More on Galatians 3 and Then My Article on Pseudo Dionysius

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's good to have you with us. Oh boy, you know what? I'm gonna... I don't know why this is... Sound is... I can hear myself so well in it. It's really weird.

I'm not sure why it is today. Maybe it's hooked up to the phone. I don't know. Anyway, I may end up losing that, but I'm not sure that I'm going to be playing anything that I need to hear anyway. So we may be all right.

But class, that won't work real well. Anyhow, yes, after our program today, we take a quick break and then I'm teaching the second class in the Early Church History class for Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

We'll be getting into the background, you know, the Greek philosophical background in which the gospel was proclaimed and hopefully, because we only have so much lecture time, into the subject of persecution and the church's response to persecution, because there's almost nothing in that patristic time period, well, apostolic time period, those first couple hundred years, that has more relevance and will... and has more relevance around the world today, because there's a great deal of Christian persecution in places like Nigeria and in Muslim countries in general, but may well be something that all of a sudden, we were talking about it in 2021, in 2022, and we stopped talking about it.

We got a quick vacay and we've forgotten a lot of the serious stuff. I think it's one of the reasons you've had this insanity and this lunacy, you know, NXR and all these guys and, you know, Alex Jones.

It's just... I still sit here and go, they're really going to do that? That's just, wow, okay. I mean, credibility, dead, don't move, I'll shoot you again. It's just unbelievable. Anyways, all this insanity that has developed up in Prescott and places like that with Dale Partridge, I think the reason it developed was because the pressure came off and so all the loony stuff, you know, started spinning out.

When you actually have to be dealing with actual persecution, you need real answers and these guys aren't giving real answers. They're just going for the clicks and the giggles and all the rest of that stuff and followers and Patreon subscriptions and things like that.

And so... Where'd the cameras go? Oh, the cameras went to the RV. Yeah, I'm just sitting here looking at the cameras that Rich has up and I realized he doesn't have nearly as many cameras as he had before and then I realized, oh, that's because they are in the RV.

Are they already there? Okay, so yes, we're going on a trip. I'm leaving this weekend and we've got a debate coming up a week from this weekend and speaking all sorts of different places all over the Midwest.

Please pray for good weather after what happened here yesterday. Wow, if I ever got caught in a thunderstorm like that, there wouldn't be much left of my truck or my rig. If you've seen any of the videos, just look up Phoenix hailstorm and wow, the truck's fine.

I just happened to be at Sprouts when it hit, so I was two miles north and these storms, they are, you know, you can just follow their path, you know, and if you're two miles north, you're not gonna get hit.

We got a lot of rain up there. I got hit about two or three hailstones that didn't do any damage or anything, but when I got back to my house, oh my goodness, an entire stone wall, you know, leaning backwards, knocked over in the wind.

The wooden slats in the gate next to it looked like they had been shot. I mean, the power of that storm. My wife and I were sweeping the rocks back into our rock lawn. It had moved the rocks out of our rock lawn onto our driveway and that had never happened before.

I don't know what those wind gusts were or how sustained they were, but, you know, broken windows and we're gonna have to have the roof looked at and all sorts of fun stuff like that. But yeah, we got plastered as I drove out today coming here in the bright sunshine.

Then I could see so many of the cars that were parked out just dimpled everywhere, just dents everywhere, and broken windows, and the neighbor directly across the street, the entire back window of the car they had just bought, gone.

Just history. So it was a powerful, powerful storm and tornadoes up north. That's not normal in Arizona. That's very, very unusual. Very unusual indeed. But it happens once and it seems to happen in October because that other big one was in October too.

And so there you go. Please pray that I don't run into that. I've thought about it more than once. If I saw one of those things heading my direction, I'm sitting here going, can I find an underpass someplace to try to pull under, you know, to try to get out of something like that.

But when you're 57 feet long, which end of that 57 feet do you sacrifice, you know? Yeah, I've definitely thought about it. Do you try to turn around? Do you try to outrun it? Do you try to go lateral to it, you know?

I don't know. I'd just be doing a lot of praying at the time. I don't know what to worry about. But anyways, we're heading out on the trip. All but one of the churches I've never been to before. And they're in small areas.

I mean, okay, Des Moines isn't really small. Bismarck isn't tiny. But Hayes, Kansas? Yes, that's like Kinsley. And I'm really looking forward to getting to be in those places. And I'm packing up my facsimiles, the papyri and stuff like that in the other room.

And so yeah, looking forward to that. If you want to help us get down the road at $6 .20 a gallon for diesel, that'll be the biggest hit we've ever taken. We do have a fleet card, so it'll probably be in the upper 590s, I would imagine, with the discount.

But the travel fund at aomin .org is how you can help us to do that. So, yesterday morning, was it yesterday morning? I think it was yesterday morning. Anyway, I haven't been on X much over the past period of time.

I've just got too many things going on. Rich and I met at the RV storage place today and, you know, hooking up and, you know, there's stuff to do. You gotta load stuff, you gotta prep stuff, you gotta check stuff out, repair little things.

There's just a million things to do. Because once you're on the road, if you forgot something, you get to buy it again. That's why I end up with, you know, six of everything, because I keep buying stuff on the road.

So, I just haven't been on social media, which may mean, which may explain why my blood pressure is better than normal. And so, oh, text message. Hey, is this the owner of blah blah blah blah West Vogel Avenue?

I just like to say to all you desperate realtors out there, they're just trying to get in the game. First of all, I have my own realtor, okay? Same guy I've known forever, and he does the best realtor advertisements that anyone's ever come up with.

And so, but you would be the last person on the planet that I would contact if I wanted to sell my house. Oh, look at this, honey. I just got a cold text from someone I've never heard of before wanting to sell the house.

Let's go with him. I just, oh, every time. And Rich says when they call, he talks to him. And I'm like, no, no. My phone does not ring for things like that. But the text messages, it's just like, I remember when we had a scintilla of privacy.

I remember we had the landlines. You'd be sitting there at dinner, and the phone rings. And it would just be so annoying when it was someone trying to sell you something. And you just hang up or, you know, stuff like that.

And then they had the call blocking stuff. And that works a little bit, I suppose. But anyway, yeah. So, Jay, no, I'm not selling my house. And I'm not using you as my realtor, okay? You're not watching anyways.

So, anyways, what were we talking about? Yes, trip coming up. Excited to be visiting a lot of churches that we haven't had a chance to be to at before. And talking about a lot of, interestingly enough, at least one of those churches wants to talk about Eastern Orthodoxy.

Part of that is, it's not because it's such a huge movement, okay? The EOs in the U .S. are still a very, very small group. Very, very small group. But the reason there is this discussion is because there isn't a whole lot of information on the movement.

And so people just don't feel prepared. And they sort of feel like, and they fall into the trap that Eastern Orthodoxy is just simply popeless Catholicism. It's not. And you're not going to get very far talking to them as if it is.

So, yeah, I think that's why there's there's been a real uptick in interest. And I got the feeling from something you said, Rich, at some point, that once you got to listen to someone actually presenting it and defending it, it was like, it was one thing to listen to me talking about it, but then to actually hear somebody, especially a former Reformed Baptist, so vociferously promoting it, all of a sudden it's like, hey, this is real.

This isn't just a topic to talk about on the program. These are real people. This is real stuff.

Oh, yeah. It hits home. You suddenly realize, wow, people are actually defending this, and vociferously. I mean, he was zealous in how he approached the whole thing.

Galatians 3 and the Claim That Paul Presented a Crucifix

Yeah, and my biggest criticism is, I think, overzealous. I honestly believe the stuff on Philippians 3, that's what I was trying to get to. As I was saying, I haven't been on X, I think, since yesterday morning.

And the one thing I did on X was, I responded to Craig. He had asked me why I hadn't read from a particular citation, and I explained. I tried to. I tried to bring it up on Kindle, but it didn't sync.

Well, it's not supposed to sync. I had read it on Kindle on the web, and that doesn't sync with your app stuff. And so I had forgotten to bring it up. I had too many windows. It may look like I have two screens here, but really, when I'm setting stuff up, I've got it all on one screen.

And I had forgotten to open up Kindle, and I did try to open it up so I could read the whole thing. Again, there's nothing about icons and crucifixes, even in what was there. But he did catch me on one thing.

I quoted the wrong Longenecker. There's more than one Longenecker. That was actually news to me. I did not know there was more than one Longenecker. I think I had probably been confusing two of them for quite some time.

When I was younger, there was only one. So you sort of get used to how that works. That's a really unusual name. I mean, I've never met anybody with that name other than now these two authors who have written.

I've never met anybody in my life in any of the churches I've been in. Nothing that had the last name Longenecker. Well, anyways, so I quoted the wrong Longenecker. Of course, the quotation was still directly relevant.

And so I asked him some questions, and I was looking just before the program to see what his response was. And all I could find for a while, I looked into chats, I didn't find any chats. I finally found his response.

It was sort of like, well, we need, this isn't the place to talk about this. Oh, well, okay. I'm not sure what you want to do about it. But I had asked some specific questions of him. And I think they're directly relevant questions.

If his interpretation of Galatians chapter three, Praegrafe to Placard before, if he really, really, really is going to die on that hill, then I think it needs to be pointed out that as far as I can tell, and I'm not going to do his work for him, I would challenge him to do it.

As far as I can tell, he's the only guy that takes that view. Chrysostom didn't take that view. Most everybody else in orthodoxy just repeats Chrysostom's interpretation. I gave him another orthodox interpretation, which I agreed with, Orphan the Hermit, something, I'd have to look it up, that I had tracked down.

I looked at the orthodox study Bible. It had nothing. You would think that if Galatians chapter three is this vital, important text that establishes the apostolic connection to the veneration of icons, that this would be everywhere.

I mean, I had Claude examine all of the documents, the entire price book, all the documents of Nicaea 2. There is no reference to Galatians 3 .1. Well, there's no discussion of Galatians 3 .1. I don't remember if there was a footnote someplace, but it didn't have anything to do with the actual statements of the council.

So the council that defined the dogmatic status of icon veneration did not use Galatians 3 .1. I don't think they used mezuzahs. They certainly did make reference to Dionysius. That's true, and we're going to be talking about that a little bit later.

But if the orthodox study Bible doesn't have it, and I've ordered a few other references, you know, next week when we're on the road, maybe, because the one arrives either today or tomorrow, but shouldn't we have all sorts of patristic evidence saying Galatians 3 .1 is talking about icons that are to be venerated and a crucifix?

Shouldn't that be all over the place? Because I did invest a little bit of time in looking through Basil. The English translations of Basil and Gregory, because, yeah, you know, so are, by the way, my other icon came.

I forgot to bring it with me. My Athanasius icon came. It was made in Greece. That's why it cost so much money to get into the country. But I have an Athanasius icon now that we'll talk about later. But remember, I'm using these guys.

I've had lots of people tell me that the closing statement closed the deal for them. And it is sad, I have to admit, to see the Eastern Orthodox who respond to that, and they didn't hear a word I said.

They did not, they couldn't hear Chris System's words. They couldn't hear him saying that we have fellowship with them, not in an image, but in their words, which represents their soul, their belief, their statements, their teachings, rather than the image.

You don't think that's relevant? If this guy was venerating icons the way you think he was venerating icons, is that what he would say? And so I was looking at Basil and Gregory, and so I used TLG to do it, Thesaurus Lingua Greco.

And I only had time to sort of visual finish Basil, and none of the key terms in that section of Galatians 3 .1 came up. So you would think that Galatians 3 .1 would be a text that would have all sorts of patristic conversation, if Craig Trulia's interpretation of it is historical.

The Context of Galatians 2–3

I see no evidence that it is. Now, the man is insatiable. I use a particular term for a person who sees icons everywhere in my response to him, and he's dogged. So if we don't have, pretty quickly, an extensive discussion of the patristic interpretation of Galatians 3 .1 that supports the idea that Paul was holding up a crucifix, which, by the way, just so you can think about this, everybody in Galatia knew what crucifixion was.

You did not have to explain to anybody in the Roman Empire what crucifixion was. They had seen it. Rome used it as a way to keep people in fear. They had seen those men dying in agony, slowly, suffocating, sometimes for days, naked on those beams.

So they didn't need anybody to put their hands out and go, this is what it looks like. They didn't need that. So that is, I think, a real strike against the idea that, yeah, Paul was showing them what it looked like for Jesus to be crucified, as if they didn't know.

Of course they knew. Everybody in the Roman Empire knew. In fact, it would have been redundant. But to vividly present that reality of his self-giving in the proclamation of his humiliation, yeah, okay, that fits the context very, very strongly.

And in fact, what we ought to do, really, is just look at that text. If you start, for example, around Galatians 2 .20, one of our favorite verses, you know, I've been crucified with Christ, there's no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

You know, that life I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. There is the giving of himself. And then the assertion, if righteousness comes to the law, then Christ died needlessly.

That is one of the most, I mean, Galatians is such a strong, strongly worded text. But remember, Galatians 2 .21 is the verse before Galatians 3 .1. And here's where our modern division of the text into chapters and verses, again, it helps us find stuff.

Yes, it's fine, it's wonderful, it's a good thing to do. But we mentally put this big wall between chapters 2 and 3. I assure you, if you go look at P46 and read Galatians, there ain't no wall between there.

In fact, there won't even be a break between the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3, because there were no chapter 2 and chapter 3 back then. It's just gonna be one continuous long line of capital letters.

I've got a P46 in the other room, I can show you one. Anyway, so he has just said, if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. Oh foolish Galatians! Those are the very next words.

Who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to learn from you. Did you receive the spirit by the works of law or by the hearing with faith?

The contrast of the works of law, which comes in chapter 2, and the hearing of faith just continues. There is no break. The idea that this is, I mean, the best you can do, the absolute best that Craig Trulia can come up with, would be to say that no, the subject doesn't change.

All commentators, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, unbelieving, they all see the continuing discussion of law, and works, and faith, and grace, and yeah, that's all there. And all you have in Galatians 3 .1 is just this exclamation.

Paul has just talked about the fact that if you follow after the Judaizers, you're making the death of Christ empty. You're emptying of its meaning. And that's what launches him into, oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly displayed as crucified?

His whole point is, if your life is in him, if you've already started in him, if you recognize his centrality, how can you be going after these other things? So the point was, the clarity of the message of the cross should make the Judaizing message utterly untenable.

That's what's going on. And so the best thing Craig would, I think the only thing he could possibly say is, nope, no change in topic. And yes, this is just Paul's amazement, but when Paul says he's amazed, he's amazed that they could be so quickly deserting Christ, who I had shown you the crucifix of.

What does that have to do with anything? See, there is no way to make this, Paul was showing them a crucifix idea, fit with the context of Galatians 3. And I think everybody sees it. It's not what Chrysostom said.

I'm challenging Craig Trulia right now, show us the patristic exegesis of Galatians 3. Nicaea didn't do it, didn't even claim to do it. That's not Chrysostom, it's not in Basil, it's not in Gregory. I'm going to look into Athanasius when I have the time to do the kind of extensive digging that you need to do to make sure you pull everything up, which doesn't mean using the English.

Like I said, when I looked at Basil, I was looking at the TLG. So you're using Praegraph A or the key terms in Galatians 3 .1 to pull every possible citation, even if it's a paraphrase, out of the entire collection of Basil's recorded words, which is found in TLG.

So you can do the same thing with Athanasius, you can search by author, and it takes a few minutes to set the search up, but then what comes up is all in Greek, so you've got to be seeing what the context is and stuff like that.

Anyway, my assertion is that this is not a disputed text amongst Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox. I'm not seeing it. Like I said, today an Orthodox commentary on Galatians is coming today, so maybe next week I'll have something, but my real gut feeling here is Craig Trulia is the outlier here, and he doesn't mind being an outlier.

He likes being an outlier. The Dionysius stuff is being an outlier. It's taking a small minority position, and like I said to him, just a reminder, and this goes back to the days when I was debating the papacy, which he has to agree with, he's written a book against papacy.

I would point out that there is a series of arguments that Rome uses to establish Petrine Primacy. So Peter has to be in Rome, Peter has to be the subject of this verse over here, and Peter has to be the one talking about this, and when Jesus says this, this has to be about Peter, and Rome's interpretation of each of those texts or historical realities is a minority view.

So if there's a 20 chance that this is a good argument, and then you string it together with another one that has a 20 chance, you string it together with another one that has a 20 chance, the probability doesn't stay at 20%.

It gets less and less and less as you go along, and a lot of people don't understand that. The percentage goes down and down and down and down the longer you go with a string of arguments that are less likely to be true.

And so, as I said to him, if you take the mezuzah stuff, and then you take Galatians 3 .1, then you take Dionysius, and you multiply the possibilities of them being true together, the result is a tiny fraction of possibility that this is a valid argument.

But that doesn't seem to bother him. It doesn't seem to bother a lot of the Eastern Orthodox either, that they are going that direction, even though it's strange that in this instance, the patristic interpretation is pretty clear, and that's not something that everybody argues about.

So anyway, there's that. Now, so what I'm going to do with the rest of our time here today, before we head off on our trip, and so that means that the next programs, Lord willing, unless Rich messes up the install, hey, you can't expect me to be fixing stuff.

I mean, last trip, one time I tried to get a program started, and nothing would turn on. I mean, it was just dead. So I'm laying on my back, and I call him up, and he says, okay, there's one thing up there, there's a screw on this side, screw on that side, sitting here, lowering this thing down.

And what it was, was you put this thing underneath the desk, sort of hold all the wires up in one place, because it bounces around a lot back there. And what happened was, the main plug that powered a bunch of the stuff, just, you know, you're getting bounced around down the road, and it just came out of the plug.

And so I was able to reach in there, and find it without electrocuting myself. And, but yeah, I wouldn't suggest making me do that very often, because that could end up, I could end up plugging in the wrong thing, and blowing everything up.

So, best not to do that. So, hopefully, on the road, we'll be able to continue this discussion, and do so from our wonderful studio, mobile command studio. And I have a feeling, given some of the places I'm going on this trip, we may be using Starlink a little bit more this trip than normal.

And we're gonna be out in the boonies. In the boonies, and hopefully, not in the snow. Yeah, well, you know, no more ice skating with the rig. No, I'm gonna try to avoid that. I just sort of figured early November is still okay.

You know, you could get some cold snaps and stuff, but I would be really surprised if I get, you know, snowed in someplace. It could happen, but that would be very, very unusual. Anyway, I wanted to get one more trip in, and the only other thing to do is go south.

And man, even when I went south in February, that ice storm went way south, all the way down to Mexico. So there was... That's when you're ice skating with the rig, 57 feet of stuck. Oh man, believe me, I know.

I've still got the picture of me stuck on that tiny little hill, just couldn't go anywhere. That was fun. Did you already put the snow melting stuff in the unit? No, I thought you grabbed it. It's in the closet here.

So we better put it on the... Better put it on the cart. I've got a cart. I've got the heated hose sitting there, put it on the cart. That's how I got out of the last one. Not because I had it, but the guy working in the store had it.

Dating the Corpus Dionysiacum

Anyways, our little story is here. I asked Claude to take my article that will be available for free download in Pro Pastor, which is the journal of the Grace Bible Theological Seminary. There are other articles on orthodoxy and other movements in this journal.

So I think I'm going to make sure on the 26th, so that's this coming Monday, I'm going to make sure... Someone remind me, please, to post the link for a free download, electronic download, of the whole journal.

I think mine's the longest article. It's like, everybody else is supposed to be 4 ,000 words or so. Mine's 9 ,000 something. And with the mother of all footnotes, which is, I think, one slide in my presentation here.

I think it was 684 words for a single footnote. When you see it, you'll know why. It's almost all numbers in Greek grammatical forms. It was just Claude going, okay, how many searches did you do? All right, well, just put them all in one thing and I'll tabulate all of it.

And it's just basically a written out database. Was Dbase, was that the program we all started using back when it was on floppy disks, was called Dbase? The spreadsheets? You used that.

That's close. It's very close. By the way, so I will remember to remind you to drop the link on Monday. You need to remember, and see, this is our age where we have to remind each other of the things that we know we're going to forget.

I have been asked to make sure that you, before the class tonight, do a three-minute talk or commercial for that volume, for the release of that paper. You mean before the class? The journal, yeah. We need to record that before the class.

Oh. So they want you to, and I'm going to send that over to them so they.

Can circulate it far and wide. Oh, you know what? I do remember that the social media guy did want.

That. Yes, and obviously he knows who he's dealing with, with both of us, because he better remind.

Everybody or everybody's going to forget. Huh, yeah, okay. Well, we'll do our best, but you got to remember to order food, too. That we don't forget about. Well, no, but I didn't eat from Tuesday night till this morning, and I've had almost nothing today, too.

So I'm not going to get through that class, I think, without a little bit of sustenance. That's absolutely necessary. Anyways, okay, so on the screen, this is Claude taking my paper and hopefully making it somewhat understandable in less than 9 ,000 words, I guess, something along those lines.

So, just by way of general introduction, I started on this project because when I, when I started thinking about engaging the subject of Nicaea II and Eastern Orthodoxy, you may recall we threw out the possibility of talking to Jay Dyer, and Jay Dyer's response was less mature than a, than a sugared up 13-year-old.

It was absolutely destructive of any reason to ever take the man seriously about anything. And once you realize he, he also hangs out with Alex Jones and that kind of stuff, then you just realize there's, there's not a serious bone in this man's body.

And so when people heard about that, then I had other people contact me, and I think Turretinfan specifically said, you need to talk to Craig Trulio, because they did a veneration debate as well online a couple years ago.

So, and in fact, Turretinfan and his Armenian friend, who's Kopa, Dan, Dan Kopa, I think, Kopa is, what's the last name? Chapa, Chapa, right, Chapa, Chapa, we'll get it there eventually. He and Dan reviewed the veneration debate a couple days ago, as I recall, and I tuned in, but I didn't, wasn't able to stay very long, and I know they were going to Galatians 3 .1, so I'd like to see what they came up with too.

But anyways, so, so Turretinfan suggested contacting Craig Trulio, and so we did, and that's how we set it up. Well, it was shortly after that, that I was sent or ran into a link to a video on YouTube where Craig Trulio is talking with his co-author Nicotopoulos about their theory about Pseudodynesia.

Now, I think it is important to mention, you know, I took Church History a couple times in seminary, because my professor was so good, and it was so enjoyable. Pseudodynesia was mentioned, but not extensively.

I think the vast majority of seminary graduates, as long as you're not doing Church History as your focus or something, know very, very little about Pseudodynesia. I think you could count on two hands the number of Protestant ministers that have done almost any serious work.

And then I started running into them, before the Eastern Orthodox stuff, I started running into more about Pseudodynesia from Jeff Johnson at GBTF, because Jeff got himself into all sorts of trouble when he wrote a book critiquing Thomas Aquinas.

And as he's studying Aquinas in preparation for that book, he discovers that one of Aquinas's primary sources is Dionysius. And not Pseudodionysius, but Dionysius. So Aquinas believed that the corpus Dionysiacum, you can see it on the screen there, the Dionysian corpus, the body of works that make up the Dionysian corpus.

We read an entire one to you from the unit a number of months ago, remember, when I was on the road. He believed that that body of work was written in the early 2nd century. End of the 1st century, beginning of the 2nd century.

Which would make it the most important patristic document that we possess. I mean, something just hit me, and I don't want to necessarily... oh, that's right, let me just use this as an illustration. I was just about to mention Ignatius.

Yeah, I know, I touched the microphone. Here, how's that? Stop it. I can be uncooperative if I wish to be. I was just about to mention the epistles of Ignatius. And what it reminded me of was what happened in the debate, what, February of 2025, I think, where I mentioned the historical reality of the problems with the Ignatian corpus.

You've got Latin, Greek, you've got short, long, middle recensions, you've got... there are a lot of textual critical problems. And I even mentioned that they're so severe that they've caused some people to question whether there was an Ignatius.

I wasn't saying I questioned Ignatius, I never even suggested it. Well, that's how it was spun afterwards, and I still get people repeating, well, you don't even believe Ignatius existed. And I'm like, so you can lie about somebody.

And I mean, I corrected all of this that day. And on the next dividing line, I did like an hour and a half on it. And then when I got back, we did two and a half hours on it. Put it to bed, any honest person, it's done.

But there are a lot of really dishonest people in the world. And so they just keep repeating the lie. And it is a lie. They don't care that it's a lie, but they like repeating it. So today, I think it was in our chat channel.

I don't know if you saw it, Rich. But yeah, there it is. There it is. A guy named Daniel Jones. Yeah, Daniel Jones said, he's talking about me. He says, something this God-hater and fatalist in general just don't understand because they like James White, who admitted in open debate recently, do not have a relationship with Christ.

Now, I mean, the guy can't even write English sentences. But who admitted in open debate recently, do not have relationship with Christ. So that was the Alex Sorin thing from the cross-act. And no rational person, no person with an ounce of integrity could watch that cross-examination come to that conclusion.

If you came to that conclusion, you are a liar and you live lies. I mean, this is all there is to it. I never said anything even close to it. But this is how, when people cannot respond to your arguments, this is the desperation they will go to.

And so, just talking about the Ignatian Corpus made me remember that keeps coming up. This will keep coming up. Five years from now, there'll be somebody to say, I denied knowing Christ in that debate.

You just watch. Will they ever watch it? Will they ever actually deal with it? No. But that's the level of thinking many people. Back to Dionysius. The Dionysian Corpus would be more important than Ignatius, because it would be before Ignatius.

And yet no one treats it that way. No Roman Catholic scholar treats it that way. No Protestant scholar treats it that way. But Aquinas did, because up until and even through the Reformation, it was believed that the Dionysius who wrote these materials was the Dionysius who was the convert of the Apostle Paul in Acts chapter 17, after he preached at the Areopagus.

And so, that gave massive weight to these writings. And so, Aquinas was deeply impacted. The form and shape of Western mysticism, all the Western mystics, the apophatic theology, the negation, the, you know, when I read to you, most of you didn't have an idea what I was talking about.

I mean, I tried to explain a few things, but it's just so outside of our experience. And that's why when you read most of the mystics, you're left going, what is going on here? Well, there's the connection.