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

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00:37

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're in the big studio today. Haven't been in here for so long that neither

00:43

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,

01:00

I'm afraid. I'm getting the echo back from it. So anyways, I already had a bunch of stuff lined up.

01:12

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.

01:38

It's like, oh no, that's not good. That's not supposed to happen. 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.

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Let's just put it that way. So it was just leftovers spilling all over the place.

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But anyway, that messed everything up because you got to rush in and they got me in real quick. I appreciate that.

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But honestly, I think everything's providential.

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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.

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And it actually helps to tie a bunch of these topics together.

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This is going to be a little bit of the Alpha and Omega Ministries Seminary going at it today.

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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 today.

02:54

Now again, this is not like most people do webcasts.

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This is honestly, I would say, seminary level, very much seminary level material.

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That's really bugging me. There we go. When you can see yourself and it's like, what's that?

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Anyways, this is seminary level material. It's not the most scintillating discussion.

03:29

If I wanted to get everybody excited today, I'd be talking about the

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Biden crime family. I'd be talking about the descent of the

03:40

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

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I started saying in November, December of 2020, when

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I first found out about the nature of the injections that the government wanted to give all of us,

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I started doing some reading. Some of you will remember, I said, give me five -year safety data, and I'll think about it.

04:21

There is no five -year safety data. There still isn't five -year safety data, for that matter. And man, we lost supporters and all sorts of stuff because we went, there's something stinking here.

04:36

This isn't right. And now we have all these young men.

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Their sports career is ruined. Their lives forever altered, if they even survive.

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The mountain of evidence. We have all these young men. It's just astonishing.

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Rich doesn't know what he's doing back there, so he's playing with the buttons, and it's making stuff happen.

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Anyways, all this evidence. I have never met a single person who didn't get the vaccination who is sad that they didn't.

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But vaccine regret is the watchword of the day. We could be talking about all that stuff.

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And with 2024 barreling at us, and with the

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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.

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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

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Ho Chi Minh Trail, okay? So I've always been really interested in what was going on in the world.

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And what we're seeing in the United States today was what everybody experienced in the

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Soviet Union for decades. Pravda is now CNN. It's the

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Mono Party. They're under, there is no law above them, but they can do what they wanna do.

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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.

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There's nothing new about it. So if I wanted to get everybody excited, that's what we'd be talking about.

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But we're gonna 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.

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And the scripture is our foundation, but we need to handle it right.

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And we need to understand its supremacy, its unique nature. And so there you go.

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I just realized as I was sitting here that I didn't cue one thing up.

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Let me see if I can grab it real quick. I can. Let me see if I can pull this up.

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Let me give you, let's start off with the absurd and move on to the sublime.

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How does that sound? Oh, okay,

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I know what's going on. All right, let me move this over here.

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There we go. And, okay.

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So here's the absurd and we'll move from the absurd to the sublime here in a moment.

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But I think it was last night, yes, Chris Kdub from Texas, a new daddy, adopted baby.

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I'm sure he's not sleeping well these days, but that's how it works. Anyway, he posted this on Facebook.

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And I was like, dude, who is that? I need to find out who that is.

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Okay, and I had some troubles recording it. So this should get us where we need to.

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Here is cultic King James -onliasm. Again, I have many times defined the difference between King James preferred,

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King James more trusted, King James -onliasm, but not being cultic.

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And then the Peter Ruckman, Gail Riplinger, wild -eyed nutcase King James -only cultism that is out there.

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And so this popped up and Chris helped me track it down. So let's take a look at what this is all about.

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Hi, 100 % pure water representing your

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King James 1611 Bible preserved by God, by divine providence in the universal language of the end time without error.

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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.

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Let this right here represent corruption and error. I just got this water out of my toilet bowl before I flushed it, all right?

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So we'll just put a drop in there. Boom, okay, just a drop. It's still what, 97 to 99 % pure, still smells like water, still looks like water, would quench your thirst.

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No major doctrines were affected. Here, have a drink. No, I didn't think so.

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Ah, oh, there really is a difference. Do you get it now? Okay, so there's...

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

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But the people who would be sitting there staring at the screen with their mouths hanging open would have been the

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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

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King James to the standard. They'd be going, well, wait a minute, what about the translations that came before?

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And what of the fact that we made changes and alterations and there's been different versions and almost nobody reads the 1611 today anyways.

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They're reading the 1769 Blaney revision and there've been changes there and there's difference between the

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Oxford and the Cambridge and we never, ever, ever, ever, ever dreamed that our translation would be the standard 400 years later.

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That doesn't, that's a sad commentary if that's the case.

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No, there's just so many holes in all this stuff that it truly leaves you going, wow.

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But this is the mindset that's out there. And of course, the

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King James translators didn't believe their translation was perfect, which is where the whole thing falls apart from the start.

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But it's become perfect without their knowing it and there you go. But so there's the absurd.

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Then on Twitter, I'm sorry, I don't even know what to call it anymore to be perfect honest with you.

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Xpro, I'm not calling it Xpro. Look, it still says tweetdeck .twitter

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.com in the line. So it's Twitter.

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On Twitter, I noticed this morning, Jeffrey T.

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Riddle, Jeff Riddle and I have done two debates online. There are other debates that need to be done,

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I think. We did the long writing of Mark and we did Ephesians 3 .9. Honestly, I think for the vast majority of people, that was more than enough to illustrate what the problem is.

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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

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Johannium, a different standard for the Percuvia Adulterae, whatever. All ecclesiastical text, whatever people, have to use a different set of arguments depending on which variant we're looking at.

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They do not have a single method because they already have a text.

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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.

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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.

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They come up with all different terms. And so Jeff Riddle, who teaches at IRBS, he teaches a

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New Testament at IRBS, put out a tweet and it said, given that the catechism receives the doxology of the

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Lord's Prayer as canonical and spiritually normative, can a confessional

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Christian make use of a translation that removes Matthew 6 .13b from the text and relegates it to the footnotes, see

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NIV, NASB, ESV, et cetera. And so what he's saying is, dine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever.

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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.

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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.

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Not sure the early church could have understood that. But the issue is, what did

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Matthew write? And that has to be our ultimate standard. What did Matthew write?

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And so here's an argument that's saying, well, since the confession cites

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Matthew 6 .13b in its scriptural proofs, then can you be, can a confessional

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Christian make use of a translation that removes Matthew 6 .13b

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from the text? And so I pointed out, once again, I believe that Dr.

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Riddle truly destroys the context of history by seeking to turn the

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London Bapst Confession, or whether it's that or the

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Presbyterians who turned the Westminster Confession into statements of textual critical study.

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They were not. They were not statements of textual critical study. Even the King James wasn't, technically.

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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

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Greek New Testament, so Erasmus, Stephanus, and mainly

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Beza for the New Testament. Which became the foundation of the various forms of the

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Textus Receptus. And so that wasn't, they weren't really seeking to do textual critical work very much either.

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They did provide column notes when there was a variant that they were very well aware of, but it wasn't done consistently.

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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.

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Until the last century, we did not even have a consistent notation system for which manuscripts were which.

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And that led to confusion. And great theologians of the past made what we know today were ridiculous statements about all the

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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.

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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.

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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

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I was out, specifically out in London, and talking to Muslims or Mormons if they happen to come along, and now it's all there.

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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.

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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.

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And so I had identified that as a, how did

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I put this? I said, here's an excellent example of confessionalism gone awry.

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No one who wrote the Baptist Confession of Faith thought that providing scripture references, they were providing the final word in textual studies.

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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.

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So I sort of repeated that. I did ask the question, given that he teaches at IRBS, is this now the position there?

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Timothy Decker says no, evidently Dr. Decker teaches at more than one school. And he says, no,

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

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Which obviously I agreed with. And I asked, so IRBS has no position on textual critical matters?

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And he said, not officially that I'm aware, there is thankfully academic freedom to allow the profs to have varying positions.

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They're not explicitly confessional. We do have a footnote, see right there. I think

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Riddle's argument is that it is explicitly confessional. We do have a forum for faculty to present their views and allow charitable disagreement.

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I plan to do mine on textual criticism soon. And that's good. And then

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I had seen, and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but the theology in particular, which

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I think comes from IRBS. And it was

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Riddle presenting this type of material. And I will be listening to it.

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And we may have some comments to make about that. But anyways, the point is here's, we've obviously dealt with textual critical material before.

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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.

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Problem is we need to have familiarity with where our translations came from, where our texts came from, how translations are done.

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And a lot of this has come up. In the conversation that we had from the

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RV a few weeks ago in regards to a couple things, in regards to, for example, the

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Granville -Sharp construction, Titus 2 .13, 2 Peter 1 .1, in reference to Unitarianism. And in regards to what a hapax legomena is in the

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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.

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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.

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I have said forever that cross -examination is the heart of the debate.

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That is where Proverbs 18 is fulfilled. That is where you come and you ask questions and you test for consistency.

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If you don't have cross -examination, there's no reason to have debate. Because if you wanna know the difference between myself and Dale Tuggy, we've both produced hours and hours and hours of video.

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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.

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What you can't hear is those two sides interacting. And that's what cross -examination is.

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And a lot of people are afraid of cross -examination. Everybody knows

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I'm not. Cross -examination is my forte. And it wasn't when

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I started. When I started, we just stumbled into the question period.

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And then I started realizing, that's really where the rubber meets the road, in essence.

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And so we're working on all that to make that work.

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I personally think the two debaters interacting is far more important than the debaters taking audience questions.

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Audience questions in maybe 10 of my debates have added to the debate.

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Which means in 171, they subtracted from the debate.

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Because audience members generally don't know how to ask questions. Or audience members just simply want to preach a sermon.

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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 had been submitted, it's even worse then.

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So, that's sort of how all that works. So pray for us as we work toward all of that in putting all that together.

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So, all of that back to here. Are we having any problems?

25:55

No. Okay. I was just looking at element and it was saying I did not have any connectivity.

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So that was worrying me just a little bit, but. No, it's good. Oh, okay. All right. My side said it was no good, no bueno.

26:09

All right, so what we're gonna try to do here, what we were going to try to do here, and now it doesn't look like we're gonna try to do here.

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Where'd this go? Window. Okay, maybe I put it in this one.

26:27

All right, the video I was going to show you has seemingly. Oh, now it popped up.

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Okay, all right. Nope, the thing down at the bottom. There was nothing I could click to start it. So don't ask me where it went.

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And we won't ask any questions. It may have been doing stuff we don't want to know about. All right.

26:51

So, about two hours ago, the troublemaker in North Phoenix, eventually we'll have so many troublemakers that no one will actually be able to identify who's whose.

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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.

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Brief clip. The continued anti -biblicism campaign.

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And again, always defining biblicism in the most absurd. Who in the world actually believes that?

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I have no earthly idea. I'm a straw man form. Not reformed biblicism, not a biblicism that is based upon a recognition of church history and all that kind of stuff.

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But anyway, so we have our good friends,

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Steve Meister from Emanuel Reformed Baptist Church up in Sacramento and Josh Sommer.

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And they're talking about biblicism. And what is said to me, again, very, very important.

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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?

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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.

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And I think in terms of pastorally and evangelistically, why it's important to make this point. Because I actually,

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I believe this is the road to Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy for Christians who are taught biblicism.

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Because they'll eventually realize that that's impossible. That there's no such thing as approaching scripture without a paradigm, tradition, or received.

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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 which we would reject 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.

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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

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Steve Meister said. He said, tradition as revelation. Okay.

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I'm fairly certain, looking at the screen here, that combined, the two of these gentlemen have that many debates against leading

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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.

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Which would explain why Steve doesn't seem to understand how Rome presents the concept of tradition.

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They do not say that it is revelation outside of Scripture. They subsume the written tradition underneath the broader category of sacred tradition, capital

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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.

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Now, we all agree that that's wrong, but you have to be a biblicist to be able to demonstrate. That's the problem.

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You have to have a fundamental standard that is not dependent upon a traditional authority.

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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

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Twitter space or Facebook Live or something, or just written back and forth warfare going on between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

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And it never gets anywhere. It never accomplishes anything.

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You know why? Because it's one set of self -defined traditions versus another set of self -defined traditions.

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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.

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It is the biggest waste of keystrokes and breath and everything else that I can even imagine.

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And so here, Steve Meister says that Biblicism is the road to Rome.

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Now, again, I've dealt with a hundred times the number of actual converts from Catholicism than Steve Meister's ever even met.

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I've dealt with them after they've converted. I've dealt with them before they've converted. I've kept people from converting.

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I've helped people deconvert. I've tried to help people that converted anyways, all sorts of things like that.

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I've 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.

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And we said, you know, this has happened in the past.

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It happened at SES and it's happened at other schools and your students, they're gonna follow the breadcrumbs and they might read more of Thomas than you think they're gonna be reading.

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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.

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If you haven't done that, then you're gonna end up with the young man who became

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Roman Catholic out of Midwestern just this past April and more people to come,

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I'm sure, unfortunately. And the other side, all they could do was, oh, all you can say is we're swimming the

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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

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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, that the only thing that was said there, you know, it's this idea of this tabula rasa.

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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.

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But if you've been taught biblicism, then these folks will come along and they will use that to bring you into Roman Catholicism.

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Unfortunately, there was no explanation, Steve, as to how that works, because I don't think he's ever been involved with those situations.

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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

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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.

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Okay, that's not biblicism, that's ignorance. That's just simple ignorance. That's just not even reading the

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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.

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Well, I've been working on that since 1990. I taught church history in 1990.

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That's the year Josh Summer was born. I was already teaching church history.

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I knew the importance of it then. And yet I'm a biblicist. And so this idea that biblicism, it doesn't work.

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Remember this book? The Obscurity of Scripture, Disputing Sola Scriptura and the

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Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity. Forward by Scott Hahn. There's a convert for you. Casey J.

35:56

Chalk. Remember we talked about that? Came out, I think, last year, late last year.

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Might've 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.

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About the same time, we have this book from Christian Smith.

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The Bible Made Impossible, Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

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That's what these guys are saying. That's what these guys are saying. And that's what Catholic Answers says.

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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.

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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 ban rule?

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Again, I was debating this Roman Catholic apologist when these guys, before one of them was born, they don't have any experience in these.

37:06

Why are you even sticking your nose into this stuff? I don't get it. It's amazing.

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But you see how this is relevant to what I was gonna be doing, which

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I need to actually go over there and make a little bit of a change here so we can have a chalkboard.

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So we need to have a chalkboard. Oh, see what it did? But remember, we can do this fast now.

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Ha, ha, ha, ha. And I'm just gonna make that a little bit smaller so we have a little bit more. Okay.

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So when we think about the textual issue, we want to know what the apostles wrote, not what developed as a tradition later on.

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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.

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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.

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But there has to be some kind of objective methodology to determine these things, to understand these things.

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So let's think about a book.

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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.

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So it took me, I'm not sure how long. And I was tempted a bunch of times by,

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I saw a book and I 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.

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But I resisted all but one, all but one. This has a clear coat on it.

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You know, I did one of those things. April 19th, test. Yeah, test on 16th.

39:42

Okay, yeah, this was, this is William Hersey Davis's Beginner's Grammar of the

39:49

Greek New Testament. You know what's amazing? Oh, that's fine, don't confuse me.

39:58

I'm gonna have to get my own thing back in here so I control the cameras myself. Just get rid of the guy.

40:07

Hey, you know, I had a hard time starting the program today because I was a little on the hurt side, you know?

40:16

The last program we did, before we did the program, I walked into where Rich sits there and does his stuff.

40:30

And I gave him, what's going on? Is the battery dying on my microphone?

40:36

Okay, good. All right. Oh, yeah, sure. And I gave him one of my

40:44

Quest peanut butter cups. Now, if you've not had a Quest peanut butter cup, may

40:51

I recommend, first of all, refrigerating them. They are so wonderfully good when they're cold and crisp.

40:59

And it's not a huge shot of sugar, thankfully, but it is a fair amount of protein. They're protein peanut butter cups.

41:05

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

41:19

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 put it on his desk.

41:27

I said, let me know what you think about that. And you know, ever since then,

41:33

I've been asking myself, I wonder what Rich thought about that peanut butter cup.

41:39

You know what happened, folks? You know how this program almost didn't start for me today? I walked into the offices.

41:45

I walked by the desk there in that studio. There it sat.

41:52

It had been there the whole weekend. Never touched, never touched. Okay, Tuesday, since Tuesday, all right.

42:00

Couple days, three days, it sat there, alone, getting warm, no longer crisp.

42:08

Here was a gift from my heart and it had just been rejected.

42:15

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.

42:24

So there you go. You know, this is the kind of thing that, you know, in the

42:30

Christian life, you learn to forgive and you allow healing to take place. And so there you go.

42:37

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

42:53

T next to the things that are gonna be on the tests and all that stuff. You know what's amazing?

43:00

This is the exact same grammar. Now, not this particular one. I happen to have that one too.

43:06

It's the exact same grammar my dad learned Greek from in 1952 at Moody Bible Institute.

43:16

Exact same, no change, no updating, no nothing. And in fact, the first two times

43:24

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.

43:38

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

43:54

The Invention of the Inspired Text. This is the paper version. I had it on Kindle in the

44:00

RV. By John C. Poirier, P -O -I -R -I -E -R.

44:10

And I don't know anything about John. It says he is an independent scholar based in Germantown, Ohio.

44:17

Great. I don't know if he's taught anywhere. I haven't found anything else from him.

44:25

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.

44:35

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,

44:47

I started talking about what is necessary to be able to analyze and understand the argumentation in this book.

45:00

This is a 2022 publication. So it's, relatively speaking, brand new.

45:09

And I'm sorry, first published in Great Britain in 2021, this paperback edition published 2022.

45:18

So there you go. There's a slight difference there. But it's a relatively brand new book.

45:27

And what happened is, in the Gavin Ortland debate with Trent Horn, Trent Horn pulled this book out.

45:39

And he has, in later videos, identified this argument as the death knell of Sola Scriptura.

45:51

The death knell. Wow, that's pretty important. Now, I immediately go, so for 2000 years, the infallible magisterium has been ignorant of what they've discovered from a non -Catholic scholar in 2022.

46:11

Or if you wanna go to 2021, they're in Great Britain. That seems really weird.

46:19

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.

46:32

But when that happened in a debate, Jay did that with Shabir Ali.

46:41

And I've criticized Jay for doing that. But anyway, it just seems really strange to me that a

46:49

Catholic layman, he's not a priest, he's not a bishop, he's nothing like that. And Poirier, it's not like he's on the

46:56

Papal Biblical Commission or something. By the way, I've been looking at the

47:01

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.

47:14

It's gonna be very, very interesting. I hope a lot of you will be able to attend. And yeah, those are, they've always live streamed those debates, haven't they?

47:25

From Houston. So yeah, that'll be on live stream because there's only so many seats in the auditorium.

47:32

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.

47:52

And specifically in this book, what you have is he utilizes the

48:04

TLG databases, Thesaurus Lingua Graecae, Thesaurus Lingua Graecae.

48:18

These are databases that began to be developed back the 1990s.

48:24

I would say that we purchased our first subscription to the

48:33

TLG CD -ROM somewhere around 96 or 97.

48:43

You'd say 95. It was like $300 for two years or something along those lines.

48:51

It was. When we first started doing this and accessing this, you would literally pay a subscription fee.

49:05

And at that time, the database was on a CD -ROM. And so then it would come up for renewal.

49:15

And that was one of the biggest expenses we had. And I used that in working on my

49:23

PhD and the Doctrine of the Trinity. And I used it in analyzing a very important term.

49:39

Just as an illustration here, arsenokoites is the

49:48

Greek term at 1st 76 at 1st Corinthians 6 and 1st Timothy 1. Together with mollikoi at 1st

49:57

Timothy 6, ESV, for example, renders it homosexuals. Most other translations have homosexuals and effeminate.

50:09

The ESV understands arsenokoites to be the dominant and mollikoi the passive in a homosexual relationship.

50:19

We'll get into that right now. Point was, what does this term mean? And so I used the

50:26

TLG CD -ROM, which we were still paying for at that time.

50:34

Because this was around 2000, 2001. I think it was late 2000. Trying to remember when

50:40

Jeff Neal and I did the radio program with the two homosexuals.

50:46

And that's what led to the same -sex controversy. I used the

50:51

TLG databases, which is basically an encyclopedic indexed database of all ancient

51:00

Greek literature, broken down by authors, centuries, so on and so forth.

51:08

Obviously the interface now is better than it was then.

51:19

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.

51:39

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.

51:51

And they give you a range. So it was pretty much contemporaneous with Paul, but it also could have been after Paul.

51:59

So there was a range. With Paul, at least we know when he's writing. A lot of other stuff, it could be 100, 200 years, either direction, you're really not sure.

52:10

Most scholars now believe that Paul is the earliest user of the term arsenicoides.

52:18

But the point is, the TLG database would allow you, what

52:25

Poirier does is he's looking for the term theanostos, and related terms.

52:33

And he then is making translational decisions based upon the wide utilization of the

52:47

TLG database and that means he could be comparing uses that are two, three, 400 years separate from one another, 500, 600 years separate from one another, actually.

52:57

But the only way to know these things is to have access to the TLG databases, and I'll just be honest with you,

53:06

I don't have any reason to believe that before Trent Horn utilized the argumentation in this book that he verified anything that Poirier is saying in regards to the

53:23

TLG database. Again, stuff that I've been using for a long, long time.

53:30

In fact, I'll just be honest with you, when they pulled the CD -ROMs, you had to go online access.

53:35

I could never find mine. It's, my heirs will find it in a book someplace, and I just had to tell them,

53:41

I'm sorry, it's lost. I don't think it's lost. There are those books on the one shelf, there's some boxes on the one shelf that haven't been down pretty much since we moved in here.

53:53

There's a good shot, but I don't know. And they said, well, if you ever find it, please return it to us. Well, okay, like I said,

53:59

I think it'll be my heirs that end up doing that. Anyway, so we, by the way, do have a valid and current subscription to TLG online.

54:12

And they're extremely valuable, extremely useful, but you have to read Greek to use them, fundamentally.

54:19

You really do. I mean, I suppose you could muddle along, but I'm not really sure how. You have to be

54:26

Greek literate. And when I asked Trent directly, where did you study

54:32

Greek? How long? Have you ever taught it? Where'd you teach it at? I didn't get any answers. I may have missed it.

54:38

Maybe somebody can point me to where I missed it. I don't know where he answered that question, but I've seen no answers to those questions.

54:45

The other thing that is important to be able to understand is semantic domains.

54:55

Now, that's why I was looking for this book.

55:01

And thankfully I found it. This is the original one that I used.

55:09

It's fascinating finding stuff stuck in your books. You know, it's normally from Taco Bell, you know.

55:19

You look at something that you're stuck in a book from Taco Bell and you go, it only cost that much back then.

55:26

Oh my goodness. I had an entire meal for a buck 79. Yeah, things have changed.

55:32

Anyway, so this is Moises Silva's book,

55:38

Biblical Words and Their Meaning. Biblical Words and Their Meaning. Now, it's still in print, but I think they changed the name.

55:45

I think they changed the name. That's my recollection. Thankfully, I know when

55:50

I read this book, can't normally tell that, but I can in this one because I remember it was,

55:58

I had graduated from Grand Canyon in 1985.

56:05

I was working on my master's at Fuller. I had the same

56:10

Greek professor that I had had at Grand Canyon. Had him for seven years,

56:16

Dr. Mike Baird. And I was the only person left at this point in the advanced, advanced, advanced, advanced

56:25

Greek stuff. And we read this book. And I remember there used to be a restaurant at Indian School on the freeway.

56:37

If you're coming south and you'd stop at the, you're gonna be turning left on Indian School. It was right over there.

56:43

There was a restaurant over there. There may have been a couple of them by then. I don't know. But I remember we met there to have our discussion of this book.

56:54

This book was revolutionary for me. It was revolutionary for me because here's how most people, they learn

57:08

Greek and I open up the, okay, first eros indicative active and middle, lesson number 36 has six vocabulary words included.

57:27

And I think I have written in pencil the number of times these terms appear in the

57:32

New Testament. I'm not sure how I knew that, how I had access to that. But anyways, hagiadzo,

57:39

I sanctify. Basiluo, I reign, I am king. Thea 'amai, I behold.

57:45

Katharidzo, I purify. Oh, kataluo, I destroy man.

57:50

I would have to wear glasses to read this thing anymore. I didn't have to back then because the sixth word, taflao,

57:57

I make blind. Taflao. Yep, and now

58:03

Rich remembers, Rich took Greek from me for a while. And Dr.

58:08

Baird, I'm gonna have to blame Dr. Baird for this one. I'm sorry. But Dr.

58:14

Baird, and my computer has gone to sleep over here. I've been talking so long. Dr. Baird would sometimes give us vocabulary helps.

58:28

And he looked a little embarrassed when he gave us this one, but it worked. Notice it just worked for Rich. And how many years ago was this?

58:35

I mean, 25, 30 years ago? Yeah, taflao, taflos.

58:44

Wow, blind, huh? Taflos. It's terrible, but you'll never forget it.

58:51

In fact, there are people in the audience right now who will never learn another word of Greek, but they will know taflao, oh, taflos.

59:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like a cult group we've got going there. So anyway, that's how we learn, is, okay, there's a definition, you know.

59:13

Here's eleithnos, eleithne, eleithnon, true. Habeas, life. Hadeabolos, devil.

59:21

Ekai, adverb, meaning there. Okay, so you have a vocabulary list. But where did they get that information?

59:29

William Hersey Davis may have been very old, but he was not from the New Testament period. A .T.

59:34

Robertson wasn't either, his mentor. So how do you get that information?

59:41

And then once you start doing actual translation, you start realizing, you know, there are ranges of meanings for words.

59:51

And in first -year Greek, you're encouraged to be very literal, sort of wooden.

59:58

And then in second -year Greek, you start doing something called syntax. Syntax is the relationship of words to one another.

01:00:08

So syntax is going more into the, you're going beyond grammar into the relationship of clauses and how context will color these things.

01:00:24

And so your translations start becoming a little smoother, hopefully not because you're forgetting the literal meaning, but because you're seeing how the

01:00:33

Greek expresses things and how you can express that more clearly in English. But all of this still makes you go, well, how do they know what these words mean?

01:00:44

Well, you can go to Accordance and you can fire up Accordance, and you've got

01:00:56

Accordance up here in the corner. And we can get it big here, and we can just simply take our cursor and we can just put it on a word.

01:01:15

And here's your instant stuff. Here's aparabaton, permanently, unchangeable.

01:01:23

Well, where'd they get that? How'd they get that information? And I didn't have computer programs back when

01:01:31

I was learning Greek. They hadn't developed those things yet. And so how did they know?

01:01:41

And then you start discovering that, for example, when you look at, and we're gonna come back to here because I want to use aparabaton as our example of a hapoxogamona here in a little while.

01:01:52

But everybody, hard to see that down there.

01:02:00

Everybody knows John 1 .1, and everybody knows the term lagas,

01:02:08

N -R -K -A -N -H lagas, K -H lagas, N -P -R -O -S -T -O -N -T -H -A -N, K -T -H -A -S -N -H lagas. The word.

01:02:16

And so we have all sorts of discussions about what's the background to lagas?

01:02:25

Is it membra, devar? Is it the

01:02:30

Greek philosophical term lagas that pre -exists John's usage? What's influencing these things?

01:02:36

All that's fascinating and important stuff. But the fact of the matter is, lagas is not an overly specific word.

01:02:49

Not an overly specific word at all. And in fact, you can find lagas in a new testament meaning matter, issue, all sorts of stuff like that.

01:03:01

And so when I read the work on semantic domains, it revolutionized my understanding of Greek vocabulary and translation.

01:03:20

So semantic domains, some terms like lagas have a wide semantic domain.

01:03:38

And hence the writer has to identify what part of this range of meaning he wants you to understand through other means, through other vocabulary and context and grammar and issues like that.

01:04:05

But then other terms have a very narrow semantic domain.

01:04:12

And so we looked at operabaton from John, I'm sorry,

01:04:20

Hebrews 7 .24. And I wanna bring that back up. So forgive me for a moment here.

01:04:27

This is somewhat of a visual program today. Hebrews 7 .24

01:04:36

says, but he, on the other hand, because he, menain, abides forever, ekitain hirosunain, his priesthood, holds his priesthood operabaton, operabaton.

01:05:02

Now, very often you can look at other uses of the term to help flesh out meaning.

01:05:12

Let me show you something. If you go to operabaton and you go search for lexeme, oops.

01:05:24

Now, I don't know if you can see that. You need to actually bring up the screen for them to be able to see that cause that doesn't show anything.

01:05:32

There we go. One, one result, Hebrews 7 .24,

01:05:38

there it is, operabaton. What that means is operabaton is a hopox legamina.

01:05:51

And please do not pronounce that with a L sound in there or I will have to call you out on it, hopox legamina.

01:06:00

And that means it's used only once in the New Testament. That does not mean that it's only used once in all of Greek literature.

01:06:11

So you can go to other sources and see if there are other uses, but think about it.

01:06:19

Let's say we have, okay, opera.

01:06:31

Let's say we have this term. It has a very narrow semantic domain, a very, there's only, it's not like Logos where you can use it a bunch of different ways.

01:06:44

This is very, very narrow, but not only that, if you look up the TLG database and you find a use in let's say pagan literature from three centuries after Hebrews, how relevant is that?

01:07:04

How relevant is that to defining how a writer writing to Hebrews in the first century would have understood the issue of Jesus's priesthood?

01:07:19

It might be relevant. It might be completely irrelevant, but that's one of the problems.

01:07:28

You have to have some way of recognizing that. And in the same way, for example, you can now get,

01:07:38

I had this made. I wonder if the date's in this. Nope, no date.

01:07:48

But I did have my library of stickers, so. This is the two volume

01:07:54

Lo and Nida Greek English lexicon based upon semantic domains.

01:08:02

And so it's different than your regular lexicon where you're just gonna look up a word by alphabetical order.

01:08:13

This is putting words together that have similar meanings that are based upon semantic domains.

01:08:20

And so it's a completely different way of looking at vocabulary, meaning.

01:08:26

It's very helpful when you're trying to translate languages that are not based upon Greek and Latin and things like that.

01:08:34

So translators find this extremely useful. So behavior and related states, particular patterns of behavior, hire, rent out, sell, buy, price, earn, gain, do business.

01:08:49

So it's based upon related areas of meaning, semantic domains.

01:08:55

Now I should mention, sadly, I think it was vocal distance.

01:09:01

I don't know when we're gonna be getting done today. I hope you're not planning on going home anytime today. Anyway, I think it was vocal distance on Twitter that made the comment that, and it was really disappointing because he made reference to, oh, name's escaping me now because my mind's elsewhere.

01:09:33

One of my favorite Romans commentators, commentaries, he posted a video of that author being woke and he made the right observation, sadly, that the academy, and it's not just the secular academy, the

01:10:01

Christian academy is woke. And he's right.

01:10:08

It is sad to see seminaries that were once conservative and biblically sound just following the society anywhere.

01:10:18

And this is influencing Christian literature, not just books you're gonna find in a

01:10:24

Christian bookstore, if you can find a Christian bookstore anymore, but it's influencing areas like this.

01:10:32

Semantic domains have been abused within academia, as well as Christian academia.

01:10:40

I was gonna point this out. I did once before on the dividing line, and hey, now with our super search engine, you can go find it for yourself.

01:10:52

But if you look at the entry for arsenic coites, homosexual, in the previous edition of Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Donker, and in the third edition became

01:11:12

Bauer, Donker, Arndt, and Gingrich. If you compare those two, the entry on arsenic coites,

01:11:22

I'd say doubled or tripled in size. Now, were there all sorts of discoveries as to the use of this term?

01:11:29

No. But there have been hundreds, minimally, of scholarly papers written trying to find a way around the meaning of arsenic coites.

01:11:46

And just as a lot of people rightly saying, make sure you've got paper books, because if you've got on Kindle, Amazon can make it disappear in a second.

01:11:54

That's true. And I've got a lot of stuff on Kindle because when

01:12:00

I was flying, and now when I'm driving, sorry, but I can't carry a library with me.

01:12:07

Either way. And so it'd be good to have old materials available because you don't know when things are gonna be changing and why they're changing.

01:12:26

That is a very troubling issue. There's no question about it. Especially when you look at other areas today, the climate scam, and you know that the data is out there that demonstrates it's been much hotter in the past.

01:12:42

It was much, much, much hotter in the 1930s than it is today. So it doesn't have anything to do with carbon dioxide.

01:12:50

This is all a means of enslaving us. It's a fraud. It's just as much of a fraud as certain stuff that happened between 2020 and 2022 were frauds.

01:13:02

Meant to get power, meant to get taxes, meant to impoverish people and enslave people. That's another issue, but it's same reality.

01:13:13

And NASA has, remember, most of you are too young to remember the hockey stick.

01:13:22

The hockey stick was this graph that this famous climatologist produced showing this massive increase in temperatures and it's all due to mankind and all the rest of this stuff.

01:13:32

It was a complete fraud and it was exposed as a fraud. It was exposed as a fraud, but people kept still using it.

01:13:43

And so you'll see NASA producing graphs showing this huge increase in temperature, but where'd they start the graph?

01:13:49

Right after the warm period beforehand so that it looks different. And we've all seen, hopefully you've seen, how they're using color in weather reporting.

01:14:02

So there's been these really interesting examples of reporting summer temperatures in Europe.

01:14:11

And from 2017, it's in green with a little bit yellow and da, da, da, da, da, da.

01:14:16

Now it's all red and magenta. And you look at the numbers and it's cooler now than it was then.

01:14:23

But the whole idea is we're dying. Earth has a fever. The oceans are boiling.

01:14:28

So you just change the data and people are gullible enough to go along. Well, same thing with biblical words and their meanings.

01:14:38

You've got to make sure that if, you know, this 1946 movie, I haven't even seen it yet.

01:14:43

I don't even think it's available yet as far as rental or anything like that. I need to look again, but it was -

01:14:48

It works better in a rubric. It just - Get the rubric out there.

01:14:54

Yeah, yeah, I know. When you hear people saying, scholars say this and scholars say that.

01:15:01

Well, you know what? A true scholar is never afraid of you checking his facts.

01:15:06

And a true scholar will not get upset with you when you ask them to explain their statements in plain language.

01:15:14

If they can't express it in plain language, it's probably because they don't understand themselves. I mean,

01:15:21

I've always thought, if you think you know the doctrine of the Trinity, teach it to the junior high schoolers. Yeah, yeah, it's easy to do that with adults.

01:15:30

You can use all the big words and all the rest of that stuff. Teach it to the junior high schoolers. So yeah, there is a problem of wokeness in the academy.

01:15:41

So you do have to be concerned about these things. But back to the issue here. In essence, when we talk about what

01:15:53

Poirier is saying about theanoustos, God breathed, his theory is called the vivification model, that theanoustos means life -giving.

01:16:07

And you go, but isn't it God breathed? Isn't that literal? Yes, but his idea is that it means giving of life.

01:16:16

And of course, if God speaks, he gives life. He's the living God, so he's the source of all life. So there's sort of an element of truth you can tie in someplace.

01:16:26

But here's the key issue. Here's the problem. And it was the first thing, even before I had, how did

01:16:35

I? I think it was the day I got the book, because I'm not sure the

01:16:43

Kindle was available. Right after, when I first heard that debate, I'm like,

01:16:50

Poirier, what? Where'd this come from? And so, you know, you track it down.

01:16:56

And one of the first things I noted as I was thumbing through the book, is that Poirier, like most

01:17:04

New Testament scholars, doesn't believe Paul wrote 2 Timothy.

01:17:11

Paul didn't write this. So think about this for a moment. If we're looking at meanings of our semantic domains, and we're looking at the

01:17:26

Agnustos, and you're looking at the possible range of meanings, what are you going to bring to bear to accurately find the range of meaning within all of this that the author intends in a particular text, specifically 2

01:17:54

Timothy 3 .16? And here's something to keep in mind.

01:18:00

And this is why you have the kind of publications you have in Christian bookstores, you can buy in Lagos, in Accordance, and all the rest of this stuff.

01:18:12

You can buy a lot of heresy in Lagos and Accordance. You really can, sadly. If this is the section that means

01:18:21

God breathed, right here. Okay? And let's say you can make an argument for over here is life -giving.

01:18:31

Okay, how do you choose this over this? What do you need to bring to bear?

01:18:39

And obviously, one of the most important things that you need to bring to bear is the use and understanding and context of the author.

01:18:53

But what if you reject the author that the book itself identifies as being the author?

01:19:04

Now you don't have that content. So most of you know, if not,

01:19:09

I'm going to inform you, someone like a Bart Ehrman has an extremely reduced Pauline corpus.

01:19:16

What that means is he only thinks Paul wrote seven of the epistles that are attributed to him, about half of what we would normally view.

01:19:26

And so when you have a limited Pauline corpus, that impacts how you're going to interpret things.

01:19:35

When you look at books that you don't say Paul wrote them, but you don't think Paul wrote them, then you can draw from outside sources to define terms that you wouldn't be able to do if you thought

01:19:50

Paul wrote it. Because there may be all sorts of things out here in Pauline usage that will influence where in the semantic domain of theanostas you're going to place that meaning.

01:20:05

But if Paul didn't write it, then you can use all sorts of stuff over here and say, that's the meaning.

01:20:13

See? So how you understand authorship and hence context and where this fits in time, vitally important to the definition of the term.

01:20:25

That's why I asked, I think it was the day I got this book in. Once I realized, hey, wait a minute,

01:20:32

Poirier doesn't even believe Paul wrote this. So I asked Trent Horn. I said, do you think

01:20:38

Paul wrote 2 Timothy? He knew where I was going. I don't know if he had actually read the book or was aware of Poirier's position.

01:20:45

I don't know. But he's a smart guy. So he's like, well, I can gain insights from Bart Ehrman.

01:20:54

I don't have to believe everything Bart Ehrman says, to which I would say, well, that's very nice, but it has nothing to do with this.

01:21:03

Because when you're analyzing someone's assertion as to lexicography and semantic domains, who the author is makes all the difference in the world.

01:21:14

And we have an entire corpus of Paul's writings. Now, the irony here, obviously, is this takes me back to 1993.

01:21:29

1993. And Rich and I, what did we drive up there?

01:21:35

Is that your car? Yeah, it was the Sunbird. It was the Sunbird, okay. You know, cars built in the 1990s were, that was a bad period of time.

01:21:45

Anyway, we drove - Yeah, for back then.

01:21:52

You wouldn't want to drive it now, would you? No. Yeah, they don't need parts for those cars anymore.

01:22:03

Anyway, we went up to Denver, Colorado, and I debated Gerry Matitick's first night at Denver Seminary, his second night at a

01:22:11

Presbyterian church, which I keep telling people the only thing that Presbyterian church is famous for is two years later, that's where John Denver's funeral was.

01:22:21

So there you go. Anyway, the first night when

01:22:26

I was at Denver Seminary debating Gerry Matitick's, Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid were at a local

01:22:32

Protestant church beating up on two fundamentalists. And that's the only way to describe it.

01:22:38

I mean, it was not a fair fight. I've always thought it was a little bit cheesy because I had challenged them to debate first.

01:22:44

I said, oh, we're not gonna be debating while the Holy Father's in town. And then once I arranged debate with Gerry Matitick's, all of a sudden they found the time to do this debate on Sola Scriptura.

01:22:53

And one of the arguments, and it's been an argument they've used over and over and over again over the years.

01:22:59

One of the arguments was, how do you know Matthew wrote

01:23:04

Matthew? Now, sadly, the response from the fundamentalist was, because my

01:23:10

King James Bible says the gospel according to Matthew, which is not a good response. But anyway, the irony is,

01:23:21

I don't think any Roman Catholic in the day of Francis can make that argument.

01:23:29

If Trent Horne's willing to use people who deny that Paul wrote this word to then define that word, the irony is, look at who's on the

01:23:42

Papal Biblical Commission. The Papal Biblical Commission, it's a five -year term. Francis has been

01:23:47

Pope for more than five years. So everybody on that was, even if they were chosen by the

01:23:54

Pope before, because I think you can have at least two sessions, they've had to be reaffirmed by Francis.

01:24:01

So this is Francis's Papal Biblical Commission. And it's pretty obvious to me that these folks would not think that Matthew wrote

01:24:12

Matthew. So in the 90s, the Roman Catholic was saying, well, we know

01:24:18

Matthew wrote Matthew because we have the authority to tell you that. The reality is,

01:24:25

A, they don't, and B, that's not what they're telling you. Isn't that interesting? I find it fascinating, personally.

01:24:33

So here you have a non -Catholic coming up with a meaning for theionistos that is disconnected from Pauline authorship.

01:24:45

And that's supposed to be the death knell for sola scriptura. Well, you might say it's an argument against, certainly my understanding of sola scriptura, because my understanding is

01:24:54

Scripture is ontologically different than anything else. But that's only part of the argument.

01:25:00

Let's say theionistos doesn't mean God breathed. I'm not granting that for a second. You still have to come up with a positive argument to not only defend this reading, but to then explain what else has the same ontological character as Scripture.

01:25:18

It sounds like Trent wants to say church tradition, even though he can't identify what it is.

01:25:25

But it has equality with Scripture? I think we can find lots of popes.

01:25:32

And of course, I just simply go, hey guys, we've been debating this since 1990, and this is the first time you've come up with this?

01:25:42

How come y 'all didn't know this before? Doesn't this sound just a little bit strange?

01:25:49

For the people who say that we have the 2 ,000 year old church to be going, hey, and now in 2022, we can finally defend it.

01:25:57

I just go, oh, that really, that really doesn't, that smells bad, doesn't it? Yeah, it smells really bad, really does.

01:26:06

So anyways, I wanted to expand out on some of this stuff and to, this is why you have books like this, the obscurity of Scripture, the impossibility of Scripture.

01:26:22

You have these people who want to say, well, you know, it's complicated to translate the

01:26:29

Bible. It's complicated to look at biblical words and their meanings, things like that.

01:26:35

All of that's true. It's actually more complicated to do that with the

01:26:41

Old Testament, and yet Jesus held men accountable to it as if God spoke to them directly. So your excuses are gonna go nowhere in the day of judgment.

01:26:51

If Jesus could hold men accountable, so can we. And so should we, in fact, is how we should do things.

01:27:01

So let me look around here. Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything that we wanted to cover today, and I hope that's been useful to you and helpful to you and encouraging to you as well to talk about some stuff that you probably weren't expecting to be talking about this weekend.

01:27:23

Please do not bore your family and friends with a discussion of semantic domains if you're having a cookout this weekend.

01:27:29

I do not want to be blamed for that. I have been blamed for things like that in the past. Anyways, thanks for watching the program today.