Beyond Mega Length Edition of the DL: Textual Critical Topics, Islamic Topics & More

Greetings and welcome to the Binding Line only program for this week. So we're gonna have to get a lot of stuff in here and I'm just gonna sort of look in between the two cameras since, oh, there we go.

Oh, just slow, huh? Okay, all right. I understand. Lots of turkey dressing. Probably just not quite recovered from all that yet. So got a lot to get to. So it's, it dropped into the 70s as a high, so I could, you know you live in the desert when you're, you know that over the weekend the highs are gonna drop into the 60s.

So you can finally get your coogies out and do stuff like that. You know, I don't have my Pross Purgatory scripts here. So, hmm, I'll have to, I'll get those installed later on so I can take care of the guy in channel that's going to need to do that.

Lots and lots of stuff to get to. And no, not everyone is safe because I can either use kick or ban. I just don't have the thing. Someone just directed me to Brandon Howes' Facebook page. Report, Linda Sarsour is Time Magazine's most likely pick for person of the year.

Remember her, she is best friends with James White's buddy, mentor, and kindred spirit, Yasir Qadhi. You know, you know you cannot possibly have a meaningful argument when you have to twist the truth this badly.

Even twist the truth in regards to Linda Sarsour and Yasir Qadhi. Yasir Qadhi very clearly has numerous differences with Linda Sarsour. The only reason he supports her is because of all the people that attack her, the same people that attack him.

So enemy of my enemy, friend of my friend, all the rest of that kind of stuff. But the mentor and kindred spirit thing, let's not worry about context. We don't have to be truthful even though we claim to be Christians.

There you go. That's just Brandon Howes. That's just the way things are over in the Howsean compound. We do hope to make it through the program today, by the way, without getting hit by a North Korean missile.

They just launched one over Japan and Yahoo. People are absolutely nuts. It's run by, well, it's not the people. It's not the poor North Korean people. Did you see that guy? Shot five times and still managed to get out of there.

What an amazing thing. And to realize they're actually Christians in that country is astounding. Anyway, oh, I'm glad someone mentioned this because I forgot to put it on my list, but please, I don't think we have it up on our website yet, but we need to.

I've announced it on Facebook and Twitter, but we are having a pre-debate, pre-conference debate at G3 again this year. Last year, we debated Trent Horn. And this year we are bringing Adnan Rashid in from London Adnan and I have debated primarily in London and in Dublin, Ireland, actually.

And so we are going to bring Adnan into Atlanta. And we were talking about possible topics and he came up with a real nice, concise way. It was more concise than the way I had expressed it. And that is, can we be saved without the cross?

Because obviously from the Islamic perspective, the cross never took place. Well, it didn't take place with Jesus. Well, it depends on if you're Shabir Ali or not, but Jesus didn't die upon the cross is the Islamic position of Surah 4, verse 157.

And so you can have peace with God, a proper relationship with God in Islamic theology without the work of Jesus Christ. And that truly is the soteriological focus of the difference between Islam and Christianity.

It's not the most fundamental difference because obviously who Jesus was is I think even more fundamental at that point. You can't, you know, I mean, in a sense, we're sort of, and Adnan and I have debated this before.

We debated at Trinity College in Dublin, but you can't necessarily fully address the topic we're gonna be addressing without the background of the deity of Christ, but we have addressed it before. And so I think that that will be an excellent opportunity.

I've already asked that those who are gonna be going to G3, coming to the debate there in Atlanta, to please be praying for Adnan. I would like us to break the mold of the, so many sadly who have given the gospel a bad name by how they approach Muslims and how they treat Muslims, how they think of Muslims.

I would love to see believers just loving all over Adnan and showing him the grace of Christ and complimenting the message with the behavior and the attitude and just really, I want Adnan to see once again what true believing Christians are like, not the politicized make the gospel American type stuff, but people who really, honestly, if that room is filled with people who've actually been praying for Adnan Rashid by name and their Muslim neighbors and Muslim friends changes everything about the night.

So if you're planning on coming, I ask that you would come having prayed for both of those speaking, clarity of thought and presentation on my part and praying that if we believe that it is the sovereign God who reveals to us our need for the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ, well, then that's what needs to be prayed.

So I put the stuff on Facebook, I put stuff on Twitter. We hopefully I'll have a banner added up soon with the information on the debate and how you can be a part of it. Obviously, we're flying him in.

So it's not a freebie. We wish we could do things freebie like that. But if you've priced out tickets from London to America, Southwest doesn't fly that route, if you know what I mean. So what's that?

You just laughed? Yeah, okay. Yeah, Southwest doesn't fly that route. So it takes a little bit of funding to be able to put all this together. And then of course, you've got a rather large room and the cameras and everything else and hotel rooms and food and all the rest of that stuff.

So I'm sure you understand the necessity of those things. So that will be the pre-debate. What's the date on that? I don't even have it in front of me. It's da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Hopefully, I don't care what's new in calendar.

Should be the 18th? Is that the Thursday, I think? If it's the Thursday night and the conference is Friday, Saturday, then yeah, it should be Thursday night, the 18th.

The announcement I'm seeing just simply says join us in January.

If for some reason I'm off on that, then the 17th. But I think it's the 18th for the debate. So we'll eventually have the banner add up, yes?

I was gonna say, out of all of your Muslim opponents that you've debated over the years, Adnan is by far and away my favorite. I know that you may have a different favorite, but I just have really enjoyed every debate I've ever seen him do with you.

Well, look, real quickly. When Adnan and I first debated, he was used to speaker's corner. And he was very aggressive the first time we debated at that Baptist church in London.

Is that the one where you had the young men in the audience who were?

No, that was later on when we did the transmission of the Quran, transmission of the New Testament. And we had the men in the audience and stuff like that, or they were doing their thing. But the shifting point was up in Dublin when between the two debates we had, we had lunch together.

And since then, it's been different because once the two people know each other, Adnan knows Jay Smith, for example, that changes the dynamic and things like that. So I think that's where part of it comes from.

But yeah, Adnan, and of course, down in Australia, Abdullah Kunda, pretty hard to top the kind of appropriate relationship that we have exhibited in our debates. Is it something you're pointing at?

There's some people in the chat channel who are posting the links. So yeah, the date and time is January 17th at 7 p .m. I can't just sit there and read links.

So January 17th, it says. So isn't that the Wednesday night? Yeah, that's Wednesday night, if that's correct. So that's interesting. I didn't know G3, well, it does say G3, 18th and so on. Yeah, day one of the conference.

Is actually the 18th, Thursday night, so.

Yep, okay, so there you go. Let's hope we don't have snowmageddon. Well, it's Atlanta, so almost any snow is snowmageddon in Atlanta. So they're not used to that anymore than we are. So yes, that's coming up.

That's exciting. Let's keep that in our prayers and things like that. I was gonna mention this to Rich beforehand, but I forgot to. We have, I guess, a, ministry resource list fund somewhere?

Yes, we have a ministry resource list fund. It's a revolving account. So as you tell me to go buy things that we need for your research and ministry resources as well, we go into that account and we go buy things.

And people donate to it. Well, I don't know where that is. All I can tell you is. It's on the donations page. See, if you ever actually. No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know what the amount in it is. Oh, well, there is that too.

That's what I meant. I know where it's found at. But I know that I'm gonna be hitting it up for about four or five volumes that are not cheap, but really important. I caught up on the Evangelical Theological Society's audio from their meeting a couple weeks ago, the textual criticism area, where they specifically addressed apologetics and textual criticism, which I wish I had known about, but I probably still wouldn't have been able to make it anyways, one way or the other.

But obviously very, very interesting to me, especially because they were criticizing some apologetic errors in misuse of scholarly material, which, you know, a lot of things they said was stuff that we've pointed out a number of times here.

But they had some great information, some good stuff, but I was very encouraged to basically hear echoes from the leading scholars dealing with advancement in the area of textual criticism, and their tracking where I'm going in my PhD studies, where my stuff is taking me, and I haven't had any interaction with them.

This is just, as I'm looking at what's coming out and looking at the materials, seem to be headed in the right direction. And unfortunately, I'm doing this program right as computerized tools, computerized databases are becoming available, but are not completely available yet.

And so for some areas, you simply need to have these very expensive volumes available to you. And a lot of them are not in libraries. They come from overseas and stuff like that. And so we just got one, it's the primary one that I'm gonna need, but there are some other ones.

So all I'm saying is, if you'd like to, we're gonna be talking about text criticism today. It's gonna be one of the primary things we're talking about, though it's gonna be a long program, we got a lot of things to cover.

If that's particularly an area, and I do know a number of you have commented on Twitter and places like that, encouraging me to press forward in that work, we're gonna have some needs in that area. So, the Travel Fund always needs support and then the Ministry Resource List as well.

So just letting you know about those things. So let's get into it. Um, what's the dress code for this weekend in St. Charles? Today's Kuja and the DL is setting a high standard. Well, thank you very much.

I normally do, you should see what, you know, you all jump on me, but you don't see what happens behind this mirror. It's not a mirror, it's a window. If you saw what Rich just did, you all would feel for me because of what I have to put up with and what I frequently just ignore, because I have to ignore it, you know, because I don't have that many friends left in the world anyways.

So, I normally wear a Kuji for the first night of the conference. It's sort of a tradition that we do, and sometimes on Saturday too. So, we're pretty laid back, we're pretty laid back. So we've got the Friday night, the Saturday sessions, and I preach Sunday morning and then have to catch a flight out, and they canceled a nice flight that I used to get back on, so I'm having to go through Dallas.

But anyways, let's get to it. Finally came, since I wasn't at SBL or ETS and all the rest of that stuff, finally came, it's being called the THGNT, the Tyndall House Greek New Testament. It says Tyndall House Cambridge, produced Tyndall House Cambridge.

And it's from Crossway. Crossway does a really good job with stuff. And even the box is nice, I'll have to admit. And it's the new Greek New Testament. And of course, it's in the, they've put it in the nice leatherette binding type thing.

Though I'll have to admit, if you leave it sitting for very long, the cover tends to come up a little bit. Still, it's a nice, it's called the True Tone. So I don't think it is really leather, but it feels like it's leather anyways.

It's not the case bound like you have with the Nessie alum. Long time working on this. Boy, what do I say? On a real practical level, it's a nice size, decent font size, and it's very clean in the sense that the Nessie alum especially, the page seems cluttered because of all the textual notes and all the symbols in the text that your eye is sort of, eventually gets used to sort of skipping over, not really seeing while you're just trying to read the text.

So if you're a person who, for example, has had enough Greek to where you want to use it in the pulpit, if you're a preacher and you wanna actually read the text in the pulpit, and you're, like some people, a little bit too afraid to do that from like an iPad, which is how I do it, though that probably means you're younger because I just love, I got one of those iPad Pros and it's so huge, it's so massive that I can make the font size and that thing so big that you can read that Greek from halfway across the room, it's awesome.

But this would be a real nice text along those lines because it's a very, very clean text to read from. So nicely bound, nicely laid out, but extremely idiosyncratic. If you are accustomed to the Nessie alum, and, or the UBS, probably more to the UBS, then what you're used to, you can get to the books of the Bible, you can go through it because this uses standard canonical order.

This does not. For some reason, the whole, one of the primary things they're trying to do is to produce an ancient Greek text. And so a couple of things they do is they don't follow the standard order of the books.

So you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, then you have James. Yeah. You have James and then for a second, Peter, and then you've got, where Jude is? No, no, for a second, Peter, then for a second, third, John, and then Romans.

And then you go through the Pauline stuff and you get to Hebrews and that's, Jude's gotta be in here someplace. They didn't decanonize Jude. But it's a very different order than what you would be expecting.

And so if you're wanting to try to find something, you may end up having to look up front and find it that way. Where did, James, Peter, John, oh, there's Jude. Jude's right after third John. Okay, it's just so small, I skipped it going to Romans.

So it's a bit of, I'm sorry. Yeah, poor Jude. Hey Jude. That's right. And then the introductory material is in the back. So there's a fairly lengthy introduction in the back. They're gonna be putting a book out on the methodology they used for making the decisions that they did as far as the text is concerned.

There are textual notes, and, but they are, very, very minimal at the bottom of the page. And in fact, here's one page. There's no textual notes on it whatsoever. You won't find any page in the Nessie Island without text notes at the bottom.

I suppose there are a few in the UBS. But again, this is definitely meant to be very clean and readable. From reading, the other thing is gonna throw you off if you wanna use this. Or if you wanna, you know, if you're thinking about getting your pastor something for Christmas or something like that.

The other thing that's gonna throw you off is they also utilize non-standard spelling conventions. So, for example, in the manuscript that I'm focusing upon in my PhD studies, P45, Ginnatai would be spelled Gynatai with a epsilon iota.

There are a number of interesting antiquated spelling conventions in the early papyri or even some of the early unseals, and they follow that. And so book order, spelling conventions, paragraph division stuff, they're trying to follow some of the earliest witnesses in reproducing that.

Which is interesting if your focus is the earliest text, but could be, not disturbing, but distracting if you're just trying to read the text in the pulpit or for things like that. And if your Greek really isn't all that strong, it could totally throw you off because of the nature of that.

You do realize that I have the channel up. Yeah, I do have the channel up. People are demonstrating a disinterest in the current topic of discussion because even people in control of the program are having childish conversations about the sweater in the chat channel.

And maybe you could take that over. Maybe you could start your own little bunker someplace and have private conversations about that kind of stuff. That's the best place to express childish type things.

So you might wanna think about doing that. So anyway, so one of the things that struck me is I get the feeling, but I can't document it yet because they said they're gonna come out with a book within hopefully a year on all the methodology issues.

I mean, all the readings in here have to appear in at least two witnesses in the first five centuries. Well, okay. That means it's not a primarily Byzantine-oriented text, but all right. But for example, it does read Jesus at Jude 5, Jesus saved the people out of Egypt, which is what's in the Nessean 28th, what's in the ESV, which comes to us partly through the application of the methodology that eventually I want to share with everybody once I understand it well enough to be able to explain it.

It is extremely complex and very difficult. It's called CBGM, the coherence-based genealogical method. And part of the problem is the newness of the vocabulary, pre-genealogical coherence and coherence and local stomata and global stomata.

And it's so new, relatively speaking, that the language is very idiosyncratic and can be very difficult to explain to folks. And one of the things I like doing is making textual critical issues understandable, hopefully accurately to folks.

I'm not like Bart Ehrman, who in our debate insulted the entire audience by basically saying that they weren't smart enough to understand what we were talking about. I don't believe that to be the case.

And so we try to do that kind of stuff. So anyway, it seems... So you've got the reading in Jude 5, but at John 1, 18, they have monogamous huios rather than monogamous theos. And I'm sitting here going, well, I can think of at least four incredibly important, the earliest witnesses to the gospel of John all long before the fifth century that have the os.

So I'll be interested in reading their reasoning as to why they went with huios rather than theos at John 1, 18. But of course, there's a note at the bottom of the page gives you that information. And so you can make those decisions for yourself.

So I definitely think that it's a valuable addition to, and interestingly enough, I have not found it electronically. I think they have made the decision to try to make as many of us buy the physical book first before they make it available to Logos and Accordance and Olive Tree and BibleWorks and all the rest of the major Bible program providers.

But I'm sure it will be eventually made available, eventually, like the SBL, Greek New Testament was and things like that. And so you might say, well, did we really need something like this? Well, I think it's extremely encouraging, to be honest with you, listening to these ETS discussions, listening to young men who are becoming scholars in the textual critical field who've grown up in the Ehrman era, who were in Bible college when Ehrman's books were coming out and things like that.

It's the next generation. It was interesting to see how young the voices were. And so it's good to see that there is a healthy interest in these things and a recognition of how important these things really are.

And so, yeah, I would encourage that. It's good to be able to compare and contrast them. But I think it's really, really important. And I'm speaking primarily to my fellow believers here. You have to keep something in mind.

If you apply, I know I've said this before, I'm gonna say it again because it's absolutely necessary that people hear it. If you apply the same methodology of interpretation and hermeneutics to this text as you would to this text, and by the way, the editors of this were saying, hey, we're not trying to replace this.

We are simply supplementing it and giving another perspective, another view. This is an S .E. Allen text. This is the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. If you apply the same method of interpretation to this as to this, or to this, this is the New Testament, the original Greek Byzantine text form.

This is Robinson Pierpont text, okay? I'm not sure if it's available. It's nice, clean text too. It's got nice wide margins and it's pretty readable as well. I really like the font, by the way, in the Tyndale House.

But interpretation of a particular text. I mean, obviously, if you take monogamistos, the only begotten son at John 1 .18, you're not gonna be making the same applications that you would if you have monogamistos at John 1 .18.

But there is no central doctrine of the Christian faith that is dependent upon any single text. And so if you consistently, fairly, honestly, I realize my King James Only friends, some of my ecclesiastical text friends can always find a way around this if they want to become imbalanced.

But for those of us who don't have that kind of a bias playing in our minds, if you utilize these texts, you're gonna come up with the same faith. It's not like, well, one of them has a higher view of Jesus.

No, I don't think that's true. Well, one of them has a clearer testimony of the gospel. No, I don't think that's true. And so you have to keep that in mind. One of the things that's been certainly striking me yet again in my studies is in looking at, even listening to the ETS audio, which by the way, if you go to the Evangelical Textual Critical blog, Evangelical Text Criticism blog, there's a link on there to the audio.

There's like $4 per audio or something. It's not all that expensive. And if you listen to the presentations, you'll be struck once again by the fact that our New Testament manuscripts are incredibly alike.

We tend to talk about the 400 ,000, 500 ,000 textual variants. And we emphasize that big, big, big, big number. But when you start breaking those numbers down, what you really discover is that the vast bulk of these manuscripts throughout the history of the transmission of the text, they're communicating the same thing.

There's the idea that, well, you know, you've got these manuscripts and they have a savior named Jesus. And then in these manuscripts, they have a savior named somebody else who doesn't. No, completely and totally bogus.

It's the same message, the same thing. And it's really a testimony to the bankruptcy of the argumentation that says the New Testament has been corrupted and changed and altered and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

It just really does give a lie to all of that kind of stuff. So there's, what I was gonna say, I can't confirm this yet, but I get the distinct feeling that there's sort of a pushback in the Tyndale House, Greek New Testament against CBGM, against Munster's use of that methodology in really giving it a lot of weight in making decisions so far in the General Epistles and the Book of Acts.

Those are the parts of what's called the ECM, the Editio Critica Maior, actually, the new mega Greek New Testament. I mean, I don't know how many volumes it's gonna be, but if Acts was four volumes and the General Epistles were two volumes, you can sort of figure out from there, each of the gospels I'm gonna predict is gonna be a minimum of two volumes, maybe three a piece.

And then Paul, oh, good grief, who knows? And Revelation, I don't know. That could end up being this big or that big. It's hard to say because the text of Revelation, you really honestly could separate that out as its own field of study.

I mean, I don't have it in here anymore. I used to have behind me the complete collation, at least of the manuscripts that existed then of the entirety of the Book of Revelation. It took someone over 30 years to do it.

Now it's just one book. It's a completely different history than the rest of the New Testament. I mean, just the Book of Revelation had a completely different transmission history to it. And you might say, why are you telling me this?

Well, you know, if we don't do it in the context of faith, when you get hit with that from the context of unbelief, it can be twisted. And in light of the internet, you've got to understand there are sharp, sharp opponents of the faith that will grab anything.

And if you don't have a background, if you don't have a foundation, they will grab anything to throw at you and take it out of its context saying, well, you don't really know what the Book of Revelation said.

I mean, so few manuscripts in the first 900 years of the Book of Revelation in comparison to, you know, most of our people never hear that. And I realize most of our people don't necessarily need to hear that.

But those who, you know, I think fathers who want to prepare their sons and daughters for going into the university setting and things like that, I think there's every reason to prepare yourself on the highest level to be able to communicate these things to others.

And so I think that's, I think it's important. So there's a little bit of stuff about the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, but let's stay in the, stay in that field and see if I can find, there we go.

Yesterday, Michael Brown tweeted back at me. Someone had, much of the chagrin, I'm sure, of the more voracious of my critics. Someone had tweeted about how encouraged they were in listening to my debates against Michael Brown about the standard of conduct and respect and things that we managed to maintain in our debates.

And that certainly is one of the things that I'm most thankful for, for those encounters that we've had. And so I mentioned something about it to Michael and he wrote back and, because I said something about, you know, if we can do this when we're on opposite sides, how much more fun would it be if we were on the same side, like we were when we did the debate with the two Unitarians?

And he said, well, what we really need to do is we need to get a couple of Black Hebrew Israelites to debate Michael and I. And, because that would be especially interesting given Michael's Jewish background.

But yeah, it's definitely something we want to do. And it would be a very interesting encounter. No two ways about it. But speaking of Black Hebrew Israelites, a little over, well, right at a week ago, there is a fellow who actually called in when Vocab Malone was on the program, when we were taking calls.

He goes by the name of Divine Prospect, but his name, at least in Facebook, is Ron Shields. And I happened to see a link in Vocab stuff where he was asking questions of this Ron Shields fellow, Divine Prospect.

And listening to the answers just left me more confused than ever, to be honest with you. But obviously, the gentleman has done a lot of reading. I don't get the feeling it's in the classical sense of a classical education.

It seems somewhat disjointed in how it's related to one another. I mean, I think it's one of the advantages of a good education is that you can, you're challenged to be consistent in how you handle data and information, rather than, well, I'm just gonna collect as much information as I can, and then how I handle it is up to me.

When you get to be with people who have dedicated themselves to handling information properly, it sort of rubs off on you, and you sort of learn that attitude. I think that's an important part of education.

Anyway, one of the things that came up is that Ron Shields asserts something that is very common in Unitarian argumentation. At least I've encountered it many times over the, well, coming up on, well, in the middle of my fourth decade.

Do you have some Geritol in there?

We need to start putting a little Geritol dispenser in here. Most people don't even remember, do they make Geritol anymore? I have no earthly idea, but Haven't had the need yet. Haven't had the need yet.

Oh yeah, sure. Given your advanced age, you just forgot you needed it. But we're dating ourselves here by that particular comment. Yeah, and what's worse is that, when I try to hear what they're saying on the other side of that allegedly soundproof window, which really isn't allegedly all that soundproof, 35 years of fourth decade, this next year will be the 35th year for Alpha and Omega Ministries.

And I think for 30, or was it 25, we had that testimonies at aomin .org, remember? We had that email address. Was it 25? I think it's been a long time. We gotta do something, because it was enjoyable reading and posting some of that stuff from people that certainly would be very encouraging to us, I think, if we put something like that up and people could write in.

Because we've been around for a while. There aren't too many other ministries that, there are some, but there aren't too many other ministries that have been around for, and pretty much doing the same thing for 35 years, like we will be this next year.

But I've certainly heard this argumentation many times over that period of time. And that is when you're encountering Unitarians, one of the ways to deal with Trinitarian texts in the New Testament, especially explicitly Trinitarian texts, such as Matthew 28, 19 through 20, where you have baptism into the name singular of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

We've read in years past the very insightful commentary of B .B. Warfield on this particular text and the balance that's found there, singular use of name, and yet the distinction, Father, Son, and Spirit.

And obviously, even those who don't try to get rid of it, some Unitarians who are, for example, modalists, the modalists, the Oneness Pentecostals, will try to say, ah, well, what we really have here.

Who just posted that? Because I found a thing in Textual, and I need to fix it on my one in there, but if you post images in Textual now, it'll display in the channel. It's really cool. So someone just posted a Geritol commercial.

A Geritol, if you feel run down because of tired blood, take fast-acting Geritol. And it's got a woman about to stick her finger on a iron. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. But yeah, that's pretty cool.

And she's smiling. Looks like it's 1952. I'm gonna have to turn that on on my other Textual 7 thing. That's pretty cool. We can now post graphics and channel if everybody can get a modern thing going.

So anyway, see, they're still back. They're still stuck on Geritol. I completely lost them when I started talking about Unitarianism. But the Oneness Pentecostals will say, see, it's name, and that name is Jesus, that type of thing.

Or they'll say, this can't be original because all the baptisms in the Book of Acts were in the name of Jesus. And all the Book of Acts is saying is it was specifically Christian baptism. Only Matthew 28, 19 -20 gives us a formula, whereas Acts is giving us the distinction, the distinctiveness of what the baptism was.

It wasn't John's baptism. It's Christian baptism. Yes, it's in the name of Jesus, but that's not the formula. What you have in Matthew 20. So what do people do? Well, one of the ways around it, yes, Summer just said, of course a woman in 1952 could only be reaching for an iron.

Well, if you saw it, that's what she's doing. And then we have such amazingly in-depth commentary as do Unitarians use Geritol? I have no, but you did say the thing before about the Coogees. I saw that.

Well, look, dude, I know you have some jealousy issues. If I can get you one, I'll get you one, so you can wear one too. I bet they'd go over real well up where you live now. I think they would. I think they would.

I really do. Anyways, I should stop looking at the other screen over here because it's really distracting me. What were we talking about? Moses was in the bulrushes and something along those lines. So anyway, Ron Shields claims that Matthew 28, 19 through 20 is not original to the Gospel of Matthew.

And so this is one of the ways it's very common for this claim to be made. And it's one of those textual critical myths that sort of like, it's sort of like the issues regarding the Council of Nicaea sort of grows its own life, you know?

And so you get people quoting other people, quoting other people who then go back and quote the first person, but none of them have any idea what they're talking about. It just sounds good. So for example, on November 20th, Ron Shields, who evidently is back in summer's old stomping grounds, Marietta, Georgia, well, we'll have to get Red together with Ron Shields and Red will take care of everything.

Or at least we'll confuse him enough to keep him busy for a while. On November 20th, he says, so what do we have here, ladies and gentlemen? Well, it looks like a New Testament codex without Matthew 28, 8 through 20.

Now notice how big that is, 8 through 20, not 28, but 8 through 20. Meaning no Matthew 28, 19 baptismal formula. Hmm, what you are looking at is derived from the Syriac Sinaiticus Palimpsest dated the early part of the fourth century CE.

Interesting, huh? More to come. Textual criticism, I'm not finished. Let's keep going. The plot thickens. So you have a printed text here in Syriac and it stops at the end of verse seven and it says dist ad finum.

Now dist ad finum in Latin means the ending portion is missing. Well, that's not shocking. There are, anyone who knows anything about textual criticism knows that unless you have a completely fragmentary text that has been torn apart over the years, a text that holds together and yet only contained one book, what, where is the damage of time most likely to take place with a book like that?

The beginning and even more so the end of the manuscript. Those are the exposed pages. And so it's a little bit like last year, we, or maybe the year before, I don't remember what it was, but not too long ago, we did that response to Ijaz Ahmed regarding John 2028 and the fragmentary nature of P66.

And the fact that once you get into the last portion of the Gospel of John, the manuscript's in bad shape and it's fragmentary, it's just made up of pieces and there's stuff missing. And so anyone familiar with textual criticism knows that, well, for example, I'm working with P45 and P45 does not contain, it initially contained Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

But everything that we have today is from the interior portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts. Nothing from the beginning, first earlier chapters or later chapters of any of those books. We don't have Mark 1, 1, that would be great to have because of the variant there.

We don't have a John 2028, that would be great to have or a John 21 and the issues there. No, we have interior portions because those are gonna be the pages in a book that are gonna be the most protected.

Now, if it was all bound together, we could have, in P45, we could have had Acts 1 because if it was all bound together, that would have been part of the internal material. But if it's bound as a, if it is transmitted as a single volume, it's the earlier and later portions that are most likely to be damaged in just simply the handling of the text.