Jumbo Dividing Line: Biblicism is the Road to Rome (Steve Meister)? Then Semantic Domains & More

Well, greetings. Welcome to The Dividing Line. We're in the big studio today. Haven't been in here for so long that neither Rich or I have any idea what we're doing anymore. So it will undoubtedly be completely messed up because we were just literally right before the program trying to get the sound to work and the board to work with like two minutes.

And that's going to be way too loud for me, I'm afraid. I'm getting the echo back from it. So anyways, I already had a bunch of stuff lined up. And providentially, we didn't get to do this yesterday. It was just basic stuff.

I mean, literally, when your wife sends you a picture of where your truck was parked in the carport and there's oil and your truck doesn't leak oil, but you had an oil change yesterday. It's like, oh no, that's not good.

That's not supposed to happen. And ended up being, I won't tell you what they said because they're car repair guys, but he said the young guy we had do the oil part didn't do a good job cleaning things up.

Let's just put it that way. It was just leftovers spilling all over the place. But anyway, that messed everything up because you got to rush in and they got me in real quick. I appreciate that. But honestly, I think everything's providential.

You can always look back. But as I think about what we're going to start off with today, this wasn't out there yesterday. And it actually helps to tie a bunch of these topics together. This could be a little bit of the Alpha Omega Ministries seminary going at it today.

I will have to remember to do one change on the board to have my little chalkboard ready to go. But we will do what we can to cover some important topics. Now again, this is not like most people do webcasts.

This is honestly, I would say seminary level, very much seminary level material. That's really bugging me. There we go. When you can see yourself and it's like, what's that? Anyways, this is seminary level material.

It's not the most scintillating discussion. If I want to get everybody excited today, I'd be talking about the Biden crime family. I'd be talking about the descent of the United States government into a pure banana republic.

I would be talking about the astonishing amount of studies, evidence, admissions that what we were saying, what I started saying in November, December of 2020, when I first found out about the nature of the injections that the government wanted to give all of us, I started doing some reading.

Some of you will remember I said, give me five-year safety data and I'll think about it. There is no five-year safety data. There still isn't five-year safety data for that matter. We lost supporters and all sorts of stuff because we went, there's something stinking here.

This isn't right. Now we have all these young men, their sports careers ruined, their lives forever altered, if they even survive. The mountain of evidence, we have all these young men. It's just astonishing.

Rich doesn't know what he's doing back there. So he's playing with the buttons and it's making stuff happen. Anyways, all this evidence, I have never met a single person who didn't get the vaccination who is sad that they didn't.

But vaccine regret is the watchword of the day. We could be talking about all that stuff. And with 2024 barreling at us and with the Department of Injustice doing everything that, I mean, I just think back to the 70s and 80s.

And I was one of those weird young people. Rich is going, no, he was not a weird. I was one of those. Look, I've told you before, I have a letter from President Nixon that I got in first stinking grade because I wrote a letter to the president about the international implications of the war in Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

So I've always been really interested in what was going on in the world. And what we're seeing in the United States today was what everybody experienced in the Soviet Union for decades. Pravda is now CNN.

It's the mono party. There is no law above them. They can do what they want to do. Right now, they're trying to imprison the leading candidate from the other side. This happens in banana republics all around the world all the time.

There's nothing new about it. So if I don't want to get everybody excited, that's what we'd be talking about. But we're going to be talking about semantic domains instead. And the reason for that is that this has to do, if we want to interact with what's going on within the church and with how the church deals the world, we have to have a solid foundation.

And the scripture is our foundation. But we need to handle it right. And we need to understand its supremacy, its unique nature. And so there you go. I just realized as I was sitting here that I didn't cue one thing up.

Let me see if I can grab it real quick. I can. Let me see if I can pull this up. Let's start off with the absurd and move on to the sublime. How does that sound? Oh, OK. I know what's going on. All right.

Let me move this over here. There we go. And OK. So here's the absurd. And we'll move from the absurd to the sublime here in a moment. But I think it was last night. Yes. Chris Kdub from Texas, a new daddy, adopted baby.

I'm sure he's not sleeping well these days, but that's how it works. Anyway, he posted this on Facebook. And I was like, dude, who is that? I need to find out who that is. OK. And I had some troubles recording it.

So this should get us where we need to. Here is cultic King James only. Again, I have many times defined the difference between King James preferred, King James more trusted, King James onlyism, but not being cultic.

And then the Peter Ruckman, Gail Ripplinger, wild eyed, nutcase King James only cultism that is out there. And so this popped up and Chris helped me track it down. So let's take a look at what this is all about.

Hi. 100 pure water representing your King James 1611 Bible preserved by God, by divine providence in the universal language of the end time without error. Let this cup represent all other Bibles who even their creators and writers say is not perfect because they don't believe there is a perfect Bible.

Let this right here represent corruption and error. I just got this water out of my toilet bowl before I flushed it. All right. So we'll just put a drop in there. Boom. OK, just a drop. It's still what?

Ninety seven to ninety nine percent pure still smells like water still looks like water would quench your thirst. No major doctrines were affected here. Have a drink. No, I didn't think so. Oh, there really is a difference.

Do you get it now? OK, so there's.

Good thing he had the right hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thought the thought crossed my mind, too, that if he had if he had messed up, which which was which there at the end, that would have been a glorious video.

But the people who would. Be sitting there staring at the screen with their mouths hanging open would have been the King James translators themselves. They simply would not have any context in which to understand the absurdity of these people and their elevation of the King James to the standard they'd be going, well, wait a minute.

What about what about the translations that came before? And what of the fact that, you know, we made changes and alterations and there's been different versions and almost nobody reads the 1611 today anyways.

They're reading the 1769 Blaney revision and and there have been changes there and there's difference between the Oxford and Cambridge and and we never, ever, ever, ever, ever dreamed that our translation would be the standard 400 years later.

That doesn't that's that's a sad commentary if that's the case. No, there's just so many holes in all this stuff that it truly leaves you going, wow, but this is the mindset that's out there. And of course, the King James translators didn't believe their translation was perfect, which is where the whole thing falls apart from the start.

But it's become perfect without their knowing it. And there you go. But so there's the absurd. Then on Twitter, I'm sorry, I don't even know what to call it anymore, to be perfect honest with you. I'm ex pro.

I'm not calling it ex pro. Hey, look, it still says tweet deck .twitter .com in the in the line. So it's it's Twitter. On Twitter, I noticed this morning, Jeffrey T. Riddle, Jeff Riddle, and I have done two debates online.

There are other debates that need to be done. I think we did the long writing of Mark and we did Ephesians 3 .9. I honestly, I think for the vast majority of people, that was more than enough to illustrate what the problem is.

That is, he has no consistent standard. He uses one standard to defend Ephesians 3 .9, a different standard to defend the long writing of Mark, a different standard for the common Johannium, a different standard for the Pyrrhic of Adultery, whatever.

All ecclesiastical text, whatever people, have to use a different set of arguments depending on which variant we're looking at. They cannot, they do not have a single method because they already have a text.

They did not present a textual critical methodology. They are presenting a text and then you do with your textual critical methodology whatever you need to do just simply to substantiate that text. And there's very little functional difference between King James only-ism and ecclesiastical text or confessional text or whatever they want to call themselves these days.

They come up with all different terms. And so, Jeff Riddle, who teaches at IRBS, he teaches the New Testament at IRBS, put out a tweet and it said, given that the catechism receives the doxology of the Lord's Prayer as canonical and spiritually normative, can a confessional Christian make use of a translation that removes Matthew 6, 13b from the text and relegates it to the footnotes C, NIV, NASB, ESV, etc.

And so, what he's saying is, dine is the kingdom, power and glory forever and ever. The doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer is not in the earlier manuscripts. Now, we still use it, but we recognize that if you're talking about, you know, there's one thing using something within the church that is, you know, we sing the doxology, not that doxology, but the song identified as the doxology.

At the end of all of our services at Apologia, it's been used forever. I would like us to mix that up personally with some even more ancient hymns of the church, or we won't call them worship choruses.

I'm not sure the early church could have understood that. But the issue is, what did Matthew write? And that has to be our ultimate standard. What did Matthew write? And so, here's an argument that's saying, well, since the Confession cites Matthew 6 .13b in its scriptural proofs, then can a confessional Christian make use of a translation that removes Matthew 6 .13b from the text?

And so, I pointed out, once again, I believe that Dr. Riddle truly destroys the context of history by seeking to turn the London Bapst Confession or whether it's that or the Presbyterians who turned the Westminster Confession into statements of textual critical study.

They were not. They were not statements of textual critical study. Even the King James wasn't, technically. The King James basically used the 1525 Blomberg text in the Old Testament and the various editions that had been printed in the preceding century of the Greek New Testament.

So, Erasmus, Stephanus, and mainly Beza for the New Testament, which became the foundation of the various forms of the Texas Receptus. And so, they weren't really seeking to do textual critical work very much either.

They did provide column notes when there was a variant that they were very well aware of, but it wasn't done consistently. It wasn't meant to be much more than that. And so, we are forcing the authors of the 1689 into a context that they didn't live in until the last century.

We did not even have a consistent notation system for which manuscripts were which, and that led to confusion. And great theologians of the past made what we know today were ridiculous statements about all the Greek texts say this, or all the Greek texts say that.

And it just wasn't true, but they had no way of knowing. The universities didn't start communicating as to what they had in their libraries until recent times. And I've mentioned before that just the changes that have taken place in my lifetime, my ability to have on my phone vast amounts of textual critical information, that didn't exist only a decade ago.

I remember trying and just wasting a tremendous amount of time, now in hindsight, trying to find a way to import textual data so I could carry it on my phone or at least a small device. So, when I was out, you know, specifically out in London and talking to Muslims or Mormons, if they happen to come along, and now it's all there.

So, there's been tremendous advancement just in the latter part of my life. And what that means is that the farther back you go, the less information was available. And so, to try to hold men accountable as if they had access to that information, when they didn't, it just simply wasn't there for them, is anachronistic and erroneous.

And so, I had identified that as a, how did I put this? I said, here's an excellent example of confessionalism gone awry. No one who wrote the Baptist Confession of Faith thought that providing scripture references, they were providing the final word in textual studies.

Historically, only a fraction of the manuscripts we possess today were known. And what is more important, were available for any kind of serious study, hence the many erroneous statements by even sound men about what the majority or all of Greek text actually read, so on and so forth.

So, I sort of repeated that. I did ask the question, given that he teaches at IRBS, is this now the position there? Timothy Decker says no. Evidently, Dr. Decker teaches at more than one school. And he says no.

I've pushed back on that a number of times. And he did, he linked to an article, does our confession require printed text or indicate the need for a text critical methodology? Which, obviously, I agreed with.

And I asked, so IRBS has no position on textual critical matters? And he said, not officially that I'm aware. There is, thankfully, academic freedom to allow the profs to have varying positions. They're not explicitly confessional.

We do have a footnote, see right there. I think Riddle's argument is that it is explicitly confessional. We do have a forum for faculty to present their views and allow charitable disagreement. I plan to do mine on textual criticism soon.

And that's good. And then I had seen, and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but theology in particular, which I think comes from IRBS. And it was Riddle presenting this type of material. And I'll be listening to it.

We may have some comments to make about that. But anyways, the point is, here's, you know, we've obviously dealt with textual critical material before. And once you get into textual critical issues, translational issues, lexicographical issues, this is where a lot of people just sort of throw up their hands and go, well, that's too much for me now.

Problem is, we need to have familiarity with where our translations came from, where our texts came from, how translations are done. And a lot of this has come up in the conversation that we had from the RV a few weeks ago in regards to a couple things.

In regards to, for example, the Granville Sharp construction, Italius 2 .13, 2nd Peter 1 .1, in reference to Unitarianism. And in regards to what a Hapax Legomena is, in the New Testament, a word that is used one time in the Corpus, in regards to Trent Horn, which will be coming up again in about five months when we do the debates in Houston.

We're working on the contracts for those and getting final things ironed out. I can just simply tell you that most of the conversation, pretty much regularly anymore, in arranging the forms of debates are people not wanting to have to do much in the way of interaction during the debate.

I have said forever that cross-examination is the heart of the debate. That is where Proverbs 18 is fulfilled. That is where you come and you ask questions and you test for consistency. If you don't have cross-examination, there's no reason to have debate.

Because if you want to know the difference between myself and Dale Tuggy, we've both produced hours and hours and hours of video. You can go online, you never have to leave your house, never have to jump in a car, you don't have to go anywhere.

You can just simply listen to both sides. What you can't hear is those two sides interacting. And that's what cross-examination is. And a lot of people are afraid of cross-examination. Everybody knows I'm not.

Cross-examination is my forte. And it wasn't when I started. When I started, we just stumbled into the question period. And then I started realizing, you know, that's really where the rubber meets the road, in essence.

And so we're working on all that to make that work. I personally think the two debaters interacting is far more important than the debaters taking audience questions. Audience questions in maybe 10 of my debates have added to the debate, which means in 171, they subtracted from the debate.

Because audience members generally don't know how to ask questions. Or audience members just simply want to preach a sermon. Or audience questions want to ask a question that has nothing to do with the topic of the debate at all.

And as someone who has now moderated a number of debates and had to read the questions that have been submitted, it's even worse then. So that's sort of how all that works. So pray for us as we work toward all of that and putting all that together.

So all of that back to here. Are we having any problems? No. Okay. I was just looking at Element and it was saying I did not have any connectivity. So that was worrying me just a little bit. But okay.

All right. My side said it was no good, no bueno. All right. So what we're going to try to do here, what we were going to try to do here, and now it doesn't look like we're going to try to do here. Where'd this go?

Window. Okay. Maybe I put it in this one. All right. The video I was going to show you has seemingly, oh, now it popped up. Okay. All right. Nope. The thing down the bottom, there was nothing I could click to start it.

So don't ask me where it went. And we won't ask any questions. It may have been doing stuff we don't want to know about. All right. So about two hours ago, the troublemaker in North Phoenix eventually will have so many troublemakers that no one will actually be able to identify who's whose.

That's probably a good thing. The troublemaker in North Phoenix sent me this video and I'm like, okay, not only does this fit with the topic, but we have to deal with this. Brief clip. The continued anti-biblicism campaign.

And again, always defining biblicism in the most absurd. Who in the world actually believes that? I have no earthly idea. Straw man form. Not reformed biblicism. Not a biblicism that is based upon a recognition of church history and all that kind of stuff.

But anyway, so we have our good friend Steve Meister from Emanuel Reformed Baptist Church up in Sacramento and Josh Sommer. And they're talking about biblicism. And what is said to me, again, very, very important.

Very, very important to hear. Let's hope this works. Let's listen in.

And it makes me wonder, like, is it even really possible to be a biblicist consistently?

No, I don't think it is at all. And I think that's actually an important point. And one of the reasons biblicism needs to be rejected is because it is impossible. And I think in terms of pastorally and evangelistically, why it's important to make this point, because I actually, I believe this is the road to Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy for Christians who are taught biblicism.

Because they'll eventually realize that that's impossible, that there's no such thing as approaching scripture without a paradigm, tradition, or received. And then that makes them all the more susceptible to whether it's Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or other apologists who give them their view of, which we would reject, of of tradition as revelation and the authority of the church and the infallibility of the church.

And so on, and become more susceptible to that. Okay. Now, let me just scroll it back here so we have something on the screen. Okay. Now, what you just heard, for example, notice what Steve Meister said.

He said, tradition as revelation. Okay. I'm fairly certain, looking at the screen here, that combined, the two of these gentlemen have that many debates against leading Roman Catholic apologists. Zero.

None. I don't know what interaction they've had, written, oral, anything like that, but I'm not aware of any. Which would explain why Steve doesn't seem to understand how Rome presents the concept of tradition.

They do not say that it is revelation outside of scripture. They subsume the written tradition underneath the broader category of sacred tradition, capital S, capital T. So you have the oral tradition and you have the written tradition, and they would say it all comes from the apostles.

Now, we all agree that that's wrong, but you have to be a biblicist to be able to demonstrate. That's the problem. You have to have a fundamental standard that is not dependent upon a traditional authority.

Otherwise, you just have dueling traditions, and so anybody who, for example, has spent any time at all—and I don't spend much time on it because I consider it a waste of time—but there are, if you wanted to, almost any given night, you're going to be able to find some place where somebody's doing a Twitter space or Facebook Live or something, or just written back and forth warfare going on between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

And it never gets anywhere. It never accomplishes anything. You know why? Because it's one set of self-defined traditions versus another set of self-defined traditions. And so when you quote your tradition against the other side, they just say it's not tradition and vice versa, and it goes nowhere, accomplishes nothing.

It is the biggest waste of keystrokes and breath and everything else that I can even imagine. And so here, Steve Meister says that biblicism is the road to Rome. Now, again, I've dealt with a hundred times the number of actual converts from Catholicism that Steve Meister's ever even met.

I've dealt with them after they've converted. I've dealt with them before they've converted. I've kept people from converting. I've helped people deconvert. I've seen, I've tried to help people that converted anyways, all sorts of things like that.

Been at this a lot longer than he has, a lot longer than he has. He has no idea what the road to Rome looks like, but isn't it amazing that when we raised the issue regarding the great tradition of Craig Carter's materials and the fact of the exaltation of Thomas Aquinas, it's the greatest theologian that's ever breathed air.

And we said, you know, this has happened in the past. It happened at SES, and it's happened at other schools, and your students, they're going to follow the breadcrumbs, and they might read more of Thomas than you think they're going to be reading.

And if you haven't already demonstrated where Thomas is wrong in these areas, and the only way to do that is not by appealing to tradition, but to scripture, and demonstrating that his handling of scripture in some times, amazingly good.

Vast majority of other times, amazingly bad. If you haven't done that, then you're going to end up with, you know, the young man who became Roman Catholic out of Midwestern just this past April, and more people to come, I'm sure, unfortunately.

And the other side, all they could do was, oh, all you can say is we're swimming the Tiber. Well, we're not swimming the Tiber. And now what are they doing? Oh, you're the people that are making people swim the Tiber.

Oh, so what's fair for you is fair for me, right? Okay. And so what we were just told is if you've been taught biblicism, whatever that means, the only thing that was said there was, you know, it's this idea of this tabula rasa.

You come to scripture, and you have no preconceived ideas, and there's no paradigm for understanding anything, and as if that's what biblicism is, which it isn't, obviously. But if you've been taught biblicism, then these folks will come along, and they will use that to bring you into Roman Catholicism.

Unfortunately, there was no explanation, Steve, as to how that works, because I don't think he's ever been involved with those situations. How does that work? Now, if what he's saying is, well, look, you know, if our people have no idea the history of the interpretation of the Bible, if they have no idea how we got the Bible, if they have never even thought about Paul's exhortation that Thessalonians hold the traditions which were taught, whether they were delivered to you by word of mouth or by letter.

Okay, that's not biblicism. That's ignorance. That's just simple ignorance. That's just not even reading the Bible. Those are all issues to deal with. If you're talking about, well, you know, people who are just completely ignorant of church history.

Well, I've been working on that since 1990. I taught church history in 1990. That's the year Josh Summer was born. I was already teaching church history. I knew the importance of it then, and yet I'm a biblicist.

And so this idea that biblicism, it doesn't work. Remember this book? The Obscurity of Scripture, Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity, forward by Scott Hahn. There's a convert for you.

Casey J. Chalk. Remember we talked about that? Came out, I think, last year, late last year. Might have even been early this year. I'm not sure. And then around the same time, we'll take the brothers down here a little bit.

About the same time, we have this book from Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. That's what these guys are saying. That's what these guys are saying.

And that's what Catholic Answers says. You may be ignorant of it. You may mock it, but don't sit there and tell people that the road to Rome is found in believing that Scripture is the standard by which any tradition must be tested.

And that to follow Jesus, that's what you have to do. That's what he taught us in Matthew and Mark. Remember the core bound rule? Again, I was debating this with Roman Catholic apologists. When these guys, before one of them was born, they don't have any experience in it.

Why are you even sticking your nose into this stuff? I don't get it. It's amazing. But you see how this is relevant to what I was going to be doing, which I need to actually go over there and make a little bit of a change here so we can have a chalkboard.

We need to have a chalkboard. Oh, see what I did? But remember, we can do this fast now. Ah, I'm just going to make that a little bit smaller so we have a little bit more. Okay, so when we think about the textual issue, we want to know what the apostles wrote, not what developed as a tradition later on.

In the same way, as far as apostolic teaching is concerned, we want to know what apostolic teaching was, not what became traditionally attributed to the apostles at a later point in time. I say I'm being consistent.

I'm being consistent in wanting to have apostolic text, and I'm consistent in wanting to have apostolic teaching. But there has to be some kind of objective methodology to determine these things, to understand these things.

So let's think about a book. Oh, by the way, just for the fun of it, I was looking for this book, and my library is not quite as organized as I would like it to be. So it took me, I'm not sure how long, and I was tempted a bunch of times by, I saw a book and thought, you know, it would be cool to grab that and tell the story about how that was relevant long ago, and so on and so forth.

But I resisted all but one, all but one. This has a clear coat on it. You know, I did one of those things. April 19th, test. Yeah, test on 16th. Okay, yeah, this is, this was, this is William Hersey Davis's beginning, Beginner's Grammar of the Greek New Testament.

You know what's amazing? Oh, that's fine. Don't confuse me. I'm going to have to get my own thing back in here so I can control the cameras myself. Just, just get rid of the guy. Hey, you know, I had a hard time starting the program today because I was a little on the hurt side, you know.

The last, the last program we did, before we did the program, I walked into where Rich sits there and does his stuff, and I gave him, what, what's going on? Is the battery dying on my microphone? Okay, good.

Oh, yeah, sure. And I gave him one of my Quest peanut butter cups. Now, if you've not had a Quest peanut butter cup, may I recommend, may I recommend, first of all, refrigerating them. They are so wonderfully good when they're cold and crisp, and it's not a huge shot of sugar, thankfully, but it is a fair amount of protein.

They're, they're, they're protein peanut butter cups. I discovered them. They're great while driving, you know. You keep them in your little cooler on the thing, and, and it satisfies this, this, this, you know, your sweet tooth, and yet you get protein from it, and so on and so forth.

And I asked Rich, I said, hey, Rich, do you like peanut butter cups? He says, oh, yeah. So, I brought this peanut butter cup in, and I, I put it on his desk. I said, let me, let me know what you think about that.

And, you know, ever since then, I've been asking myself, I wonder what Rich thought about that peanut butter cup. You know what happened, folks? You know how this program almost didn't start for me today?

I walked into the offices, I walked by the desk there in that studio. There it sat. It had been there the whole weekend. Never touched, never touched. Okay, Tuesday, since Tuesday, all right. A couple days, three days, it sat there alone, getting warm, no longer crisp.

Here was a gift from my heart, and it had just been rejected, and so I put it back in the refrigerator, get it nice and cool, and then I devoured it, and it was particularly good, because I was redeeming it from its rejection.

So, so there you go. You know, this is the kind of thing that, you know, in the Christian life, you learn to forgive, and you allow healing to take place, and so there you go. Anyway, this was my actual grammar.

It's still got all the yellow markings, and there's the third declension nouns, and the future indicative, and all the exercises that we would have to, and the T next to the things that are going to be on the tests, and all that stuff.

You know what's amazing? This is the exact same grammar. Now, not this particular one. I happen to have that one, too. It's the exact same grammar my dad learned Greek from in 1952 at Moody Bible Institute.

Exact same, no change, no updating, no nothing, and in fact, the first two times I taught Greek, I used Davis as well, and then Mounts came out, and Mounts is much more friendly than Davis is from an old day, an old time, and I just happened to see it, and I was like, you know, there it is.

So, I mentioned to you on the program a book called The Invention of the Inspired Text. This is the paper version. I had it on Kindle in the RV by John C. Poirier, P-O-I-R-I-E-R, and I don't know anything about John.

It says he is an independent scholar based in Germantown, Ohio. Great. I don't know if he's taught anywhere. I haven't found anything else from him. I don't know what his religious background is. Nothing.

The book doesn't give us much of an insight into any of those things. I don't think he's a Roman Catholic. Why do I mention this? Well, because a couple weeks ago, while we were still on the road, I started talking about what is necessary to be able to analyze and understand the argumentation in this book.

This is a 2022 publication, so it's, relatively speaking, brand new. And, I'm sorry, first published in Great Britain in 2021, this paperback edition published 2022, so there you go. There's a slight difference there, but it's a relatively brand new book.

What happened is, in the Gavin Ortlund debate with Trent Horn, Trent Horn pulled this book out, and he has, in later videos, identified this argument as the death knell of Sola Scriptura. The death knell.

Wow, that's pretty important. Now, I immediately go, so for 2 ,000 years, the infallible magisterium has been ignorant of what they've discovered from a non-Catholic scholar in 2022, or if you want to go 2021, they're in Great Britain.

That seems really weird, and it's also not overly kosher to pull something like that out in a debate when the other guy has never even seen the book. But, when that happened in a debate, Jay did that with Shabir Ali, and I've criticized Jay for doing that.

But, anyway, it just seems really strange to me that a Catholic layman is not a priest, he's not a bishop, he's nothing like that. And Poirier, it's not like he's on the Papal Biblical Commission or something.

By the way, I've been looking at the Papal Biblical Commission recently and tracked down some of their publications and fascinating stuff that will undoubtedly be coming up in the debate in February in Houston.

It's going to be very, very interesting. I hope a lot of you will be able to attend. And, yeah, they've always live-streamed those debates, haven't they, from Houston? So, yeah, that'll be on live stream because there's only so many seats in the auditorium.

So, it'll be coming up. One of the things that I mentioned last week was that there are certain things you have to be able to do to analyze arguments such as those presented by Poirier. And, specifically, in this book, what you have is he utilizes the TLG databases, Thesaurus Lingua Graecae.

Thesaurus Lingua Graecae. These are databases that began to be developed back the 1990s. I would say that we purchased our first subscription to the TLG CD-ROM somewhere around 96 or 97. You'd say 95.

It was like $300 for two years or something along those lines. It was. When we first started doing this and accessing this, you would literally pay a subscription fee. And, at that time, the database was on a CD-ROM.

And, so, then it would come up for renewal. And, that was one of the biggest expenses we had. And, I used that in working on my PhD and the Doctrine of the Trinity. And, I used it in analyzing a very important term.

Just as an illustration here, arsenokoites is the Greek term at 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1. Together with mollikoi at 1 Timothy 6, ESV, for example, renders it homosexuals. Most other translations have homosexuals and effeminate.

The ESV understands arsenokoites to be the dominant and mollikoi the passive in a homosexual relationship. We'll get into that right now. Point was, what does this term mean? And, so, I used the TLG CD-ROM, which we were still paying for at that time because this was around 2000, 2001.

I think it was late 2000. I'm trying to remember when Jeff Neal and I did the radio program with the two homosexuals. And, that's what led to the same-sex controversy. I used the TLG databases, which is basically an encyclopedic indexed database of all ancient Greek literature broken down by authors, centuries, so on and so forth.

Obviously, the interface now is better than it was then. Still could be better. It was simpler back then. But, this is where I looked into this and discovered that there was one possible earlier use of the term than Paul.

But, what they do is they give you canons, and those canons give you the general dating for whatever piece of literature you're looking at. And, they give you a range. So, it was pretty much contemporaneous with Paul, but it also could have been after Paul.