January 10, 2006

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Around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded
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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. Good morning, welcome to Dividing Line. Hope we will be with you the entire hour.
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We are having technical difficulties, but it sort of cleared up, but that means of course it could unclear up very quickly.
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Actually hoping the move of the offices, which is somewhat like a freight train heading toward us at high speed, will take care of some of these issues, because our current internet service provider is a little bit slim on the
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P part of ISP, or the S and P part. They just do internet, but you don't necessarily get service or have it provided to you on a regular basis, at least of late.
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And when you have their number memorized and without even looking, you can just hit the right digits to go to where they tell you who's blacked out, and entire cities disappear on a regular basis, that's generally not a good thing, okay?
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And that's where we are. So I wish I could recommend our internet service provider, but only if you're my mortal enemy would
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I recommend that you... Anyway. Yes, today on The Dividing Line, we have been responding to Bart Ehrman's NPR interview, and I have been getting a series of emails from someone that seems rather disagreeable and unhappy, and obviously sitting there listening, and as he's listening, he's firing off emails at me.
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I generally, when folks start getting a little sarcastic, or you can just sort of tell they're really not happy campers, there was a day when
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I really felt like, oh, I've got to respond to this person. I've got to review this person. And anymore, I just shuttle them off into little dark corners of my email program and don't worry about it.
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But I thought, well, instead of either just ignoring this person, and then they'll run around and say, hey, you've got no answers, and that's just how people are, or spending the huge amount of time of having to go through all these examples and stuff, typing it out, that it would be better to just go ahead and respond to these assertions as part of the
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Ehrman response, and we can go back to listening to that. I have three emails in my hands here.
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Basically, he's saying, look, you're not being fair to Ehrman. He's not claiming, and I mentioned one of the earlier emails, he's not claiming to read mine.
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Well, I'm sorry. I disagree with you. Okay? I have that right. My program, you get your program, you start doing your own thing, and you can say what you want, and then we can go from there.
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But the fact of the matter is, when you look at a textual variant, the first thing you do is not start making assumptions about the theology of the scribes.
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That may come in. There's no question that people discuss that. I've discussed that in my books. There's no question it comes in, but that's not the first thing you do, and that's what
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Ehrman's doing. He seems to have this almost infallible knowledge, and I'm not the only one who said this, by the way.
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Many people have faulted him for this. He seems to have this almost infallible knowledge of what the scribes were thinking, and the fact of the matter is, we don't know what they were thinking, and the best you can do there is conjecture, because they're dead, and unless you speak to the dead, or I see dead scribes, you really can only put that on the level of conjecture, and we're not hearing conjecture from Bart Ehrman on these
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NPR interviews. We are hearing, I am great scholar, expert, and I say this, and of course, the
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NPR people are like, yeah, that proves that. Chose the Bible as only a human document, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so I'm sorry, but let me give you an example.
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There is a very well -known textual variant at 1 John 3 .1, and 1
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John 3 .1, see how great a love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God, and such we are.
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Now, in the King James, and the New King James, it simply says that we should be called the children of God, then it continues on, for this reason, the world does not know us, because it does not know him.
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The phrase, and such we are, is not found in the King James, New King James, in the
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Textus Receptus, and the reason's fairly clear, it's not a part of the
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Byzantine platform. It is, however, found in a large number of sources, and specifically,
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Alexandrian and Western sources, P74, Sinaiticus, ABC, so on and so forth, so it's got a very strong foundation to it.
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Now, when you look at the data for, it's just two words,
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Kai Essman, and we are, it would be real easy. I mean, if this is how we want to start doing textual criticism, it's going to destroy any meaningful agreement, but this is how
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I'm seeing Bart Ehrman approaching the text as selling books this way. Well, you see, the early church didn't want people to believe that you were truly adopted as sons of God, there was a great deal of discussion about how you needed to persevere, and so on and so forth, and so scribes altered this, and they removed this so that people wouldn't be encouraged to live in a libertine lifestyle.
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Well, you can go the other direction. You can say, well, actually, scribes added this at a later time because they were concerned that people would not embrace the fullness of their salvation in Christ.
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I mean, you can do all of that stuff and read back into scribes' minds all sorts of things, but that's not how you start.
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You start with the textual evidence, and you look at the text, and this is a classic example of what's called homo eteluton, similar endings.
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If you can find a reason that does not involve mind reading, it is best to start there, okay?
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That's how you do it. It is best to start by looking at a text and going, hmm, okay, we do know, pretty much everybody agrees about what kind of scribal errors scribes would make because we make them today.
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Homo eteluton, similar endings, you're sitting there copying along, and you've just written the word producing, and your eye goes back to what you're copying, and you just type the letters ing, your eyes see ing, and you continue on.
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The problem is it's an ing at the end of a word two words down from where you actually were, resulting in the deletion of the material in between.
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If you're not paying attention to what you're typing, then you may not know that it no longer makes any sense, or it may make perfect sense because it is a continuing comment that is not necessary to the flow and context of what's being said.
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You might not even notice it unless you proofread it, and how many of us do much of that anymore, right?
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So, the first thing, when you look at 1 John 3, 1, is you see the
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Greek term kleithomen mu epsilon nu, and then you see chi s men, and you go, oh, you have mu epsilon nu.
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You have the same ending at the end of kleithomen as chi s men, and therefore, the first thing line of discussion is, it's a textual variant where a scribe, primarily in the
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Byzantine area, his copies influence the Byzantine area, not the
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Western or Alexandrian type texts, an early scribe missed this word because of homo et al.
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Not because you can read his mind, not because you know that he was concerned about this that or the other thing, but because of simple scribal error.
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That's what I'm talking about. Now, if you want to go the other direction, you can sell more books. There's no question about that. I mean, there is a huge audience of people who don't want to believe that the
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Bible's Word of God, and don't want to believe that we can have any idea what it says. Now, they don't want to go so far, and this is what they'd have to do if they want to be consistent, and I think my writer would have to be consistent on this, you'd have to go to the point where you would say, well, we don't know really anything about history.
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We just don't know, because at least until the invention of the printing press, you have text with variation in any handwritten documents, and therefore, since we have variation in handwritten documents, we can't know anything.
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We really can't have any knowledge of anything in the past, and so we just become radical skeptics, and there's no way of really knowing.
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Now, hopefully, everyone would agree that of all of the ancient documents that we have, the
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New Testament has the richest and fullest textual manuscript tradition behind it.
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There's nothing else from that time period that can even come close. So, if this, if we can exercise radical skepticism on the best we have from ancient history, then the rest of it, of course, is just, you know, throw it out.
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It's, you know, who cares? We don't know anything about history. Unless you find it chiseled in a piece of stone that you can demonstrate hasn't been amended, hasn't been changed, and you can identify its specific strata archaeologically, then if it was passed on in writing, forget it.
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Unless it's chiseled in stone, that's the only way to do it. I guess that's the only way you can go. So, this is what
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I've been talking about, is this ease with which Ehrman makes these comments.
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But there are other things he says here. He doesn't, he says, oh, yeah, but even tenacity isn't perfect, especially if the problem happened very early.
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How do you know that? How do you, how can you, how can you prove that one way or the other? How do, where is this skepticism coming from?
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And again, NA -27 contains a conjectural emendation in the text and several hundred notes.
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I'd like to know what the conjectural emendation is. I've never seen a reading in the Nessie Olin text that has no manuscript, no manuscript support whatsoever.
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I've never seen it. You will see the letters CJ in the
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Nessie Olin text, and that's giving you information concerning where a scholar or more than one scholar, but normally it's just one listed, has conjectured about an original reading that does not have manuscript support.
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And I do not know, never seen, and would reject outright, to be honest with you, any reading in the main text of the
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Nessie Olin text that is based merely upon conjecture. I have not seen any at all.
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I'd like to know what it is, never run into it. I'm sure that since I've got three emails in like one day from this individual,
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I'm sure that I will be informed very quickly as to what this alleged conjectural emendation is.
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He says that's New Testament, the Old Testament situation is much worse. Not much worse, completely different. The textual transmission of the
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Old Testament is completely different than the New Testament. Completely different time frame, different materials, different, everything's different.
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I mean, to even parallel the two is, well, it's not worthy of doing because it was a completely different process.
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So you validly criticize Ahriman for making things sound worse than they are, but aren't you going to the opposite extreme and making things sound better than they are, contrary to the scholars on your namesake
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NA27 committee? Well, it's not my namesake. I've used that in email addresses because it's easy to get that email address.
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Not too many people are doing so. I think it's sort of silly to pick on people's email addresses. I could pick on his, but that would be childish.
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And so I'll leave the childishness to other people. When will you start railing against them? Well, when I find them out trying to make money by spinning things all the time, then
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I will. But that's generally textual critics are not out there trying to make money.
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They're actually trying to ascertain the original reading the text. Then you say Ahriman wouldn't want to refer to John 1 .8,
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I think you meant 1 .18, because the vast majority of scholarly opinion would go against him and that he has odd views that he's been refuted on.
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I was referring to some scholarly articles that came out about three or four years ago, maybe five now,
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I think about it on this particular subject. Again, aren't you going to an extreme here? Again, at least one member of the NA27 committee agreed with Ahriman's choice in this verse, which, if you're wondering, 1 .18
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is the difference between monogamies, theos, monogamies, quios, only begotten God, unique God and unique son.
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Again, no one is going to argue that you can't find a scholar who's going to.
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I mean, there's all sorts of people who hold to the Byzantine text platform that are going to take quios. There are some eclectic scholars that are going to take son at that point, not very many, but that was the point that was being made.
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The vast majority do agree. It is interesting, he points out, that the Holman Standard Bible reads with the
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Byzantine rather than the eclectic text at that point, which I find odd. But OK, great.
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Big deal. You make it sound like he is out on a far out scholarly limb here with his choice here, but that is, in fact, not correct, is it?
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No, I would say that, again, he is talking, he wants to try to make it sound like, and this was the context of it, that central definitional biblical doctrines like the deity of Christ are based upon just a few verses.
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And this writer is going to do the same thing. I'll give you an example. That's where John 118 came up at, is if Ahriman was going to be fair, then he would be fair in mentioning 118 and saying, now here is a situation where further studying of the text has brought greater light because the vast majority see that theos is the better reading here and blah, blah, blah.
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But he didn't and he won't because he's spinning things. That's the whole point. I wish this person would just listen to what the point is.
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You're responding, we are responding to the extreme spin for the sake of selling things and for the sake of, in essence, in my opinion, excusing or defending an act of apostasy.
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That's what's going on here. Pretty simple. I mean, he's the one who brings this out, is he not, in his own book.
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I mean, he's the one who brings in his moving from being a conservative evangelical to where he is now.
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And that's now being used by everybody as, oh, here's great evidence of once you start thinking how you can't believe those things, et cetera, et cetera.
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So he's got he's got an agenda. We're exposing the agenda. It's all there is to it. So it was in that context that he was talking about the deity of Christ and trying to make it sound like, well, you've just got this here and here we have again an out of context citation here of Dan Wallace.
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Dan Wallace, editor of the NET Bible, also prominent text criticism, says, quote, The list of passages which seem explicitly to identify
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Christ with God varies with scholar to scholar, but the number is almost never more than a half dozen or so, as it's well known.
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Almost all the text dispute is to the affirmation due to textual grammatical glitches. John 1 1 in 2028 being the only two which are usually concede without discussion.
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End quote. Then he says, if there are only half a dozen, then losing two or three to text criticism is a valid point for airmen, isn't it?
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Again, it's very frustrating. You know, when when people have got have made up their minds, they don't listen to what you have to say.
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And that's what's happening with this gentleman. What did Dan Wallace say? What's he addressing?
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Well, anyone who's familiar with the field knows he's addressing the use of the term theos of Christ. And what are the passages?
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Well, right off the top of your head. You would have one in the Old Testament, Isaiah chapter nine with El Gabor, you would have in the
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New Testament, John 1 1, John 20 28, Romans 9 5, possibly
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Acts 20 28. You would have Titus 2 13, 2
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Peter 1 1 and 1 John 5 20. I went through all of these in the
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Forgotten Trinity, this entire chapter. Here are the passages that specifically use the term theos. But I also made it very clear, both in my comments last week and in the book, that that is not in any way, shape or form the only foundation or even, to be quite honest with you, the strongest foundation of the deity of Christ in the
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New Testament. There are all sorts of lines of evidence, the identification of Jesus as Jehovah.
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There's no textual variant to John 12 41. There's no textual variant in regards to the identification of Jesus as Jehovah in Hebrews chapter one, verses 10 through 12.
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All the manuscripts say that they're quoting from the subject at that point, that the author of Hebrews is. That's just one element of it.
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You have all the ego, I mean, stuff. That's not a textual variant issue. You have all the facts that Jesus says things that no creature could ever, ever say.
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It is only by atomizing the text and ignoring all of the teaching of the text and all of these passages that you say, oh, well, see, there's these two passages and that just throws the whole thing out the window.
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And I tried to point that out, but again, my correspondent here has already made up his mind. And so he only hears, you know, it's a little bit like Dave Hunt.
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You only hear what agrees to your thesis. But when it doesn't agree with the thesis, well, then you just, you know, you don't hear it.
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So that's a shame. Let's see. I do the deed, the deed, the deed, the deed speaks of certainty.
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He says you made a comment in 1229, which I presume is concerning the email sent you for weeks ago, where I defended
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Ahriman against your claim that he had to be able to mind read dead people. Well, I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. That's what you're claiming to do.
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In this dividing line, you defend your claim on the basis that Ahriman says that a scribe changed his or changed that and speaks with certainty.
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Yes. In other words, Ahriman speaks with certainty as to what a scribe was thinking when he did things.
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And you can't do that unless you talk to dead people. OK, but that means you have to throw out all the work of mainstream textual critics.
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No, it does not, because mainstream textual critics will only discuss possible scribal reasons and predilections after dealing with the text and the external evidence.
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Yes. Start with what everybody agrees on, and then you attempt to explain the form of the readings with conjecture or looking at what scribes might have been thinking afterwards.
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Hello. Afterwards, not first. And then you let people know what order you were doing that in.
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And you don't go out and try to say no one can know anything about the deity of Christ because you do it backwards. That was the whole point.
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That means you have to throw out Metzger's textual commentary, where he frequently says that a scribe did this or did that and oftentimes speaks with just as much certainty, saying a certain thing happened for a certain reason, not expressing any doubt at all.
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Well, once again, I haven't seen Bruce Metzger and sadly, you know, he and Ehrman seem to get along quite fine, but I have not seen writing books called
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Misquoting Jesus and Peering on NPR and doing things backwards, starting with the conjectures about scribal thoughts and then going backwards from there.
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At least Metzger starts with the witnesses to the text. And that's what you do.
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I don't see you criticizing Metzger and the NA27 committee for producing this work. In fact, you've adopted NA27 for your email address.
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Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, anyways, we've we've now seen that this is where this fellow is coming from.
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On your 3 -1 dividing line, you seem to be complaining about Ehrman's presentation of John 8 because there are so few additions from the margin to the
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New Testament that there is John 5 -4, 7 -53, 8 -11, 1 John 5 -7. This doesn't substantiate a case of wholesale editing.
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Yeah, my point was that that, again, when you go into these NPR interviews and you've titled your book in such a way that that you are in essence questioning the originals, not so much transmission over time.
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But you're you're the whole thing you're trying to say is there's you're communicating the idea that there's so many hundreds of thousands of variants.
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Really, you have no idea what the original said and what you're really talking about is a small number of texts where you have major textual variants.
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He says. Aren't you being overly certain now about claiming why the scribes added these verses because they came from the margin?
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No, because when you're talking about a text that is not found in earlier texts and in fact goes from one place to another, there really isn't a whole lot of a question as to where these things could have come from.
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We're not talking about what the intention of a scribe was as to his theology. We're not talking about what a scribe's theology was.
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We're not talking about, well, you know, he he believed this. And so he would he would want to do this.
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No, we're just simply talking about the fact that in handwriting, we've seen this over and over again in handwritten manuscripts.
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When you would forget something, you'd put it in this in the margin. You didn't have extra pieces of vellum laying around to just throw it out, you know, wad it up and throw it away.
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It wasn't like you go down to Kinko's and buy another 500 sheets and go on from there. It doesn't work that way back then.
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And so the issue of scribal insertion of notes in columns and sometimes text in the margin that was supposed to be put back into the actual text itself because they made a mistake is well known.
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You don't have to read minds to know that. OK, so anyway, I've wasted more than enough time here in demonstrating where we're going with this fellow.
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But anyhow, sir, I wish you'd listen. I'm sorry you have problems with with this stuff.
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But, you know, in my experience. I don't believe that Bart Ehrman made the move he made simply because he was studying stuff, there's there's always when you dig down and when you talk with folks, there's something more.
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There's always something more. There's some other reason down there that somebody isn't isn't coming out and really telling the story about.
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So anyway, you know, I unfortunately did not open a text window . So I know we have a have a caller here, but I haven't a clue who it is.
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Here we go. Let's talk with Mike in Texas. I might.
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Hello. How are you? I am doing very well. Have a quick question. Can a
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Christian know that Jesus is I'm sorry, or maybe to rephrase the question, do you have to believe that Jesus Christ is
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God in order to be a Christian or can you be a Christian and not know that Jesus is God? Well, you know, there's a big controversy about that.
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The there are there's there's been a tremendous amount written of late. There is no salvation in a in a
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Jesus Christ who is less than God. And Jesus himself said, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.
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And so the deity of Christ is definitional of the gospel. The question is, what level of understanding does a person have to have?
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In other words, the concern that that I would have is that some people want to go so far as to say, well, you have to have a perfection of knowledge of the relationship of the father, son and spirit.
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And you need to be able to explain the procession of the spirit from the father and the son in comparison to the Eastern view of the procession of the spirit from the father and needed to understand the hypostatic union and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And if that's the case, there are almost no Christians on the planet simply due to the fact that I think if we were to give a basic Trinitarian quiz to almost all evangelicals walking out of church this coming
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Sunday, it would be very easy to to put the words in such a way as to trap them into various forms of modalism to get.
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I bet you could get well over 50 percent. And in fact, if I was to be really honest, probably 90 percent.
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Well, let's be nicer, 80 percent of of those individuals to agree that on the basis of John 1030,
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Jesus, the father, I think you could really do that. And so the question becomes, for me, the issue is
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I do not believe a person who rejects the deity of Christ, who believes that Jesus Christ is less than God, who believes
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Jesus Christ is merely a creature, who's Michael, the archangel, for example, if you want to go with Jehovah's Witnesses, a person who holds to a false view of who
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Christ is knowingly rejecting the deity of Christ. I don't believe that person can be saved.
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Can a person be saved in simple faith in Christ without a full blown developed doctrine of the relationship of the father and the son simply knowing that Jesus Christ came into this world and died to save sinners and that he wasn't just merely a a man, but we call him
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Lord and and is then willing to be taught the word of God and to understand the word of God and to embrace the word of God.
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That's a different issue. And I think that most definitely can happen because we're how many young young children do we know who embrace
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Christ and yet honestly couldn't give you the the specific definition of exactly how the deity of Christ is outside of, well,
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I understand that Jesus Christ is Lord and that he's risen from the dead and that he he created me.
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And how all that relates to the father and stuff like that, I may not be perfectly clear, but I'm willing to willing to be taught and willing to embrace the word of God at that point.
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So I think the issue when you look at what keeps people from salvation in scripture is holding to a false view of something, not ignorance of something that's true.
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If they have been given the whole gospel, then that's going to be a part of it. They're going to hear about the Lord, the Lordship of Christ.
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But they may not fully understand how to integrate that with, well, how does the son relate to the father and and all the issues of inter -Trinitarian theology and things like that, that should be our joy to to study and to to understand and to and to want to grow in knowledge of those things that should be something that we really enjoy.
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It shouldn't be a chore. It shouldn't be something that we go roll our eyes and I don't want to do all this work, blah, blah, blah. But that's that's where I would see the the dividing line between the two.
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OK, does that make sense? It makes sense to me. Yes. OK, all right. And also, what exactly is historic
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Christianity or do you have a book that talks about it? Is there a book you could recommend that explains that?
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Well, see that that question, that that phrase is going to be approached from all sorts of different perspectives.
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You have the historical secular way of looking at, quote unquote, historical
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Christianity, which is going to be an incredibly wide subject.
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And the reason being that now you're defining Christianity based upon anything that in any way relates to Jesus.
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So if that's why you'll find secular historians referring to the
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Gnostics, that the apostles anathematized as Christians because they talked about Jesus.
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Now, the apostle Paul said that his enemies who talked about Jesus were under the anathema of God and didn't have salvation.
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So there is a theological answer to what is the history of the true Christian church.
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And then there is the secular answer. And then even when you get into the theological realm, there are those who are going to say, well,
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I think you need to define that based upon God's word. And you're going to say others say, no, I think you need to define that based upon some other standard outside of what the apostles themselves would have recognized as true
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Christianity. And so that is a conflict I get into with people all the time because they want to equivocate on that.
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I try to at least make those distinctions clear to folks and I try to be consistent anyways in the answers that I provide in regards to that.
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And that when I speak of Christianity, when I, for example, Richard Dawkins is on Channel 4 in the
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United Kingdom, just started a just a grossly anti -Christian, really anti -religion.
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It's not just Christianity, but Islam and everything else, but I think primarily focused on Christianity. Two part series on television there blaming
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Christianity and religion for all all evil. There would be no evil if it wasn't for religion.
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And it's interesting on one point, he's right because he is a naturalist materialist, has no basis for even talking about evil to begin with.
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So I guess that's somewhat true. But without religion, you wouldn't know which way which way is up.
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But anyway, he's going to make reference to the
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Inquisition and the Crusades and say, see, this is Christianity and secular authorities are too.
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And I immediately say, excuse me, but how can you saddle Christ and his gospel with activities that have absolutely positively not a shred of ground to stand on in his own teachings and in the teachings of his apostles?
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How do you how do you blame him for that? How do you blame someone for taking a teaching or a perspective and just absolutely ripping it out of its context, completely perverting it and saying, oh, but see, that's that's what these people that I stand in their line.
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I have their authority. No, you don't. You know, people talk about apostolic succession. I talk about apostolic succession of truth.
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That is, if you don't teach what the apostles taught, don't claim to stand in their succession. You know, if someone comes along after I died.
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Don't don't take over Alpha Omega Ministries and teach the exact opposite of what I did and say somehow I have something to do with it.
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Doesn't work that way. So I try to be very, very consistent about upon that.
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And and really, you know, I don't know about any books that are specifically addressing that particular subject just alone.
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But any book that you you study in regards to the history of the church, that is a concept that you have to keep in the forefront of your mind all the time.
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And that is, as you're reading about these people and you're reading about the history of the church, what standard are you going to be using to judge what's going on?
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And fundamentally, it has to come down to the word of God and its teachings. And it's very easy for us to, from a distance, be very, very harsh in our criticism of others.
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But that's one of the reasons I've had a number of people call this and they'll say, what do you think about such and so in history? Do you think they were a
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Christian? And I go, well, wait a minute. I can't read people's hearts. I can't read people's minds. I can identify what they were teaching and whether they were teaching is biblical or unbiblical or where in the spectrum it falls.
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But don't ask me to try to look back in history and read people's minds and their hearts. I can't do that with people who are alive, let alone people who are dead, which is one of the issues we were discussing earlier.
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So any church history text you're going to be studying is going to address this, but it is not necessarily going to address this within the theological construct.
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And that's what I try to encourage people to do is look at it from a theological perspective. More of your older church histories did seek to be more theologically accurate or biblical in their examination of the past.
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Modern histories don't really, really make an attempt to do that because that's considered to be bad form.
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If you're a historian, you don't deal with theology, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, I don't know how anybody can do that. But anyways,
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I hope that's helpful to you there, brother. We need to take a quick break and we'll come back.
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Wow, I'm excited to get to talk to just just one of the most amazing, amazing folks ever.
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Right after this break, we'll be right back. Be blessed. Try to save your soul from death.
33:56
It's all works, righteousness, you know, and I mean, the
34:18
Trinity is a basic teaching of the Christian faith. It defines God's essence and describes how he relates to us.
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James White's book, The Forgotten Trinity, is a concise, understandable explanation of what the Trinity is and why it matters.
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It refutes cultic distortions of God, as well as showing how a grasp of the significant teaching leads to renewed worship and deeper understanding of what it means to be a
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Trinity. Dr. John MacArthur, senior pastor of Grace Community Church, says James White's lucid presentation will help layperson and pastor alike.
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Highly recommended. You can order the Forgotten Trinity by going to our website at AOMin .org.
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More than any time in the past, Roman Catholics and evangelicals are working together. They are standing shoulder to shoulder against social evils.
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They are joining across denominational boundaries in renewal movements, and many evangelicals are finding the history, tradition, and grandeur of the
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36:26
We continue with the program, and now I've had to try to calm myself down during the break just because I'm so excited to get to press this button and talk with Gary in Minneapolis.
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Hi, Gary. Hello, Dr. White. Well, I tell you, unless John MacArthur was calling me,
36:46
I don't know I could be any more excited. Well, you're giving me the creeps, Dr. White. Well, Gary, let me just say on behalf of all of the channel rats, we've truly enjoyed having you back recently, once or twice, and you are the only person
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I know of who could be in channel just a few hours and be kicked out more often than anyone else in all of 2006 so far.
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It's truly an exciting thing to get a chance to have you on the program today. I'm very humbled by that news.
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Well, seriously, you have been greatly missed, and so everybody in channel is really enjoying what
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I'm doing right now. And I'm sure you wish you could be there, but you're not. You're on the phone right now. Yeah, I do wish I could be there, but I better make this relatively short.
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Yes, if you want to remain employed, right? Employed, correct. I stumbled on this set of cassette tapes in our church library on the
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Lawson -Sproul debate, and I'm new to this whole issue of the evidential versus the presuppositional way of doing apologetics, so I have two questions.
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One is I was wondering how you think about that as you approach your own ministry and your own debate activities.
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And number two, if I wanted to get more info, how could I do that? I did read this article by John Frame.
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It was pretty good, but if I wanted to take it further, where would you suggest I read? OK, well, a couple of things.
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Yeah, I remember listening to the same set of tapes. I mentioned this a few weeks ago. A caller had also just stumbled upon that particular debate, and I play for my students at Golden Gate when
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I teach the apologetics class, I play for them the debate between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein on the existence of God.
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And I then use that as a springboard from which to discuss apologetics, because in dealing with the atheist, in dealing with the non -theist, a person who biblically is suppressing the knowledge of God, you are not dealing with a morally neutral person, you're dealing with a person who is going to take any factual evidence that you press upon them and going to pervert it.
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They're going to twist it. They're going to suppress that knowledge. It's already there in their own created being.
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And therefore, you have to deal with the presuppositions, the ungodly presuppositions that individual brings to the text, brings to the table.
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And you can never, I believe, play the idea that you can stand on neutral ground with the unbeliever.
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If God is the creator of all things, there is no such thing as neutral ground. Any ground that exists, exists because God made it.
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And therefore, that forces me to agree with Greg Bonson in the necessity of the presuppositional approach, because I believe that while the theistic proofs can have an edifying effect upon believers, as long as you are still in your sin and suppressing the knowledge of God, all the evidence in the world isn't going to stop you from doing that.
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There has to be a change internally, first and foremost. And I play the Bonson -Stein debate and then contrast that with a debate between William Lane Craig and Frank Zindler held at Willow Creek.
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And in the Bonson -Stein debate, Bonson is saying, look, you cannot explain our debate this evening.
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You cannot explain the entire reasoning process that we are using.
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You can't deal with the world around us. And without accepting the fact that God has spoken, he's spoken with certainty in Jesus Christ.
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And then you compare that with the presentation of William Lane Craig, where he says, the majority of the data points to the greater probability of the existence of God.
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Now, those are not the same ways of approaching the issue. They are very, very different from one another. And I use that as the as that basis.
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And so, obviously, on the issue of dealing with an atheist, then I would fall into the presuppositional camp.
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And we have a book available through Alpha Omega Ministries called Always Ready. It was posthumously collected from Greg Bonson's writings.
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And it addresses the issues of engaging in apologetics from a biblical perspective, from a presuppositional perspective, from a perspective that takes seriously the lordship of Christ.
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And so I would recommend that there. Other books, Every Thought Captive, I think
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Pratt's the author of that. There are a number of works along those lines. And Bonson has a number of other lectures as well available on the subject of the necessity of a presuppositional approach that, of course, just in the conversation that they had there, he wasn't able to develop all of that in that particular conversation.
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But they are available. OK, well, that's very helpful. Thank you very much. Now, just briefly, for those that are gnashing their teeth on the other side,
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I've actually assigned the Sproul -Gersner -Lindsley book, which is called Classical Apologetics, which opposes
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Vantillian presuppositionalism. I've actually assigned that as reading in my classes as well. But obviously, from my perspective,
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I feel that there was some misunderstanding of Vantill. And I think Bonson fairly well brought that out in the debate that you listened to.
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But that's why I like people listening to a debate like that. You got to hear both sides. It wasn't like, well, I heard one person say this and another person says that.
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That's what I liked about that. It was congenial. It was within the bonds of fellowship. And that was a really good encounter.
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That seemed to be one of the conclusions that Frame mentioned in his article, is he felt like Sproul didn't understand
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Bonson completely. Well, not just so much Bonson, but I felt that there was some misunderstanding in the book.
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And it wasn't just Sproul, it was Gersner and Lindsley in the book itself. And I think it more went back to Gersner, to be perfectly honest with you.
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As to what Vantill was saying. And then again, Vantill was not easy to understand. If you've tried to read or if you try to pick up a
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Vantill book like Christian Epistemology or Christian Apologetics, English was not his first language.
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OK, so you're dealing with a philosopher who, well, let's just put it this way.
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Sometimes he makes the Puritans sound simplistic. So it's just not an easy read.
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And so part of the misunderstanding of Vantill could be very much traced to Vantill himself.
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And so maybe it would be better to say, you know, people like Bonson have not so much tweaked Vantill, but filtered out some of the issues and problems.
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And actually, it'd be better instead of dealing with Vantill to deal with Bonson and what what he wrote and the developing perspective on presuppositional apologetics that has gone on since Bonson's death.
43:58
All right. Well, thanks a lot, sir. Thank you very much. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.
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Get a lot of calls on that particular subject. Always worthwhile to have people thinking about it, listening to the the
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Bonson Sproul discussion, which, again, I appreciate because it was undertaken in the proper spirit.
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It's always good to hear both sides. That's what's good about debates. That's what bothers me so much about the fact that we have to work so hard to get enemies of reformed theology.
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And I use that term. I'm not necessarily calling them my enemies as far as it can be in heaven with me or something.
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But. The people who are the most likely. To identify me as an enemy of the truth and to attack reformed theology are the very ones who are the least likely to defend their statements in public debate.
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It is I can't I can't actually even tell you how difficult it has proven to be to try to get people to step up and defend what they say in writing in public debate.
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Now, we all know Dave Hunt won't do that. We all know that he'll debate all sorts of other issues. It's not an issue of, you know,
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I'm sorry. His excuses are weak. He knows he cannot defend what he's saying. That's all there is to it. He knows he can't defend what he's saying.
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And but he wants to keep saying it. So he's enslaved to tradition. He calls his tradition the word of God.
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And as a result, you can see the mess that he's fallen into. And I mentioned just recently the the horrific little note, almost incoherent.
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I mean, it was one of the most poorly written things I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about actual people who actually have like published something.
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And, you know, we're not talking about Brother Bob off the street who's willing to debate anything, but someone actually knows what we're talking about.
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The the hit piece that appeared in the current Breean call on John Piper written by someone,
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I don't know who wrote it. I don't think Dave Hunt wrote it. If I if he did, shame on you.
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But whoever wrote it, it sounded it was almost incoherent. I mean, it whoever wrote it doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.
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They couldn't have read more than two paragraphs. Or if they did read more than two paragraphs, Piper's work, they they did so without the slightest bit of comprehension.
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It was just sad. I mean, you just want to say, isn't there someone who could stop you before you start expressing your ignorance in public that way?
46:36
It's not someone who can keep you from so embarrassing yourself. It's a little bit like that commercial it's running right now for Verizon.
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Or the guy, you know, he's got 5000 people Verizon behind him and he meets the he's he's switching over to Verizon from his other network.
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And, you know, you've got the the people in the spacesuits sitting there, you know, their little beat up system.
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And that's, you know, he says, stop it. You're embarrassing yourself. And that's that's really what the Breean calls.
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That's the level they've gotten to. They're just embarrassing themselves. It's sad. Anyway, eight, seven, seven, seven, five, three, three, four, one.
47:09
Let's move on. I spent plenty of time on the airman material in responding to the correspondent. So let's move on to D dot.
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This is the again, his presentation is opening presentation against the deity of Christ.
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We have already heard him misrepresent the deity of Christ, presented as modalism. And I mentioned to you that in just a few moments we would hear him actually defining what modalism is.
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Therefore, he has no excuse. He had had no excuse. He passed away in August of this year. He had no excuse whatsoever for the misrepresentation.
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And yet, as I have been listening to other D dot presentations. He does the same thing.
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Evidently, if he thought he'd get away with it, if he thought that that whoever he was debating simply wasn't going to have the time or the ability to accurately define the doctrine, the
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Trinity and expose his own misrepresentation, then he was more than willing to do that. And that to any person who is concerned about credibility, about truthfulness, integrity, destroys
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D dot right there. That's that's that's the end for him. But that seems to be his modus operandi. So we continue with him.
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The 13 times the man is telling you that God Almighty is the father of everybody. Metaphorically, he is the creator, sustainer, involver, cherisher of everybody.
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He's the father of everybody, but physically, he does not beget. Because begetting is an animal act, it belongs to the lower animal functions of sex.
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And we were not to attribute such a quality to God. Now, you'll hear that that exact phrase, that exact statement from D dot over and over again.
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I've heard it in at least three different presentations so far. So it was one of his standard presentations.
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It's almost a mantra type thing. And so the idea that since God is called father.
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Of all, then that means Jesus can only be son in the way that we all are sons of God as our as God is our creator.
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The fact that, for example, in John chapter five, Jesus calls the father
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God and father in a way that makes him his own father. And in fact, he actually claims the right of deity of working on the
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Sabbath. The Jews knew that God continued to sustain the universe and to work on the Sabbath. And Jesus claimed that.
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And that means he called God his own father, making himself equal with God. The fact that he does this in a unique way and the fact that he does it within the context of not making
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God a man who begets and therefore the terms father and son have a higher meaning than the animal.
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The fact that that is more complex than evidently I'm a dude that thought that God could be God did it has such a such a limited perspective as to the capacities of God.
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All of this comes together. Repeatedly, over and over and over again in Didot's presentations, he simply has a very little
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God, a very small he can define who God is, and that's it. And if God does anything beyond Didot's little definition, which isn't a biblical definition, then it was perverted scripture or, you know, whatever else it might be.
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That's what he that's what he ends up coming up with. That God begot a son, though the
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Christians keep on repeating the word son of God, son of God, son of God.
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So he said, what about Adam? He said, how many sons have they got? The bulk of Christendom will tell you one.
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I said, you're not reading your Bible, you don't read your Bible properly. You know,
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God has got sons by their tongues in the Bible, by their tongues. You're not trying to go to Genesis chapter 6.
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And of course, everyone recognizes that when the Bible uses the plural sons, sometimes, for example, and he doesn't seem to recognize this in the
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Gospel of John, it uses a different term for children rather than huyas, which is reserved for Christ, the son.
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But Peter, as it may, we are talking about created beings. And this is a completely different level, a completely different context than the discussion of Jesus Christ, because Jesus described as being eternal, so on and so forth.
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And by the way, I didn't queue it up. We'll listen to it later. But I was listening and was that that was
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Friday. To a question and answer period with Ddot and some of the it was it was obviously a situation where he was addressing a
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Christian audience. And so it was somewhat frustrating because the moderator wouldn't allow the
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Christians to really say much. He didn't really want a debate breaking out there. Obviously, he was rather unfair.
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It was very clear. And he knew he was being unfair. It was real obvious. While someone in channel just asked if Ddot was a
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Muslim. Yes. Yes, I meant Ddot is a Muslim. Muslim apologists, probably the most famous of all
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Muslim apologists in in the past hundred years, and that's why we're reviewing him and his attacks on the
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Trinity and the Bible and so on and so forth. But I'm a Ddot got hit with a question and finally someone it was so frustrating.
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The Christians would get up there and here's your chance. All right. Here's a chance to ask question.
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Right. Don't preach, just get the question put out there in the best form.
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You can get it out there. And what do they do? They want to preach. And it's like, oh, that's why
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I hate audience questions. Audience people, you know, Bill Shishko at the last debate, did he not?
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Does he not in almost every debate say the same thing? And he says, you folks don't know how to ask questions.
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You only know how to preach. It's right. Oh, it's so frustrating.
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So the finally somebody got up there and they actually nailed him with an excellent question.
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John twenty twenty eight. And John twenty twenty eight, you know, about the only way that you can meaningfully deal with it from the
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Islamic perspective would be to just question its text and just say, well, you know, this is John and and do what
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Shabir Ali does. Do the Jesus seminar. A .D. 90 evolution change.
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This isn't representative of the earliest followers of Jesus stuff. That's go liberal.
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That's really the only way to try to do it is go liberal. Now, of course, you can't be consistent as a Muslim and do that, because if you're going to be consistent in your use of sources and you have to do the same thing, the
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Quran, you can't do that. So hence the internal inconsistencies and Shabir Ali's stuff.
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But that's not direction Didat went. Didat went. I should have queued this up.
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I wasn't thinking about going that direction, but what he just said sort of brought this out. Didat went for the old time, lousy
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Jehovah's Witness response. And you go, what in the world is the old time, lousy Jehovah's Witness response?
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That's the. Well, remember, John 20, 28, Jesus has appeared to Thomas.
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He shows supernatural knowledge of what Thomas had said and thought. Even when Jesus wasn't present, he's come into a locked room.
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He shows him his hands and his side invites and reach for his finger touch.
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He doesn't, by the way, there's, you know, everybody assumes he did, but there's no no reason to believe that he did.
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Thomas's immediate response is he answered and said to him, I'll tell this is addressed to Jesus.
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He answered, said to him, my Lord and my God. I could ask him how they asked me, my
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Lord and my God. And Jesus' response then is because you have seen me, have you believed?
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Bless are those who did not see and yet have believed. And so there's no rebuke.
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There's an acceptance of Thomas's address to him as Lord and God. It's identified as an act of faith.
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I mean, it's just too plain. It's just too obvious. And by the way, it's not a textual variant either.
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So what's the what's the old, lousy Jehovah's Witness response that what he actually does here is he's so shocked, he goes, my
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Lord and God. A almost a I'm shocked.
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Oh, God, I can't believe this type of a situation not addressed to Christ, but this this idea that it was just a response.
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And that's what he presents with with great solemnity and uncertainty.
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He presents this as the way to read John 20. And of course, sadly, there
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I have yet to find any evidence. I could be wrong. I've not listened to everything he's done yet so far.
56:18
I'm working on it. You know, I can only ride so many miles and listen to so many debates. One time I did thirty nine and a half miles on Saturday.
56:25
Listen to D -Dot. And let me tell you something. The last three miles I was ready to throw my MP3 player in the in the canal.
56:32
I was just getting sick and tired of because it was just a lecture. It wasn't even a debate. I didn't even get the opportunity of hearing somebody who was at least trying to say the truth in between that.
56:42
So it was got very, very frustrating. But I've never heard him put himself in a position where he would actually have someone who could come back after such an absurd explanation of John 20, 28 and point out, no, sir, you again are misreading the text.
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Thomas is not addressing this in some wild fashion of shock. He answered and said to him,
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Alto, there is the language. There is the grammar. Notice Jesus response.
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You know, go through the whole thing and demonstrate your explanation. Absolutely. Positively carries not the slightest bit of water.
57:22
But I've never heard anyone put him in that situation. And of course, if any of the Christians, the microphone tried to follow up with another question, they're immediately shut down and and so on and so forth.
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So I don't know if anyone ever did. And if they did, like I said, the only one
57:37
I I listened to it years and years and years ago and I need to track it down, but I don't find on any of the Muslim sites is the debate that he did with with Josh McDowell.
57:47
I read the book back in early in high school. I think that's how long ago that took place. And I didn't at that time really have the background, know why they were discussing a lot of stuff they were discussing.
58:00
But I'm sure that if there had been cross -examination that that he would have hit him with that and been able to do so.
58:06
But other than that, I've not heard any. Well, thanks for joining us today. I'm awful thankful that the server kicked in and and our
58:12
ISP worked and everything else. Thanks. The phone calls, excellent phone call. Thanks, Gary, for brightening up our day by I won't mention where you work or anything because I don't know anyways.
58:24
But but good to see you again. We'll be back Thursday evening here on the dividing line. See you then. God bless.
58:31
Been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
59:35
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World Wide Web at AOMIN .org. That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates and tracks.