Short Follow Up on Aquinas, TR Onlyism in the OPC

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:34

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We're back here in the big studio. We've got a lot to get to today, a lot of audio to listen to, and a couple of different topics to get to.

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Just on the subject of the last program, which garnered a lot of comment, a lot of positive comment, but plenty of negative comment as well, it didn't seem much in the way of response substantively.

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I saw a lot of what can only be described as subtweeting mockery, but that's not overly helpful.

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It doesn't actually advance the conversation any. What can you say about it?

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How can you even respond to it? But there was one brief thread by Danny Slavich, who is a

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PhD from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, MDiv from Southern.

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I did ask for clarification on all these things. No response was provided. So that's sort of like Fox News asked, and there was no response given or whatever.

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So I did ask for some clarification, and no response was offered.

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James White's attempted takedown of Dr. Barrett. So if our side asks questions and provides a response, that's an attempted takedown.

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Most of us by now should be sort of familiar with how this works. And it shouldn't work the way politics works out in the world, not in the church anyways.

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Why was that a takedown? Why can't? There were a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that were going, 88 % of the sumo what?

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Eh? So we weren't the only ones that went, you know, there's some things that can be said about this and so on and so forth.

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And then, have you noticed one side quotes the other side extensively?

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And then the other side just does the subtweeting thing. Strange. It's not a healthy thing, as far as I can tell.

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So it wasn't an attempted takedown. James White's attempted takedown of Dr. Barrett and the reformed evangelical retrieval of Thomas is not helpful nor convincing.

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The reformed evangelical retrieval of Thomas. That's what these folks think that they're doing.

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They are retrieving Thomas from a self -imposed exile, evidently.

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And they really do believe this. That we are the benighted folks. We are the traditionalists.

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We are the less educated folks. And they're the ones seeking to expand our horizons and everything else.

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And you need to understand, this is not the first time when a system of scholasticism is developing that you'll get this kind of thought, this kind of perspective.

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And what we have to be very careful of is allowing those perspectives to solidify as much as we can do anything about it.

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I mean, there are just certain people who have made up their minds, and there's not going to be any discussion, and there's not going to be any talk, and it's just the way things are.

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And White's out of here. We don't need to worry about White anymore. He's no longer with us.

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He's out. And that's all there is to it. As far as it depends upon me,

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I try to leave those avenues open. But I also recognize that once somebody has the idea that if you respond, if you say anything, then you're trying to take somebody down and so on and so forth.

05:08

Okay, so he says it was not helpful or convincing. For one, White seems totally inconversant with Thomas's commentaries, arguing for a sort of biblicism that cannot be sustained in theory or practice.

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Now, I asked, what do you mean by Thomas's commentary? Are you talking about commentaries written by Thomas?

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Or are you talking about commentaries on Thomas written by other people? No response.

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But this is what Jeff Johnson will tell you, that when he first started telling me about his project long ago,

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I made some passing comment that there is no way to engage

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Thomas with Thomas. Because unless you carry the card, unless you're a part of the group, you're just simply not smart enough to understand it.

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There is a, let's just be honest with you. Thomas really are proud of their knowledge of this man and his writings.

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And if you're not on board, so think about it.

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So I should have grabbed it, but you've got the massive tome of the

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Summa, and then you've got many other works, Contra Gentiles and so on and so forth.

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So it would be a pile of stuff, but now you need to have commentaries on that? Well, aren't there people who read the commentaries on the commentaries too?

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I mean, there's no end to what must be mastered. And once you make this something that's absolutely necessary to hold an orthodox

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Trinitarian position, there's no end. There's absolutely no end. But the second half of the sentence has no logical connection to the first half of the sentence.

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Arguing for a sort of biblicism that cannot be sustained in theory or practice. Now, I want you to remember what

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I said on last program. I was saying that sola scriptura is central and vital to what we believe as Reformed Christians.

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It was central and vital to the Reformation. It was forced on Luther by practical realities of his debate with Eck, and then thinking through what that meant during that period of development in Luther's experience.

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And Zwingli, without the same external pressures, had to go through similar things on his own.

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And as to how consistently even the first generation of Reformers applied these things is yet another issue.

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But what I said that seemingly offended many people is that when we look at Thomas, we need to recognize that there is a difference in the theological conclusions that are drawn by people who are drawing their conclusions from the recognition that Scripture is unique because it is theanusta.

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It has a unique authority and a unique consistency to it because it is

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God -breathed. And those who would view

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Scripture as a highly important source of information but do not function on that sola scriptura basis.

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Now, I know that there are those who've tried to make the argument that Thomas Aquinas believed in sola scriptura. He did not.

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That's obvious by what he said concerning the papacy, the power of the keys, the tradition of the church.

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I gave an example. Interestingly enough, did you see? I did not see anyone even try to touch the example

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I gave him Thomas. In fact, so far, every single citation I've given Thomas has been met with mockery, not with counter -argumentation.

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That says something to me. That says something very loudly to me. But I gave a rather clear example from Thomas where he misinterpreted 2

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Thessalonians 2 .15. By the way, the Logos that I had in front of me had that as 2 .14.

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I'm not sure if that's different with the Vulgate and maybe the enumeration issues with maybe the

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Roman Catholic version or something. I don't know. But it said 2 .14, but I know it's 2 .15, at least in our

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Bibles. But the point is that Thomas clearly admitted the existence of an oral tradition passed down from the apostles.

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And on that basis, came to conclusions and accepted the utilization of that traditional authority.

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That means he did not believe in Sola Scriptura. But let's be as kind as we can to Thomas.

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He lives before the Reformation. And when something like that takes place, there is pressure placed upon the positions, and that normally results in a radicalization of positions.

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And so if you look at the Counter -Reformation, you look at Trent, just look at the issue of the canon.

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In Thomas' day, there were various views on the subject. And popes had rejected deuterocanonical books as being inspired.

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And Cardinal Cajetan, even up to the days of Luther, continued to represent the

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Jerome tradition in regards to the Old Testament canon. But once you get Trent, now there's a solidifying, and that's no longer an option.

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So now those apocryphal books, the deuterocanonical books become canonical on a deutero level or something.

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And that's been forced by the other side saying, well, they're not canonical. And so that's a good example.

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Thomas lives before that. And so he is not pushed to be as radical in those areas as post -Reformational

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Roman Catholics become. But he was not functioning on that foundation. And if it's relevant to, for example, the issue of authority, why isn't that relevant in the area of theology proper?

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And does that not allow us to examine the sources of Thomas' metaphysics?

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Especially when we are being told that to be truly confessional, you have to embrace

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Thomas' metaphysics. To reject them is to reject being confessional. That's what we are being told directly, straight up front.

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So anyway, so what is this sort of biblicism that cannot be sustained in theory of practice?

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What I just said cannot be sustained in theory of practice. We have been doing it for decades. We've been doing it for a long, long time.

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Hmm, interesting. Also White argues that Thomas rests presuppositionally on a non or unbiblical authority, whether the

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Pope or Aristotle. Well, not just the Pope, but the actual example

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I used was the idea of unwritten oral tradition, which is the key issue. I really wonder,

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I just, I don't know, the thought crosses my mind. How many of my critics out there on this subject have read

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Yves Kungar? Have read his work on tradition? If you haven't, then you don't know what you're talking about.

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See how easy that is? See how easy that is? I've been dealing with Roman Catholic claims about Sola Scriptura for decades.

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Some of my critics were barely alive when I first, well, some of them were not alive when I first started dealing with Roman Catholic claims in regards to the subject of authority.

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And it just makes me wonder, should I just dismiss everything that is said? Just, how, is that really where we are today?

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Well, have you read this? Well, have you read that? Well, have you read this? Does that get us anywhere? I don't know.

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Yet in my non -expert reading, Thomas clearly means to expound the biblical canon even while submitting to the church and reason as secondary authorities.

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Biblical canon could raise issues, we could talk about there. I gave an example of him mis -expounding a biblical text.

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And the question is, yes, is Thomas as radical in the allowance of the church and reason as secondary authorities, especially

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Aristotle, as later Roman Catholics would be? No, but is he in the proper arena of submitting those external authorities to a solid exegetical understanding of the text of Scripture?

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The answer is no. The answer is no. Which is why, two or three months ago,

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I was stunned when Reformed Baptists were recommending

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Roman Catholic authors who were fundamentally saying that the exegetical methodology of the medieval period needs to be recovered for all the rest of us.

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When the whole point was, remember, there's all these phrases that are getting lost all of a sudden.

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Remember, post -Tenebrous Lux, after -Darkness Light? There was no Tenebrous. There was no darkness. It's light now.

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It was light all the time. It was just a different shade of light. What about origin's impact upon the interpretation of the

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Old Testament? What about the primarily allegorical interpretation is used for Old Testament text?

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I thought it was a given that there was a great outbreaking of light in the

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Reformation, exegetically speaking. And so, even while submitting to the church and reason as secondary authority.

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Secondary in what way? If they produced the very lens through which you must then read the scriptures. How is that secondary?

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It certainly isn't secondary any longer. Not in the claims of even Vatican II on that level. Anyways, I'm going way too long.

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Third, White's analogy between the Reformers and post -Reformation Reform dogmaticians' neglect of directly addressing

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Marian theology as something like they're acceptable. This sentence didn't make any sense.

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As they're acceptable of Thomistic Trinitarianism strikes me as near parody of argumentation. I think

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I know what that was meant to say. And Dr. Slavich just didn't understand the argument,

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I guess. And that is the issue that I brought forth was the

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Reformers did not examine every aspect of the

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Christian faith in the first generation. That's one of the reasons why I think Semper Reformanda is a very, very good concept, very necessary concept.

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If you're going to have Reformation continue. It's funny, a lot of these guys, I'm not the only one to have pointed this out.

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A lot of these guys are Baptists who never would have been accepted by the original

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Reformers, or by many in the dogmatic Reformed scholasticism developed after that.

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And as Baptists, they argue that the Reformation needed to continue. In fact, the whole 1689 project was the continuation of Reformation.

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And so guys, if we're pointing to 1648 and going, oh, we need 1689, you can't then turn 1689 into the final point, where there can't be anything beyond that.

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But anyways, back to the point. The point was, my argument was that the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary was an error from the beginning, biblically, without question.

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Without question, it was an error. Even though I'm seeing, you've seen them too,

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I've commented on one of them. These allegedly now formally Reformed people going, well, you know,

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I had never really thought about that. Well, then we should be talking about it more often. We should be going back over why we are what we are.

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Maybe we stopped doing that. I didn't, but maybe everybody else did. And the point was that it's not a direct parallel.

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The point is that we need to have the freedom to continue the examination.

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And if we discover that some of our Reformed forebearers accepted, for example, the extended assertion of simplicity ad intra and not just ad extra, then you can't cite the authority of the original

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Reformers as, well, they looked through it all and therefore you're rejecting their authority if you dare question this.

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I don't see where they did. I don't see where they did. And I'm not, I am in no way denigrating

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Luther's history and standing by saying he was wrong on the issue of the perpetual

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Virginia Mary. Am I? Didn't think it was, but anyway. So that was about the only response out there and there wasn't much to it.

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There was not much to it at all. So there you go. Just wanted to talk about a few of those things and did not intend to spend that much time.

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I apologize. I apologize deeply for doing that.

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Now we had some, we're having sound issues and it's not us. It's the program that I use that it's an extremely useful program.

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Very helpful for being able to do what we're about to do. It's called Audio Notetaker and for some reason, Audio Notetaker doesn't want to send sound to anything but the

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PC speakers, including HDMI. And we had that problem in the other room and had to bail out of something

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I was gonna do at the end of it. We just thought it was, you know, do a reset and everything would be fine. So we are going another direction and hopefully from what

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Rich says, it still sounds good. So we're gonna go from there. All right, so quickly, I want to respond to a program and it came out of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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It is about the next Kept Pure in All Ages conference.

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Jeff Riddle going around doing this thing. He went to London and did this thing there and nothing has changed.

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Nothing can change. I mean, once, you know, the TR only position cannot be anything other than what it is.

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It can't advance. It can't come up with new arguments. It's stuck with what it's stuck with.

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So, but this is in the OPC. And so I wanted to respond to some of the stuff

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I said. Now, even Greenville immediately responded when I linked on Twitter.

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I said, I'm gonna respond to this. Hey, I hope you heard at the beginning, our seminary doesn't take a stand on this, so on and so forth.

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So let's listen to that. The conference exists to issue an earnest but brotherly call to return to the classical

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Protestant view of the biblical text of scripture, which led our fathers in the faith to receive the textus receptus as the authentic word of God, especially in light of the radical changes that are coming to both the

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Greek New Testament text and our English translations. And that was a quote pulled from the conference website, which is keptpure .com.

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Now, so there's the description. Obviously, I'm going to fundamentally disagree with that assertion.

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I'm going to fundamentally disagree with the assertion that any of our fathers made a specific decision with knowledge concerning the text of the

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New Testament as if the TR existed as a body that was distinguishable from critical text or anything else.

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They did not have the information we have today. It is historically anachronistic to say these things, but it is the essence of the perspective to do so.

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But I think this is what they are referring to. And I do want to note that some of our faculty here at Greenville Seminary favor a majority text or Byzantine text type position, and others favor what's called the critical text position.

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So I want to make abundantly clear that today's podcast is not putting forward one position as a test of faith, but rather engaging with an important topic for us to consider and discuss as brothers.

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Okay, I get it. I appreciate that. I will confess I'm not sure how that works.

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I'm not sure how that works. We can all make our arguments, but as we will see, this position is making the assertion that the

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TR is the word of God without question. And there is no need for further study.

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The TR position says every manuscript that has been discovered since the days of Beza, irrelevant.

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Every bit of textual scholarship, irrelevant, has no meaning, has no benefit to the church at all.

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We're going to see this a little bit later on when they talk a little bit about this. But the reality is you have your standard.

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There it is. This is it. Not a word of this can be changed, not a word of it.

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So what do we need textual scholarship for? We'll be told that the best response to Bart Ehrman is this position.

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There is no response to Bart Ehrman in this position outside of, well, we've got this, why that?

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Can't say. What about its history? Can't say. Weren't the people who put that together initially,

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Erasmus, weren't they doing reconstruction? Weren't they taking manuscripts? Yeah, but that means they were doing text criticism, but we can't do it anymore.

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They did it, and that was it, because this is it. That's not a position. It's indefensible.

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It cannot come into the, it can't do apologetics. And the irony is the title for this year's conference in,

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I believe it's in June, is TR Apologetics, Ecclesiastical Text Apologetics.

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Well, there is no apologetic. Listen to my debate with Riddle, especially on Ephesians 3.

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It comes out as clearly as it possibly can that this is our text, this is the reading, because this says it's the reading.

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And the arguments that I'll use, and this is why, and it is good in hindsight, that we did the long writing of Mark and then

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Ephesians 3, because people in many other different perspectives can make the argument for the long writing of Mark, and they have.

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Byzantine priority people and majority text people, and even certain eclectic people will make an argument because there's much more, there's ancient evidence for the long writing of Mark.

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There isn't any evidence outside of a single manuscript for the text in Ephesians.

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And so the set of arguments you use here is completely different than the set over here. And the point is, for every text in the

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TR that is highly questionable, you're gonna have a different set of arguments, and they're gonna be contradictory to one another.

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The arguments that Riddle used for Ephesians 3 contradict the arguments he used for the long writing of Mark. That was the end of the debate.

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He didn't realize that. But that is the end of the debate. So they don't do text criticism.

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There is no apologetic, there is no defense. This is it, we start here, and then we'll use whatever argument we need to make to defend any particular reading of this text.

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But there is no apologetic. So I'm not sure what they're gonna be doing.

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I hope they have really cool food and stuff like that, because there you go. And Dean Burgon happens to be a contemporary of them and a critic of the

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Revision Committee. And as you read his work, especially Revision Revised, you see that this man is a master of the

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New Testament and a master of the patristic literature. And really, probably, these men probably were not in his league.

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He was just a master of these disciplines. Well, it's fascinating, because Dean Burgon was not TR only.

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Dean Burgon did not support the Kama Yohanian, which is in here, which they can't question. It stuns me on two levels why people keep going back to Burgon, okay?

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First of all, he's not supportive of most of the people who cite him. All right, the

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King James Only guys, he could never be a member of their... Dean Burgon could not be a member of the Dean Burgon Society, first of all.

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But secondly, Dean Burgon was working with a completely different set of facts than we have today.

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And this is what people just don't understand, and this is one of the fatal problems with TR only -ism.

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TR only -ism can only exist in the printed age. And I suggest to you any theory that can only exist in the printed age, given that the

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New Testament has existed primarily before the printing press in its history, is a really bad position to hold.

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It could only exist in the printed age for many reasons. First of all, TR only -ism is fundamentally based on printed texts.

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This is not a collation from manuscripts. In fact, this one that they use, and they're going to say,

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Scrivener, 1894, this one is one they're saying, this is your default text.

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This is a Greek text based on an English translation, based on the comparison of printed editions of the

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Greek New Testament, based on about 20 to 25 manuscripts, the oldest of which was about 1 ,000 years after Christ and wasn't trusted much.

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That's what this is. But this is it. Somehow, this is the final work.

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So it's amazing, because remember, this Scrivener went back, looked at the printed editions,

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King James translators did not use manuscripts, they used printed edition. This could have been used, we don't know, but this may have been used in the translation of the

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King James Version, 1550 Stefano, but it's a printed edition. It is not handwritten, it is printed.

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This is the actual 1550, and they used this, and they liked this one because it was a nice large print.

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And they didn't have the nice lights that we have today, and LASIK, and all that kind of fun, and reading glasses and things like that.

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So I have a feeling that was really popular. But they used the five editions of Erasmus, they used

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Stefanos, they used Basic. And so what Scrivener did is he went back, and there are differences between these, and these guys admit there are differences.

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And Scrivener went back, and based on the English translation of the 1611, he created a

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Greek text based on the textual choices represented by an English translation.

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That's what they're presenting. Folks, Bart Ehrman's a bright guy, and he would tear through this like I don't,

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I would not even want to listen. It would be frightening to listen, it'd be sad. To make this your final authority.

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But there you go. Anyway, so Bergan is writing in a time period.

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So just before this is created, Bergan is writing in a time period where you have no microfilm, you have no internet, you have no ability to know where is this manuscript?

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What does it contain? What are its readings? You don't have collation.

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We have so much more information today, simply because we can find where manuscripts are.

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Now we can not only find out where they are, but what readings they contain, and we can put all this information together.

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And now it's all being put into a computer database, and so you can go online, and now you can have access to more information than Christian scholarship has ever, ever, ever, ever, ever had.

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And these men would have loved to have that, but they didn't. Dean Bergan lived before the discovery of the papyri, which are vitally important because they demonstrated that the readings found in many of the early unseals were in fact from antiquity.

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They weren't just one -off readings. They go back into the earliest period, into the second and third century.

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And so it stuns me whenever anyone goes a hundred and let's just say 40 years into the past and go there, not recognizing that 140 years ago, people simply could not do what we can do today.

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That's not modern hubris. That's just recognizing that the very thing that's changed in my own life.

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I remember how many times we went to the library in my junior high school to learn how to use the card catalog.

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Yes, the card catalog. That was high tech, and we're way beyond that now.

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Things have changed. Things have changed a lot. I don't understand going back to someone who

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I believe would be thoroughly embarrassed that his writings were being used this way.

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I really do. We've had for over the last 100 years, two main Greek New Testaments.

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The received text, which was produced during the times of the Reformation, and then this reconstructed text by Westcott and Hort and the revision committee.

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Now, I want to address terminology here, all right? Reconstructed text.

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Okay, that's a bad thing from the TR -only position. Reconstructed text is a bad thing.

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The problem is, so is this. TR is a reconstructed text.

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All you have to do is read Erasmus' annotation. All you have to do is read

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Beza. And you know that the source documents for this, the men who created these

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Greek New Testaments, like Stephanos here, were doing what we're doing today.

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They were reconstructing the text. They were dealing with manuscripts that were not identical to one another.

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They were making textual critical decisions. And while we can applaud them for the great work that they did in the context in which they did it, we also have to recognize they had a minuscule amount of information in comparison to what we have today.

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And they were not consistent. Erasmus, especially, was not consistent. And part of it was because he initially just didn't put that much effort into the

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Greek New Testament. It was just supposed to be over there. His focus was upon his Latin translation. And so to somehow go, well, but that was the only time when real reconstruction took place.

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And anything after that doesn't matter. Just dismiss it.

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Upon what basis? This is a reconstructed text. Just, that's a fact.

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Try to dispute that. Tell me that Erasmus was not comparing manuscripts that had different readings.

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Tell me he did not discuss textual critical issues in his annotation. He did. That's a fact.

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And it's a fact that the TR only, that refutes the TR only position. Because that's what you've got.

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And the experts in text critical fields are still tinkering with this reconstructed text.

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And we think it's time to return to the text of our fathers that we confess has been kept here in all ages.

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So that's kind of what a Bergonian is. It roots our movement in Reformation history, but also recent history because of the reconstruction.

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So they got them, there's actually a - Cease and desist, thank you. So that has been kept pure in all ages.

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That's borrowing from the confessional language. And the problem there in using that kind of terminology is the argument that's being made is that this has been kept pure, but this has been not, this has not.

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And so the idea is, and you're going to hear this later on, we hold this position so you can have certainty.

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And this is the 28th edition of the Nessie Island. 29th is coming out fairly soon, I would imagine. And there will be maybe a hundred differences, most of them extremely minor, but there'll be some changes between this and the 29th edition.

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Ah, you see, no certainty, no certainty. Where, my friends, have we heard that before?

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Well, we're going to, I'll let you, I'll play that to it. I'll play it for you and we'll go from there.

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But we must apply the same standards to the

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Texas Receptus that we apply to the Nessie Island text and what they're saying is, no, textual criticism ended about 1633.

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That was it. And so we're going back to the text of our fathers. Well, this is what they had.

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They didn't have access to anything. It's not like they had that and they had this and they went, oh, this is much better.

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They didn't. They had no idea about 98 % of the information in here.

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So they didn't reject this. They're going to say that later on, but they didn't. That is anachronistic, totally unfair to these earlier writers to hold them accountable for information they did not have as if they made decisions based upon stuff they did not know.

37:53

That's one of the main problems with this whole perspective. There's actually a third option and that it is, it is the reformed and the confessional understanding.

38:04

And it's just, when you look at Burgon and then Hills who followed in his track and then

38:11

Ledith and now Riddle, just stand back and look, you have these four men who've written and done wonderful things for the text.

38:20

But one is an Anglican and then the next is a reformed Presbyterian and then the next is a

38:27

Lutheran and then the next is a confessional Baptist. It's interesting to hear

38:33

Riddle being put in with those three now. That is very, very intriguing.

38:41

But we need to point out this remains a very, very fringe perspective, very, very fringe.

38:49

They want to make it sound like this is the reformed and this is the, so all these people. No, it's extremely fringe.

38:57

And needs to be recognized because the fact that when I criticize it, they tend to make all of their

39:08

Facebook groups private and things like that. And again, I'd be happy to let anyone listen carefully to the debates that I did with Dr.

39:22

Riddle and ask themselves a simple question. Am I right or am I wrong?

39:29

Does TR -onlyism present to us a methodology of doing textual criticism that would allow them taking all the manuscript evidence that we have today, recreate this?

39:48

Answer is absolutely, positively no. And I think they would agree.

39:54

I think Bart Ehrman, I think everybody who knows anything about textual critical history, methodology, anything else would agree.

40:05

TR -onlyism does not present a textual critical methodology that could reproduce this text.

40:12

They start here. The historical issues that led to this were reconstructive in their nature.

40:23

The people who brought us this were doing text criticism, but they start here. And so it's history does not matter.

40:32

Just does not matter. It's irrelevant. You can't hold this to the standards you're going to hold this to.

40:39

No, no, no, can't do that. Can't do that. I wonder if the thermostat decided to go back up in temperature because it's getting pretty toasty.

40:51

It's warm here in Phoenix. We're trying to push 90 already. It's going to cool back down tomorrow, thankfully.

40:57

But anyways, we press forward. Did I play that? Well, hopefully

41:02

I did. The color is a little off. Anyway, here. How many versions of the

41:08

Greek New Testament are there out there that are kind of a part of this kind of conversation or scholarly milieu?

41:17

Is it just two? You have the Texas Receptus and the Westcott and Hort, or are there more than two options that someone in good conscience might adopt and take as their textual basis or preference?

41:29

Well, mainly there are two, if you're going to judge their legitimacy on whether they've been printed in English or translated.

41:35

That would be the received text. Again, it was edited in the Reformation era. It was based on the text used by the churches, the worshiping community,

41:43

East and West in all ages. And there's the revised text, the eclectic text. And that's based mainly on two manuscripts, which are purported to be very old,

41:51

Sinai and Vatican manuscripts, and also some papyri. Okay, two things.

41:57

The assertion that the Texas Receptus represents the text used by the church throughout the ages. This is just simply,

42:04

I'm sorry, brethren, with all respect, it is just simply a fable. It is absolutely a fable.

42:14

Anyone, one of the areas that I've done a fair amount of study in, in fact, it's interesting.

42:21

Before I debated Bart Ehrman, I read his dissertation, and his dissertation was on the early

42:27

Proto -Alexandrian text type. It's interesting, CBGM has pretty much made the fundamental assertion of his dissertation irrelevant.

42:37

It doesn't impact anything. That's how development should be. But anyway, and I think it was

42:44

Pseudodionysius, if I recall correctly, the early Alexandrian text type, things like that. The point being that even in that reading,

42:52

I was dealing with a number of texts that are relevant to the deity of Christ.

42:58

It's something that I've been involved in defending against Muslims globally, things like that.

43:06

And Muslims will bring these issues up. And so, one of the things you immediately recognize is that Athanasius did not have this, okay?

43:22

Athanasius did not defend the deity of Christ with the TR. Please don't tell anybody that.

43:30

That is simply not true. One of the issues that I have pressed against the

43:36

TR -only position is, this position takes a 16th, 17th century printed text and makes it the standard, and in so doing, basically says, we don't have to worry about anybody back there in the early church.

43:52

We don't have to worry about what text they had. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. And when they cite texts differently than the

43:58

TR, well, we just close our eyes because we're not applying the same standards there. That is simply a fable.

44:04

It is not true. It is not true. The number of examples that can be produced are legion.

44:13

Okay, that's the first part. Secondly, only somebody reading

44:19

Burgon is gonna think the Nessie -Aland text is based on Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

44:26

That was, look, you can make the appropriate criticism of the

44:33

Westcott -Hort text of 1881 as being far too reliant upon those two great manuscripts.

44:39

That's true. But if you don't recognize that's not the 1881, you don't know what you're talking about.

44:47

You just don't. It's just, it's astonishing to me. But that's what happens when you read 140 -year -old scholarship and think this is still the case.

44:59

Both the things that were said there were historically in error, both from the patristic period and from the modern period.

45:09

It's just, it's troubling. It is troubling, brethren, to hear this kind of thing.

45:15

But then we also have the majority text. I mean, you mentioned that in the introduction, Byzantine priority majority text.

45:20

And that, from what I understand, was a well -intended move back toward the traditional text of the

45:27

Greek New Testament, a return to the majority of textual witnesses. And it's based on a huge number of Byzantine manuscripts.

45:34

And it's quite similar to the received text, but not identical. There are about 1 ,800 differences, actually, as Dan Wallace has counted them.

45:41

But Byzantine priority and majority texts are not the same thing. They're not the same thing.

45:49

There are fundamental differences in methodology there that I think are being glossed over. Doesn't end up having a huge impact.

45:58

I can, look, I can respect someone who holds a Byzantine priority perspective because they will allow for the editing of the

46:07

TR. These men will not. So you can have conversations with Dr.

46:15

Robinson and his Byzantine position, but you can't have conversations with Dr. Riddle because he can't allow,

46:24

I mean, again, Ephesians 3, the debate we did, 3 -9. There is only one reason, one reason why

46:36

TR -only advocates would defend the clear and obvious error in the

46:41

TR at that text, tradition. It has nothing to do with textual critical argumentation.

46:51

Dr. Riddle's attempts, for example, to twist P46 at that point, thoroughly refuted.

46:57

100%, no way of responding to the refutation that has been provided to them.

47:04

The only reason is we must have certainty, we make this our final authority, and therefore that's it, that's it.

47:14

Doesn't matter what you say about, we don't care. If all those other manuscripts say something completely different, we're sticking with this because there's our certainty.

47:26

That's why it's indefensible. You can't take that into debate.

47:32

Do any of the missing or questionable verses affect doctrine in any substantive or material way?

47:39

Well, definitely, the first doctrine being that of bibliology. Now, I have said over and over again, and I will defend it,

47:47

I have the S .D. Allen text here, I have the TR, I have the Tyndale House. If you apply the same methods of hermeneutics and exegesis to these three texts, you will not come up with a different faith.

48:04

You will not. If you say you will, prove it. I've never had anybody prove it.

48:11

And I've been saying it for decades. But I hope what you're hearing, notice the first doctrine, it's bibliology.

48:19

It's what we believe about the text is affected.

48:25

Somewhat circular. It may, you know, mainly the attribute that we call infallibility. We've confessed for centuries that the

48:32

Bible, because of what it is as inspired by God, is not capable of falling or erring or being mistaken.

48:39

So having inspired the Bible, the question is, did God then also preserve it? Is this something he promised to do? Do we have today?

48:45

And can we hold in our hands what the apostles actually wrote? Now, listen to what's being said, because you've heard this argumentation before.

48:53

Every King James only has to use it. Now, these guys differentiate themselves and they should be differentiated, but they're using the same argument.

49:00

The argument is I'm holding in my hand the word of God. And the King James guy goes, but it needs to be in English.

49:06

So now I'm holding in my hand the word of God. Same argument is we can't have any history to what gave me this, or then that means it's fallible.

49:22

And so when you can go back into the second century, you can go back into just and martyr, and you can start seeing discussions of textual variation.

49:34

They did not have this. This was not one of the options.

49:41

That's just a fact. So to make this argument is to say, well, yeah, most

49:49

Christians didn't really have the word of God, but we've got it now. Which is how you get the re -inspiration theory the

49:56

King James only is. They're King James only is, they don't care about this. God re -inspired the

50:02

Bible between 1604 and 1611. And now we have so much for preservation. But when these guys say this is the preserved text and then they can't show it to you in the early church, how is that any different than what

50:15

Roman Catholics say? Well, what Thomas said, remember? Thomas said the apostles passed along this tradition that you can worship images of Christ.

50:27

Really? Demonstrate that from church history. You can't. It's wishful thinking.

50:34

And to say that this was the text back then goes against all the data that we have.

50:40

That's wishful thinking. That wishful thinking is indefensible in a debate.

50:46

That's all there is to it. And I believe that God promised that. I believe Christ promised that, that not one jot or tittle would pass from the law.

50:54

So the doctrine of bibliology is probably the most effective by the Reconstructionist model. Jesus' words are true, but they have nothing to do with transmission of the text down through the centuries.

51:05

They really don't. How do you demonstrate that? What, not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law. What was he talking about?

51:11

Textual transmission? Or the abiding validity of the law? Well, both.

51:19

Come on, guys. There are several other doctrines that we could touch upon. I'd mentioned Christology in John 1, 18.

51:27

Is Jesus the only begotten son or the only begotten God? That's a textual variant, and those are two different things in my view.

51:34

And also the great proof text of the incarnation of the son, 1 Timothy 3, 16, was

51:39

God truly manifest in the flesh, or was it just he or who was manifest in the flesh?

51:45

Brett, do you have others that you can think of? Now, for those of you who have seen, and I probably should pop this up.

51:52

For those of you who have seen over the years my presentation on the

52:02

King James Only controversy or the preservation of the text of the

52:08

New Testament and all the rest of that stuff, for those of you who have seen those things, you know, oh, this will be fun.

52:21

This is called typing in the dark. I cannot see that.

52:27

Look at that, would you? That's shooting in the dark. But if you've seen my presentation for years, you know that I deal with both of these texts and talk about both of these texts.

52:42

But let's just look at them for a second, because I think it's important. A lot of folks don't follow these things, and we're either going to be having a mega -length dividing line today, or I'm once again going to skip the theater of the absurd and just stick with this.

52:59

But what they're talking about here, here's the NASB, no one has seen God at any time. The only begotten

53:05

God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him, is the rather stilted translation of the

53:14

NASB there. And I'll be honest, that's a pretty stilted translation.

53:22

But here you have only begotten God, and the

53:28

Nestealon 28th edition here, monoghanes theos. So the key is, of course, the use of theos here.

53:39

In the Byzantine text, in the majority of texts, it says monoghanes theos, which means only begotten son.

53:48

That's what you'd expect after monoghanes. Now, this is the reading. Let me see if I can pop this up here.

53:59

Yeah, well, I can, but that's really small. Well, wait a minute.

54:05

Oh, I can't do it that way. Wish I could. I think if we did it, oh, look at that.

54:17

That's pretty good. There you go, very nice.

54:22

All right, here's what you need to see. Theos is read by P75, the original hand of Sinaiticus, Manuscript 33, which is very important.

54:36

And the text itself is also read by P75, P66, so hwios, the son right here, majority that you have.

54:52

And here's the text, and the text is monoghanes theos without the article. So the difference there is whether you have the article or whether you don't have the article, but theos, the word

55:03

God, is in P75, the original hand of Sinaiticus, and then down here in the text, P66, I'm sorry, first hand of Sinaiticus, the original hand of Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and these manuscripts along here, along with these early church fathers.

55:18

So what does that mean? That means that the four earliest manuscripts we have that contain the

55:30

Gospel of John, and that contain the first chapter of the Gospel of John, important to emphasize,

55:37

P66, P75, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, they all have God. All the earliest manuscripts have

55:45

God. Now, that's a minority reading. You would expect hwios, that's what's supposed to come after monoghanes, everywhere else in John, you'd expect that.

55:58

But the reading God, now, we're gonna hear in a second, but I'll go ahead and address it now. Ledus made the argument, and some others have made the argument, that this phrase, monoghanes theos, is from Valentinian Gnosticism.

56:18

Only one problem, none of them have ever shown us a single place in any Valentinian text that uses it.

56:25

Pure speculation, no foundation. But that argument is repeated over and over again, prejudicially, because the reality is, the earliest text we have of the

56:38

Gospel of John says God. Now, I don't know what

56:43

CBGM's gonna say about this. In other words, CBGM, Gospel of John, I'm sure it's already done for this.

56:50

It's been worked on in Birmingham. I'm hoping it'll come out rapidly, soon.

56:57

It's been delayed by COVID, like everything else. But that's the one that I'm most fascinated,

57:04

I'm most fascinated to look at, when that information becomes available.

57:11

But this is textual criticism. This is looking at real stuff.

57:19

This is the difference between what's called lower criticism, where you're actually dealing with manuscripts. Can I see any one of these here?

57:25

I can click on any one of these manuscripts, and it's gonna come up and say what its date is, what it contains, where it's housed.

57:34

This is data, it's real, it's real stuff. Higher criticism doesn't worry about stuff like this.

57:43

Higher criticism is, what theories can I come up with about how this may have come into the form that it's in now, or what the author was thinking, and all sorts of stuff like that.

57:56

But you need to understand, there's a vast difference between those two. A lot of people just, they hear the term criticism, they don't like it.

58:02

It sounds liberal. You can't have a Bible without doing textual criticism.

58:11

Your Bible is the result of textual criticism. So like it or not, that's the reality.

58:19

The King James Bible did not float down out of heaven on a pillow, and it was delivered to the king's printer.

58:25

Didn't work that way, that's not how it works. Now, what's interesting is the fact that,

58:37

I wonder if I can do it this way. Well, first of all, let's get rid of that.

58:48

And I wasn't thinking about doing this, so I hate to do things like this live, and I can't seemingly get the cursor over back over here.

58:59

But I might've done this one recently enough to be able to pull it up, and to do this fairly quickly.

59:07

Dropbox, oh, wait a minute. File, open recent, please, please, please.

59:15

There it is. That looks good enough.

59:22

See if I can pull it up for you, it'll be worthwhile. Just simply as proof.

59:36

Yep, there it is, good. There it is. Now if I go play, where's that gonna go?

59:46

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yay! Okay, I said,

59:53

I've dealt with this for years, all right? Key theological examples. This is one of the key texts used by advocates,

01:00:00

King James Only Movement. Look at how modern translations try to remove the deity of Christ. Surely the variant is theologically relevant.

01:00:06

We're talking about 1 Timothy 3 .16. But is there some kind of evil agenda in operation here? God and he who do not look a lot alike, in English anyway.

01:00:15

The variant is fairly evenly matched as far as manuscripts go. Here is the evidence for 1

01:00:22

Timothy 3 .16. Let me see if I can do this.

01:00:28

I can. So you have, Has Ephanorothe and Sarki, who was manifest in the flesh.

01:00:41

Now there is one variant in D, ha. We don't care about D.

01:00:48

The os is the reading of the corrected hand of Sinaiticus. We'll look at that.

01:00:54

It was corrected about 700 years later. Corrected hand of Alexandrinus, corrected hand of C, or second scribe of C, second scribe of D.

01:01:06

It is the majority reading by far. And it is in 1739 -1881, which are important manuscripts.

01:01:12

But the text, which is Has, he who was manifest, is the original of Sinaiticus, the original of Alexandrinus, the original of C.

01:01:24

And so that's the textual data. But what does that mean?

01:01:33

What we have to remember, and this is where, again, we have the difference between doing textual criticism and simply saying, well, all that's pretty dirty, so we're just going to stick with this.

01:01:48

All right? We're just going to skip all that, and we're just going to go with that. The original, well, we don't have the original manuscripts, but the manuscript copies we have for the first 900 years of the history of the

01:02:09

New Testament are written in what's called uncial or majuscule script. And I've shown papyri on here many, many times before.

01:02:19

It's all capital letters. It's all written in one line with almost no punctuation or space between the letters.

01:02:29

Around the year 900 or so, someone got the brilliant idea, you know, if we put spaces between words and we use capital letters smaller, it's a lot easier to read.

01:02:37

And fairly quickly, that became the way everything was done. But for the first 1 ,000 years, long lines of capital letters.

01:02:45

And so the difference between he who and God is seen in these two versions.

01:02:54

And I'm sure you can see exactly what the issue is, right? Well, let me use some color to show the difference.

01:03:01

The difference is between the os and hos. Now, one thing you have to remember is that the os is a nomina sacra, the sacred name.

01:03:14

And hence in the early manuscripts, it would be abbreviated theta sigma with a line over the top.

01:03:22

So the only difference between the os and hos is two small lines. Let me blow that up so you can see.

01:03:31

So here's God and here's he who. Now, so they're both two letters.

01:03:40

You can see how very similar they are to one another. And what was the writing material of the first centuries?

01:03:50

Papyri. And what is papyrus made of? It is made of the leaves of papyrus plant placed at 90 degree angles, pressed together.

01:03:59

And what do plant leaves have in them? They have veins and lines. And so you do not have to come up with any kind of conspiracy theory to understand why there'd be confusion of these two, especially since both make perfectly fine sense in the context.

01:04:21

And I mentioned here is Codex Sinaiticus right here.

01:04:27

You can see the original hos very, very clearly. And then you can see three dots.

01:04:34

And then theos, actually in a nomina sacra form, has been written above it in a completely different ink, a completely different ink.

01:04:43

Most would say about 700 years later after the original writing. So there you go.

01:04:52

So are these two textual variants theologically significant? You better believe it.

01:04:58

Is the deity of Christ dependent upon which one of these two you choose? No, it is not.

01:05:04

Textual variants will determine which verses go into which list, but they will not change the theology.

01:05:13

They will not change the theology. And that's the reality of that.

01:05:21

Okay, so let's keep on rolling here.

01:05:29

Before I mention any others, I would just mention there's a really helpful and eye -opening essay on John 118 in Theodore Letus's The Ecclesiastical Text.

01:05:38

Very interesting that that actually, he argues that that's actually Valentinian Gnostic reading that found its way into our

01:05:45

Bibles, whereas at first you'd think, this is just a proof text for the divinity of Christ, and I can show my

01:05:51

Jehovah's Witness friends, but it actually might be a little bit different than that, maybe a little more problematic.

01:05:57

So I'd certainly commend that with resources later, but as far as others...

01:06:03

Yeah, and I simply say Letus was wrong, completely, and that argument is unsubstantiatable.

01:06:08

Valentinian Gnosticism did not utilize that terminology, and that is a prejudicial argument without foundation.

01:06:16

And if you wanna see, Letus and I went at it for a while, in 1995, and I think it's up on the website, yeah.

01:06:26

Yeah, just put in Theodore Letus, it'll pop up, and you'll see us going at it, wow, 27 years ago.

01:06:38

Somewhat interesting is Jude 5, whether Jesus takes the people out of Egypt, the

01:06:46

Israelites out of Egypt, or whether the Lord does it. Of course, Christologically, it becomes

01:06:54

Jesus at the Incarnation. We don't tend to talk about him as Jesus or the

01:07:00

Incarnation, we tend to talk about him as the Son. So a number of interesting variants there, obviously not verses that are removed, but verses that are changed.

01:07:12

Okay, so I have mentioned Jude 5.

01:07:19

Oh, I see what happened there. All right, all right, all right.

01:07:26

I see exactly what mistake was made. And I don't know if this is gonna work.

01:07:35

Nope, it's not. That's because, oh, all right, let's try it one more time.

01:07:42

That is such a small box, oh my goodness. All right, there's

01:07:48

Jude 5, bing, bing, bing, bing. And what he's talking about is, you will see in the

01:07:55

NASB, it says that the Lord, after saving the people out of the land of Egypt, but the

01:08:01

NA28 says, Hati Yesus, La 'an Ek Yesus.

01:08:07

So Jesus delivered the people out of the land. Over here, you will, and this is interesting.

01:08:16

Look at all the variants here. That is an amazing number of variants for a single text.

01:08:27

It really, really is. And what has happened is

01:08:32

CBGM has now been applied to this. And the reason that the Nessialon 28th edition went from having kurios, which is what the

01:08:40

NASB was translating to Yesus, is because, and I can really see it now looking at this, so many of these witnesses that have the term kurios,

01:08:53

Lord, have other variations associated with them. Make a long story short, what

01:09:00

CBGM does is it looks at the coherence of the witnesses. And so the manuscripts that said

01:09:06

Jesus cohere with one another, are more consistent with one another, far more than the manuscripts that say kurios.

01:09:15

So in other words, if a manuscript says Jesus, its closest relative also says

01:09:20

Jesus. But many of the manuscripts say Lord, their closest relative says Jesus. So they're not coherent.

01:09:27

And so as a result of that analysis, which we've only been able to do over the past 10 years -ish, around there, that's why the editors of the

01:09:38

NA28. Now, let me just ask you a question. There are some people that are bothered by what

01:09:48

I just said. Okay, I get it. You're bothered.

01:09:53

Look, I didn't bring it in here right now, but my dad's NA23 or something, one he used back in the 50s at Moody Bible Institute.

01:10:04

You can look at Jude 5, and you'll see manuscripts say

01:10:09

Lord, and manuscripts say Jesus, right there in the footnotes. Nothing was being hidden. There's no questions.

01:10:18

No one's trying to hide anything or anything. It's been known for a long, long time. And so what should we want out of our

01:10:30

New Testament? Well, first of all, even asking the question, does that really matter what you want out of the

01:10:39

New Testament? I mean, seriously, think about that. Do our feelings really matter here?

01:10:48

What has to be our ultimate goal? Our ultimate goal has to be what did

01:10:54

Jude write, right? What did Jude write? Not what did someone 500 years after Jude think he should have written, or a thousand years later think he should have written.

01:11:04

What does the evidence, what's the best evidence we can come up with to tell us what

01:11:10

Jude wrote? That's what I want to know. And as long as you have that as your goal, there are certain positions that are open to you, and there are certain that are not.

01:11:24

And one position that is not open to you is TR only, TR onlyism, because that's not the question of TR onlyism.

01:11:32

TR onlyism doesn't care what Jude wrote, really doesn't. What do you mean it doesn't?

01:11:38

It doesn't. TR onlyism says, Jude wrote what's in the

01:11:44

TR. End of discussion. But how do we know that?

01:11:50

End of discussion. But I want to, end of discussion. This is, are you questioning our ultimate authority?

01:12:00

But that's from 1633. Well, that's actually from 1894, but even if you go back to the

01:12:07

Elzevier brothers, their printing, that's a millennium and a half down the road.

01:12:13

Right. But it's what our fathers used. And therefore, that's what

01:12:19

Jude wrote. But there are all these witnesses, there are all these Christians that thought that he said

01:12:25

Jesus. And in fact, all the witnesses say Jesus are more consistent with each other than the ones that say,

01:12:31

Lord, it doesn't matter. But no one's ever had that information, does it matter? Nothing that we're doing today matters.

01:12:38

No textual criticism study today matters at all. At all.

01:12:46

Right? Press your TR only friends. Press them.

01:12:54

Don't let them get away with easy answers. Press them and say, okay, what would be the process whereby any word in this document could ever be changed so as to more faithfully reflect what the apostles wrote?

01:13:18

There's no mechanism. Can't be done. This is your final authority. Right? Right.

01:13:24

Right. So many of us would feel that at the very time when you have the most blatant attacks upon the text of the

01:13:36

New Testament, we have been given more information than we've ever had before at that very time. Isn't that amazing?

01:13:43

But the TR only position just simply retreats back into history and says, nope, we're not gonna worry about any of that stuff.

01:13:50

We're not gonna do textual criticism. This is the text of our fathers. Yeah, they didn't know about all the rest of this stuff, but hey, there you go.

01:14:00

There you go. Oops. Helps if I am actually back over here. Let me also follow up, if I could, on 2

01:14:08

Peter 3 .10 very briefly. When we talk about the confessional view of scripture, we're of course focusing on this phrase kept pure in all ages, that God kept his word pure.

01:14:17

But also in the Westminster Confession of Faith, we affirm that the locus of inspiration is the Hebrew and the

01:14:22

Greek text. And this new reading in 2 Peter 3 .10,

01:14:29

it's not based on any Greek manuscript and only scant versional support. And that should be alarming to those who are confessional.

01:14:37

I would agree, and I reject the reading. And the nice thing is no one is forced to accept any reading that anybody comes up with.

01:14:46

That is a conjectural emendation. And many people reject that reading and should reject that reading.

01:14:53

I reject all conjectural emendation. And if you want more information on that, put conjectural emendation in the search bar.

01:15:03

I'm not sure if that'll work, but we've done entire discussions of that. I don't know if we tagged that, but we've done entire discussions of that very issue in the past.

01:15:15

What is your goal in keeping this discussion alive? Maximal certainty in the authority of God's word.

01:15:21

There. There it is. Maximal certainty in the authority of God's word.

01:15:29

Now, who on earth could ever disagree with that? I mean, who could ever disagree that we want to have maximal certainty in God's word?

01:15:41

That is a laudable goal, but the goal should be knowing what the apostles wrote.

01:15:52

And you can put the two together, but not this way. Not this way.

01:16:01

Every group has this goal. Every group. So tomorrow night,

01:16:09

I am moderating a debate. I'm not participating in the debate. I'm moderating a debate between two young men from Apologia and two

01:16:18

LDS gentlemen on what our ultimate authority should be. And that means that once again, the discussion is going to be, has

01:16:30

God spoken and can we have certainty? Interestingly enough, I understand that the position from the other side is not going to be the position that I've certainly dealt with with Mormons for a long, long time.

01:16:41

But anyway, many a Mormon has told me that they have absolute certainty that the

01:16:48

Book of Mormon is the word of God. Absolute certainty. And I could not show them anything.

01:16:55

No facts could possibly change the absolute certainty they have that the Book of Mormon is the word of God.

01:17:00

As long as the Book of Mormon is the word of God, Joseph Smith was a prophet, that's it. Right? Look up the debate that I did with Adnan Rashid.

01:17:10

I think it was the second debate that we did in London. On the transmission of the text of the

01:17:18

New Testament versus the transmission of the text of the Quran. And his argument basically was, we have

01:17:25

Uthman's text. We're certain of it. Good enough for us.

01:17:31

Good enough for us. There was anything that happened before, it doesn't matter. We've got Uthman's text. We have our certainty.

01:17:41

So claiming certainty without providing the basis of that certainty, is extremely dangerous.

01:17:52

I document the King James Only controversy. The fact that, for example, when

01:17:57

Jerome started doing the work on the Latin Vulgate, he started a riot in Carthage when his version of Jonah was read publicly.

01:18:08

Because people had certainty in the Septuagint, the

01:18:13

Greek translation of the Old Testament. And now they're hearing somebody changing that and they rioted as a result. That Latin text that he translated became the text of the church for 1100 years.

01:18:28

And you could lose your life for questioning its reading by the time of Erasmus.

01:18:36

And so people were absolutely certain. And we all say today, but they were wrong.

01:18:46

Dan Wallace has said many times, you have to be very, very careful that you do not trade truth for certainty.

01:18:54

You do not trade truth for certainty. And while we can laud the desire to have certainty, simply taking this, ignoring its history, ignoring its character, and saying, there it is.

01:19:13

There's your certainty. Provides no one with certainty at all. Provides no one with certainty at all.

01:19:23

That's why I have spent the hours that I have spent responding to this movement over and over and over again.

01:19:33

We must do so because the certainty we're being offered is not a certainty that can survive in the apologetic arena.

01:19:44

Can't. Ministers, there's nothing more significant than when we stand before a congregation and say, listen to the word of God.

01:19:52

Thus saith the Lord, hear the words of your Savior. It is our calling to help our people believe that the

01:19:58

Bible they hold in their hands is the true, authentic word of the living God. And if there are questions about the text, footnotes that raise objections or undermine the authority of it, it can be very destructive to the faith of weaker people.

01:20:12

Now, I've just gotta stop there. You know, it's possible this fella has just never had the opportunity of examining something like this, but I'm here in Acts, and the 1550 here was the last one published before the insertion of the verses.

01:20:39

So the chapters are here, but, and there are notes, and there are variant readings.

01:20:48

1550. So are you saying that Stephanos was undercutting the faith of young believers by putting notes in the column?

01:21:02

How many thousands of notes were in the

01:21:08

King James Version? Oh, I know, they're not normally reproduced today, but they were there.

01:21:16

And the New King James, thankfully, has a full set of textual notes that are right there in the margin.

01:21:25

I am concerned because when you go to this point and say, you know, there aren't any notes in here, by the way, there are no textual variant notes, nothing in there, just like there isn't in the

01:21:42

Quran. There could be. You could have notes in Arabic Quran, but you don't.

01:21:53

That's not giving someone certainty. My Muslim friends will hold up the

01:21:59

Arabic, there are no notes in here. Right, but there should be. What do you mean?

01:22:04

Well, here's the variants, I'll show them. I'll show them to you. Can't be. They have certainty, but it's not true.

01:22:14

We should not be doing the same thing. The notes are a good thing. And our job as ministers should be teaching our people to know the history of the word well enough to know why the notes are a good thing.

01:22:28

If you're not teaching your people well enough for them to know why the notes are a good thing, you are not teaching them well enough at all.

01:22:37

You really aren't. We saints, so we want to serve our people well.

01:22:42

We also want to call our brothers to reconsider where the past century has led them in terms of scholarship and the understanding of the historic

01:22:50

Reformed confessions. We've lost something, and this is an age of retrieval and recovery.

01:22:56

Everybody talks about that, and we want to retrieve a classic Protestant bibliology.

01:23:02

I do not believe the TR -only -ism is a classic Protestant bibliology. It is anachronistic.

01:23:10

It is thoroughly anachronistic. It is reading things back into time periods that simply were not present at those periods whatsoever.

01:23:18

Just for the young people, we have concerns for the young people growing up in the church.

01:23:24

They might have gone to more of a youth group culture where they're not given a lot of the heavy -hitting stuff.

01:23:30

Then they go off to college, and they end up with a professor that has imbibed some of airmen, and he's gonna point out, she's gonna point out all sorts of changes in your

01:23:42

Bible, and they're gonna look, and they're gonna see this right in the text. And a lot of people obviously lose their faith.

01:23:50

Of course, as Calvinists, we'd say we never had it, but we still have a responsibility to teach these things, and it seems to me a very good answer to airmen, and I think the best answer would be the

01:24:01

Reformed and confessional answer. It's not an answer. Simply saying, well, yes, of course, the earliest manuscript to contain the pericope adultery is an incredibly unreliable manuscript called

01:24:20

Coda Expese Cantabrigiensis from the 5th century, the living Bible of the early church, and it's not known for the period of time before that in any manuscript copy, and it actually appears in other places in the

01:24:33

Gospel of John. In fact, it appears in some manuscripts in Luke. And yeah, all that's true, but textus receptus.

01:24:43

That's an answer? That's an answer? No, that's a retreat.

01:24:50

That's a capitulation. That's not an answer. My daughter ran into an airmanite, and she knew enough about the history of the

01:25:00

New Testament to refute him. And of course, when I challenged him to debate, well, he had to floss his cat.

01:25:08

Cat? No, he ran like the coward that he was. The man was despicable.

01:25:15

Oh, yes, Dr. Carter, he was despicable, vile man. But I didn't have to run into some,

01:25:25

I didn't have to start spinning in tight circles to respond to the blather he was putting out.

01:25:32

And I stood toe to toe with Bart Ehrman. And when he finally, years later, posted that debate, remember what he said when he posted it?

01:25:44

This wasn't my best debate. That's as close as you're going to get Bart Ehrman to ever admit anything. We can stand toe to toe on the facts.

01:25:55

We don't have to go, well, we're going to apply a completely different standard to our text that's applied to every other text.

01:26:04

That's not an answer. That's not an answer. Just a few more here. I can't believe I've done an hour and a half.

01:26:09

I guess I should have realized that was going to happen. But they also believe that the copies they held, the apographs, were the authentic word of God.

01:26:19

Now, modern Presbyterians can disagree with that, but they can't deny that was the prevailing view amongst the

01:26:25

Reformed in the Reformation and post -Reformation era. Apographs versus autographs, this is an important discussion.

01:26:32

Yes, we believe the word of God has been transmitted down through the manuscript tradition, yes.

01:26:38

But that doesn't give us the basis for stopping doing the work of textual criticism.

01:26:47

That does not mean, see, you are actually rejecting the witness of the apographs.

01:26:53

And when you say that the reading of Ephesians chapter three here is the reading you have to have, you are rejecting what was just said.

01:27:02

You're rejecting it. Listen to the debate with Dr. Riddle. You'll hear. Very clear, very straightforward.

01:27:09

We've covered this very, very deeply in the past as well. Yes, God has kept his word pure in all ages, and we hold in our hands the authentic writings of God.

01:27:16

And that's a wonderfully liberating and emboldening place to be. It helps you to believe, it helps you to preach, helps you to minister.

01:27:23

And of course, it puts you in communion with our fathers in the faith. Now, that sounds wonderful. Doesn't it sound wonderful?

01:27:29

It's liberating. Allows you to preach, this is the word of God. It puts us in communion with our fathers in the faith.

01:27:38

I'll accept all our fathers in the faith that lived and ministered before the

01:27:44

TR came along. You don't need to worry about them. You know, when they were using different texts and had different readings, and you just don't want to worry about that kind of stuff.

01:27:55

And I've literally, there was guys here locally who got into this stuff and they're like, it's just so liberating to not have to worry about textual variance or anything like that.

01:28:06

It's so wonderful. Well, I get why people want to go there.

01:28:14

I really, really do. But you ain't dealing with what God gave you. And you're not dealing with the way that God preserved it.

01:28:22

God did not preserve his text on some golden tablet up on a mountainside in a cave with some monk that lives for 700 years.

01:28:34

That'd be nice, but that's not how it worked. That was not God's purpose.

01:28:40

And we are not telling the truth when we tell people that that's how it worked out.

01:28:45

The only thing I would add is modern translations based on the critical text are missing portions of the word of God.

01:28:53

And we shouldn't be embarrassed to admit that. We believe that at least, you know, an epistles worth of material is missing from the

01:28:59

New Testament. And that doesn't undermine the authority of the word of God that is present in other translations, because we believe the word of God is quick and powerful.

01:29:07

It's able to save to the uttermost. So even a poorly translated verse on a refrigerator magnet or a bumper sticker is able to reach people and to change hearts.

01:29:16

But we want the full word of God translated into our common language and only those translations that are based on the received text offer that.

01:29:26

Now, here's really where you start to hear it. Now, the differences are not that major.

01:29:35

You've got the woman taking adultery. It's a nice story. What doctrine is dependent upon that?

01:29:42

You've got the long granting of Mark. There's some weird stuff in there. I don't believe Jesus appeared in different forms.

01:29:50

And I don't believe Jesus said that we can drink poison and get bitten by snakes and stuff like that.

01:29:58

But you want all that? Fine, dandy. This is why I say it's pretty hard for you to understand how

01:30:06

New Testament... This causes problems in New Testament departments.

01:30:12

Not many of them. I don't know of almost any Reformed seminary that has a majority of the

01:30:19

New Testament. I don't know any that has a majority of the New Testament faculty that are

01:30:25

TR only in any way, shape, or form. Vast majority accept critical text and utilize critical text.

01:30:34

But once you make that kind of an assertion, just listen carefully to the conferences that have already been done with Jeff Riddle and others.

01:30:49

This is a position that is taken to the utter exclusion of all others.

01:30:58

And listen to the conversation. We walked through the conversation that Peter Gurry and others did with Dr.

01:31:10

Riddle. And it came down to, yes, this is the ultimate authority.

01:31:21

And no, I can't really give you a methodology whereby it could be reproduced.

01:31:29

It just is. You just have to accept it. It's a fideistic position. It really is.

01:31:37

And as such, it casts doubt upon the faithfulness of everybody else.

01:31:45

You're not accepting God's word. You are rejecting part of God's word. All based not on textual critical argumentation.

01:31:54

Go listen to my debate with Dr. Riddle, Ephesians 3, and tell me that I'm rejecting

01:32:01

God's word when I accept the entire manuscript tradition and all the early church fathers that ever cited it over against pretty much just one manuscript that Erasmus had access to.

01:32:17

I'm rejecting the word of God? Really? But that's where they have to go. Because once you take this and say, this is the standard, yep, you're rejecting the word of God.

01:32:28

It's sort of hard for these folks to get along with everybody else because it's not the difference that you would have with a

01:32:36

Byzantine priority person where you can have arguments about the manuscripts. You can talk about history. It changes things, it really does.

01:32:45

When you look at the proof texts that are in the three forms of unity, the proof texts that are in the original

01:32:54

Westminster Standard, you'll note that they held to these disputed texts.

01:33:01

They believed in them, they had looked into it, they had listened to the arguments for and against, and they had said that all scripture is inspired by God.

01:33:12

That would include even the disputed text. That sounds really weighty until you recognize the anachronistic nature of it.

01:33:22

What do I mean? Says they had looked into both sides. How? How at that time period had they looked in both sides?

01:33:32

You will frequently find writers in the reform scholastic period,

01:33:39

Turretin, for example, will say, well, all the Greek manuscripts read that way.

01:33:45

He was wrong. And you know why he was wrong? Because he lived in a day when he couldn't have known.

01:33:53

There was no way to know. There was no catalog system at the universities.

01:33:59

There was no collations of the manuscripts. When Erasmus was being harassed in like 1519 or so, about the fact that he did not include 1

01:34:13

John 5 -7, the Communion in his first two editions of his Greek New Testament, he wrote to his friend

01:34:19

Bombastius in Rome and said, could you go look at the Vatican manuscript, which we call Vaticanus today?

01:34:25

Could you go look at the Vatican manuscript and tell me how it reads in 1 John 5 -7?

01:34:31

Bombastius goes, he does. He writes back to Erasmus and says, nope, it's not there. Now, how long did that take?

01:34:41

Think about it. Erasmus has to write a letter, whoa, like with a quill.

01:34:49

And then it gets rolled up and it gets stuck in a bag and some sweaty, smelly person walks for days and gets to Rome and then

01:35:00

Bombastius has to go to the Vatican library and he has to look it up and he has to write a response. How long did that take to look at one manuscript?

01:35:12

Did Erasmus have any idea where another dozen or two dozen manuscripts of 1

01:35:17

John might be found? No. He went to Basel, Switzerland to do the first edition because he thought there'd be a lot of manuscripts there and there weren't nearly as many as he thought there would be.

01:35:28

He couldn't even find one of the Book of Revelation for crying out loud. So to think that these men, most of whom were not textual critical scholars, they were not dealing with manuscripts.

01:35:40

Once Erasmus was published, they're pretty much just using what he did. To think that they had looked through the evidence.

01:35:49

They didn't even have the evidence for crying out loud. They had no papyri.

01:35:55

They didn't know about P66 and P75 for John 118. They didn't know anything about Sinaiticus.

01:36:05

They couldn't examine the original hand that I just put up on the screen for you of 1

01:36:10

Timothy 3 .16 from Sinaiticus, hadn't been discovered yet. So what do you mean they examined these things and came to a decision?

01:36:19

This is the fundamental historical error of TR -onlyism in its assertion that we can take those great men who came before us, who did not have 1 ,000th of the information available to us today.

01:36:33

They lived in a day where there was no means for universities to share their resources with one another and be able to know what's in one place and collate manuscripts or any of that kind of stuff.

01:36:45

And to say that they made a decision where they chose this over this, that never happened.

01:36:56

The church never did it. They never did it. It is a falsehood to say that it ever happened, okay?

01:37:07

Disprove it, disprove it. Show me where the church chose this over that knowingly.

01:37:15

Show it to me. I've said that for years now. Silence, because it never happened.

01:37:23

It never happened. It's fiction. It's fiction. Maybe you believe deeply, but it's still fiction.

01:37:33

It's still fiction. One last one, we'll be done. Yeah, this has become one of those gotcha questions in modern textual.

01:37:40

Okay, now this one was really funny. Let me back to that for a second. The host was asking a basic question.

01:37:50

This isn't the only TR out there, okay? Like I said, this one isn't really a TR. The TR isn't really a

01:37:57

TR. There have been many different Textus Recepti. And because different people published different editions.

01:38:09

You had the 1633 Elder Brothers and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And that's not completely identical to this. And so he asked an honest question.

01:38:18

So which TR? If you're going to say TR -only -ism, then you want to know exactly which

01:38:24

TR we're looking at. Remember when I did the written debate with Doug Wilson, that was something

01:38:29

I said. And Doug didn't know that I had this, the 1550 Stephanus.

01:38:35

But that's the one he chose. He said, well, if I'm going to pick one, it's going to be the 1550 Stephanus. Okay, I'm half,

01:38:42

I'm this close to packing that baby in a nice, tight plastic bag and taking it with me so that Doug can hold the 1550

01:38:55

Stephanus in his hand and then have to give it back to me. That'd be a lot of fun.

01:39:01

So anyways, it's an honest question. But the funny thing is the guy takes it as it's a gotcha question.

01:39:07

It really responds extremely defensively when it wasn't asked in that way at all.

01:39:15

But it's a perfectly good question. Why the

01:39:20

Greek text based on English translation based upon multiple Greek texts, why is this the standard?

01:39:28

Why not the 1633 Elsevier? There were others. Why not?

01:39:34

I mean, if you're going to make this is the word of God, every single word, no variances allowed, no footnotes, nothing like you have in the

01:39:45

King James Version that says some manuscripts say this, some manuscripts say that. Or a better rendering would be this or anything.

01:39:50

No, can't have any of that. You've got to have the straight text. And if you're going to go that far, then yeah, you better be able to answer this question.

01:39:58

It's an important question. This has become one of those gotcha questions in modern textual apologetics, which makes it kind of fun.

01:40:06

But having heard it so many times, I don't think it's as clever or convincing as people intend because every scholar acknowledges that several editions of each text base exist.

01:40:17

And they also acknowledge that there are variations between those printed editions. You know, for example, there's about 190 differences between Beza 1598 and Scrivener's 1881 edition, but only 20 or so are even translatable.

01:40:29

And if you compare that with the 3 ,000 differences between the Sinai and Vatican manuscripts and the gospel alone, we're talking 3 ,000 versus maybe 20 translatable or 190 technical variants.

01:40:42

Irrelevant. I'm sorry, brother. Irrelevant. No one's saying that your final authority is

01:40:50

Sinaiticus. No one is saying this is it. There can be no changes.

01:40:56

There can be no variations. No one's saying that, but you're saying that about this. So you're making a completely different category of claim.

01:41:07

And if you're going to claim what you claimed earlier, it's so liberating to have the word of God.

01:41:14

Okay? Then you need to answer those questions. Well, you've got differences between the

01:41:19

Nessean. Yeah, we're not making the claim you're making. We're not trying to bind people to one particular version like Sixtus did with the

01:41:30

Vulgate. I thought we learned the problem here a long time ago.

01:41:36

We should have, anyway, but we didn't. And that's the problem. So I'm wondering, you know, it's strange.

01:41:48

If you're going to be doing a whole thing on apologetics for the confessional text position, whatever you're calling it these days, wouldn't that be the perfect time to debate it?

01:42:01

Have a debate on the subject? Did we get any emails? Not yet? Okay, well, okay, well, there you go.

01:42:13

Okay, so I, again, had everything queued up.

01:42:21

But I'll be honest with you. I'm struggling a little bit. Let me just mention this.

01:42:28

I'm struggling a little bit as to whether I even want to do the Paul and Hess thing.

01:42:36

And the reason is, look, there's good stuff in there in the sense of, you know, he tries to get around 1

01:42:46

Corinthians chapter two, verse four. He pulls the latent flowers on John six. Well, you know, this was just a specific situation of judgment upon the

01:42:57

Jews, and it doesn't have general application. And John 12 talks about a later time, and everything's different.

01:43:02

So he pulls the flowers on that. And it's well worth refuting that stuff, because it's eisegesis to the max.

01:43:11

But there are people who hear that stuff, and they're going, well, I'm not sure how to respond to that. So there would be useful things, especially dealing with the textual stuff and the exegetical stuff.

01:43:25

And by the way, look it up. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but I'll take

01:43:31

Paulman's own description. He got destroyed in a debate against Dr.

01:43:36

Boyce. We've had Dr. Boyce on the program here, on the subject Calvinism, especially on Ephesia chapter one.

01:43:44

So there's other stuff out there. I had honestly, honestly, until he said that Greg Bonson was a shallow thinker,

01:43:52

I had never heard of him. I just never ever heard the guy. But on the other side is the fact that just today,

01:44:07

Hess posted just a jumbled, incoherent article.

01:44:13

I mean, it's just next to impossible to follow on a bunch of different subjects, allegedly in response to the article that I wrote and posted when

01:44:21

I was down in Wilcox on the way back, on my travels, documenting beyond all possible reasonable reputation, the fact that he had just lied about me.

01:44:37

And to this day, he continues to tell people that I said Molinus denied the

01:44:43

Trinity. I mean, there comes a point where when someone will not even utilize the

01:44:52

English language in any meaningful fashion, when they have lied, you documented every which direction, you close all exits and they just go, but I didn't, and you did say that.

01:45:08

There's no reasoning with such a person. They're not functioning as an adult human.

01:45:16

So part of me is like, why even bother? Why even try?

01:45:22

But at the same time, like I said, the biblical texts, my focus is on Paulman anyways, primarily.

01:45:31

So we'll think about it. I mean, it's very distasteful. I cannot conceive of how anyone,

01:45:39

I have expressed the truth of what I said with the greatest clarity that you can in English language, and nobody home to respond to it.

01:45:54

It's sad, but after a certain point in time, I do not have the time or the inclination to deal with that level of immaturity.

01:46:06

It's childish on a level, it's hard to understand. So anyways, I'll think about that, but you'll notice

01:46:14

I'm always putting it at the bottom rung of importance. There are other important things to cover, and certainly

01:46:21

I think we covered a lot of them today. So, oh,

01:46:27

Scotty Crawford, an hour ago. What are the two books on the dividing line?

01:46:33

Oh, okay. I was, original edition of the

01:46:40

Pilgrim's Freedom, in case we got into the thing. And then, okay, I'll go ahead and mention it.

01:46:47

Someone on Twitter this morning showed a picture of a book they were reading, and it's this book, book been in my library for many years, and I see it and its legacy and approach to fourth century

01:46:58

Trinitarian theology by Lewis Ayres, and someone, and he knows who he is, commented, and it was a mockery subtweet toward me, commented, papist, and what was the other part?

01:47:20

Let me see here, I might actually still have it here. Yeah, papist and should read books on wokeness instead.

01:47:34

That was what was said. So I was thinking about addressing it and going, look, can I say something?

01:47:42

Recognizing the fundamental foundational influence of not only

01:47:50

Aristotle, but the erroneous Roman Catholic materialogy and worldview in Thomas Aquinas does not mean you don't read

01:48:00

Thomas. It does not mean that we do not utilize and read

01:48:07

Roman Catholics. Look, my church history section in my library has all sorts of stuff.

01:48:14

I've engaged far more Roman Catholics in debate than all of my critics put together, all of them.

01:48:22

I don't know one of them who's ever debated a Roman Catholic apologist who's actually trying to convert people to Roman Catholicism.

01:48:31

That ecumenical dialogue stuff at the university, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the people that want to see the people in your congregation received into Roman Catholicism.

01:48:42

That's what we're talking about. It's unworthy of reformed people to be using subtweeting mockery rather than meaningful argumentation.

01:48:55

And I would invite them to cease and desist. But it says to me, you don't have any meaningful response if this is all you're doing.

01:49:06

You're just, it's like, well, you just go away now. We're all going to do our thing. Sort of sad.

01:49:12

I didn't go there, but now that the question was asked, those, and all the other book here that I did not talk about but I kept moving it,

01:49:20

I just happened to grab this. This is my Tyndale House, Greek New Testament. So there is a,

01:49:28

I've mentioned it a number of times before, it's fairly new, and it's a fascinating, it's basically, the readings are based upon the first 500 years of manuscript tradition.

01:49:39

So the reading has to have appeared in the first 500 years. And it's laid out differently, the canonical order's different.

01:49:48

And that's fascinating. Even some of the spelling differences, they go with what the unsealed manuscripts were.

01:49:54

So I was going to mention that in regards to what Greek New Testaments are available today because it came up in the conversation, but I didn't go there.

01:50:02

So there you go. That's what we did. Okay, well, wow, almost mega edition, fairly close.

01:50:10

I've still got, I'm preaching on baptism and I'm going to start the church history section of baptism at Apologia on Sunday, but it's going to be short.

01:50:21

And you go, right, sure it is. It will be because we have 30 baptisms after the sermon.

01:50:32

So unless we want to be there for a while, I'm actually going to have to be disciplined and keep the sermon short because we've got 30 baptisms.

01:50:43

That's something to rejoice about. That's awesome. That's wonderful. And it's great.

01:50:49

And one other thing, real quick, if you didn't see it, I posted the video from my dear brother,

01:50:55

Jeff Durbin's appearance before the Colorado State Legislature around midnight.

01:51:04

He, background, he got to the Capitol before noon and did not get to testify for 12 hours.

01:51:14

He was dead on his feet. And the testimony on that bill went to three o 'clock.

01:51:24

The bill is a bill of abolition, equal protection for all human beings.

01:51:30

And listen to it. You can just hear the, in the opposition.

01:51:39

And Jeff is cool as a cucumber, straightforward. And the one thing it's so reason for rejoicing is here in the halls of the

01:51:50

Colorado State Legislature, these people are being called to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

01:51:56

And I'm going to tell you something, sadly, the vast majority of the pro -life industry does not want to hear that.

01:52:06

They do not want that to happen. They do not want that to happen. But it is, but it is.

01:52:12

So look it up, it was posted this morning on YouTube. I put it on Twitter and on Facebook and I'm proud of brother

01:52:21

Jeff and thankful for my little contribution is I'm preaching three weeks in a row so he can run all over the place and do this stuff.

01:52:30

That's my small contribution to these things is what we're doing here.

01:52:35

So, all right, with that, thank you for enduring almost two hours of the program today.

01:52:42

Don't know exactly when we'll be back, probably on Tuesday, I would assume, but we will see.

01:52:49

And who knows what the situation in the world will be then. I have avoided getting into all that, but maybe we will next week.