Fake Memes, Monetization, Thomas and Dionysius

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We've got a lot to get to today. We might do another Zoom show. Those are always so good. You can't prepare for a Zoom show. I mean, I suppose you could announce a topic or something as if people would actually listen to you.

That normally doesn't work. But we'll do one before I head out again. I'm doing a pretty short little run to West Texas and New Mexico in just a matter of weeks. In fact, I didn't bring the calendar up.

I think it's less than two weeks. Yeah. Less than two weeks from now. It feels like it's farther away because we don't have our unit back. We're doing that one. Yeah. Less than two weeks. I need to pick it up on the 9th.

So yeah. Going to be in Lubbock and then in Las Cruces. So just getting to be in some churches there that again normally wouldn't get to be in places like that. Did you know the church exists outside of major metropolitan areas?

Yeah. It is there. It's sort of neat to get a chance to go there. In fact, I was talking to, I just briefly had an exchange with a pastor today. I wanted to stop by the church during the summer. I'd been there before and had a great time with the folks.

He was like, you know, we got a lot going on. I'm like, hey, I just want to be of assistance. If I can help the church. It was one of those situations where we don't ask an honorarium. Most churches give us something, but we don't ask it.

There are lots of times when that's necessary to be there. That's very helpful for them. When you support this ministry, you're allowing us to do that. I mean, it's the fact that the lights are still on and the air conditioning is running.

It's because there are just lots of regular folks. We have very, very few large donors at all. That's how we can go to smaller churches and minister in that context. A lot of people say, you're wasting the best years of your life.

I'm like, no, I'm not. I have a feeling if they were honest about it, some of the quote unquote big boys, the A-listers. I've never been an A-lister and I don't want to be an A-lister. I think some of them are a little jealous, to be honest with you.

I seem to be having too much fun, first of all. I think a bunch of them would sort of, the 13 ,000th time they get into an elevator with their little rolling bag to go to the same kind of hotel room again, they sort of go, that'd be sort of nice to have my own bed and my own pillow and my own food and my own shower.

Yeah, that would be nice. That's what I've got. It just happens to roll down the road with me. Which means you've got to repair it because certain states that will remain somewhat unnamed like New Mexico, Louisiana, Michigan, just don't repair their roads.

I do the best I can to avoid those craters and canyons on their interstates, but sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. You're laying, when you got a big old truck over here, you got no place to go.

You see it coming. It's like, hold on everybody. Here we go. Kaboom. It's just, yeah, yeah. It's just how it works. So anyway, anyway. Hey, I want to start off with this. Someone, I think posted this in our channel.

Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Imputed Righteousness of Christ

Stephen Boyce, Dr. Stephen Boyce was on this program a number of years ago, shortly after we built the large studio that we haven't used for a while. And we talked, as I recall about, if I remember, it was about Clement of Rome.

Which is super ironic because that epistle is so obviously an argument against Roman Catholicism. That is not the papacy functioning. That is a church without a monarchical bishop writing to another church without a monarchical bishop.

During the course of church history, early on, the New Testament pattern, which is plainly a plurality of elders, plainly without a pope. There is no papacy in the New Testament. I mean, the exegetical, eisegetical handstands you have to do to come up with that stuff is legendary.

And the only people who do it are the people who have already accepted Rome's claims of authority. But the New Testament pattern is bishops and elders are the same thing. Early on, that started to change, and the episkopos started moving away from the presbyteros, even though Paul uses the terms interchangeably.

And many Roman Catholic exegetes will admit that that's the case. And eventually, the presbyteroi, who are the equals of the episkopoi, the bishops, became hieroi, priests. A completely non-apostolic development, which causes all sorts of problems for Roman Catholicism.

Because in Roman Catholicism, Jesus literally ordained the apostles as priests at the Last Supper, when he said, do this in remembrance of me. A lot of people aren't aware of that. But since he used the imperatival form, do this, as command, and therefore the only way to do that is to work the miracle of transubstantiation, and therefore he had to be ordaining them as priests, because we know only priests can do that.

And it is just... Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are both studies in massive historical anachronism. How to read modern developments backward into history. That is the essence. And that's why a lot of my work right now is in the area of Eastern Orthodoxy, and specifically the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus, the claims of Craig Trulia regarding that subject, and how that's relevant to the veneration of icons as defined by the Second Nicene Council.

You know the debate coming up October 17th on that particular issue, which has direct relevance to both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, because both accept the Seventh Ecumenical Council as an ecumenical council, hence infallible.

Both interpret it very differently and make application of it very differently. Anybody that looks at the liturgical forms of those two faiths sees the connections, but also sees the differences. And especially in iconography, the function of icons.

And this is where, again, most evangelicals are like, come on, we don't know anything about Eastern Orthodoxy, we're hearing more about it now, I have a friend that converted, and it's a three-hour-long service standing, and stuff like this.

But most evangelicals are like, that's just popeless Catholicism. Well, I can see how looking at it from the outside, sure, there's all sorts of liturgical parallels, and to a Protestant that doesn't come from a liturgical background, yeah, I can see how it would appear that way, sure.

But there are actually some fascinating differences, functional differences, and that does impact the dialogues that we have together, and conversations we have together, and things like that. So anyways, so that's where a lot of my thinking right now is, is preparation for that debate, and I've got an article that I need to get written in a matter of weeks, I'm going to be writing it on the road, I know.

Still got a lot of work to do on that. Fascinating stuff, I'll be sharing a lot of it with you over the next number of months, and I know there are a number of you who do want that. I know there are a number of you who are like, yeah, my family, and I can't find anything.

By the way, Samuel Farag, his book in response to Eastern Orthodoxy should be out soon, I think. I haven't gotten my copy from Grace Bible Theological Seminary's publishing house, printing press thing, and then I got this one called Who's Orthodoxy, Evangelical or Eastern, Todd Jamison, James Wright.

Those are pseudonyms because these brothers work in challenging contexts, shall we say, overseas, and I have not looked. I am assuming this is available on Amazon. Who's Orthodoxy, Evangelical or Eastern.

But there are some books coming out. It has been the reality that when people are looking for information on Eastern Orthodoxy, there's been some scholarly stuff out there that's as exciting as chewing on aluminum foil, as passion-filled as chewing on aluminum foil.

Not much else. We've had Jason Wallace's stuff from ancientpaths .tv on YouTube, excellent videos, you know, Simon Licaris, and great stuff there. But now we're seeing some other stuff come out. Yes, sir?

So that's available not only on Amazon, it's available for free on Kindle as well as an audiobook. Really? Yeah. For free? $11 .99 for the paperback. Well, that's because you got to print it. Yeah. But free on Kindle.

That's what it's got here. Interesting. Kindle Unlimited. Okay,.

Good. So a little advertisement for the guys here. Todd Jamison, James Wright,.

Who's Orthodoxy Evangelical or Eastern? So I need to clarify, you have to have a Kindle Unlimited membership. Oh. That's where it's free. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you click on the Kindle, then what is it?

Well, I don't have that. Well, let's see what happens. It normally brings up a price. Join now. Oh. You can't click on the Kindle listing and... Okay, $5 .99 to buy. You're right, you're right. Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

That's what I figured, yeah. Yeah, it's normally not much. So yeah, it's good that there's stuff showing up, and we're going to try to add to that, at least in some substantial fashion. So anyway, that's a long ways, 15 minutes in to get back to this finally.

But Stephen Boyce, we saw over the years since he was on the program, saw him moving. It became pretty obvious where he was headed, that he was going to be swooned into Iber before long. And of course, no conversations with people like me.

That never happens. They know what they're going to hear, and they know I'm going to stare, look them right in the eye and go, okay, you're telling me that you once said that the imputed righteousness of Christ was your sole ground of peace with God, that that was the foundation that you would have when you wake up in the morning, knowing my own heart, why do I have peace with God?

Why do I not fear the wrath of God? Because Christ's perfect righteousness has been imputed to me. I'm the blessed man of Romans 4a. How anybody can preach that and teach that and then turn around and deny it, trade that away for the endless cycle, the treadmill of penances of Romanism?

Yeah, I wouldn't want to have to answer those questions either. So that's why they convert and then take shots after converting. So anyways, I see this graphic and it was posted on Facebook. I hate Facebook.

But I went and tracked it down on Facebook first and then eventually found his account on X as well. But he said he had some, I think his colleague made some glib comment about had a little extra time, so I thought I'd have a little fun.

Some of you may not know what this is about, so let me just very briefly, since we have spent an absurd number of hours, what was that? A little over a year ago? I think it was a little over a year ago.

I think I was in Jonesboro, February of 25. That sounds about right. We could look it up. You could look up the date on the Heshemeyer debate and that would tell me when it was. Anyway, at the end, the very last question in cross-examination in the Heshemeyer debate, which was supposed to be on the subject of the supper as a sacrifice, so it's supposed to be soteriological.

Heshemeyer asked about the Ignatius quote, which we've dealt with. I mean, I have, good grief, I have an eight-part video series. This was back, you know how long ago this was? Each section is less than 10 minutes long because that's the longest you could post on YouTube back then.

So this was when we first started doing YouTube. I had this lengthy thing where we walked through the various texts in Ignatius that are used to try to, again, anachronistically read modern Roman Catholic theology back into the patristic era, which they have to do.

I mean, Rome demands they do it. It's funny, they wouldn't have to anymore thanks to the elevation of Newman and Newman's development hypothesis, but Roman Catholic apologists are schizophrenic. On the one hand, they'll say, we're the church of 2 ,000 years because that sounds so good.

It grabs folks. But then when you press them on it, then they slap some Newman on it, and it just becomes development. So it's an abandonment of the historical field of battle. It really is. George Sandman was exactly right in his response to Newman long ago.

So anyway, right in the final question, I made a mistake, and the mistake was I tried to say too much in a short period of time. He asked about Ignatius. I had been reading this stuff about the various recensions of Ignatius's writings in the weeks preceding this, and had seen some stuff I had not seen before, and seen some folks pressing some issues I had not seen before.

So I was fresh on my mind, and I tried to cram too much in. I tried to make a comment, to provide some context. Shouldn't have done it. And then something happened with Heshemeyer's light. Something on his desk.

Did the light go out? Did the light fell over? I forget what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It fell on the floor, and he's, and so it was a mess. And he misunderstood what I said. I mentioned that Ignatius's, the epistles of Ignatius, there are seven that are considered genuine, but it depends on which recension you're looking at.

There's the long, there's the middle, there's shorter, there's language issues, and different language exemplars, and there's more issues. There are more issues with Ignatius's actual writings than with almost anybody else in that period.

Now, of course, he would be very early, 107 to 111, maybe. That's the standard dating. But here's the reason I was interested in it, and it didn't have anything to do with the debate. If you're going to use the Ignatian material, and I have, in response to Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, the problem that a lot of Protestant apologetics has is they don't necessarily know the historical context of some of the sources they'd be using.

And so in this situation, if you're going to be honest with working with Ignatius, then you need to probably expand the date window, and you need to, if you're going to use a quote, is it found only in one of the recensions?

Is it found both in the longer, in the middle? There are issues that probably need to be looked at if you don't want to get completely tripped up by a really sharp person on the other side. That's just being honest.

That's just dealing with the facts, which evidently is something that Catholic converts aren't overly concerned about. So what happened was, I eventually gave a quick answer. That's not what he was talking about.

He's talking about the Protonostics, and he's talking about their denial of the physical body of Christ. You're reading something back into this if you're trying to have make it have something to do with with, uh, transplantation, or the mass, or a sacrifice, or all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Well, in his closing statement, he takes what I said. This has, the textual issues have convinced some to even question his existence, as if I was. I'm not questioning Ignatius's existence. I was simply stating the reality that there are serious problems with the various versions of Ignatius's letters, whether identifying which letters are genuine, which letters are not.

There's a, there's a fairly substantial pseudo-Ignatian body of letters, too. Some were written much later, but dating this stuff is extremely challenging. That's all I did. I mean, anybody who knows the scholarship was like, yeah, nothing controversial there.

But, uh, Heschmeyer ran with it in his closing statement, and I told him afterwards, I said, I don't, I don't question Ignatius's existence. Well, within a day or two, uh, Boyce and these other guys are out there just beating the drum, having a grand old time, completely ignoring what the debate was actually supposed to be about, and the most ungracious, unfair, ridiculous reading of what I said.

I mean, if they had an honest bone in their body, they would have gone, well, he could have been saying this, and that's what he's saying now, he was saying, and so it just wouldn't have been a big deal, but that doesn't fit the narrative.

So, just like the leftist media, they, they did what that is, and to this day, I encounter people online, well, you don't even believe Ignatius existed. It's just a lie. So, I mean, within a day or two, was when I was traveling back from Jonesboro, I was in Texas, did like an hour and a half, hour, 45 minute, um, program from my hotel room during a massive windstorm in Amarillo, I remember where it was.

Um, it was such a massive windstorm, it literally tore the tonneau cover, um, on, on the truck. Um, it was, it was doing 70 miles per hour easy. If I had had the RV, I would have been in, in a world of hurt.

Anyway, um, so I, I did the whole program, corrected all of this. Anybody that says anything about my denying Ignatius existed after that is just a bold-faced liar. That, that's all there is to it. Um, just, just, just lying through their teeth.

I mean, why? Well, because it fits their narrative. They can't deal with the reality of what we're arguing, so you have to create this false narrative. And then, what, about a week or so later, um, we did another program once I got back, and, uh, this time brought on a guest to talk about it.

And we talked about a lot of the background issues and things like that. So we've got, like, at least three, three and a half hours, I think, of stuff that I can just link to. Any fair-minded person, that's enough.

That, that, that'd be it. But they continue on. And so here, here's Boyce, uh, Ignatius, no bishop, no church, John Calvin, fake news, don't even know what that has to do with anything, and me, you don't even exist.

Okay, so that's a lie. Now, why would Stephen Boyce be lying, making memes, graphics, that are just lies? I don't know. He's a convert to Roman Catholicism. And I've seen this happen over and over again.

What you do when you convert is you've got to prove your faithfulness to your new, your new cadre, your new, your new team, see? And you do that by attacking the people you used to work with. And you can do that by lying through your teeth about them, and no one's going to call you on it.

There's, there's not going to be a single Roman Catholic that's going to contact, uh, Boyce and say, dude, he's explained all this, this is, this is really not how to make these kind of arguments, this is making us look bad to anybody who actually examines the fact.

No one's going to do that. No one's going to call him out on it. He'll, he'll get away with it. Um, but this is the convert syndrome. This is, I've seen this happen over and over again, over the years.

Um, someone who never would have done that before their conversion, this helps, I think it helps with the conscience. Uh, I, I think this is, this is what people do when they know that they can't defend what they did.

And it helps to soothe that over, really does. So this is a lie, just so you know, uh, Stephen Boyce, B-O-Y-C-E, posted it. So if you'd like to comment and tell him you're lying. Now, what happens is, he's like, well, you, do you want to debate Ignatius?

I'm like, debate what? Debate what about Ignatius? I don't deny he exists. And he's like, well, you, you say he doesn't mention the Bishop of Rome. Well, he doesn't. Well, Jesus is a Bishop of... Seriously?

This is that, that's, that, that's, that's intended to be an actual argument on your part? And at one point, he's even like, well, debate me on the subject, and you'll find out how he did identify the...

Oh, we have to wait for the debate before you do that? That's how you handle Christian history? Oh, hold on, you just wait to the debate, and what I'll throw out there... That's not... What? Just a level of absurdity that's really difficult to, to understand.

Go ahead and take that down. Um, so, I actually threw back at him, I said, you want to debate? Okay. After we do the, uh, the Trulia debate, uh, I'm willing to... It was March 1st of 25. Yeah, I was, I thought it was February.

Yeah. Um, after the Trulia debate, October 17th, I'll probably do another trip in November somewhere. Um, somewhere warmer. Uh, well, November shouldn't be too bad. I mean, the way things are going this year, what's it going to matter?

It'll still be 120 degrees. Um, I know of a certain church in Houston that loves to have debates, and this might be a topic. So, I, I'm like, hey, you're a freshly minted Romanist historian. How about we debate something real?

Something with value? And so, I threw a bunch of stuff out, and, um, yeah, and he called it bait-and-switch. And it wasn't anywhere near bait-and-switch. Um, here's, here's what I said. Um, I said, you want to debate?

Let's debate the role of forged documents in the creation of the Roman papacy. Let's debate what the early church actually believed about the key passages Rome has used to forge its pretended supremacy.

Let's debate whether papal infallibility even has a definable meaning, let alone whether Honorius' successors could anathematize him as a heretic for 400 years as a part of their accession to the papal throne while still believing him infallible.

Maybe you would like to defend the actual claims of, and this is the main thing right here, maybe you would like to defend the actual claims of ineffabilis Deus and munificentissimus Deus, those are the documents defining, in 1854, the Immaculate Conception.

In 1950, the Bodily Assumption of Mary. Okay? Um, not the watered-down Numanian modernistic view, but what they actually meant when they were promulgated. You know neither dogma is apostolic in any way, shape, or form.

Want to demonstrate your chops with the early church? Because he really likes to talk about that. Okay, let's debate those two dogmas. Did the early church believe, proclaim, and practice these dogmas?

Or are AI-generated memes about things that never happened more to your liking? Pretty straightforward. But there's your challenge. Stephen Boyce, Dr. Stephen Boyce, will you defend the Immaculate Conception, the Bodily Assumption of Mary, as they are claimed by the Roman Catholic Church in those documents?

Now, the Bodily Assumption, they're much more careful. Because you know, Stephen, you can't even get close to defending that as consistent with New Testament teaching, apostolic practice, first centuries of the church.

You know that. You know you have to accept Roman claims of authority to even start down that road. You know that's true. But you willing to back it up? You want to do it? I'll contact the folks in Houston, see if they're interested.

We'll make it happen. If you're gonna put this stuff out, I haven't said anything about you forever. I don't pay attention to you. Okay? I'm not following you around. I don't follow you. Not interested.

Sorry to have seen you go. Saw it happening. You had so little respect for me, you didn't even ask questions. Fine. Whatever. But you want to take shots like this? You want to play these games? Then stand up like a man.

Be counted. Okay? Just that simple. Rich is looking at me like, really? Okay. Fine. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Hey, if you're gonna have fun, think about the next time before you have fun, what the result might be.

Okay. Good old Anthony at Catholicism 1 did it again. Look, when you see folks post, this is what he wrote, the thief on the cross was saved by the prayers of Mary. Everyone knows this. Now this is a repetition of what he did, what about 18 months ago or so, that Calvin Robinson called Mary-pilled and agreed with and all this.

The only thing that's been added is, everyone knows this. As if everyone knows this. Nobody knows this, actually. You just gotta understand something. This guy is about nothing but clicks. I don't know how this works because we have not monetized my account.

I have, what? A hundred and, let me see here. What have I got right now? Where'd it go? Oh, 177 .5 thousand followers. Okay. That's not huge. People have millions, but that ain't small. And I guess you can actually get paid for posting on X.

And it has something to do with retweets, interactions, quotes, responses. And I guess the more followers somebody has that responds to you, the more money you get. I don't know, I've never even looked into it.

And it's not because I think there's necessarily something wrong with it, but I've already seen the really negative impact it has had upon dialogue and discussion in X. You've got all these people, and sometimes good people, and it's so obvious that every day what they're posting is simply meant to get you to click.

They'll post these polls. Where would you rather live? A, B, C, or D. And after the 47th one of them, you get the idea, oh, this is today's thing to get their clicks for their checks for the month. Okay.

All right. Well, okay. Whatever. That's all this guy is. When you see people make just wild, outlandish, absurd statements like this, just as much as your heart wants to say this is so foolish, if you're going to respond to it, screenshot it and post it on your own thread so they don't make any money off of it.

That's the only thing I would say. Because if you quote it, I think they get something out of that too. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep pulling that one-armed bandit type thing. Yeah. But just realize this is the nature of social media.

Monetize social media. Monetize social media encourages the most absurd theological statements that could possibly be made. And most of them aren't even serious. Or if they are, that just tells you something about who's out there.

It's pretty wild. I had mentioned this book. We're going to have to do a program at some point where we run through a quick introduction to what's called pseudo-Dionysius. I've mentioned this before, but Dionysius...

Oh, by the way, before I jump into this, one of the things that I've wanted to do for about three months now, I think I mentioned it once before, is I've been really disappointed with the fact that the Heshmeyer debate, I've never seen any meaningful discussion of the actual substance.

All I've seen has been discussion about Ignatius. It's got to have been... It couldn't have been much of a victory for the Roman Catholic side, like they claim that it is, if the entire substance of victory is a single cross-sex question, and the issue isn't even the topic of the debate.

I really felt that Heshmeyer's presentation... He's a good speaker. He's a nice guy. He's a good speaker, but I found his presentation horrifically simplistic and extremely shallow. It's so shallow that I felt I took it apart in the rebuttal, and that's rare.

Think about it. A rebuttal, you have normally less than half the amount of time that the other person had to make their case. In a rebuttal, you're generally just going, what are the main points that I can respond to in the amount of time I have, and what can we get into in cross-examination?

But especially the biblical texts that he used. Now, they're the standard text. It's not his fault. Rome has glommed onto a lot of texts in the Bible, especially in Old Testament, that have nothing whatsoever to do with priesthoods and sacrifices and stuff like that, and have pressed them into service.

And so, what's he supposed to do? If he's going to make a biblical argument, he's going to have to engage in the same eisegesis and anachronism that Rome has for a long time. And so, one of the things I want to do, I've wanted to do for a long time, and AI is getting rather helpful.

I mean, I have an AI-driven transcript program now that, it would be very easy to, it listens, it can, for example, it can listen to debates, and it separates out speakers. So, I think I've seen this, it's called MacWhisper.

And so, it'll listen to a debate, and it'll say, Speaker 1 said this, Speaker 2 said this, then Speaker 1 said this again. So, it matches the voices up. So, it knows who the moderator is. So, you can go in and easily identify, you know, that's the moderator's voice, this is debater number one, his name is that, his name, and now you have a really nice transcript that is really easy to work with.

You throw that at Claude, you throw that at Grok, you throw that at ChadGBT, whatever one you're using, and you can just go, hey, I want Joe Heschmeier's opening statement outline. What was he reading?

And you'll pretty much get it. Do the same thing with all my stuff, too. I figure all my opponents are doing that. They may even have a group of people helping them to do that. All I've got is, I've got the AO think tank, and we do have one particular ultra geek in the AO think tank when it comes to AI.

I mean, I'm not 100 certain he isn't AI. I mean, I did meet him once, so he's probably not AI. But, you know, it could have been a holographic projection, you know, an experiment, you know, I don't know.

And he may be listening, or he'll listen later. And I'll get AI-generated images of our first meeting and all the rest of that stuff. You know, that's just, that's how it's going to happen. Anyway, so I do have some, like, he's the one who told me about MacWhisper.

I had an older program that he had actually recommended to me a year earlier. But man, stuff develops in a year, uh, big time. Anyway, I'll get his outline, and I want to walk through all the scripture passages.

And I just want to demonstrate that if you just use standard biblical hermeneutics, in fact, if you just follow the standard hermeneutical practice suggested by the majority of the people on the papal biblical commission, you won't come up with his conclusions.

That's what's fascinating. The papal biblical commission, you know, these people are way on the left, but they're sincerely on the left. And they will admit that Rome has used, I mean, you look, I don't have it in here right now, but I have the current Jerome, um, New Testament commentary.

I think it's the New Testament, maybe the Bible commentary, I think it's the New Testament commentary, with the forward written by Pope Francis. Everybody who wrote for this thing, he put on that papal biblical commission.

They're papal appointees. And you look up 1 Corinthians 3. Well, it's supposed to be a purgatory. Eh, no. It's not. They admit it. That's not really what it's about. You look up almost any text, and they're going to be going, yeah, actually, historically, it had to do with this, and didn't really have to do with all the rest of that stuff.

It's sort of like, um, I was told, what was the context of this? This was, oh, yeah. I was told, sorry, I'm wandering about here. Um, I haven't seen this yet. I need to watch it, because once I get done with this, we're going to be talking about, um, Jacob Hansen with Ali Bestaki.

Um, and I guess Hansen and Trent Horn did an interview. And evidently, Hansen just loves Trent Horn's arguments against Sola Scriptura. Shocking. Uh, you know, um, I mean, the enemy of my enemy, right?

Even though they come to completely different conclusions on things. But the thing that was fascinating is, I was told, and I'll have to confirm this, I was told that one of the things that Jacob Hansen liked the most was Trent Horn's talking about, well, how do you know Matthew wrote Matthew?

And I'm like, they're still doing that? I thought Catholic answers had matured. Because I've told you, how many times have I told you, when I was debating Gerry Matitick's in Denver in 93, um, one of those two nights, I think it was the first night, when I was at Denver Seminary, or that was the second night I was at a Presbyterian church, uh, we did two nights, seven, seven hours of debate on the papacy with Gerry Matitick.

Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid debated two fundamentalists on the subject of Sola Scriptura, and just wiped them out. Just destroyed them. It was painful to listen to. And of course, it bothered me, because I had challenged them to debate initially, Keating and Madrid, and they said, well, we're not, we don't feel it's a proper time to be debating while the Holy Father is visiting.

And then as soon as it's announced that I'm debating Matitick's, they set up this debate with these folks that they know cannot challenge them, to a tenth of the degree that I could.

I will never forget walking up to them on the street that day, and you're going, hey, what happened? Yeah. You, you, what happened to this being so holy and all that? And now you're doing Nemec and Jackson.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. Ron Nemec and Bill Jackson. That's right. Uh, those names are floating around the back of my head. Yeah, we did run into them. And I did. I'm like, I know what you did, guys. I know you dodged me to get them.

And yeah, they wiped them out. But in that debate, you can go back and listen to it. I'm sure they have it online someplace. Uh, you can go back and listen to it. There they are. Asking, they, they asked Nemec and Jackson, how do you know Matthew about Matthew?

Now their answer was, because my Bible says the gospel according to Matthew. And if you know anything about the manuscripts, that's not in the early manuscripts, that's editorial, that's not apostolic in the sense of having manuscript evidence behind it and stuff like that.

And the thing that I thought would keep them from making this kind of statement any longer is that I've pointed out, I do not believe, if I challenged Carl Keating, Patrick Madrid, if I challenged Trent Horne, identify any person on the papal biblical commission that will look you in the eye and say, well, of course, Matthew wrote Matthew, and here's why.

I don't think there's one. If you read the authorial introductions in the Jerome Bible Commentary, it's pretty obvious, well, this is the Matthean community, it's not the apostle Matthew, but it comes later, and this is your standard progressivist take, both inside Rome and outside Rome.

Okay? I mean, there's, you go to Boston College, ask their New Testament people, okay? They're Jesuits, for crying out loud, all right? If you know anything about Jesuits. So, I sort of thought they had stopped doing that, but according to what I've been told, Trent Horne did that with Jacob Hansen, and I'm like, okay, all right.

All right, back to this. Is it quarter to three? My goodness. How did that happen? I know, I've been wandering around all day. My mind is in this stuff, and it keeps sneaking in when I'm talking about other stuff.

The Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus and Its Importance for Church History

Pseudo-Dionysius. Pseudo-Dionysius. Most of the scholarly stuff, and just so you know, if you want to know some of the stuff that your money goes toward, I now have pretty much all the current top-end scholarly material on the Dionysian Corpus, DC, the Dionysian Corpus, either in hardback, which isn't the way I'd like it.

I prefer electronic because I can get summaries, I can listen to it while working out, doing stuff like that. But this just came out. This is the first time that Thomas Aquinas' commentary on one of the major works in the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus, the Divine Names, there are 10 epistles and then a few books in this corpus of works.

And it's the first time with Latin on one page and English on the other that Aquinas' commentary has been available in English. So we got it. And why should you care about Pseudo-Dionysius? I don't have anything in front of me.