August 19, 2003

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is the dividing line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you would like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good morning and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning here in August.
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It is a wonderful thing because it's only 78 degrees outside here in Phoenix, which when it's below 100 at 11 o 'clock in the morning, it is a blessing and it is a beautiful day here in Phoenix.
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But we have much to do today. By the way, for those of you wondering, I will be playing either sections of or pretty much all of my debate with David Bernard.
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It wasn't a debate, it was a radio program. It was a one -hour radio program. It was a 33 -minute radio program, actually.
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Yesterday morning, we'll be playing most of that on Thursday evening and doing some other fun stuff since that'll be the last
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Dividing Line for about a week and a half, so you might want to tune in then. But we have much to do today because I am joined by Dr.
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Eric Svensson today. I've been talking... Okay, we'll turn the sounds off, thank you.
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Is that supposed to be me? No, that's not supposed to be you. That was somebody in our chat room that I forgot to turn my sounds off and we greet this fellow from Texas.
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He's called Cow Poet. He's a cowboy poet. That's what he actually does. He travels around and he sings poetry and I guess you don't sing poetry, but you know what
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I mean. And that's how we greet him is we have that sound. That's just great. Anyway, nothing like starting off on the right foot there.
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I have 10 clips lined up here. I started figuring it out. We're going to have to work quickly to get through all these things, but you know, both you and I, Eric, and I thank you for joining me this morning, have done a number of debates.
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I've done 47 of them now. And my first debate was with Jerry Matatix in a
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Catholic church in Long Beach that was primarily populated by priests and nuns.
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And so I have a feeling that that's a little bit what you walked into. I want to play a clip from your closing statement where this will give you an opportunity to give us some context of when this took place, where it took place.
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I think you got a little extemporaneous audience participation at this particular point.
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And I'm going to be asking you if you have any idea what this lady was yelling out, but let's listen to what happened.
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That's the point, isn't it? It's an issue of trust. You have to decide tonight whether you are going to continue to trust an institution that is so far off base that it can't even get it right on this one simple issue that is so plainly laid out for us in Scripture.
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And how many other areas that she misled you? The plainly in Scripture against the philological evidence, the lexical evidence, the exegetical evidence that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
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Now, do you have any idea what she said? I do, James. And before I start,
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I just have to make this disclaimer here because I really don't feel well prepared to do your show.
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Ask me why. Why is that, Eric? Well, I missed a flight yesterday and I was on standby for a midnight flight and I got into wee hours in the morning and I've been running on fumes the past three weeks and I had probably about four or five hours of sleep.
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And all your books are packed up in boxes. They are. And I've been living off protein bars and cinnamon rolls as well.
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And you're writing all your notes. If I don't do well today, you'll understand why.
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We need to pray for you then. It was classic when
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I was standing there giving that. It's kind of hard to hear the background noise as I'm almost yelling into the microphone, but if you listen closely, you can hear laughter while I'm talking, while I'm saying an institution that's so far off base that it can't even get it right on this one simple issue.
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There's laughter and ribbing and people looking at each other and cracking up, rolling on the floor, and then you have this lady at the end that says, that yells out, is this part of the debate?
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Oh, is that what she was saying? That is what she said. Well, I'll tell you, it must have been interesting.
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It does seem it's primarily with Jerry that I end up in those situations where I am,
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I mean, you asked and there was one Protestant in the audience, right? That's right. That happened to me in Omaha, Nebraska in 1992.
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The late Greg Bonson was going to be debating Jerry, and he got an opportunity to debate someone on homosexuality, so he called me, asked if I would go up there, and at this
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Roman Catholic high school, there was one Anglican. And do Anglicans count as Protestants anymore? I'm really not sure.
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Hard to tell. Hard to tell, yeah, but he was in the front row, and that was it. I mean, that was the extent of it. So, where did this take place?
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It actually took place in San Jose, California at a Lutheran church, of all places. I had no contact in San Jose, and so they promised they were going to send flyers to all the
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Evangelical churches in the area. They may very well have done that, and it's a sad commentary on the importance of truth in the minds of some
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Evangelicals today. Oh, no kidding. Well, it was an amazing debate. I remember listening to it initially a number of years ago.
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In fact, the two times I've listened to it, I've always been working out. I'm not sure if that's a good thing to do, because it makes me angry.
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But this time, especially, knowing that I'm going to be debating Jerry in just a little over a month on the very same subject,
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I was listening very closely. And one of the things that truly bothers me, and I mean on a sense of anyone who
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I think loves truth cannot help but be bothered, I have come to the conclusion, after at least a dozen debates against Jerry Madetich, that he is tremendously gifted at twisting the statements of others into something that you never intended.
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And then when you face him with that, all of a sudden his story changes. This happened a lot in the debate that you two had, and here's an example from a little bit later on in the debate, and I'd like to get your comments on it.
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These are the arguments that Mr. Svensson sees refute the virginity of Mary, the professor of virginity of Mary.
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And yet we've seen that Protestants, on every single one of these, say that they are inconclusive. We saw that Henry Alford's Greek New Testament.
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We saw that Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich, a Protestant lexicon, says about the word sunerchemi that coming together doesn't have to have that sexual connotation in the papyri of the period.
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Mr. Svensson wants to talk about contemporary accounts. It simply means to marry. You can look that up for yourself in Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich.
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I have the photocopy right here. Now, that kind of argumentation fills everything that Jerry says.
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And you, in a debate, only have a few minutes to respond. It takes ten seconds to make an error and a minute to correct it.
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When you hear him saying, these Protestant scholars, in essence, have dismissed your argumentation, what would you have liked to have said at that particular moment?
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If you could have just stopped him right there, turned off his microphone, and corrected him, what would you have said to him? Well, as you aptly pointed out a couple of weeks ago, to mischaracterize my opening presentation as saying that the primary meaning of sunerchemi is sexual relations, he's just lost the day at that point.
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And I should have brought that up. And as you know, James, as you are listening to the rebuttal, or the other person's opening statement, you're also conferring with your notes and writing down statements.
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You hear a point, you write it down, and of course, as you're writing, you miss certain points that he's making. And I didn't hear a lot of these points until I went back and listened to the tape and was quite surprised that I believe that sunerchemi has as its primary meaning sexual relations.
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I didn't say that. What I said was the primary meaning is to come together, but it often has the connotation of sexual relations, and I cite several lexicons that even cite
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Matthew 1 .18 with that meaning. Now, that's not the most bizarre point. The most bizarre point is that he goes on to claim that the primary meaning is to marry, to come out of the betrothal period into the marriage.
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And of course, there is no lexicon that gives that as a primary meaning or even a secondary meaning.
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That's quite true. I mean, it's obvious. Here's a man who has his undergraduate degree was in Greek.
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I mean, he's not a non -intelligent person. He's a very intelligent person.
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I've had friends who have spoken with professors that he had at Gordon Conwell at Westminster Seminary. He wrote tremendous papers.
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He has the ability to understand, and that's why I've come to the firm conclusion that this is not just simply a lack of carefully listening.
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It is just the opposite of that. It is very carefully listening, and then twisting what is said. I mean, when you can make that kind of a statement, say, well, what he said was this, when it wasn't what you said, and then sneak in this little thing toward the end that it supports my position of this strange protectorate marriage situation and all the rest of this stuff, when in reality,
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I mean, the majority use of sonarchimia is people gathering together in a group for whatever it might be.
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And then it has specific uses within its semantic domain, depending upon the usage of the text.
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I mean, he knows all these things, and yet with audiences that cannot hold him to those facts, he will consistently misrepresent those things.
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That's what really, really, really concerns me. Right, but the other point to mention here is he seems to come to no advantage for his own position to make the claim that sonarchimia simply means to come into the marriage relationship.
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He could have just as easily, and it would have been probably more to his advantage to point out that sonarchimia has its primary meaning simply to gather together, and it's a very rare usage when it means to come together in a sexual way, although it does have that usage.
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So it baffled me that he would, it's almost as though, and you're right, he has his undergrad in Greek, it's baffling to me to take a simple word such as sonarchimia that you learn in first year
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Greek and misconstrue that word to mean something that you will not find in any of the lexicons.
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Well, to me, I honestly believe that if you listen to Jerry's debates, each debate is different depending on what the audience was.
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He knew this was a friendly audience. He knew it was an audience that you could be talking about the most arcane word in the
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Greek language or one that is very common like sonarchimia. They're not going to know the difference between the two. Therefore, all you have to do is present some sort of argumentation that's going to make your side go, oh wow,
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I see he's right about that. Now, you specifically raised the issue of this next question. I want to,
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I had, this may have been one of those situations where, as you point out in this clip,
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Jerry raised this alleged citation during his closing statements of a debate many years before this, and you've challenged him on this.
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And as people listen to this clip, you're going to challenge him to provide you with documentation. At the end, the first question
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I want to ask you is, did you ever get the documentation promised in the following words? If we interpret that phrase in the strict sense in which
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Vincent wants us to, we know from Josephus' book, The Jewish War, that when James, the brother of the
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Lord, was put to death by a mob of the Jews who threw him off a parapet of a temple in the 60s during the revolt against Rome from 66 to 70
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A .D., we know that he was an aging man in his 80s. Now, you can stop and do the math for yourself.
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I haven't, I haven't slept for two days because I've been traveling here, but even I can figure out that if James is the brother of the
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Lord and he was in his 80s when he was put to death in the 60s A .D., then he had to be a child of Mary, according to Vincent's logic, before Mary was even born.
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But at least he had to be older than Jesus. And therefore, Jesus would not be the firstborn.
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The math would require you, if James is the brother of the Lord and he's in his 80s when he's put to death, and brother of the
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Lord means son of Mary, then Mary was having children long before she had Jesus, and so in what sense is he the firstborn at all?
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And even Mr. Vincent doesn't believe that he wasn't the firstborn in the sense that Mary had children before him, because he believes, as I asked him, that Mary was a virgin until she gave birth, until after she gave birth to Jesus.
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So I think the evidence of history is against interpreting these brothers of the Lord in that way. Jerry, can you produce that quote from Josephus?
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What is the citation there? I don't have my copy of Josephus. Because you quoted that in your debate with James White, too, and you didn't quote the citation there.
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I looked that up, and the only citation that Josephus has for James, the brother of the
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Lord, is not in Jewish Wars, as you alluded to in that debate, I'm not sure what you said this time. It's in Antiquities.
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It's in Antiquities. It does not mention any age. It does recount the death of James, but there is no age mentioned.
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You keep mentioning it's 89 years old. That just doesn't exist. Well, I'll be willing to stand...
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I would like to see that. I'll be willing to retract my statement if we find that it doesn't exist.
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It's in Chapter 20 of Antiquities. But nobody has challenged the statement before when it's been made.
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So all I'm saying, if I'm being honest with you... I would like to see it. Your point would be valid if you said, hey,
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James White challenged you on that two years ago. No, he didn't challenge you. Exactly. You said it in your closing statement. This is the first time
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I've ever heard anyone challenge that there is no such statement. I'd like you to produce it before you go on to your next debate.
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If I knew that if I had known you were going to challenge it, I would have had the copy here. That's all
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I'm saying. This is a novelty. I've never heard anyone deny that there is such a statement. So I'm willing to do the work. I'm personally inviting you to send me that reference.
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Very good. I'm personally responding. Thank you. Eric, did you get that in the mail a couple days later?
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I have written to Jerry two or three times since that time.
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To date, he has not written me back. I do not have the quote. Of course, I'm not going to get the quote.
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The quote doesn't exist. He mentioned that, I think, in your debate.
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I believe he also mentioned it in a debate that came between yours and mine. I think it was
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Rob Zentz who debated him. So I wanted to put a stop to it. When I looked it up, of course, it was in Antiquities, not in Jewish Wars.
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But there is no age mentioned for James. It just recounts his death. Well, we need to be careful, because we might be able to find that citation in the donation of Constantine or the pseudo -Isidorean decretals, because as long as it's helpful to Mother Church, we can find it someplace.
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I'm hoping that you will ask him for that citation during your debate, because I'd really be interested in what he says.
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I'll try to find a way. Unfortunately, my debates can be about 25 minutes shorter than yours was.
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That really makes it very difficult. The citation is there. It's just packed up in one of those boxes.
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You just can't get to it right now. Unfortunately, that is the kind of thing. I'm not sure if you're familiar with why this debate is taking place now.
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Last year, actually, I think it was May of the year before, Jerry challenged a Reformed Baptist pastor at a very small church,
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Vernonia, Oregon. I mean, it's the type of city you go through, and if you blink twice, you miss it type thing.
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And he's challenging this pastor in this long letter to debate this very issue. Oh my goodness.
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And you know that he's going to use the exact same arguments. And to someone who's not had an opportunity of hearing them and looking these things up, they can sound very convincing unless you actually check the facts.
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And you can't do that on the fly in the middle of a debate. That's right. So it truly is an amazing thing.
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Well, in the substance of the debate itself, I think one of the reasons,
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I've had some people say to me recently, why in the world would you be debating a subject like the perpetual virginity of Mary?
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Did Mary have other children? I mean, come on. Aren't there more central issues? Isn't there something more?
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Can't we talk about the gospel? Can't we talk about authority? Things like that. And not saying that this is as central to eternal life as those things are.
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This still is an important subject. What motivated you? And then I'm going to play a clip from where he talks about the importance of the subject.
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But what motivated you to engage this debate? Well, one thing that motivated me was I was working on it on my doctoral dissertation and already had firmly in mind a lot of the ideas that I was amazed to find.
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And in relation to the beliefs of Roman Catholics on this issue and what scholars are saying, even in the
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Roman Catholic camp. But the other issue is this. And you know he didn't like that. Oh, no, he didn't.
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And that's another point as well, because as part of his conversion story, which he always gives in every debate, he tells us how he came to terms with his own fallibility and so had to join the
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Roman Catholic Church. But then he feels at liberty to say that the Roman Catholic Church is currently an apostasy and all these scholars are modernists.
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So you can't have it both ways. He's making a judgment either way there. But I had been working on particularly the piece about the perpetual virginity of Mary in my doctoral work during that time.
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And I felt that even though this is not a central issue, and I even bring this up toward the close of the debate, that it doesn't matter to me if Mary remained a virgin.
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That's her choice. The point is the Roman Catholic Church has dogmatically defined this.
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This is one of those infallible dogmas that must be believed. And so it becomes incumbent upon them to show that this is a biblical belief.
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When we turn to the pages of Scripture, what we find is just the exact opposite. We find that the plain reading of the text yields the conclusion that Mary had other children.
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Jesus had biological brothers and sisters. And so if we can demonstrate that, it actually destroys the credibility of the claim to infallibility.
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So I think that is where the significance lies for the Protestants. Right. And I think that came out in this cut that I'm going to play now.
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I remember when he and I did our debate on Mary, and that was very different than yours.
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It was four different topics at one time. And it's really hard to do any four of them justice in the short period of time that you had.
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Exactly. It was very, very fast moving. But one of the things that he stated was that the bodily assumption is an essential part of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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And that we have the exact same basis. And next year we did a debate on Sola Scriptura.
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And he said that we have the exact same basis for knowing the bodily assumption that we have for the resurrection. And I think when you think through what that means, it really demonstrates how important this is for defense of the
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Christian faith as a whole. Here's an example. The perpetual virginity of Mary is a historical fact.
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And that is the only reason why the Catholic Church teaches it. Not because it's a nice -sounding theory.
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Not because it seems to buttress or buck up other ideas about Mary. It is rooted in space -time history.
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It is a fact like the fact that God created the world. It is a fact like the fact that God destroyed the world with a flood in the time of Noah.
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It is a fact like the fact that God parted the Red Sea in the time of the Exodus, so that he kept Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego supernaturally preserved in the fiery furnace.
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Like the fact that God became a man born as a baby in Bethlehem. Like the fact that he died upon the cross for our sins.
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Like the fact that he rose again three days later. Like the fact that he ascended back to the right hand of the
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Father. It is a fact of history to which Scripture testifies, and the constant teaching of the
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Church. Now there you have the cross, the resurrection, being paralleled with the fact of the perpetual virginity of Mary.
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Absolutely. That to me is what illustrates why this issue must be addressed, and it cannot simply be ignored.
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But let's face it, for the vast majority of Protestants today, most Protestants don't even know what the perpetual virginity of Mary means.
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That's right. They could care less what it means, and their responses to it are generally extremely weak and anemic.
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I think it is vitally important to address this issue. Now one thing, I didn't bring this up, so before I forget it, because I will forget it, one thing that I found interesting, it didn't come up in this debate, it will in Salt Lake City in a few weeks, and I don't care if Jerry is listening to this or not, he can, what can you do?
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Facts are facts. But there wasn't any discussion of the first discovery, or the first documented reference to this concept in Church history.
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I found that interesting. There was discussions of people not believing it, and you raised the issue of Gnosticism, but one thing
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I'm certainly going to make as a major portion of my presentation, is that the first, as with so many of these
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Marian doctrines as you know, the first place we find them is not within quote -unquote Orthodox Christianity at all.
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Just as with the bodily assumption found in Pseudo -Milito and things like that, here it's in the second century
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Gnostic Gospels, like the Ascension of Isaiah, that you find the first references to, especially the elements of this dogma that Jerry pressed you on, which was where he tried to define virgin birth as somehow
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Jesus is born without violating the physical aspect of Mary's virginity.
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I've always wanted to ask the question, and I will ask the question in a few weeks. So how was
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Jesus born? Was he not born like the rest of us? Did he beam out of Mary? That's an interesting point, and in fact if you read the
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Gnostic literature of that time, in the second century on, what you're going to find is they believe that same thing too, that the
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Messiah passed through Mary, without rupturing her hymen. And when he was pressing me on this issue, and asking me, okay, when did
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Mary lose her virginity, was it before, and of course we agreed it wasn't before the birth of Christ, was it during the birth of Christ he brought up?
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And that baffled me a little bit, although I was aware of the Roman Catholic teaching on that.
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To define virginity lost as the point at which you conceive, or the point at which you give birth, or the point at which the woman's hymen is ruptured, is to me to really skew the issue.
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Imagine the case of a young girl climbing a tree and actually falling and impaling herself, and rupturing her hymen in the process.
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Would anybody in their right mind say that girl is not a virgin anymore? And so I had to make it clear to him, the point at which
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I define virginity lost is the point at which a woman engages in normal intercourse with a man. And that is so obvious that that's the meaning of the term virgin birth, and yet that's not the way that he was utilizing it.
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No it's not. And it's just amazing, and one thing that I've, when he was talking about the birth, one thing
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I'm going to press him on is, is in Isaiah chapter 9, when it says, a child is born to us, a son is given to us, the term, the
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Hebrew verbal form that is used for born to us, is the standard term for the birth of a child.
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And I'm going to ask him, upon what basis does he really stand in saying, that wasn't really the birth of a child,
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Jesus just sort of beamed into existence. I mean that's a docetic, gnostic concept.
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That is not biblical. It is just incredible. Well, you know it's fascinating, I'm sure, I don't know if you caught this the first time through, or exactly when you caught it, but I know that I was in the middle of a bicep set, when this next statement was made, and let's give
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Jerry his due, he is a very good speaker. He speaks somewhat rapidly, but he speaks with a tremendous amount of confidence, even sadly when he's not telling you the truth.
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And he will just seamlessly insert these little statements, right in the middle of a bunch of truths, so that that statement carries with it the weight of what's around it.
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Here's a good example. And God chose to become a man through a woman, to take his flesh, his human nature, from a woman.
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And God decreed, from all eternity, the most appropriate way to do this was to make her a virgin mother, so that the uniqueness of the one who is to be both
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God and man, two terms that up until then had been incompatible, mutually exclusive, this uniqueness was to be mirrored in the woman he was to be born from, for she too would now be two things that never before had been simultaneously true of one person, virgin and mother, simultaneously and perpetually.
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Now, simultaneously and perpetually. Yes, he sort of pulls that one in on the coattails of the simultaneous.
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And absolutely not even an attempt to provide any kind of foundation for that assertion.
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It's just, let's talk about the Incarnation, let's get everybody agreed, let's preach a little bit here, yes, the
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Incarnation is unique, and the birth of Christ is unique, and she's virgin when she conceives, and then just slide it on in there, as if it actually has something to do with everything else in the preceding sentence.
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And it doesn't. I mean, you can't do that without it being on purpose. That is not just simply, oh,
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I didn't think about, I'm sorry, I guess in a debate you're supposed to substantiate what you're saying, and things like that.
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He doesn't do that. No, I absolutely agree. I think it was an attempt to slide in the conclusion into the evidence itself.
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Well, he does that all the time. He has done that several times, even in this debate. Oh, and believe me, let me see, we've done the mass justification, the
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Apocrypha, the Sola Scriptura, three times, the Papacy, believe me, I've seen him,
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Mary, on almost every subject there is to debate, and it is not just this subject.
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It is every single subject that Gerry Mattox addresses. Well, let me give you an example, a good example of that, and that is in the cross -examination, when he was cross -examining me, and it was toward the end of his cross -examination.
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Actually, it was when I was cross -examining him, I believe, and we were talking about the evidence for the word autophagy and autophos, and I said,
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Do you have any evidence that this is used this way? Is there anything in the context that would lead you to believe it should be used this way?
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And he said, Yes, the context of how it was interpreted four centuries later. Now, if that isn't reaching for the conclusion to justify your evidence,
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I don't know what is. But you see, he does, and in fact, this is something I wanted to do, and I didn't warn you about this, but I'm sure you're up to it, despite the fact that you're living on coke, and have been driving for three days, and haven't slept, and writing all your notes on a yellow pad at stoplights, which, if he pulls that in Salt Lake City, I'm going to get up in the middle of it and say,
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Jerry, be a man. Stop it. This is number six or so. It's getting really, really boring.
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It's like Carl Keating's, look at the person to your right, look at the person to your left. If he has a Bible, he's not a Catholic.
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He does that in everything. Give it up. Come up with some new material. Oh, please.
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But what I'm going to ask, I want to listen to a cut here, and what this cut is discussing, this is where Jerry started to preach a little bit, and he did.
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You do that when you're in front of a home audience, and you know it. He started to preach, and what he did was, in essence, he started to mock your assertion, your discussion of heos hu, and the study that has taken place, that you've done, in regards to this particular construction.
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And he expands it way beyond, obviously, what either you or he would ever understand it to mean, but he expands it way out there.
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He preaches on it. I want to ask you, and I'm sure you've listened to enough of Jerry Mattocks, that you'll be able to pull this off.
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I'd like to role play with you after this clip. I'm going to ask you to be Jerry, if you can possibly do that.
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Oh, sure. And I'm going to see how you would respond to how I would have responded to what he said here, even though you probably didn't get a chance to.
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Let's listen to what he had to say. If we're going to come along 2 ,000 years later and say, hey, they didn't have the
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Logos Bible software, so they can't really know what the verse said. Even those poor slobs 500 years ago,
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Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, they didn't have the computers we've got now. It falls into what
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C .S. Lewis, a Protestant apologist, condemned as the heresy of modern progression, that says only we moderns really understand reality.
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This is to now make truth held hostage by every new advance in so -called cutting -edge critical scholarship.
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We can never know what the Bible teaches them, because next year we'll have a new software or a better computer program or some new scholar pushing the envelope even further and daring to...
30:31
This is not the instinct of the Christian who says what Jesus taught, what was true in the story of Mary, what the apostles taught, is something that Christians can know in every age.
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This is a tradition that has been passed on down from generation to generation, shows up in creed after creed, council after council, pope after pope, church father church father, commentary after commentary.
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And we don't need to avail ourselves of presenter technology to at last ascertain what all these people were confused about in all these previous periods.
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No. That is not the way truth works. Now, Mr. Matitix, you majored in Greek in your undergraduate studies.
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Is that correct? That's correct. Are you familiar with what is called Granville -Sharpe's rule?
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I am familiar with that. How does it apply in this case? Well, Granville -Sharpe's rule, of course, you would agree with me that the best translation of Titus 2 .13,
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2 Peter 1 .1, says that it is our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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Both terms, God and Savior, are being applied to the Lord Jesus Christ. These are important proof texts of the deity of Christ.
31:39
Wouldn't you agree? I would agree with that, yes. Now, do you know when Granville -Sharpe lived? I believe he lived in the past couple of centuries.
31:47
He doesn't live... Oh, I get where you're going. He published his work around 1798, around in that area.
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So, let me ask you a question. Did Titus 2 .13 and 2 Peter 1 .1, as they were written by the inspired authors, were they testimonies to the deity of Christ in the year 1500?
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Yes, but you would never have known that without the teaching magisterium of the 2 ,000 year old church, you understand.
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That is exactly the way to go on this, and that's exactly how I should have approached it.
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And I kicked myself because I didn't, because here's the situation. It is not the case that we are just making new truth as we plot along here.
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Exactly. What happens is we read the New Testament, and the plain reading of the text of the New Testament testifies to the fact that Mary had other children.
32:41
That is how it is plainly used. That's the plain use of the word brother, the plain use of the word until. It's not until Roman Catholic scholars come along and they are trying to uphold their tradition as, well, look, you have to interpret the
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Bible through our tradition. Well, all right, let's test that tradition. Let's go a little bit deeper into the
32:59
Greek words and find out what they mean. And when we do that, we find out, hey, they support what we've always said, and that is that it's the plain reading of Scripture that Mary had other children.
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So it's not the case that we're simply making up truth or relying on the most cutting edge scholarship
33:15
In fact, Jerry was freely quoting lexicons and grammar throughout the entire debate. And so you're absolutely right.
33:23
There's a huge double standard that he's using there. Well, and the double standard came out in almost every time he attempted to address the text.
33:30
For example, he went after the sunerchimi. I'm going to play his comments of sunerchimi here in just a moment. But then he would turn around, and if he's trying to say, well, we need to see sunerchimi in its normal usage, then he turns around and tries to address
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Adolphos and Adolphe. And anyone who is familiar with these issues is just sitting there going,
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Jerry, how can you look at yourself in the mirror as a scholar and say these things?
33:57
What is... And people ask me, well, you've talked with Jerry a lot. What's going on there?
34:03
No, actually, the vast majority of my conversations with Jerry Matatix have taken place in the debates. And as you know, that's not a conversation.
34:10
So I can't answer that question. I don't know why this man... And I don't know if you've looked at his website recently, but someone pointed out to me that he's got a big spiel up there right now about how he may not even be able to be traveling over the next two months because of the finances and all his children and all the rest of his stuff and his
34:28
Discover card's been frozen and all these things. And you've got to give him credit where credit's due. He is a very busy person.
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But I don't think you need to give credit for being busy deceiving people because that's what he's doing.
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I don't understand why a person has the desire to go out and do this kind of stuff other than possibly, in his case, the constant need to validate the action that he's taken in having known truth so clearly and then denying that truth.
34:58
Well, not only that, but to go into a debate under the pretext of the title of the debate or the proposition statement of the debate only to constantly pull out the same trump card that, hey, we're both fallible human beings and we have to submit to this 2 ,000 -year teaching magisterium.
35:13
To me, why even go into a debate if that's what you're going to conclude in the end when you can't produce the evidence that you need to produce to rest your case on this situation?
35:23
Well, we were at Boston College in 1993 and we were debating the
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Apocrypha, which we had both admitted beforehand it was probably going to be a very boring debate. It ended up not being boring at all.
35:35
No, it wasn't boring at all. No, it wasn't. And as I got up from my closing statement, I had just had hernia surgery recently,
35:42
I wasn't moving too fast, and I got down to the podium thing there and most of the people sitting in this lecture room at Boston College, a
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Jesuit institution as I recall, are wearing their brother this and brother that, they're monks and they've got their tonsure cut in the
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Hawaiian yards. And as I walked up to the podium, all of a sudden, and this was not what
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I had planned, and generally I don't do this, I'm not one of the, you know, spirit moved me to all of a sudden do something completely different type of situation that can get you in a lot of trouble, but I just stood there and I said, the
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Book of Mormon is the Word of God. And I stopped. And you can just see, you know, everybody who had fallen asleep at that point wakes up and they're like, wow, those two guys on the bikes just showed up.
36:21
And then I said, now, if I accept the ultimate authority of the prophet in Salt Lake City, that is going to be my conclusion and I can come to no other conclusion.
36:31
And in essence, what Mr. Matics has done this evening is he has said the canon of the Roman Catholic Church is correct because we say so.
36:39
It is an argument from authority. That's right. And really press it. And that really, in each one of these debates, it ends up coming back to that particular issue.
36:46
Oh, absolutely. It's the trump card that he pulled out in my debate several times and he, of course, is going to pull it out in your debate with him as well.
36:53
I'm certain that he will. Now, here's what he had to say about Sunerekamai, and now we get the specifics of what we talked about a couple of times.
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Oops, let me make sure I'm on the right. There we go, right one. Here we go. ...begun to have sexual relations with Mary at that point, that their grammar requires it.
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Now, what can we say about these two points that this one passage refers to?
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The first thing that we can say is that even Protestant commentators and Protestant lexicons, that is, dictionaries of the
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Greek language, point out every single one. And I will ask Mrs. Benson to produce one single instance tonight in your hearing of any
37:34
Greek lexicon written by a Protestant or Catholic, doesn't matter, which said that the phrase translated, come together, has as its primary purpose sexual relationships, so that there would need to be a clear statement in the context precluding this.
37:54
Now, the first question I ask is, how can a person who has a degree in Greek make the kind of presentation that was just made in light of the fact that he would have to have at least a working basic knowledge of the function of a lexicon?
38:12
Yeah, that's right. And I pointed that out too later on in the debate, or maybe it was before,
38:18
I don't remember. A lexicon, the purpose of a lexicon is, and by the way, he pulls the same technique or strategy, we'll call it, in reference to hetos, who?
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And he says that you can go to any lexicon, you won't find any difference in the semantic range between hetos and hetos, who?
38:40
Well, that's not surprising, given the fact that lexicons are not there to deal with the connotations of a word or a
38:48
Greek construction as it's used in the literature. It is there to give the semantic range, the basic denotation of the word, and confine it to that in the semantic range.
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The example that I give here that is sort of an analogous example is the phrase, aphrihu, which means the same thing, by the way.
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It's translated until, just like hetos, who is. And you won't find a treatment of aphrihu by itself.
39:17
You're going to find aphrihu in the lexicon, but it's going to be right next to aphri, by itself. But what lexicons don't tell you is what every single
39:26
New Testament scholar that addresses this issue will concede. And I did my master's work on the
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Lord's Supper, so I know this. In 1 Corinthians 11, 26, you have a statement where Paul says as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the
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Lord's death until he comes. That's aphrihu. And what every scholar,
39:50
New Testament scholar, that addresses this issue concedes is, anytime aphrihu is used with the subjunctive, it always denotes a goal.
40:00
And so the proper translation of that passage is, you proclaim the Lord's death until the goal of his coming is reached.
40:07
Which means that there's a theological implication to that. There's an eschatological view of the
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Lord's Supper there. Well, you wouldn't get that simply by turning to Bauer, Arendt, Gingrich, and Danker.
40:19
You need to go beyond that and turn to New Testament studies and to Greek grammar studies. And this is the mistake that Jerry Matitick makes.
40:27
It's the mistake that Roman Catholic apologists make on a regular basis when dealing with these things. And I can understand when someone like Patrick Madrid, who is not trained in the biblical languages specifically, simply parrots what he's been told by other people.
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However, that's not the case with Jerry Matitick. That's right. He doesn't have that excuse. He should know better.
40:49
He should. He definitely should. You mentioned the discussion of Heos Hu. Here is some of what he had to say.
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Well, first of all, this is Patriot Nick in his own book. Whoa! Whoa!
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That was when they were attacking him. What in the world happened to that one?
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I have absolutely, positively no idea. Let me see if I can play that again and see if it'll clear up.
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If not, I'll have to go to the next one. Well, first of all, that one must have gotten corrupted.
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Let's try this one. Wow! The aliens have landed on my computer.
41:27
My goodness. Somebody's been to a virus. No. I have absolutely no idea what happened there.
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What I can do here is go to another program and pull them up fairly quickly. I have absolutely no idea what happened to that at all.
41:40
Let's see what it sounds like here. Well, first of all, this is Patriot Nick in his own book. According to Paul Seaton's Another standard apologetics works.
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There are many places where the preposition haos doesn't imply a change.
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Psalm 110, verse 1. God the Father saying to God the Son sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.
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After our Lord conquers all his enemies, God doesn't say now get out of my sight. We read the statement in 2
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Samuel 6, 23 that Michal, King Saul's daughter, King David's wife, had no children until the day of her death.
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She began to have children posthumously after she died. And there are many passages.
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Now, stung by the fact that there are many places where the English word until the
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Greek preposition haos, the Hebrew preposition ad, clearly indicates that something can be true until it's point
42:40
A and continue to be true, a rather novel argument has been hatched in the last couple of years in Protestant apologetics, perhaps pioneered by Mr.
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Stenson, I want to give credit where credit is due, that okay, we won't use, we won't confine ourselves, we don't even look at as relevant the places where the
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Greek word haos is used. We'll only look at the passages where it's haos who. And Mr.
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Stenson pointed out that James White used this in a debate against me a couple of years ago.
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Now, I pointed out in that debate some things that Mr. Stenson didn't mention repeatedly. I want to stop it there for a moment, aside from the fact that we need to escape from the board.
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That statement that was just made, where he said, he mentioned our debate, I had briefly mentioned the haos who issue, and he says right there, and I love,
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I was going to say I love how he does this, no I don't, I detest how he does this, but he does this all the time.
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He will say, well, Mr. Stenson didn't mention to you, Mr. White forgot to tell you, and it's always said in such a way that there is an insinuation of dishonesty, an insinuation of trying to hide the truth, and in reality, the untruth here is coming from Jerry's perspective, because what people need to realize is what he then goes on to say here, and I will play it, it's understandable sort of, but I don't know what happened, it just sort of got weird here,
44:08
I guess my sound card has gone wacky or something, but what he now says that he said to me, he did not say to me in that debate.
44:16
In fact, when you listen to the first of the great debates from 1996, I believe, when
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I presented this, his basic response was, uh, that was about the depth of it.
44:29
The next year, and this is another thing, the next year, we're debating Sola Scriptura, and in his closing statement on Sola Scriptura, a completely different subject, he spends a number of minutes presenting what he wished he could have said the year before.
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Now, on any level, on any basic level of debate, forensic debate, he would lose that debate immediately.
45:01
He'd be disqualified. You do not raise issues like that in a closing statement. You're not even supposed to be presenting new material in a closing statement.
45:07
You're disqualified if you do that. But to go back to the previous debate from a year ago, and go, you know,
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I don't like how I respond to that. I think I could take some time here. That shows a tremendous disrespect, not only for your opponent, but for the audience as well.
45:21
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. It's just incredible. Well, anyways, here's what you forgot to tell everybody,
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Eric. And that is that, um, there are at least five things wrong with saying, the
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Greek phrase used in Matthew 1 .25 must mean, even if Hales doesn't by itself, must mean that Joseph would have had to change his abstinence afterwards.
45:46
He had to have elusive reserve. First of all, as Mr. Svensson has already alluded to, any first -year
45:52
Greek student should know the difference between a preposition and a conjunction. Now, Mr. Svensson has said that, um, that Hales can be used as a preposition or a conjunction.
46:05
I would like to ask him to show us that. Not to simply state it and expect us to take it on his face, but to show us other passages.
46:14
I just love when he challenges you, we don't want to just take anything on your own words, you know.
46:20
We don't want any unsubstantiated assertions. And I'm like, you know, if we cut out all of Jerry's unsubstantiated assertions, that debate would have been about 14 minutes long.
46:29
Yeah, you may be right there. How do you respond to what, uh, if you could have stopped him right then, and you did get an opportunity to respond, but again, you're having to respond to four or five things, not just one.
46:41
If you had the luxury of just simply really expanding on it, what would you have said to him at that point?
46:47
Well, what I did say in my rebuttal to that was to cite 15 passages where Hales by itself is used in the very way he denies it can be used.
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His whole premise is, Matthew had to use Hales who, he could not have used Hales alone, because Hales alone is a preposition, and Hales who is a conjunction, of course, that's just not true.
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He claims to be citing that from a grammar, and I don't remember what grammar he cited, but he must have misunderstood that grammar, because it is clear that when you go to those passages,
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Hales by itself is being used as a conjunction, not a preposition. The other part of it is, he appealed to the
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Septuagint usage of Hales and Hales who, and that, I think, is another mistake that is often made by Roman Catholic apologists in dealing with this issue.
47:34
They engage in what is called synchronic Greek analysis, which is, you know, we can go back however far we want, all the way back to Homer if we want to, and find out what this word ever meant in its entire lifetime, and that's the semantic range, forever and ever, amen.
47:52
And, of course, that's just not true. Words undergo etymological changes, and a word can have a semantic range in one era, and not have that same semantic age.
48:04
It could broaden, it could narrow, it could change it completely. And that happens all the time with Greek words.
48:09
And now, when did you think of the let example? Oh, I believe it was when
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I heard him debating you on this issue, and trying to go back to the
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Septuagint, as his proof that those who can mean these things, and Adolphos can mean brother, and can mean,
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I'm sorry, can mean close relative in the New Testament, which it just doesn't. And so I thought, well, what is analogous to that?
48:38
Well, the thing that's analogous today is to take a major translation like the
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King James Version, which is read by a majority of Christians still, and it is still a top seller, and to posit from that that since so many
48:54
Christians use the King James Version, we must all be speaking Elizabethan English today. And of course, when you go to that passage in 2
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Thessalonians, I believe, and you find Paul saying that he who now letteth will continue to let until he's taken out of the way.
49:14
Well, modern translations are going to have he who restrains, or he who hinders, or he who forbids, will forbid, until he's taken out of the way.
49:22
Let had a semantic range back in the 1600s that it doesn't have today. One of the meanings was to allow, but the other one was just the opposite.
49:31
It was to prohibit. And of course, I brought that up in my closing statement in an analogy of misdramatics, and of course, misdramatics conceded at that point that it would be confusing for him to use that kind of language.
49:45
But he goes on to misconstrue the point that I made even after that. And he says, look, it's not analogous because in the case of let, it changed entirely.
49:56
Well, no, it doesn't. It doesn't change entirely. It still has the same meaning that it has today, even back then. And it is completely analogous because in the
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Septuagint, in a handful of cases, even there, it's a rare instance, heos, who can mean what the
50:09
Roman Catholic needed to mean in Matthew 125 for their position to be true, but it never means that in the contemporary literature of the
50:16
New Testament. Right. Well, I think he understood that. I'm wondering if he's come up with some other way of trying to get around it since then.
50:23
I certainly haven't heard anything about it. Well, I hope he drops that line of reasoning altogether. I'd be interested in how he addresses it. Well, it'll be interesting to see indeed.
50:30
one of my favorite, and I wish I'd queued up, one of my favorite incidents in a debate that I did was with Jerry in the
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Mary debate. You may recall that Jerry really did not like whatsoever my constant asking him questions
50:54
Okay, Mr. Matitix, who in the 2nd century believed this? Who in the 3rd century believed this?
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Mr. Matitix, who in the 4th century? And you could just hear the anger sort of rising.
51:08
Well, Mr. White, they didn't have to do that. He did not like being put on the historical hot seat in essence.
51:16
And then when we got into the last section, I could tell the audience itself was getting a little bit on the there was some pent up emotion in the audience.
51:28
And I started down the centuries road again and I said, who in the 3rd century believed this?
51:35
And he goes, Mr. White, not every single early church father needs to make reference to these things.
51:41
And I said, Jerry, I'll take just one! And the whole place just exploded. I mean, there was yelling and clapping and hooting in the whole nine yards because everybody was thinking the same thing.
51:52
Everyone could hear it. How could he not hear it? Is what everyone was wondering.
51:58
How could he not understand that? And you had a similar situation and I played it on the program a couple of dividing lines ago and I with especially the sound card all messed up.
52:11
I'm not going to bother to replay it again. But you had a similar moment when you said Mr. Matitix, you asked him the
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Peter's mother -in -law question. And there are only a few times that you can catch
52:26
Jerry Matitix in a situation where he is just completely and totally speechless.
52:34
He had no idea where in the world you were going with that. When did you thought that one up?
52:41
I thought that up while I was preparing for the debate. It was probably a month or two before the debate actually took place.
52:49
I thought there has to be he keeps asking this logical fallacy that we have to have a passage in Scripture that specifically says
52:56
Mary had other children before we can actually believe that Mary had other children. There are inferences that we use all the time in theology that are natural inferences from the text.
53:07
And so I decided to use the Peter analogy. We know from Scripture that Peter had a mother -in -law.
53:13
The Scripture tells us that. We know he had a wife. But it never says that Peter's mother -in -law was the mother of Peter's wife.
53:23
It never says that. So I asked him do you believe he had a mother -in -law and is there a relationship between Peter's mother -in -law and Peter's wife?
53:34
And of course he had to concede yes there is. That's a natural inference. The natural inference applies the same way with the relationship the common relationship between Jesus and his mother and Jesus and his brothers and sisters.
53:48
Exactly. You can tell it took a while for him to get that though. He wasn't sure where you were going with it.
53:55
And I can understand. I mean you know that was not a question he'd ever been asked before. But it took him and then eventually he just had to say well that doesn't help your case at all.
54:04
Well of course it helps my case. What are you talking about? I just established my case. That's right.
54:10
He's asking for the same evidence that he himself allows in other situations. It was pretty hilarious that point.
54:16
I've got one more cut I'm going to try to get in here before we run out of time today. This one illustrates how to make it sound like your own scholars disagree with you when you both know that those scholars weren't even addressing your argument.
54:30
Let's see if this can sound good enough to understand. A New Testament scholar an evangelical
54:35
Protestant who lives at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California who says in his massive commentary on St.
54:42
Matthew on page 25 commenting on Haos 2 he says quote By itself Haos who which belongs to Matthew's preferred diction says when
54:51
Matthew uses Haos he prefers to follow it with who. He uses that that's characteristic of his style.
54:58
By itself Haos who which belongs to Matthew's preferred diction does not necessarily imply that Joseph and Mary entered into normal sexual relations after Jesus' birth.
55:07
And I could quote other scholars who say and admit the same thing. So we see that this this argument that if we really pay attention to Matthew 1 verse 18 to 25 we have to reject that Professor Virginia of Mary doesn't hold water.
55:22
Even Prodo admits that this argument is not an argument against the Professor Virginia of Mary. So we need to reject this argument and say this does not prove
55:31
Mr. Stenson's point it does not refute the classic 2000 year old teaching of the church that Mary was a virgin in her entire life.
55:39
You'll have to come up with another argument than this one. Now, first of all I just love this constant 2000 year stuff.
55:48
I guess for some people it works. Let's face it. You just keep hitting your audience with that over and over again and eventually they're going to actually believe that what you're saying is true.
55:58
But quoting these scholars as if they were actually and this was clearly what he was attempting to communicate that they were examining your argumentation your presentation that they were interacting with the position you had enunciated and they were rejecting it.
56:17
Now, wouldn't you agree with me? Jerry knows that's not the case. Oh, absolutely. I think it's a political point he was making.
56:25
It's a lot of rhetoric with very little substance. Not many scholars in fact I don't know of any that have actually gone through the trouble of examining every instance of that OSU but that is the natural way that we do
56:36
New Testament studies. And of course it happens on a daily basis. These reconstructions are commonly undergoing
56:47
New Testament scrutiny and when they do we find that okay, there are various nuances that we just really didn't see before.
56:56
And so, of course, these scholars are not interacting with my argument. But to raise their names as if you it's the attempt to marginalize what you're arguing.
57:08
And then, of course, to do that in the context of his dismissing Fitzmeyer and others who have been
57:17
Oh, it's huge. Especially and I think it's more of a double standard for Jerry in light of the fact that he's talking about people like Fitzmeyer who, as you pointed out, have been appointed to the papal biblical commission by two different popes.
57:31
And you did say, and I was sort of going come on, say it. You did say and I don't think
57:37
Jerry has been something along the lines of I don't think it's something that's happened for Jerry or something along those lines.
57:42
I doubt the pope even knows who Jerry is. That's exactly right. So, for him to stand up there and say, you need to be in submission to the
57:50
Roman Catholic Church and at the same time turn around and show that kind of, what would you call it?
57:59
chutzpah to in essence say, well, this man may be viewed by the current living pope as one of the greatest biblical scholars within what we call the church, but I have the standing to in essence dismiss him based upon my own personal interpretation of tradition.
58:17
Well, that's just it. He pulls the trump card of fallibility and infallibility of the church, but then he freely dismisses that trump card when it comes to his accusing the
58:26
Roman Catholic Church of being an apostasy and all these modernist scholars who are disagreeing with him now, even though they are fully embraced by Rome.
58:35
Completely, I mean, there's no, none of the people that you mentioned other than Kung, have had any action taken against them, correct?
58:44
Not only have they had no action taken against they have been invited on board of the Pontifical Biblical Commission to help set doctrine.
58:51
It's absolutely incredible. Dr. Svensson, thank you so much for joining us today.
58:56
Isn't it nice to get a chance to say all the things you want to say? It's a pleasure. By the way, your audience may not have appreciated this, but there was the noise of the tearing up of a poster board in the background in his last statement there.
59:13
And you know as well as I do that when he is tearing up poster boards, that means he has written on there the
59:18
Protestant argument, and he's standing in front of the audience tearing it up to show how this has now been destroyed.
59:24
What I wanted to suggest to you, James, is you take a roll of masking tape with you so that you can tape these poster boards back together after he tears them up.
59:31
Wow, incredible. Well, thanks a lot for joining us today, Dr. Svensson. I hope everybody enjoyed our discussion today.
59:38
Thursday night we'll be talking about the debate with David Bernard, some other things that have taken place.
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Thanks for listening to AOMIN .org.
01:00:29
That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.