A Helpful Discussion with the Muslim Metaphysician, Jake Brancatella

Hello, greetings and welcome to the VineLine. My name is James White and we are back in the AO Max studios today. And that's because we have a special guest and we are joined today. It was first introduced to me as the Muslim metaphysician, which made me sort of go, hmm, OK, that's not a term I've heard before.

But then let me give the background so you understand why all this is going on. Jake Brancatella was introduced to me by Yusuf Ismail. Now, some of you may remember the name Yusuf Ismail. Yusuf and I have debated.

Well, I've lost track of how many times, but we debated. The most memorable debate was in the Juma Masjid in Durban, South Africa. And that, of course, is available online and we've done a number of other debates.

I think the last debate we did was in that Anglican church. I think it is down the Durban area and it was on is the Quran uncreated or something along those lines. I'm trying to remember specifically what it was about, but it was a little while ago.

And so Yusuf got in touch with me and said, have you heard about this young fellow? I think it would be worthwhile if you all had a conversation. And I was like, well, OK, could you link me to some stuff so I could listen?

I sort of like to hear what someone has to say. And and so he did. And I loaded up a bunch of stuff to listen to on the trip that I took to Pryor, Oklahoma. And so I started listening and very quickly realized, yeah, this is something we want to do.

We want to have Jake. I want to have this conversation. So let me say hello to Jake, the Muslim metaphysician coming to us from the East Coast. A little bit. Probably. I bet you it's much more humid where you are than than where I am right now.

I can pretty much assure that. But I bet it's hotter here than it is where you are.

Yes. Yes. Pretty humid here now. Oh, yeah. But yeah. How's it going, guys? Appreciate you having me on, Dr. White.

Well, yeah, you know, we haven't really chatted except a little bit beforehand. We're having a little back and forth. But but I mentioned in my emails to you that I got a chance to listen to really hours and hours of stuff that you've done.

The whole testing the Trinity series and then some of the reviews that you did.

I found it really interesting. How did you make it through? Wasn't it painful?

No, not at all. Because I'm I'm I'm thinking about how unusual it is to hear a Muslim who is quoting the sources and materials that you're quoting, first of all, and then speaking to other Muslims about subjects that I've just never heard anyone mention in this context before.

I mean, in my experience, even in talking to some of the most accomplished Muslim practicers of Dawa, it's very hard to get them to even read my book on the subject, let alone be diving into the Oxford material.

Yeah, there you go. You know, Oxford Dictionary of Christology. And I do run into people who read a lot of William Lane Craig. That's a whole different issue. But you are you just got to admit you're not your run of the mill Muslim.

Wouldn't you agree?

Yeah, with respect to the Dawa scene, as you mentioned, I'm not sure I have some theories as to why exactly that is. I'm not exactly sure. Right. You you might have some theories about why that is. I don't know.

Why do you think that I seem to be unique in this kind of thing?

Well, you you are unique. I appreciated your attitude in addressing so many of the issues. You were always trying to be restrained in the rhetoric that was being used. I only pointed out to you two things that I found humorous.

One was the video. Is your favorite apologist a heretic that had a picture of me as the screenshot? But then you never talked about me. Yeah. So and then there was a super chat thing where someone said something.

It was very poetic. And I realize I've never done that super chat stuff, but I realize you're seeing it for the first time as you're reading it. So it's not like you can, you know, really monitor that stuff.

But so I knew you were aware of who I was. But no, it's just very, very unusual to have these kinds of conversations on the topics that you're addressing. And so one of the things I did after listening to some of the series as you did and some of the dialogues you did, and then at least a portion of the program where you had some comments about what happened.

And I don't know, what was this about two months ago where Anthony Rogers and David Wood and Sam Shamoon had the conversation with, was it Sheikh Uthman? Am I correct? Yeah. Correct. OK. Yeah. You were with some other guys commenting on certain aspects of of that particular conversation.

I started looking and going, I bet he has a video somewhere about his conversion. And you do. So that, to me, was really important to listen to because I want to know where people are coming from. I hope you don't mind if I give the background here.

But when I started doing debates with Muslims, I started with Shabir Ali at Biola University in 2006. And especially when I go overseas, like when I would debate Adnan Rashid, Adnan was used to going to speaker's corner and just sort of like being in a Muhammad Ali fight.

You know what I mean? Just trading blows and speaking loudly and stuff like that. And finally, we were in Dublin. I just thought, you know what? I want to have lunch with this guy and I want to explain to him why I do what I do.

Because if he could at least understand why I approach this subject, why I care about him as an individual, it might change everything. And it did. And I've tried to, when it's possible, do that kind of thing now, get together with folks and get them to know me as an individual, me to get to know them.

And it just makes the debate so much more useful and it lowers the temperature level. And as you know, in discussing some of these topics, the more emotions are involved, the less rationality is going to be involved at the same time.

So I listened to your conversion video. And so what I found interesting is you're a former Roman Catholic, right? Yes. Yeah. But it sounds like it was like in high school that because you said you were not confirmed.

So that would be fairly young, right?

Yeah, I wasn't confirmed because I was a little bit of a rebel and they kicked me out of Sunday school and they didn't confirm me.

So it was around the same time then that you start having conversations with a Muslim classmate or something. Was that what I understood?

A few years after that. So that was probably when I was about, I don't know, 13, 14. OK. Because I think that's around when you get confirmed as a Catholic. Right. And later when I was about a junior in high school, so I was about 16, 17.

I, one of my best friends in high school at the time was a Muslim. And we never really talked about it much until probably senior year of high school. He started to talk to me about it a little bit more.

I forget. I mean, it's over 10 years ago. So I forget exactly what it was about.

Oh, Jake, Jake, Jake, 10 years. Come on, bro. I'm just about to hit 60. So you can't, you cannot use the it was a long time ago excuse yet. I'm sorry that you're not allowed to do that until you're minimally 50 years old.

So you need to know the rules about that. So, so senior year then.

Yes, it was about senior year. And he just brought certain things up to me. And I said, you know, well, let me just check out what this religion is about, because I didn't know anything about it. So I started reading the Koran from there.

And then, you know, I don't want to progress too much in the story, but that's kind of how it got started.

Right. Well, but you did. I'm not sure when you made the video I listened to. But you had said in the video that for you had only been Sunni for about two years at the time you made that video. Is that fairly recently?

Yeah. So about two, a little over two years now. I became a Sunni. So when I first became a Muslim, quote unquote, I was a Koranist. So I don't know how much your audience is familiar with it. But basically the idea is that the Koran is the sole authority in traditional Sunni Islam.

We have a secondary source, which is the Sunnah, which is basically the sayings, deeds and sort of practices of the Prophet Muhammad. And I rejected that outright. So I just strictly just stuck to the Koran alone.

I was very kind of militant in that for about, I want to say, almost eight years. Until about two years ago, I transitioned to a more traditional Sunni Islam. So that's about two years ago now.

So we have discussed that on the program, because it's fascinating to look at the various strands of Islam and the difference between Sunnis. And, well, there's all sorts of difference between different schools amongst the Sunnis, but then the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

And then we both know a fellow who is Koran only, who was the first Muslim that I debated, but not my first Muslim debate. I think I explained that. But Hamza Abdul Malik was a fellow that I encountered.

He first started coming to debates I was doing with Roman Catholics, ironically, on Long Island. And he would always get in line to ask questions during the audience Q &A that generally had absolutely positively nothing to do with the topic of the debate at all.

But, you know, he was dressed in, at that time, he was still Sunni. So he was dressed in the Muslim garb and everyone was very interested in what he had to say. And he seemed like a really nice guy. So eventually, I think it was 1999, we had a very interesting debate.

And then years later, I heard that he had left Sunni Islam for a Korani or Koran only perspective. So yours was the opposite movement. And so you've been Sunni for about two years, which would mean that the authoritative interpretation of the Hadith, the various schools of interpretation of how to understand the Hadith, to rate the Hadith, whether they're Saki or Hassan or whatever, these would be issues that would be now something that you're dealing with that you really wouldn't have been dealing with before.

So that puts you pretty much in the mainstream of certainly about 85 of the world's Muslims are Sunni. And so that helps us to understand, you know, where you're coming from. But the question then becomes, your focus is the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation.

And you have a bachelor's degree in philosophy. So hence, Muslim metaphysician, you're coming at this. Well, I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of Muslims around the world. Very few of them are coming at it from the perspective that you're coming at it from.

And that is from a very heavily philosophical perspective. In fact, in my experience, the Wahhabi Salafi range of thought really has a deep distrust of philosophical categories. Have you encountered that?

Is that something that you have to deal with as you present your materials?

It depends. I mean, even the Salafis are not a monolith, so I don't want to paint them with a broad stroke. But yeah, I mean, you definitely get that sometimes. It depends on the group. But then you have some Salafis that are more philosophically minded.

So you do come across people on both sides of that issue. I myself, obviously, I have a background in philosophy and much of my reading is in that area because I'm just really interested in it. So, yeah, I mean, I get that based on certain comments that I receive in YouTube comments because I haven't smartened up and got rid of them like you guys yet.

Well, let me tell you something right now. What I've been told, I haven't verified this, but what I've been told is if you turn comments off, it's deleterious to YouTube's promoting your videos. So we just started that very long, long time ago, mainly because we had so many atheists coming in and just filling the boxes with profanity and stuff.

I wasn't going to invest the time in monitoring that kind of stuff. But just be aware that it might impact your distribution if you turn the comments off. So that's what I've been told.

Yeah, that's primarily why I've left it on, because I know it's good for the algorithms and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, turning back to the Salafi thing, yeah, of course, I think there are certain strands of thought within Christianity and Islam where you can see certain parallels that one group tends to be more philosophically minded than the other.

And of course, there's not a one for one comparison, but I think it can be said on both sides in that way.

Yeah, OK. Well, it's just I've listened to a lot of lectures and yes, I do know there's all sorts of different perspectives there. But some of the strongest arguments have come from people who had a real deep distrust of some of the developments in Islamic history, where they feel the pure message of the prophet and his companions ended up getting overlaid with a philosophical and hence non-representational tradition that came about centuries and centuries later.

And I mean, that's part of the Wahhabi Salafi drive is to go back to the original sources and to shed some of that kind of stuff. And so I've heard that. And so when I heard where you were going, again, the most important thing to me was I hear someone who is addressing topics that I would say 99 .9 of the Muslims with whom I've dialogued could not give me an accurate definition of the hypostatic union.

That's not a criticism. That's just fact. I would sadly say that probably 85 of most Christians could not give you an accurate definition of the hypostatic union either. So that doesn't mean anything other than you're just doing something that I have expected someone to do.

But you're the first person I've encountered that's been doing it in this way. And you asked why I might think that might be. I mentioned, I'm not sure if you have my book on whatever Christian needs to know about the Quran, but I mentioned in a footnote in there that I think one of the reasons that many Muslims hesitate to do the reading that you've been doing, and maybe most of your readings have been in philosophical stuff, so maybe not so much that, but especially I've met a lot of Muslims who were really hesitant to dive very deeply into biblical topics, biblical history, transmission of the text, things like that, was represented in a hadith where, if I recall, it was Uthman was reading from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Old Testament, and the prophet came in and his face turned red.

In other words, he was angry. And he basically said to Uthman, is not what I have given you sufficient for you? And it just seems like many times I've encountered folks and I've asked them, you know, well, you know, I've read the Quran multiple times.

I've read all of Muslim and Bukhari. Why wouldn't you maybe read a few of the Gospels or something along those lines? And there was just this hesitancy. And I wonder if that's where it comes from is that kind of mindset that if I read that stuff, then I'm in some way sliding the final nature of the revelation of the Quran or something along those lines.

That's just one theory I've thought of. What do you think of that?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. It's really difficult to say. I think it's more to do with the method of dawah that's been prominent for the past 30 or so years. I know you're familiar with Ahmed Deedat, Zakir Naik and these kind of people, and I'm not saying anything bad about them, but I think that their methodology and work has been very influential on Muslims for either good or bad reasons.

And I think that's just the fact of the matter. I don't think that really can be disputed. And so I think much of the Islamic apologists, so to speak, have just been following in that sort of way of arguing things and haven't really looked as much into the philosophical issues or maybe some of more of the deeper theological concerns that I myself would have.

I think, at least in recent history, because that's all I know. I'm only 30 years old. So that's what I see personally is, I think, what the strongest reason would be. But I can't say for sure.

Yeah. No, Deedat had a lot to do with it. And I don't know if you've seen the debates I've done in South Africa with a gentleman who really purposefully attempts to speak like Deedat, dress like Deedat, stand as Deedat stood.

But, yeah, he's still, as far as I know, probably the most listened to Muslim speaker in the world, even though he's been dead for, what, 16 years, something like that. So, yeah, he has a huge, huge influence.

And I have said, I've been saying since I started to Muslims on the other side, guys, you've got to step up your game. We're well past the Deedat age. And so I congratulate you for being a part of that.

I don't want to get you in any trouble with anybody for saying that. So let's talk a little bit about some of your key issues. I have up on the screen, actually, a screenshot from one of your videos, the first video on the logical problem of the Trinity.

And so I don't know if you've come up with something fancier than this that you wanted to screen share or not, but it's straight from your own video anyways, because you said you specifically wanted to make some comments.

I had commented briefly on this and had basically said to people, you know, this is where the conversation normally has to go in speaking with Muslims or, to be honest with you, in speaking with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, in any context where a Christian is seeking to define and defend the doctrine of the Trinity.

This is really what the issue is. In fact, I think it's probably in the first chapter, first one or two chapters of the Forgotten Trinity. Do you want to run through it or what?

Yeah, I'll run through it. I just want to say something briefly about my approach in a little bit more detail to these discussions and why I would even be looking at something like the quote unquote logical problem of the Trinity.

Part of the reason is because when I was a Roman Catholic myself, some of the core doctrines like the Trinity and Incarnation, it didn't really make sense to me on a sort of just basic intuitive level, but I didn't have a way of really expressing that.

And so when I looked into it more and more, I realized, okay, what seems to be the problem is an example of this is what you have here on the board with the logical problem of the Trinity. But why I feel that this approach, at least from my perspective, is necessary is because the sort of strictly scriptural and maybe even a little bit historical debates that you, in tandem with the Muslim apologist that you've been speaking to for 30 years or whatever it is, I feel like the conversation's gotten a little stale and the same sort of arguments and talking points have been repeated over and over again.

And I think that what is undergirding a lot of it, at least from my perspective, I don't know if many of the other Muslims feel the same way, but from my perspective is the logical coherence of the doctrine.

So I want to differentiate between my sort of approach so people understand where I'm coming from, as opposed to this purely scriptural thing. The way that I look at it, and obviously this is going to be the fundamental difference between you and myself, Dr. White, is that in order for a doctrine or a belief set, whatever it is, to be considered true, it has to be at minimal logically coherent.

And if it's not, then I'm going to have an immediate issue with it. So I think it's a necessary component. It's not necessarily sufficient, but it is necessary. So that's where I start off with. And then if I take a belief or a belief system and I think that it entails a contradiction or some sort of incoherence, then that's going to give me reason to cast doubt on the belief itself.

And so what I've mainly been doing in my videos is saying, well, all right, we've been arguing about whether or not the Trinity is in the Bible for how long now? People who are far better than me can probably do a better job of it from the Muslim side and obviously from the Christian side.

So all of those debates are there. People are free to watch them. I'm saying, okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that the Trinity is in the Bible and explicitly in the New Testament at least.

Well, what does that leave us with? What are the implications? Is it a sound doctrine or is it incoherent? And so I obviously think that it's not sound. And I try to, obviously, and this is where we would differ, I don't engage as much in the scriptural part because I feel that it's much of a kind of tit for tat.

Like you quoted a verse and then I quote John 17 3 and then you say it's out of context and it's like this kind of back and forth thing. So I'm just explaining to the audience that my approach is different in that sense.

So I kind of grant it for the sake of argument that the Trinity is in the Bible. And then I say, well, if it is in the Bible, does it make sense? So that's kind of my basic foundation. Now, before I go into the LPT, I don't know if you have any comments on that.

Yeah, I would like to comment because, as I mentioned to you, I do think that is one of the key issues. And that is, I think, the philosophical explication of the categories that are inherent in a discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, which include being person, nature of the relationship with the divine persons.

All of these things, from a truly Christian, a believing Christian perspective, are determined and defined by the biblical categories first and foremost. And I think one of the reasons that I was yelling alone in my RV somewhere in Oklahoma as you were properly and contextually quoting William Lane Craig was because of that very issue of my saying, look, this is the foundation where we're coming from.

And here would be the question I would have for you. And by the way, if I ask a question, if we get into an area and you're like, I'd like to do some reading on that, I'd like to put that off to another time, please feel free to do that.

We're not trying to do a debate today. We can do a debate on a specific topic at another time. And it seems to be working fairly well. But do you apply the same standards to your own faith that you are asking me to apply to mine?

Because if you're familiar with my debates, I have said for many years that we need to have equal scales, that we need to be consistent in the criticisms that we're making of others. If I present an argument that refutes your position, but it refutes mine at the same time, I can't bury that fact.

I need to be open about that fact. And so in light of that, would it be as part of your regular studies, not just on the doctrines of Trinity, but also on the logical coherence of Tawhid and how, for example, you can understand the relationship.

I know you do deal with the issue of the attributes of Allah in regards to Tawhid, but in regards to how love can exist in absolute monotheism and how some of the things that are asserted in historic Sunni Islam in regards to the Quran, the nature of the Quran, certain actions of Allah.

These all seem to be relevant issues as well, that as a Christian, I need to respond to what you're saying, but we also need to make sure. I mean, do you share that emphasis that, yes, you need to use the same standards in the positive presentation of your faith that you would then require us to use in providing our response?

Yes, definitely. I think, of course, my view, whatever it is, obviously I'm a Sunni Muslim, it should be coherent. If I think that God is, in Christian terminology, one being and one person, well, how does that work in eternity past?

I do engage things like, it's known in the philosophical literature as the Richard argument, which is this sort of argument from love, because it was kind of popularized by Richard of St. Victor and then Richard Swinburne as of recent.

So, I am engaged in that stuff. Of course, the idea of the Quran, well, if it's eternal, then what is it? Its relationship to God, God and His attributes. Now, on my channel, I haven't gone in depth with a lot of those things.

I recently did do a video on Allah and His attributes and the relationship between the two, which was prompted by that discussion between Sheikh Uthman and Anthony Rogers. But yeah, I mean, long story short, yes, it should be equal scales, and that should be, if you had difficult questions on that side of the coin, I should be able to answer them.

So, if we ever did do a debate, that would be probably a good topic of Trinity versus Tawhid, something like that, to where you can ask difficult questions and we could kind of go back and forth. I'm all for that.

I think to deny that would be kind of a cop out from my perspective. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not prepared right now to go through every single one of those points. I definitely do think that that needs to be equal scales in that respect.

Yes, good. Well, that's good. So, LPT, go ahead, and I want to give you sufficient time to make any comments you want to make on that.

Okay. Yeah, so the way I set up the LPT in that particular video, and I want to make it clear, it's not a creation of my own. Much of the material I'm presenting is available in the literature. I'm not some guy that's kind of just a mastermind making all this stuff up.

The logical problem of the Trinity, the name also is not something that I've come up with. It's literally in the introduction to the text on, I think it's called Theological and Philosophical Essays on the Trinity, published by Oxford Press.

Yes, it is very expensive, so I'm not telling you to go out and buy it.

A number of the books that you made reference to were ridiculously expensive. You realize that like 12 people have read them. You do know that, right?

That's probably why I'm the only one talking about it, because nobody's reading it. They don't have the money to pay for it.

Don't any of your friends sort of take you aside once a while and go, yo, Jake, you need a life, dude.

Yeah, so I mean, yeah, it is difficult, especially in academia. They put a lot of these sort of deeper things behind a big paywall, and it's unfortunate, but it is the way it is. I can't break that barrier.

So anyway, on the LPT, it's not a creation of my own. I was kind of introduced to the terminology from Dr. Bo Branson. He's an Eastern Orthodox scholar, mainly in philosophy. He did his PhD on, it was literally called, The Logical Problem of the Trinity.

And I came across this literature specific on this, preparing for a debate slash discussion that I was supposed to have with him. And I went into a lot of detail on it. I started reading a lot more material.

Point is that this is kind of known terminology in the literature. Now, the way that Dr. Bo presents it, he presented it as seven premises. But I'm going to make it even simpler, because I think we can make it down to even three premises.

And that would just basically be that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God. So the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God. The Father, Son, and the Spirit are not each other. So they're not identical to each other.

And yet there's one God. So that's the basic idea. And the concern is, because in the seven premises, it just lists that out in a bit more detail. Well, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.

The Father is not the Son. The Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. There's exactly one God. So that's basically saying the same thing, but in seven premises instead of three.

Well, seven is a nice number. Yeah. And three is two, because that's the truth. Well, that's true. Yeah, they're both good numbers. They're both good. So the basic claim of the problem anyway is that these three or seven premises seem to be at odds with one another.

And one of the ways that you could see this is that sort of affirming the first six premises before you get to the last premise that there's exactly one God, it doesn't seem right. It seems that you would want to conclude that there's exactly three gods instead of one.

Because, well, if the Father's God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit's God, and they're not each other, then you have three is God statements. And it seems like you would have three gods instead of one.

And so on the surface level, that is the problem that's presented in the literature. And then because that's in the introduction to the text I brought up, it's literally, I think, on the first page where the author presents it.

And then subsequent articles in that book are trying to respond to that specific issue. How should we understand the terminology in the seven premises? And what are the different models associated with it?

Because I think something that's important for the viewers to understand, not just Christians, but Muslims as well, which I was kind of surprised at when I started researching this, is that from my perspective, there doesn't just seem to be one thing that is the Trinity.

There are all these different conceptions and models of the Trinity, and many times they're mutually exclusive. So if one is correct, then the other one can't be correct. And so the question is, well, which one is correct?

And most of my research is trying to figure out, well, which one makes the most sense, if any? And I think, and my claim is anyway, kind of fast forward, is that all of the models to me seem to either not really solve the problem, so they remain incoherent, or they take a heretical position, like I would argue Dr. William Lane Craig does, in order to maintain some type of coherence.

But yeah, so with that being said, I don't know if you want to respond to maybe how you understand what the LPT is supposed to be, even if you don't agree that it's a logical problem, what it's supposed to be.

Well, if you've seen my presentation where I'm teaching Christians, and of course Muslims, I hope that they listen in as well, what the doctrine of the Trinity is, the seven, if we were to do that one, I would take the seventh, start with the seventh, and say that everything else in the other six has to be interpreted in light of the epistemological foundation demanded by absolute monotheism.

So that, and this again, if you've looked at Forgotten Trinity, I'm going to be coming from a very different perspective, but you've also done some reading in church history. I've taught church history.

I started teaching church history in 1990, so that was just before you were born, right?

Yeah, I was born in 91.

Okay, so I was teaching church history, and I love it. I'm not one of those people that teaches church history and causes people to fall asleep. I always thought that teaching, even when I've taught Greek, I want the students to end up loving Greek, not hating Greek.

So that's actually a challenge sometimes, given the time frames you're allowed to have to teach. But in church history, you've done reading in church history, and I would argue more like an Athanasius or an Ignatius of Antioch, who's very, very early, as you know.

I mean, died 107 -108, because of the fact that they are being forced into defining things in light of the scriptures. And that's what I was saying to you. What is definitional here? What is the overarching presuppositional framework to define our epistemology?

And for much of philosophy, it is external philosophical concepts that are currently popular in that day. As you know, I mean, the Greeks had very different contexts than the Enlightenment, which has very different contexts than today.

And, you know, in philosophy, a philosophy textbook that was written 40 years ago is hopelessly outdated and not up to date and blah, blah, blah. So if you're going to have, and this is something that with a Muslim, I think we should be able to communicate with one another.

Because my assumption is in historic classical Islam, there is a divine revelation that does not change and is not dependent upon current philosophical popularity, shall we say. And so we share that, which means if that's true, then any philosophical expression has to be judged by the consistency of the divine revelation over time and not the other way around.

So that's why I say if you start with monotheism, there is exactly one being of God. Every other of the assertions requires definition from Scripture because it says the Father is God. Well, who's the Father?

How is the Father revealed in Scripture? How is there a difference between the utilization of the terminology of Father in the Tanakh, in the Old Covenant Scriptures, in the Hebrew Scriptures, and what's found in the New Testament?

When Jesus says to the Father in his high priestly prayer in John chapter 17, glorify me together with yourself, Father, with the glory that I shared with you before the world was, that has to be involved in our definition of the other six assertions.

Because it's assuming something about Father that if you only have the Old Testament, it's going to be different than you have the New. And it's asserting something about the Son and how the Son is differentiated from the Father.