Rich Saves France; Injustice in America; Eastern Orthodox Anthropology; 2 Responses to Dan McClellan

Well, greetings.

Welcome to The Dividing Line.

Here we are again.

Hey, did you see, before we dive into things here, did you see, most Americans don't pay much

attention to elections anywhere else.

One of the fascinating things when I was traveling globally was how much interest

people overseas showed in American elections.

I remember I had to walk, I think I was in Brisbane, Australia, and

I was walking someplace, and I walked through this very

large outdoor courtyard thing, they had big old

television, big widescreen, big screen TV set up, and it was

Trump and Hillary.

And I'm like, I'm in another country, and people in those other countries generally know more,

sadly, than most Americans do about the elections taking place here.

So, Europe just had a bunch of elections, and almost universally, there

was a hard swing to the right, nationalism, get rid of the immigrants, deport them,

this kind of stuff.

And I saw a map of France.

They might get rid of Macron.

It was, I mean, same thing in the United States.

You look at a map, and the vast majority of it's red, but then you've got these blue blotches, which are called

major cities.

But what I think people need to understand is how that happened.

You see, what people don't know is that the most famous Frenchman

outside of France wrote an email that was distributed

around France that encouraged them to return to a more

a meaningful form of government.

And it was rich.

People just don't, I mean, you go to France, and you go Prescott, and they ask you to go Richepierre.

Richepierre, they know.

So, if France does manage to rid itself of much of its wild socialism,

it's our own rich that was behind the whole thing.

And if you believe that, I have some land to sell you out in

the middle of nowhere.

So, Rich has no words, which is good, which is a very, very good thing.

So, very seriously, yes, yes, Rich has been playing with

cameras.

And so, the rich cam is gone, and he was out there playing with the new Starlink system

that I'll be taking with me, really, just barely over a month from now.

Lord willing, I mean,

as saying Lord willing is not just like when the Muslims say the same thing,

basically, if Allah wills, inshallah.

There really is a theology behind it.

You know, all sorts of things could go wrong between now and the 17th of July when I

plan on pulling out.

Anyway, seriously, before we dive back into theological, super theological issues,

I need to do another run through the Minor Prophets, just simply, it's been a while

and you need reminders.

But if you've read the Major Prophets, but especially the Minor Prophets,

the idea of justice, and, you know, sometimes we get tired of the term because it's just been so overused,

misused, abused, turned on its head, emptied of all meaning.

And, you know, when you live in a society that can euphemistically

refer to the murder of unborn children, to the burning of them

alive in their mother's wombs, using hormones

to destroy their little lives, absolutely unique, genetically unique,

never to be repeated.

I wonder how many Beethovens and Bachs have been thrown into a trash can in

an abortionary, who knows.

But any culture that can call the murder of unborn

children reproductive freedom, and the people using that term don't get

laughed off the stage for being moral pygmies and

having the IQ of a wet shoelace.

But that's what you got.

That's what the president, vice president, senators, everybody in the Democratic Party, and sadly enough people in

the Republican Party to make sure that they'll always get what they want.

That's what we face today in our society.

So it shouldn't be, when we look at the Minor Prophets and we hear them talking about justice,

I'm starting to understand why there is so little discussion of real justice.

But I've just been struck recently, we think back to what happened in 2020, we think back to people

literally throwing bombs at federal buildings, injuring police

officers, just riots on an unbelievable level.

And they're all just let go.

The Soros bought and paid for DAs, we have a Soros bought and paid for mayor here in

Phoenix, they don't care about the law.

And they don't care what these people did.

And the government, whether it wants to have it or not,

has a teaching role.

And the laws that they enforce and the way they enforce them,

and the laws they choose not to enforce, are a means of teaching a society.

And so our society has said that as long as you're with

BLM and Antifa and you're supporting

Hamas and Hezbollah and all the rest of this stuff, you're good.

You can do whatever you want.

We won't touch you.

But they are literally prosecuting people for

burning out their tires, doing

donuts on top of pride flags.

Now, of course, the very fact that any government entity would take my

tax money and paint my streets in a way to celebrate sexual perversity

is disgusting in and of itself.

But I was riding, I've done a little bit more outside riding

than I've done for a long time recently.

And I was going across a bridge over the 303.

And I noticed going both directions, there were donuts, there were spins.

Someone probably two o 'clock in the morning had done that type of stuff out there.

And I'm sure they have cameras, and if they catch the person, they'll get a ticket.

But they're not going to jail for

the

or a whatever these disgusting things

are that are being put up in every public school and everything else.

They'll go after them.

They'll ruin their lives.

They'll ruin their lives.

They'll charge them with felony.

So you can throw bombs at federal buildings, deface a

pride flag.

We're going to put you in prison forever.

Tells you everything you need to know about this corrupt regime.

I don't call it administration.

It's a corrupt regime.

And the fact that we do now have without question right in front of our faces,

the establishment in a very non -democratic or representational way, the

establishment enforcement application of blasphemy

laws in the United States.

Now, a number of people have pointed out, and it's true, every society has blasphemy laws.

Every society does.

You can't avoid it.

There are sacred things in every society, and secular societies

establish their sacred ways dishonestly without

being open about it.

And so we have blasphemy laws.

The blasphemy laws here are that which represents the American

history, American morals, and values from the past.

No problem.

They are not valued by our society any longer, and we're trying to teach everyone to not value them.

But the new values, the new values of sexual rebellion,

sexual perversity, destruction of family, destruction of male and female, anything

that would dare to remind us of what we once

were, all that,

that's the new holy places.

Schools and universities can't touch them.

They're ours.

And our sacraments of sexual rebellion, abortion,

you cannot touch it.

If you dare show disrespect, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

And so what happens, I think, over time, and

you see quotations on Twitter from Solzhenitsyn,

and you are hopefully reminded that

we can't become apathetic about this.

As Christians, the temptation is to go, well, it's the world, fallen world, judgment's

coming, therefore, I'm just not going to really

continue to be constantly troubled by what we're euphemistically

calling a two -tier judgment system.

It's a justice system.

It's just simple injustice.

It's absolutely no different than the banana republics,

where if you're in the party, you can do whatever you want.

If you're outside the party, the law will come down upon you

all the time.

That's where we are.

And we can never become apathetic about that.

We have to prophetically say to our culture that not only is this wrong,

but it truly, justly calls the wrath of God in a

special way.

And that's not going to make you popular.

You're going to lose your job but there's no other way to deal with it.

We teach our children and our grandchildren by what we are

passionate about and what we become apathetic about.

And we can't afford to become apathetic about this.

We just can't.

I'm not following overly closely the happenings

at the Southern Baptist Convention.

I'm seeing lots of tweets and

Megan Basham has presented evidence of the

external funding of the ERLC.

And it's working to turn the Southern Baptist Convention leftward, which

obviously it's accomplishing.

There's been a motion to defund the ERLC.

I'm sure I would have seen if that had gone anywhere.

And I'm going to see what happens at the end of all of this.

And hopefully we can just sort of sit back and go, look, this was a signal year.

Fundamentally, the concept of a female elder,

if you're going to accept that, if you're going to say that that is appropriate,

then there are ramifications as to the

sufficiency of scripture.

Because scripture only gives you qualifications for male elders.

And the argument is, well, we're past that now.

That was the Roman Empire at the time.

Now we're past that.

And so it's sort of like, it's like homosexuality, the

spirit speaking new things.

And just like it was a new thing to have the Gentiles come into the church, it's a new thing to have homosexuals

come in.

Or in this case, don't go that far.

We'll just simply say, yeah, the reason qualifications weren't given back then

is because God knew eventually we would, the gospel would be going to

nations where that really wouldn't be an issue.

And so we don't need qualifications for female elders.

We can make them up on our own.

That's seemingly where things are going.

It will be very, very interesting to me to see what the vote is.

To give you an idea of what eventually within three or four years, if it's

voted down, the percentage

of the vote will give you a good idea of who's going to be leaving and how

fast the SBC will become the next United Methodist

debacle.

Because that's what's down the road if they go that direction.

We will see

what happens with that.

Um, real quickly, uh, don't forget the, uh, raffle continues

on for our Jeffrey Rice rebind and for our layered, uh, cross.

And, uh, we will have another raffle with, for a Melton forged blade when,

uh, when, uh, Derek gets back from a well -deserved vacay in Alaska,

a beautiful place to be going.

That's for sure.

And, um, we've sold a bunch of tickets and, but the ticket sales goes

through the end of the month, goes to the end of the month.

So I know it seems like a long time from now, but, um, get to it while you can,

uh, to get, uh, your shot at, um, at those two items.

And we'll let you know about the others when we get that opportunity.

Okay.

Um, I said that I would deal with this and I need to, it's, it's only 60 seconds long.

Of course I could spend days on it.

Um, but we will get back to, uh, Dan McClellan in just a moment, but I specifically said

on Twitter that we would look at this.

And as I said, Dan McClellan too, we'll get to it.

Just not sure how far we'll get with all this stuff.

Um, here is a video that was sent to me

from an Eastern Orthodox priest.

And what was it?

2017?

When did Hank Hanegraaff convert?

I think it was around, I think it was around 2017 ish.

So that's about seven years ago.

Um, and so when that happened, we took,

um, you know, some time to especially address issues

regarding Sola Scriptura.

And what I said at the time was, I'm not going to get into this.

Um, mainly because it is very, very,

very, very hard to explain to people,

um, not only the differences amongst Orthodox theologians,

um, and the, the expression of Orthodox belief,

especially as it differs between Russia, Ukraine, Greece,

that kind of stuff.

But especially when it comes here to the United States, it just gets in a

sense demystified mystery.

And I don't know what other term to use.

Um, spirituality.

I hate to use that term because I'm using it in a different way.

Orthodox experience is different than what we have in the

West.

And it's very hard to explain all of that.

Like I said, the Orthodoxy when it becomes Westernized does become

very much like a hopeless Catholicism, but real Orthodoxy outside

the United States in the East really isn't, it is different.

And it's hard to explain because the way of thinking in the

East is so different than in the West.

And one of the fundamental differences is anthropology.

And I'm not talking about if you took a class on anthropology in college or high school, I doubt they offer

any more anyways, um, in high school.

But, um, when I talk about anthropology, I'm talking

about the doctrine of man and specifically in regards to the doctrine of sin.

Now, a lot of this goes back to the early

centuries of the encounter between Christianity and Islam.

Um, that is very important.

And the fact that Orthodoxy, from my

perspective, and I don't claim to be an expert, but I have done a

little reading over the years and I've mentioned before, I had the opportunity of having dialogue with a

Eastern Orthodox fellow, oh, 30 years ago, who,

uh, understood Reformed Theology.

And there have been a couple, a number of Eastern Orthodox folks

who have not only understood it, but embraced it.

Uh, but they don't like to admit that.

Anyway, um, so the

concept that, that I certainly function under is that Orthodoxy

is a freezing in time of the

body of traditions that existed at a certain point in time in church history.

Now, it's not the apostolic period.

And so there had been development, there had been growth and, and things like that.

Um, they of course will claim that it's completely apostolic, but it obviously isn't.

And it's like they have created their identity

out of freezing church history, basically between the years

650 and 850.

And the, the traditions that were in prevalence at that point in time

become the most important things to them.

So you have the iconoclastic controversy during that time period.

And so today, you know, there's video of the, of Eastern Orthodox folks,

anathematizing us, um, Protestants and

by name, Calvin, Luther, so on and so forth.

And so much of it is over the second Nicene

council, 787 -ish time period.

And the fact that that council decreed not only that you can

venerate icons, but that you must venerate icons, creating that kind of division.

And so the anthropology that had become prevalent in

Eastern churches at that time, I believe was a fundamentally unbiblical

anthropology.

It did not take seriously the impact of the

fall of man on all of men.

And of course, that's the tendency, the tendency in every

branch of what is called Christendom is to exalt the

capacities of man and diminish the capacities of God.

That's, that's how man works.

You've got to give yourself that power, that control.

So when this clip started circulating, I'd say Saturday,

something like that.

Most everyone is responding with, uh, just

amazement that someone would say the same things this man's saying.

If you're familiar with Eastern Orthodox theology, it's not nearly as shocking.

And, but what, what it does do is help us to see where this ends up going.

And so let's, uh, let's listen in and, uh, make a few comments and move on from there.

This, this whole idea that Christ is a human sacrifice to, to redeem us from God,

however you want to phrase it, exactly what it teaches is that Christ died to save us from God.

Okay.

I, I, I do need to make comments in between.

Um, to save us from God.

Um, no, this is going to be a denial of penal substitutionary atonement,

which you may think if you were raised in evangelical churches, you may think,

um, if, if you've not interacted with her is what everybody believes, but in reality, it is

a belief under severe attack, certainly not believed by liberals.

And, um, so you need to be aware of that reality, but that's what he's going to be denying.

This is not to save us from God.

This is the Steve chalk error where he over in the United Kingdom has said that, well, this, uh,

this is about, you know, cosmic child abuse, that God abuses his own child.

This is an eternal decree, a, an eternal

covenant by father, son, and spirit to bring about the glory of the triune God through

the amazing act of redemption

whereby fallen man will be graciously redeemed

through the work of the son, the application of the spirit, all of the glory of the triune God,

and that God's law and God's character

will be, um, vindicated through the son's

self -giving.

Now, what surprises me a little bit again, in light of

orthodoxies fight for its existence

against Islam is that this is so important

in talking to Islam and dealing with Islam's view of salvation.

I won't go any further on that, but just go listen to the debate that I did with Shabir Ali at the Abu

Bakr Siddiq mosque in 2013, I think it was October of 2013 in South Africa

on this very topic.

And you'll see how important that really is.

So that's what surprises me a little bit.

You would think that would have pushed orthodoxy to a little bit more biblical anthropology

in regards to man and sin, but anyway.

The substitutionary sacrifice.

Is a neo -pagan doctrine worthy of Baal or Molech.

Just need to make sure you understood what he said.

Substitutionary sacrifice, penal substitutionary atonement, um,

substitutionary sacrifice is worthy of Baal and Molech.

Baal, the Baals, the fertility gods that were constantly causing the

Israelites to trip up.

Molech, the god to whom children were sacrificed.

This is what he is saying.

This is what he is likening.

What we believe, the self -giving of the sun in behalf of his people

really is.

Pretty amazing.

But not worthy of the living God.

First thing to understand is that we're not dealing with sin, we're dealing with human

suffering.

And most people fall into sin, not because they're intrinsically evil, but because the

inner human suffering becomes so strong that it erupts out.

In the form of a sin.

Now, as I said, the real issue is the anthropology.

It's not that they don't have Romans 1, 2, and 3 in their Bible.

It's not that they don't have the Psalter and all the texts

about the sinfulness of man's heart and all the rest of this stuff.

But the chief source of theology within Eastern Orthodoxy

is the liturgy, the prayers, and the worship.

That becomes a very, very, very thick set of lenses

that filters out from the reading of Scripture.

Those elements that tradition filters out.

Everybody has lenses like that.

Our greatest goal should always be to be thinning those lenses as much as

possible, and to honestly be aware of how they would impact our

specific reading of specific texts.

And to understand now, sin isn't about breaking the law.

Sin is about doing something that alienates you again from God.

Sin is not breaking the law, but sin is doing something that alienates you from

God.

Now, you will hear very similar things to this amongst

progressivists in the West.

But even the way he said sin the first time, in a

mocking tone, how do you even define it?

Sin is breaking the law of God, and that's what brings alienation, because the law of God

actually expresses and reveals his holy character.

So when you sin against that law, then you are being alienated from God, but it's

because you are setting yourself up as the ultimate authority.

You're serving your own lusts, desires, and things like that.

It's the alienation that's the problem.

The sin is just a symptom.

It's just an instrument.

But the alienation from God is a problem.

Okay, so if you don't have substitutionary atonement, then how do

you find reconciliation with God?

Well, that's what Theosis is about.

That's what the Energia is about.

That's what the church and the sacraments is about.

Again, this is just a fundamentally different way

of even approaching the issue, and it's problematic.

I'm not sure why the screen went dark there, but okay, you need to pull it down since I've got

other stuff up there.

So, just one of the many, many, many areas of difference

that exists between us and the Eastern Orthodox that is well worth our discussion.

I hope to do some more programs in the future.

We'll talk about a little more of that, hopefully, over the next couple weeks before I head out on the road again to do

that.

Now, we started off

listening to—we've done four minutes, and it's taken us two programs—but it's on textual criticism.

So, hey, listening to Dr. Dan McClellan, who is a walking

contradiction.

He introduces himself before his little videos by calling himself a scholar of the

Bible and religion.

Dime a dozen there.

But what's strange to many of us is that he is

a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints.

I say that because he clearly embraces critical

views of Scripture, harmony of Scripture, things like that,

that his critical training must reveal to him, if he reads

anything at all in LDS Church history, that Mormonism began and cannot even be

defined outside of a view of Scripture and revelation that he

clearly himself does not hold.

And so, as with so many Mormons today, we are

seeing all these truly fascinating ways

to find a way to make it fit all together by fundamentally

redefining what Mormonism really is supposed to be.

And this tremendous widening of perspectives,

I really think, started back with Hinckley in about 1999.

But even before then, I think they were sending, like I said, they sent people out to get degrees at Ivy League

schools and things like that.

What they didn't realize is these people were going to come back and they were going to inject into the very bloodstream of Mormonism

a form of skepticism and critical analysis that

the so plainly man -made documents called the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and

Covenants, the Prophetic Grace, and especially the Book of Abraham in the Prophetic Grace, simply can't

survive.

And so, I want to finish listening to, you know,

he was responding to an admittedly very poorly stated

Christian argument about 99 .5 accuracy on the New

Testament manuscripts.

I couldn't even figure out where the Christian presentation was going.

It was comparing apples and oranges.

It just wasn't well done.

So it was an easy one for McClellan to go after, to be honest with you.

But this raises the question of

what he calls the black hole, which is the fact that for any work of

antiquity where you do not have the original

writing itself, which until very modern times

means everything.

I mean, we, you know, we don't have the originals of the

Koran or anything like that.

I mean, that's just how things work when you're talking about history.

That the period of time between when it's written in our first manuscript

evidence, he calls a black hole.

Well, I don't know if that's the best terminology to use, but

yes, there will always be a time period between our first manuscripts

and when something was written because it has to be being copied during that time and distributed.

And the vast majority of

everything that was written, unless it was chiseled in stone, the vast majority of everything

that was written in the first century doesn't exist anymore.

Or in the century before that, you keep going backwards and the percentage gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

That's why when they find, when was it?

Is it about a year, year and a half ago?

They found, you're always finding stuff in Israel because

archaeological work is going on constantly.

Whenever they build a building, they run into something archaeologically and they have to stop and redesign the building and people come in

and collect stuff.

And it's great for us because we get all this information, but they had found some of the blessings and

cursings.

I think it was cursings from Deuteronomy 28 -29.

I think it was actually chiseled on rock in Paleo -Hebrew

from what?

700 -800 years before Christ, something along those lines.

And everybody gets all excited and we're like, but that's only a couple of verses.

But the point is almost nothing that's written

in the ancient world is going to survive through to today unless it's chiseled on

rock.

And the New Testament wasn't chiseled on rock.

It wasn't meant to be.

It was meant to be something that was a message that goes out to the whole world.

So as I said last time, other works of

antiquity written contemporaneously with the New Testament average a black hole, if

you use that terminology, a time period between when they're written and our first

extant existing copies of between 500 and 900 years on average.

So half a millennium to almost full millennium before we have our first copy.

And so he had said we have about 124 manuscripts of the New Testament books in the first 300

years, which means the New Testament is attested far earlier

than any other work of antiquity.

And in the same way, we have no

manuscript evidence for the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham.

None.

The golden plates were taken back to heaven and

the manuscript that Joseph Smith used to translate

the Book of Abraham is actually an Egyptian funerary document, which we can now read easily.

There really isn't a question about this.

Joseph Smith did get a few words right.

He did translate the Egyptian article the as the.

But the problem is he also translated that one Egyptian symbol into like ninety six English words, which happened to include

the.

But it's pretty amazing what what what happened there.

So apples and oranges again, the New Testament's actually a historical document.

The Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are not historical documents

at all.

They're fake frauds.

They're not what their authors said they were.

And yet this man belongs to a church that continues to hold them out as the word of God.

I'm not exactly sure how that works, but there you go.

All right.

So that's where we were.

Let's dive back into it.

Or we're never going to get this done.

Now, I want to return to the biggest problem here.

The elephant in the room is that black hole between the composition of these texts and our earliest textual

witnesses, because when scholars talk about textual criticism and how sure we can be and how few verses

are unsure, they're talking about based on the manuscripts that we have.

I mean, it's again, just point out.

I don't know why it seems to be a.

Lack of familiarity on McClellan's part, people trained in textual criticism do

not talk about verses.

Now, maybe he's doing that just because the.

Video that he was tearing apart.

Use some reference to verses, but when you're talking about variants, you talk about variants, there are

there can be multiple variants within a single verse.

There are verses without variants.

So I don't I don't get it.

But what he's what he's saying is when you talk about.

Relative statements, and we mentioned in previous programs, we don't have to do the

ask a bunch of textual scholars average their answers thing anymore.

We have CBGM.

We have we have massive collations that have been computerized and

entered into the database, and that's never happened before.

It couldn't have happened until just the past few decades.

And it really started around 2010.

I mean, the folks in Munster have been working on stuff like this for a long time, but and everybody knew eventually computers would be used, but just

how they would be used.

No one really knew and still until.

Certain individuals came up with this this methodology.

So it's not just a matter of he's saying that this is all based upon the manuscripts that we

have, which is the broadest.

Earliest and most accurate manuscript tradition for any work of antiquity, period.

End of question.

You cannot argue that.

You cannot argue that.

All right, so we continue on.

Here are the readings that are unsure, and those readings are the readings that are found in

the existing manuscripts, because many textual critics think you should not do any

conjectural amendation.

Um, that should be E -M -E -N -D -A -T -I -O -N -S, conjectural amendations.

And as I said last time, yes, I would be one of those say I do not see any reason for conjectural amendation, which is where you

propose as the original reading a reading that does not have any basis in the manuscript tradition.

The vast majority of other works of antiquity, with the exception of Homer, especially Plato,

Pliny, Suetonius, stuff like that, you at times have to use conjectural

amendation because you do not have sufficient manuscripts to have

a high enough level of confidence.

So when you encounter a major variant that just doesn't make any sense, then they'll go with a

conjectural amendation.

You know, it seems like what he was saying was and that would make more sense and, you know, that kind of thing.

I don't see any reason to do that in the New Testament.

We have sufficient and early enough attestation

to not have to do.

That.

In other words, you should only propose a reading if we have a manuscript that contains that reading.

Right.

And this is an enormous assumption.

This is assuming that every single word that was written in the original autographs of the New Testament

is somewhere preserved across the thousands of different manuscripts.

Which was the position of Kurt Aland.

And he discussed that many, many years ago, this concept of tenacity.

And while Bart Ehrman may scoff at it, he didn't provide much in the way

of refutation.

In fact, in our debate, when I asked him, okay, so show us where we don't have the

original words.

He, again, pointed the same that there's only one reference that they'll refer to in Peter.

Anakai, Enoch.

It does not impact anything theologically or anything like that.

And that's all he could give us.

Because the fact of the matter is, I suppose

someone that really wanted to put some work into it might be able to come up with maybe

five places where you could at least try to make an argument that, nah,

it just doesn't seem like any of our manuscripts have the original reading here.

But you'd really be pushing it to do that.

And that's probably like five words out of 138 ,000 in the New Testament.

Which would be better than 99 .5 % accuracy, by the way.

Just thought I'd mention that in passing.

So he needs to recognize, McClellan needs to recognize, if you're going to deny tenacity,

then you're the one making the assumption.

You're the one making the assumption that the most broadly and

earliest attested manuscript tradition of any work of antiquity

is not tenacious and would be liable to lose

original readings.

I guess my hand touched the touchpad, which is why I don't like touchpads.

That's the assumption he's making.

That was composed by a New Testament author writing an original manuscript that was lost in

that black hole between the original composition of the text and our earliest.

Textual witness.

So, again, every work of antiquity has a time period

between the original composition, which would not be in the same year for all the New Testament.

I mean, you've got multiple authors, multiple times, and their first manuscript copies.

And what he's saying is stuff might have been lost.

And, hey, as a Mormon, he has to believe that.

In fact, he should say many plain and precious truths have been removed from the Bible, but he

knows he can't back that up.

And he knows many plain and precious words have been moved around in the Book of Mormon, too.

So there you go.

That sort of causes a bit of a problem.

That is a dogma.

There are no data that support that.

In fact, I would argue that the data argue directly against that, because the further we go back in time in our

manuscripts, the more likely a given verse is to have a variant.

Okay, what he's talking about there is the assertion, and

there have been studies on it, I've not seen.

Royce comes as close as you can in his magisterial work on

the New Testament papyri, but even he would come to the

conclusion that the idea

is once you get into a period of establishment, establishment of the Christian faith,

no longer under persecution from the empire, that's 313 AD, and then especially you start

getting after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, you get the monasteries

and the monks copying manuscripts and things like that, that you get a standardization of the text.

That's somewhat true, and it's standardization, especially of a certain form of

the Latin text.

The Greek text became less and less important over time in the west until the Reformation.

But the idea is, well, the papyri, all these wild variations,

that's not really the case.

Though, if you are to look at the differences between them, you are looking at

manuscripts that are being copied during a time period where they

very well could be being copied in a place that was illegal to possess them, which means you don't get to have

professional scribes doing that.

That's why Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, they pop up after the Peace of the Church in 313, where you can actually

have professional scribes doing the work now.

You look at, I've always used P72 as an example.

The author of P72, have you ever heard the theory that when you're writing in

handwriting or printing cursive, I know no one reads cursive anymore,

that if the line goes up, if it's not a lined piece of paper, if the

lines tend to go up, that means you're happy.

If the lines tend to go down, you're sad.

Did anyone else hear that?

I'm just, I must be really, really old.

But I remember hearing a lot of that.

So P72, which is our earliest handwritten copy of 1st 2nd Peter and Jude,

the scribe must've been happy because the lines go up.

A couple of years ago, we did an impromptu unofficial tour of the

manuscripts in the Bible Museum in Washington when I was speaking at the G3 local,

regional thing there.

They wouldn't let us do a real thing.

So I just sort of showed up and our people just found me, and then we literally

had 150, 250 people walking around.

I'd stand next to a manuscript and start talking about it.

They had the standard facsimile.

It wasn't the actual one, but standard facsimile of P72, which is the one that I saw.

Oh, hold on.

I have this up, so I might as well.

Oh, where'd it go?

Here it is.

Let me

see.

Okay, no.

Other direction.

Other direction.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Back.

Back, I say.

There we go.

Oh, this is worth playing as well.

Let me just throw this in here for the fun of it.

Here is that amazing Q &A question that I

asked Bart Ehrman in 2009.

This is 15 years ago now.

I almost interrupted him before he gave us this incredible statement.

But here's the most widely read critic of the New Testament in

the English -speaking world today.

Listen to what he says when I ask him this question.

Ready?

Here we go.

On the Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the

Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years.

You described this time period as enormous.

That's a quote.

Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or

Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?

Very enormous.

Sorry, ginormous would be a good one?

Ginormous.

Ginormous.

Okay.

I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.

The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity.

Catch it?

The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other work of antiquity.

I almost interrupted him and kept him from saying that.

And I'm very glad that I didn't do that.

But here, I can see it over here.

Here we go.

Come on.

I went past it.

Okay.

Oh, all these fancy -dancy graphic stuff I put in here.

Okay.

Here is P72.

And don't worry about the background stuff.

There's P72.

You can see the lines.

They go up on the right -hand side.

And you can see the Nomen Sacra here, for example, is 2 Peter 1

.1.

And the Granville Sharp construction there, our great God

and Savior, Jesus Christ.

No, our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 2 Peter 1 .1.

The other one's Titus 2 .13.

Anyway, here are these manuscripts that we possess today.

And this is from around the year 200.

So, this would be written within about 120 years of the

original that we have today.

But you'll notice that that's probably not a professional scribe.

If it was, he wasn't all that good.

Or maybe he was just only used to doing business stuff like that.

But the point is, it's not a super professional hand in these earliest

manuscripts.

And so, people say, ah, that means there was all this variation.

But the reality is, though, this should look familiar to Rich.

He's seen it.

This is the very page that Rich and I went and saw in

1993 in Denver at the Papal Treasures exhibit

when I was debating geromatics and on the papacy and all the rest of this

stuff.

And we almost got ourselves thrown out of the Papal Treasures exhibit because this is all I came to see in the

first place.

I didn't care about the tiaras and the diamonds and the furs and all the rest of that stuff.

And what's amazing is, if I had had my Nestle Alland

back then, 26th or 27th edition in 93,

probably 26th.

Yeah, it's 26th.

I could have recreated the readings

that you see on the page right now just with my Nestle Alland text, just with the amazingly brilliant

notation system that they've developed for that particular text.

And if you translate P72 and you translate

today's Nestle Alland 28th edition, 29th, should be coming out fairly soon.

They're not going to give you different teaching, different meanings in any way, shape, or form.

It's just not going to happen.

So I need to go...

Well, just for the fun of it, here's...

I may not get to the homosexual stuff today.

Here's P75.

This is one of the most accurate papyri we have.

And what's fascinating about P75, we know that it has a common ancestor

with Codex Vaticanus, which is from around 325 to 350.

So when P75 and Codex B agree on a reading,

that is a reading that goes back to at least 125 AD.

So very, very, very early in the quote -unquote black hole.

So in other words, there are ways to shed light back into the period

before your earliest manuscripts when you have multiple manuscripts later on.

So when this manuscript and B agree, then their common ancestor, which has to be

earlier than P75, had that reading, you see.

So there are ways.

That's why I was looking at P45, to do the same type of thing and looking into that dark

period before the first manuscripts that we possess.

But what's fascinating about P75...

I am not going to get much farther than...

The fascinating thing about P75 is we know how this scribe

copied this text.

And you go, what do you mean?

Well, if you were copying a text, if I handed you

1984, since we all need to be reading it, since the left's using it as a textbook these days,

if I handed you 1984 and I asked you to hand copy a page of 1984,

would you do it word by word?

Would you do it by short phrases?

Would you do it by sentences?

How good's your memory?

That's not something we do a lot of.

We cut and paste anymore.

But in my younger days, that was something you did.

You had to copy from books on a typewriter or whatever else it might be.

We know how the scribe did it.

You know how we know?

Because he did it letter by letter.

He didn't do it word by word.

He didn't do it phrase by phrase.

All of the errors he makes are single letter mistakes.

And so that ain't fast, but it's really accurate.

Fascinating that you can look at that and go, oh, wow, how'd they do that?

There's P75.

Here's P66.

I love this particular picture, because you can see what a codex would look like, a papyrus codex would look

like.

The damage to the outer portion, because the

spine's on the left there.

And you can see everything along there is just fine, because that's where it's best protected.

But the upper corner and then the lower outer corner, that's where you always get damage in

these papyri.

There's P66.

That's also from John 1.

And there's that.

And then here's my P45, which is on the wall behind me.

So we'll skip that one.

There's P46.

Here's this collection of Paul's writings.

And notice the exact same shape.

See how that works?

This is one of the earliest collections of Paul's epistles, which

did, by the way, include Hebrew.

We won't go into the post -Philippines.

There's me holding P91 from down Macquarie State University, blah, blah, blah.

I'm trying to get through this.

Here's Sinaiticus.

And this does give you an idea.

That's what Sinaiticus looked like when I saw it in 2005 in London.

Very much, that's exactly what it looked like at that time.

Hard to see from there, but check it out here.

That's not printed, folks.

That's hand copied.

And that's what I mean by the difference between the papyri being done by non -professionals

and what could be done after the Peace of the Church in 313, when you have parchment and you have

professionals and stuff like that.

It's amazing what that looks like.

There's Codex Vaticanus.

There's Codex B.

That's the one that is related to P75.

They both have a common ancestor there.

There's Codex Alexandrinus.

And then what I need to get to here real quick, there's 124 manuscripts, which I've been

talking about for ever and ever and ever.

But I want to get to my, don't have the volume up.

We're going to go by old Bart Ehrman here.

And here's what I want to show you, is I created this graphic.

And it's important to understand the

Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament were written at various places at various times,

different authors writing to different communities.

And some were written for distribution within the community, such as the Gospels.

Others were epistles sent to specific locations.

And so then copies would be made and sent elsewhere.

Often Christians traveling from one place to another would encounter a book they had not heard of before and hence would make a

copy to bring back to their own fellowship.

And though a graphic that would represent how many different lines of transmission there were, and how

often they were interconnected, would rapidly become useless due to the number of manuscripts would be on the screen, the fact of that

complex history of the transmission should be remembered.

Over time, single books would be gathered into collections.

This is especially true of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, as we saw.

Hence, we have P75, P66, Gospel collections, P46, we just looked at, containing the Epistles of

Paul, all dating from the middle to the end of the second century.

These collections would then come together until finally, after the Peace of the Church in 313, you could have entire copies

of the Scriptures, such as we find in Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus.

But the important point to note is the multifocality of this process.

Multiple authors writing at multiple times to multiple audiences produced a text that appears in

history already displaying multiple lines of transmission.

This results in the textual variance we must study, but it also illustrates

the vital importance of what I talked about earlier, and that is the tenacity of

the text.

To have an original reading simply disappear,

if you had a single line of transmission, then you could do that.

But when you have multiple lines of transmission, then the confidence that all the original

readings are still in manuscript tradition increases tremendously.

And Kurt Allen certainly knows more about the manuscripts than even Bart He knew.

He's obviously gone now.

And yet he believed in the tenacity of the text.

And it has been well said, and I'm sorry the name is skipping my mind at the moment.

I'd give due credit if I wasn't just spacing on the name, but there's an

individual who came up with an illustration, and Dan Wallace has used it,

and I've used it over the years.

What we're looking at when we look at the text of the New Testament, the manuscripts of the New Testament, is like having a 1 ,000 -piece

jigsaw puzzle, and we have 1 ,100 pieces.

What McClellan is suggesting is we might only have 990.

The reality is the later

manuscripts get longer.

It's the expansion of piety primarily.

Sometimes it's conflation.

If a guy had two manuscripts of Romans and there's a difference, he'll put both of them in his, and so it gets longer

that way.

But it's normally the expansion of piety, titles of Jesus, things like that that get longer

over time.

But I think it's vitally important to recognize this historical reality

in light of the claim that McClellan is making about

this black hole, this period of time there

in the early manuscripts.

Let's see if we can at least finish this one up.

...ability in our earliest manuscripts than in our later manuscripts, because as these manuscripts

circulate more widely and as people are comparing them, they start to harmonize them.

They start to standardize the textual tradition.

Well, I would just point out that if you're.

Specifically going to talk about harmonization and standardization, that creates variance.

That creates variance where you take a reading from here and take a reading from there and put them together

and expand it.

That actually creates variance.

That's not what we see in the papyri.

Royce's study demonstrated that, and now with CBGM, we'll be able to, I think, do

more work in that specific area.

I don't know of anybody that is yet, especially because we don't have the entire New Testament to compare things with.

So there is a big assumption among more conservative textual critics that that black hole has no

differences in it.

No differences.

No.

What Kurt Ahlund, I think, demonstrates very clearly is that

it's not that there are no differences.

It's that the original readings remain tenacious and are transmitted through there through

the multiple lines of transmission.

If that were not the case, if there was major textual disruption,

then what we would have is we would have manuscripts with wild variation.

Entire stories not found anyplace else.

We looked at P52.

We might find a manuscript with a whole different story of what Jesus says to Pilate in John

chapter 18.

Never happened.

We've never found anything like that.

The closest thing you can get, and it's really not from the dark period at all, is Bese Canterburgiensis Codex D,

which I call the living bible of the early church, where the scribe was just willing to just make stuff

up as he went along.

He tells us how many stairs Peter descended to get to the street after the angel freed him from prison.

Okay, but the very fact that we can recognize that that scribe was doing

weird stuff demonstrates the tenacity and the consistency of the

rest of the scribes that weren't making stuff up and editing things and taking stuff out and everything else.

So I would say that McClellan needs to be able to demonstrate, needs to be able to give more than

just agnosticism, and he might find himself in the exact same position that Bart

Ehrman found himself in.

Well, where don't we have the original?

Is it Enoch or one little place over here someplace?

You would think that there would be hundreds of examples.

There aren't.

It's not there.

And that assumption is wildly irresponsible.

And that's where it just ended.

Wildly irresponsible.

No, it's not, Dr. Dan McClellan.

It flows from actually studying textual criticism on a level that I don't think you

have.

I'll just be honest with that.

I just don't think you have.

All right, so through a lot of stuff out there with that, that's cool.

That's fine.

Got enough time here to go ahead and get to what I said I was gonna get to.

I want to at least start it.

I hate to tell people we're gonna look at this and then I don't do it because I spent time looking at everything else

under the sun.

But here's another one of these.

And again, I guess these are TikTok videos.

That's why they're so narrow.

What are they called?

Anyway, I don't know.

After I started responding to McClellan initially, I went to go look for

the link to, you know, because I type up the blog article.

I just want people to be able to go see it for themselves.

And as I'm going through his videos trying to find the one I responded to, I start seeing

all this stuff on homosexuality.

And I stop and I look at some of them.

I'm like, oh, this guy's a full -blown progressivist revisionist.

Which again, makes me wonder how much influence he has had

in the fact that, hey, Rich and I were in Salt Lake City

the first year that the gay Mormons showed up.

And we watched the Mormons attending conference.

It was like these people had leprosy, okay?

I mean, it would just go right around them.

And I mean, oh, really?

Seriously?

Yeah, it was amazing.

We've seen over the past quarter century the

major changes in Mormonism on this subject.

Now, quarter century is not a long period of time as far as church history is concerned.

It is for Mormon history.

And the reality is, what this has demonstrated is, that Mormonism does not actually produce

a Christian worldview.

Because it doesn't have the Christian God.

If you have a God who evolves and changes and everything else, you know, what I said,

the first missionaries I ever talked to, someday you're going to need to know the God who

does not change.

And I hope myself or someone else will be there to testify to you of who he is, as I have in our

meetings so far.

And that was the best stuff I could ever say to them.

And it's the same stuff that I say to them.

And Mormonism, because of its intense subjectivity, because of its testimony and

things like that, cannot provide the objective bulwark to be able to survive the

crashing waves of the society.

And I don't know what Mormonism is going to look like in the future.

But if there is a major schism, and if some prophet -like guy comes along, one

thing I will predict is that the new Mormonism will

reject where the current church is clearly going.

Oh, I know, they're going slowly.

I know, we can't change our doctrine of marriage.

We've watched all the denominations doing this.

We get it.

We get it.

But I know too many people that live in Utah, and they tell me, you wouldn't believe what's

going on up here.

So yeah, I'm not sure how much influence he had,

or has, not had.

Obviously, this movement began long before he started doing anything.

But it is fascinating to me to hear a Mormon

scholar making the arguments of the revisionists from

progressive Protestant Christianity, and Roman Catholic, for that matter.

Really, really interesting.

So here we go.

Let's start into this, because I don't know how many times I have to say this,

we have to know this stuff.

This is the 1946 movie.

I mentioned to you, they're going on a...

I didn't mention.

I forgot.

I only did this on Twitter.

There's a 1946 road tour starting.

I'm going to miss it, because they'll actually be here in Phoenix while I'm still in Colorado.

I'm sorry.

I wouldn't be invited, but I wouldn't mind trying to crash it.

But the people behind the 1946 movie, which has been a stellar failure, and the reason is they

won't let it out.

You know, I assume someday it'll be on YouTube.

It'll actually be viewable by the majority of humanity.

But they've been holding on to it, because once you watch it, and I paid to watch it.

I paid to watch the whole thing.

It is horrific.

I mean, as far as actually presenting any kind of scholarly argument, it is laughable.

It is a massive attempt to create emotional response

to these individuals in the film.

That's all it is.

What it tries to do in redefining Arsena Coytes,

again, we have said over and over again, Bob Gagnon has said, Michael Brown has said, I have said, we

will debate.

We will debate the people in the film.

We'll debate the scholars in the film.

We'll debate scholars that they want to come up with.

Whatever.

We'll debate the thesis of this film.

They'll never do it.

They will never do it.

They can't.

They know they can't.

They know it's indefensible.

They absolutely know it.

So they're going to be going from city to city.

Hey, look up the 1946movie .com.

See if it's coming to your area.

Go ask them the right questions.

And ask them why they won't defend the thesis of the film in

debate against published authors who have been talking about this subject

for decades and have said, we will debate you on this subject.

Bob Gagnon has said, I'll do it.

Michael Brown has said, I'll do it.

I've said I'll do it.

But they won't.

But what McClellan's presenting is pretty much the same thing,

which is astonishing.

It really, really, really is.

Okay, dive into it here.

The word homosexuals did not appear in our English Bibles until the year 1946.

The old translation was abusers of themselves with mankind.

Seems kind of open -ended.

The word homosexual appearing in the 20th century, when contrasted with previous translations, isn't really sound argument to invalidate the

translation.

It's like me using the word immoral didn't appear to the 20th century and previously it was fornicators.

What it really boils down to is, is the translation accurate?

All right, let's see it.

And we've got to use the experts in the field in order to assess this.

One of them is a leading New Testament Greek scholar, Dr. Bill Mounts.

M -O -U -N -C -E. M -O -U -N -C -E.

Dr. William Mounts is a PhD educated Greek scholar, and he wrote the book on basics of Biblical Greek.

He wrote an article on the meaning of the word arsenokointos, which has been translated to homosexual.

He says, The association of arsen and kointai, from Leviticus 20 .13, ometa arsenos

koumenos kointe gounai kian, one who has intercourse with a man as with a woman.

The definition, Leviticus 20 .13, which the word arsenokointos is sourced from, is if a man lies with a

male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.

Doesn't really matter how we label it, what it boils down to is what is the activity being described.

It's two people of the same sex engaging in sexual activity.

No, it absolutely is not.

Yes, it absolutely is.

That was a well done presentation from the sources,

and it was absolutely accurate.

And so now you get to hear how someone who calls himself a Bible scholar perverts the Bible.

How do you do this?

And I've been saying for years and years, but especially when the 1946 movie

started trying to raise money to do the 1946 movie thing, I have been saying to Christians,

I've preached sermons, we just put together a playlist

for YouTube that somehow we're going to get on our YouTube thing, and maybe I can just try to

grab it.

Actually, I'm looking at my thing right now.

It's at the top of my Twitter stuff, but it's

all my sermons from Apologia, and I have preached on this subject.

There is a specific, there may be more than one, sermon about the 1946 movie, the

meaning of arsenokointos, and I've been saying for a long, long time, everybody, moms,

dads, grandpas, kids going to school, everybody in our society

has to know the truth about this subject.

It's not fun.

My grandparents never even talked about it.

They didn't have to.

We can't get around it.

And if you're going to be willing to give up your job and your livelihood, or maybe your freedom in the not

too distant future, then you have to know why you're doing this, not just by tradition.

You have to know what scripture says.

What the previous guy said is exactly true, okay?

What the previous guy said was exactly true.

That's where arsenokointos comes from, Leviticus 2013.

They've both committed an abominable deed.

It's both partners.

That's where the term came from, and that's what it's describing.

He was exactly right.

How do you twist that?

Well, you go get your PhD from an Ivy League school, and here's how it's going to be done.

It's describing one man taking the insertive role in an act of male same -sex

intercourse.

Okay, well, let's just stop right there for a second.

Let's say you take that.

You're talking about one of the two.

Despite the fact, Leviticus 2013 says they are both.

They are both.

Here.

Where'd it go?

Oh, it popped over there.

Thanks.

They are both.

Here.

Here's the term.

Amphoteroi.

If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, that's

clearly sexual intercourse, and this is a man engaging in sexual

intercourse with a man in the way that you would with a woman.

Both.

Amphoteroi.

Shenehem in the Hebrew.

They have both committed a detestable act.

Toeva.

They shall surely be put to death.

Their blood guiltiness is upon them.

Okay, so here is arsenos coetane in

the Greek Septuagint.

So, coimethe, to sleep with, meta, with arsenos, male,

coetane, to bed, to have sexual intercourse, as with a gunaikos, woman.

There's the Greek Septuagint.

That's the background of the utilization that you'll find in 1 Corinthians 6 and

1 Timothy 1 in Paul, who may have coined this.

He may be the one that took these two terms.

It may have been a rabbi before him.

We don't know.

There's only one use of arsenos coetanes that could be

prior to Paul.

Most feel Paul's the first, but there's one that, depending on where you date it, I remember back

in 2001, using the TLG CD -ROM, the Saraslinga Greki,

in writing the same -sex controversy to do those studies.

I put a footnote in the book that gave you the other references possible in regards to where Paul

got this idea.

But that's where it's coming from.

And it specifically says both, not one.

It does not say one.

They both.

Okay?

So he's twisting the text.

Twisting the text right there in front of you.

It's right there.

How does he do that?

Well, he does it by looking at

these terms right here.

Malakoi and arsenokoitai in 1 Corinthians 6 .9.

And just to remind you, the ESV

interprets malakoi and arsenokoitai in such a way as to

translate the two together as simply homosexuals.

Now, we've discussed this before.

And there have been people who said, oh, it's just terrible.

They shouldn't do that.

The understanding of the ESV translation committee and others is that this is

referring to two sinful

behaviors.

One is the penetrating aggressive.

The other is the receiving feminine.

The malakoi, the soft, the feminine.

Now, others would argue, no, you've got uta moikoi,

uta malakoi, uta arsenokoitai.

So since you've got a consistency all the way through with

pornoi, with idolatry, with adultery, adultery, effeminate

homosexuals, that malakoi, malakos is a

separate category of sinful sexual behavior.

The soft, the effeminate, maybe crossdressers, what we call

transgender today, whatever, whatever else.

So there have been those who have disagreed with the ESV interpretation.

Okay, fine.

I don't think it's something you can be dogmatic about.

You just need to understand that even as the ESV translates it, it's translating

both of them as having to do with the one act that is

described in Leviticus 2013, that both, both,

did I say both?

Both are to be put to death for in Leviticus 2013.

And the most you could, you know, the most you could really do with this interpretation

of 1 Corinthians 6, 9 is to say Paul is just simply wanting to close any doors

and to say the entire idea of this behavior

is going to preclude you from the kingdom of heaven.

And by the way, I just want to point out in passing

that what is said here, neither sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor

homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy

play a necktie.

That is an attitude.

That's not an action.

That is a disposition.

And so the other thing, and you all can go, last summer, it was last September

when I was in Pennsylvania.

I forget exactly when it was.

I think it was September when I debated a self

-professed Christian homosexual.

This is what it came down to, was we dug into this text and his whole idea was

it can't have anything to do with orientation.

Uh, isn't greed an orientation?

Isn't that, isn't that whole, isn't the whole idea of covetousness

play a necktie?

Isn't that what it's about?

It is.

It is.

So that's what we're talking about here, is what's being said there.

So let's go back to Fallon and continue to demonstrate how

wrong he is.

That is an important distinction because there is a different word that is used in 1

Corinthians 6, 9 to refer to the man who takes the receptive role.

It's maliki in the plural.

And this means something like soft ones.

And it's a pejorative that could be used to refer to men who are effeminates or who are

soft or who do a lot of things that are considered unmanly in the ancient.

World.

And I should just mention in passing that Paul, if you do, if you

make that strong distinction, says they don't inherit the kingdom of heaven either.

Right?

So you're, you're actually, you're not, you're not accomplishing anything here.

Even if you take the ESV and these are both referring to homosexuals, that means they're, they're,

that still recognizes what was said in Leviticus 20, 13, that they are, they're,

their blood guiltiness, both of them is upon them.

Again, part of this is we are

looking at this from a perspective that I doubt

McClellan would have been taught in his education.

And that is, we think there needs to be a consistency and a harmony between

what is found in Leviticus 20 and what Paul is writing in, in 1

Corinthians 6, and the vast majority of theological education today, that's rejected.

This is just Paul's understanding.

There doesn't have to be any type of harmonization here.

In fact, harmonization's bad.

It's better to have a tension in the text and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And, and so that, but the problem again, for me is

that you can't make heads or tails out of LDS scripture and LDS

history and LDS relation, understanding of how the Book of Mormon, for example, relates to the Bible,

if you don't have that understanding that I just enunciated.

If you walk into it with the, oh, they're all contradictory to each other, Mormonism implodes upon

itself.

It just, it just collapses.

That's why I just, I sit here and go, I don't get it.

I don't get it.

And one of those things is taking the receptive role in an act of male same -sex intercourse.

The word also makes no reference whatsoever to female same -sex intercourse.

So to suggest that this word refers to both participants in any

same -sex intercourse is flatly false.

Okay.

Again, if, even if you accept the distinction, Paul

flatly said neither one of them receives the kingdom of God.

So he's wrong as can be.

Secondly, no one is saying that arsenokoites is in reference to

lesbianism, but Romans 1 is.

And so, this seems to be, well, you'll see where it

goes.

And that is an important distinction to maintain because it means rendering homosexual

expands the group that is being referred to exponentially.

Additionally, the word homosexual today overwhelmingly refers to people who identify

as having a homosexual orientation, which does not necessarily mean that person has

ever engaged in homosexual sex.

So this is, again, this is your standard Ivy League

progressive.

This wouldn't, there was no one in the state of Utah.

The first, the first general conference, when I stood outside

and started passing out tracts, there was no one in the state of Utah that would have had any idea what he was just talking

about.

LDS or non, nobody would have had any idea.

What, what in the world is he talking about here?

And what you have here is this is, when you, when you don't let scripture

define your categories, when you instead limit scripture

and take as your ultimate authority, the perspectives of

culture and, oh, well, now we have homosexual orientation and blah, blah, blah.

Hey, remember something, in Romans chapter 1, they burned with desire one toward another,

one toward another.

That was mutuality.

That is homosexuality.

You can stand on your head.

You can do whatever you want to try to do.

And that's what he's going to do.

He wants to stand on his head and make room for these communities and all the rest of this stuff.

But in the process, you have to twist scripture.

You have to close your eyes to scripture.

You have to close your eyes to the consistency of scripture.

Everybody in this audience who is a Bible -believing Christian, go ahead and take that down,

because a Bible -believing Christian needs to understand

what 1 Corinthians chapter 6 is about, how it's related to Leviticus chapter 20.

You need to be able to go to 1 Timothy chapter 1 and demonstrate that Paul uses ars in ekoitai

as an expansion on the commandment against adultery.

He includes it within that as part of the 10 commandments themselves.

We need to understand these things.

We need to understand Matthew chapter 19.

We need to understand that from the beginning, God created the male and the female, the marriage between one man and one woman, and that therefore,

to demand celebration of the rebellion against these things

is to ask us to deny Christ.

That's what it's about.

That's what it's all about.

So you can sit there, and everybody I've ever encountered that throws out these arguments, I'm a Bible

scholar!

Then you start digging into it.

It's like, you ain't a good one!

If you don't seem to be deriving your actual position from the text,

you seem to be enforcing it on the text.

That's what you see going on here.

So there you go.

All right, so we covered the waterfront there.

We covered a lot of stuff.

We looked at some manuscripts, and we did all sorts of fun stuff today, and

even got the Eastern Orthodox folks mad at us, which is, there's nothing really new about that.

So who knows what we'll do, Lord willing, on Thursday.

What do you, what do you, what?

Oh, I already did it once.

I already did it once.

Okay, I gotta do my Vanna White thing.

Please buy your raffle tickets before the end of the month.

There, how's that?

You may not ask me to do that again in the future.

You may want to come in here and record something, and then at the end of this show, you can just drop it in there and,

okay, okay, that's cool.

That's fine with me.

You do whatever you want.

You do whatever.

I'll even, I'm even in my, my, my fox, my foxy kitty shirt.

So everybody can make fun of me.

Here's, yeah, where's the bird?

Yeah, because see, there's, there's, there's Foxy Kitty, and this is my, this is, he's one of my three cats,

and I, I sent Rich a picture last night because Rich has a cat that looks very, very much like

Fox, except he's twice the size.

He's huge.

You say he's like 16 pounds, and Fox is about eight and a half.

So he's, yeah, he's, but I walked out, I walked into the kitchen last night.

My wife's away right now.

She's visiting a friend back east.

I walk out of the kitchen, and here's Fox laying there on the tile, and there's

feathers everywhere.

There's blood all over the floor, and there's this dead bird right in front of him, and he's just

looking at me like, he doesn't, he does not know the word guilt at all.

Instead, it was like, hey, dad, look what I did.

I, I got, these things have been torturing me for a long time, and I got one, and I was, I was hoping that

also in the back of his mind was, and they don't taste nearly as good as I expected them to.

When you give us food, there's no feathers or nothing.

It's, it's a lot better.

It's like, yeah, there's a reason for that, buddy.

So yeah, I was down on my hands and knees cleaning up the floor last night, but I sent that picture to Rich, because

his kitty doesn't go outside.

My kitty goes outside and eats birds.

So yeah, you don't have that problem, and believe you me, your kitty

wishes you had that problem.

Very, very, but put him in front of a window with birds outside, and you'll see how much he, oh, you

do know.

Yes, okay.

If he ever goes straight through that window sometime, you'll know what, what was going on there.

Anyways, we could have stopped about four minutes ago.

All right, thanks for watching Dividing Line.

We'll see you next time.

God bless.