Shabir Ally on the Deity of Christ, John 1:1, Greek Grammar, Robert Truelove and Abandoning Context

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00:35

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. On a Tuesday afternoon, a lot to get to today.

00:41

I want to begin the program by looking at a recent debate that took, well, just a small portion of a recent debate that took place.

00:53

Our subjects today will be the deity of Christ and the Greek language and the fact that Muslim apologists like to use really bad sources for their arguments and why that might be and why they should stop doing that basically.

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And then after looking at that and hopefully once again helping to ground believers in why they believe on that subject,

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I want to respond to a video that was posted criticizing the

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Q &A, well, a portion of the Q &A section from my entire

01:37

New Testament Reliability presentation that I did for Wretched about, what, two years ago now?

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Something along those lines. A very fascinating study in how to isolate, ignore context, and then accuse me of a lack of charity, divisiveness, all sorts of stuff like that just by completely ignoring what

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I was actually talking about. It's fascinating and hopefully useful in teaching us all how to avoid really bad arguments and actually being divisive yourself, actually, at the same time.

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But first things first. Oh, by the way, on Thursday at 5 o 'clock

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Eastern Daylight Time, we will be joined by Dr.

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Michael Brown and we are going to be talking about his new book.

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Mine says, Advanced Reader's Copy, not for resale. Well, we weren't gonna resale it anyways, but Outlasting the

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Gay Revolution, and mine's not signed. That's okay. We'll survive that too.

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I, of course, read this book, how long ago was that? I don't know, three, four months ago when

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I first mentioned it. Michael was on it shortly after I read it.

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We did something, either I was on his program or he was on mine, or I don't know, I forget what it was. And I jokingly said,

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I don't know, Michael, you sound a little bit like a post -millennialist in that book, and in some ways he does.

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I'll ask that question again. But it's called Surviving the Gay Revolution and very thoughtful exhortation, in essence, in seeking to give direction as to, you know, what do we do now?

03:34

And there are a couple books coming on that. I mentioned that Dr. Mohler's written a book and Dr. Brown's written a book and I imagine other people are writing books on the subject as well.

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So then, and he's already agreed to do this, there are two issues I want to challenge him on that have come up recently.

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One was that graphic on Facebook. Another one was from a program he did recently. And so we'll have a little back and forth on some areas of disagreement because that's what we do.

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And every time we do that, we get all sorts of people contacting us going, so that's how brothers are supposed to disagree about things.

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That's great. Or we get the other people saying otherwise. But anyway, so that'll be on Thursday of this week, five o 'clock

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Eastern Daylight Time is when that will be. So that's that's coming up in two days from now.

04:30

All right, let's get to the work that we need to do today. And it, you know, it's going to take some work.

04:36

This is this is this is not an entertainment show. If this is an entertainment show, we would have all sorts of funny sound effects and stuff like that.

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I even keep forgetting to cue up my favorite sound effect, which is Fraser Crane asking, what color is the sky in your world?

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I have that on here someplace. I've I've put it somewhere on my PC, but I don't know where it went.

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Wait a minute. I'll bet you it's I'll bet you it's in here someplace. I wonder what I called it. Anyways, it's it's around here somewhere.

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And now I'm now I'm looking going, where did where did I put that thing?

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But yeah, rabbit, shiny, shiny object. Maybe it's in Dropbox someplace.

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I don't know. It's it's disappeared. Anyhow, this is gonna be some work. Some of what we're gonna have to discuss is.

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Not entertaining, but hopefully very useful to you if you want to have a solid foundation in engaging the culture around us.

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I this debate was pointed out to me only, I believe, the day before yesterday.

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Shabir Ali, interestingly enough, has been doing a lot of debates on the subject of Trinity and Tauhid.

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Why we're not doing that book yet, I don't know. You can blame me for that if you want. But we're doing a lot of debates on that subject.

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I see changes, and this is troubling to me in some way. You know, if I had had the time,

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I don't have the time. I could have compared what Shabir says in this debate with what he said in our debate at Pretoria in 2013, where I demonstrated that Paul was identifying

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Jesus as Yahweh. And in this, he's even going to say that Paul does not identify

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Jesus as theos, which is well, demonstrate that that's a clear and obvious error.

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But anyway, what I want to get to, I'm going to be fairly brief with some of the stuff leading up to what

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I want to get to is, well, actually, let me give the background here first.

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I'm actually going to change what I'm feeding you. Sorry to throw you a curve here that quick. But I want to remind folks, because I never played this in the program,

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I did a ScreenFlow video. And this was in May of this year.

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Some of you saw the ScreenFlow video where Dan Wallace, despite his outrageous schedule and the fact he's been spending most of his time over in Greece doing that vitally important work of high -resolution digital images of manuscripts before they're lost.

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For all of us that do textual critical work, this is absolutely foundational. Anyway, before doing all of that, he actually took the time to record for me a response to Yusuf Ismail.

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If any of you have seen the debate that I did with Yusuf Ismail in the mosque, the Duma Mosque in Durban last year,

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Yusuf and Shabir both will utilize

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Unitarians as if they're Christians. There's a great inconsistency here. They would never allow us to quote

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Ahmadi scholars or anybody like that. They're not Muslims. They're not Muslims. They're Sunni Orthodoxy.

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Anybody who claims to be a Christian is a Christian and we're responsible for them. So they can deny the deity of Christ, whatever it is, they're still a

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Christian as long as they claim to be a Christian. It's a glaring double standard and I find it offensive to me.

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I'll be honest with you, it's offensive to me that they would seek to expand

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Christianity while recognizing how offensive that would be for themselves.

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But anyway, Yusuf especially has had a penchant in the past and I'm hopefully having a positive influence here in utilizing all sorts of contradictory sources.

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Grab a piece of something from over there and grab something from over here, string it all together and voila, you have an argument.

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I'm ignoring whether any of those people ever came to those conclusions themselves, whether the worldviews that are being drawn from are consistent with one another.

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You know, it's easy to string things together and put arguments together.

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Well, in fact, I should have brought in here. I was just looking at a book. I may end up being on issues, etc.

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to talk about it. But there is this book by this guy who's a professional cryptologist who thinks that he's the only one who's ever figured out what the

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Bible is really all about because he's a cryptologist. And what it is, is he'll grab something and stick it all together.

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Look, I solved it all and everybody's like, what? But there are people that go, oh, that's great stuff.

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It's called Paul and homosexuality. It's Gale Riplinger level silliness.

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It's just absurd on his face. But man, that kind of stuff is filling the bookshelves out there because, again, we're now living in a culture where people have been taught what to think, not how to think.

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And so really, really, really, really bad forms of argumentation just go right past people.

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Sounds pretty good. And it's frightening. Anyway, Yusuf has done that.

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He's done stuff with, you know, with the parallels to Jesus, pagan deities stuff.

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And I've told him over and over again, really, if you want to be taken seriously, don't even go there. It's been blown away so many times,

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I find. Well, in the debate, what he did was, you know, he'll go find these Unitarians. And he tried to make some comments about John 1 1 and claiming that Trinitarians were altering

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Greek grammar and all the rest of the stuff. And I was rather straightforward in saying, Yusuf, you don't have a clue what you're talking about.

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But I sent his comments to Dan Wallace because he specifically made reference to Dan Wallace.

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And he badly misunderstood and misrepresented Dan Wallace. And I said that in the debate. You would fail my

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Greek class and I guarantee you'd fail Dan's Greek class too. Well, Dan took the time to record a response to Yusuf Ismail.

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And I put this into a ScreenFlow video back in May. Go full screen on this?

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I didn't do anything. That's full screen.

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Okay, so you don't want full screen. That better? Well, nothing we can do about it.

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Okay, so here's the relevant section from the ScreenFlow video. I wanted to have this sort of read into the record because it's going to be relevant to some of the things because Shabir is likewise going to badly misunderstand.

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And it's interesting, neither Yusuf nor Shabir, to my knowledge, have any formal training in Greek at all.

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None. But they're borrowing from people who claim to anyways.

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And that's where they get in trouble. So here's the section from the ScreenFlow video that hopefully will be useful to you.

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Coming from the first century. And in fact, if you'll take the time to look at the debate that Yusuf and I did at Potsdam University last year, you can listen to us engaging some of the issues about the text.

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Listen to the debates I've done with Shabir Ali at University of Pretoria, University of Biola. We've engaged all those things.

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I'm here this evening to compare and contrast the Christology of the Gospel of John with that of the

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Quran. And so let's do that. And I'll cover some of the other stuff and rebuttal if I have time to do so.

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You have had a lot of Greek thrown at you. A lot of slides thrown at you this evening. I didn't make a presentation.

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I didn't think we'd be able to do that in the mosque. And so I'm going to have to explain it to you. But I have had the opportunity, the joy of teaching many people the

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Greek language. I deal with the Greek language all the time. And with all due respect to Yusuf, if Yusuf took my first year

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Greek class, I'd have to fail him this evening. Because he made a lot of errors. Because he's fought a really bad scholarship that just isn't up to date.

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He quoted my friend Dan Wallace. Dan Wallace would fail him as well, I'm afraid, because he just hasn't understood, especially the

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Greek article. It's one of the most difficult parts, the Greek language. So I don't put him down for that. So there you go.

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And later on, I did talk about the significance of the article and so on and so forth.

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But that's why I said I'd have to fail you. And basically, that's what

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Dan said too, to be perfectly honest with you. So here is Dan Wallace's response to the clip

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I played at first. And all I've got is, it was sent as a garage band thing.

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I've never used this program before, but I'm glad I had it, because nothing else would play it. But here's

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Dan Wallace responding to Yusuf Ismail on the subject of John 1 .1.

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And at the end, he will also comment on the Coptic material as well.

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Thank you once again, Dan, for taking the time to do this. Here we go. James White debated

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Yusuf Ismail earlier this year in Durban, South Africa. I understand that the debate, or at least part of it, dealt with the deity of Christ.

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James was kind enough to send me a three -and -a -half -minute clip in which Mr. Ismail was citing my work,

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Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, and attempting to show that my own analysis of John 1 .1 argues against Christ's divinity.

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Frankly, I was surprised at how sloppy Mr. Ismail was in using my grammar. Not only did he quote it incorrectly, and at a crucial point no less, but he also completely butchered my argument.

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What I'd like to do in this brief critique is to address these two points. Mr. Ismail is speaking about my treatment of the last clause of John 1 .1,

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which is traditionally translated, and the word was God. I argue that the word translated

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God, thos, is qualitative in force. That is, it has virtually the force of an adjective and could appropriately be translated divine.

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I am quick to add, however, that such a qualitative force needs to be seen for what it is.

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It is saying something about the essence of a thing. Here is what I wrote in my grammar on this point.

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In the second translation, divine is acceptable only if it is a term that can be applied only to a true deity.

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However, in modern English we use it with reference to angels, theologians, even a meal.

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Thus divine could be misleading in an English translation. The idea of a qualitative thos here is that the word had all the attributes and qualities that the

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God of 1 .1 .b had. In other words, he shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person.

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Mr. Ismail refers to my argument as follows. Daniel Wallace, in referring to John 1 .1, says the following, and he quotes, the most likely candidate for thos is qualitative, meaning a quality, is what he adds.

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And then he adds, if I say this food is divine, does it mean that the food is God? If I say you are godly, does it mean you are almighty

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God? What is truly remarkable here is that I explicitly state that modern

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English uses divine in a way that could include even a meal. But that is not what divine would mean in Greek.

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Yet Mr. Ismail not only ignores what I am saying about the difference between modern English and ancient

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Greek, but even uses the very illustration that I reject. He adds that calling someone godly does not of course mean that they are almighty

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God. Here he is taking an English adjective, godly, as though it meant the same thing as divine.

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Again, this is based on English etymology and has nothing to do with Greek. Mr. Ismail then puts up a slide that begins,

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Wallace has to concede as though the qualitative understanding of thos is in any way a concession on my part.

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Instead I make the point that a qualitative thos here underscores the real deity of Jesus Christ.

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Mr. Ismail goes on, as though quoting me, with the following, and so he says that possible translations in respect of that,

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John 1 .1, is what God was the word was. And then Mr.

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Ismail adds his understanding of what I am saying. He doesn't mean that the word was almighty

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God. The he here can only mean me. Mr. Ismail is saying that in my grammar

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I don't mean that calling the word divine is the same thing as claiming that he is almighty

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God. Where does he see that in my grammar? I explicitly discuss on the very page that Mr.

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Ismail is incorrectly quoting, page 269 for those of you who care to look it up, what

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I mean by qualitative. Here is the quote, the idea of a qualitative thos here is that the word had all the attributes and qualities that the

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God of 1 .1b had. In other words he shared the essence of the father though they differed in person.

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The construction the evangelist chose to express this idea was the most concise way he could have stated that the word was

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God and yet was distinct from the father. Now in the space of less than a minute

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Mr. Ismail has made numerous mistakes in both quoting for my grammar and understanding even the immediate context.

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I tell my students that when they quote some source in their papers they had better triple check their work to make sure that they quoted the source correctly.

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I think Mr. Ismail must have missed that memo. It is imperative to get it right when quoting someone whether you agree with them or not.

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Here is Mr. Ismail again and he, referring to me, concludes by saying, such an option, meaning adopting the idea that the word

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God should be qualitative, does not impugn necessarily on the divinity of Christ.

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There is no kind way to put this. Mr. Ismail has not only badly misquoted my grammar, he has misrepresented the argument significantly.

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One more time here is Mr. Ismail's quote of my grammar. Such an option does not impugn necessarily on the divinity of Christ.

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But here's what I really said. Such an option does not at all impugn the deity of Christ.

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I immediately add, rather it stresses that although the person of Christ is not the person of the father, their essence is identical.

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At the end of this diatribe Mr. Ismail then adds, I'm not making up anything. Check it up. I think he meant check it out.

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See what Daniel Wallace says. Okay, I did. He misrepresented what

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I had to say. I'm left with one of two views about Mr. Ismail's discussion of my treatment of John 1 -1.

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First, he either totally misread what I had to say about John 1 -1 and really was urging people to read my grammar for themselves, thinking that they would find the same thing he thought that he found.

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Or he assumed that his audience would not look at my grammar, but instead he was using a typical debater's ploy, cite a source, although he doesn't give the page number, and ostensibly encourage people to check it out, but assume or hope that they will not.

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If it is the former, this impugns Mr. Ismail's intelligence, because he is apparently not capable of reading even the narrowest context to get an author's meaning.

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If it is the latter, it impugns Mr. Ismail's character, for in this case he would be intentionally deceptive, both in his representation of what

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I wrote and in his half -hearted plea for his audience to look it up for themselves. Either way, there is blatant misrepresentation here.

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Mr. Ismail then invokes an article by Brian Wright and Tim Raschutte on the sahidic coptic of John 1 -1, an article which was published in the

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Journal of Theological Studies in 2011. This is a well -known and very well -respected journal.

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It publishes quality articles regardless of the viewpoint the authors take. Mr. Ismail notes that the authors, quote, reason that the indefinite article in the coptic translation of John 1 -1 has a qualitative meaning.

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He seems to be implying here that Wright and Raschutte are on his side, namely that Jesus is not described as true deity in John 1 -1.

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He doesn't elaborate much on this, at least not in the clip that I heard, but had Mr. Ismail actually read the article by Wright and Raschutte, he would have realized that they were not saying what he is claiming.

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Here's a direct quote from page 509 of their article. This qualitative, descriptive understanding makes the best sense within John's prologue.

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The Copts, that is the Coptic people, understood John to be saying that the word has the same qualities as the

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God of the Bible. In sum,

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Mr. Ismail has not only butchered what I wrote in my grammar, but he has apparently misunderstood what Wright and Raschutte wrote in their article.

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All of us would claim that John 1 -1 affirms, and affirms strongly, unequivocally, the deity of Christ, and the basis for that claim is both

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Hellenistic Greek grammatical usage and Sahitic Coptic usage. For Mr.

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Ismail to claim that a qualitative thos in John 1 -1 means anything less than true deity is to not only misrepresent what we are saying, but also to misrepresent what the

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Bible is saying. Well, there you go. And again, I am very appreciative.

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Yes, well, there you go, indeed. And I am very appreciative. Dan was straightforward, as always is, and took that apart as it needed to be taken apart, and dealt with.

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There is no question about that. So, what is important there is that Muslims are willing, and I am not sure why, because the

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Quran makes it clear, the author of the Quran does understand that Christians are saying something that he is objecting to.

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And evidently the reason they are trying to do this is to say, well, yeah, but the

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New Testament doesn't really support what later

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Christians came up with. But it clearly, obviously does. And I guess they can just take whatever approach they want because the author of the

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Quran didn't bother to argue against it, didn't bother to show any familiarity with it, did not interact with it on any meaningful level whatsoever.

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So, anyway, you have this searching around for standard

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Unitarian arguments against what we find in the New Testament, specifically in John 1 .1.

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So, let's go to Shabir's comments. Like I said, I'll be brief at the beginning. There are some things

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I want to mention, but I specifically want to look at what he said about John 1 .1. Because it's just, you know, he has his

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PhD in Chronic Interpretation now. From my perspective, that means that if you know how to utilize and do research in regards to the

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Quran, that means you should apply the same standards in the research that you do for everything else.

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That's what scholarship should be. And I think this is just beneath Shabir's station, to be using these kinds of arguments.

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They're just, there's bad arguments. So, here's, let's just,

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I sort of picked a spot in his opening statement that hopefully isn't too far away from where we need to go.

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Let's look at the New Testament. And before I do, let's say something about the development of ideas as an introduction to reading the

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New Testament. In the intertestamental period, that is the period between the Old and the

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New Testament, people began to speculate. Perhaps there is an intermediary between God and man.

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God, the philosopher said, is so unchangeable and so remote that he does not deal with the changeable world directly, but he deals with the world through some kind of intermediary.

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That could be like the divine mind, or the Logos of God, his reason, or his

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Sophia, his wisdom. So maybe he doesn't create the world directly, he creates through an intermediary.

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But that was an idea, but it did not lead Jews to worship something other or someone other than Yahweh.

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Now, in the New Testament, we have some developments. Some people now begin to think of Jesus as that intermediary.

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We have in one of St. Paul's writings that Jesus is that agent through which

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God created the world. So here we have the agent idea. But Paul does not attribute to Jesus the title

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Theos, which in Greek would mean God. Paul always distinguishes between God and God. Okay, now, just a minute guys, stop.

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What do you mean? So you reject Romans 9 .5, you reject Titus 2 .13.

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No explanation is given here. My assumption would be, you know, you can find people who would say

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Romans 9 .5 is not in reference to the deity of Christ. There's a very strong argument made for it. You'd quote one of them, and then

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I would imagine you'd attack the authorship of Titus. I guess that's the only way around it. But none of that has been established.

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It's just, well, Paul doesn't do this. Well, in our debate in Praetoria, he admitted that in the

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Carmen Christi and in the use of Isaiah, Paul's identifying Jesus as Yahweh. So has he forgotten that?

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Has he decided that he was, that I was wrong about that, but hasn't explained why that is? I don't know.

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I don't know. But I'm like, no, but Paul actually does use that term of Jesus.

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That's not his normative term. But why make these kinds of,

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I don't get it. And Jesus. He's granting Jesus a lofty status as creator of the world, but still as an intermediary between the ultimate creator

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God and the world. So he's an intermediary, but not Yahweh himself.

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So this is why when Paul would speak. So again, in Praetoria, what was his objection?

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That can't be true because that would make Jesus Yahweh. Exactly. Exactly. So now we've got this intermediary thing going on.

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I want to see if this, if I move this, if it's going to mess you up. Good.

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It sticks with it. Good. All right. Now I won't have the, the doc jumping up in front of it every few seconds whenever I try to stop it.

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All right. We press on. Jesus. He would speak of Jesus in a very exalted language.

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And some of our Christian friends would say, see, that means God. What you're looking at is that when, when we look up to our creator, according to this concept, what you're seeing is

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Jesus. You're not seeing the ultimate creator because as far as you're concerned, Jesus is the one who created you because he's the intermediary, the agent through which

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God created everything. So he is your creator, but that does not mean that he is the ultimate creator.

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And this is a distinction that we have to keep in mind when Paul speaks.

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This of course is your standard modern Unitarian argument hasn't been established, but he's adopting it from not so much

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Jehovah's witnesses, but a bunch of the online guys that are out there throwing this stuff out there.

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But it goes again, directly against what was demonstrated in our debate in Pretoria about the very earliest sources.

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And his argument then was not to introduce some kind of, of representative argument, but instead to go back to the old

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Testament, which established my argument that the earliest followers of Jesus clearly held the highest view possible of Jesus.

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And that is seen in Mark, that's seen in Paul, that's seen in James, that's seen in all the earliest strata of tradition, if we want to use that, utilize that terminology in regards to the

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New Testament. The Shema Yisrael, which Israel was commanded with,

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Shema Yisrael means hero Israel. In Deuteronomy chapter six, verse number four, it says, hero Israel, the

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Lord, your God, the Lord is one. Now, I've translated Yahweh by saying the

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Lord God. But if you look at the New Jerusalem Bible, where the name is retained, it will say, hero

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Israel, Yahweh, your God, is one God, or Yahweh alone.

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So the name Yahweh is retained. Paul now is using a translation of Yahweh.

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Remember, we said that the word Yahweh had a history, it came to Jehovah eventually, because the

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Jews did not pronounce the name when the Jewish Bible was translated into Greek.

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Hold on a second. Now, how does Shabir know when the

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Jews stopped pronouncing the divine name? When was that?

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You certain that in the days of Jesus, that had already been established? Yeah, the

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Greek Septuagint uses kurios, but is that indicative of the pronunciation at that time?

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I mean, we don't know when the vowel pointing was inserted under the Tetragrammaton, using the vowel pointing of Adonai.

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I mean, the pointing of the text comes long after Jesus. So Shabir just assumes so many things and presents them as facts.

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And the problem is, most of the time in debates, you can't challenge all of that.

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I think I do about the best I can in challenging as much as I can get to, but time is always getting shorter and shorter as you move through a debate, not longer and longer, which would probably be the logical way to debates, have short opening statements and then longer to develop everything after that.

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That would probably be the best way to do things, but I haven't found too many people that actually want to do six hour debates.

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Well, except the Church of Christ folks, as long as it's on Acts 238, then they'll do that. Instead of rewriting the name

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Yahweh or Jehovah, the translators translated that word or replaced it rather, not translated, replaced it with the expression the

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Lord. So as the Jews were saying Adonai, our Lord, the Greek translators put the

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Lord. So now when one reads the Old Testament, instead of finding the word

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Yahweh in the Greek Bible, one is finding the Lord, and the

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Lord is an ambiguous term. Now I want to remind you of my caution about vagueness. Now we're using a vague term,

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Yahweh, very specific. The Lord, very general. May I point out that Allah can be both specific as well as general, depending on who's using the term.

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That, I mean, just means the God, and hence could be El, Elohim, all sorts of stuff like that.

33:53

So while Yahweh is a personal name, I'll grant that, context and usage can very much make specific the use of kurios.

34:07

Hakurios, kurios, whatever the, however it is. If you're quoting an

34:13

Old Testament text that uses kurios in the Septuagint, but uses Yahweh in the

34:19

Hebrew, is there really, is it vague? So when the

34:24

New Testament writers quote texts using kurios of Jesus that in the Old Testament Hebrew used

34:30

Yahweh, how is that vague? How is that vague? It's not.

34:36

So, correction. It can be used for ordinary human beings.

34:42

In Matthew's Gospel, chapter 23, many parables are told in which the term Lord, or kurios in Greek, is used for ordinary individuals, human beings.

34:54

In Arabic we have it as well. Rab can mean the Lord God, or it can refer to a human master.

35:03

In Hebrew, rabbi is still being used, meaning my master, my teacher.

35:08

It's similar to maula in Arabic. So this is ambiguous. Now when

35:13

Paul and other writers are speaking about God, they sometimes take Old Testament passages where Yahweh is mentioned, and they start in a tantalizing way, putting it in such a manner that when our

35:26

Christian friends read it now, they're thinking, oh, it looks like Jesus is that Yahweh. A tantalizing manner?

35:36

Seriously? What do you mean by a tantalizing manner? You mean like in Hebrews 1, where you quote from the text specifically about Yahweh's unchanging nature, and you say that's the

35:50

Son? That's not tantalizing, that's direct. That's not just suggesting something, that's stating it.

35:58

But what needs to be distinguished very clearly is the usage of the Lord, which is ambiguous and vague and more general, and a reference to the

36:08

Lord God, the ultimate God, and Paul does make that distinction.

36:13

We have to be aware of this. So when we read Paul's writings, whose writings are the earliest that we have of the

36:19

New Testament, we should keep that distinction in mind. If we keep that distinction, then when we go to John's Gospel, we understand.

36:28

Okay, here we go. Now, what Shabir has done is he has suggested the idea.

36:36

He hasn't proven it. Hasn't even started to do the preparatory material necessary to prove his point.

36:44

But this is something he does all the time. He'll say, well, some scholars have suggested, and then five minutes later, it's taken as a given fact.

36:52

This happens over and over again. It's a regular part of his presentations. And now we're going to go to John, and we're supposed to go to John with the idea of Jesus isn't

37:06

Yahweh. He is a representative of Yahweh. I haven't proven that.

37:12

I haven't even dealt with the text to the point of being able to even begin to say we have established this, but we're going to use this as our way around what

37:21

John has to say. But now let's get to John, because this is what I wanted to get to. It's happening. For John's Gospel as well, there is the ultimate

37:30

God, the only true God, according to John chapter 17, verse number 3. Jesus looks up into heaven.

37:36

He's praying, and he's saying, this is eternal life, that they may know you as the only true God, and Jesus, your messenger as Christ.

37:45

Well, that's not what John 17, 3 says, of course. And while, of course,

37:51

John 73 is a favorite text of Unitarians, only a part of it is.

37:58

Because what they want to do is they want to say that Jesus is speaking in ontological categories, and that he is saying that the

38:05

Father, in distinction from himself, is the only true God, so Jesus is denying his own deity.

38:12

Now remember what Jesus actually says, this is eternal life, to know you, speaking of the

38:19

Father, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. To have eternal life is to know both the

38:28

Father and the Son. And in the very next two sentences, he is going to speak of his own eternal pre -existence in the presence, glorious pre -existence, in the presence of the

38:45

Father. Which to any Jewish person reading this text, you know how

38:52

God is presented on his throne, you know what's in Isaiah 6, you know what this means. This is the same level of blasphemy of, of, that Jesus commits in, in John, in Mark chapter 14.

39:04

You will see the Son of Man, see at the right hand of power, coming on the, that's Daniel, Psalm 110, being brought together, you've heard the blasphemy, ripping clothes, he's worthy of death.

39:13

Okay. So it is a complete, I mean, what our

39:19

Muslim friends need to understand, this would be like my, and this is, this is where I have challenged

39:24

Shabir on this before. And I have it queued up here, but I have Shabir rebuking

39:32

Robert Maury for isogetically quoting the

39:39

Quran and ignoring what came in an Ayah just a bit down from what he had quoted.

39:46

But that's what Shabir does all the time. Double standards, It's inconsistency. One standard for the

39:51

Quran, completely different standard for anything that he's opposing. That's that's the problem.

39:59

That's what we've been documenting now for, well, coming nine years, 2006 was our first our first debate.

40:05

And here's where it's happening now. You take John 17, 3, you ignore John 17, 5, you ignore the overall arching context of John himself, starts with John 1, 1, ends with John 20, 28.

40:16

You put all together and you can honestly say that you're representing John. I mean,

40:22

Bart Ehrman even says John's obviously presenting the incarnational deity of Christ model, et cetera, et cetera.

40:28

It's obvious there really isn't any argument about it. And it's true. There isn't except for Unitarians, but they've got their religious reasons.

40:37

So this is this is, you know, you just grab that out there, ignore its context, read something into it, and then we're going to read that backwards into the prologue of John rather than starting with the prologue of John.

40:53

This is this is not how you do exegesis of anything. I mean, if you did this to a

41:02

Wall Street Journal article today, you could make it say the exact opposite of what the author intended.

41:08

Start in the middle, bring in some foreign stuff, read it back into the beginning. I mean, this is not how you read anything, but this is how the

41:17

Bible is handled by all sorts of folks, all sorts of folks. So he's distinguishing between himself and the true

41:24

God. It is true that John's gospel also uses the term

41:29

God to refer to Jesus, but not the ultimate God. John's gospel begins in the beginning was the word and the word was with God.

41:38

And the word was divine is the best translation because the word used there in Greek is

41:44

Theos, which means God. But it can mean a God as opposed to Hotheos, which means definitely the

41:52

God. All right. Now, we have what's amazing here is this.

42:01

This goes all the way back in its error. Well, of course, it's your standard

42:08

Jehovah's Witness error. Some of the very first videos that we ever posted that I did sitting at my desk long, long ago, 2006, refuting

42:21

Akhmed Didat was Didat making this exact error.

42:28

This is what Dan Wallace just shredded, took apart, refuted to the nth degree.

42:38

And yet here it is again. And I just have to ask why? Why keep going back to already discredited arguments and repeating them?

42:49

Is it because you feel that your opponent isn't gonna be able to point those things out? No, that's not a meaningful reason for repeating bad arguments for anybody.

43:01

But let's switch over to, oh, come on.

43:09

I gotta do this again, da -da, da -da, da -da, da -da, da -da, there.

43:16

Let's switch over to accordance and let's, I know lots of people in this audience, you already know this.

43:24

Refresh your time, and we've always got new listeners, new viewers, gotta go back over some basic stuff once in a while.

43:35

What is the error in what Shabir Ali just said? Well, here is the key phrase here in John 1, 1c.

43:45

Qaithaos ein halagos. Now what you have in the prologue, in the beginning was the word.

43:52

In the prologue, John utilizes the imperfect form of aimi, right here, ein, when referring to the halagos.

44:03

When he refers to anything else, he uses a genitah, for example, verse 3, panta diao tu, a genitah, all things were made through him.

44:11

A genitah is the aorist form of genomai, and the aorist refers to a point action normally in the past.

44:20

So, a point of origination. But ein is timeless existence in the past, there is no point of origination with it.

44:29

And so, when he refers to the halagos, he consistently uses ein until verse 14, when in verse 14, qailagos sarx agenitah, the word became flesh, because the word became flesh at a point in time.

44:41

This is the incarnation that is found there, this is specific construction on the part of the

44:47

Apostle John. So, the first phrase, in the beginning was the word, as far back as you want to push that archaic, the word is in existence, the word is eternal.

44:57

The second phrase, the second portion of the verse, qailagos ein pros tantean, and the word was with God, pros tantean, face to face with, pros, and again, it's an eternal relationship, so there is a relationship between the halagos and whatever tantean is, who we're going to see in verse 18 as the father.

45:18

And then we get to the last phrase here, qaitheos ein halagos, and what

45:24

Shabir is saying is, is that if John wanted to say that Jesus was the ultimate

45:31

God, now, of course, I would like to remind Shabir that John is a monotheist, and that this idea of ultimate gods and lesser gods is more of a

45:44

Greek concept than it is a Old Testament concept. Now, there are certain Old Testament scholars that want to play around with that particular issue too, but what he's saying here is that if this term theos is to mean truly

46:05

God, that it would have to be qaitheos, that this word, this letter here, the article, would have to be in front of theos as well, so it would have to read qaitheos ein halagos.

46:21

That's what John would have to have said, according to what Shabir just said.

46:27

Now, if you read Greek, you know that that's wrong, and in fact, should know that that's wrong by the end of first year

46:36

Greek, don't, I've certainly had students in first year Greek that would have been able to catch that.

46:43

If not first year, you'll definitely catch it second year. Why? Because when you have a copulative sentence like this, when you have a, well, you've got a phrase here, and you have the verb ein, and it's, you've got two nouns in the nominative, and one has the article and the other does not, that is the standard way for Greek to tell you what the subject is and what the predicate nominative is.

47:25

And so just looking at it on that level, the fact that lagos has the article and theos does not, is simply telling you lagos is the subject.

47:35

So the correct translation is the word was God, not God was the word.

47:41

That's one of the things that people struggle with when they first start reading Greek is that we

47:47

English speakers are so word order oriented that, and I think if, if we read more poetry and things when we were younger, we wouldn't be as word order oriented and would not struggle as much with foreign languages.

48:02

But anyways, we don't do much of that anymore. But we're so word order oriented, check for updates.

48:11

No, not right now. Thank you. That's a, that we just want to go with, and God was the word.

48:20

But the language is telling us, no, the subject remains the lagos. Just as in the first clause, we may render it in the beginning was the word, but the word is the focus of what's being said.

48:39

The word was with God, the word's still the focus. And the third clause, the word was God, same thing.

48:46

The focus is always on the lagos. So if there was an article before both nouns, what happens then in the language is that we're making both nouns interchangeable.

49:05

So you could render it. God was the word. The word was God. It basically takes the copulative there that it's functioning in that way.

49:15

It takes the noun, I'm sorry, the verb, the verb of being and turns it into a equal sign.

49:24

So if as Shabir and as Jehovah's witnesses, and as all other confused

49:30

Unitarians insist, if it said

49:36

Hathaos, then what it'd be saying is all of God is all the word and all the word is all of God.

49:45

So the distinction that was just made in the preceding clause between the lagos and theon, the relationship that that would be contradicted in the very next clause, it would be incoherent.

50:03

Now you also have the issue of the word order that is used. And there has been much ink spilled over the fact that the us is an arthritis and pre -verbal.

50:21

That is, he could have written Kai halagos and theos if he wanted to and put the us post -verbal, but he didn't.

50:35

And that's what Dan Wallace was talking about. Is that by placing theos pre -verbally before the verb ain, that this is describing the nature of the lagos or as I was,

50:52

I was going to, I should have written it down, but, uh, the terminology, the phraseology he used in the video was, this is simply the most efficient way that the author could express the statement that Jesus was

51:14

God. This is the most efficient way that he could do it. And so he's not identifying the lagos as the theon with whom he was.

51:25

That's going to become explicit in verse 18 because no one has seen God, the father, it's the monogamous theos, the unique God.

51:36

He has exegeted him. He has made him known. But of course that would require you to actually want to know what

51:44

John meant and to actually read all of the prologue and go, what did

51:51

John intend? And I don't think Shabir Ali wants to know what John and I don't think

51:59

Unitarians want to know what John said. And Jehovah's Witnesses definitely don't want to know what John said. It's pretty easy to recognize when someone is just utilizing a text as a means of argument and not really seeking to enter into it in any meaningful fashion.

52:19

So there you have it. And it's not just Muslims you're going to hear making this kind of erroneous argument.

52:29

Jehovah's Witnesses do it. It's, it's, it's repetitive. You may be sitting there going, do you really expect us to know that stuff?

52:40

Yeah. I would like to say that in the day in which we live, yeah.

52:47

I'm sorry, but I'll be pretty honest with you. I see kids playing video games that have significantly more complex instructions than the level of what

53:00

I was just talking about there. So I do struggle a little bit when Christians say, well, I don't know, it should be so complicated.

53:09

Our apologetic has to be just as complicated as the attacks upon the faith are, right?

53:16

You can't give more simplistic answers than the level of complexity and advanced level of argumentation of the arguments being presented against the faith, can you?

53:30

So I think it's important that we understand that. And for me, I mean, just the contemplation and meditation upon the prologue of John, just John one, one, an amazing thing to consider the gift that these words are.

53:50

I mean, it's one of those places where the veil of eternity itself is, is drawn aside.

54:01

And we are able to see the relationship of father, son, and spirit. We don't deserve this.

54:08

In his condescension and grace, he provides this to us. And so we should enter into it as fully as we can.

54:15

And when we do, then we will be able to very quickly recognize the misrepresentation of our faith and our text that are made by those who oppose our faith and our text.

54:27

So I want to get to that. I hope that's useful to you. And we have more to do, however.

54:40

And oh, I can't do that because I minimized all the windows, didn't I? There that goes.

54:49

And this thing does not like when I do that. There it is. We found it eventually.

54:56

It's not a real fast way of doing it, but it works. And I hope you all can give us that time.

55:02

All right. Switching gears, because I was going to do all this in an hour, but obviously

55:08

I'm not. We're going to press on here because I said we're going to do this. And so we need to do it. But I don't have as much time as I'd like to have to address this.

55:17

A Robert Truelove posted a video a couple of days ago.

55:26

I had actually thought that there was sort of a truce or at least an understanding. Once I had seen his videos where he was basically presenting a

55:40

Byzantine text, Byzantine priority position. I really don't have a problem with people like Dr.

55:47

Robinson, the Robinson Pierpoint text, things like that. I obviously disagree, but we have enough common ground that we don't have to be in constant warfare and the like.

56:04

But then I saw this video and I was really taken aback because remember, this had all started when a comment had been made about how the only reason that I get invited to mosques is because of my text position.

56:22

And the Muslims will use that to mock the Bible and stuff like that. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

56:29

And that's what had started the initial exchange. In this video,

56:38

I am accused of being uncharitable, divisive. We speak of the

56:45

James White distortion field. I mean, and I'm sitting here going, what on earth prompted this?

56:53

I mean, I, I hadn't, you know, but anyway, I won't,

56:58

I won't go into speculations on, on that. Uh, only to say that my real problem here is this is really a study in how not to make arguments, um, in ways how

57:12

I try to avoid doing what Pastor True Love did to me. I don't want to do this to other people.

57:19

I, sometimes you fall into it. Um, sometimes you think, you know, the background when you actually don't, whatever.

57:29

Uh, and, and some of that just, it just comes from where we are today with social media and, you know, people expect you to respond to stuff just like that anymore.

57:41

And, uh, it leads to, I think, uh, uh, level of shallowness to the, to the dialogue as a result.

57:52

Anyway, what he's critiquing is a, evidently a portion of, it's a video from Wretched Radio.

58:03

What he doesn't seem to recognize. And I don't know how he could not recognize this given that, um,

58:10

A, the New Testament Reliability presentation that I gave, uh, at Wretched before this, this was just the

58:20

Q and A section, section after the presentation is widely advertised.

58:28

Um, I have done it, I've probably done it at least a hundred times.

58:34

I've done it all across the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Germany, Ukraine, South Africa, and Australia.

58:48

Might even, might have even done in Peru. I'm not certain about that. Um, I've done it for years.

58:56

The whole presentation was recorded at Trinity Law School and is available. Um, it's, it's my most popular presentation.

59:08

And what he's reviewing was that after I get done talking about why we can trust how

59:18

God has transmitted the text to us, Todd Friel came up and he asked some questions.

59:24

And one of the questions that he asked was about King James Onlyism. Now, what

59:31

I'm criticized for here is all sorts of misrepresentation and attacking the

59:38

TR. And if Pastor True Love had watched what came before, every objection would be refuted.

59:49

Every single one of them. You want evidence? Let's, let's give you some evidence. Let's give you some evidence here.

59:55

Um, here is, I'm gonna change this on you here.

01:00:01

Uh, here is some of the material that comes from my presentation.

01:00:12

Now, one of the things that Pastor True Love says is, you're making it sound like, uh, those 5 ,700 manuscripts, they, uh, they support the critical text and there's only 12 manuscripts behind, uh, the, the

01:00:28

King James and so on and so forth. I had already explained to the entire audience.

01:00:34

In fact, uh, I'm not sure if, uh, Red's still in channel, but Red was in the audience that particular evening there in, uh,

01:00:43

Georgia. And he can tell you this. There's no question that this screen right here was in the presentation.

01:00:50

And you'll notice what it says. The majority of the 5 ,700 plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1000

01:00:57

AD, comprising the majority text. And I know this was in the presentation too.

01:01:06

Uh, here's a graph showing the various kinds of manuscripts, the papyri in blue, the uncils are in green, the minuscules are in yellow.

01:01:15

I use this to discuss the transition from maguscule text to, to, or uncil text to minuscule text starting in the ninth century, how quickly that, that happened and in discussing, you know, how difficult it was to transcribe maguscule text.

01:01:33

And, uh, in the sense that it's, you know, basically a bunch of capital letters with no spaces and no punctuation, it's sort of a bit of a challenge, but, um, and it led to many of the examples of Homo Eiteluton and dittography and, and the various scribal errors that make up the vast majority of the textual variants we have in the

01:01:55

New Testament manuscript tradition. So I break it down according to, to, uh, the centuries here.

01:02:01

And, and, uh, that was definitely in there. I don't know if this one was in there or not, because it depends on how much time

01:02:08

I have. And I don't remember exactly what Todd had said we had time -wise.

01:02:15

I, I've forgotten what it was. Sometimes I include, sometimes I, I can't, it all depends.

01:02:20

I have to, you know, I ask the church or the school or whatever I'm speaking, how much time

01:02:27

I have, then I go through beforehand and I will hide slides depending on how much time

01:02:33

I'm going to have. But this is one that's been there. Uh, and you know, this is New Testament textual families.

01:02:38

I included the Caesarean in here just because some people identify it. Most people don't anymore. But, uh, you'll notice

01:02:43

Alexandrian blue, Caesarean green, Western yellow, and Byzantine orange.

01:02:50

Um, that means vast majority of Byzantine, huh? Yeah. But then

01:02:56

I explain what that means because when I'm showing this screen, I'll talk about the fact that we need to recognize that certain things happened in history.

01:03:08

Uh, two of the most vitally important things that happened in history in regards to transmission

01:03:13

New Testament text was the transition over time in the

01:03:20

Western church starting at the end of the second century to Latin and hence the living being utilized manuscripts in the

01:03:29

West are going to be primarily focused upon Latin rather than Greek. And then something really important.

01:03:37

And that is what happened between 632 and 732. It's amazing. 98 % of my audiences, people in my audiences don't know what happened between 632 and 732.

01:03:52

Uh, I would actually probably predict a higher percentage or a better percentage of this audience knows, but you know that Muhammad died in 632 and hence the century of the

01:04:03

Islamic expansion is 632 to 732 marked by the end, the defeat of, uh, the

01:04:10

Muslims at the battle of tours, Charles Martel and the beginning of the rolling back of that Muslim expansion, at least until the sell you

01:04:18

Turks. And that goes centuries down the road. So I talk about that here.

01:04:24

And if I show this one, and again, this file has been in this form.

01:04:29

I add little something every once in a while, but these have years, years and years and years, uh,

01:04:38

I've been showing these things. If I have time, I talk about the early majority text.

01:04:44

And I demonstrate from this, that when you look at this here in blue is

01:04:52

Alexandrian texts per century. And then in red Byzantine texts, it's not until the ninth century, the

01:05:00

Byzantine is more than the Alexandrian. So what would the majority text in these centuries have been?

01:05:07

Now I know what the Byzantine priority folks say. Well, that's because the

01:05:12

Alexandrian texts, because of where they were, were preserved. The Byzantine texts were destroyed. Some people have theorized that the

01:05:19

Byzantine texts are being used more. Uh, and therefore they would have worn out.

01:05:24

It's the weather elsewhere. There's all sorts of things, but all of it is special pleading.

01:05:31

All of it is pure speculation. This is the hard evidence. According to what we possess today, according to the evidence that we have in our hot little hands, the majority text would change over time, depending on which century you live in.

01:05:51

And I've always said a textual methodology that will give you a different text, depending on what century you live in might be questionable for that.

01:06:03

Especially if that's the center of your textual theory is counting noses. What's, what's the majority texts?

01:06:09

Well, however many manuscripts you have, but this is a part of the presentation. This is a part of what

01:06:15

I go over and talk about these things, uh, as I teach through this material.

01:06:21

So there's, there's no question, um, about what, you know, was, was there.

01:06:29

You can, you can go and get the DVD from wretched.

01:06:35

I'm sure they'd love to just do that. Um, I'm sorry. You can get it from us too.

01:06:40

That's right. We have it available to get, get the DVD from us, listen to it and you will see this was not an anti anti,

01:06:50

I didn't even bring up King James only as I, I just, there's so much background material you need to give. Even when

01:06:55

Friel raises it, you can sort of see a little bit of a sigh on my part because I, I hesitate to try to simplify it so fast, uh, because there's, there's a lot there.

01:07:09

I mean, I have an entire presentation on King James only as huge presentation, you know, minimum hour and a half.

01:07:20

And just to be able to give the backgrounds and talk about Erasmus and the fondness and Bayes and, and, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

01:07:29

So Friel comes up and he asks about King James only as I can assume that my audience will place what

01:07:41

I say in two contexts. One in light of what I just got done, spending an hour, 20 minutes, hour and a half, whatever it was, um, explaining to them as to the history of the text, the papyri, uh, the unseals, the minuscules, when the majority of them were created, the situation around Byzantium, all that kind of stuff.

01:08:05

That's first context. The second context is going to be that Friel is asking about King James only as he's not asking about Byzantine priority.

01:08:19

If he had asked about Byzantine priority, I would have answered in a very different way. I remember once going to a little church, where was that at?

01:08:30

I remember exactly what the church looked like. Um, and there was a older fellow sitting in the back, asked a question about Byzantine stuff.

01:08:39

It was Dr. Robinson. He actually came to my presentation. Well, the leading proponent of the

01:08:45

Byzantine platform. And we had a nice talk afterwards. Um, in my book,

01:08:51

I absolutely bent over backwards to be fair to that perspective and to present it in a fair way.

01:09:02

Really did. I mean, but evidently for some people, the context of presentation

01:09:12

I just made doesn't matter. The fact that we're talking about King James only isn't specifically doesn't matter.

01:09:20

What's in my book doesn't matter. All that stuff is irrelevant. It doesn't matter.

01:09:26

Who cares? So what you get is this just,

01:09:38

I don't even know how to describe it. Well, I guess I'll play it for you so you can see for yourself, but you have the complete removal of the context of what

01:09:49

I was speaking. And hence, all the criticism is based upon transplanting my words into a completely different context.

01:09:56

Well, if you're talking about King James only isn't why are you talking about the Greek text? It's real simple. If, as I pointed out, um,

01:10:07

Erasmus had major problems with the book of revelation and he did.

01:10:12

No one, no one has disputed that. No one who can read the textual data at the bottom of these pages in the

01:10:25

Nessie Olin text and knows that there is that little fracture

01:10:31

M, which normally means majority text, which is the Byzantine text. But in the book of revelation, it's

01:10:38

M superscript a and M superscript K.

01:10:45

Why? Because there is no united Byzantine reading to the book of revelation.

01:10:51

That's why there is no singular Byzantine text to the book of revelation.

01:10:56

That's why. So if there are clear, indisputable textual problems in the text that the

01:11:13

King James translators rendered, whether it's in the book of relation or the other unique readings of the

01:11:19

TR that in and of itself refutes

01:11:26

King James only ism, doesn't it? It's an illogical, rational person. So why criticize me for presenting an argument that refutes the position that I'm criticizing?

01:11:40

Because you can take my words out of that context, put them someplace else. And now you don't like what it says about your position.

01:11:47

I don't care about your position. I wasn't addressing it. So why in the world are you criticizing me for it?

01:11:54

It's, it's, I just don't understand it. I cannot understand the motivation of this kind of thinking, but it's out there.

01:12:05

And it's amongst those that it shouldn't be amongst. Let's put it that way. So let's take a look at it.

01:12:12

I've given you the background now. So let's, let's take a look at. Untitled Dr.

01:12:17

James White, which Bible translation is the most reliable? I'm making this video as a critique of this particular edition of Wretched Radio.

01:12:27

Because while this is addressing the King James only movement, and I'm not a

01:12:33

King James onlyist, the things that they deal with throughout the video are really talking about the

01:12:38

Greek text and talking about matters pertaining to the traditional

01:12:43

Greek text. And there's a tremendous amount of misinformation being communicated in this video.

01:12:49

So I wanted to take the time to walk through it with you and give a traditional text response to the things that are being said here.

01:12:58

I could call this, and I've seen James White do this in a number of other videos. So this isn't something unique to this.

01:13:05

Just over the last few weeks as I've become more acquainted with this things being put out here in video on this subject,

01:13:13

I've seen how this just repeatedly comes up and is presented in a very similar way to this.

01:13:19

And I want to call this the James White reality distortion field. That is, in his argument against King James onlyists, he lumps a lot of other stuff in there with it regarding to the

01:13:32

Greek text, and then presents the data in such a way that if you've never studied this stuff, you're going to have a totally different idea of what he's saying versus what the reality is.

01:13:43

And I want to take this short video to demonstrate that. So maybe people will be a little bit better informed as to what the issues are on the table between a critical text position and a traditional text position.

01:13:56

So let's get started. This is an issue? Wow. Can we Christians ever go to the mats on this one?

01:14:05

What exactly is the controversy? Well, give or take about 500 years, predominantly, the

01:14:13

Protestant church has loved the beloved and rightly so, King James version of the

01:14:18

Bible. However, a group of upstarts came along and said, we've got ourselves better manuscripts than we did before.

01:14:27

You see, the King James version is based on what was called the received text, the textus receptus. But now a bunch of manuscripts, give or take partials, fragments, and holds about 5 ,700 of them called the eclectic text, kind of cobbled together from all over the globe.

01:14:42

That's the focality issue that they come from all over the place. We've now got a better manuscript.

01:14:48

And so they produced new versions of the Bible, like the NASB, the

01:14:54

NIV, et cetera. It's anything but the King James version. Okay, this argument about the multifocality of the

01:15:01

New Testament text, that somehow the textus receptus that the King James Bible was translated from and New King James, and now the modern

01:15:10

English version all come from, that they're based on just a handful of late Greek manuscripts, whereas the critical text or eclectic text, the same thing, they come from the thousands of manuscripts that are available to us.

01:15:25

That is patently wrong. If I do understand from a critical text standpoint, they're saying that they assess all of the manuscripts in coming up with their text, but that assessment means that they reject the vast majority of them.

01:15:42

They settle with a small minority of readings, by and large, which are the Alexandrian manuscripts. Now, let me just stop right there.

01:15:56

What would the TR look like if Erasmus had had a more representative manuscript supply that showed him what the text looked like in the 5th century?

01:16:15

We don't know. In fact, he had an older manuscript amongst the few that he had.

01:16:24

He didn't trust it. He preferred the later manuscripts that were more traditional in their text.

01:16:35

He also, of course, inserted readings from the Latin Vulgate, which is another issue we can look at.

01:16:41

The reality is that we have today the ability to look at the readings of far more manuscripts.

01:16:54

What's being objected to here is, yeah, but you reject the Byzantine as a secondary text.

01:17:01

Not always. There are times when you can look at the

01:17:06

Nessialan text and what are what would be considered early Byzantine readings. Are chosen over early

01:17:15

Alexandrian readings. There are not many, but they're there. The point is that we have a much wider manuscript tradition to draw from today.

01:17:26

It all goes back to what is your textual methodology? Do you count manuscripts or do you weigh manuscripts?

01:17:37

But you see, I don't know why a traditional text advocate is even arguing this because this is textual criticism and it's that unbelieving stuff and we have the text the church has chosen.

01:17:47

So why are we bothering with any of this to begin with? So at least one side is actually looking at all of the texts and can go, you know, this

01:18:01

Byzantine reading, there seems to be a pretty obvious reason why in, you know, haplography, dittography, homoeteleuton, there seems to have been in the early transmission of the

01:18:19

Alexandrian text an understandable scribal error. Let's say the

01:18:24

Byzantine, the Western lined up against the Alexandrian. We go with the Byzantine, the Western, because we can see on transcriptional basis why that would be.

01:18:37

Erasmus couldn't do that. Couldn't do that. Didn't, didn't have the material available to him to even enter into that process.

01:18:46

And so what we're saying is, is not that we are counting manuscripts, but that we have such a broader and now so much earlier testimony than we possessed before, that we are able to allow that entire manuscript tradition to speak.

01:19:08

Even if we have to recognize that a large bulk of that only gets to have so much voice because it comes from one place and is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy within one transmission stream.

01:19:29

Yeah. Why should you give that more voice than a much earlier manuscript that actually has connections to all of the families of manuscripts?

01:19:41

I mean, we're going into some stuff here that I don't know what Pastor Truelove's textual theory is.

01:19:50

I mean, he obviously favors the Byzantine, but why? Because it was used in the confessions.

01:19:56

He doesn't seem to say that. So there still has to be some kind of textual critical methodology going on here.

01:20:03

Is he saying we just ignore these manuscripts or is that an implicit critique of the weighing of manuscripts versus the mere counting of manuscripts?

01:20:12

Whatever it might be, that doesn't make the statement misinformational, which is what he is saying this is full of is misinformation.

01:20:21

That's what it was, you know, James White reality distortion field, whatever in the world that is.

01:20:27

That's that's how we start. Which are under 200 of the 5700 manuscripts we're talking about.

01:20:34

So we're going to come back to this in a minute when we deal with this, when James White's going to repeat this thing.

01:20:40

But I want to leave you with this question for now. Why is it that when the critical text advocates present their case, they talk about their text being based upon an assessment of the 5700 manuscripts?

01:20:54

When patently their text is based upon a small minority of those manuscripts.

01:21:00

That is a surface level criticism of the entire methodology that is based upon you weigh texts.

01:21:11

You don't count them. Some texts have a greater say in the representation of the early text than others.

01:21:23

Obviously, a manuscript from the third century has more weight than a manuscript from the 15th.

01:21:33

If you just count manuscripts there to be one to one, but logically you wouldn't do that unless you have some goal in mind, a tradition, maybe a theological position that you're seeking to establish.

01:21:50

Then you might say they all have the same weight. Otherwise, it's pretty obvious why the one has more weight than the other.

01:21:59

So we'll come back to that. Well, that doesn't make some people very happy. They believe that the

01:22:05

King James Version Bible is really the only English speaking translation that we should be using.

01:22:12

So what do we do with this controversy? Well, we turn to the eminent

01:22:18

Dr. James White who was right here in this here studio to do a presentation on New Testament reliability.

01:22:24

I thought he was very, I asked him. Whoa, I hadn't caught that. He even said that's what

01:22:30

I had just done. Even said that. He even said

01:22:37

I had just done a presentation on New Testament reliability. So there's no excuse to say, well, this is all

01:22:43

I had. Even he said that this was after that.

01:22:49

Oh, that's interesting. I had missed that. But anyway, he was thoughtful.

01:22:54

He was polite. He wasn't trying to be snarky. So for your consideration, the new

01:23:00

King James Version or the old King James Version controversy with Dr.

01:23:05

James White. Let me be clear in this. I am not a King James only advocate.

01:23:12

I think it's an indefensible position. I think it's an unorthodox position to elevate a translation over the original

01:23:20

Greek and Hebrew. So, you know, we need to be very clear about that. The problem with this video, though, is for most of it, they're not talking about the

01:23:29

King James Bible. They're talking about the Greek text. It's a different subject. I understand that King James onlyists will try to use these

01:23:36

Greek text arguments in their favor. But it really doesn't matter because when I do those same

01:23:42

King James onlyists. Okay, let's let's okay. Let's listen to that again.

01:23:48

I want it. I want you to hear what was just said. It really doesn't matter.

01:23:53

Let's let's catch this again. A King James only advocate. I think it's an indefensible position.

01:23:59

I think it's an unorthodox position to elevate the a translation over the original

01:24:05

Greek and Hebrew. So, you know, we need to be very clear about that. The problem with this video, though, is for most of it, they're not talking about the

01:24:14

King James Bible. They're talking about the Greek text. It's a different subject. I understand that King James onlyists will try to use these

01:24:21

Greek text arguments in their favor. But it really doesn't matter because really, it really doesn't matter what

01:24:33

I was actually addressing. It really doesn't matter that the demonstration of the fundamental error on the textual level utterly refutes the

01:24:42

King James. It really doesn't matter. Brother Truelove, I hope people don't listen to your sermons the way you listen to me.

01:24:51

Because they they would come up with all sorts of fun stuff, wouldn't it? You don't want people to listen to you the way you listen to me.

01:25:00

That's strange. When I do those same King James onlyists will show them a correction in the

01:25:09

King James Bible using the Greek or something that's made more clear using the Greek. They won't have it.

01:25:15

They don't want me taking the textus receptus and demonstrating a verb tense issue or something like that.

01:25:23

So again, we're talking about different things. King James onlyism only uses this text argument to get them so far.

01:25:31

But the reality is they don't give a rip about the Greek and Hebrew text. Again, so I don't know why.

01:25:37

There are all sorts of King James only folks that are going, what do you mean we don't give a rip about the Greek text?

01:25:42

Well, in the final analysis, they don't. But the more the less

01:25:48

Sam Gippian, Peter Reckman -y, Rippling -ry want to try to pretend they do and might actually think they do.

01:25:58

But again, what was I addressing? I was addressing King James onlyism and demonstrating that the underlying text that they're translating has fundamental problems in it.

01:26:09

Great way to demonstrate the situation, doesn't it? The whole thing is going to be about the Greek text, but that's what we're going to be looking at and thus that's how we're dealing with it.

01:26:17

On the subject of Bible translations, though, I do like the King James Bible. I think it's a fantastic historic

01:26:24

English translation, and I do encourage Christians to have that as part of their reading. As an

01:26:29

English -speaking Christian, we need to be in touch with our historical Bible heritage, if you will.

01:26:35

But as far as modern versions, the new King James version is a great modern version. If you're looking for a modern version of the

01:26:42

Texas Receptus, there's a book by Arthur Forstead, who was the editor of the majority

01:26:48

Greek text as well as the new King James version, and he wrote this book called The New King James Version in the

01:26:54

Great Tradition. If you're interested about learning about the new King James Bible as a modern

01:26:59

English Bible based upon the received Greek text, this is a pretty good book to read. And I bought this on Amazon for a penny, used, and my copy came looking almost new.

01:27:09

So I recommend that to you if you want to learn more about the new King James. The modern English version is also a new

01:27:15

English version based upon the Texas Receptus, an update of the King James Bible. I haven't spent enough time in that to know if I would recommend it or not, just because it's so new.

01:27:23

But again, certainly, I don't believe that God only speaks in one single English translation.

01:27:29

Which perhaps brings us to a controversy of the day. Okay, now, just notice.

01:27:36

Did that start in the middle of something? Obviously. Which perhaps...

01:27:43

So this is obviously... And right there. Can you trust your

01:27:48

Bible? Purchase new test of reliability at wretched .tv. I don't know how much clearer it can be, but that this is clearly just a segment from a larger thing.

01:28:03

You're going to criticize it. Take the time to listen to the larger thing, maybe. I think it would be fair.

01:28:09

I think I'd be fair. Which one of the manuscript or manuscripts is the line that is most accurate?

01:28:19

It is the King James Version only controversy. Yeah, yeah. Now, what did who say?

01:28:31

What's what's interesting? If you want a little background information you won't get from the DVD, there is a huge sewer roach behind this thing right here.

01:28:39

And eventually we are going to attack it and there is a I hope someday there is a outtakes from wretched .tv

01:28:48

DVD because you will be able to see what Todd Freel looks like when dancing in the spirit because it came right after him.

01:28:57

And eventually you can actually hear crunch when he got it. I mean, it was one of those big, big, but oh, it was bad.

01:29:05

It was bad. You wanted to hear what he said. OK, hold on. Which one of the manuscript or manuscripts is the line that is most accurate?

01:29:20

It is the King James Version only controversy. Yeah, yeah. This isn't the way you should start a conversation about the

01:29:27

King James only controversy. It wasn't how we started the conversation.

01:29:33

We had just done an hour and a half laying the foundation, sir. But are you saying you shouldn't ask a question?

01:29:43

You shouldn't ask a question about the manuscripts that were used. This isn't relevant. Of course, it's relevant.

01:29:49

It's smack dab relevant to begin talking about which line of manuscripts Greek manuscripts for the

01:29:55

New Testament is the line that we should use is not a translation question. That's a source question.

01:30:02

And the King James only controversy is made up of the source and translation issues, which is why in a little old book that I wrote a while back, we have chapters on differences based upon manuscripts and differences based upon translation.

01:30:25

Both absolutely central, absolutely. And in fact, what's more important?

01:30:31

Apologetically, the source issue is more important than the translation issue. Without any question.

01:30:38

Without any question. And it certainly divides King James only us up because I mean, look at D .A.

01:30:44

Waite and his attacks on the new King James. But anyways, again,

01:30:51

King James only ism is a wide movement. I've simply identified all the elements of it. And I'm answering a direct question from Todd Freel.

01:31:00

And rather than correct that notion and talk about what King James only is really is as it's at its heart, this whole thing is going to really be ripping on the traditional

01:31:10

Greek text. And and really, as far as the King James Bible goes, it's an anti King James video.

01:31:17

It's an anti historic English Bible video. Why? Why?

01:31:25

I I mean, you make the assertion, but you provide no no evidence. Again, it's part of and advertises itself as a part of a larger presentation.

01:31:36

It's it's an it's an ad is what it is. And unless you're identifying the

01:31:42

TR with the traditional text, which I hope you don't do, there's there's lots of difference between the two.

01:31:49

What's the basis of this? I don't. That's why it really took me aback. And it's going to take me about a whole lot more back here in a second.

01:31:57

The whole impression you're going to get as far as the Bible goes and the modern Bible is you should be using almost anyone but the

01:32:04

King James. And I feel like a lot of what I see coming on the Internet from Dr.

01:32:10

White is the spirit in which it's said and not so much this video, but others that he's done himself are as inflammatory and offensive as stuff.

01:32:22

I see the King James only guys doing that. This kind of thing is supposed to be critiquing. I don't even know what to say.

01:32:35

It's just that's just so far from reality. It's it's difficult to even know what to say.

01:32:42

Anyone who has watched Gail Riplinger, anyone who has listened to Peter Ruckman, anyone who has watched my response to Sam Gipp when he sent me the crayons and the coloring book or who was, oh, if you really want to have fun, watch

01:33:04

Steven Anderson and Sam Gipp go at it. Now, there is entertainment for anybody.

01:33:11

I was watching a Sam Gipp response to to Steven Anderson recently.

01:33:19

Wow. But anyone who knows what

01:33:25

I do in this field and looks at that is to look at this and go, what are you talking about?

01:33:33

That's that's that's just so far from reality that it's absurd. It really is absurd, brother.

01:33:39

It's the only way to put it. I, you know, the spirit, so on and so forth.

01:33:49

Thankfully, most of the people out there who've read the book, listen to the debates, you know, they know the reality.

01:33:55

I don't know whether you have or haven't, but they know they know the reality. And I just I simply have to go.

01:34:02

I don't know where this is coming from, but that's just indefensible. So there is very much a critical text only ism going on out there that's rude, divisive, critical, unloving, uncharitable.

01:34:18

And the more I see stuff on the Internet and things that that are being said and going on there,

01:34:23

I think Dr. Y is a source for that kind of spirit and attitude. And it really does need to be addressed.

01:34:30

Well, well, now notice that was before I even said anything. I hadn't even said anything to critique yet, which we'll get to here in a second.

01:34:40

We're almost done. I've already passed the the jumbo length of the program here.

01:34:47

But so I'm the source of this rude, divisive, uncharitable.

01:34:54

Well, I'm sorry if you think that. I don't think you've even started to substantiate your assertions.

01:35:01

And so far, I think that some people might point out that ripping my statements out of context and ignoring what

01:35:10

I actually said is what's rude and uncharitable. So I, you know, I think that that argument could go either direction,

01:35:17

I think. And I'll let you sort of figure out from there. Just a few more seconds here.

01:35:24

Didn't have time to get into is the fact that when we started producing printed

01:35:31

Greek New Testaments, the first printed and published Greek New Testament was by a man named

01:35:36

Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus is a Dutch humanist scholar. He rushed his first edition to print because his printer.

01:35:43

Now, keep something in mind here. This is television. I know that this man right here,

01:35:51

Todd Freel, wants me to move quickly.

01:35:58

I learned that from the very first time I ever went on the air with this guy. When he does an interview with you, there better not be even the semblance, even the semblance of dead air.

01:36:13

You can't slow down. You I mean, you just listen to anything

01:36:19

I've ever done with Freel. He is super intense. As you can see,

01:36:24

I'm having to look up at him. He's facing directly toward me. And I know

01:36:30

I have basically in my mind, I have to justify every sentence

01:36:37

I say here. Because if I start taking too long, he will interrupt me.

01:36:45

And he will refocus the question. So, you know, that that leaves me open to criticism to those who are not friendly toward me.

01:36:58

That's fine. I would just simply ask any honest person in the audience. Put yourself in my position.

01:37:07

And tell me that you could summarize that whole area.

01:37:17

Under that kind of time pressure. Any better than I did.

01:37:23

And I'll go more power to you. I'll you want Todd's number? I've got it. You know, if you want to go for it.

01:37:30

But this is not a presentation on King James only ism. This is answering a single question.

01:37:40

And very briefly in the process, Froben knew that Cardinal Jimenez was going to had already done a multi -volume called the

01:37:48

Completentian Polyglot. But back then you had to get papal approval before you printed anything. And you didn't have fax machines.

01:37:55

And there was all sorts of red tape to go through. So they were sitting in a warehouse. And so Erasmus' printer is a entrepreneur, shall we say.

01:38:03

And so he's pushing him to get this thing done to get it out. Now, there are people who say, no, no, no, that was never the case.

01:38:09

Let me just ask you a simple question. Real simple question. If there was no pressure on Erasmus to hurry the first edition out, why did he say it was precipitated rather than edited?

01:38:23

A. And B, why did he do what he did with Revelation? If he had all the time in the world and he could not find, he was very disappointed.

01:38:33

He had actually gone to Basel assuming the library there would have what he needed. It didn't.

01:38:41

If he's got all the time in the world, go someplace else. He's got his friend

01:38:47

Bombasius in Rome. Maybe Bombasius can get some manuscripts for him. He can send them. He's got all the time in the world because he's not under any pressure.

01:38:55

But that's not what happened. Well, anyway, just a little thought there. As a result, as Erasmus himself said, his first edition was precipitated rather than edited.

01:39:04

Had a number of errors in it. He went into the book of Revelation. I got to tell the story now.

01:39:09

He went into the book of Revelation. He can only find, he thought the library in Basel, Switzerland would have multiple copies.

01:39:16

Couldn't find a one. So he borrowed a commentary on Revelation from a friend.

01:39:22

And he had to extract the text of Revelation from the commentary. And he got to the last chapter and discovered that the last pages had fallen off.

01:39:32

And so what he did is he translated from the Latin Vulgate into Greek for the last six verses of the book of Revelation.

01:39:38

The amazing thing is he came up with readings no one had ever seen in any manuscript before. That was in his first edition.

01:39:46

That was in all five of his editions, all the way through 1535. And to this very day, the

01:39:54

King James Version of the Bible has the weird readings that Erasmus came up with from the Latin.

01:39:59

Now, I stopped right there. Is that relevant to King James onlyism? You better believe it is.

01:40:07

You better believe it is. Because you see, to establish King James onlyism, you would have to actually in some way prove that the back translation was inspired over the

01:40:21

Greek text that had been possessed by Christians up to the time of Erasmus. I've never had, never had a

01:40:30

King James onlyist be able to answer that question. Not once. How is that not relevant? How is, how is that not directly on spot relevant to King James onlyism?

01:40:45

It is. Obviously, it is. Notice the reaction.

01:40:51

In its readings in the text of the book of Revelation to this very day, because it was those five editions of Erasmus, the 1550 edition of Stephanos, and the 1598 edition of Beza.

01:41:01

Those were the seven printed Greek texts that the King James translator used to translate.

01:41:06

Between 1604 and 1611 to produce the New Testament of the King James version of the Bible. Erasmus only had between 6 and 12 manuscripts.

01:41:14

We have 5 ,700. So the general message so far is that the text of Receptus was, it's really a load of festering crap.

01:41:22

It was horrible. It was rushed to market. It's filled with errors. It has all kinds of problems. To be honest with you, it stands its own reputation.

01:41:32

I mean, that is so imbalanced. And it's just absurd.

01:41:38

I mean, that's true. A lot of losses balance there. And just, I don't even know what to say.

01:41:47

I was dressing King James onlyism. Everything I said was factually true.

01:41:53

Even the dates were right. Those are the seven texts that they used. And that was directly relevant to King James onlyism and has almost nothing to do with Byzantine text priority.

01:42:11

So why is he getting upset about it? Sounds like he's a TR only guy.

01:42:17

Says he's not. Why would you be upset in my documenting problems with the

01:42:22

TR? That doesn't represent the Byzantine text. Dr.

01:42:28

Robinson would not, would not accept the TR readings at the end of the book of Revelation from the

01:42:35

Vulgate as few as they are. Would he? So what's the problem?

01:42:44

There seems to be, as I said in my Facebook article on this, a level of aggression here that starts to develop, you know, critical text onlyism.

01:42:56

Well, here's, here's how I'll close things off here. Because we're, we've gone over time.

01:43:02

What's, what's, what's a, what's between a jumbo and a mega? I'm really not sure.

01:43:09

Because if we, if we go one more minute, it'll be exactly between a jumbo and a mega. So I'm not sure that we've ever done that before.

01:43:15

This is going to be, anyways, what we, what we have here,

01:43:25

I, I sense my, my concern.

01:43:31

The reason I've addressed ecclesiastical text -ism, which is different than Byzantine platform, which is different than TR onlyism, which is different than King James onlyism, but they all share one common element.

01:43:48

And that is, well, we don't like where Christian scholarship is today.

01:43:54

Well, I get that. I understand that. I understand that. I mean, the, the, one of the most difficult things

01:44:01

I have to deal with as an apologist is the massive amount of apostasy in what calls itself

01:44:06

Christendom today. But I get it. My concern is this. If Reformed Baptists want to remove themselves from being able to make a meaningful contribution to Christian apologetics and a defense of the

01:44:27

New Testament text today, I'm not going to sit around and be silent while it happens.

01:44:35

And that's what's happening. You can get all the warm traditionalist feelings you want carrying your

01:44:45

Byzantine text around if you want, or your TR or whatever. Um, I just know what's going to happen when you come up against a sharp ermine trained apologist or a sharp

01:45:01

Muslim who's been reading ermine or whoever else. And I'd sort of like to try to help you to avoid that.

01:45:11

Now, if I have to get misrepresented as I was grossly misrepresented here, okay,

01:45:19

I'm sort of accustomed to it. I don't like it happening from people within my exact camp.

01:45:26

That's not comfortable. Um, but if that's the price, okay, fine, whatever.

01:45:35

Um, I've got much, much, much bigger priorities than any of that, than any of that.

01:45:41

Because again, for those of you thinking about this, one of the reasons I'm doing this is to demonstrate, once again, consistency.

01:45:47

I can't close my eyes to stuff that's happening even in my own backyard, even if that would make things easier for me with folks.

01:45:53

Because when I stand in the mosque, I want to be able to have an absolutely clear conscience that I'm seeking to be consistent.

01:46:01

Whether it's there or the university or wherever else it is, I'm trying to be consistent. Trying to be consistent.

01:46:06

And that's why we address these things. That's why we address these things. Okay, so just real quickly, one last thing to add.

01:46:16

To those of you who are playing with this idea of, you know, let's just go against the vast majority of those that study this field and let's go with the minority position and let's do this

01:46:33

Byzantine thing. Okay, let me ask you a question. I know how the guys

01:46:43

I can respect in this field, how they answer this, Dr. Robinson, people like that. But how do you folks that are sort of amalgamating all this stuff together and sort of playing with ecclesiastical textism, but then not and all the rest of this stuff, develop a critical methodology that can produce a

01:47:06

Greek text that will explain and tell us how we should read

01:47:14

Luke 23, 34. Luke 23, 34.

01:47:23

Yeah. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Textual variant.

01:47:32

It's part of the majority text. It's part of the Byzantine text platform. So you might just say, that's it. There you go.

01:47:38

I mean, it's been preached on. God wouldn't allow that. Okay, then lay that out and say, that's how you determine the text.

01:47:45

But explain to me why it's not found in the earliest extant testimony of the

01:47:57

Byzantine manuscript tradition, Codex Washingtonianus. Explain that to me, please.

01:48:06

Why should the later Byzantine manuscripts be more important than the earliest

01:48:13

Byzantine manuscripts? See, when you have to answer questions like this and do so consistently, that forces you to create a textual methodology rather than just taking pot shots from the back rows at the eclectic text.

01:48:37

That's easy to do. I'd like to hear the consistent textual methodology.

01:48:44

And I've got a bunch of others. A bunch of others we could look at. Okay. 2334 to someone in channel who was confused as to what

01:48:55

I was referring to there. And Jesus said, Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.

01:49:02

Textual variant. We've discussed it. Look it up. Look 2334 up on the blog. You'll discover an entire program we did on it.

01:49:09

And we've talked about it at other times since then. Well, we went really long today. And I've got to get going because I've got stuff

01:49:16

I've got to do. But thank you for watching the program. Remember, five o 'clock Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, Michael Brown, his new book,

01:49:25

Outlasting the Gay Revolution, and some other stuff we're going to talk about as well. We'll see you then. God bless.