Steve Ray, Catholic Answers, Ergun Caner and Calls

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this 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.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

James White. Good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line, listening to a number of things on my ride this morning.

I was listening to Catholic Answers Live, I listened to Steve Ray on the program they had yesterday, where you have non -Catholics call in.

And there were a couple interesting, there was one particularly interesting call I thought about cutting out and playing, but I didn't.

On John chapter 6, I had a fellow call in, a former Catholic. And I appreciated this guy, he, at one point he said he's a born again, which made me go, man, that's not language we use of ourselves, but maybe he was just nervous or something because even after the rather surface -level response

Steve Ray gave him, of course, going to John 6, and I would just so much love to do a debate with some meaningful

Roman Catholic apologist, I mean, Steve Ray would never do it, and I'm not sure he really qualifies as a meaningful

Roman Catholic apologist anyways. But on John 6, I am so tired of hearing that chapter just dragged through the mud, misused and abused by Roman Catholic apologists.

I would just, and I would, I would invite Steve Ray or Tim Staples or the

Patrick fellow who does the hosting of Catholic Answers Live to come on this program. But I don't get any responses from anybody at Catholic Answers anymore.

Three times now I've sent the same email to Tim Staples. I think I just need to get, someone send me the Catholic Answers number and I will give them a call and leave a message for Mr.

Staples because evidently either the email address, which worked just fine before our purgatory debate, and he'd get emails and respond very quickly about the details of the debate as we got close,

I write the same address today and I don't get any responses at all because I was asking if they're ever going to make it available because they made the available, the quote unquote debate with Steve Gregg that they did on Steve Gregg's radio program.

But I have not never heard a word on Catholic Answers Live about our purgatory debate.

But I would be happy to have Tim on again to discuss John 6.

I would just, that would be really, really useful. In fact, it's interesting, the host of the program, they had that one caller that I was talking about who was a former

Catholic and he says, look, I went to the Eucharist. I tried to believe, but since I've gotten the word of God into me, it's changed me completely.

And man, that was a good point that he was making and they're trying to argue with him. But right at the end of it, the guy said,

I'd like to get your email address because he said, we're considering having some callers actually who've called the program on the program for dialogues.

Well, if they want to have dialogues on Catholic Answers Live, there's a number of us that would be very well prepared to do that.

We've actually done a fair amount of study in the field. We have something to say. And so I'm looking forward to hearing from Catholic Answers Live because I'd be happy to help them out with that little project.

So keep a line open, Rich, for Catholic Answers Live to call. And with the invitation, then again, maybe not.

We might need this open for everybody. But it was an interesting call and the surface level answers given on the subject of John 6 were amazing.

I also listened to another program where they had a Marian expert on. I did learn one thing that I did not know before from what that fellow said.

But then I also learned again and again and again that these folks just don't listen to the criticisms that have been made of their position.

They just keep repeating the same mantra over and over and over again. And it is there have got to be

Roman Catholics out there that just get really tired of hearing the same thing over and over again and realize that their most popular apologists just they don't do homework.

They don't listen to what anybody else is saying. They don't update their arguments. They don't expand their arguments, improve their arguments or anything else, especially when there are people who are interacting with them.

It's one thing when there's no one really interacting with your arguments, then there's really no reason to be expanding them,

I suppose. But when people are and you just ignore it, that I just I cannot even begin to understand.

But another thing that I listened to as well is a fairly long ride. But remember, I have my iPod

Nano on fast, and so I get through a 55 -minute

Catholic answers program in about 47 minutes or so, I think. So you can you can save time that way.

And so I also listened to a podcast of a 50 -minute presentation by none other than our good friend

Ergen Kanner, I suppose I should mention Christianity Today has contacted me.

I have not done the interview yet, but a reporter from Christianity Today who's written over a thousand articles for that magazine has contacted me and wants to talk to me about the

Ergen Kanner situation. When you try to suppress something in the days of the

Internet, it will not work. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, folks in Lynchburg, listen to me now.

Either you come out with absolute transparency or honesty, or this thing is going to blow up all over you.

That's what I see coming. The time for being honest, the time for answering the questions honestly and with no more games, you've got a chance right now.

But in fact, maybe the maybe the door is closing. There might just it may be too late now. I don't know.

But you better get to it if you think it just absolutely amazes me.

Absolutely positively amazes me. I want to play two real quick clips and we'll go to our phone calls at 877 -753 -3341 or Skype at Dividing .Line,

Dividing .Line on Skype. I want to play two sections for you. Now, this is this is not a new recording.

This is from 2006 when I had not heard before. And it really is. After a while, you start getting used to what you hear from Ergin Kanner.

You hear the same jokes. He's very he's very good at telling jokes. He's very good at throwing out all sorts of ethnic epithets against himself and things like that that are that are highly offensive.

But he, you know, it's his way of getting to the audience, getting them to like him, etc.,

etc. And he's a good speaker. He can keep an audience interested. There's no question about that. That's probably why he's been so popular, you know, on campus and things like that.

But there were a couple of interesting statements that that he made during the course of right the beginning, where, again, he's he's doing his story stuff and and that's what most of this is about.

But let's listen to just a couple of minutes of this and make some make some comments as well. Here's Ergin Kanner.

He's up in Seattle in 2006. As I said, as I said,

I am I am a Turk. My full name is

Ergin Mikael Mehmet Giovanni Janer. And born in Sweden.

But I was there. My father was studying there. I'm Turkish. One hundred percent Turkish. Came to America.

OK. Now, wait a minute. One hundred percent Turkish means that what he's claiming is that his mother is

Turkish as well. I mean, can you be 100 percent when only your dad's a Turk? If your mom is

Swedish and your dad's Turkish, that makes you 50 percent

Turkish, doesn't it? I mean, I wish I was 100 percent Scottish, but I'm not.

I mean, that'd be nice, but but but I'm not. So how does that work?

I'm 100 percent Turkish. Well, we'll find out eventually all this stuff will come out.

But we got immigrated here. And so I tell you this. When did you immigrate here,

Dr. Kanner? We're going to find out here. He's going to claim this one was interesting. Tarzan fan had actually found this one first,

I think. And I found it from somebody else, actually. But he's going to talk about the TV shows that he watched while in Turkey, living in Turkey.

And one of them was the Dukes of Hazzard. Yes, the the the censors in Turkey allowed

Daisy Duke. Yeah, sure they did. Uh huh. Right.

But the point is, the point is, when did the Duke of Dukes of Hazzard go on the air?

In nineteen seventy nine. Now, we know from court documents that Eric McCann was living in Ohio in nineteen seventy nine years earlier.

And even in the stories that were on the Liberty web page, they came here in seventy nine.

There would have been no way unless they have a time portal in Turkey for him to be watching the

Dukes of Hazzard in Turkey. He's making it up as he goes along. But listen to the audience.

They love it because it's it's somewhat important to what I'm going to tell you. Raised as the son of a Muazzin in the mosque and much of the time when

I speak, I speak in front of hostile crowds. I do debates, university debates, colleges and such, where I debate

Muslims. Now, later on, and I'm not sure I can get to this one. He actually gives a specific number.

And remember, it was 2006 where the newspaper article mentioned sixty one debates. He says forty five here.

So he must have been really busy in 2006 doing these debates that no one can find. No one ever recorded.

No Islamic apologist has any recollection of. But here he is.

And notice this is just his first presentation. He's giving like three more presentations in this apologetic conference.

And he's telling people this is all based on all this work that I do in doing these debates. And no one can find any of them.

And in the current bio now on his own website and Liberty website, all mentions of debates have disappeared, gone poof history.

But you see, the Internet doesn't forget. That's the point. It's still out there about the true ethic of Islam.

And a lot of the things that I'm going to be sharing with you in two plenary sessions and in one workshop tomorrow, a lot of the things that I'm going to be sharing with you come from those debates or spring from those debates, because I think quite frankly, we as Christians have been cowered into silence about 50 years ago.

Niebuhr wrote a book entitled Christ and Culture, and he gave us a lot of models for this. You know, the Christ of culture is the church that whatever the world does, we do.

You know, American Idol becomes popular. We try to find some way to assimilate American Idol into our churches. Then there are the churches that are the

Christ against culture. That's where whatever the world's for, we're against it.

Automatically knee jerk reaction. They're the Christ above culture, et cetera, et cetera. But none of those models actually fit what

I feel. And I feel that we are to be Christ confronting culture, that the body of Christ is supposed to be on the onslaught, that it is our job to provoke culture.

And I think you'll quickly get that taste of what I would like to do with you. And secondly, I want you to get the taste that I will at some point during the time that we are together, the very brief time that we're together,

I will offend you with something. OK, so he goes on from there. I want to get to where he's he's he's talking about.

Well, here. Hello. You can start anytime you want to now.

Let's see. I got to get a decent audio player someday. And there it just sits staring at me.

What's that? Oh, it's a Mac. Give it a second. No, it's a free program.

Give it a second. That's the problem. Here we go. The terrifying part, the terrifying part for me is that what used to be our culture's motif, leitmotif, has entered our pulpits, pulpits that used to thunder with with men of God saying, thus saith the

Lord, thus saith the Bible, are now filled with guys who say, well, it seems to me or in my opinion, well, you know what?

I didn't get dressed up to hear your opinion. I came to hear the word of God. And if you spend your time giving me your opinion, you know what?

I can get somebody else's opinion. I can go on the lake and get an opinion. I want to meet

God. There are misconceptions that we have to deal with when we talk about Islam.

We have my people, we have misconceptions about you. You have misconceptions about us.

Coming to America, the only thing that I understood, I was 15 when we came, the only thing or 13 when we came, the only thing that I understood about American culture

I got from American television. OK, so I was 15, I was 13, we came.

No, he was four when they came. That's the documented evidence he's admitted in.

If that again, if that internal memo, which as far as I can tell,

Liberty is now being completely silent about is accurate. He was four when he came.

Not 15, not 13, whatever, either one, it doesn't matter.

He's trying to notice what he's saying. You know, all I knew about your culture as I saw on American television in Turkey.

Well, what were the examples of that? And the only television that we were allowed to watch was the television that was that passed the conscriptions of the censors in Turkey.

Now, say right now someone in channeling said they don't they don't have censors in Turkey. Fine, well, but the problem is.

Ernie Cantor says they did and that therefore there was only a limited range of what you could watch that wasn't censored.

But the point is, he's going to say he watched The Andy Griffith Show. I can understand why that would get by the censors of any nation just about.

But to say the Dukes of Hazzard got by the same censors doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

I lived in Ankara, but then I lived toward the east for the most part of my life. Catch that. He claims to have lived in Ankara, Turkey.

But then. For most of his life, I remember he came here when he was four.

So is he is the claim that's being made here that sometime between his birth in Sweden.

And emigration, the United States, when he's four, so ages two and three, then he was watching the

Dukes of Hazzard in 1969, 68, 10 or 11 years before it started.

Is that when they lived in Turkey? I want to know. We need to know. Thanks to Dr. I mean, it wouldn't have been an issue if you hadn't been so constantly inconsistent with his own statements.

But we need to know, Dr. Cantor, when did you live in Ankara, Turkey? Where? We know that your dad did.

When did you live there? You talked about training in a madrasa there. Those words would have no meaning whatsoever if they took place before you were four years old.

All right. So the only way this could be relevant is if the family left the

United States after arriving here initially, then turned around, went back to Turkey and lived in Ankara.

And then he's going to say here over toward the Iraq border. That is that what he's claiming?

It needs to be answered. He stood in front of audiences and made these claims and said, this is important to your understanding the apologetic methodology

I use on the Iraqi border. I want to name three of them and show you how misconceptions operate.

One thing we were allowed to watch was Andy Griffith. I love

Andy. The thing is, I thought all of America was like Andy Griffith.

And I came to America through Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn, New York, Mayberry.

The second television that we received was a thing called the Dukes of Hazzard. I know we in church and everything, but I wanted to marry

Daisy. I wanted to go to the boar's nest. I wanted to drive a car like this.

But again, Brooklyn, New York. We used to get you wanted to drive a car like that at what age?

Again, if he comes here at 13, even even given the story he's using right now, if he comes here at 13, doesn't make any sense.

But the fact that he comes here at four, it makes even less sense. And the fact that Dukes of Hazzard didn't start till 1979 makes the whole thing a lie.

It's just a lie. It's all made up. How do you stand in front of an audience knowing that they're they're believing everything that you're going to say and make these kinds of comments?

I don't understand it. Now, you got some main channel right now going, well, don't you? Don't you think he's been embarrassed enough now?

He hasn't even admitted any of this yet. He's refusing to deal with any of this.

That's the point. How can anybody listen to this and go, oh, well, you know, hey, we all know.

We all know now. Really, do we? The relatively few people listening to my voice, that's enough.

It's OK to let Christian leaders do this. You want to know why it's not

OK to let Christian leaders do this? Listen to the end of his presentation. In other words,

Jesus Christ shed his blood so that I wouldn't have to. And neither would bulls or goats.

Jesus Christ strapped himself to a cross so I won't have to strap a bomb to myself and that he gave me mercy and grace.

As the Keswick teachers tell us, mercy is that when I don't receive what I do deserve and grace when I receive that which I don't deserve and that it was unmerited, unearned.

I lasted four days on Thursday. I didn't know what the bulletin said about an invitation.

If you're not from that tradition, an invitation is when we sing like 800 verses of just as I am. I didn't know.

I just stepped out in the middle of the sermon, walked to the front, and Clarence was preaching. Clarence Miller taught me that if you ain't spitting, sweating and slobbering, you ain't preaching.

And he had his eyes closed, handkerchief waving. And he looked up and there's this boy in full gear. He said, what?

And I said, Isa ben Allah. Jesus is God. I want saved.

And he said, could you, could you wait for the invitation? And I said, nope.

And he led me to Christ right then. Amen. Amen. That night we went to Afterglow.

If you don't know what Afterglow is, that's where everybody goes to the Denny's and IHOP. And I got to do two things as a new believer.

Number one, I got to take my geffia off and tell the waitress I was saved. And number two,

I had me some ham. I'm a ham eating man.

That night I told my father that I was a believer in Jesus Christ. And it was the last time

I saw my father until right before he died. He disowned me, which he believed was an act of mercy. Now, I just thought for just a moment to point out that, again, if you try to make the chronology work, that seemed to have taken place a year later when

Emir's, when Ergen's brothers were converted. Again, we can't even get accuracy on that.

And it's right in the middle of this part where all of us are sitting going, we want to hear about people getting saved. This is this is all being attached to the gospel.

But it continues. My church, my little storefront church became my family.

A year later, I surrendered to preach. A year later, both my brothers got saved.

Now, I have other siblings from my brother, my father's other wives. But catch that my father's other wives.

Does he mean that after the divorce is his father married other women or that he had multiple wives at the time he came to the

United States that he didn't bring with him? Again, these are questions that need to be answered.

All three Jeannere boys are born again, all three in the gospel ministry. Emir teaches at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

I teach at Liberty University. Ergen is a pastor in Indianapolis, Indiana. Because one kid, one kid.

In 1991, my mom got saved and in the baptistry took off her hijab.

Now, remember, the divorce papers demonstrated that his mom had been fighting allowing the children to be raised as Muslims.

Where is the evidence that she was a practicing Muslim? That she's Turkish or she's a practicing Muslim? I'm not saying she's not and she wasn't.

Where's the evidence though? You see, once you start piling on these obvious lies, the dukes of hazard, then everything becomes questioned.

And if that was not the case, if that was not the case, then why weave it into this emotionally intense leading up to invitation style evangelism?

Does that not offend people in this audience? I can't believe there are people going, well,

I don't see what's wrong with all this. When you associate known lies with the truth, what does that say about the truth?

She's a church planter in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. And in 1995, my mormor, my grandmother, she got saved.

Because one kid wouldn't shut up. If you don't think this meeting is important,

I stand here not because I have a Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, Doctor of Ministry and PhD.

It's a THD, not a PhD. I personally think THD is even better. But why change the name?

I don't understand this freedom with facts. God could care less about that. Degrees burn as quickly as dollars.

I stand here because one kid was trained. That's what

I mean. Now, there's, I mean, this guy knows how to use his voice.

He knows how to speak. And he knows how to work evangelicals. But do you see why it's important now?

Do you see why, you know, there's some people, well, we're getting burnout. Yeah, people don't last very long anymore. Attention spans are very short.

And if you don't get an immediate response, like, ah, whatever. The questions only keep multiplying as long as Ergin Kanner and the leadership at Liberty University, specifically

Jerry Falwell Jr. refuse to come out in the open and speak the truth.

And it's just going to keep getting louder and louder and louder. And they don't seem to know what to do about it.

Just come out and say it was all a bunch of lies or explain how it wasn't.

Give us the chronology. Explain the contradictions. That's all it needs to happen.

But the chances of that happening are very, very, very small. 877 -753 -3341.

Let's talk with James in England. Hi, James. Hey, James, how are you doing?

Doing good. I just had a question. It's kind of off topic. But I'm very much a believer in the reliability of the

New Testament and Old Testament canon. And I very recently had several people from the

Eastern Ethiopian Orthodox Church talk to me about the Book of Enoch. And I can't find any detailed explanations as to why it isn't in the

Bible. So I'd like to know, why is this book quoted in Scripture but not considered Scripture?

Well, it was never considered Scripture. Did they actually consider it Scripture? That's what

I was told. That, well, Ethiopian, I suppose, be news to me.

I've never heard of any Christian group that believed the Book of Enoch was Scripture.

But I don't know anything about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. And so I suppose that's a possibility.

But it is an intertestamental work. It is one of the later intertestamental works.

And so it's not even a part of the argumentation between Protestants and Catholics in regards to the

Apocrypha. Because, like I said, if they actually believe it's Scripture, they're the only group

I've ever heard of that has adopted that perspective. It is clearly long after the time of the ministry of the prophets in the

Old Testament. It was known and quoted by Jude in the same way that if Scripture were being written today and some were to quote from Pilgrim's Progress or something else that was familiar to your audience, that doesn't mean that you're turning that into Scripture.

There's no evidence that anyone to whom Jude was writing had ever adopted that perspective or ever believed that it was itself

Scripture. It's making a point from a familiar story that was available to people.

But that does not mean that just because the Old Testament or New Testament makes reference to a book, just as Paul quotes from Aretas, the philosopher, well, it doesn't make

Aretas inspired. There's all sorts of references to the Book of Jasher and various historical works in the

Old Testament that people could go and read more about a particular story in or anything like that. None of that makes any of the things recited

Scripture. So they'd have to substantiate this idea that if—let's put it this way.

They're going to be consistent and say, well, that one reference to that one text to the

Book of Enoch makes it Scripture. Therefore, everything else, including the Assumption of Moses, which likewise is quoted in that section of Jude, or the

Book of Jasher in the Old Testament, or the Chronicles of the Kings, which isn't our Book of Chronicles, all those have to be

Scripture, too, because the mere citation of it turns it into Scripture. The problem is we have references to pagan historical sources and things like that as well that clearly could not be

Scripture. So that is not an appropriate standard for what is the canon of Scripture at all.

So you have a reference to a book that was being read and was recognized by people not as Scripture—nobody at the time accepted

Scripture—but as religious reading material at the time, and it makes a point that Jude wants to reinforce, and so he quotes from it.

If that group—and I'll take a look at it and see if I can find any information on it—if that group has turned that into Scripture as a result, that would surprise me, but it would certainly not be the first time that someone has gone way too far with something and probably out of ignorance of what the original context were all about.

Okay, thank you very much, that's pretty helpful. Okay. Also, one more thing I found out, the guy who was calling on the other day on the show, on the

YouTube video, two very different phone calls, the first guy, I think he's part of a religious system that you can find at somewhere called

Temet Nu, it's like some, I think it's some weird Egyptian god resurrectionist cult. I'm sorry,

I'm not familiar, what are you referring to? On your show the other day, or you put it on YouTube, you had a video titled

Two Very Different Callers. Oh, yes, yes, okay. And that guy calling you crazy and insane was,

I think, I'm not sure, but I think he's part of some sort of Egyptian god resurrectionist.

Well, actually, he told us that he was just simply a rationalist, and my thought was that he was actually sort of like an agnostic, unbeliever type thing, so I don't know.

But yeah, it was an interesting phone call. Anyways, James, it's late for you over there, and I've got another fellow who claims to be there in the

United Kingdom I need to get to, so thanks for staying up and talking. All right, thank you, sir. Thanks for your help.

Good night. 877 -753 -3341. Let's go to Douglas in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Hi, Douglas. It's not Milwaukee. Well, I don't, you know,

I just get the feeling that it, what's that? It says it is? It worked?

Yeah. Rich is extremely excited that he actually got you on the air first round, which is a sort of sad thing that we're excited about that.

But anyways, so, Douglas, actually, you told Rich you're calling from London, but I was in London recently, and I didn't see you, so I, you know,

I don't know. Are you really certain about this? Yes, I'm 100 % certain that I'm a

Londoner, and I can verify that with various proofs, so yeah. What kind of proofs can you offer?

You sound a little bit like someone from Wisconsin to me. I've never been to Wisconsin, so I wouldn't know.

Okay, well, for the moment, we'll just go with the idea that, you know, maybe you've visited

London or something. I don't know. I think my British accent sounds even better than this, so I just don't know.

It's hard to trust. But anyway, you actually have a serious question, so what might that be?

Yeah, I'm involved in a little bit of teaching through the Book of Romans at the moment, and so that involves, obviously, looking at the text a lot more, and I just feel that, obviously, it's a lot more helpful to be able to look into the original language rather than, you know, just relying on a commentary and secondhand information.

So I want to know what kind of resources would you recommend for someone who can't go into a formal educational setting to learn

Greek but has the means to do it themselves, if you get what I mean?

Well, the primary means is time and discipline, to be perfectly honest with you. There's so much more available today than there was even a few years ago.

About 10 years ago now, I had a friend in, well, in your neck of the woods.

He's from Illinois. But I had a friend contact me and said, look, I want to go to a master's seminary.

They're going to require me to take Greek. I want to try to do two master's degrees in the time that most people do one, so I need to learn

Greek on my own over the course of the next year so I can test out and do that.

And so what I told him then is what I've told everybody. The best resource that I know of remains

William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek. As far as the grammar is concerned, it is one of the most friendly and encouraging grammars.

A lot of grammars of Greek are not friendly. They're not encouraging. They are discouraging in the extreme.

The one that I learned from was discouraging because it was written in the 1930s, and the idea of encouraging anybody back then really wasn't a big thing.

Mounce's grammar is encouraging. The accompanying materials, specifically the workbook, is encouraging.

You can get recordings of Dr. Mounce actually presenting the material himself.

That's extremely helpful. That's what you're missing by not going to a class, is having that kind of lecture context that helps out a lot.

And then he has programs that help you with parsing, that help you with drilling yourself on the vocabulary that you need to learn.

There's a certain level of vocabulary that must be learned. And so there's a lot of support there. I've been told that a couple of other new grammars have come out that likewise have that kind of material.

Someone told me recently about one of the grammars even had videos online where the professor was lecturing, and you could actually watch it, which could be an advantage to listening because you get to see if he's writing something on the board or something like that, which would help out a lot.

But what it really takes is the setting aside of the time to do it.

It has to be something you review on a daily basis. And it likewise takes your having a solid knowledge of English.

Now, with the strained British accent that you're giving us right now, it might be a bit of a problem.

But if you understand British grammar,

English grammar first, you'll probably not have too much difficulty with Greek.

The vast majority of people who fail out of Greek or who give up or throw in the towel or whatever other terminology you want to use, the reason they fail is because they're trying to learn two languages at the same time.

They're actually learning English grammar at the same time they're learning

Greek grammar, and you just can't do that. I mean, people come up to me, I'm taking Greek this fall and starting in seminary or Bible college.

What would you suggest I do this summer? And I say, learn English grammar. Make sure that you've got your language down because you don't have the time, you don't have the strength to be learning both at the same time.

That's the biggest danger. And so if you feel that you've got a real strong English grammar foundation, that you understand infinitives and how they function, understand gerunds, participles, all the forms of speech, direct objects and predicates, and you've got all that stuff down and you really feel that that's something that you could explain to somebody else, that'd probably be the best way

I'd suggest it, is if you could explain those things to someone else and not confuse them completely and convince them to go off to Germany and learn

German, then you probably are in a position to launch into Mount and have a good opportunity of making it.

And obviously, the one other thing that might be very helpful in these days of, well, we're on Skype, we could be doing this video if we wanted to.

Would be to see if there's someone else who wants to go through it with you. I mean, obviously, having somebody else, some accountability, things like that, is extremely helpful as well.

But that friend that I told you about 10 years ago, he did it. He tested out. He got both master's degrees.

And last contact I had with him, he was finishing up a PhD at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. But for every one that I know of like that, and I only know of two,

I know of 20 people who have contacted me, bought the books, and those books are sitting on a shelf today, collecting dust.

It's quite encouraging, that. Well, sorry, but it's just the reality. Seriously, if you could get somebody to push you, like I said, if you've got someone to have some accountability with.

But see, it all comes down, Douglas, to you yourself recognized that you don't want to be dependent on secondary sources.

When you're looking at a commentary on Romans, if you've got five commentaries on Romans, you've got about 15 different perspectives on some of the texts.

And the only way that you can in any meaningful fashion analyze and weigh the consistency of those writers and those commenters is if you can engage with the language they're using.

And so just remember there in, again, if you're actually in London and you're really being honest with us here, back, let's see, about 300 years ago, to get a bachelor's degree in religion in your country about 300, 320 years ago, by your junior year, you had to be able to not muddle your way through Greek, not even read

Greek well. You had to be able to debate in Greek. So people back then were probably not nearly as distracted by things.

Oh, shiny object, you know, as we are today, because there weren't nearly as many shiny objects around.

I mean, let's face it, living in London, I had to be worried about the plague, which swept through every little while, a little bit of a different world.

But for some reason, it made people considerably more focused and considerably more disciplined in what they did.

And so it can be done. And it all depends on how much you actually want it.

That's really all there is to it. It's a matter of discipline. And so there you go. Okay.

Thanks for that, Dr. Wade. Okay. So how long have you lived in London then?

Well, minus the three or four years I lived in Germany, you can call it, okay, 15, 16 years.

15, 16 years. And where have you lived in Germany? I lived in Berlin, then in Frankfurt.

Oh, very good. Very good. All right. Well, you know, hopefully,

Lord willing, and I need to do a big blog article about this. Hopefully, Lord willing, next February, I'll be back in London again.

And so my suggestion to you would be put it on your calendar and show up, especially if I'm at Leicester Square with the open air preaching folks, because if you don't show up next time, then

I am absolutely going to blog about Douglas from Milwaukee. The voice behind the glass points out that if the airline tickets remain at $10 ,000 one way to London, that's not going to happen.

Well, something tells me the volcanoes are going to stop erupting between now and then in Iceland.

But if, yeah, obviously, at $10 ,000 a pop, that ain't going to happen. But February is still a long time from now, thankfully, and we've never paid anywhere near that kind of money for the trip to London.

So anyways, Douglas, hopefully, Lord willing, we'll see you in February then.

Yeah, most definitely. All right. Thanks a lot for calling. Thank you. All right. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341, dividing that line on Skype.

Let's go to Hussain in Chicago. Hussain, how are you? Good. How about you,

Dr. White? I'm doing well. Good. I'm a former Muslim, just like Dr.

Khanna. And in fact, my whole name is Hussain Hajiwario, and I grew up in Kenya.

I'm originally from Kenya. So I'm just calling you because I've been keeping in touch with these people that have this ex -Muslims website.

You mean Mohammed Khan? Yeah, yeah. We've been emailing back and forth.

In fact, I emailed him a few months ago. He didn't respond for a while. He responded about three weeks ago, and then

I wrote him back recently, and he's pretty much...he probably will go after me next, because they like to dismiss people who convert from Islam to Christianity.

The reason why I'm calling you is because I have a few concerns, and I have a few hadith to share with you.

But before that, it's just the biblical aspect of when you have an issue with a brother, you shouldn't be doing it in public like that.

Well, Hussain, that's where you're wrong, because that brother is making false statements in a public context.

And so the private element...and remember, this isn't the first time

I've dealt with Ergin Kanner. We had an extensive interaction in 2005 and 2006 in regards to a proposed debate at Liberty University, and he wanted everything to be private in that, too.

And I said, no, I'm not doing this privately. We're talking about having a public debate. The arrangements need to be made publicly so people can understand if something happens, why it happened.

And I'm very glad we did that. But you're simply wrong to say that a religious leader, that a

Christian religious leader, can stand in front of public audiences and have what he says distributed publicly.

And then you're supposed to only privately deal with those public statements, especially when there's no evidence that he is willing to admit the errors that he has made.

But I will point something out to you, Hussain. When Mohammed Khan informed me, as I was going to London back in February, that Ergin Kanner had twice claimed to have debated

Shabir Ali. Do you know Shabir Ali? Yeah, I've heard of him. I've quoted him in one of my books.

He wrote with R .C. Sproul. Is that the guy? No, you're talking... No, no, no! No, you're talking about Abdul Saleeb.

Ahmed Didat guy. The guy that's like Ahmed Didat. Ahmed Didat? No, I said Shabir Ali is like Ahmed Didat.

Yes, yes, he's an Islamic apologist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I've debated him four times.

And when Mohammed Khan informed me that Ergin Kanner had at least twice publicly claimed to have debated

Shabir Ali, the first thing I did was not go public with that.

The first thing I did was I contacted Shabir Ali. Okay. And I asked Shabir, have you ever debated

Ergin Kanner? And he wrote back and said, not only have I never debated Ergin Kanner, I don't think I've ever met

Ergin Kanner. Okay. So did I go public then? No, I wrote to Ergin Kanner directly.

And I asked him and he responded and said, well,

I misspoke. Twice. Okay. And I wrote back and said, okay, since you claim to have debated

Ergin Kanner in Nebraska and you now say that you misspoke about that, please tell me who you did debate in Nebraska.

Okay. And he would not respond. Okay. So it was only after I verified the information with Shabir Ali, I wrote to Ergin Kanner directly.

It was only after that, that I then went public with the clear fact that he had twice claimed to have debated

Shabir Ali. And that is untrue. He also claimed to have debated Abdul Salib.

Now, Hussein, you know what Abdul Salib means. It means servant of the cross. Have you ever met a

Muslim who called himself Abdul Salib? No. Then why does Ergin Kanner claim to have debated

Abdul Salib? You know, that one, I, like, with that, you know,

I really cannot speak for him, but I got a few issues, especially with this Mohammed guy.

And we've emailed each other back and forth. And I took down one of his arguments already. And you have it on your blog.

So I think it's good for us to go there first, because I know you care so much about the truth.

And you care so much about Brother Kanner's credibility as well.

Yes. You even mentioned that on your blog, that you know that for sure that he's not a fake ex -Muslim.

There is no question. I disagree with Mohammed Khan that he is a fake ex -Muslim.

What I say is he's a fake ex -devout Muslim. Okay. Because you know the difference between Surah Al -Fatiha and the

Shahada. Yeah. Why doesn't Ergin Kanner know the difference between Surah Al -Fatiha and the Shahada? You know,

I've spoken in many churches, and sometimes when we get excited, even for me, like, even Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, I could sometimes, you know, mess that up, depending on like how the audience interacts and stuff.

But let's just go to your blog right now. The issue with prayer in the bathroom. The prayer in the bathroom, the hadith clearly says that there are two places that a

Muslim cannot pray. A public bathroom and a graveyard.

That is, like, out of bounds. Right. And this one says in Sunan Abu Dawud, hadith number 492.

So this is a question that I was going back and forth with Mohammed Khan. I told him very clearly,

American high school bathrooms, you cannot call it a public bathroom, like, in the UK, or the public bathroom in Kenya, where I'm from.

Those bathrooms are filthy. So... Wait a minute. Go ahead.

Has something happened to high school bathrooms since I was in high school? No, no, no. I'm just saying, though, like,

Brother Kanner, I don't know what kind of high school he was going to, okay?

But what I'm just saying... We know exactly what high school he was going to. Oh, okay. But you know exactly, but I don't. The hadith very clearly says, well, in one hadith it says you cannot pray in the bathroom.

But in this one, which is more of the authority than the other one, it specifically says public bathroom.

Which any bathroom in a high school will be. Okay. But in this case, because I cannot just leave my house and go to a high school next door and tell them that I would like to use their bathroom.

I don't think they will let me. Everything is locked down in this country. A public... A bathroom at a high school is...

That's where the drugs... The drug smoking takes place. I'm a teacher.

I'm sorry? I say it is done by students and teachers. Oh, well, I never saw any of my teachers doing anything like that.

No, but I'm just saying, though, I'm just saying everything is... They are being used by students and teachers. Where I'm going here,

I'm going on the technicality path. Well, okay, let me address this. Once this was raised,

I decided to go to... And if I could, for some reason, remember how to get hold of my other

Mac, and I've forgotten what program it is that I used to do that just while I'm doing a number of things here. But just a few minutes before this program started,

I received an email from Sheikh Yasser Qadhi.

Sheikh Yasser Qadhi is a scholar of Islam. He is a

Muslim. I have played a number of his lectures here on the program before and interacted with them.

He and I have exchanged a number of emails together. We've conversed over certain things.

We've actually talked about the possibility of doing a book sometime in the future where we compare Muslim Tawheed with the doctrine of the

Trinity from the Christian perspective. He is a Muslim scholar. He's a real scholar.

He's not just a person who leads in prayers. He is a

Sheikh. He is an Islamic scholar. And so I wrote to him and asked him about this. I said, you're an expert in these things.

What's your answer? And he said, well, obviously, the bathroom, any type of bathroom would be one of the last places you'd ever want to pray.

Specifically, there is being forbidden two places. That is the public restroom and the graveyard.

He said, if in an extreme situation, someone were to argue that you had a waterproof prayer rug and an extreme situation, he said,

I could see someone doing that. And he specifically said that the younger generation who are ashamed of doing the prayers tend toward this.

Now, there's the problem, Hussein, because the whole point of Ergen's making this statement was just the opposite of what

Sheikh Yasir Qadhi said. People need to understand why

I just said that. He was saying that he was wearing Muslim garb to school.

Now, as a Turkish Muslim, that would be unusual. I think you understand that. Turkish Muslims are not big on wearing a kufi or any other openly

Islamic or Arabic garb. So he said, in fact, in what

I played today, he said he was in full gear, etc.,

etc. If he was afraid of the people seeing him doing this, why did he wear the clothing?

So he was saying that he was open. He was bold about this. So that means the last place that he would be would be in the bathroom.

But if it's the way that Sheikh Yasir Qadhi mentioned that there are young people who are ashamed of that, then that'd be the exact opposite of what he was saying.

And so, again, I think, Hussein, that what we have here, and you mentioned it just a few moments ago,

I think we have here is a man who had a Muslim father. He was raised in a

Muslim context. His parents divorced when he was very young.

He lived with his mother, who fought against him being raised as a Muslim. And he only saw his dad every other weekend for five weeks during the summer.

So he was not living with his father. From the time of a very young age.

And so I think what we have here is preacher exaggeration.

Like you said, the audience gets you going. And everything I just played here, if everybody just listened to what

I was playing here, the audience was clapping and laughing and getting all excited. They're hanging on every word.

And I think what has happened since 9 -11, because up to 9 -11, he was Butch Kanner.

After 9 -11, he was either Butch Kanner or E. Michael Kanner. Now, all of a sudden, he's

Ergun Mehmet Kanner. I think what happens is he starts feeding on the audience and he starts making things up.

Now, there's lots of people go, well, you know, that's just that's just fine. As long as Jesus is getting preached.

Hussein, I have to debate Shabir Ali. Okay. I have to debate the

Muslims who know that this man is making things up. And are you not aware of the fact that Ergun very frequently uses very disparaging language of Arabic and Turkish people?

He calls them sand and word. He calls them towel heads.

He uses all stuff because he says that's what he is. Actually, he's only half Turkish. His mother is

Swedish, as far as we can tell, unless you come out and explain something. So the point,

Hussein, is when you wed exaggeration to the proclamation of the

Gospel, you are dragging the Gospel into the realm of exaggeration and myth.

Okay, but let me just—maybe you misunderstood me, but what I just said is when people—when

I go, like, I speak in churches sometimes and people get excited and whatnot, when

I say the opening of even a chapter in the Quran, you know,

I mean, I can easily misspeak over there. So, I mean, there are a lot of—I mean,

I know there's a lot out there about him. And this is the next issue that I've even thought about.

But do you know, though, that Prophet Muhammad even observed when he observed one of the prayers?

That's what Muhammad Khan has not responded about, is he observed a prayer right in the middle of a sheep and, like, a goat fold.

You know what I mean? Yes, I am aware of that. But again, what does that have to do with his claim that as a bold Muslim who was unafraid in high school that he did the prayers in the bathroom?

Yeah, I know. I mean, in that case, I mean, there's a guy trying to convert him, too.

Was it—was indeed that the context, though? Somebody was trying to convert him? Yes, uh -huh. Yeah, so could it be that maybe he was afraid of that guy and—

He never says that he was in any way, shape, or form afraid of Jerry Tackett. No, I'm sorry,

I just don't see it. I see, I see. Okay, another— Let me ask you, have you ever prayed in a high school bathroom?

No. I mean, I'm from Kenya, let me tell you this. Our public bathrooms would be the last place you want to be.

Well, but trust me, I don't know, maybe there was a super -duper janitor in Ohio, but the public bathrooms at my high school was the last place you'd ever want to be to do prayers.

I wouldn't want to be on the ground in the public bathroom in any high school in the United States. He had a prayer rug, though.

He had a prayer rug. Well, fine, I would be leaving it behind once I put it out.

I wouldn't be rolling it up, that's for sure. And you don't know if it is waterproof or not, okay? Well, there you go.

Don't you think, though—I mean, honestly, Hussein, I'm not—first of all,

I hope you—and Mohammed Khan would verify this. I don't agree with everything Mohammed Khan says. I have criticized

Mohammed Khan for some of the ways that he has dealt with some of this information, and I don't agree with everything he's said.

So I'm not—don't put me in a situation where I have to defend everything he said, but at the same time,

Hussein, as a true Islamic convert, doesn't it bother you when someone exaggerates their testimony so as to make it sound—I mean, this guy talks about being trained in a madrasa in Turkey to be a jihadi.

He came to the United States when he was four for crying out loud. Did he go back, though?

How do you know? He won't answer the question, Hussein. We keep asking it. Okay, okay.

And as far as we can tell, there's no reason to believe that because the divorce took place shortly after this time period.

They owned a house in Ohio, and there's no question that from the time the divorce papers were filed, the children were not allowed to leave the continental

United States. So unless he was training to be a jihadi at six in Turkey someplace, which

I suppose is a possibility, but he needs to come out and tell us these things.

Just so you know, like madrasa, the most I can remember in my childhood, going back,

I remember me being in madrasa. That's like the farthest I can go, you know? Right.

So kids going to madrasa, they start at the very tender age. So I really cannot speak for him. I mean,

I know you have a lot of questions, and I hope he answers them. Yeah, well,

I hope he does, too, Hussein. We've gone way over time. We've still got Michael and George that I need to talk to. So could

I thank you for your call today and move on to him real quick so we can wrap up? Thank you. All right. Thank you, Hussein.

Thanks for calling. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, real quickly, since Michael's been hanging on a long time, I know we're going long, but let's real quickly talk to Michael.

Hi, Michael. Hey, how are you? Doing good. Good. I hope my accent matches where I'm from.

Yeah, you don't sound like you're from Milwaukee, like that other guy, but that's okay. I don't think I can fake the accent, so I'm not going to try.

Okay. I have some questions. I, of course, being in the Bible Belt South, you know,

I have some family members that are James -only cults. Okay, so sort of like Peter Ruckman?

Um, maybe not quite that bad, but enough to where, you know, they want to dialogue with me concerning the issue.

So, but I have some questions that I've gotten on YouTube. I found your stuff on YouTube very helpful, but, of course, there's a lot of, you know,

I know you engaged with some guy named Calcium Boy at one point, but there's several on there like that.

I've got some that are, you know, very genuine friends. You know, I consider them friends, but they're, you know, they've bought into this, and so I'm actually working on a series of videos that I'm going to put up, you know, more or less explaining why

I can't buy into that, you know. But there's one thing, looking through some of their literature, which

I know you've been exposed to some of that, too, that, um... Yeah, you can say that. Because I'm not versed in textual criticism other than the research

I've done online and from your book, other than that, you know, I really don't know, and it's kind of hard to just do a

Google search on TV and, I mean, on the internet and, you know, find it. But I had a couple of specific questions for you that you might could either answer or at least kind of point me in a direction where I can get the answers.

Okay. The first one is the claim that Erasmus had access to the

Vaticanus but did not use it because, you know, he just outright dismissed it. On your...

Okay, I'll answer that one. I believe, possibly in my paper posted on our website on Erasmus, there might be a response to that.

I'd have to look, but I... Yeah, well, I read that actually today, and the only thing you said on there was that you said that he did not have access to it.

He did not have direct access to it. However, he knew of its existence, and he wrote to his friend Bombasius, maybe looking for...

I mean, this is an unusual word that Google should pick up. If you look up Bombasius, B -O -M -B -A -S -I -U -S, you'll probably find a reference to Erasmus contacting him and asking him to look at Vaticanus at 1

John 5 -7 to verify whether it did or did not contain the text. And so the fact is that Erasmus did know of his existence, did seek to make reference to it, though he knew that there'd be no way he could actually utilize it, because he was in Basel, Switzerland, and not in Rome.

Okay. So, I mean, because I know, doing some research on his biography and all that, that, you know, he was kind of hobnobbing with some higher ups, so I didn't know if maybe...

Of course, we're thinking in 21st century terms, it's not like he could have just hopped on a jet and flew down there. Exactly. Okay. All right.

So, all right, so you got that. Let's see. Also, there's a claim that Tischendorf thought that both the

Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus were by the same author, or scribe, or however you want to...

I'm unfamiliar with that claim. That would be highly unusual, because there is a pretty...

You know, actually, in the back of my mind, there's a... Maybe I have heard something about that from somewhere, but I don't know of any modern scholars that would substantiate that, because, obviously, we have had the opportunity of extensive study of both manuscripts now, much more

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, but certainly enough to be able to identify the scribes. Actually, I do think that I remember something to where I did read somewhere someone theorizing that one of at least four scribes of Sinaiticus might have been involved with Vaticanus, but outside of that,

I've only seen it stated as a theory. But there wasn't just one scribe of either one.

So you'd have to have multiple... Okay, so, again, it's oversimplifying the situation.

Is there anything written directly by Tischendorf about this? I know in your book you have had some quotes by him.

Yes, uh -huh. Oh, he wrote, yeah, and I don't know how much of what he wrote is in Google Books, but you might want to check, but he would write, for example, introductions to the various scholarly works that he, you know, like his texts of the

Septuagint, things like that. So he wrote, and you should be able to obtain, if not these days, by Google Books, at least via Interlibrary Loan, pretty much everything that he wrote.

Right, okay. All right, and then, let's see, of course, the claim that the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are missing, you know, portions of the

Scripture, which, for an older document, that's kind of expected, right? It was the late doctrines that were more complete.

Well, Vaticanus, for example, breaks off at Hebrews 9 -something, 13,

I think, something along those lines, but it would seem to have... Obviously, if it breaks off in the middle of a book, then yeah, there's been a problem.

I mean, these are very, very ancient books, and most of my paperback books from seminary are starting to look pretty bad.

The bindings are yellowed and hardened and all sorts of things like that.

So the question as to what they originally contained and the fact that they would contain extra -canonical books is normally what's raised by people who don't recognize or don't seem to understand how books were produced back then and jump to the assumption that if a book contained, if it contained in its collection a book, that it automatically means that the people who produced it believed that those books were canonical.

That does not follow, especially a book of that size. Other popular works that were considered to be pious, to be read, might be included without in any way, shape, or form indicating that the person thought those were canonical.

All right, okay, so the manuscripts at Erasmus, of course, it all comes back that Erasmus was the chosen one that delivered to us the perfect, pure line of manuscripts.

So his six to ten manuscripts that he actually worked from, because they were so late in date, they probably,

I mean, were any of them incomplete other than, of course, was it Rusell's or whatever that he had that revelation?

But other than that one, were the rest of them, were they complete or would they have been partial also? I believe that they were partial in the sense that an entire text of the entire

New Testament would be very, very large. What you'd normally have would be a Gospels compilation and a

Pauline compilation, whatever it might be. The point is, none of them contained revelation. And in fact, he didn't have a revelation manuscript.

He borrowed a commentary from Reuchlin and had to extract the text of Revelation from the text of the commentary, which is a tough way of going at it.

He didn't trust the earliest of the manuscripts he had. He relied upon the later ones.

He had one, I think it was as early as 1000, but he didn't trust that one. He relied more heavily upon 13th and 14th century manuscripts for his production.

And you got to remember, he didn't deliver to us any type of pure manuscripts at all. He has five, there's five different versions of Erasmus, each of which disagrees with the other.

And then you have Stephanus in 1555 and then Bayes in 1598. And the

King James translators rely primarily upon Bayes. So there's differences amongst all of those particular printed editions.

Is there a source to actually be able to identify specifically those areas? Yeah, Scrivener's work.

Scrivener in the 19th century. In fact, the TR, the Textus Receptus that people carry around today, the little blue casebound one, the

Trinitarian Bible Society puts out, that's actually a Greek text based upon an English text. What Scrivener did is he went back to the

King James and he took those five of Erasmus, he took Stephanus and he took

Bayes. And he looked at what the textual decisions of the

King James translators were and then created a Greek text based upon what their choices were.

Because none of those seven texts that they drew from said the exact same thing.

And so that TR that he created is actually based upon the King James version of the Bible. And that's what people carry around.

But there is no manuscript known to man that reads exactly like the TR. It's an eclectic text, just like any other text is.

Right, right. OK, because there's no two manuscripts, Greek -wise, that are identical, right?

Well, the handwritten ones, no. I mean, there's some that are extremely similar that would be produced in later periods in the

Byzantine manuscripts. But the idea of this is the TR, this is the received text, the vast majority of people who are carrying around that little blue casebound volume do not know where it came from.

And they do not know what its history is. It's actually a Greek text based upon an English text. But that's the reality.

And so, anyway. All right, here's a mouth -to -wall question for you.

OK, real quick, this will be the last one. OK, all right. Are you familiar with any revivals that were not based or not utilizing the

King James? Any revival that took place before 1611 would have been not using the

King James. The Puritans detested the King James. The Pilgrims didn't even want it on the ships to bring over here.

And so, any of the... But Jonathan Edwards, unfortunately, used the King James. Well, I would not say unfortunately, but there have been...

Well, that's my argument, it is. Yeah, well, but there have... Well, I'm sorry. But the whole idea that, well, there have been revivals that utilize the

King James version of the Bible just shows such an amazing ignorance of church history and such an amazing focus upon one -language people.

Any revival that took place in any church outside the English -speaking world from 1611 onwards didn't have anything to do with the

King James. And anyone who ignores those is so Americocentric and English -centric that it just boggles the mind.

And yet again, a lot of our King James -only friends are very much that way, unfortunately. So, there have...

I know lots of folks today who have become revived in their faith, and their faith has grown, and they've never read the

King James version of the Bible. And so, that whole functional argumentation for the

King James just simply doesn't work. Well, I was just hoping to throw something up, because I thought, first, the Great Awakening, but then that kind of fell.

And I'm thinking maybe the Ninth Hour Welch Revival, and I'll have to check on that and see if what was common there is based on the

TR amount. All righty, Michael. Thanks for your call, sir. All right. Take care. All right. God bless. Bye -bye.

All right. Well, we went 11 minutes long there, but I felt it was important to talk with Hussein.

If we need to next time, I'll read more specifically Sheikh Yasser Qadhi's email.

I couldn't bring it up for some reason. But I appreciated that interaction. And you're listening to the program today.

We'll be back again, Lord willing, next Tuesday morning here on The Dividing Line. We'll see you then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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