The Dividing Line In Response to Chris Pinto

And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line, a special Dividing Line today. What we're going to do is I'm going to respond to an article posted this morning by Chris Pinto on the debate that we did on Wednesday evening, and then we are going to play the entirety of the debate.

A number of you obviously listen to The Dividing Line primarily through iTunes, through a subscription, you know,

RSS feed, whatever it might be. And since the debate was not live -streamed through our facility, then you might not hear it, and so we are going to provide that entire debate.

It's just over an hour and a half in length. But I wanted to, the reason

I wanted to do this, I had thought about just starting the music and then putting the debate in, and we could do that at any time, not even break into the

Wayback Machine or whatever. But when I got up this morning and saw the article that Chris Pinto had placed on the web,

I was amazed, I was disappointed, but I just had to respond to it, because it is fairly amazing how you can go through something, you can experience something in reality, and then a little while later it's very different than what everybody else experienced.

And so I just wanted to respond to some of the things here that are just so far off -beam, so far outside of the reality of history or fact or just what happened a couple days ago, that it's very troubling, very troubling indeed, that we would have this kind of spin being placed upon something.

But I personally think it's damage control. I think most folks know what happened in that debate, but I want to take a look at the debate summary provided by Chris Pinto, then we'll play the debate for your own listening pleasure.

You can make up your own mind if you did not hear it, or click on over to Chris Rosebraugh's site either.

Anyway, under the debate summary by Christian J. Pinto, I'm just going to go through it.

I've marked the things I want to discuss here briefly, and then we'll jump into the debate itself, and you can listen to how that went.

Second paragraph. In the immediate aftermath, it is interesting that most of White's followers have been very reluctant to claim victory on his behalf, something they are known for doing.

I dispute this. I'd like to have evidence of this. And in fact,

I saw lots of stuff. First of all, I don't have control over who he thinks my followers quote -unquote are.

I don't know who they are. There's no organization of James White followers or anything of the kind.

And so I think that's an unfair statement. While supportive of his effort, they seem to have generally cooled their typical insults against us.

Their typical insults against us. Sounds like poisoning the well, and sounds like something I haven't seen. Well, most of them, anyways.

But we discovered the following Twitter exchange where Jim D 'Addis tweeted James White.

And then he gives an exchange that I had yesterday where I specifically, you know, here's what you get for trying to be a nice guy, you know.

I was told in Twitter, I think you did yourself a disservice arguing with that moron. He will declare victory and gain followers.

To which I responded, Brethren, Brother Pinto is no more of a moron than I am a Jesuit. Let's hold ourselves to a proper standard, shall we?

So I tried to, you know, I certainly had never used that type of terminology.

And so what happens is Chris Pinto responds, I'm certainly glad to see Dr. White make the effort to compel his supporters towards greater civility.

But I can honestly say that after dealing with the critical text proponents of the past six months, they can be every bit as fanatical and unreasonable as any extremist on the

Bible version issue. Now, I've never met somebody who actually, you know, had a

T -shirt that said critical text proponent or something like that. But the reality is he doesn't seem to understand that it's the conspiratorial element of his material.

Remember, you know, and what's sad about this is that is that Mr. Pinto wrote to me and he apologized for the attack he made upon me.

Interestingly enough, to my knowledge, he did not apologize to Alan Kirshner because his attack on him is significantly more personal.

But he doesn't seem to realize that that kind of stuff is, it's really out of bounds. And when people respond to it, you know, the temperature is already extremely high.

Anyways, he says, yet the above tweeter was concerned that our side would declare victory and gain followers. Why? Most likely because he realized that Dr.

White simply had no salient arguments against the central issue, which was whether or not Constantine Simonides was telling the truth when he claimed to have authored

Codex Sinaiticus in 1840. Now, if you asked that tweeter what his reasons were,

I think it was pretty clear in his original tweet what his reasons were. How do you get from,

I think you do yourself a disservice arguing with that moron, to the idea that what he's actually saying is that, oh, you didn't have any good arguments and he won.

How do you do that? I mean, seriously, how do you, how does that happen? I don't,

I don't. That is spin that the only place that I'm used to spin on that level is from a guy named

Carney. Okay. Uh, and, and, and that's a daily thing and it's gotten so tiring and no one even listens to it anymore, but that is spin and delusion.

It's amazing. You can go from going, that guy was a moron too, but I think he won all without any evidence whatsoever.

It might give you an idea of how a lot of this film came into example. And it was any quote, somebody named

Steven Avery who thinks he won. Well, that's, that's great. I'm glad he's got somebody. Um, and then he said, uh,

Dr. White's arguments or lack thereof, I didn't, I didn't have any arguments. But now there were people that mentioned to me that they figure

I probably said twice as much in my opening statement as he did. He did not have a prepared opening statement.

And he sort of gave a little, well, you know, I was looking in the Bible and I read this stuff and I ran across the story of Simonides and you know, and that's all there was to it.

I had a 15 minute prepared opening statement, biblical references, uh, manuscript references, a whole nine yards, but I had no arguments.

This is what's scary because when people get to the point of saying you had no arguments, you had nothing and you're just like, but you didn't even respond.

For example, major portion of my argument, the different scribes in Codex Sinaiticus, where'd they come from?

If Simonides is the one who wrote this, Sinaiticus does not show us that there was a single hand, even with correctors.

There were multiple hands in the actual manuscript itself. So um, how do you explain that?

He never even tried. Didn't even try. It was, it was, well, Dr. White, don't you think it's possible that maybe something like this could have happened or, or maybe, and thought that was argumentation.

So Dr. White's arguments lack thereof only confirmed the declaration of James Farr in 1907, that the matter had never been settled and must continue to be considered an interesting but unsolved mystery of literature.

And let me, let me mention something. This is his big book. Here's, here's Farr from 1907.

First of all, 1907, before papyri, before the full study of Sinaiticus, therefore on that level, irrelevant.

Can't interact with Junkind or T .C. Skeet or any of those things like that because it's too old.

This man is not a textual critic. Okay. He can't interact with that stuff. He can only interact with the literary stuff.

And remember, this was the very same guy who finished his entire chapter by saying, in literary ability, he surpassed all his contemporaries, but unhappily, the central element of truth formed no part of his mental constitution.

Now, how can you take, when, when someone, the conclusion of their entire study is this person who's, he is including in a book on literary forgeries, truthfulness was not an essential component of this man's character.

How can you take that source and then turn it into, oh, Simonides was truthful.

How do you do that? How does that, how does that work? I really,

I really don't know. Well, I've got somebody in channel right now that is disappointed. I'm not wearing a kikuchi. I will probably for the rest of the holiday season, make sure to bring my kikuchis in and blind the entire audience.

And if you all want, if you all have any, oh, blind you, well, you're used to it. You lost your vision a long time ago.

And if you have any complaints, his nick and channel is

MMCGlam1017. I don't know why he comes up. That's one of the weirdest nicks in channel.

But if you have any complaints, he's the one to bring it up to when I wear kikuchis for the rest of the holiday season.

I just thought I'd mentioned that in passing. So anyways, we go back to, we go back to the serious topic here.

So he asserts, and now my, I hate when this happens. Now my cursor will not go back up to that screen.

That just bugs me. Anyways, so he quotes Farrar. That's his big thing.

As I pointed out in my opening statement, he never bothered to quote the conclusion of Farrar on Simonides. Did I say

Simonides? Simonides. I'm trying to do the modern Greek pronunciation, trying to, and that's not how

I do Greek, but I'm just, I'm trying because he lived in the modern period. So he didn't live back then.

Simonides. He doesn't even quote the concluding statement of his favorite author on the untruthfulness of Simonides.

And keep that in mind because his entire theory on the sources

Simonides used comes from Simonides. But we can't trust Simonides according to his favorite source.

You know, there you go. Um, okay. So, uh, Matthew McLamory is the person to, uh, uh, uh, uh, go after.

Look him up on, on the web. If you don't like my coogies, just blame will be all over.

Yes. Um, so, so yeah, I, I know the, the connection failed.

I'm, I'm, I'm, oh, now it works. Thank you. There we go. Anyways, he says, this has been my position all along.

Here's the next thing I've got a real problem with Chris Pinto about. Um, when you produce a three hour video movie, okay.

Two hours and 57 minutes. We want to be really, really, really exact that goes on and on and on about the

Jesuits. And then you try to defend that movie without ever mentioning the Jesuits. You are dodging.

You are backing off. And I really, how many of his, his followers really think that his position is just that, oh, it's just an unsolved piece of mystery.

Yeah. That's why you spent a three hour movie building up to the idea that Tischendorf was a secret

Jesuit and he was working with the Jesuits and people were making the manuscript look older and it took them 15 years to do it.

And that's why it took so long. Yeah. Yeah. But you're, you're really coming to the same conclusion Farrar did. Let's be honest.

This is a conspiracy theory. The Jesuits created Sinaiticus to attack

Sola Scriptura. That's what he's saying. Come on, defend, defend what you're really saying.

Go watch the film. Anybody who questions it. During the debate, White continued to argue that Simonides and his uncle could not have collated manuscripts in the time allowed and mired himself down in speculations, which he has no way of proving.

This is the thing that really caught me. I'm the one being accused of getting mired down in speculations.

When the common comment of almost everybody that I have seen who has listened to the thing has been, that guy had nothing.

All he had was speculation. Well, is it possible that maybe, listen to the cross -examination, listen to the questions.

Is it possible? Could it all be? Who is presenting facts and who is presenting, well, you never know, might be this, might be that.

You don't know. It's an amazing, amazing thing to see this, to say that I'm the one who gets mired down in speculations, which he has no way of proving.

Excuse me. His entire case is based upon speculating that these ancient manuscripts, other than Moscow Bible, Alexandrus, no, only these three ancient manuscripts, which we only know of from the

Simonides, contain all these wild readings that differ from the Byzantine text type that are found in Codex Sinaiticus.

Now, let me read the section, and again, this is fascinating.

I'm going to read you the very quote that he read during cross -examination. This is from J .K.

Elliott's Codex Sinaiticus and the Simonides Affair. Listen to what's said here.

All right. Let's see.

Dionysius, the professional calligrapher of the monastery, was requested to undertake the work, but he declined, saying that he could not accomplish the task assigned to him, which he considered very difficult and quite beyond his capabilities.

Hmm. Boy, it sounds like a big task. When he objected to perform what had been allowed to him for the reasons which he gave,

I myself yielded to the entreaties of my venerable uncle and undertook the performance of the work, for I had been proved and approved in time past.

This is a 19 -year -old. And my hand was very well practiced from childhood in the ancient writing.

And so we straightway inspected the oldest manuscripts preserved in Mount Athos of the sacred writings referred to. Now, notice, and so we straightway inspected the oldest.

This is Simonides and his uncle. Remember what he said during the debate? He said, well, maybe his uncle had been working on this for a long time.

But he says, we straightway inspected the oldest manuscript preserved in Mount Athos of the sacred writings referred to.

I, for my part, carefully considered the questions connected with the best possible performance of the penmanship, and the Lord Benedict, taking to his hands a copy of the

Moscow edition of the Old and New Testaments, published at the expense of the illustrious brothers Zosimas, and by them presented to the

Greeks, collated it with my assistance with three only of the ancient copies.

There is his three copies. Not done by Benedict way before. Okay, which, what had he done with them?

Which he had long before annotated, so the collation later is during the time of Simonides.

So that initial argument didn't work. Which he had long before annotated and corrected for another purpose, and cleared their text by this collation from remarkable clerical errors, and again collated them with the edition of Codex Alexandrinus, printed with unsealed letters, and still further with another very old

Syriac codex, and gave me in the first instance Genesis to copy. So these three manuscripts, now think what's being said here.

And again, this is from a man who according to his own favorite source is an untruthful man, all right?

What's this saying? So he added three manuscripts, and they are collated against what?

Alexandrinus. But wait a minute, there are all sorts of readings in Sinaiticus that are not in Alexandrinus, and would not be in the

Moscow Bible. So are these three supposedly constantly overriding

Sinaiticus and the Moscow Bible, which by the way would have much more represented the text that would have been the

Ecclesiastical text of the Orthodox Church of that day. And of course we have to ask ourselves the question, were these manuscripts?

When can we see them? Oh well, there's at least a hundred manuscripts of Mount Athos that haven't been seen yet, and maybe a thousand others, and isn't that called speculation?

Aren't you speculating as to what would be in manuscripts we've never seen before?

So who's miring himself down in speculations? I think you'll see that it's

Christopher J. Pinto actually. Continue on, he refused to recognize that attempting to figure out how long it might take these men, whose entire lives revolved around manuscripts, is something he simply cannot know.

Here's a man who cannot read Greek, cannot read unsealed Greek, has never collated a manuscript in his life, but he knows that Simonides can be trusted on this.

That's why I asked him, can you read those things? And he'd be, oh you're being arrogant, that's not fair. No, he's the one to produce the film.

He's the one producing and promulgating a conspiracy theory and using it to attack believing

Bible scholars. That's what he's doing. And in the process, undercutting the strongest foundations we have for the defense of the

New Testament text. It's not Chris Pinto who's debating Bart Ehrman, or John Dominic Crossan, or John Shelby Spong, or any of these individuals.

He's not out there doing that, nor could he, given his, he says he's not King James only, but he sure argued it at the end, the position that he takes.

So it's an important, important issue. He says, White also refused to acknowledge that other scholars like James Farrer have completely dismissed this view, which had been argued in the 19th century.

I've already just read to you what James Farrer said. He was not a textual critical scholar. He's writing before the discovery of the papyri.

He does not interact with the key issues of what, well he couldn't interact with the key issues of the scribes of Sinaiticus, because a lot of the study,

Skeet and then modern studies with Yunkin and others, simply weren't in existence at that time, wasn't there.

So, like so many of this group of people, they like to stick with old sources that do not take any consideration whatsoever, cannot take any consideration for the modern finds, especially the papyri.

They just dismiss them. At the end of it all, White's overwhelming tendency to confuse historic facts with the opinions of the filmmaker proved to be the demise of his ambition, which was to remove the question mark placed upon the controversy in 1907.

Well again, right there shows you, 1907. That was 106 years ago.

You don't think there's been more study since then? He doesn't interact with any of it. Though he quotes from Yunkin, he quotes from him, but I honestly do not believe he could understand

Yunkin. You have to be able to read Greek, you have to be able to read unsealed Greek to follow that book, and he can't.

So that's why he may quote from it, but I don't think he understands what he's saying. But then this White's overwhelming tendency to confuse historic facts with the opinions of the filmmaker.

Mr. Pinto, to my knowledge, has never taught history. I could be wrong about that, I don't know. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.

I started teaching church history in 1990. It's been a little while. And what

I've pointed out, which he just doesn't seem to understand, it's he who is confused here, is he seems to think if he can find a quote in a book, that makes it a documented fact.

So for example, he says elsewhere he dismissed the history of J .A. Wiley as mere opinion. I did not dismiss anything.

I said that Wiley expressed his opinion that the Jesuits were in control of the media.

That's an opinion. That's not a documented fact. There are many other people who would say the exact opposite of that.

Just because someone expressed something in a book, which may not be the most widely respected book as far as its fairness and accuracy goes, but still, that doesn't make it a documented fact.

And Mr. Pinto thinks as long as you can find it in a book, it's a documented fact. It's a documented fact. But it's not.

It's not. So I haven't confused anything in any way, shape, or form.

Then he talks about, yet his opposition was not just concerning Codex Sinaiticus, but against my entire film,

Terrorism Among the Weak. And why? Because it also documents the history of the Oxford Movement, which was the aggressive effort of Rome to reclaim

England for the Pope. The efforts of Rome and her counter -reformation preceded the 19th century for hundreds of years, and lead right up to the events that happened all the way through the work of the

Revision Committee of 1881. Actually, they continue on. The story of Simonides and Tischendorf unfolds during an era of what was called the

Age of Jesuitism by one of the leading historians at the time. Okay? Now listen to this.

But White wants to hear nothing about this, because it does not agree with the world as he had imagined it, as he had imagined before he saw the film.

Now, I'm sorry. Sorry. But I cannot help but laughing. It is so amazingly insulting that Chris Pinto thinks that I learned something about the

Oxford Movement from watching his film. Yeah, I don't know what I was doing teaching church history back in 1990.

I don't, you know, and how was it that I was debating Tim Staples, a

Catholic apologist on papal infallibility, and provide all those quotes from, oh, that was

John Henry Cardinal Newman. Oh, you mean I read Newman's work on the development of doctrine?

Oh, that means I would have to know something about the Oxford Movement. Huh, long before Pinto made his first movie, let alone his second movie.

Wow. So Chris thinks he can get into your mind and go,

White wants to hear nothing about this. No, Mr. Pinto, I've been dealing with the results of the

Oxford Movement for a long time. In fact, I probably have read far more books on the subject than you even know exist.

And I've been quoting them for years before you came along. One of the best responses, for example, to, well, and you would have known this,

Mr. Pinto. This would have kept you from making the amazing blunder at the beginning of your film, where you grant to the

Roman Catholics, you give to the Roman Catholics, Sermon 131 from Augustine, where you present it as if, in Sermon 131,

Augustine was saying, Rome has spoken. The case is closed. You actually believe that lie from Rome.

And it's a lie from Rome. We documented that it's a lie from Rome. That documentation has been on the website since, oh man, 99, 2000, somewhere around in there, because I quoted it specifically to Peter Stravinskis in 2001, and he had no response to it.

So it's been there for, what, 15 years, around that time period? You have fallen into the trance of Rome.

Maybe there's something Jesuitical about this. See, it would be real easy to do this.

If you had taken the time to do some study in these areas, you would know that to say that I somehow didn't know about this stuff until I watched your film is just laughable.

And it involves you in trying to do mind reading, which, my friend, you shouldn't be trying to do.

Then we have this next one. I love this one. Oh my. At one point, he even threw

John Calvin under the bus when a quote from the renowned reformer disagreed with him. This is remarkable, considering that White calls himself a

Calvinist. I love that. I'm also a reformed

Baptist. How many times have I said that Calvin would have driven me out of Geneva? To be a

Calvinist does not mean that you agree 100 % with everything

John Calvin ever said. My goodness. What is the mindset here?

I didn't throw John Calvin under the bus. I pointed out that when you quote something,

John Calvin was in conflict with the Bishop of Rome, and so he said strong things. In fact, all the reformers said imbalanced things about Rome.

They all did, because that was the world they lived in. Look, the school at Geneva was producing men who went from that school straight south into Italy and died for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

They died there. I have sat in Italy and talked with a man who edited a book on the martyrs who came from Geneva to Italy.

I know about these things, Mr. Pinto. It doesn't require me to think that John Calvin was infallible to recognize that because of the conflict they were in,

Rome became the big evil. They didn't have a global perspective.

They couldn't have. They couldn't see the evil that was being performed by Islam. They couldn't see that the inhumanity of Hinduism in India wasn't a part of their experience.

They couldn't see that the deadening of the human spirit that comes from many forms of Buddhism wasn't part of their experience.

So all I said was, I disagree. He was a man of his age. That's what he saw. I'm still a

Calvinist. I believe what he taught on the sovereignty of God and salvation. And the funny thing is,

I think you've defended elements of Calvinism, but Calvin would have driven you out of Geneva too, just by the way.

He says, as I have said many times in our radio program, the neo -reformers of America today are but a shadow of the original

Reformation. The modern reform movement has been subverted by historically Romish teachings about both the

Bible and history. I can guess what almost all of that is about, but I just point that out to you and let you make the decision from there.

I was polite to him. He says, despite whatever was said months ago, words that no doubt gave the impression that he would spend his time in sarcasm rather than sober discussion, he was, it seemed to me, committed to making the best argument he could.

Well, I appreciate the pat on the back. I did my best. Golf clap, yeah.

My concern, of course, was at that time raised by his own program, where he did the homosexual

Jesuit thing, and that was what that context was. And finally, one thing here.

Yet under the leadership, now this is where, again, Chris Pinto eschews being a

King James onlyist, but the reality is his arguments are King James only arguments.

They are King James only arguments. What he said in the debate at the end, James White and Dan Wallace, they're questioning traditional readings of the

Bible. Yeah, I want to know what John wrote, not what someone a thousand years after John thought he should have written.

They're casting doubt on the Bible. No, I'm not casting any doubt on the Bible. You're the one casting doubt on the

Bible when you insist that readings that cannot be traced back to the time of the apostles should be what we accept as the authoritative

Word of God. You're the one casting doubt on the Bible, not me. I'm actually doing the work that's necessary.

And see, that's why Chris Pinto could never go to South Africa and debate Shabir Ali in Damascus, or at Pretoria University, or debate

Yusuf Ismail at Northwest University, or the University of Johannesburg, or all the places

I went to, because those people would shred him. It would be an embarrassment.

He can't do it. Why? Because he's in the same boat as the Muslim who opposes the scholarly study of the history of the

Quran. We don't need anybody casting doubt on anything. We know it's the

Word of God. Let's not look at those early manuscripts. Exact same mindset, exact same mindset.

We've got our traditions. Remember London, in the debates in London? Remember when

Adnan Rashid got up? He said, well, hey, if what he's admitted is we can go back to Uthman, that's good enough for me.

And not realizing what he was saying. That, yeah, I've established a text.

And that's my text. And I don't care about where it came from or anything else. Same thing with the TR, evidently, for Mr.

Pinnow. So he says, yet under the leadership of modern textual scholars who have embraced ecumenical apostates like Bruce Metzger, Kurt Aland, and the

Jesuit Carlo Martini, our nation has gone steadily downhill and society has been brought to the point where they no longer believe the

Bible has any true authority. Now, first of all, I was going to get

Metzger's testimony out, but I didn't get around to doing that. I will let Mr.

Pinto answer to God for what he says, should people like that be Christians. And of course, if I was ever in a room with Jesuit Carlo Martini, I would seek to present the gospel to him, obviously.

But what worries me here is the mindset that is found plainly expressed by Gail Ripplinger, where she connects every social evil, the decline of Western society, to a differing view of hers of the textual traditions of the

Bible. 99 .99

% of the people who are promoting some kind of wild -eyed leftist immorality today have never heard of Codex Sinaiticus or anything of the kind, and their disbelief in the

Bible has zippity -doo -dah to do with modern translations or anything else.

They just don't believe in supernaturalism, period. And if Mr. Pinto thinks this is a matter of, well, if they all just had the

King James Version of the Bible, all would be well, then he is not prepared to even begin to engage, begin to engage in a meaningful defense of the faith today.

I submit to you that the mindset that says, well, you know, if we just didn't have those footnotes down at the bottom of the page that says some manuscripts say this.

You mean like the ones that there are thousands of them in the King James Version of the Bible in 1611? Well, they're not in my

King James Version of the Bible. Well, they were in the original. If we just didn't have those notes, then everybody would believe the

Bible. But the reason people don't believe the Bible is because they don't think we know what it means. We can't figure out what it says.

It's that Codex Sinaiticus. I'm sorry if you think, well, you're being mocking now. I don't know how to even present such thinking without pointing out that it's just vacuous.

It has no foundation. It can only exist in these little enclaves and pockets where there is no interaction with the world around us.

And that's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. It truly is. So I was just amazed.

You know, I got mired down in speculations. Well, is it possible?

Who was saying that? Well, you're about to find out because we are going to play for you the entirety of the debate from the opening music all the way through to the end that took place on December 11th, two days ago, between myself and Mr.

Pinto. Now, listen carefully. You will note that Mr. Pinto's opening statement, he has 15 minutes, just sort of rambles on.

You know, well, this is what I did, and I started reading this, and I looked into that, and, you know, and it's just sort of...

And mine is rather focused, and I move a little bit faster than he does.

And then as we get into the cross -examination and then the Q &A, listen to how many times is it possible?

Could it be? Might this have happened? And ask yourself, who had speculation and who presented facts?

That's really the issue that we need to listen to. So it's sad for me to see, honestly, this level of spin from anybody.

It just, it strikes me as massive damage control.

That's the only way I can explain it. But can't let him get away with that. Sorry, Mr.

Pinto, but don't spin it. Just put the debate out there. Let people listen. Let them watch the film.

I'm the one. How many people, Mr. Pinto, has posted your film on their blog?

Said, go ahead and watch it. Have the background. Have the background. Watch the film if you want to.

Listen to it like I did while writing. Now, I will say one thing. It is sort of like the

Nixon -Kennedy thing. The visual film is worse than the audio.

What I mean is, once you get to see the portrayal of Tischendorf as this buffoon, as this, and Simonides as this dashing young man.

That really bogged me. I mean, the bias and prejudice there on Pinto's part is amazing. But he eschewed that during the debate.

I don't know. I think I was just perfectly fair there. Pretty amazing.

So here is the edition of Fighting for the Faith, December 11th, the debate between myself and Chris Pinto on the

Simonides theory. And here we go. It's time.

Wednesday, December 11th, 2013. If you're joining us live today, we have a very different program.

We are doing a live debate. That's right. Live debate between Dr.

James White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Chris Pinto of Noise of Thunder Radio.

Thank you for tuning in.

You're listening to Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ. And this is the program that dishes up a daily dose of biblical discernment.

The goal of which, help you to think biblically, help you to think critically, and help you compare what people are saying in the name of God to the

Word of God. No shortage of crazy things being said out there. We take the time to slow down and stop and compare with an open

Bible. Now, like I said at the beginning of the program, we're doing something a little bit different today. We're doing a live episode.

And I've invited on the air Dr. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries, as well as Chris Pinto.

And they're going to be debating a topic regarding Codex Sinaiticus.

Is it a modern forgery and all of the implications that go with that? The format for the debate is pretty straightforward with opening arguments, rebuttals.

There will be a cross -examination portion in there. I am going to be serving as the moderator of the debate.

And let me introduce the gentleman that I've invited in studio, actually via the phone.

And that's Dr. James White and Chris Pinto. Gentlemen, are you there? Yes, sir.

All right. Yes, we're here. All right, good. Let me introduce

Chris Pinto. Chris Pinto is an award -winning documentary filmmaker, founder of Agilem Films.

He's a Christian, which is a Christian film ministry, dedicated to defending the gospel of Jesus Christ through film and video production.

He has written and directed some 10 documentaries, and is also the host of the Noise of Thunder radio program, dedicated to exploring history and prophecy from a biblical worldview.

Christian Pinto, thanks for coming on Fighting for the Faith. Well, thank you, Chris. It's good to be here. Okay. And Dr.

James White, I don't think he needs an introduction. He's in the debating world, known as an ultimate cage fighter, things like that.

But Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, host of the radio program

The Dividing Line, as well as Radio Free Geneva. And Dr. White, thank you for coming on Fighting for the

Faith. I should have expected an introduction like that from you, Chris, but thank you very much. And did

I say he was a Calvinist? And, you know, we can go on. Anyway, what we will be doing shortly here, in fact, we're going to go ahead and get into the debate.

Now, again, I am not a participant in this debate. I am simply going to moderate. And we will go ahead and get started with our 15 -minute opening arguments.

And so I think without any further ado, we can just get right to it. Christian Pinto, are you ready to get going?

I'm ready. All right. Then without any further ado, we will go ahead and you will be defending...

Well, actually, the question on the table is, is Konex Sinaiticus a modern forgery? And your position is that that's still an open question.

It hasn't been determined as to whether or not that it really is authentic or not.

And so that will be the position that you will be taking. Dr. White will, of course, be arguing that it is an authentic fourth -century codex.

And with that, we will get right into it. And your 15 minutes begins now.

Okay, praise the Lord. Well, I must confess that I am not familiar with doing formal debates of this sort.

However, I've seen a few. And I've always found most endearing the fact that those who debate will often begin by stating what they agree upon before entering into the subject matter.

In this case, I am pleased to consider that this is an in -house debate among fellow believers in the

Lord Jesus Christ, and that where the gospel of eternal life is concerned about this, Dr.

James White and I certainly agree. While we may be part of a family that does not always get along, does not always agree, nevertheless, we acknowledge that we are a family together in Christ.

We also acknowledge that the Lord has told us to take heed that no man deceive you, and that we are to prove all things.

And in truth, that's what this discussion is about. So that brings us to Codex Sinaticus.

Is it an ancient Bible created sometime in the fourth century, as is commonly believed?

Or is it a modern work created in 1840 by a Greek paleographer named

Constantine Simonides, which is what he said in the 19th century. This very question was explored by 19th century scholar

F .H .A. Scrivener in his full collation to the Codex Sinaticus. He dedicated a whole chapter to the question.

Needless to say, Scrivener did not believe Simonides. He thought he was a forger and a liar.

But then in 1907, nearly half a century later, another scholar named James Farrar, after reexamining the story of Simonides in depth, came to the conclusion that the matter had never been truly settled.

Farrar called it, quote, an unsolved mystery of literature. Now, this whole subject came up for me when

I was working on my documentary series on the history of the Bible. And we got into part two, which is called

Tears Among the Wheat. And that's where I came across the story of Simonides. And I remember when

I first came across it, I thought what most people thought. I thought that Simonides was a forger, that he was a liar, that he was a trickster.

But then as I looked a little bit deeper, I began to have questions. In 2008,

I went to the British Library and I was able to interview the curators there,

Dr. Scott McKendrick and Dr. Juan Garces, who were in charge of the Codex Sinaiticus project, which is the project where they have most of the manuscript there in their possession.

And they've been scanning the pages up to the internet now. They've launched the website several years ago.

But I remember talking to them about the history of the Codex. And they were somewhat vague, but they did say that they wanted to come up with a full agreed -upon history.

And it sounded very interesting at the time that they worded it that way. And when

I saw the history that they posted, I thought it was somewhat politically correct. But here's what they say on their website.

They say this. They say, quote, events concerning the history of the Codex Sinaiticus from 1844 to this very day are not fully known.

Hence, they are susceptible to widely divergent interpretations and recountings that are evaluated differently as to their form and essence.

And so I found that to be a very interesting statement. And I think it could be said that the story of Simonides, because it's so well documented, is at least one interpretation of the possible origin of that Codex.

But the question is, how did it all begin? In the 19th century, as many of us know, a

German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus at St.

Catherine's Monastery in Egypt. And he discovered the manuscript in three phases.

First, in 1844, he found the first 43 leaves. He said they had been jettisoned in a rubbish basket.

But he didn't come up with that story right away. He brought the leaves back. He was somewhat secretive about where he got them.

Then he went back for a second trip in 1853, and there discovered a fragment of the manuscript, the fragment from Genesis, he said, being used as a bookmark.

Then he returns a third time in 1859, and there made the discovery of the main portion, which included a complete copy of the

New Testament with part of the Old, the Epistle of Barnabas, and a partial copy of the

Shepherd of Hermas. And so he comes back with his manuscript, he publishes it, and it's pronounced to be the world's oldest

Bible. But then in 1860, you had this Greek paleographer, who was a controversial figure, there's no question, named

Dr. Constantine Simonides. And he came forward in 1860, he saw the first facsimiles, and he declared that this was no ancient manuscript at all, but a modern work that he had created in the years 1839 and 40, and it was intended to be a gift to the

Tsar of Russia, Tsar Nicholas I. And this was a project that he had engineered with his uncle

Benedict on Mount Athos 20 years earlier. And then he describes the whole process in the newspapers.

Now, when I first heard the story of Simonides, the histories that you read, typically, and if you go most anywhere for the last 100 years, the histories that you read will tell you that Simonides was a forger, but not just a forger, he was the most brilliant forger.

And he was a trickster and so on, and that he often peddled these manuscripts and this kind of thing.

And at one point, he claimed that he was the author of the Codex Sinaiticus, and that people didn't believe him.

He was denounced and exposed and this kind of thing, and then that was the end of it. When I began looking into the story of Simonides, however,

I remember I planned this reenactment where I had my actor and he was going to be the guy who was going to play

Simonides. And I was going to have him sitting there working on forging a particular manuscript.

And this kind of thing, and I say, oh, let me go look into this exactly where was Simonides found guilty of forgery.

So I go and I start looking into the history, and I had read somewhere that he was a convicted forger.

So I go and I look up when he was convicted for forgery, and I come to find out he actually wasn't convicted as a forger.

When he was brought into court, he was on one occasion, and he was declared not guilty.

He was acquitted. Then the newspaper headlines the next day said, Simonides, no forger.

Then you read in different histories that supposedly he had presented a forged copy of the

Shepherd of Hermas at the University of Leipzig in 1855, and that this had been exposed by Tischendorf.

And Tischendorf exposed it as a forgery, and that supposedly Simonides was going to get revenge on Tischendorf by making these claims.

Well, then you go and you research the Shepherd of Hermas that Simonides had that was supposedly a forgery, and you come to find out that it wasn't a forgery at all, that even though Tischendorf called it a forgery in 1856, after he discovered

Codex Sinaticus, Codex Sinaticus had a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas in it.

And when Tischendorf compared that copy of the Shepherd of Hermas with the Shepherd of Hermas that had been presented by Simonides, he realized that they matched.

They matched enough so that in 1863, Tischendorf had to retract his former objections.

We read about that, of course, in Philip Schaaf's History of the Christian Church, Volume 2, but he retracted his former objections and essentially had to acknowledge that Simonides had been right, that this was a genuine

Shepherd of Hermas, and that Tischendorf had been mistaken, because he thought it was a medieval forgery.

So in looking into the story of Simonides, and especially this episode with the Shepherd of Hermas, I began to wonder whether or not there were other unanswered or unknown issues, because many of the historians that write about these things don't tell you these kind of details.

So I began looking into the details of Simonides' story, and then

I stumbled across the history by James Farrar. And James Farrar, in his book

Literary Forgeries in 1907, he presents probably the most in -depth analysis of Simonides.

Now, he's certainly not always on Simonides' side. There are times when he is, and there's times when he isn't.

There's times when he believes Simonides was a trickster and a forger, but then there are times when he's sympathetic toward him, and he believes that he was, in certain cases, falsely accused.

But when it comes to the subject of Codex Sinaticus, it's interesting that Farrar did not believe that the issue had been fully settled by 1907.

And that's what struck me. So I began to look into the things that Farrar claimed and why he believed.

Now, the Shepherd of Hermas was a big issue, because in order for somebody to have been able to create the

Codex Sinaticus, he would have had to have had a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas. And the remarkable thing about that is that at that point in history, no

Western scholar had ever seen a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas in Greek.

It was unknown. They thought it had been lost to antiquity. And so here, this guy,

Simonides, presents a copy of the Shepherd at the University of Leipzig in 1855 and 1856.

And then, what do you know, another copy that seems to match shows up in 1859.

And while there were a lot of controversies, probably the one that I found the most startling after the

Shepherd of Hermas was the fact that Simonides claimed when he gave his lengthy description of how he created the manuscript, he talked about using vellum, for example, that was already an ancient character that was found by him on Mount Athos.

How he had written the characters in ancient Greek letters intentionally, because that was the whole point for creating this codex to be a gift for the

Tsar of Russia. And how then he had worked on it.

And his uncle died at some point. He ran out of vellum. But then he decided to deliver it to Constantius, who was the bishop over Saint Catherine's Monastery.

And Constantius then delivers it to Saint Catherine's Monastery by 1841, several years before it was said to be discovered by Constantine von

Tischendorf. But perhaps the most remarkable thing in all of this is that while Simonides' story was being published in the newspapers, and he's given all of these details, and he's giving the names of witnesses, people who were still alive, there was

Constantius, there was Germanus, the scribe or the monk who had carried the manuscript to Saint Catherine's.

There was Callistratus, another monk who had apparently added certain corrections to the manuscript while it was at Saint Catherine's Monastery after it arrived.

And yet, despite all of these things, it seems that the scholars, the critics, were not interested in pursuing the matter and actually testing and proving the things that Simonides said.

And Farrar even says that they found it more convenient to declare as spurious anything associated with his name.

And at one point, Simonides challenged Tischendorf to a public debate.

He declared that he had put special markings in the manuscript and that he could prove that he was the true author if Tischendorf would bring the manuscript to London, not a facsimile but the original, and that he would point out in public in front of all the interested scholars, he would point out those places in the manuscript that proved he was the true author.

And it appears that Tischendorf agreed to the debate at some point. But then at the last minute, he backed out.

And so then Simonides challenged him on that. And he said that the public were assured that at a certain point

Tischendorf was going to show up with at least part of his great codex. But the date had come and gone, he said, and Tischendorf had not appeared.

And so he said, let the favorers of the fanatic codex urge him to come at once and brave the ordeal or else forever hold their peace.

And of course, Tischendorf didn't show up. So Simonides solved mysteries of literature.

All right. Time is up. That was Chris Pinto's opening statement.

Dr. White, let me reset the timer. You now have 15 minutes for your opening argument.

Waiting for you to say go. Go ahead and go. All right. Thank you.

Our debate this evening will not be easy to follow. Our time is far too short. And please remember that Brother Pinto has produced a film that is longer in runtime than most of the

Lord of the Rings movies. So the danger exists that we could become completely lost in many allegations and claims made therein.

Furthermore, the majority of our audience has never seen Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, or almost any other biblical manuscript, let alone is it history, common knowledge, even among seminary graduates.

So the challenge this evening is great. However, may I assert that the importance of our time this evening is be found in this fact.

Mr. Pinto's thesis, namely that Sinaiticus is a modern text written innocently in 1840, also involves a wide range of associated accusations.

For it would require us to believe the Jesuits have been behind a campaign to not only alter the manuscript, but then to utilize it in company with Codex Vaticanus.

In fact, almost all the papyri that have been discovered in the past 100 years in a grand and vast conspiracy, all aimed at attacking the veracity and sufficiency of scripture.

As I have engaged in the defense of scripture, it's an errancy, the doctrine, the sola scriptura for three decades. I feel the weight of Chris Pinto's concerns, but I truly believe that his imbalance and his grain to Romanism, and especially the

Jesuits, a near supernatural capacity and ability to be behind just about anything in history results not only in an indefensible apologetic, but it actually cripples the great lacking in fairness, balance, and accuracy.

This is seen most clearly in the current film under discussion, and it's grossly imbalanced and unfair treatment of the subject matter. It seeks to make connections without providing evidence.

It attacks the character of Christian men like Constantine von Tischendorf mercilessly, while ignoring any and all counter evidence.

And even when it admits documentary sources opposed its thesis, it takes the time to allege that the Jesuits were in control of the media, even in the 19th century, all with a convenient way out of any factual problem.

There is no way, of course, of debating such thinking. Every fact is simply dismissed as a Jesuit conspiracy.

This is why I say, if you buy this way of thought, my presentation will not assist you. But for others, I would provide just one brief set of examples before moving to my key arguments about the

Codex Sinaiticus. No stone is left unturned by Brother Pinto in attacking the character of Tischendorf.

Yet the very sources that he gives, evidence of having read, in particular, the works of J .K.

Eliot, James Farrer, and F .H .A. Scrivener, contain numerous statements that, if Mr. Pinto's work was to actually claim some level of fairness, accuracy, and balance, would simply have to be noted and explained.

For example, he refers to Farrer's work, which is the most sympathetic of the three just named, yet he does not mention the following citation, quote,

But the temptation to deceive was born of its seducing facility, and Simonides was no votary of strict veracity.

Other Greeks besides Simonides had lax ideas of the value of truth, and in literary ability he surpassed all contemporaries.

But unhappily, the essential element of truth formed no part of his mental constitution, speaking of Simonides.

And the other often -used source, that of Eliot, likewise contains these citations, passed over in silence by Brother Pinto.

Quote, It will be seen that well before 1862, Simonides was known as a dubious character in scholarly and literary circles.

What is particularly interesting is that despite this, so many people were prepared to debate seriously Simonides' challenge to Tischendorf rather than merely ignore it or dismiss it out of hand.

Then, with the subtitle of Simonides the Forger, what is surprising about the Simonides affair is not so much that it happened at all or that it lasted for over a year, but that a man with Simonides' known background had any credibility at all, end quote.

These quotations, from the main sources of our knowledge of this topic, are directly relevant to Mr. Pinto's thesis.

Yet he ignores them while emphasizing all sorts of issues with Tischendorf that are not nearly as directly relevant.

This is why any honest and balanced historian is truly put off by this film. But as I said, the key issue is not to be found in the imbalanced presentation of the film.

The real issue this evening is this. Could a 19 -year -old youth have produced, in a relatively short period of time, printed edition of Codex Alexandrinus?

But as many scholars have pointed out, no known Moscow Bibles, in conjunction even with Codex Alexandrinus, could ever, ever produce the readings found in Sinaiticus.

Further, collation of manuscripts takes a great deal of time. It is, of course, utterly impossible for Simonides, even with the assistance of his uncle, to both collate old and new tests of manuscripts while then producing the ancient unsealed script of the manuscript.

Such a task would take years. But still, the sources Simonides himself cite is a fatal flaw to this theory.

There are far, far too many singular readings in Sinaiticus unknown in those sources.

Further, Sinaiticus joins with the other early Alexandrian manuscripts, not only such as Codex Vaticanus, but far more importantly for our subject, the early papyri, in containing readings unknown in any

Moscow Bible or even Codex Alexandrinus, which has a primarily Byzantine reading in the Gospels.

This was indeed the first thought I had upon hearing a summary of the Simonides theory. I have had the opportunity of studying the text of the

New Testament and doing textual critical work for a number of years now, and it is painfully obvious to anyone familiar with the readings of the early manuscripts that Sinaiticus is related to the early papyri in its readings, including many unique and important readings.

But how can this be if it was produced by a 19 -year -old with only a few sources to draw from, writing in a hurry, 60 years before the papyri were discovered?

Let me give two examples, one drawn from Scrivener and one drawn from my own studies. Scrivener points to Matthew 1430, where all later manuscripts have the term boisterous after the term wind, yet Sinaiticus omits the term boisterous, as does

Vaticanus, though it is inserted in Vaticanus in a later hand. The reading was not known, as Alexandrinus does not contain this portion of Matthew, and no

Moscow Bible lacks the phrase. Scrivener comments, quote, one example will illustrate our meaning as well as a thousand, which the student may readily find for himself in the following collation, end quote.

That is, there are literally thousands of places where Sinaiticus contains readings confirmed by later discoveries, discoveries unknown even in Scrivener's time in the papyri, that would have been completely unknown to Humanides or anyone living in his day.

To attribute these readings to mere chance is, of course, inconceivable. The second text I will present, and will ask

Mr. Pinto to explain, might be a bit better known to our audience in John 118. We have a vitally important Christological text where Jesus is identified as the monogamist theoph, the unique God who exegetes, explains, makes known the

Father. The reading of the later manuscript is only begotten Son, not using the term God of Jesus here.

Codex Vaticanus, and may I point out I know of no evidence of Humanides even knowing of this manuscript, let alone having access to it, has the reading unique God at John 118.

P75 and P66, the two earliest papyri copies of John, likewise have this reading.

But they had not been discovered in Humanides' day. So where did he get the reading? Alexandrinus has

Son. The Moscow Bibles have Son. And even more compelling is the fact that Sinaiticus contains a correction here, where the first corrector inserted the definite article before monogamate.

This is important because it shows the reading of God is indeed that of the exemplar, not a mere scribal error in Sinaiticus.

Mr. Pinto needs to explain to us where Humanides got these readings, which just happened to coincide with the papyri, which had yet to even be discovered.

This textual material would be more than enough to lay the Humanides theory aside, but there is more.

Mr. Pinto, likewise, needs to explain why Sinaiticus clearly shows that multiple hands produced it in concert with the others.

In other words, multiple scribes produced this work, along with multiple correctors, some writing long, long after the first.

Mr. Pinto has quoted Dirk Junkin's work, Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus. If so, then he should know that we have been able to isolate the work of the scribes, even to the point of analyzing how they use

Nomina Sacra, for example. That is, we can identify their habits. This is particularly the case in contrasting

Scribe A with Scribe D. Junkin notes, quote, none of these three scribes has the same policy in using

Nomina Sacra. They all differ in the frequency of their preferred contractions, as well as in some of the actual forms of the contraction.

How can this be in Humanides' model? Who are these other scribes who work concurrently with Humanides? Junkin also notes, quote, in Sinaiticus, there is not homogeneity in the quality of copying.

Different scribes produce a demonstrably different quality of text, end quote. How could this be since Humanides did not admit to anyone else being involved other than his uncle, and he limited his participation to correction?

Furthermore, speaking of corrections, how is it that Humanides has thousands upon thousands of corrections? Sinaiticus has thousands upon thousands of corrections.

These were all allegedly the work of his uncle. Why are they in different hands? Why do they draw from different textual sources?

Why does Humanides, for example, read Haas at 1 Timothy 3 .16, and his uncle allegedly accrued a much later hand, scribble, and pay off in a

Nomina Sacra form between the lines, while other corrections on the page are in a different ink and a different hand?

I could, of course, extend these examples for the entirety of the 90 minutes of this discussion, but time will not allow this.

Instead, let me close by pointing out that Mr. Pinto's professed concerns are quite noble, but he is tilting at windmills simply because he is seemingly not taking the time to study what conservative

Bible -believing scholars have said about the field of textual criticism. His primary evidence of the evils of Conex Sinaiticus, which he connects with an overarching conspiracy on the part of the

Jesuits to overthrow the authority of the Bible, is a citation from a BBC documentary. I use the term lightly if anything produced by the

BBC, especially when it comes to Christianity and Christian history, where any narrator indicates the corrections in Sinaiticus indicate the text of the

New Testament was still fluid and changing in the fourth century. Rather than finding solid -believing Christian scholars who can respond to such a statement, the very character of these corrections betrays the silliness of the notion and the conclusions drawn by the rabidly anti -Christian

BBC documentary, Mr. Pinto decides the real evil is not the misuse of Sinaiticus by liberals, but it's

Sinaiticus itself, and this is his fundamental error. Sure, folks like the BBC and atheists and all sorts of others will twist and turn any fact of history in their vain attempts to suppress the knowledge of God.

What is new about that? But to think that Conex Sinaiticus is somehow this great tool of evil simply because ignorant men and women use it as a tool of evil is foolishness in the extreme.

The reality is Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, Washingtonius, P52, P66, P75, P46 are great treasures that, when seen within a

Christian worldview and handled fairly and accurately, are a tremendous bulwark of truth. Our New Testament is the single most widely attested document of all of antiquity.

It is also the earliest documented work of antiquity. Having this wide variety of manuscripts is a great blessing, not a curse to be avoided.

Mr. Pinto's desire to enshrine a particular localized text as the final authority is common, but it is also foolhardy.

It cannot survive apologetic examination, and it does not actually assist in the defense of the

Bible. It hampers it. As such, I would highly encourage Mr. Pinto to turn his considerable talents toward a robust defense of the faith that will actually promote the cause of Christ.

Such is much needed in our day. Thank you very much. Thank you,

Dr. White. I'm going to reset the timer here. Chris, you are going to have 10 minutes to offer a rebuttal to what

Dr. White has said and expand upon your arguments. You may go. Okay.

Well, wow, that is a whole lot to deal with there. This is... All right, well, let me break down some of the things that Dr.

White has talked about here concerning my film. The element of the

Jesuits in the film. All of these things that are happening in the 19th century in the history of the

Bible are happening under the backdrop or with the backdrop of what was known as the

Oxford Movement in England. The Oxford Movement, the motto for the Oxford Movement was to reclaim

England for Rome. If you study the 19th century historian

Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, who's considered one of the greatest historians of that time in 1850, right in the middle of these events, said that the time in which they lived could be called the age of Jesuitism.

That was what he... That was how he defined it. In fact, he said that the time was defined by Ignatius of Loyola, who was the founder of the

Jesuit order, and he said Loyola was, quote, the poison fountain from which all the rivers of bitterness that now submerge the world have flowed.

And this is a view, which was kind of strange to me, is Dr. White, you know, is a reformed believer, but he seems to be unaware of the many historic warnings about Rome and the

Jesuit order throughout history, especially in the 19th century. Even if we go back to the time of the reform, you know,

Dr. White has said that I'm attributing too many things to Rome and to the

Jesuits and this kind of thing, but I think he is confusing the witness of history that I am quoting throughout my film, he's confusing history with my own opinion.

Let me give you a quote from John Calvin. Calvin said, quote, this I maintain, while in the present day the world is so inundated with perverse and pious doctrines, so full of all kinds of superstition, so blinded by error and sunk in idolatry, there is not one of them which has not emanated from the papacy or at least been confirmed by it.

So that was Calvin's view of the papal system, and the

Jesuits are committed throughout history to defending the papal system. And this was known by all of our

Protestant reformed Christian forefathers, but especially in the 19th century you had men like Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Dr.

H. Gretton Guinness, J .A. Wiley. At one point Dr. White made mention that I'm suggesting that the newspapers were controlled by the

Jesuits. In reality, that's not my suggestion. That is the documented history put forth by J .A.

Wiley in his book on the Jesuits, their morals, maxims, and plots. Okay, so that is a, again, it's a quote from a historian who lived at that time.

It is not my opinion about what they were doing. Let's take a minute and talk about Constantine von

Tischendorf and the assertions of Dr. White that I've somehow or other misrepresented

Tischendorf and done this savage attack upon him and all this other kind of stuff. I think his evaluation is simply unreasonable because I do not offer really an opinion of Tischendorf in the film.

The reality is the only thing we do where Tischendorf is concerned, we document the things that he said, we document the things that he did, and the things that other people said about him.

That is what we do. The primary complaint from Dr. White is that supposedly there was spooky music that was used with Tischendorf, or that we neglected to include some of the pious declarations from Tischendorf, him talking about wanting to defend the faith and this kind of thing.

The problem with those is, I mean, our film was just really occupied in what was going on with the

Bible, not necessarily an in -depth analysis of Tischendorf. And the problem with those pious declarations is that they are sometimes contradicted by other testimonies where he's concerned, where Simonides is concerned.

And the analysis of James Farrar and the quotes from J .K. Elliott about who would take

Simonides seriously and this kind of thing, that's the impression that you get from some, but it's not the impression that you get from all.

And Simonides had a circle of friends. He had the Mayer Museum. He was working at the

Mayer Museum in London. Mr. Joseph Mayer and the curator John Elliott Hodgkin, Hodgkin, whose papers are still contained in the

British Library to this day. He had a number of newspapers that defended Simonides, who said they believed he was wholly honorable, et cetera and so on.

You had Alexander von Humboldt, the great 19th century scientist who called

Simonides an enigma. You've got James Farrar. Yes, he's quoting areas of Simonides' dishonesty, but then he says

Simonides did not always forge or invent or lie, and that most of his work was honest and laborious and useful.

That's the other side of what James Farrar said that Dr. White avoided. So Simonides is a complex character.

Tischendorf is likewise a complex character. And I'm not going to pretend that we portrayed them perfectly in the film, but we tried to bring out sides of this history because the theme of our series is the untold history of the

Bible. And so to draw out those things from the pages of history that are not ordinarily known.

Now, let's take a minute and talk about the corrections in Codex Sinaticus. In reality,

Simonides identified himself, his uncle Dionysius the scribe, and Callistratus, who was another monk, who all four in a documented way are said to have added many corrections to the manuscript.

But during the Q &A, maybe we'll be able to talk more about that because the whole corrections thing is a mystery that needs to be addressed.

The idea of Simonides as a 19 -year -old, he was known for having this enigmatic talent as a calligrapher.

And Farrar and others have said he most certainly could have done the work. They did not buy the argument about his age.

Probably most importantly is the textual basis that was used according to Simonides' own testimony.

This is where I think Dr. White has overlooked what Simonides himself said.

It wasn't just the Moscow Bible and Codex Alexandrinus. It was an edition of the

Old and New Testament of the Moscow Bible that was collated with Codex Alexandrinus and an ancient

Syriac codex and three additional unnamed manuscripts of ancient character.

So you had there, you had six manuscripts in total. Three of them were unnamed and have never been identified.

They were all used for the textual basis of the manuscript that Simonides described.

And so what would you have if you were combining all of these different manuscripts and collating them together?

What you would have is a very unique collection of readings, which is exactly what

Codex Anaticus is. But without knowing what the three manuscripts are, the unnamed manuscripts are, that Simonides talked about on Mount Athos, it's virtually impossible to know whether or not the readings that Dr.

White, the very specific readings that Dr. White is talking about that have this unique character, it's impossible to know whether or not those readings could have been contained in the three unnamed manuscripts that are mentioned.

Now, what's very interesting about that today is that today, according to Dr.

David Brown, with the Center for the Study and Preservation of the Majority Text, there are on Mount Athos, which is where Simonides claimed he created the codex, on Mount Athos today, there are said to be at least a hundred manuscripts that have never been catalogued by the outside world, never been catalogued by any

Westerner. No Westerner has ever seen them. At least a hundred manuscripts on Mount Athos itself.

And then we are told by Dr. Brown that in the area surrounding Mount Athos, you have an additional 900 manuscripts that have never been seen by the

Western world. So men like Dr. White, Dr. Dan Wallace and others, they've had no opportunity to see these manuscripts because they've never been made available.

Well, it just so happens that those manuscripts are contained in the very location that Simonides claimed he created

Codex Sinaticus back in 1839 and 1840. So I believe the only way that you could possibly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Simonides did not author the manuscript, as he said, would be to go to Mount Athos and examine those unseen manuscripts and determine whether or not they contain the unique readings that Dr.

White has referred to. All right, let me reset the timer here.

Dr. White, you have 10 minutes for your rebuttal, starting now. Okay, thank you very much.

I begin by pointing out that, again, I have to assume that the listener has watched the film and must have been rather amazed at Brother Pinto's opening statement, because the entire

Simonides issue does not arise until much later in the film. Hours are spent talking about the

Jesuits and about the papal system and everything else, and yet the term

Jesuit, unless I missed it, was never once mentioned in the 15 -minute opening statement. It is very clear that the film is presenting a particular theory, and in his written material,

Mr. Pinto has likewise presented the idea in a number of different sources that, well, what you really got going on here is you've, in his answer, for example, to Dr.

Daniel Wallace's comments at ETF, under questions and speculation, he has this line.

Is it possible that during his visits to the monastery, Constantine von Tischendorf was working to tamper with this manuscript, just as Kalinikos claimed?

Is it further possible that he deliberately removed certain pages and hid them away in a chest or somewhere else in the sacristy?

And just now, we just had, well, there's all these other manuscripts that no one's ever seen, and so maybe he used those.

We don't know which ones they are. We don't know what they are. This is supposed to be a debate, and when you present evidence in a debate, you actually have to be able to document what it says.

And so here we have, well, maybe this happened, maybe that happened. The Jesuits were involved with this.

A whole bunch of time was invested in Tischendorf visiting with the Pope and his connection with this cardinal over here, and very, very clearly a complex web of conspiracy is being woven here.

But then when we get down to debate, well, it's, well, you know, we don't know. We can't really disprove it.

It's just a possibility. It's two different things, and I would just simply suggest to people, watch the film, ask yourself some simple questions.

Is Tischendorf represented in an even slightly fair way? He's shown to be a buffoon, an arrogant buffoon who's angered at things and drinking and toasting people and all the rest of this stuff.

And, of course, Simonides is never presented as like that. I think it's absolutely a given, but you have to watch the film to see it.

So take a look for yourself. I even posted the film today on my blog, so you can watch it for yourself and just ask yourself the question, is

James White being fair in his discussion of that? He then says that, well, you know,

I seem to be unaware about warnings about Rome, the Jesuit order. I've taught church history since 1990.

I'll be teaching again in Ukraine in the next spring, actually in February. I'm well aware of the warnings about Rome.

And again, I've been involved in dealing with Roman Catholicism and debating Roman Catholics for many, many years.

The issue is between recognizing Rome's false gospel and the fact that Jesuits are the enemy of the gospel, and then granting them some amazing power to be everywhere and to do everything.

There is no question that Jesuits want to attack solo scriptura, which is why I've debated that subject more often than any other in my debates against Roman Catholics.

But to use them as the glue to hold together disparate assertions when you don't have facts, well, you know,

Tischendorf must have met with the Jesuits, and so he's going to St. Catherine's, and it's taken all these years to keep altering the manuscript, you see, to try to make it look older, and that's what's being suggested.

No evidence can be brought forth of it, of course, but that's what's being suggested. And it's that kind of overarching power, that kind of ability that I am questioning.

I would even disagree with the quotation from John Calvin. The papacy was not the source of all the evils in the world.

Calvin just simply didn't know about Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and what was going on in the rest of the world. If you want to limit that statement to Europe, well, okay, maybe, but he was a product of his day, and there's all sorts of evil that comes from other sources, and when we get outside of our narrow confines of conflict, we discover that that's the case that it is.

Just simply because J .A. Wiley said something doesn't make it a fact. Mr. Penno just said, well, it's written in his book.

Well, yeah, Alberto Rivera and Jack Chick have written a lot of things, too. That doesn't make them facts. The whole, again, the point was that there was strong response to Simonides, and in the film, the assertion was made right then, that's when you have the

Wiley quote, that the Jesuits were in charge of the media. Well, what is that supposed to communicate? Was that just happenstance that, oh, and by the way, this is what's going on?

No, obviously, what was being communicated by Mr. Penno is that, well, yeah, all these people that were against the

Simonides and all these things about the trial he had in Germany and why he was let off and rusty nails and everything else, all that stuff, you know, you've got to realize, you know, the

Jesuits were involved in this, and once you have the Jesuits involved, then it's real easy to hold your conspiracy theory together, because any evidence that is against your conspiracy theory can just simply be chalked up to the

Jesuits. The Jesuits did this, the Jesuits did that. You don't have to prove it. You don't have to provide any documentation.

You just throw a Jesuit in there, throw him up on the screen as long black Cossack and doing something evil, and all is well.

Make sure you talk about the Inquisition and the number of people dying in ovens, which, again, was the vast majority of what this film was about, and you throw it all together, and that's how you have your conspiracy theory.

Now, here at the end, it's fascinating, the discussion of the textual material is extremely important to me.

So what we just had presented to us was this theory. Well, yes, he used the Moscow Bible, and he used

Codex Alexander, but he also used three other manuscripts, and we have no idea what they are, and maybe they contain all these different readings that anticipate papyri, but they've never been found, so we can never really disprove it.

Okay, there you go. There's your answer. Is that really how historical inquiry is done?

Where are these manuscripts? What did they contain? How would these three manuscripts anticipate the wide and divergent ranges of readings that Deinonychus contained that are also found in the papyri?

Did that mean that these were purely early Alexandrian manuscripts? They must have been extremely ancient, even earlier than Sinaiticus itself.

They would be massive treasures. Where are they today? And how does that answer the question of the scribes?

Because even if you allow for these other monks to have done some of these corrections, it was

Simonides, whose great skill as a calligrapher is brought forth by Mr. Pinto and others as the basis for his supposedly being able to do this.

Why are there different hands? Who are these different scribes? Who is scribe A? Why does scribe

A have a completely different way of handling the exemplars than scribe D does?

Why is scribe D more accurate than scribe A? How can scribe A and D interact with one another and even plan copying different portions of the same book and interact with one another?

Who were these people? According to Simonides, who would not have known of the different hands in Codex Sinaiticus, he's the one who did the writing, and then the corrections are made by other people.

So you might be able to explain the other corrections in that way, but you're not going to be able to explain the different scribes in that way.

It simply doesn't make any sense. And so we have a real problem here. We have unnamed sources, anonymous sources, being brought forward as being, well, you answer it by pointing to manuscripts that no one has ever seen.

He must have had all those readings over there. But that doesn't explain, then, why he, in writing a book that's supposed to be given to the czar, it's supposed to be a gift.

It's just supposed to look like the agent. How, I just don't believe, and I'll ask Mr. Pinto during the

Q &A, has he ever collated a manuscript? Collation of manuscripts is a massively long process.

It takes forever. And so if you want to collate the Moscow Bibles with Alexandrinus, and now with three evidently extremely ancient

Alexandrian codices that no one's ever seen, that process alone, done by one individual at 19 years of age who is not learned in that area, you can say he's a great calligrapher all you want, but collation of manuscripts and calligraphy are two different things.

The amount of time that it would take to do a collation of those manuscripts in that way would be massive.

It would be huge. So now you've got to write all these millions of unsealed characters, somehow manage to do it in three or four different hands, throw the corrections in, and collate all these manuscripts in a brief period of time, and that's what we're supposed to believe is being done here.

And then you bring the Jesuits in who age the manuscript and turn it into something the BBC can use a few hundred years later to attack everyone's faith.

This is why I think the vast majority of Christian scholarship does not accept this particular theory, because they recognize the simple impossibilities of the timeframes involved, given the materials that are actually cited by the sources.

Thank you. All right. Let me change the timer up again here.

Mr. Pinto, you will have 15 minutes to do Q &A cross -examination of Dr.

White, and your time begins now. All right.

Dr. White, you've got J .K.

Elliott's book, and so you have read the various newspaper articles there, etc., and so on.

So then you know that Simonides, when he was in London, he had in his possession some 2 ,000 manuscripts that were housed by Mr.

Charles Stewart and his brother. And this is written about, Elliott talks about this in his book.

Those manuscripts were seen by people. In fact, Stewart at one point writes a letter, although I think that's published in the letter, where he's inviting people to come, and of course people come over and they look at Simonides' manuscripts, and they examine them, and he says

Mr. Simonides is always very open with people. He's willing to explain to them about these works of antiquity, etc.,

and so on. Have you ever sought out what happened to the 2 ,000 manuscripts that Simonides had, reportedly had, in London?

I'm not sure they're relevant to the question, but I will answer it. Elliott's work provides numerous sources that go back and forth.

There were those like Stewart who were almost sycophantal in their defense of Simonides.

There were others on the other side. There were people in the middle, and there's all sorts of disputes as to what was and was not displayed.

Simonides at times would say, for example, that he actually displayed amazing manuscripts, including claiming to have one of Matthew that was dictated within like 15 years of Matthew's death, and so on and so forth, that to my knowledge no one from any perspective actually believes to be real today and is utilized in any form of Christian scholarship whatsoever.

There's tremendous argument about what he possessed, who examined it, when they examined it.

There's all sorts of problems as to dates, where he was when he was there. It's one of the things that makes the book very, very difficult to even follow, is because of all of the massive differences there.

So in the idea of following these things out, I would love to see the alleged manuscript of Matthew.

I would love to see the alleged manuscript from the first century of the Kamiohane. The last

I've heard of any of these was allegedly at Liverpool, but I see no evidence that they're still there.

But if you're asking, have I traveled to Liverpool and traveled around the United Kingdom looking for these things?

No, I have not done that. All right. Well, my reason for asking the question is because what we're...

Just based upon the available records, and I would... You know, you made a number of statements in your comment there about things as though I'm just throwing them out there.

I'm making things up and this sort of thing, and what I'm trying to get you to realize is that these are the things that are documented in the pages of history.

My point is... Is that a question? It's... I'm trying to find the question here. All right. I'm coming to a question there.

My question is, is it not possible that within those 2 ,000 manuscripts that there could be the readings that you are referring to in Codex Sinaiticus, the unique readings?

Is that not possible? I don't remember ever saying that you made anything up or just create anything out of there. What I was saying that the connections that you make are not functional as far as a historian is concerned.

But in response to your question, anything is possible, but that is not how you do history.

When you say, is it possible that within these alleged manuscripts, which

Simonides himself did not claim to have used all 2 ,000 of these, that there are unique readings that would be reflected in Sinaiticus?

Yes. But what you don't seem to understand, Mr. Pendo, is the concept of a text type. And the same thing is true of the fact that you can find

Byzantine readings in certain ancient manuscripts. That does not make that manuscript a

Byzantine manuscript. There is such a thing as readings taken together that identify a particular text type.

And the idea that amongst these 2 ,000 manuscripts, many of which were not of New Testament books, by the way, according to Eliot's citations from the newspaper article.

But the idea that somehow amongst there you might be able to find a reading over here, might be able to find a reading over there, does not have any meaning to what would have to have been in front of Simonides over a few -month period of time in collation form to be able to produce the text of Sinaiticus.

You can't be running around a room with 2 ,000 manuscripts in it and drawing readings out, then sit down, write a few words, then get back up and do it again.

It just doesn't work. Well, have you been to Mount Athos?

No, I have not been to Mount Athos. You have not been to Mount Athos. Okay. Do you believe it is possible that within the total of 15 ,000 manuscripts on Mount Athos, because this is where the work was done on Mount Athos, they have a total of 15 ,000 manuscripts there, and we are told there's at least 100 manuscripts on Mount Athos itself that have never been seen by the outside world, do you believe it's possible that among those manuscripts are the three unnamed manuscripts that Simonides mentioned in his writing?

Well, again, it's possible that the New Testament in Klingon is on Mount Athos, too, but I haven't been there because nobody's seen them.

But again, the problem in your question is that mere possibilities are not facts in evidence.

And if you're going to try to expand the realm of manuscripts from which

Simonides could draw, you are only arguing against your position, because once again, to collate two manuscripts takes a long time.

To collate three against each other takes even longer. To collate four becomes a real mess.

And once you start doing all of this type of collation, you only have a certain amount of time,

Mr. Pinto, for Simonides to produce 1 ,400 -plus pages of excellent calligraphy.

If he had just one exemplar before him, that's a possibility. If he is having to do collation of Moscow Bibles, Alexandrinus, and three more manuscripts that are allegedly, well, we don't know what they are, but they would have had to have been some of the most unique Alexandrian ancient manuscripts to have ever been seen in the world, the amount of time that he now has to do that collation work.

And by the way, at age 19, he wasn't trained to do collation work. To do all of that in Great Sinaiticus, again, is what makes people go, no, not a possibility.

Can you think of why, when considering the paleographical assertions that were urged by F .H

.A. Scribner in the 19th century, why would a scholar like James Farrar in 1907 say that the paleographical assertions urged by Mr.

Scribner simply did not settle the issue? Why would he say that? Well, Farrar is not nearly the textual critic that Scribner was, and so again, it's fairly easy, since he's primarily writing on literary issues, to not understand exactly where you're not understanding right now.

And that is, if you've never collated manuscripts, if you have never dealt with the unsealed text, if you've never recognized the difficulty that unsealed text presents, the fact that there aren't spaces between words, there's no punctuation, there's differing levels of the ink in the quill, the material itself, whether it's vellum or papyri, all these things enter into this.

And so I don't know why Farrar would be more likely to take the position than Scribner, but I know

Scribner's work, and I know Scribner did tremendous work on numerous manuscripts.

I've never seen anything else written by Farrar as far as a textual critical material is concerned. So I would have to give the nod to Scribner, even though Scribner is writing before the papyri, and therefore, just like anyone who depends on Dean John Burgon or anybody else before papyri is pretty much out of date, he's dated.

Still, I would give him the nod at that point for that reason. All right, well, but do you not think, do you not think that given the fact that Simonides, according to his own testimony, was not the one who did the full collation of these manuscripts, but that rather it was his uncle

Benedict, who was an older man, a Greek Orthodox monk, who had been part of this community, where primarily what they do with their lives is spend time with these manuscripts?

Do you think it's not possible that his uncle Benedict could have conceived of this project years before and spent years doing the prep work that led to this project that he ultimately had his nephew carry out?

Is that not possible? Well, that would have required him to actually produce the text, because once you start doing collation, you have to come up with what your collation is going to be, what your final reading is going to be drawn from the various sources.

And so again, your questions are, to be honest with you, from a debate perspective, questions that demonstrate the actual thesis of the debate and who actually wins this debate, because the question is not, is it possible?

The question is, can it be documented and can it be demonstrated that such is the case?

And to my knowledge, I'm unaware of any statement made by Simonides. I certainly didn't see anything. Elliot, if you'd like to point out something,

I'd like to see it, where he indicated that Benedict had been working upon a massive collation effort, a collation work, for years prior to Simonides beginning this.

Everything that I have read in Elliot seems to indicate that they came up with this idea when

Simonides arrived as the idea to give a gift to the Tsar, to endear the monastery to him, and that the work was done in a short period of time, including the collation of manuscripts.

And if you'd like to show me any place where he indicates something different than that, I would be very interested in seeing it.

Okay, well let me ask you another question then, since you brought that up. When he actually describes this, he says that Benedict had a copy of the

Moscow edition of the Old and New Testament, collated it with my assistance, with three only of the ancient copies which he had long before these three manuscripts, which he had long before annotated and corrected for another purpose, and cleared their text by this collation from remarkable clerical errors.

Would that indicate, in your opinion... Right there, Elliot. Yeah, right there, you just gave me the information.

That citation, what did the beginning of that citation say? It mentions those, and it specifically says, with Simonides' help.

Now, the three manuscripts, whatever they were, he may have done work on them before, but the collation with the

Moscow Bible, Alexandrinus, these manuscripts in the production of Sinaiticus, takes place with Simonides' help, and he hadn't been there.

He was only there a certain period of time. So all that does, let's say the assistance that does for you there, gives you one source instead of three that has to be collated over there, that still has to be collated together with Alexandrinus and with the

Moscow Bible in the presence of Simonides. So you still have three sources that have to be collated together at that particular point in time with the assistance of Simonides.

And again, now, and what this raises in the mind of the scholar who works in textual critical material, is if, in your theory, and this is a theory that we have to point out has not been given a single bit of factual evidence.

If your theory is that these three texts, and notice that he cleared them of errors. If these three, in fact,

I think what you just cited pretty much ends off of this, because think about what you just said. He had cleared those three of errors.

On what basis? What was the basic text at Mount Athos?

We know what the basic text of Eastern Orthodoxy is. It's a Byzantine text type. So if he cleared them of errors, it would have been

Alexandrinus, because that would have been the most unlike the Byzantine text type. And so if he had cleared them of errors beforehand, there has to be a standard by which that they've been cleared of errors.

And that would have brought them into conformity with the Moscow Bible, not into disconformity with that.

And so if your theory is, here's our Alexandrian readings, this is where the unique readings come from these three, you just cited something that argues against that, if he had cleared them of errors.

Otherwise, you have to say Benedict didn't have any problem creating an Alexandrian text type against the

Ecclesiastical text that would have been used in his own monastery, and then he wants to send that to the czar, as if the czar is not going to maybe notice it.

I mean, what would be the point of him using six manuscripts if he's going to make them all conform to the

Moscow Bible? Why not just use the Moscow Bible? You'd have to ask him why he utilizes that, the sources that he did.

Why do you use Alexandrinus? Does it not sound to you like he's really describing a composite text drawn from a number of resources that then has a very unique character?

Is that not what it sounds like he's describing? No, I see no evidence that his desire was to create a unique text to send to the czar.

He never said that. Where did he say, I want to come up with a text that would look nothing like anything the czar had ever seen before in its actual readings?

The whole idea that this would be the intention is absolutely amazing, and it does raise the question that Scrivener himself raised.

Scrivener, as you know, actually said, you know, we don't have to say that Simonides did not, in fact, produce a manuscript during that time period.

All we have to say is he's wrong about which one it was, and that it wasn't this, and then he provides the reasons why that is, and one of the main reasons exactly what we're talking about right now, and that is you could not come up with those readings from those sources.

All right, time is up. Let me reset the timer. Dr. White, you now have 15 minutes to ask questions of Chris Pinto, and your time begins now.

Mr. Pinto, do you have facility in reading Koine Greek, including

Unsealed Greek? I do not read Unsealed Greek or Koine. Are you trained in the collation of New Testament manuscripts?

I am not, but I read about scholars and so on who talk about collating manuscripts.

What I find really interesting, James, about your comments is that the scholars in the 19th century to my reading did not think that this was an impossibly

Herculean effort. There were others who believed that it was entirely possible. Okay, I didn't ask that question yet, but we'll get to that in just a moment.

I was asking about your capacity to engage in collation. So when you make the statements that you just did in regards to these three ancient manuscripts that were utilized indicated by Thiminides, you don't personally have any way of evaluating how much time it would take to actually engage in a collation of these manuscripts, both

Old and New Testament. Well, I'm a documentarian, so what I would do is I would document the testimony of others who do have experience with it and then determine, based upon a cross -section of their testimonies, whether or not you have a consistent witness.

It's kind of like if you're sitting on a jury in a court of law and they bring in the different forensics experts.

You yourself are not a forensics expert sitting on the jury, but you have to listen to the arguments, see if you can pinpoint the consistencies, inconsistencies.

Is it logical what they're telling you? Does it make sense? Or are they leaning toward a particular bias because they want to draw a certain conclusion because you have that tendency among people who are considered experts in a variety of fields?

They will often lean in... Mr. Pendleton, do you have a bias in your analysis of this information in regards to Thiminides, Tischendorf, and Sinaiticus?

Well, I can say honestly that when I began this whole thing, uh, no,

I don't think I do because... simply because I began believing that Thiminides was a forger.

I began believing what you believe and what most everybody believes. And the point that my film comes to, as I've said over and over again, anybody who studies my work knows, is that I believe...

I agree with James Farrar. My understanding of what happened with these events, because there's still a number of things we don't have time to talk about today, but I believe that the issue was brought to a certain point.

Thiminides was denounced based upon flawed information. We haven't even gotten into the reference to the, uh, ancient catalog at St.

Catherine's Monastery, that a letter shows up supposedly from Mount Sinai, and in it, it says that Thiminides is a liar, and the proof that he's lying is that the

Codex Sinaiticus was contained in the ancient catalog at St. Catherine's Monastery. And, uh,

Thiminides then writes back into the newspaper, and he says, I emphatically deny that the

Codex Sinaiticus is contained in the ancient catalog for the simple reason that no ancient catalog exists.

Uh, so then I'm reading along with this storyline in, uh, Eliot's book, and I'm expecting that somebody's gonna produce this ancient catalog and prove that Thiminides can't possibly be right.

But nobody goes after the ancient catalog. Uh, it's interesting that Scrivener makes reference to that letter, but he avoids mentioning the ancient catalog, and in Thinides, it's simply denounced.

Uh, and then he publishes his final work and then leaves England. So as I studied the story...

Is this an answer to a question about bias? You seem to be going very, very long in my just asking you a simple question, and that is, you do not believe that you have any bias in your handling of the information, uh, on this particular subject at all.

Is that what you're saying? I do not believe I do, no. Okay, so when...

Not an unfair bias, not an unreasonable bias. Again, everything in the film is documented.

And when you started, when you started this project, you were not a proponent of the

Byzantine text type over against, uh, modern critical text? Well, I wouldn't have necessarily defined it that way.

I think my, certainly my inclination, my preference would have been, and is, toward the, uh, toward the work of the

Protestant Reformation, toward the work of those who laid down their lives for the cause of Christ through the

Middle Ages, and an appreciation for their sacrifice and all that they did on our behalf so that we could have the

Word of God in the English language. And that's really what part one in my History of the Bible series deals with in A Lamp in the

Dark. We're talking about the struggle that existed for centuries prior to the 19th century.

See, I don't believe you can really understand what was happening in the 19th century, uh, and the struggle with Rome and the

Oxford Movement and all of that, unless you understand the centuries that came before. So, is it your position that the, the

Byzantine text type or the Texas Receptus is the product of the Reformation? Well, I believe that the, uh, the received text is the product of the

Reformation, most certainly. Absolutely. So, the Reformers specifically chose that text over against, uh, the

Alexandrian text. They knew the distinction, and they made that choice purposely. Well, in your, you know, in your book on the

King James Only Controversy, Dr. White, uh, when you talk about the text types and families, you make this very interesting statement.

You're talking about the Western text type, the Byzantine, the Alexandrian, the Caesarean, and you say, quote, in recent years, some have questioned the validity of these categories, and due in part to the further study of manuscripts that defy all attempts at categorization, have suggested abandoning this type of terminology.

So, the idea of the text types, even you admit in your book, is something that when people actually compare all of these different readings, one manuscript with another, and so on, you, it's very difficult to argue the text type family argument.

It's more of a tradition than it is a reality, based upon what you're saying in your book, and based upon what

I've read from other textual critics as well. So, to say that the Reformers, did they know this difference from one textual family to the other, obviously,

I don't think they were thinking in those terms. I think they were comparing what they thought were the best manuscripts, the collective most faithful readings, and they put together what they believed was the most faithful and accurate representation of the

Word of God. Okay, going back to your statement, you don't feel that you were, you're biased.

In your response to Daniel Wallace, when he brought up the issue of Italiano Donati visiting

St. Catherine, your response was very interesting. It seemed that your response was, well, if you don't mind,

I'll just quote you. Notice the scholars at the British Library tell us this may be a reference to Sinaiticus.

They're not quite as confident, Dr. Wallace, because Donati's description is relatively vague and can scarcely be called precise or to a

T, as Dr. Wallace said. Donati writes what the Bible he saw in terms that might also apply to a thousand other works, depending on how a person defines what it means to be handsome in the world of manuscripts.

We also consider that there are currently more than 3 ,000 manuscripts at St. Catherine's Monastery, and there may have been many more back in 1761.

So, do you think that you're handling that reference to the fact that many people see in Italiano Donati a reference to Sinaiticus long before Thumanides was born?

Are you handling that with the same consistent perspective as you would, for example, the idea of these three manuscripts that Thumanides claims he had access to?

Do you think you're really, there's no bias in your handling of these sources? I don't think there is, Dr. White, and I'll tell you why.

Because the description from Donati is, here you're talking about a manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, with very unique features, as you know.

You've got a four -column manuscript. It's now today said to have 23 ,000 corrections, an average of 30 corrections per page.

It deliberately omits the last 12 verses of Mark, which makes it very unique indeed.

And it contained a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas, at least a partial copy of the

Shepherd of Hermas, in Greek, something that no scholar had seen anywhere in the

Western world. They thought it was lost to time. And so now we're to believe that that manuscript sat there one century after another.

Nobody ever noticed these very unique features, even though everybody's looking for a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas. And so nobody noticed that Donati supposedly saw it.

And what he describes is simply a manuscript with, a handsome manuscript with rounded script, is essentially what he says.

Obviously, he doesn't have any of the particular details, the unique characteristics.

He mentions none of them in that description, which is provided by the

British Library. Thank you. May I ask, why did you not include the quotes I provide from Eliot and Farrer in my opening statement?

Your movie was three hours long. You had plenty of time to do it. There were lots of things that didn't have anything to do with your thesis that were included in the film.

So given that both of them came to conclusions that are detrimental to the theory that you put forward, don't you think it would be incumbent upon you to note that the sources that you actually are drawing from come to the conclusions that they actually come to?

Can you be a little bit more specific about what you mean? I'm not trying to be evasive. I'm just not sure exactly what you're asking me.

Sure. I read a number of citations that you did not include in my opening statement.

Such as? Okay. In Literary Ability, he surpassed all his contemporaries, but unhappily, the essential element of truth formed no part of his mental constitution.

That is from Farrer. Now, that's talking about Hemanides. And it's saying the essential element of truth formed no part of his mental constitution.

And for Eliot, he has an entire section called Hemanides the Forger, which says, what is surprising about the

Hemanides affair is not so much that it happened at all, or that it lasted for over a year, but that man with Hemanides' known background had any credibility at all.

Now, you didn't include those quotes, even though you included, I don't know, half an hour of material about Tischendorf and meeting the

Pope and Cardinal Archbishop Meyer, all that kind of stuff.

Don't you think that these quotes from the sources you yourself have read would be significantly more central to the thesis?

Than the information that actually ended up in the film? Well, right off the bat, anybody who sees the film and the section on Hemanides can figure out very quickly that right off the bat,

I let the audience know that if you do any history of Hemanides, you're going to read quotes like that, that he is portrayed as a forger, as a trickster, as this brilliant forger, et cetera, and so on.

So it's not as though I am hiding that aspect of his character. Not at all. The film makes it very clear that he was denounced, that people did not trust him, that he was suspected of being guilty of forgery.

Mr. Pinto, that's not the question I asked. I didn't say that. I wasn't asking about what was said at the time. The sources you yourself are quoting, the scholars that you put, you put,

J .K. Eliot, you put James Farrer in the film, but you didn't quote their own conclusions.

And Farrer's conclusion was that truthfulness was not an essential part of Hemanides' character.

And Eliot, well, I just read you what he said. Don't you think that their conclusions would be relevant to the audience having an accurate understanding of even the context of their own citation?

Well, I think their conclusions are included in all the other denunciations of Hemanides, which are really assumed in the film.

But the real issue is whether or not Hemanides could have written the

Codex Sinaticus. So while you're reading the quote there about Hemanides and his mental honesty and whatever from Farrer, you're overlooking the part where it says that in literary ability, he surpassed all of his contemporaries.

You're talking about a person here who was considered to be exceedingly talented and had great abilities.

Not only that, but the circle of people who knew Hemanides in that time, his close friends, Stuart Hodgkin, Mr.

Joseph Mayer, Sir Thomas Phillips, and others, none of them thought that he was this liar and this trickster and a swindler that he was accused of being.

Thank you. If anyone had testified that Konstantin von

Tischendorf had been found with rusty nails in the implements of forgery on his person, don't you think you would have spent maybe 20 minutes on that in your film?

And yet you're aware of the fact that Lepsius made that argumentation against Hemanides.

And yet that doesn't get mentioned either. Doesn't that indicate, you just said that it's assumed in the film, but isn't that an example of some level of bias?

Well, I think that you're being somewhat unreasonable. I mean, there are volumes of information.

You've already somewhat complained a little bit about the length of my film.

If I had included all of these different quotes, it would have gone on and on and on. Certainly there's a lot of information that could have been included that did not make its way into the film.

Now, the strange thing about Tischendorf is that even among those who admire

Tischendorf... And that's the time, time, time. Okay.

I apologize, gentlemen, but the cross -examination is, you know, the time has run out.

We will now reset the clock and, hang on a second here, and you will have five minutes for closing arguments.

Chris Pinto, you get to go first for the closing argument, and your time begins now.

Well, as I have said, as I make it very clear in my film, Tears Among the

Wheat, and in all the other materials that I've published on this subject matter,

I believe that the story of Constantine Simonides, and whether or not it's possible that he could have created the

Codex Sinaticus, I believe it's an unsolved mystery of literature. I agree with the conclusion that was drawn by James Farrar in 1907.

And so I'm very careful in my film about what we say, about what I say and what's documented on the screen.

And I did that with Tischendorf as well. I was very careful that we don't put things on Tischendorf that cannot be documented through the pages of history.

And where Simonides is concerned, everything that we say about Simonides is fully documented.

But the story itself unfolds in a very mysterious manner. It ends in a way where Simonides is actually condemned based upon what appears to be a false accusation or a false piece of information about the manuscript being contained in the ancient catalog at St.

Catherine's Monastery. And so I believe the whole issue was never fully concluded.

And so this is what James Farrar says. He says it's unfortunate that the matter was never settled at the time that the claim was made.

And he goes on from there. And I generally agree with that conclusion. Now the reason

I think this is important is because we have in modern times for the last 150 years, we have textual critics like Dr.

James White, like Dr. Daniel Wallace at Dallas Theological Seminary, who question historic traditional readings from the

Bible. One of the quotes that Dr. White has shared in the past on Dr.

Wallace is Dr. Wallace will make reference to the story of the woman taken in adultery in the

Gospel of John. And Dr. Wallace will say, oh, that's my favorite story that's not in the

Bible, right? Casting doubt upon that reading. The last 12 verses of Mark are cast out upon continually.

Why? Because of the readings in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus and other passages.

Now we're being told by Dr. James White that Luke chapter 23, where Jesus is on the cross and he says,

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And we're told that we should doubt this scripture as well, and that possibly it's a forgery that was inserted into manuscripts long ago, giving

Christians the impression that we believe something that is false, that we believe this false testimony.

And part of the purpose of my film and part of the purpose of this series and part of the reason for bringing up the history of Codex Sinaiticus is to say to the critics who are casting doubts on these historic readings in the

Bible that have been handed down one century after another and represented in the greater majority of biblical manuscripts that we have throughout history.

But what are they basing their doubtful disputations on? They're often basing their doubtful disputations on doubtful manuscripts that are themselves called into question, that are themselves of questionable origin.

And so when people see a reading in their

Bible, a footnote, etc., that makes a reference to Codex Sinaiticus, I believe there should be a footnote there that gives them a heads up and lets them know something about the history of this codex.

Even if it is an unsolved mystery, if we look at our footnotes quite often, they're not always conclusive.

They're often presenting theories. They're often presenting possibilities. They're saying, well, maybe this and maybe that and this guy says this and this guy says that, etc.,

and so on. And we're brought to a point with these footnotes where we're not sure what to believe. But question marks are placed in our

Bibles. And I think to be objective, to be fair, the readers, our

Bible -believing Christian brethren, should know the truth about the history of the manuscripts that the modern -day textual critics are basing their theories and their arguments upon.

That's really the issue. That's what all this is about. So, thanks for listening.

All right, let me reset the clock. Dr. White, you have five minutes for your closing argument, and it begins now.

Thank you very much, and thank you to everyone who has listened. What we had there at the end is a classic

King James -only argument, unfortunately, and though Mr. Pinto eschews that identification, that's what that argument was, saying, well, you're casting doubt on reading the

Bible. No, I want to know what the Bible originally said. I do not want to know what a scribe 500 years after John thought

John should have said. The Percopaea adultery, the story of the woman taking adultery, is not found until the 5th century.

It's first found in the most unreliable of the early manuscripts, Codex Vedae Canterburgiensis.

In some manuscripts, it's found in the Gospel of Luke. I want to know what John wrote. I don't want to know what was inserted later.

And so, that's a standard traditionalist perspective, but it's the very perspective that cannot defend the accuracy of the

New Testament against the attacks that are being made upon the New Testament in our day -to -day. That kind of argumentation is not going to stand up against Bart Ehrman.

That kind of argumentation is not going to stand up against John Dominic Crossan. I can tell you that because I have debated these men.

And if Mr. Pinto would just understand the process that believing textual critics go through, he would recognize that his concerns are unfounded, that his concerns are based upon an ignorance and a traditionalism that, while it may be very good to appeal to that for some people if you want to get them to watch your movie, is not the way to defend the

Bible. And so, what we've had here is the presentation of a theory. And when you ask for the most important facts to substantiate the theory, well, we don't know.

The problem is, Tarzan the Wheat says it knows, because it concludes with a warning against Sinaiticus.

It doesn't say, well, you know, it's a possibility. No, you've got this BBC documentary that's cited. You've got

Jesuits everywhere. You have Mr. Pinto talking about Vaticanus and the papyri. And I just have to wonder, does

Chris Pinto really believe that Vaticanus is a fraud as well? That the papyri are all part of a

Jesuit conspiracy to undercut the Byzantine text? Instead, what we get is, well, okay, so the

Moscow Bible and Alexandrinus wouldn't really give him these readings, but there are these mystery manuscripts, and there's all sorts of manuscripts we haven't seen yet, so maybe it came from that.

And as I tried to point out, rather painfully, I'm afraid, and I apologize for that,

Mr. Pinto doesn't know what goes into a collation of a manuscript. He doesn't understand the concept of how you collate, and you collate against the standard, and what standard

Benedict would have had in an Orthodox monastery, and the amount of time.

We're not just talking about New Testament here. We're not just talking about Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. We're talking about the

Psalter. We're talking about Isaiah. We're talking about Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Leviticus.

We're talking about a huge project that would take a massive amount of time, and allegedly this is done by a 19 -year -old.

A 19 -year -old! And then when that's practiced as well, you know, Benedict might have started years beforehand, and then when

Thimidides showed up, then he already had everything done, none of which is even hinted at.

And in fact, the texts themselves say otherwise when you understand the process of collation and the process of textual criticism, and Mr.

Pinto has admitted that he does not understand those things. And I wish he had gone to believing textual scholars, not the people who default back and run away from the attacks that are being made upon the

Scriptures, because this is the whole reason that I agreed to do this, and I've invested the time to do this, is

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and the papyri are a great gift given to the Church that demonstrates that the bartermen of the world are wrong.

They are a gift to the Church. They are something that we should rejoice in, that we should be thankful for.

And I'm on the front lines defending these things. I've got back from South Africa. I debated Yusuf Ismail at Northwest University, the old university in South Africa.

And we were debating on these very issues. And ironically, it's

Mr. Pinto that's taking the argumentative position of the Muslims at that point. He doesn't know that. He isn't aware of that.

This isn't built by association, but he needs to be aware that they make the same kind of arguments that he's making, and because they do not understand the processes involved.

So I do not believe that a 19 -year -old Greek managed to produce Codex Sinaiticus.

There has been no explanation of the multiple scribes, the interaction of the scribes, the different inks that are used, and the corrections.

It's all been, well, it might have been something like this, or it might have been something like that. That's not how debates are done.

That's not how history is done. And thankfully, I think we've been able to demonstrate that's not how we should be giving an apologetic defense to the world, either.

Thank you very much for your listening, Steve. All right. Gentlemen, thank you for your time, and thank you for coming on, fighting for the faith in order to debate this important topic.

And I'm certain that the listeners, although at times the debate is technical,

I think that they will find that this is useful and edifying for them to consider.

Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you very much for having us. All right. Let me go ahead and sign out here.

If you'd like to email me regarding anything you've heard on this edition or any previous editions of Fighting for the

Faith, you can do so. My email address is TalkBackAtFightingForTheFaith .com, or you can subscribe on Facebook.

It's Facebook .com forward slash PirateChristian, or you can follow me on Twitter, my name there, at PirateChristian. Till tomorrow, may

God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.