this new movement, Dr. White, and I know you're familiar with this, where the Gnostic Gospels are now popular.

Oh yeah. Oh, they were expelled. And it's like, well, nobody used them and nobody quoted them but let's take, for example, I can read it off to you real quick in

Or I can bring it up so people can see it because if you give me the reference ahead of time, I can normally pull it up fairly quickly here.

Well, I got my chart and I was gonna show you how many, read how many of these. Sure, you can do that because we'll be able to display that. Are you gonna do a screen share? Let me see if I can. I would love to actually.

Let me see if I can, because this one is updated. I believe the one I sent you was not updated. Is that working? Yes, uh-huh. Okay, so I have changed my formats here to direct, indirect, partial, potential.

So if there was a direct citation, it was a clear, you know, an entire verse section or something like that, that's a direct citation. Indirect is he's paraphrasing, or you could tell he's kind of quoting from memory and he might even add his own nuances in for emphasis.

Partial is just a single phrase, maybe a short phrase. And if I was not sure, and this happened quite a bit, there was a couple of times I was like, man, I really want this to be something he's quoting, but to be honest, I wasn't sure enough so I just put it in a potential category.

And so Matthew's gospel, he quoted six times total when you're looking at all of these collectively. And Mark once, Luke twice, Acts twice, 1 Corinthians at least two, possibly three with a potential there.

2 Corinthians, he used a partial phrase out of 2 Corinthians, which again, makes sense. He's writing to the Corinthians. 1 Timothy, he did a partial phrase and I actually was shocked that he was, there was another one between 2 Timothy and Titus, but the wording was closer in the Greek to Titus' phrasing of it than 2 Timothy.

So it seemed that he was using Titus more so. I don't remember all the words, I could go back and look, but it was closer to Titus. Hebrews, he quoted directly five times at least and then paraphrased a section.

And then he also used the partial citation three additional times, nine times he used Hebrews. James, surprisingly at least twice. And that's very, very important too because James was a very disputed epistle and some would say that didn't become a canonical viewpoint, but he quoted James.

He used Proverbs quite a bit and he used Proverbs and James next to each other a lot, which was kind of annoying because sometimes Proverbs and James are on the same page and it's like, whoa, whoa, which one are you quoting?

And so it was hard to discern that. 1 Peter was quoted one good time. Now, 1 Peter is not disputed at all. In fact, Polycarp's Epistle to Philippians, he quoted 1 Peter more than anybody. So there's no dispute there.

And I was really, really hoping 2 Peter would have been a quote. It seems like 2 Peter, I struggled with 2 Peter for at least a year. It really bothered me. And when I saw a potential there, I wanted to slip it into this category right here, but I wanted to be honest too.

Jude, I think he quotes Jude, Dr. White at the very end. He does not, he uses a Pauline salutation at the beginning, but if you read his conclusion, it's very close, very close in wording to how Jude closes out his short epistle.

And Clement doesn't know how to stop. He was probably a Baptist. He didn't know how to stop a letter. He gave a closing and then he picked right back up and went again. It's like, wait, I thought you were ending the letter here.

But so he does two closings and he uses the same phrasing in both closings, which are very similar to Jude. Now, Revelation, and I put this in a partial and I fought hard because I really wanted to put it in potential because it seemed odd to me that he was quoting, but he conflates a phrase and maybe we can look at this in a little bit.

He conflates a phrase from Isaiah that John is quoting in Revelation chapter 22. And the difference is, is Isaiah reads one half of it, but John adds an additional phrase to Isaiah that's only in the book of Revelation and he quotes the whole thing.

So he clearly had at least the terminology of John and what he wrote in his closing in the book of Revelation. And I placed it in a partial and again, we can look at that. So that's the difference. Do you have that reference?

I do. I can actually pull it up. I can switch screens. I don't know if somebody can see my switch screen here. I, it's chapter, I pulled it off on the side. Chapter 34, verse three of 1st Clement. 34, three.

Since he forewarneth us saying, behold, the Lord and his reward is before his face to recompense each man according to his work.

Yes. Yes, the Apo, Dunai, Ekistot, Hekistot is not in Isaiah. And I don't know if it'll let me unshare.

I have that on the screen so I can, well, actually, look at that. I want to share it with you. I seem to have lost my connection to the screen. Oh no.

Is it showing up on mine at this point? It is, uh-huh. Okay, so here's the layout here. Here's the English I'm highlighting. This is Clement's statement in Greek. And I had to add this in here because this phrase right here of kurios kai a mythos, you have a phrase that lines up with Revelation 22, but it's probably from Isaiah 40.