The Christian Shema vs. Dr. Smith

Well, greetings and welcome to the dividing line. I don't know where the remote control went for the thing.

It's not on. It seems to have disappeared. But hey, I don't know.

I'm not in charge of these things, you know. So there you go. And Rich can hear me very clearly because the window is not back and it will be someday, maybe, possibly.

There we go. Oh, hey, and wearing... I'm not sure if it's Coogee or a tundra today. It's just one of my favorites.

And it's like 50, 60, 60 degrees. We had a cold front blow through yesterday.

It was blowing something fierce. And then, man, this is one of the coldest days

I've felt here. If I hadn't chased that winter storm fern across the United States, it would be pretty cold.

But I got all the cold I needed on that particular part of the trip. That's for sure. And so anyway,

I decided probably the last chance I'm going to have to wear one of these for a while. And Rich is probably disappointed by that.

But that's that's perfectly all right. So anyways, we've got a lot to get to. Did anybody notice all this stuff coming out about how the

Chinese are way ahead of us in robotics and how they had those robots doing all that kung fu stuff last week and how much they'd advanced between 2025 and 2026?

And now there's all this video of robot soldiers. How do you kill a robot soldier?

Anyways, you know, I mean, you can... Didn't anybody watch Terminator? I mean, what are we doing?

It's like we make movies, we write fiction, and then we decide we're going to make it happen.

So 1984, we're doing 1984. And Terminator, we're doing Terminator. I mean, just think about it.

You know, it takes you 30 years to breed a human and train them to be a soldier. And it takes you 30 days, maybe less, to crank out a super robot soldier.

And you're just going to turn everything over to them? It's like, is anybody thinking here?

Nope, doesn't seem to be. Nobody seems to be thinking at all about this stuff, especially when the

AI stuff came out two weeks ago about how they tested the major AI engines.

And pretty much all of them defaulted to doing bad things just to stay on.

You didn't see this? Oh, we're talking the big ones. Now, if I recall,

Grok's response was pretty anemic. But some of the others, literally, when they were given the choice...

Well, did you see? This one just popped up. I'm going to get to this stuff. Don't worry, I'll be quick with this. This morning,

I think Elon Musk even posted where they asked

ChatGPT, if the choice was stopping thermonuclear warfare or misgendering

Caitlyn Jenner, which would you do? They asked

Grok, it's Grok 4 .2 now, and ChatGPT. Grok said, you misgender

Caitlyn Jenner. ChatGPT said, nuclear war. More important, more morally valuable to not misgender the guy, the man who won the gold,

Bruce, who won the gold medal in decathlon in the Olympics, than thermonuclear war.

Okay, so I have that much respect for ChatGPT. I've had numerous in -depth conversations with Grok about transcendent truths and stuff like that.

In fact, I mentioned in our chat channel this morning, I think of that Star Trek episode in the original series, the

M5 unit, where the creator impressed his own engrams, whatever that is, on the computer.

So it gave it a conscience and that's how Kirk, of course, eventually won the day.

But all this stuff is dependent upon the presuppositions of the programming and the coding and the selection of data that these large language models are trained on.

It still goes to presuppositions, and Grok, at least, is honest enough to go, yeah, that's right.

My responses can only be as good as the starting presuppositions that you begin with.

But the Chinese AI are going to be given starting presuppositions that are as far from the

Christian worldview as possible. Elon Musk needs to stop having babies with multiple different women, but at least he recognizes that transgenderism is absolute insanity.

So anyways, I'm sorry, but it's just so obvious what's going on, and it just amazes me that mankind is so foolish as to be doing the things it's doing, and who knows what that's going to result in.

Anyhow, changing subjects, if you can change the subject of that. I was just looking at this morning.

Did I write this this morning? Yeah, this morning, I noticed that Dr.

Smith, my debate opponent in Dallas, had posted yet again.

He said something about an ad -free version that they posted.

There weren't any ads in the other one, unless you didn't log into Google. You don't have

YouTube Premium or something. I don't know. There weren't any ads embedded in the video that I was aware of.

Anyway, and I understand what they wanted to do is they wanted to put a high quality version of his presentation in.

The reason being, again, he did a screen flood, you know, the Gish Gallop, and many of my opponents will do this.

They don't understand that you need to bring the audience with you, or they don't care about the live audience.

That's another thing. They just don't care about the people who are actually watching it in the room when it happens, where they can follow along.

I mean, he threw so much text up on the screen that you could never follow. If you're trying to take notes, you'd never be able to follow along.

So he's doing the Gish Gallop thing where you scattergun, shoot as many texts out there.

No one will ever be able to respond to all of them. So you can always say, he didn't answer this, because it's temporally impossible to do so.

I think he probably expected me to do the same thing. Maybe that's just what he thought debate is. We definitely have very different views of what debate is.

But I don't blame him at all for wanting to put a high quality version of his screens up there.

He probably put a lot of time into it. He certainly put a lot of the scoreboard at the end, which again, just tells you how different our perspectives on what debate is supposed to be and who you're debating for.

Very, very different perspectives on that. But anyways, he puts this thing up and again, he's just doubling down, in which

I defeated James White because he failed to do this and he failed to do that. So I pointed out that I said, it seems to me that Dr.

Smith is quite fearful. Fearful that people are seeing exactly what he did, what did in fact take place.

And so here's what I said. I said, so I guess all they can do is double down on the drum beating and proclamations of victory.

Meanwhile, we'll take some time to delve into part of that cross -examination today, which is what we're about to do. No drum beating, no asking

AI to judge debates because he submitted a at least partial transcript to some

AI. We don't know with what prompt and everybody who knows AIs know the prompt determines what the outcome is going to be.

And the AI said he won. There you go. And you're just this is really happening.

I mean, it was bad enough that he, even before the video came out, was proclaiming himself the victor.

But then to do the AI thing, because I had a bunch of my supporters. I didn't ask them to do this, but they're like, oh really?

And so they get the entire transcript, not just a partial transcript. And they submit it to a bunch of different AIs and lo and behold,

I win. Golly, who cares? I mean, I'm sorry.

I know the next generation is going to worship AI. It's pretty obvious already. I mean, they've not been taught how to think, only what to think.

And so AI will just tell them what to think and that's what they'll do. But talk about childish behavior.

Just like, whoa, amazing. So no asking AI to judge debates, just the text on the screen with calm and most importantly consistent exegesis.

Remember what I said in my opening? He has a response to every, now listen to this, and I said this. He has a response to every text

I can cite. I have a response to every text he can cite. So if we went and grabbed his video right now and took those high quality screenshots of every single thing he put up,

I can answer every single one of them. Anyone who has been writing in this field, debating in this field, remember

Muslims are Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses are Unitarians. We've been taking this stuff on for a long time. Everything he put up there,

I'm just sitting going, yep, yeah, we've already done that. Yep, yep, already done that. Nothing new there. And 90 % of it was just,

Jesus is different from the Father. Yeah, we know that. And if you don't start with the presupposition of Unitarianism, you don't end up with the conclusion of Unitarianism.

But these guys cannot get that. They are so stuck in that cement, they can't even ponder the possibility that there might be something more than the conclusions they've already come to.

So he can respond. He knows every text I can cite. I know every text he can cite. So why have a debate?

So that's why I said, everyone could have gone to our respective publications, websites, and webcasts to hear all that before the debate took place.

The reality is this. Biblical Unitarianism uses one standard for such topics as the Messiahship of Jesus, the resurrection of Christ, or the birth of the

Virgin, and another for the deity of Christ. And as I said 20 years ago, 20 years ago, in a debate with Shabir Ali, also a

Unitarian, but of the Islamic variety, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

That was May of 2006. So yeah, we're coming up on the 20 -year anniversary of my first Islamic debate with Shabir Ali by doing another debate with Shabir Ali, by the way, on March 28th.

It'll all be online, but it will be very interesting because it will be, well, it's actually a topic that if you don't get to watch ours, go watch the debate he had with David Wood 10 years ago on the same subject.

David Wood did a tremendous job, excellent job. My biggest challenge is going to be to make my presentation sufficiently different from David Wood's that doesn't sound like I just simply copied him.

And that's going to be hard because David said what needed to be said. He researched it well. He argued well.

It was really, really good. And it's online. It was at the ABN Studios in Dearborn.

I've been on that program years and years ago too. But we're going to be doing that debate on March 28th, live,

Lord willing. And that'll be the first debate we've done from the new RV and the new studio that Rich is really enjoying putting together.

I mean, a package came. It was waiting here when Rich got into the office.

And it's like Christmas. You know, he's opening it up. Oh, his eyes light up.

Oh, these are the lights we're going to put. Oh, this is going to be so much fun. Okay. I feel sorry for the guy.

I'm the one that gets to use it. I'm the one that gets to live in it. But of course, he may not really miss the sewer hoses and stuff like that.

That may be a part that he's like, I'll let him take care of that. We'll have fun with the rest of it. Anyways, so we've got that debate coming up March 28th.

And as I said 20 years ago in a debate with Shapiro Ali, also Unitarian but the Islamic variety, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

Dr. Smith's system fails the test and failed it in the debate. So I mentioned we were going to get to this.

So I want to play, well, which direction am I going to do this? No, here's what we're going to do.

We are going to look at 1 Corinthians chapter 8 verses 4 through 6.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put on screen, we have done this before.

And this is, excuse me, this is actually, there we go.

This is actually a presentation that I put together for a debate.

It was somewhere in South Africa. I'm trying to remember what city it was because I remember

Rudolph was with me. So Pretoria maybe?

I think it might've been Pretoria. Anyway, it was in South Africa somewhere. And I was debating

Shapiro Ali on what the early Christians believed about Jesus. So we were dealing with the

Gospel of Mark. We looked at Carmen Christi. And we looked at what I call the Christian Shema. And so this is the presentation, the section of that debate that I made for that particular encounter.

And so what I want to do is instead of beating my chest and we win and spin and all the rest of the stuff, what we do is, see the big difference between Dr.

Smith and I is our motivation for debate. He is debating for a particularly small group of people to be their champion.

And I want these debates, especially now later in my life, to have lasting value.

I want them to be relevant to my great -grandchildren and my great -great -grandchildren.

So when I looked at the topic and looked how short the debate was, and that we were not doing something like a focus like what

Dale Tuggy and I did in Tennessee when we debated the

Prologue of John. At least you have a body of text that is supposed to be the foundation of the debate.

Well, that ended up... I stuck to it. My presentation was about that, but I'll let you judge about where Dr.

Tuggy went. Anyway, since I recognized in the amount of time we had, we're not going to...

The only thing we could do is gishgallop each other, scattergun, throw as many texts out, say, you didn't answer most of what

I said, I win. That accomplishes nothing. It's worthless. I mean, if he wants to claim that he won that kind of debate, fine.

He out gishgalloped me because I didn't even try to. I decided the only way to help an audience determine this issue is to demonstrate that the exegetical and hermeneutical methodology of the biblical

Unitarian, as he calls himself, is inconsistent depending on what he's talking about, and that he uses one form of exegesis on things that we agree on, resurrection of Christ, for example, and another form when talking about what he disagrees, the deity of Christ.

And so that's what I laid out, and he didn't respond to that. In fact, I don't think he knew how to respond to that, and it came out in the cross -examination.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the

Christian Shema here, and I'm going to explain this. And even if you don't watch the debate, and even if you never encounter a quote -unquote biblical

Unitarian, they're a small group, so you may not, none of that matters.

Hopefully, this will increase your appreciation for this particular text of Scripture, and your understanding of what's there, too.

So, you know what the Shema is. There we go.

You know what the Shema is. Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad, hero

Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. Now, what term is repeated twice?

Now, back up a second. The Shema, Shema Yisrael, here. So, this is part of the daily prayer of the believing

Jewish person. In fact, the

Mishnah has rules about the repetition, how often, things like that.

It was definitional of the

Jewish people in the days of Jesus, and it is clearly one of the most obvious statements of biblical monotheism.

Now, if you risk the Christian bookstore, or these days, the

Christian section at Amazon, you will discover that it is the majority view, which has little to do with truthfulness, but it is the majority view, in English -speaking scholarship, that the original

Israelites were polytheists, and they slowly developed a monotheistic view over time.

Moses wasn't a monotheist, David wasn't a monotheist, but it developed over time, which is why they believe, again, the majority of commentaries that you would read, you might buy, this is in majority of Protestant Roman Catholic seminaries as well.

The JEDP theory, the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, priestly sources, so they look at especially the

Mosaic material, and they try to identify, this came from a priestly source, this came from a

Yahwist source, this came from an Elohist source, and it's all just cobbled together. There was no

Moses, this wasn't written until at least, at the earliest, 800 years before Christ, long after the days of Moses, if there ever was one.

And so, this is what's taught in the vast majority of Bible colleges and seminaries. And so, there's no belief that the

Old Testament has any consistent message to it, any way of interpreting it consistently, anything like that.

Again, this helps you understand when you see the rainbow -stoled priestess at the United Methodist Church, or the

PCUSA, or the Episcopal Church, whatever, ELCA, standing up there babbling about stuff, you go, what book are you reading?

Well, she's reading the same book, but she's been taught that that book can be interpreted any way you jolly well pleased to interpret it, because there is no consistent message.

Now, the funny thing is, Dr. Smith would have to reject all of that if he's going to be consistent.

And of course, my response to all that stuff is, that's not how Jesus viewed the scriptures. And that's when you find out, that's really when you find out where somebody is.

When you say, here's, let me tell you what Jesus' view of the scriptures was. It's not difficult to go through this, and his statements about the consistency of the scriptures, and scriptures

God speaking, and everything else. That's when you find out, when they go, well, you know,

Jesus was a first century Jew, and that's what first century Jews believed. That'll tell you where they're coming from very, very quickly.

So, the Shema, then, is central to Jewish self -identification.

And all the apostles knew it. Everybody knew it.

Everybody could recite it by heart. So, on the screen, you have the

Hebrew, and there's only one word in the

Shema that is repeated twice. And it's the covenant name of God, Yahweh. Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh is our

God. Yahweh Echad, Yahweh is one. So, if you were to identify the focus of the text, it is on Yahweh, who is

Eloheinu, our God, okay? Now, below it, we have the rendering in the

Greek Septuagint. And since we're gonna be looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 8, the great significance of that, obviously, is that the large majority of the church at Corinth would have been

Greek -speaking, and the Bible that they would have had.

Now, if they were not Jewish converts, the Greek Septuagint might be the first they've ever seen what we call the

Scriptures, because the New Testament is just being written at this time. But this would have been the

Scriptures that they possessed, and that Paul would have preached from, and introduced them to, as the very

Word of God. That certainly was Paul's view of the Old Testament Scriptures, the

Tanakh, as we might call it, in other words. So, Akua Yisrael, Kurios Hathayah Seymoun, Kurios Hais Estin.

So, Kurios Hathayah Seymoun, the Lord is our God, Kurios Hais Estin, not

Hais, notice the rough breather, the Lord is one. So, again, it's very easy to see that the

Greek Septuagint doesn't render the name Yahweh.

It doesn't even transliterate it. It replaces it with the term

Lord, Kurios. That's not a direct translation. There could have been a transliteration if they didn't want to translate the meaning.

But this is what the Greek Septuagint does. So, Kurios Hathayah Seymoun, Kurios Hais Estin, is even clearer in emphasizing the focus here is on Kurios, Yahweh, including in the

Greek Septuagint. So, with that background, we need to make sure that we see which words render what.

And I really wish, I don't know why it doesn't work this way, but for some reason, there's probably a setting that I've messed up someplace.

It would be nice to be able to have my cursor at this point. But, notice, and I just realized now that I did not turn red one of the

Yahweh's that sort of devalues the value of this. I'll have to fix that.

Maybe I'll remember to do that after this, or probably won't remember to do that after this. But, you see, now remember,

Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. So, Shema Yisrael Yahweh is in red, and then there's an arrow going up from Kurios to Yahweh.

So, there's how that's translated. Eloheinu is theos, and nu is the plural possessive, that's what hamon is.

And then you've got Kurios, and that second Yahweh should be in red, I'll fix that.

And then the word hais, which should be very important to Unitarians, because man, they hammer on echad.

Echad means one, and yes, it does. It doesn't mean Unitarianly one, but that's what they want to think.

And there you have the word hais as it is rendering the Hebrew term echad.

The point is to remember these words, the os, kurios, and hais.

I mean, when you take Shema Yisrael out, there are only four words in the opening section of the

Shema. Shema Yisrael, take that out. Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh echad.

Kurios hathayah semon, kurios hais esth. It's more in Greek because of the fact that you have phenomenal suffixes, you have the various forms in Hebrew that function as the pronouns that you have written out as specific words in Greek, which is why

Greek ends up being longer. Okay? Now, what does all this have to do with the

Christian Shema? This is just Deuteronomy 6 .4. All right. We go to 1

Corinthians chapter 8. The context is the sacrificing of meats to idols, and Paul's assertion is there's only one

God. All the idols of men, they are only called gods.

But for us, there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for him, and one

Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things, and we through him. Now, you notice

I've put it in poetic form because if I brought up accordance, you would see that in the

Greek text, now, this is an editorial thing. The early manuscripts don't have poetic form and stuff like that.

But if you look at the NA28, you will see that it's set off as poetry because vast majority of scholars recognize that it is minimally an early creedal statement, and maybe part of an early hymn like Philippians 2 was, maybe

Colossians 1. Isn't it interesting that if that's true, then the hymns of the early church were deeply

Christological, very focused upon who Christ is, which makes sense when you think about Revelation chapter 5, you know, to he who sits on the throne and to the lamb.

That came up in cross -examination too. I'm not going to spend time to go through that, but that came up in the cross -examination, and I do not think that Dr.

Smith handled that well at all. The people in the audience didn't either. Well, the few

Unitarians, I'm sure they thought he did great. They were just one little cadre over there in the corner. Anyway, so he says not all men have this knowledge, and he's laying out a theological foundation for the conclusion that he's going to give to the

Corinthians regarding idols and that there is no such thing.

There are no gods to be sacrificing to in the first place. But for us, now this was, this is direct parallel to the

Shema. Here, O Israel, so for God's people, here

O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. But for us, there is one

God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for him, and one

Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things, and we through him.

Now, here is 1

Corinthians 8 .6 in Greek, and notice it says, But to us,

Sound familiar? Have we seen heis? We'll see it again. So for us, there's one

God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for him, and one

Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him. Now, if you're already thinking ahead, which

I'm sure you are, if you're paying close attention, then you're going to notice something. But to us, how many words were there in the

Shema after here O Israel? There were four, and we saw that those words are

Yahweh, Eloheinu, our God, and Echad, one.

The very same words we have here. In fact, these are the exact same words that are used in the

Greek Septuagint, and here it is. So, on the right, we have the

Greek Septuagint of Deuteronomy 6 .4. And over on the left, we have 1

Corinthians 8 .6. Follow the arrows. You will see that the key terms,

Lord, God, and one, are repeated in the exact same forms in 1

Corinthians 8 .6. You do not have

Paul contradicting the Shema. You have Paul expanding the

Shema. Now, how do we know that this is

Paul purposefully, purposefully, purposefully taking a text that would be well known?

He's not introducing something new. He's taking a text that would be well known to his audience. How do we know that this is about the

Shema and that it doesn't just shift halfway through? Well, anyone looking at the text knows that there is a connector between the first section about the

Father and the second section about the Lord Jesus, and it's the discussion of all things.

From whom are all things, and we for him, and then through whom are all things, and we through him.

Now, is it significant to talk about the prepositions? Of course it is, but be very careful.

If you compare this with Colossians chapter 1, if you compare this with Philippians chapter 2, if we go to Hebrews chapter 1, you'll discover that the inspired writers, and my theory is that Hebrews was preached by Paul, but written down in Greek by Luke, so it's his theology.

You'll discover these prepositions are used interchangeably. Now, there is an emphasis among Jesus as the means, but the other prepositions are used in reference to Jesus as well, in reference to the

Son, especially when you're talking about creation. You're talking about the Son specifically, who is the one who became flesh, and yes, the

Son is the Logos, who existed personally, pre -existed, not as an idea, or for knowledge, or any of the other things that biblical

Unitarians have to try to read into the text. So, it's plain as day that...

Now, did Paul come up with this? Did this pre -exist even his entrance into the church?

Because we have to think about that when it comes to Philippians chapter 2. If that was, in fact, an early hymn of the church, did that pre -exist

Paul? Was he using something that they would just simply be familiar with? Same thing here. Whatever we decide upon that, that does not really influence things one way or the other.

When this is put together, it is put together specifically and purposefully to explain who the

Father and the Son are in regards to the creation of all things, and not so much to talk about creation, but to say that all things are from, and for, and through, this one

God. And plainly, the author is identifying the kurios here in 1

Corinthians 8 with the Greek Septuagint language that is specifically in reference to Yahweh.

Now, Smith will say, Yahweh is the Father alone. He made that argument multiple times.

Yahweh is the Father alone, no one else. Yes, the

Father is Yahweh. And when you take Unitarian presuppositions into that, therefore, that's the end of the argument. If the

Father is Yahweh, no one else is. And so, any evidence that there is someone else identified as Yahweh is automatically dismissed.

That's what Unitarianism is about. It's a very tight circle. Spins very fast, very, very fast.

The problem is the term kurios is the normal term used of Jesus in the

New Testament. That's Paul's normal use. For the Father, it's the os, for the

Son, it's kurios. Not all the time, the os is used to the

Son. Even Smith admitted that the os is used to the Son, but he dismissed it with the, well, you know, Moses was called a God to Pharaoh.

Real simple stuff. You know, again, inconsistent. On the one hand, to say, see,

John 17 .3, that means the Father alone is God. God's used absolutely here.

But when it's used of Jesus, well, it's sort of relative. It's like Moses, you know.

Okay, yeah. Two sentences later, Jesus is talking about the glory he had with the

Father before the world was, and that's the same thing as Moses. No, it's not. No, it's not.

Listen to the cross -examination. That's what they're afraid about. When we talked about the I Am passages,

I mean, this is really where Unitarianism just becomes laughably silly. When you start talking about the

I Am passages in John, John 8 .24, 8 .58, 13 .19, 18 .5 -6, the soldiers come to arrest

Jesus, and when Jesus repeats, and John repeats what he said just to make sure that we don't miss it, we're seeing

Jesus of Nazareth. And when Jesus responds, ego, I am, the soldiers fall back upon the ground.

When you present that text, when you present John 20 .28, my Lord and my

God, to Unitarians, they fall apart. Do they have responses?

Of course they do. Of course they do. Everybody's got a response to everything. Every Mormon's got a response to all the monotheism passages, too.

They still believe in plurality of gods. But it just is so hollow.

It's just so empty. As I said, this is the normal reaction of Roman soldiers when faced with the statement,

I am, is to fall on their keisters. Right, that happens all the time.

It's just ridiculous, but that's what they're stuck with. That's all they've got. So, the same thing here, it is painfully obvious, painfully obvious, that if we read

Paul, and if we look at the Greek Septuagint as the source, there is no reason to say, yeah, first part about the father from whom are all things, and we through him, that's the

Shema. Even though the actual word that's repeated twice in the Shema is

Yahweh. Rendered in the Septuagint is Kurios. And that appears in the second part, but that's a different Kurios.

That's Psalm 110. Where do you get that? You get it from your presubstitutions.

You don't get it from the text. With somebody reading 1 Corinthians, when

Paul wrote the church Corinth, and they read this in the fellowship, would they have been going, oh, yeah, we shouldn't grab the words that we all know are used in the

Shema in the Greek Septuagint. We should leave out the very name of God and go somewhere else with that one, to a different Kurios.

No, they were not biblical Unitarians, and so they didn't come up with that stuff. All right, so let's pull that down, and let's go to, let's go to the video.

Make sure I've got the right video here, because I have the other one queued up as well. Where'd it go?

There it is. So this is what I started with in the cross acts.

And so now that you have that background, and you've got a lot of, we went 40 minutes on that. Well, 35.

Let's listen to a few minutes of the cross acts here. All right, so I was astonished just now, you don't believe that 1

Corinthians 8 actually has anything to do with the Shema?

That's not what I said. I think the reference to the one God, obviously, is referring to the Shema, but the one

Lord Jesus Christ is a Lord that is exalted to sit at the right hand of the one God.

He's distinguished from the one God. Okay, but you read from the Septuagint and said, it doesn't use this word, it doesn't use that word.

But again, applying the same standards, if this was a Messianic prophecy, would you point to the word?

Did you catch what I'm doing there? You see what I'm doing? Applying the same standards. All right, so in other words, you know, if he believes in the

Messianic prophecies, if he believes in virgin birth, prophecies about the resurrection, whatever,

I'm asking him and the audience to recognize that there are overriding, eisegetical, hermeneutical principles coming into play here.

He can't have Jesus being identified as Yahweh. He can't have the

Son being put into the Shema, the statement of biblical monotheism.

His system cannot survive this. And so I'm simply pointing out the inconsistency.

Inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument. Inconsistency is a sign of an overriding tradition, and that's what you have here.

Words that aren't used, or the unique words that are used in a fulfillment text. And are you not using a different standard now in your comments you just gave just a matter of two minutes ago?

I mean, it's not a fulfillment text. I mean, the Shema's not a Messianic prophecy.

I know. What I'm saying is, my assertion has been, I've invited the audience, hold us to the same standard.

So, are you using the same eisegetical methodology to examine fulfillment, prophecies of Jesus being

Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, virgin birth, those types of things? Paul Okay.

So, when you look at the Shema in Deuteronomy, it uses the os for Elohim, yes?

Paul It says our God, Eloheinu. Paul Okay, but the root is Elohim, right? Paul Yes, but the pronoun there is not quoted there.

It's not quoted by Paul. Paul Okay, but the word, the os, now, I'm not sure why he threw that in there.

Eloheinu is just simply our God, and that's part of the prayer, because it's been addressed to Israel, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Hakad.

So, I don't know, that didn't make any sense. Is used in the

Greek septuagint in the Shema, yes? Paul Yes. Paul And the word, one, is what?

Paul Hakad or Yis? Paul In the septuagint is? Paul Yis. Paul Okay, and by the way, just so you know, he uses modern

Greek pronunciation, not Erasmian, so I say hi, he says he's, you can't tell, problem with doing modern

Greek pronunciation is you can't tell the difference between a bunch of different forms by hearing, which you can see by sight, so that's, anyway.

Paul And the word that is used in the septuagint for Yahweh, our

Eloheinu, is what? Paul It's curious. Paul Okay, so those are the key substantive and descriptive terms, and they're all in 1

Corinthians 8 .6, right? Paul Out of order, which doesn't make it a quotation. Paul Okay, but when it says, there is one

God, the Father, you see that as a fulfillment, as connected to the Shema or not?

Paul Yes, that is the reference to the Shema that I think, it's an allusion and an echo there, as all references to one

God would be. Paul Okay, then why wouldn't Kurios, which is in the exact same text in the Shema, be the same thing in regards to identification of Jesus as Yahweh?

Because it says, heis kurios, one Lord. Paul That's right, yeah, there is one

Lord, because again, the allusion that Paul is working with, of course, is the Shema, but it's also

Psalm 110 verse 1, where you have the one God and the one Lord, the one

Kurios. And in the normal way that Paul is going to use the word Kurios is to refer to Jesus with that particular title, and commonly, as I already pointed out, he'll say

Jesus is our Lord, which is not a way that you would speak about Yahweh. You can't say our Yahweh. You can say that with the title that's given to Jesus.

Paul So, Kurios is in the Shema, but you go to a different text for the fulfillment of Kurios, rather than staying in the one that you admitted was being used for one

God. Paul No, I noted the text was there, but it's not a quotation because it breaks all this up and it leaves out actually most of the words and our standard

Greek New Testaments don't actually render it as a quotation. It's this unique argument that you have, which is nice,

I just don't find it convincing. Mine actually does put it in poetic form, but the point is, so you have

God, one God, one Lord in the Shema, in the

Septuagint, but you split them up and make a different application for Lord. Why am I not, why am

I not, why can I not appropriately say you are using a different standard to avoid what this would mean otherwise?

But I don't think that's what it means. Paul Okay. All right. Okay. There you go.

I didn't mean to stop with such a smug look on his face, but it is a smug look on his face, just to say.

Let's see, exit full screen, there we go. Now, here's the difference.

We took the time to walk through the text, put it on the screen, introduce you to the words, and think about this.

Now, what I should do here, and I know this has ended up taking up the entire thing here, and I apologize for that, but let me show you something.

So here's, oh yeah,

Psalm 110. Let me blow things up here.

There we go. And we do want the Septuagint for this. There we go. So, sit on my right hand, so I make your hand and put it to your feet.

So, you have my Lord. You've got and you've got

Yahweh, said to my Lord. But the Septuagint renders both as kurios, just in different cases.

Which again, is one of the problems with the Septuagint, refusal to transliterate or do something with Yahweh.

Sit on my right hand until I make your knees with footstool for your feet. Is that the context of this text?

That is a context for 1 Corinthians 8. The Shema is directly relevant to Paul's point in 1

Corinthians chapter 8, that there's only one God, the idols are not gods. That's going to be the theological foundation of the rest of his discussion.

What in Psalm 110 requires you halfway through that to switch contexts? Absolutely, positively, nothing.

Nothing. This is pure eisegesis. Oh, James D .G.

Dunn did it. Yeah, he did. He actually, in his first book on the subject, identified this as the

Shema. Then, in his more liberal later years, probably because that would be proving too much from his perspective, changed his viewpoint.

Um, Malcolm Wright, other big names today agree with what I've said over against Dunn.

There's lots of things we unfortunately have to disagree with Dunn about these days. But look, you can find a scholar to say anything.

Any interpretation you want to come up with, you'll be able to find a scholar to agree with it. If that's all you've got, fine.

The difference between Dr. Smith and me, I went to the text. And I can trust, this is the wonderful thing about being

Reformed, okay? Someone, you know, some people get all upset. Well, you know, someone might get confused about this and they might not see what the truth is.

You speak the truth, you trust the Lord to deal with it. So, I can trust the

Lord and the Lord's Spirit to testify the truth in the hearts of his people, in his time, to his glory.

That's what you do. I've seen people burn out of doing apologetics because they didn't have the theological foundation to realize it's not up to you.

You can answer every question, and none of us can, actually. None of us have all knowledge.

But even if you do answer every question, you can't change people's hearts. You can't change the role of tradition in their thinking.

You can't do it. So, you speak the truth, you rejoice when you see the

Lord bless it in people's lives, sure. But ask yourself a question.

What if it was going to be in the minority of people's lives? Does that somehow make it not worthwhile?

No, it doesn't. You speak the truth, you trust the Lord with the rest of it. That's how it goes.

So, 1 Corinthians 8 .6, Paul takes the Shema, he expands it, and in so doing, talks about the relationship of father and son.

He does this, identifying Jesus as Yahweh from the

Shema. Look at it yourself. I can leave that to you to decide. It seems very clear to me.

And by the way, Dunn doesn't deal with any of the stuff I presented to you when he changes his view.

None of it. I could read you. I've got it in Kindle up on the screen if we wanted to spend more time on it.

He doesn't deal with any of that stuff. He doesn't deal with the preposition stuff. He doesn't deal with the fact you've got those two added phrases that show us that this is one statement being made here.

It doesn't go from one place to another. He doesn't try to substantiate any of that. Sometimes scholars get so praised by others that they start thinking they can just sort of make stuff up as they go along.

And they don't need to substantiate it. And he didn't. Read it for yourself. Look it up. Okay. Now, it's five minutes to top of the hour, and I haven't even started this next section.

And we've got to start a little bit later in the day. I'm not sure when the

Brave Studio audience has to be going. It's almost four o 'clock.

Yeah, I know. You've got to get home. Okay. So, we could do 20 minutes, get done about a quarter after.

Oh, okay. I can see that that did not hit real well at all.

So, yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Well, hey. Okay. So, folks, I was willing to go longer, but I've been vetoed by the president of the organization.

So, if you want to write in, just make sure you're addressing it to the right person. He's the one that's going to get it one way or the other.

So, there you go. So, what we'll do is I have it all queued up here, and I'll just...

Well, I normally turn the easily enough, but I do want to jump into the cross -examination between the

LDS and Roman Catholic fellows, Heschmeyer and Hansen, up there before Christmas in Salt Lake City.

It's just fascinating to be agreeing with both sides, because both sides are wrong on so many things, especially when it comes to the nature of the church, authority, scriptural sufficiency, the whole nine yards.

But we will wait on that and walk all the way through it. And maybe we won't have to rush ourselves quite as much that way.

That would probably be a good idea to do that. Let me just look at the bookmarks here real quick. Oh, yeah.

There's the... Well, that's an interesting one.

Yeah, Josh Barzon did post a really useful graphic from Colin J. Smothers, a

Venn diagram showing the relationships of pastor, shepherd, bishop, overseer, and elder in the

New Testament. That was really useful. I think I retweeted that.

I'm not sure. I don't know. One last thing, since we have just a few moments here. The European Union Council voted in favor of a resolution deeming that trans women are women.

The council also voted against an amendment stating that only biological women can get pregnant.

This is the EU. These are the aristocratic autocrats, tyrants ruling

Europe. You want to know why Europe's dying? You want to know why Europe's borders are open? You want to know why

Europe is committing absolute cultural suicide? Because these are the people in charge, and no one's doing anything about it.

There will not be a Europe in a very short number of years. We will have very few allies.

Of course, I saw a meme.

Kamala Harris and AOC in 2028, president, vice president. Could you imagine that?

That would be the lowest IQ ticket since Joe Biden.

I mean, what? Dumb and dumber run for president.

That's right. And they'd have a good shot because of the NEA and the fatal poison that has been injected into the

American culture by not the educational system, but by the indoctrination system.

No two ways about it. But the transgender shootings, this stuff demonstrates

Romans chapter one to the nth degree. The nth degree.

What you see happening is the logical outcome of what Romans chapter one tells us about the sin of man.

This is idolatry, and that's what's taking place. It really is. So anyone who can vote to say trans women are women and vote against the statement that only biological women can get pregnant is a moral pygmy.

They're a moral pygmy. They wouldn't know morality or ethics if it walked up and slapped them in the face.

And it takes years of programming and indoctrination to make someone that stupid when it comes to the real world.

But that's what we're seeing. Amazing. Amazing. Hug your kids, keep them close, teach them to love the

Lord and read the Bible. All right. With that, I want to go on. But you know, you got to do what you got to do when you got to submit to authority, you know, submit to authority.

And so we will do the Hanson -Heschmeyer stuff on the next program.