Cultic Forms of KJVOnlyism

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning, barely, barely got the program started today.

And it's not because of he behind the board, who is neither the probie nor the pro, he's just a

Cowboys fan. But it's not your fault. I think the term now is noob.

Noob, newbie, newbie, newbie. Anyway, I, you know, your host is not the brightest bulb in the pack.

I don't know. I, we had a funny incident for Christmas.

I, I was, I preached Sunday morning. Some of you have said nice, kind things about the, the sermon that I did

Sunday morning. I do not consider myself much of a preacher, but I worked hard on that one.

And hopefully it was a blessing to some folks. But anyway, and then we got back to the house and then the whole family shows up.

And so I'm not going to wear my suit and a tie while trying to get a turkey out of the oven and stuff like that.

So I decided to wear a shirt that had been given to me by some, some kind folks.

There's a few folks out there that have dug around and found my personal wish list on Amazon, and they encouraged me by sniping things off that wish list.

And one of them was this real nice plaid purplish Oakley shirt. And so I said, ah, that's what

I'm going to wear for Christmas. I'm going to wear that. So I had that on. And so, you know, we did the turkey, the turkey turned out pretty well.

We're getting better. It's taking practice, but we're getting better. The daughter was, was dancing in the kitchen, which means we got really close to the, the right stuff.

But anyway, and so we're sitting there doing the gifts and I put a lot of effort into this stuff.

I had a theme going and all the rest of the stuff. Anyway, I get this present and I can tell it's a shirt.

I mean, you can tell it's a shirt. You know, it's, it wasn't in a box or anything. So you could feel it, you know, it gives, you know, it's a shirt.

Open it up. It is, it doesn't look like my shirt. It's the identical shirt.

I mean, it's the exact shirt that I'm wearing. We've got pictures of me holding it, wearing the shirt and holding the shirt.

So I'm going to take it back to, to this place yesterday. And so I go driving all the way out to where there's an

Oakley store out in Arrowhead. And I, I, I get there and I hadn't, I hadn't put the shirt in the, um, in the car.

So as I'm driving back, uh, I'm getting really annoyed because my little Nissan Versa has this little tire inflation light thing, you know, and those things are great.

I got to admit, I mean, most of you are actually driving around in underinflated tires and it, and it actually lessens life, your tire and all this.

I understand all that, but, uh, it's still annoying cause it's really bright.

And, uh, so as soon as I get back, I go out and, and a couple of years ago I bought one of those little compressor things, you know, you can plug into your cigarette lighter and then you can fill up your tires.

And so I got, uh, that's, I, and last year or the year before one of the two, I gave, uh, the kids those for their cars too.

Um, cause that's just what I do. But anyway, so I go out and you have to turn the ignition on, on my car for the cigarette lighter thing to work.

So I turn it on and I, I go out and I fill up the tires and I put the thing away.

I close the door and I go inside. Yep. Left keys in the car and left the ignition on.

Now, thankfully, uh, no one, uh, tried to get into the car. I've seen people on my security cameras try to do that in the past, but they didn't last night.

Um, but when you leave the ignition on, uh, for like 12, 13 hours, um, let's just say that we almost didn't get here today.

So right now there's a charger sitting under the hood of my car and I'm thankful, uh, that we have something called a motorcycle, uh, which is how

I got here. Um, but it's been a cool morning. It's not like, it's not like it's all that cold in Phoenix today.

It's going to be 70 for a high, which is really nice, but it was very cold this morning. I rode before sunrise and, um, my computer recorded the coldest temperature

I've seen since the mid 1990s on my bicycle. And it was 28 .4

degrees. You put a 16 mile per hour, uh, windchill in that. And that's 17 degrees, 17 degrees.

Why was I out there? Because I decided I wanted to listen to an ebook and it's a short little ebook.

I can tell it's a series of blog articles, but, um, a man from Issachar, if you follow that blog had suggested it, he is a black pastor.

I spoke with him at a conference in New Jersey, I don't know, two years ago, something like that.

And, um, so I, I listened to this ebook twice on the way out and on the way back on a 30 miler.

It's a, it's fairly short and, uh, it was fascinating. And I, so I wanted to start the program off today, uh, with some information about that.

And, uh, it's, I don't know, hopefully you'll find this to be interesting.

I could just be getting myself into a lot of trouble, which is, which is possible, but I thought it was, it was worth taking the time to take a look at this.

Um, there is a man by the name of Ronald Everett and Ronald Everett, uh, is, um, an ex -con.

Um, he was in prison from September of 1971 to,

I believe it was May of 1975, having been convicted of beating and torturing a woman.

Uh, while he was in prison, he, uh, continued his studies. And, uh, once he got out, uh, he actually had credits toward a

PhD and has since earned two PhDs, primarily in political science and social ethics.

And, um, this, uh, this man, um, helped to found a black nationalist separatist party.

In fact, the woman that he tortured was a member of his organization, the

US organization. Now, when I first saw us, I thought, that's nice, the United States organization, but it, that's not what it means.

Uh, it's sort of like, have you seen FUBU for us, by us? Well, that's the us. It's us versus them, white versus black, in this case, black versus white.

And so this was an organization with strong socialistic tendings, tendencies, even very left -leaning along those lines, that encouraged, uh, blacks to, for example, buy from only black stores and made by, you know, things like that.

There's, there's strong racial racist undercurrent there, though I've been told that if you're in the minority, you can't be a racist, which is sort of, uh, seems to be the conventional wisdom today, is that the only way you can be a racist is if you're in the majority.

If you're in the minority, you can't be a racist, which I find very odd. But anyway, uh, once he got out of prison, um,

Ronald Everett, um, decided to, in essence, uh, begin a, a, well, he had already begun a movement and it changed when he got out of, out of prison.

Now he had scholarship behind him and, and there's been some evolution over the years. But remember that he was put in prison in 1971.

Five years before that, he had, uh, laid out, uh, the principles of a, a, a black nationalism and, uh, a separatist black nationalism.

And he had expressed his dislike of the

Christian faith, uh, feeling that the Christian faith, um, was in essence, a white man's, uh, a white man's religion.

And Christmas, for example, uh, it's, it's a white man's religion. I mean, that Santa Claus looks pretty, pretty white to me.

And so in 1966, he decided to start a holiday.

Now he had also, um, taken a new name and his name as it is to this day is

Karenga. And you've probably figured out now what I'm talking about, um, is what's called

Kwanzaa, which began yesterday, I believe it's the 26th through the 2nd.

And, uh, the book I was listening to, uh, which was recommended to me, uh, is all about Kwanzaa and what its sources were and what its background is, uh, its relationship to this, this philosophy that Karenga developed called, uh,

Kawida. And, uh, it's a mixture of a number of things.

Uh, I found it interesting that the author of this, this book, uh, didn't pick up on some of the

Islamic elements to it. Uh, mention, for example, the Niyah. Uh, Niyah is a part of Islamic prayer, the intention, purpose, the

Niyah. Um, and, um, so he established Kwanzaa in 1966.

I remember he's convicted in 1971. So this Kwanzaa was before this and Kwanzaa was, Kwanzaa was religion for blacks.

Um, it is a religion. It's a religious concept. They've, they've tried to deemphasize that now, but very clearly it, it, it has strong religious overtones to it.

Um, some of the things that, uh, uh, Karenga has said is that, uh,

Kawida is a total way of life. We believe that children are the real life after death and our greatest duty to them is to leave our community in better shape than the way we inherited it.

Community there being the black community. Uh, he says, I'm the founder of a religion called Kawida and it's based on seven principles.

They also says we are God ourselves. And clearly when it was initially established, it was meant to be a alternative to, uh,

Christmas. Something for, uh, for black people to gather around and to celebrate other than Christmas.

Now, since then he has said, well, no, it's not meant to be an alternative to, or, or a substitute for any of those, the rest of those things.

But, uh, the reality was is you can find some pretty strong, uh, contradictions, uh, between, uh, what he said originally and what he is, uh, he is saying.

Now I wanted to get a little more time to see if he's, uh, still kicking out there and if he's still teaching at the, in, uh, um, uh,

Long, I think it was in Long Island. Long Beach, yeah, Long Beach on the left coast and Long Island on the other coast.

But I, like I said, didn't have, didn't have time to do as much looking into it as I wanted. So I, uh,

I found it very, very interesting, uh, to listen to this. Like I said, if you go, if you look for, just look for a man from Issachar, uh, is the blog.

I was going to have, again, I was going to have all this up, but just had to be able to get things queued up in time before the, uh, opening music started.

That's how close I was getting in here. Uh, but look up a man from Issachar, good blog to follow.

Uh, you'll see the resources link there where you can get that information, uh, as well. But, uh, it's, it really is interesting to, to realize that this thing was started when

I was three years old. Uh, it doesn't exactly have deep roots in the past, if you know what

I mean. And, uh, and it was started, uh, as a, as a, with distinct political overtones and very, very clear religious overtones too in a rejection of the

Christian faith. And, and of course for our, our black Christian brothers and sisters, the idea of separating out and not being a part of the one body.

Um, it's just, just completely opposed to what, uh, the Christian faith is all about.

This idea of, that's what, that's what's made, has always made the Ku Klux Klan such a mockery of the cross and things like that is that there is neither black nor white.

Paul could have said that if it had been a relevant issue in his day, though there weren't very many white people around. Uh, I guess black and olive skin would have been a little bit more of the issue back then.

But, um, male or female, black or white, bond or slave, you're all one in Christ Jesus.

And, and anything that comes along that is meant to, uh, disrupt that unity is, uh, well, it's, it's opposed to the

Christian faith. And so when you, when you hear people running around today talking about Kwanzaa, uh, well that's what they're talking about.

Uh, and, uh, you can get some more information on that. If you look up a man from Issachar is the, uh, is the website there.

Um, I do have, uh, Wallace Ehrman queued up. I have

D .A. Muhammad queued up. Uh, but, uh, we also have a phone call. So we'll just go ahead and, uh, we'll go ahead and take the phone call and, uh, uh,

I will bring it up on my end. And I think all you have to do is make sure it's, uh, it's up over there and let's, uh, let's talk with, uh,

Bob. Hi, Bob. Ah, good morning, brother. How are you? Good to hear your voice. Yes, sir.

Excellent. Uh, I have a question. Uh, I'm involved with a, with a wonderful countercult ministry called

Saints Alive. Uh -huh. And so most of our outreach is with either in the marketplace or on their territory with, uh, people like, uh,

Mormons, JWs, and excuse the expression, Seventh -day Adventists. But in, in the course of things, we've run across a number of people that were just really convinced that are brothers, but seem to be trapped in a way of thinking called the

King James only movement. Oh, yes. And, uh, at times, and I'm trying to be kind here, at times, it seems like when dealing with these people, they're, many of them are unable to reason, unable to consider evidence, unable to consider the facts of history, almost to the same degree of inability to think as many of our friends in the

Christian cults. I can't explain it, and I don't understand it. But if you could help our thinking,

I would pass along your response to some of the brothers and sisters I work with and be able, maybe in a more kind way, to deal with some of these people that seem to be trapped in something that at times is almost cultic.

Yeah. I have made reference to, uh, a cultic form of King James only -ism.

That is, unfortunately, what you see most often because these folks are very, very bold in their proclamation of their beliefs.

And we had an example on this program about six months ago or so, actually a little bit less than that, when a guy by the name of Will Kinney called in.

All right. I think this was, I think it was July or August. If you could look at the archives, you'd be able to find it.

All right. And Will Kinney is a King James only advocate. And in attempting to reason with him, it became very, very clear that he simply is not either willing or capable to reason on the basis of just direct factual information and cause and effect.

And because of X, therefore Y, just completely lost on him. He accused me of misrepresentation in my book.

And I went through all the facts, pointed out he had skipped a footnote that had the information in it.

And he just couldn't see how that would be relevant to read footnotes. And he couldn't see how the information was relevant.

And it was just, it was a sad and amazing thing to observe. But unfortunately, it is something we've seen many, many times.

There is a cultic kind of King James onlyism where you cannot reason with the individual.

They reason only with emotion. And if you challenge them, they assume that you're challenging the

Bible rather than a very modernistic. I mean, the

King James only movement is less than 100 years old. Its history can be traced into the 1930s.

And so when you consider all of that, they don't tend to really know much about history.

Or if they do, they only know very, very select facts about history and rarely have a context to place it into.

And so, yes, there are the cultic King James onlyists. And then there are the non -cultic King James onlyists who aren't automatically going to default to calling you a

God hater or a Bible hater or the like. And are much more rational to deal with.

And actually, those tend to be the folks that end up, if they really do think things through, leaving that movement.

But still, there's a lot of them that have never been challenged to think through the ramifications of their positions.

We talked spiritual, mental, intellectual. I think it differs from person to person, to be honest with you.

I think that there is a kind of person who very much likes the black and white world of King James onlyism.

And it's very simplified. It just makes everything very easy. And it's really easy to then draw lines and say it's me versus all the rest of them.

And so there's a mindset that it does tend to feed into as far as that cultic level of it goes.

But again, I want to make it very, very clear. I'm not saying every King James onlyist is a member of a cult.

But the ones that scream the loudest and post the most YouTube videos of them burning

NIVs and the like, do tend to be the ones that have a very cultic mindset where you're exactly right.

When I'm talking to a Mormon, there are Mormons I talk to. And they have their testimony of the

Book of Mormon. And it doesn't matter what you say, how many scripture verses you present to them, how you show them they're being inconsistent.

Because if there was a Jehovah's Witness staying there, they would say things that Jehovah's Witnesses themselves are saying. This kind of stuff, you see that kind of mindset.

And you see it functioning as well amongst many of these King James only folks where they just are totally unwilling or incapable of examining the presuppositions upon which they're basing themselves.

So it sounds like a Holy Spirit breakthrough or nothing, because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with smart or dumb.

No, no, no. I mean, there are some very simple folks that get involved with it because they don't like things like having notes at the bottom of their page that says some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that, even though the original

King James had the same thing. There are some simple folks who go, I just don't want any of the rest of that stuff.

But no, many of these folks will memorize facts and figures and everything else.

They clearly have the capacity to do that. And outside of their religious life, some of these folks were engineers and things like that.

So just as you find, I have found many, many, many intelligent Mormon people who are aerospace engineers and all the rest of that stuff, and they believe in Nephites and Lamanites, even though there's no evidence that such things ever existed.

Nobody's dug one up yet. No, no, they didn't leave much. They didn't leave anything behind, none of those jade and cocoa beans.

But anyway, you know, the Limna's and all the rest of that stuff, that's another issue.

But you know what I'm talking about. So it is, I can't give you a nice, easy way to deal with these folks because they're, you know, the best you can do is speak truth to somebody, but when you're dealing with a cultic mentality, there are times you just have to walk away.

And by the way, almost all of the street screechers, and I don't call them street preachers,

I call them street screechers. Yeah, we understand you. Yeah, well, exactly, who stand outside the temple in Salt Lake yelling, it shouldn't be

Mormon, it should be moron, and they think that's preaching. Right. The vast majority of them,

I'd say 85 to 90 % of them are King James only as well. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, the world is, yeah,

I get it. So I don't have any easy answers. Well, we'll pray and try to be more sensitive and listen to God.

All right. And I hear you, and you've given us a good clue. Blessings on you. Okay, thank you, Bob. Thank you. All right, God bless.

Bye -bye. Bye. Well, there you go. It is unfortunate that that particular movement has done so much damage.

These are the people that very frequently are seen on television, and they are the ones that destroyed our outreach in Salt Lake City and disrupted the outreach in Mesa, and there is a connection between their ahistorical circular reasoning as far as Bible translations goes and their behavior and proclamation in other areas as well.

So that is very much the case. Okay, no other phone calls right now, so we'll dive into the text.

By the way, I didn't see him active before, but I did want to mention that the primary reason we're doing a jumbo -sized

DL today, we still have over an hour to go. And Barry already looks tired in there.

It's tough, man. And the reason we still have an hour to go in the jumbo

DL today is because we had special requests. Today is a very special, special day.

It seems that special people are born in December. I'm not sure exactly why that is, but it's a special day.

And, you know, Big Ralph was born in December, and I was born in December.

And evidently today is someone's birthday. And this person's birthday, he's just a little bit older than I am.

He's just completed his 50th year, so he's turning 50 today, and I'll do that next year.

But he is a fellow who listens to every single dividing line at least three times and every one of my debates at least three times, and then he just memorizes all of them.

So he makes me a little uncomfortable. He scares me.

I very frequently will say on channel, you frighten me, because he remembers all sorts of things that I do not remember at all.

Now, if I sat around listening to myself, I'd have a great memory. I would be just like Algo.

Four times, okay, every dividing line four times, and who knows how many for each of the debates,

I don't know. But he can quote my debates, and that's frightening to me.

But today is Algo's birthday, so we're dedicating today's dividing line to Algo, who will then be able to quote everything that I say on this entire program, like five years from now.

That's the scary part, is he will. And in fact, oh, seven times for the debates, okay.

And if I was videotaping right now, which I didn't have time to set up the camera, but if I was videotaping right now, he would remember what

I'm wearing right now, which, again, like I said, frightens me, and it should frighten you as well.

Okay, anyway. So you know what?

I think what we'll do in there, Barry, so that you're not all freaked out, is we'll just – since I'm not recording anyways, as far as the video goes, we'll just slide through here.

We don't have to worry about – don't need to worry about the breaks, stuff like that. Though it would be nice – well, we'll see if after we cover some

Bart Ehrman stuff here, if we have any more calls to look at. So we'll take some calls if somebody wants to call in, want to comment about that.

What I could use from you, however, since I didn't get it, is exactly that. That's right. All right, let's get back into some of the reviews we're doing.

We will continue on with the Radio Free Geneva material. Who knows, maybe next time with James McCarthy's sermon.

We didn't really get into the most interesting part of it last time, but we will continue on with that as well. And then

I have a – do you all remember the video that I posted last week where we had a

Salafi Muslim discussing why he did not feel that you could give holiday greetings or wish a

Merry Christmas to Christians? You know, you can open that door a little bit faster than that.

It's okay. It doesn't make that much noise. Thank you, sir. And I only posted it because it helped to illustrate what

I've talked about in regards to the concept of shirk. And I included a little paragraph as to why I do not – why

I reject the accusation that Christians are mushriks. I really believe that the author of the

Koran did not understand what Christians believe and so on and so forth. So I posted that.

Well, that particular speaker, I've been in contact with him.

And I'm going to let him know when I'm going to start – I guess that was – he would rather that people would see this –

I think it was about an hour and ten -minute long presentation he did called Quoting Jesus, not

Misquoting Jesus, but Quoting Jesus. So sometime last week, I think it was Christmas Eve, sometime a few days ago,

I'm sorry, Christmas Eve, I think it was Saturday, I listened to the entirety of that presentation while doing a 68 -mile ride with my wife.

And I'm going to let him know when I'm going to be doing that review so that he can listen.

Now, he's in Riyadh, I believe, or someplace in Saudi Arabia. And I'm going to be sending out –

I want to send out some books to him. I made that offer and hopefully have some nice dialogue with him.

But we'll be doing that after we finish the Diya Muhammad series. Once we finish up Diya Muhammad, then we can go from there.

So that's what's in line here. We also had a request for a

British scholar's comments to be played. I listened – I tried to listen to that, but it didn't record correctly.

So I guess I'll have to rerecord it so we can get to that too. But lots of things to queue up and listen to here on the program as we seek to help you in being an apologist and giving an offense for the faith today.

So let's make sure I've got the computer plugged in here, which I do. And let's go back to Bart Ehrman's comments.

Bart Ehrman, the man promoting the idea that you have to have photocopies of the originals for the

New Testament to be trustworthy, in essence, is what we're listening to. Let's dive back in. There have been numerable stages between the original and our first copy.

How many mistakes had crept into the text before we start getting copies? There's no way to know because we don't have earlier copies.

But, as I have been pointing out, given the fact that you do not have a single line of transmission, you have multiple lines of transmission, if there were major modifications, changes, alterations, and the like, in those first few decades before we do have the first copies appearing, it seems that given the multiple lines of transmission, that when those first copies begin to appear in history, that we would see massive differences, not just small differences, not just a word ending here or a synonym there or a spelling there.

But if there was any kind of editing, changing going on, there would be great evidence of that because of the multiple lines.

And that's why last time we pointed out that Ehrman really tries to minimize the number of copies of the originals and to narrow down.

What he wants to do is narrow down the stream of transmission so that you can cram as much corruption into the early decades as possible theoretically.

The reality is it would be a very wide, broad stream in light of many of the historical issues that we've already discussed, the destruction of manuscripts under the

Roman persecution, things like that. It would be a much wider stream. And it's much harder to theorize massive corruption of a wide stream of transmission than it is a narrow stream of transmission.

So that's why he is invested in this narrow stream of transmission concept that allows him to promote his perspective.

These are the earliest, the first complete copy 300 years after. Now he's showing

P45 for Mark, but it'd be nice, which isn't even a complete manuscript of Mark.

We don't have a complete papyri manuscript of Mark. You know, it's funny how the mind works. I was going to mention this.

I don't know, about three weeks ago, four weeks. No, no, it was November 20th.

Yeah, November 20th. I was speaking to a church down in Tucson. And it's so weird.

Over a month later, I'm riding along and all of a sudden I realized I had misstated.

Well, I'd stated something in a way it could be misunderstood. In one of the three services, only one of the three services of that church.

What is going on in the subconscious part of your mind that all of a sudden, just out of the blue, you go,

Oh man, I said that we don't have any papyri copies of Mark. Well, I should have said that we don't have any complete papyri copies of Mark.

And it's something I said a month ago. In only one of three services. I mean, what is going on in the mind that makes, that makes, sometimes just makes me go,

Oh, that's weird. Intervening stages of copying, we simply don't know. We can't know because we don't have the manuscripts to tell us.

This, again, is not simply true for the Gospel of Mark. It's true for all of the books of the New Testament.

It seems like when you buy the New Testament that we know what's in it because you go to the bookstore and you buy a

New Testament and, you know, you go to another bookstore, you buy the New Testament. It's the same thing, but not in the ancient world.

If you lived in Rome and you read a copy of Mark and then you went to Ephesus and read a copy of Mark, you might be reading two different copies with two different wordings of this passage or that passage.

Now, notice the care with which Dr. Ehrman is speaking with different wording of this passage or that passage.

Now, he has to be very, very careful here because the most widely divergent copies we have do not give you a different Gospel of Mark.

And Ehrman would have to admit that. He'd have to. I mean, we played the portion of my cross -examination where I asked him, you know, if you edited your own

Greek New Testament, is it not true that it would be closer to the version we have today in the

Nessie Olin platform than the TR is? And remember, he was just, yep, just yes, just so.

I don't know why he didn't want to expand upon it. Maybe he realizes this isn't good for book sales. I don't know.

But there it was. And so it's almost a nuanced way of speaking here.

He wants to continue to inculcate a level of uncertainty and untrustworthiness, but he doesn't want to overplay his hand because he can't possibly substantiate any kind of accusation of major editing and changing.

The best he can do is copyist errors and maybe a tweak by a scribe concerning some type of theological controversy raging at the time or something along those lines.

These copies are circulating throughout the Roman world. Wherever Christians were, they wanted, of course, they wanted copies of the

Gospels. If you wanted a copy of the Gospel and you lived in Ephesus, but it was made in Rome, you had to make a copy in Rome and take it to Ephesus.

And then you made a copy that was maybe a copy of the copy of the copy, so maybe you're making a copy of a copy that in fact had a lot of mistakes in it, but that's the copy you have now in Ephesus.

And suppose somebody from Colossae wants a copy. Well, they come to Ephesus and they make a copy of this mistaken copy, and that's the

Gospel they have in Colossae. And then suppose somebody from Antioch wants a copy. Well, they come to Colossae and they make a copy there of this errant copy that's based on copies of the copies of the copies, and it circulates around the

Roman world like this. Again, emphasizing single lines of transmission, no discussion whatsoever of, well, what happens if you had two copies?

And we know that scribes did. We know that they did in the early period.

We know, we can tell by some of the scribal changes and errors, that the reason that they struggled at a point is because they had two different readings and manuscripts in front of them.

So it wasn't just a single line. Sometimes a scribe would actually have to engage in a level of textual critical activity, even in the early days, because they're looking, and it's, okay, this one says this, and that one says that.

This one spells it this way, and that one spells it that way. And sometimes they'd go with one, sometimes with the other.

They might come up with a sense that, well, this one's more trustworthy than that one, or maybe they knew where this one came from, or maybe it was written more nicely, or there's all sorts of different reasons.

But sometimes they'll conflate the readings. Sometimes if there's two different words, they'll put them together with a chi in between them or things like that called conflation.

All sorts of reasons to recognize that this activity did not take place in a vacuum, and that for the majority of that very time period that he wants us to focus upon as the likely period of majority corruption, of the majority of the corruption happening, is the same time when eyewitnesses to the gospel events and the apostles themselves are still in the world.

And they're a part of the mix here as well. With everybody making mistakes and no way for us to know what mistakes had been made at the early stages.

That's the problem we're confronted with with the text of the New Testament. So what can we say about our surviving copies?

Well, the good news is we have lots of copies of the New Testament. We have lots more copies of the

New Testament than for any other book in the ancient world. We have so many more copies than we have of Plato or of Euripides or of Homer or of Aeschylus.

Name your author. We have far more copies of the New Testament. So that's the good news.

The bad news is we don't have any of the early copies. It's nice that we have copies from later centuries, but we don't have the copies that we want, which are the copies from the early centuries.

Well, again, overblown way of presenting this. We have far more early century copies of the

New Testament than any other work as well. And as far as between the time of original writing and first copies, the

New Testament is, again, far better than any other work of antiquity as well. So when he's talking about early copies, man, if P52 isn't an early copy,

I don't know what is. If P45 isn't an early copy or P46, P75, P66, these are all very, very early if we want to use that word in any meaningful fashion.

But again, Bart Ehrman feels he really has some calling from a god he does not know to radically alter the landscape of New Testament textual criticism, and hence he feels he can just go ahead and use words in new ways.

The papyri used to be called early copies. Now they're not early copies. If we want early copies, then as we played in his own words during the cross, not the cross examination, the audience questions, well, you know, ten copies of Mark written ten days after the original that agree at 99 .991%.

That's good enough for me. Those are early copies. And of course, this again is the photocopier standard that Bart Ehrman is operating on.

What can we say about the ages of these copies? Well, the oldest copy of Mark is P45, which we looked at from the year 220.

We have a fragment of a piece of the New Testament from almost 100 years earlier, maybe 100 years. It's hard to date these things.

The way they date manuscripts is on the basis of handwriting analysis, basically. I mean, to simplify things, it's on the basis of handwriting analysis.

There are scholars who are called paleographers who are able to look at a Greek manuscript and on the basis of the style of the handwriting tell you when it was written within about 50 years.

Well, so we have this scrap called P52, the 52nd papyrus catalog, which is a tiny scrap probably from the early 2nd century, so maybe 100, 80 years or 100 years before P45.

It's a little credit card -sized fragment. It's about the size of a credit card written on both front and back that contains some parts of some verses from John chapter 18, the trial of Jesus before Pilate.

It doesn't contain any complete verses. It is a triangular -shaped fragment that was discovered in the basement of the

John Rylands Library in England where the scholars realized what it was. It was discovered someplace in Egypt, as all these papyri were.

So it gives us a few verses, which is great. I mean, it's great to know that you had a copy of John floating around in the early 2nd century.

It is great to know. In fact, it's vital to know, and it's vital because it tells us that John existed as John.

It's vital because what it contains is what we have. Now, he'll say, well, there's a possibility of a textual variant there, but again, they're not editing variants.

They're just a word variant or something like that, but even in P52, as you may recall from the debate that we did.

But the point is that the Gospel of John, as the Gospel of John, was in existence at that time.

There was something that the Romans were running around destroying, and there was a reason for that.

And it's vitally important because that means that it wasn't just some kind of editing process and all the rest of this stuff.

It is vitally important, and that's why I even made a tie out of P52. In fact,

I think Ralph got one for Christmas. He got a P52 tie, which

I think is pretty cool. But it's just a few lines. It isn't very much.

The vast majority of our manuscripts that survive are from after the 9th century.

From after the 9th century. So if all the books of the New Testament are written in the 1st century, as almost everybody thinks, then we don't really start getting lots of copies until the 9th century.

These 9th century manuscripts we have are abundant. We have thousands of manuscripts from the 9th century, the 10th century, 11th century, 12th century, and so forth.

But that's not the problem. It's nice that we have these later manuscripts, but they're based on earlier manuscripts, which were based on earlier manuscripts, which were based on earlier manuscripts, and we don't know how good those manuscripts were.

That's the problem. As a result of the copying practices, there are lots of mistakes found in our surviving copies.

Lots of mistakes. In the year 1707, so a long time ago, in the year 1707, there was a scholar at Oxford whose name was

John Mill, who decided to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament, in which he had studied some

Greek manuscripts that were available to him of the Greek New Testament. He studied a hundred manuscripts, and he made a note of wherever these manuscripts had differences, where they disagreed with one another, and how to word a sentence.

He didn't note all the differences, just the ones that he thought were important. And so he made a note of what he thought were the important differences in the manuscripts, and he then produced an edition of the

Greek New Testament. At the top of the page, he wrote out a line or two or three or five of the Greek New Testament, and at the bottom of the page, he listed the places where he had found different readings, what we call variant readings.

And so he did this page after page for the entire New Testament, where among the hundred manuscripts he examined, he had found differences.

To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, John Mill's Greek New Testament contained 30 ,000 places of variation among the manuscripts that he had examined.

30 ,000 places where the manuscripts differed from one another. This really upset some people.

There were people who claimed that John Mill was trying to render the text of the

New Testament uncertain. His supporters pointed out he didn't invent these 30 ,000 places, he just noted that they exist.

Well, that was 300 years ago, and it was based on a study of 100 manuscripts.

Now we have 5 ,600 manuscripts. How many differences do we know about today?

The reality is nobody knows. Nobody has been able to count all the differences in our manuscripts.

Some scholars say there are 200 ,000 differences. Some say there are 300 ,000 differences.

Some say there are 400 ,000 differences. We don't know. Even with the advances of computer technology, we don't know.

One thing we can say for certain is that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the

New Testament. I'm not sure, really, honestly, what the value of that statement is.

I mean, in Nessie Olin's 27th edition, according to BibleWorks and computer programs and stuff, there's 138 ,162 words in the

New Testament. What is the relevance of saying there are more variants than there are words in the

New Testament? Because the only thing that creates in the mind of a listener who doesn't really know what variants are or how they function is that, let's say there's 400 ,000 variants.

I think that's a fair number. That's almost three variants per word.

Does that mean there's three options per word in the New Testament? The answer is no, that's not what it means.

If you have one 12th century manuscript that has an odd spelling of a word, that's a variant.

And when you have 5 ,700 manuscripts and you multiply that out by how many variants you would expect to have per page, and you've got over two million pages of handwritten manuscripts.

Let's say if you would expect to find one variant per page for each page that's out there.

That's over two million. We've got nowhere near that. So then you have to start asking questions about how many of those are viable, they could be the original, and how many are meaningful, that they actually impact the meaning of the text.

And that's why when Dan gives his presentation, which we're not going to be playing, we'll play some of the interaction they did.

But when he gives his presentation, he says, look, there's less than 1 % that is viable and meaningful of those variations.

And that's very, very important. I'm not really sure what is the use of that. I mean, is it just simply the mental impact it has?

I honestly, outside of that, just don't know. There are a lot of differences in the manuscripts.

And those are just the manuscripts we have. How many differences were there earlier? We don't know.

I love that. And what if we even had the manuscripts that I'm complaining that we don't have?

Then you'd have more variants and it wouldn't be worse. You can't win for trying.

I mean, even if we get those manuscripts, if there's differences there, then it's even worse because now we've got more.

The fact is, the more manuscripts you have, the more textual variants you're going to have. If you only have one manuscript, you're not going to have any textual variants.

If you only have two manuscripts, you'll have a few textual variants. But the question, of course, is what do you want to have?

Do you want to have the plethora of manuscripts or a positive of manuscripts? Now, what kind of mistakes do we have in these manuscripts?

So, just to be quite clear about this, most of these 300 ,000, 400 ,000 differences are completely immaterial, insignificant, and don't matter for a thing other than to show that scribes in the ancient world could...

Okay, here we go. Now, I am really glad that neither

I nor any members of my family or any of my offspring have ever been students of Bart Ehrman.

Because whenever Bart Ehrman goes to speak someplace, he disses his students. He did this in our debate.

He's done this... I think he's done it in every single presentation I've ever listened to, is he just slams on his students in the same way.

He says, And then he laughs at his own joke.

And this has got to be the 12th time I've heard this. And people in the audience go ahead and laugh anyways, but...

You know, the funny thing is, he says scribes didn't have that. But his demand for the

New Testament to be accurate is that that's exactly how God was going to do things. Is he'd make red lines appear underneath words and make the scribe go back and fix it.

Because, again, if there's any variance, then God didn't inspire it. So either the scribe has to have a special spell check thing built into him, or God just makes him go, poof, disappears right before he makes the first error.

Which would mean you really wouldn't have very many manuscripts at all. Because every time somebody tried to write, poof, they'd blow up or something like that.

It'd be sort of gross. If you just count them up, they're probably misspelling words. These are what

I would call an accidental kind of change. Scribes just couldn't spell. And you know the scribes actually didn't care how they spelled, because sometimes you'll have the same word, like two lines later, spelled differently.

It wasn't an issue for them. Well, those are differences. Who cares about spelling differences?

Most of us don't care that much. There actually are some spelling differences that matter. But most spelling differences don't matter for anything.

There are other kinds of accidental mistakes that you find in manuscripts. Scribes often were incompetent, or they were sleepy, or they were inattentive.

And so they made mistakes. Scribes sometimes would leave out a letter. Sometimes they'd leave out a word.

They would often leave out an entire line. Their eye would skip from one line to the next line, and so they would leave out a line.

There are some manuscripts where scribes have left out a page. Well, that's an inattentive scribe.

There are other places where scribes accidentally copy the same word twice, or the same line twice.

I don't know of any instances of copying the same page twice. You'd have to be so far out of it.

But then again, it's an example he's used. We do have this scribe that was copying from an exemplar, an original that had two columns.

And he was having just such a bad day that he copied straight across the columns into his version. And the result was pretty bad.

So yeah, clearly they were inattentive. And I'm glad that Bart Ehrman tells the truth about this and says, look, for the vast majority of these changes, they don't amount to a hill of beans.

I wish some of my Islamic friends who like to quote the first part of his presentation would quote that part as well.

I think you should quote that part as well. That's very, very important. Well, we will continue on with that, but we're going to take a brief break.

And when we come back, dive back into the Diya Mohammed commentary with his debate with Samuel Green.

We'll be right back. Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.

Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

In their book, The Same Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the

Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including

Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.

In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

The Same Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality.

Get your copy in the bookstore at almen .org. Hello, everyone. The Trinity is a basic teaching of the

Christian faith. It defines God's essence and describes how He relates to us. James White's book,

The Forgotten Trinity, is a concise, understandable explanation of what the Trinity is and why it matters. It refutes cultic distortions of God, as well as showing how a grasp of this significant teaching leads to renewed worship and deeper understanding of what it means to be a

Christian. And amid today's emphasis on the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, The Forgotten Trinity is a balanced look at all three persons of the

Trinity. Dr. John MacArthur, Senior Pastor of Grace Community Church, says, James White's lucid presentation will help layperson and pastor alike.

Highly recommended. You can order The Forgotten Trinity by going to our website at aomen .org.

A special jumbo edition in honor of Algo's birthday.

I wonder now that he's 50, will that memory start to come apart just a little bit?

I mean, we even had somebody who created a webpage once where instead of Google, it was AlgoIt. So you can put in a thing and allegedly

Algo would just automatically respond and stuff like that. Is that still up? I'm not sure if that's up anymore.

But anyway, we press on with the special Algo edition of The Dividing Line.

Back to the debate that took place between Diya Muhammad. Like I said, I'd like to finish this up because I want to get to these other, just sort of slide them into its position and continue looking at the

Wallace -Urman debate. I don't want to have to rush through these things. I think that we are dealing with topics that you don't hear very often in other contexts.

That's why we have a very peculiar and special audience. I'm being very nice there.

But there are only certain people who want to know about the history of the transmission of the text of the

New Testament and how to respond to Bart Ehrman's disciples. And there's only certain people who want to know how to talk to Muslims and only certain radical crazed

Calvinists who want to listen to Radio Free Geneva. And they're an interesting lot.

And that's why we're here is we want to do that. But of course, I mean, you look back over this past year's worth of Dividing Lines, and man, have we covered the gamut of topics.

I mean, boy, a lot of things. I'm looking forward to seeing the group that's going to be getting together this weekend, the 2012

Apologetics Cruise. Again, I'm not getting off the boat. This thing is supposed to be such a big thing.

You know the only disadvantage? I mean, my wife's looking forward to it because allegedly there's like, I don't know, six or eight stories of shops and stuff.

And I'm like, oh, no. But in the middle of a ship and all in this huge thing, and it's twice as big as any ship we've ever been on before.

But there's one thing I am, I confess, I'm a little bit bummed about. And they tell me that you can't feel it moving.

And one of the things I do like about cruises is I sleep so well on a ship.

Now, okay, I've been in a few storms where hold on to something or you're going to end up being thrown out.

But normally, just the normal, you know, going through the ocean type thing, I just sleep so well.

And they say this thing is going to be so big I won't even feel it. It's like, so I could go to a hotel.

I can go to a Ramada Inn for that. So I'm hoping I'll still be able to feel something because it's like,

I don't know, 140 ,000 tons or some ridiculous thing. That's not the end you're talking to.

You're talking to the side of it. There you go. If your room happens to be like near the karaoke room, as my room on a cruise ship was at one point, you will feel it and you'll hear it.

Well, you'll hear it, but you won't feel it. You'll feel a little vibration. Well, yeah, okay. I've had that happen a few times.

Yeah, that's true. And it's fun. Not really, no. Not the karaoke part. No, that's not fun at all.

Anyway, we go back to our examination of the Diya Mohammed comments.

I've written to Mr. Mohammed multiple times. Bartolucci gently rocks

Dr. O to sleep. Thank you very much. I've written to him more than once, and I guess

I'm not going to get a response. I hoped to have some type of interaction, but that's not going to happen.

But we continue on listening to the Diya Mohammed debate. Let's dive back in.

Oh, by the way, this is the first or second rebuttal? I think this is his first rebuttal period after his opening statement.

I think. Where to start? All right.

Just a quick correction. I didn't say Paul wrote 27 books. I said Paul wrote 14 out of the 27 books.

And I would say he wrote 13 out of the 27 books. And I'm surprised you're not aware that Bart Ehrman says he only wrote seven and all the rest of that stuff.

When it comes to believing in the prophet, he said to believe in a prophet means you have to believe in what they wrote. Jesus never wrote anything in his time, nor did his disciples write anything in his time.

So there was no book at the time of Jesus. For for me to believe in Jesus. Nor did his disciples write anything in his time.

So what he must mean by that is during the specific 33 years, if that's how long it was, of his life.

But his disciples did write. Unless he's buying into the idea that it was not eyewitness disciples who wrote these things, which again would be an unusual direction to go.

Jesus. I can believe in this because according to me, he was there and it gives me his account. Jesus never had a gospel or anything under his arm that he wrote at the time he was walking this earth.

In the in the quote where Philip said, if he would, Jesus says to Philip, if you have seen me, you have seen the father.

So the problem is you're reading the Hebrew text through Greek glasses, then translating it to English.

You're reading the Hebrew. I don't understand that. I'll be perfectly honest with you, because John was written in Greek.

So the original would would be in Greek. So is he talking about John's having to render

Jesus' Aramaic original or something like that? I guess that's a possibility. Once again, if he's not a supernaturalist and he doesn't believe in inspiration, then

I could understand why you would have a problem with that. But the locus of inspiration in Christian theology is in the actual written text itself.

All scripture is theanoustos, not all scripture writers. Theanoustos is God breathed.

While the writers are directed by the Holy Spirit, it's the result of the writing that is inspired.

So I'm not sure if he was purposefully attempting to raise there the concept of whether you could have an inspired

Greek rendering of Jesus' words in a language he wasn't speaking.

If he wasn't speaking Greek, which most scholars would say he was speaking Aramaic. I just don't get the feeling that that's what he was raising, but I don't know.

What happened was Philip said to Jesus, allow me to see

God Almighty, allow me to see the Father. No, he said, show us the Father. He didn't say, allow us to see

God Almighty. He says, Philip, what is wrong with you? You know no man can see the Father and live.

He didn't say, Philip, what is wrong with you, either. It really would have been a good idea if Mr. Muhammad had actually brought a

Bible to the debate about the Bible. But I've debated folks.

Barry Lynn and Bishop John Shelby Spong came to debates on whether the homosexuality consists of biblical

Christianity, and they didn't bring a biblical. So neither one of them did. So neither one of them felt it was overly relevant.

I think that says volumes, personally, but that's just me. It says that in the

Bible, no man can see God and live. So what Jesus was telling Philip is, if you have seen me, you have seen the

Father. It's metaphorical. If you follow me, you're following the Father. That's metaphorical. It's interesting how fellows who don't have the

Bible, who have never studied the New Testament, and are simply reading other people's thoughts on the

New Testament, can all of a sudden decide what is metaphorical and what is not.

And while there are all sorts of metaphors in Scripture, it seems that from the

Islamic perspective of Diya Muhammad, anything that would contradict what he's been taught in his understanding of the

Quran will have to be taken as metaphorical. I suppose that's better than just saying it's been completely corrupted and we have no idea what the

New Testament originally said. I suppose that's somewhat better, but I'm not sure how much better. It's not literal.

If you have seen me, you have seen God Almighty. But it does tell us something,

Mr. Muhammad, that no human being could ever say. Could a human being, could

Muhammad have said these words? I really, really hope you would say no.

Because you see, the emphasis in the Gospel of John is on Jesus' role as the one who exegetes the

Father. No one has seen God at any time. The monogamous Theos, the unique God who is in the bosom of the

Father, he has made him known, John 1 .18. This is part of the thesis statement of the book.

And so here you have the real fulfillment of that in stating to Philip, Look, Philip, why do you have a need to see the

Father if you understand the perfection of my revelation of the

Father? If you understand what the writer of the Hebrews would say later down the road, and of course I'm being facetious in saying that, but later on down the road, the writer of the

Hebrews, what's the exact representation of his hypostasis? The exact representation, could any mere prophet be the exact representation of the eternal

God? Of course not. But that's what the Lord Jesus is communicating to his disciples.

And this is in the context of his saying, I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. Where is that place? Heaven. That's what prophets do?

No, but that's what God does. Again, with the word begotten, the word is begotten.

Begotten has a meaning. It's not for Christians to come and say, but that's not the begotten that we mean.

There's a new meaning for begotten. There's only one meaning for begotten, and that meaning is used in the Bible. I'm sorry at that point.

It's a little bit humorous at that point for me. The reason that I find it humorous is that it's not the word begotten,

Mr. Muhammad. If you're talking about monogamies, then it's monogamies.

And it's you that are insisting that the English meaning of a word be imported back into the ancient

Greek, the Koine Greek meaning of a word. And you're also obviously ignorant of the origination of monogamies.

And so to sit here and say, well, you Christians are just, you don't have the right to change meaning. We know what begotten means.

See, he has to go here. Why? Because he's just simply following after his leaders,

Akhmedidat. He's just repeating Akhmedidat and Zakir Naik lines, and they never dealt with the reality of monogamies either.

So how can he deal with monogamies? He's just following after the secondary sources that he's using there, and he's just trusting them.

And everybody has to do that at times. When I talked about Kwanzaa, I was using secondary sources. I do not claim to be a

Kwanzaa expert. I just let you know a little bit something about the background of what I was reading. And, you know, if the e -book

I was reading is wrong, then I got a problem. But I was open about that. I told you this is where I got it.

This is the blog that I got it from, and I ain't making any claims here. Even if Mr.

Muhammad would just go, well, you know, what I have read seems to indicate that he'd be on much better ground.

But that's not what he's doing, and that's what makes it so easy to refute him. You can't take the word and then change its meaning to suit the context in which you're putting it in.

The challenge, again, of the Qur 'an, where the Qur 'an, the verse from the Qur 'an, I don't know what you're referring to there, where it says

Qul, and then Allah says Muhammad. Let me explain the Qur 'an for a second. Nowhere in the

Qur 'an is Muhammad's, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, word, influence, writings in it.

He never says anything in the Qur 'an. It comes from God Almighty. Now, what you're hearing here, of course, is an orthodox

Islamic statement of faith. It is not what you would find the vast majority of non -Muslim scholars saying.

And interestingly enough, the very people that Mr. Muhammad is depending upon for his secondary attacks on the

New Testament would never accept what he's saying right now. They would say, no, no, no, no, you have to look at the writings, the words of the

Qur 'an as coming from Muhammad, or maybe others as well. I mean, there's lots of scholarly theories out there.

You want to talk about redaction criticism of the New Testament, you want to go the direction that Shabir Ali went, for example, in our debate on Muhammad, and start cutting

John into parts, and say, well, this part was inserted later, and that's why this doesn't necessarily mean this, and you can cut it apart, and there's this version of John, that version of John.

Hey, guess what? They do the same thing with the Qur 'an, because we don't have any copies of the original.

We don't even have copies of what Uthman produced. And so they do the exact same thing, and chop it up into pieces, and say, well, very clearly, you know, this existed over here, and then this was inserted here, and the reason there's a problem here is because this has been put in.

There's all sorts of folks who do that kind of thing as well. Not as many, because let's face it, in Islamic countries, they'd be in big danger.

I mean, they would be in physical danger of their lives if they tried doing this kind of stuff in Islamic countries, or at least getting thrown the clinker.

So they primarily do this outside of Islamic countries. They do it in Europe and the

U .K. and the United States and in institutions of higher learning out in the West, but they don't generally do it where the

Taliban or Al -Qaeda is predominant or anything like that. So just looking for some consistency here is what we're looking for.

To the angel Gabriel, who recites it to the Prophet Muhammad, who recited it to those who can write. So when he says,

Say, God is one and only. Muhammad doesn't say, I'm saying that there's only God one and only. So I'm not sure what you're reading or the two different versions.

The Qur 'an actually gives you a challenge, a bulletproof challenge, an acid test. It says, if this

Qur 'an is not from God, surely you'll find in it many contradictions. Now if the book has not come from God, if it's not come from a divine source, no man can write a book of that volume and be that confident that there is not a single contradiction in the whole volume.

It can't happen. Unless the author... It can't happen? Really? Seriously?

I don't think so. How about, oh, the 530 pages of the

Book of Mormon? That Joseph Smith said was the most perfect book ever produced?

Everybody who produces a book of scripture says that. I understand the weight that the argument carries with the already convinced or the person who simply has not engaged in much of a study of comparative religion.

But this whole argument, no one could produce anything like this. Really? I mean,

I can think of many, many, many texts in both the

Old and New Testaments that I would personally, on a subjective level, put far higher than anything

I've read in the Qur 'an. Now are there beautiful poetic sections of the Qur 'an? Of course there are. But I see them in the exact same way that I see all sorts of discussions of the fact there's only one true

God and the creator of all things. And that stirs within us a recognition of the fact there is one true

God. It's easy to mock polytheism, let's put it that way. And you can do that at a very high level.

But this idea that, well, no one could ever produce... I'm sorry, it just does not translate out of that culture.

It really does not translate out of that culture. It can make it so. Another challenge. It says, bring forth another chapter like it.

And it makes it easier. Bring forth one verse like it. So the Qur 'an is giving you a challenge to one, bring one similar to it.

But, as has been pointed out in debate with Islamic apologists before, there's also one ayah.

And off the top of my head, I do not have it memorized. It's on my list to be memorized. But there is one ayah that makes the same challenge, except it also joins the

Torah. So that causes a real problem. Because, once again, it demonstrates that without a doubt, in the mind of the author of the

Qur 'an, the Torah and the Injil existed at the time of the writing of the

Qur 'an, or the statement would be irrelevant. If the Torah has been completely corrupted, and we don't know what it originally said, then how can you even make the comparison?

Well, bring forth a verse like a verse in the Torah. But you can't do that.

That doesn't make any sense. If, in point of fact, the Torah has been corrupted by that point.

But it makes perfect sense in light of the story narrated, as I recall, by either

Qurtubi or Tabari, who mentioned when the

Torah was brought into Muhammad's presence, that he was sitting on a cushion, and he got up from the cushion, and he had the

Torah placed on the cushion. He said, I believe what's in this book. That, to me, illustrates the fact, and I think you can be very, very consistent here, that Muhammad did not believe that God's word could be altered and changed.

It could be misinterpreted. People could suppress things. People could say, oh, don't worry about that. They could twist its meaning, all those things.

But there's a very interesting book that I started reading initially in Glasgow.

I can see the airport. Isn't it odd? I can see the waiting room I was sitting in.

I remember which direction I was facing in the waiting room. And I think it was

Glasgow. Yeah, I think it was Glasgow in February. Anyways, it's excellent work, very expensive work.

It's one of those brill books on the words in the Koran that refer to tampering and changing.

And there's pretty much been two parallel traditions down through history.

The earliest does seem to be the one that did not believe that God's words could be changed but that they could be misrepresented and suppressed and things like that, but that the text itself,

God would not allow any text that he himself had sent down to be altered and changed.

And then there's a parallel stream. I think it comes a little bit later, however, that does assert that, that there is an ability to actually change the words of God in other scriptures other than the

Koran. And that certainly has become predominant today. But I don't think that that was the viewpoint of the author of the

Koran. And it's giving you another challenge that no man can make with such certainty.

And in 1 ,400 years, not one of these challenges have been met. It says the

Koran will never be changed. And in 1 ,400 plus years, it has never been changed.

Well, again, has Mr. Muhammad really engaged the discussion that's found in the early

Tafsir literature of variance? I mean, I don't think in light of the history of the transmission of the

Koran and its relative youngness in comparison to the New Testament, certainly in comparison to the

Old Testament, I don't think you have anything near the kind of textual corruption that you have.

It's not even an ancient work. It's a medieval work. I mean, technically, it's right on the border. I mean,

I'd put the medieval period right at 600, so it's very early medieval. But it's generally not included as a work of antiquity at that level.

And so given that it's shorter than the New Testament, and then given the direct interest of the caliphate in protecting the text of the

Koran, and that's even expressed in Bukhari in 6519510 in the discussion of the

Ithmanic revision. That's there too. We don't want to be like the

Jews and the Christians that argue over their book. It's right there. That's in the earliest strata of concern.

Given the governmental intrusion into the transmission of the text and the protecting of the text, of a particular form of the text, then you would not expect to have the kind of alteration that you have in the

New Testament where you have an uncontrolled transmission of the text. That is a totally, in fact, not only outside of government channels, but actually against government channels for the 250, 260 years of the transmission of the text.

It has to be done over and over again in light of the government destroying copies of both the

Old and New Testaments. By the way, this is something that I don't know when

I'm ever going to get around to it, but it is very, very interesting to me. I've mentioned that finally, over the past month or so,

I've been able to get to some books that have thrown a fair amount of light on the

Shia -Sunni issues, why the split takes place and what the historical background was and the issues relating to it.

And so it is very interesting to me, very interesting to me, that the book that came out,

I believe in 2010, late 2010, if I recall correctly, maybe it was earlier this year, but I think it was late last year, called

Muhammad is not the father of any of your men. One of the theories that it focuses upon is a particular variant in the

Quran that specifically has to do with the issue of succession.

And what was the big issue in the first generations of the

Islamic nation, the Islamic Ummah, was succession. When Muhammad died, the

Shiites would say that there are hadiths that demonstrate that he had said that Ali should be his successor.

And then the Sunnis say no, while Ali is to be greatly venerated in the sense of respected and so on and so forth.

And Abu Bakr was the first rightly guided caliph. And then you have

Umar and then Uthman and then finally Ali, but he's only caliph for a certain period of time.

Then you have the split after that and you have the rise of the Umayyads and all the rest of that stuff. Well, isn't it interesting?

Isn't it interesting? I was not aware of the – I'm putting all this together. I'm learning.

I'm still learning. I call myself a student, but at least I'm learning. What's really interesting is that I kept running into a particular name of a city.

And I had first run into this name of a city primarily associated with Abdullah ibn

Masud. Now, if you know who ibn Masud is, and I know I'm wandering off the reservation here, but please allow me to do so.

We only have a few minutes of program left anyways. But I'm wandering off the reservation here because ibn

Masud, in the early Tafsir literature, over and over again you'll have people talking about this is the reading in our codexes, in our mushafs.

But ibn Masud had this or ibn Masud had that. And it's very clear that there was a traditional reading associated with ibn

Masud. And ibn Masud is associated with Kufa. Well, lo and behold,

Kufa is central in the split between the Sunnis and the Shias as well.

And here you have textual variants that have everything to do with the concept of the succession and the caliphate.

And you've got ibn Masud, and he doesn't want to give up his copy of the Quran to Uthman.

And Uthman is killed as part of this succession issue.

And then there's a civil war afterwards, and Aisha is involved with it. So you've got the

Sunnis, and they look at Aisha with great reverence as the mother of the faithful. But the

Shia look at Fatima in the way that the Sunnis look at Aisha. And there's charges going back and forth.

And it's all at the same time that the text of the Quran is under governmental control.

And people controlling the government want to make sure that their claims to succession are established.

And, hmm, boy, you know, it really makes that burning of the materials

Uthman used beforehand even more suspicious than it would have been otherwise.

Now, I know, Diya Muhammad said, that was just the vowel pointing. There's no evidence of that.

All of this is very, very, very important. And I don't think that Diya Muhammad has actually examined any of that information and considered that, you know, there might be something to look at there.

There might be something that's rather interesting. Not a dot, not a jot, not an iota. Well, there aren't any dots, jots, and iotas in Arabic.

I challenge anybody to bring me two different Qurans. It's out there.

And I can say it was a Sunni because the book says it was a Sunni. Well, he's just okay.

So you ever heard of Fogg's Palimpsest Manuscript? Have you ever looked at the variations at Surah 2, 222?

You know, have you purchased the top copy manuscript that came out from the

Turkish scholars about four or five years ago? It has a couple pages of charts, of variations, of readings between the major and mushaf of the

Quran. Have you looked at these things? I don't get the feeling that Diya Muhammad has.

Now, obviously, on a practical level, it's very difficult for a Christian, in most situations, to even bring up these things.

I mean, if I have my iPad with me, you know, I could fire up a presentation.

Here, here's some photocopies from the London manuscript, and here's this one over here. You know, I can do stuff like that.

But most folks aren't carrying that around on their iPads and things like that. You know,

I just realized I need to find a way of putting that on my phone, because that's with me more often than anything else.

I need to find a Droid app that will do that. I think I already do. Anyways, I'm getting off the reservation again.

But still, it's important that you know that there are variations. They're not huge.

They're not, you know, Samuel will bring these issues up in his response. They're not huge issues, but they do contradict

Diya's rather confident statements here. We're pretty much out of time on the program today.

Once again, our birthday wishes to the great brain,

Algo, who memorizes all things. I hope you have a great day, sir, and I will be up there with you in the

Big Five -O range at the end of next year. But thanks for all you do and for being active and channel and supporting us and all those things.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back again, Lord willing, on Thursday. Then next week, I'm at sea, guys, so not much of a chance of doing much then.

But we'll see if we can't sneak a little extra in on Thursday here on the Dying Line. We'll see you then.

God bless. I believe we're standing at the crossroads.

Let this moment slip away. We must contend for the faith above us fought for.

We need a new Reformation day. It's a sign of the times.

The truth is being trampled in a new age paradigm. Won't you lift up your voice?

Are you tired of playing religion? It's time to make some noise. Howl, oh,

Wittenberg. Howl, oh, Wittenberg. Howl, oh, Wittenberg. Stand up for the truth.

Won't you live for the Lord? Because we're pounding, pounding on Wittenberg.

The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N .O -R -G where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.