The Gospel According to Judas? Then Calls

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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

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

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

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James White. Figures in history, the man

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Christians believe betrayed Jesus, but what if that's not true? And what if Jesus didn't really perform all the miracles credited to him after all?

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It's the premise of a new fictional work by best -selling author Jeffrey Archer and biblical scholar Frank Maloney.

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It's called The Gospel According to Judas, and it's sure to make some true believers a little bit mad.

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Mr. Archer, Professor Maloney, good to have you both here. How do you describe this, pure fiction, or do you want people to take this with a little bit more than a grain of salt?

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Oh, a little bit more, yes, we take it seriously. We all know, because we were brought up on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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And so we see that view of Jesus of Nazareth. I wanted to write a book that saw the whole story from Capernaum to the crucifixion through the eyes of Judas, and perhaps see if there was another point of view.

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Well, talk to me, before we talk about specifics in the book, talk to me about this collaboration. You turn to, perhaps, the greatest living authority on the

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New Testament, expert on the four Gospels. Is this a way to add credibility, to shut up the critics before they even open their mouths?

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I don't deny that. I went to Rome and saw Cardinal Martini, and he advised me to go to Frank Maloney, who he said was the greatest leading authority on the

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New Testament. And I said to him, when I write this book, I want people to take it very seriously.

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And then he made some very stringent rules. You said to our producers you were very eager to rein in this prolific author.

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What did you mean by that? Jeffrey has a very fertile imagination, and if you let him loose on the New Testament, anything could happen.

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Right? So I said to Jeffrey, right from the start, there are two principles. The first thing is, it's got to be possible.

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As opposed to probable. Exactly. I allow probable, even things that may not be probable, but it's got to be possible in the first century.

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So, Professor, by saying that some of these things I'm about to list in a laundry list are possible, have you been disinvited from a lot of parties?

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It debunks the belief that Jesus walked on water. It debunks the idea that Jesus turned water into wine.

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It debunks the idea that Judas betrayed Jesus for money and that Judas committed suicide. It's important to say that the gospel has all the other miracles in it.

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But when I worked with the professor... Let me just stop our replay of the

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Today Show for just a moment and welcome you to the Dividing Line. You're listening to Matt Lauer interviewing

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Archer and Frank Maloney, who we just heard described as the greatest expert on the

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New Testament. I would beg to differ just a tad bit on that one. I did not know this was going to air this morning.

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I just happened to flip on the little four -inch black -and -white television set sitting on top of our microwave in our kitchen while making my breakfast burrito this morning.

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And lo and behold, this was the first story that Matt Lauer was doing was on the gospel according to Judas.

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This is not the Gnostic gospel. This is a fictional gospel written by Archer in reference to viewing the ministry of Jesus through Judas' eyes.

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Isn't that just a wonderful project to be doing? I just...

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Hey, you know, as long as... You know, it's two weeks before Easter, so let's let all the loonies out of the bins and let them make their money twisting and contorting the gospel.

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Can you imagine if someone tried to do this with Muhammad two weeks before Ramadan in Saudi Arabia?

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Hello! It doesn't happen, and there is reason for that. Obviously, you know, offending

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Christians, attacking the Christian faith, mocking the Christian faith, that's okay. You can do that and make lots of money on it, and you'll be invited to all the best

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Hollywood parties. But what amazed me is Frank Maloney is sitting there, and he's sitting there in his priestly garb.

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He looks just like Mitch Pacwa in the debate that I was recording the closing statements from the 1999

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Sola Scriptura debate to put on GodTube, YouTube, whichever one decides it wants to process it faster.

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And looks just like him, and he's a friend of Martini, Carlo Martini, one of the leading

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Roman Catholic New Testament scholars. And here's a guy who's way up in the

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Roman Catholic hierarchy, and he actually is involved with a book like this.

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And he is going to take, in essence, the same type of humanistic, secularistic perspective.

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He's going to dismiss, for example, John's recording of the paying of the silver because it was prophesied.

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And we all know prophecy can't exist. I mean, come on. You know, John's obviously just trying to make some other point.

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It's all parable dummy. You know, I thought Croston was outside the realm of Roman Catholic scholarship. He's a lot closer than I actually imagined.

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And it was really a tremendous illustration of the frustration that must exist amongst conservative

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Roman Catholics, especially the conservative Roman Catholics who engage in apologetics, because the fact is their scholars are not behind them.

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We have scholarship in conservative Christianity. We may be in the minority, but we have sound, consistent scholarship that teaches what we believe and defends what we believe.

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But the fact of the matter is the Roman Catholic hierarchy, its leading scholars are not conservative.

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Look at their institutions of higher learning. Look at the massive change that has taken place in the past 60 years in the expressions of the

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Roman Catholic leadership due to their basic complete collapse to higher criticism and things along those lines.

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They cannot make the assertions that the popes made in the 1800s because they no longer have any supernatural basis upon which to do so.

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I don't know how you are one of these Roman Catholic scholars and claim to be a Roman Catholic when you don't really believe in the immaculate conception.

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You don't really believe in the bodily assumption. You have to come up with new ways of even defying the word believe to make it appear that you believe these things.

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It's truly amazing. So here I am making one of my patented, wonderful, very tasty breakfast burritos for myself.

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And here comes this program, this five -minute interview. And that's what we're listening to here.

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And of course then you have the statements about debunking. This is the work of fiction for crying out loud.

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The utter total 100 % lack of discernment that is to be found in modern media on these issues is absolutely just unbelievable.

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And it just leaves you gasping for breath at the willingness of the modern media to put anything on the air, no matter how utterly without merit it is, no matter how twisted it is, it's going to get time.

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But you're not going to hear, you're not going to get the people who can actually say something. John MacArthur will get 30 seconds on Larry King.

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That's about all that there's going to be. And so that's what we're listening to. This was this morning on Today.

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I saw this, what, about two hours ago, actually. And thankfully they posted it fairly quickly.

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And I was able to pull it down and record it for you. If you'd like to watch it, it is on the today .msnbc

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.com website right now. Just click on the Tuesday link and you can watch the video for yourself.

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But let's continue on with it here. We're almost halfway through it already. And began to write about some of these things, particularly the 30 pieces of silver, which

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I suspect both of us were brought up on. To my surprise, the professor said, it never happened. So you think that all these things are possible?

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You're comfortable with all these things? What I'm saying here, Matt, is that I came to this as a New Testament scholar. I came to this as a

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New Testament scholar. What is a New Testament scholar? What is a scholar? What is scholarship?

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You know, people are always attacking me because I went to Columbia Evangelical Seminary. And, you know, they will defend people who have just graduated from a school, that have never published anything, they've never taught anything, they've never demonstrated their ability to do anything, to teach, to deal with exegesis, to do research, nothing.

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Evidently in our society, scholarship is something you buy. It's something you purchase. It's like buying a

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Costco cart. Well, you're now a Costco because you bought a Costco cart. Well, you're a scholar because you bought a diploma.

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If you put out the right amount of money. It doesn't matter if you can teach. It doesn't matter if you can communicate. It doesn't matter if you can research. It's irrelevant.

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All that has become irrelevant. You know, there was a day, you know, back in the 1800s, you know, the 1700s, you had to actually prove that you could do something, that you could utilize your knowledge, you could do meaningful research, you could communicate in such a fashion as to demonstrate and prove your ability and the fact that you understood what you're talking about.

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But today, the term scholarship is thrown around. We're going to be listening to a debate that Shabir Ali did with Mike Licona, and he will throw the term scholars say this out, just like that.

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Well, what scholars? What are their backgrounds? You know, when he said, for example, that the Gospel of Thomas is earlier than Mark, well, scholars say this.

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Folks, I've been saying this for a long, long time. We need to learn to demythologize scholarship.

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Okay? I can't think of almost any human phrase that could be created, any thought that could be put out that you could not find a quote -unquote scholar to substantiate.

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No matter how stupid it is. No matter how completely outside the realm of rational thought it might be, you can find somebody who will substantiate it.

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You will find someone who talks about, I'm a scholar and I believe this. Scholars are supposed to have access to a body of information from which, if they honor the term scholarship, they derive meaningful conclusions.

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But Christians especially should not be subject to this secular and worldly view of what a scholar is, because we know what

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Romans 1 says, do we not? Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

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Sin impacts the mind. And scholars who are in rebellion against Jesus Christ as their creator will twist the truth so as to continue in that rebellion.

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There is no neutrality in reference to the claims of Christ. And those who even claim to follow

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Christ but are involved in false religions will likewise twist the information and the conclusions they come to.

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And so it just drives me crazy when I hear people going, well, you know, credentialed scholars say, credentialed scholars say everything.

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There is nothing credentialed scholars don't say. That is a meaningless statement.

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And we're going to hear, probably not today, but there's a point during the debate between Mike Lycona and Shabir Ali, where Lycona makes a very good point.

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He's talking about the methods of crucifixion that were used. He's talking about the sources.

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We can go to the historical sources that demonstrate that the victims were nailed to crosses.

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And that the ropes, the only historical reference we have to the use of binding or tying is from Egypt, not from the

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Romans doing that. And so he's challenging Shabir Ali, who has questioned this.

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And Shabir is trying to say, well, I don't think that Jesus necessarily would have died by what happened to him on the cross. And he's trying to say, well, he could have been bound, and Pilate was even shocked that he was already dead, and blah, blah, blah, and there's all sorts of things.

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But the point is Lycona presented 14 references. And he's talking about Tacitus.

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He's talking about Josephus. He's going to original sources. And Shabir responds by reference to a secondary source.

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And Lycona challenges him and says, hey, wait a minute, this is supposed to be a scholarly interchange. It's supposed to be a scholarly debate. You can't go to secondary sources.

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You need to go to primary sources. And Shabir just, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you're attacking these scholars.

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No, that's not doing scholarship. Secondary sources, all you can do when you refer to secondary sources is say, this person says this.

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A scholarly debate is supposed to go beyond that to the original sources and say, okay, if Frank Maloney says that it's possible, if Frank Maloney, for example, says that there was no exchange of money to Judas for the betrayal of Jesus, then we go to Frank Maloney's sources.

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Frank Maloney is not a source in of himself. You go to the sources he's utilizing. He's speaking of the

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New Testament. He's speaking of a historical document. So you go to his sources and you find out, are you handling these correctly? Are you engaging in double standards?

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What's the worldview you bring to this? What's the presuppositions and assumptions that you bring to your examination of these things?

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That's what you're supposed to be doing. But in our society today, well, if Frank Maloney says it and Frank Maloney is a credentialed scholar, then his viewpoint deserves this exact same amount of respect as, say, an

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Orthodox Christian's view. Well, I say to you, that's not true. And we need to get away from that.

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We need to stop thinking that way. And we need to do it openly. We need to be talking about this more and more often because, as I've said many times, the doors, the walls and the windows of the church will not keep worldly thinking out of the church.

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We need to be addressing these things on a regular basis. So, anyway, that sermon was free.

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We continue on. Now, what I am saying is that these are what we call nature miracles. These are where Jesus controls nature in a way that is typical of the

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God of the Old Testament. Is there something wrong with that? Something tells me that from this perspective, the

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God of the Old Testament never did anything with nature miracles either. Or maybe it's just, well, if the

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God of the Old Testament was supposed to have done these things, then Jesus is supposed to do these things and that makes the connection between the two.

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And, therefore, we must know that it could not have possibly happened. These are true at the level of truth insofar as they proclaim that what

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God did, Jesus did. Now, catch that. These are true on the level of truth that insofar these are things that God did,

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Jesus did. Now, isn't that a wonderful way of absolutely eviscerating the text, stripping it to shreds?

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I mean, this is the thought. The thought is, oh, well, see, there's a connection here. And you see the authors are trying to communicate to us the fact that Jesus did what

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God did, and so there's a connection, there's authority. And that means these things never happen. If you can find any meaning in the text that will allow you to get around these things actually happening, then we can say they're true, but really they're not.

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See, this is the state of much of what's called New Testament scholarship in Western culture today.

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Is it any wonder the Muslims generally don't have any respect for it? But in terms of the facts of Jesus walking on water, etc.,

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that's another story. They proclaim the truth of the divinity of Jesus. I just love this.

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They proclaim the truth of the divinity of Jesus, but not by placing his actions in a discernible history.

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They do so through parable and fiction. And this then becomes the basis upon which we are supposed to believe in the deity of Christ, is because anonymous authors, multiple authors, created a redacted work over time where they connected

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Jesus with myths from the Old Testament, and that's why you're supposed to believe in the deity of Christ. And you wonder why

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Roman Catholic apologists can sometimes get a little frustrated with their own church?

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Yeah, at least I have the ability to look at the liberals on my side. I can go debate them too.

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You don't find too many of these Catholic apologists doing that. Maybe Robert St. Genes would. I think he'd debate anybody these days. Hopefully you saw the blog article on that and know why

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I said that. Can you imagine taking that kind of argument up against Greg Stafford?

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Can you imagine the result, the massacre that would take place in that context?

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Believers, the faithful, as they read this book and they walk away from reading this book, do you think that some of their beliefs will be shattered?

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Not at all. No, I was worried about that, of course, because as a layman, not a scholar,

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I had been brought up on the 30 pieces of silver. The high priests gave Judas 30 pieces of silver to betray our

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Lord. But the professor said he certainly betrayed him, no doubt about that. But there is no 30 pieces of silver.

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And the reason he gave is that in Matthew, the only gospel that mentions the 30 pieces of silver, there's a reason, and the professor went on to explain it.

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Now, let me just stop right here, because I said John earlier. I apologize, it was Matthew. To remember, two years ago,

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I spent a lot of time, both in my Bible study class and here on The Dividing Line, preparing folks for the debate with John Dominick Crossan.

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And we played stuff, and some of you were starting to get glassy looks in your eyes, because it was like, oh, please, not him again.

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And I do appreciate the patience, especially the folks at the Phoenix Forum Baptist Church, who have to put up with whatever project it is

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I'm working on. I try not to be completely out of balance there, but it's a whole lot easier for me to speak on things

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I'm studying, and I'm passionate about the time that it is stuff that I'm not. So that's just sort of a natural human thing.

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But anyway, as we were studying Crossan, the issue came forward that since he's not a classical theist, he doesn't really believe in a personal

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God that certainly has a decree, or certainly has knowledge of future events and issues like that.

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How do you deal with prophecy? And that Crossan's perspective is, look, all the

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New Testament writers are doing is they are ransacking the

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Old Testament, and they are looking for text to apply to Jesus, and then they create the events in Jesus' life to fit those parameters.

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So these things never happen. They're all meant to be parables created fictionally by the writers.

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Now, of course, that assumes that the individuals who read these works would then read it in that way, that they would not take these as serious historical works.

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So at some point, we just got really stupid and started taking these seriously, as if you could ever demonstrate that at any point in time, the regular reading of the text was, oh, no, this never happened.

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No, we've always been good naturalistic materialists from the start. Yeah, right. That's the historical worldview of not only the authors, but the early church and down the centuries as well.

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Not quite. But anyways, that was what was being asserted, is that there is no prophecy. There is no means of knowing what's going to take place in the future, because the future is completely open.

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There is no God in control of all these things, a personal God, etc., etc. Well, here you have the exact same thing going on.

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Well, there wasn't any. Because Matthew lists this directly from the

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Old Testament text, it couldn't have happened. Because there is a fulfillment of prophecy, that means if we're good naturalists, and there are many in the

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New Testament field who are functionally naturalists, they're naturalistic materialists in their worldview, even if on Sundays they sing songs and act like they're supernaturalists.

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If your worldview is not consistent Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, then you are not only a hypocrite, but you are what the majority of that time is.

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If you proclaim yourself a supernaturalist, if you proclaim yourself a believer, that God has created this world and He's active in this world, things like that, but you don't live in accordance with that, you are inconsistent, and as such need to be rejected.

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Well, it's lifted entirely out of one of the prophets, Zechariah, 30 pieces of silver, throwing the coins in the treasury, etc.

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Word for word out of Zechariah, but what's Matthew trying to do? Matthew's trying to say that in the life of Jesus, and even in the life of Judas, the promise of God is fulfilled.

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A couple of things here. So, since the promise of God is fulfilled, this didn't happen. The only thing we need to find, as long as we can find a parabolic meaning in the words, then the history is irrelevant.

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It doesn't matter if the text says it happened. It doesn't matter if the text says it happened in such a fashion that it provides names and contexts and everything else, but we just know that prophecy can't happen because, look, this

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Matthew guy, whoever he was, whatever this community was that created this book called Matthew, in whatever form it originally appeared, they knew of Zechariah, and therefore, they just used this and they created this incident, and that's why we can now say it never happened.

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Those of you who are in seminary know that there's nothing new here, but the thing is, most people sitting in the pew assume that seminary is filled with faithful people who actually believe what the

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Word of God says, and the number of seminaries that are like that has diminished to a very, very, very, very small minority in Western culture today.

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That's why so many go in believing one thing and come out very, very different than when they went in.

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There's a reason we're talking about this book on this show. This is a big subject. You bring

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Jesus up in a book, it's a hot -button subject. You, Professor, have said that there's a worldwide attempt to render traditional religions irrelevant.

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So do you think that perhaps you, in some way, contributed to that attempt? On the contrary. The major reason for my participation with Geoffrey Archer in writing this book is because I, as a professional theologian and biblical scholar, am not prepared to sit back and allow the

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Dan Browns and the Richard Dawkins of this world to both trivialize and ridicule

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Christianity. Well, wait a minute. What are you doing now, man? I mean, come on.

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That's a wonderful sentiment. That's a wonderful sentiment, and I think I've been quite active in not allowing the

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Dan Browns of the world to do that. We spent a lot of time taking the Da Vinci Code apart, but we didn't have to abandon a

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Christian worldview to do it. That must be what drives some people nuts. I know there are

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Roman Catholics who listen to this program, and they agree with so much of what I have to say in this area, and they can't find their own people doing it.

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It bugs them to no end to get decent information, in -depth information, strong information on Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses or response to tomb story.

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They can't go to their own church. They've got to borrow from the very folks they're then going to debate sola scriptura with to get their responses.

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Because here's one of your leading Roman Catholic scholars, and what's he doing? I'm going to tell them from the point of view of a well -trained, committed scholar that there's more to this story than that.

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There's more to this story. Now, how many times has he called himself a well -trained, committed scholar so far? He's just really reminding us of that wonderful fact.

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But what in the world is he doing, saying that it's possible that Judas, that these events didn't take place and that Judas was, you know, he's throwing

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, he's throwing the canonical Gospels under the bus, as is done in large portion of the

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Testament scholarship as a whole, of course. But this somehow is supposed to be a response to Dan Brown, a response to this type of atheistic attack.

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How does that follow? Should we expect down the road some sort of formal endorsement of this book from the

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Pope? Vatican Radio has talked about it. You know the Pope for 16 years. Is he going to come out and endorse this?

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Definitely not. The Holy Father only endorses his own encyclicals and Bible documents. What was exciting was, when we were in Rome, we were treated so well, which was as close as we could get to it.

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And then I asked Archbishop Tutu if he would do the audio CD. And he sent a note back, not when he'd read it, saying,

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I found it riveting and plausible. He then sent me an email saying, and we know which one of us is riveting, and we know which one of us is plausible.

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Geoffrey Archer, Professor Maloney, good to see you both. Thank you very much, Matt. Well, there you go.

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That's what you had on, wow, what on earth just happened there? Now, you just shocked the microphone there.

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My headphones are now five times louder than they were just a moment ago. I sound like I'm in a, could you please turn my headset down, please?

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I'm just going to have to take them off. They're distorting really badly. And now I've only got them in one, you just destroyed something in there.

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I'm going to have to take these off. Rich goes and walks away, comes back, touches something.

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You've got to get rid of those metal desks, man. They need to be grounded right now. It's a bad thing.

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Anyway, there you go. That's what appeared this morning on the

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Today Show. Hopefully during the break we'll be able to get things fixed so that I can hear the rest of it, because we just fried something in the other room.

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Oh, well, that's sort of how it goes. That's what appeared this morning, and I didn't see it coming.

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I hadn't seen anything ahead of time like I had in regards to the tomb story. This is irrelevant in comparison to the tomb story.

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There's no question about it. I mean, this is a work of fiction. It's another, let's put this out within a couple weeks of Easter, make some money, go into paperback for a long, and then be forgotten.

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But it is highly illustrative, highly illustrative of the decrepit nature of Roman Catholic scholarship today in reference to its willingness to embrace the most worldly perspectives.

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I'm sure the folks on the conservative side of the Tiber bemoan that fact on a regular basis.

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877 -753 -3341 is the phone number that has been called by a couple folks already.

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We'll go ahead and take their phone calls from Roger and Jeff after we take our break and then move on to the

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Shabir -Ali debate. And let's hope the computer didn't freeze in the same shocking incident as everybody else.

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And hopefully we'll be able to take our break. We'll be right back. The church today often ignores or misunderstands this foundational doctrine.

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This is no book for casual reading. There is solid meat throughout, an outstanding contribution in every sense of the words.

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What has happened to this sacred duty in our day? The charges are as follows. Prostitution using the gospel for financial gain, pandering to pluralism, cowardice under fire, felonious eisegesis, entertainment without a license, and cross -dressing, ignoring

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God's ordinance regarding the roles of men and women. Is a pulpit crime occurring in your town? Get pulpit crimes in the bookstore at AOMN .org.

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This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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The elders and people of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming

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You can call for further information at 602 -26 -GRACE. If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at PRBC .org,

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where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.

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And welcome back to the dividing line. I still sound like what I sound like before, unfortunately.

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It's a little bit better, but hopefully we'll be able to hear the callers and things like that. And then we're probably going to have a public execution of our soundboard after the program is over.

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But let's hope we can even get the callers on the air because we're going to be using line one, which hasn't really been working overly well for us of late.

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So let's try talking with Roger. Hi, Roger. Hi. How are you doing? Is this Dr. White?

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Yes, it is. Hi, Dr. White. First of all, I just wanted to just thank you for your work.

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And I actually just come across you recently. I was actually a big Dave Hunt fan in the beginning of my college years.

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I spent some time up at Utah State and read the Godmakers. But I soon came to find out how he bashes the doctrines of grace, and I was just really disappointed with the way he defended his position.

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And I just wanted to thank you for what you've done. Well, thank you, sir. But anyways, I wanted to ask you about the

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Greg Stafford -Bob Morey debate. Actually, I heard it on your website. And Greg Stafford refers to Genesis 2, where God is basically seeing what

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Adam would name the animals, the creation. And I know you talk about anthropomorphic language, basically, you know, tying human attributes to God.

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Can you expand on that a little bit? And just, I don't know, I mean,

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I don't know exactly. Well, it's a well -known fact that God utilizes examples and similes to illustrate certain aspects of his being.

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He, at the same time, warns us that we should never liken him to anything in the creation.

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That's what idolatry is all about. But if there is no use of language to accommodate our creatureliness, then we could know nothing about God.

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So he talks about the breath of his nostrils, and he talks about his feathers and hiding us under his wings, and he talks about himself as a blast furnace and riding on the wings of the wind and all sorts of things like this, which obviously are meant to evoke images that communicate a particular aspect of God's being, but they are never to be taken in such a way that you create an idol of a blast furnace or create a big chicken to be representative of God, because it has wings under which you can hide.

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And so the fact that the scripture uses anthropomorphic languages should be at least a given to anyone who is seriously studying the word of God or seriously studying the kinds of literature that you find in the

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Bible that God utilizes to communicate to us. What Greg Stafford is missing is a simple basic element of biblical exegesis, and that is you go to those portions of the word of God that in a didactic teaching method lay out the truths on a certain issue.

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You do not go to areas that are not addressing a topic, bring out conclusions from those particular areas, create a theology, and then use that to override the clear areas of scripture.

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I've illustrated this many times, for example, in the debate over justification.

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Protestants go to what the Bible teaches in those plain sections where the

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Apostle Paul is laying out what is justification. We go to Romans 3 and 4, 3, 4, and 5.

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You go to Galatians 2 and 3. You go to those texts where the terms are being used, and they're being explained, and they're being illustrated, and they're being laid out, and you have direct teaching.

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And so you derive your foundations from those, and then if those terms are found elsewhere, maybe in passing, you might be able to gain some insight from those passing references, but you don't go to the passing references and make them normative and then override the clear didactic passages that are specifically teaching you the truth about these issues.

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And so one of the things I've said for a long time, the Roman Catholic, quote -unquote, apologist back in 1991,

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I just noticed this morning, he actually sells to the Catholic Legate site a CD of the partial debate that was recorded that we did in 1991.

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We have it available too, but not in the— I think we just made it available for free on the

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Straightgate site for a while. I'm not sure if it's even up anymore. It's still up there. But anyways, in that debate, he goes to these passing references.

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He goes to the Gospels, and wisdom is justified by her children. And so you take the term justified, and you build some theology out of that, and then you completely distort the clear didactic passages that are talking about justification on the basis of a passing reference elsewhere.

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Well, this is what Stafford is doing. Instead of going to the clear text, where in, for example, the prophecy of Isaiah, God is specifically laying out how you can recognize the true

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God, Jehovah, over against false gods. Or in Jeremiah, where you already have the people in captivity, and God gives to them direct apologetic responses that they're to offer to those who would invite them to go into idolatry.

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And what are the very things that God lays out that distinguish him from the false gods?

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They are the very things that Greg Stafford denies God has. That is, an exhaustive knowledge of future events.

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He mocks, God mocks, the false gods in the trial of false gods between Isaiah 40 and 48 by saying, no one should be fearful of you.

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You can't speak, you can't talk, you can't do anything. Do something that we might fear you. Tell us what is going to happen in the future, and tell us what happened in the past and why it happened.

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That is the challenge that he lays out. And the only God that can do that is the

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God of Scripture. It is the God who is behind Ephesians 1, where God works all things after the counsel of his will.

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Ephesians 1, where he knows the identity of the elect before they come into existence, and he chooses them to be his own.

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This is the God of Romans 9. There is no God like that in Stafford's system because he has this open theistic

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God who wants to learn things as he's going along.

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And so he looks at Genesis 2, and the subject of Genesis 2 is not the attributes of God.

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It is not to teach us the specific attributes of God in any way, shape, or form.

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But he goes there first and says, well, the only way that I think this makes sense, and I'm going to look at this without looking at the entirety of Scripture.

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I'm going to ignore what's called the analogy of faith, the fact that the faith is delivered in the fullness of God's revelation, not in any single part to the exclusion of others.

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I'm going to ignore all of that stuff, and I'm going to come up with a theology out of Genesis, and then

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I'm going to go to Isaiah, and I'm going to turn these things upside down in light of that. The result being, as it always is with Jehovah's Witness theology, that when you go to those texts, especially when they were apologetic in nature, as Isaiah was, they do the exact same thing in Colossians with their teaching about Jesus there, the apologetic argument of those texts falls apart.

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They turn Paul into a self -contradictory ninny, and here they turn

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Isaiah into someone who's contradicting himself as well. And so in each of these instances you have basic fundamental flaws on the part of Greg Stafford in his interpretation.

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I know he's written a bunch of stuff on his website. I wish I had time to be interacting with all of it.

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I would like to maybe get some of the other guys in the blog to start interacting with some of the things that he's written, especially his stuff on Acts 13, 48 and stuff like that, where he's attempted in a really futile way to provide some type of response to some of the statements in the

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Potter's Freedom. But you're dealing with someone here who is quite interesting.

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He's deeply influenced by the Watchtower Society, but not absolutely dominated by them, and in some ways feels that he has come up with some better responses than the

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Watchtower Society has. He had gotten really quiet for a while, but now has re -emerged over the past six months with Thundering Cannon, which can only indicate to me that he's been given the green light by somebody in the hierarchy of the

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Watchtower Society, that he basically is safe to go ahead and get back into what he was doing without experiencing disfellowshipping from the local

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Kingdom Hall. So exactly what that means, who knows? But you're dealing with someone who is free to, in essence, make things up as he's going along as far as hermeneutic methodology and exegesis, rather than following sound methodology that would, of course, lead him to all sorts of other conclusions that his theology would preclude.

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Now, would the same rule apply, because he mentioned Exodus, where it basically refers back to Pharaoh hardening his heart, and then he counter -references that with Romans 9, when

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Paul talks about actually God was responsible for that, using him for his purposes. Yeah, but remember, even before Moses went to Pharaoh, God said he would harden his heart.

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That's the one thing that people keep forgetting, is that they go, oh, we'll see Pharaoh harden his own heart.

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Well, yes, however, that was no surprise to God, and God's actions were not the result of Pharaoh hardening his heart.

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Even before Moses stepped foot before Pharaoh that last time, he had been told while he was still traveling back to Egypt that God was going to harden

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Pharaoh's heart, because he had a purpose in what he was going to do, and that is the destruction of the gods of Egypt, and the demonstration of his own name and his own power.

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Right, absolutely, okay, that's all. And I know Bob Morey kind of referred to, I don't know if he said this in answering that, but he kind of referred to Revelation kind of being progressive in that.

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Well, yeah, his point there would be, you don't go to Genesis to the exclusion of Isaiah or Romans, and create a theology out of Genesis that you then force upon the rest of the canon of Scripture.

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The illustration that I used earlier, what I've said in the past, is I've used the illustration of a manual for your car.

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When you finally have something go wrong with that new shiny car of yours, and the warranties worn out, which is normally about five miles after the warranties worn out that it goes wrong, you fish the thing out from the bottom of the glove compartment and dust it off, and you start thumbing through it.

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How are you going to find what you're looking for? Well, you look in the index, and the index tells you if something's gone wrong with your lights, you go to these particular pages, and this is where the lights could be mentioned.

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Now, the lights may be mentioned in other sections of the owner's manual. There's probably a section in the battery section about lights, but you don't go there first.

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You go to where the owner's manual says, this is where I'm going to tell you about your lights, this is where I'm going to tell you about your battery.

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And that's the violation of basic hermeneutical principles that we have here, and basically all

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Morey's recognizing is you do not have the entirety of Christian theology in the Book of Genesis.

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You don't even have the entirety of Christian theology in the Pentateuch. There are vitally important things to see there, but there's much more that is revealed over time, and that's what the concept of progressive revelation is, is that you don't look at the

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Bible as if it's some sort of a theological text where everything is going to be found in every verse.

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You recognize that God in his sovereignty has revealed certain aspects of his truth with greater clarity at different points for his own purposes, and that's what he's talking about there.

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Okay. Well, thank you very much, Dr. White. All right. Thanks for calling. Appreciate it. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.

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Let's go to Jeff. Hey, Jeff. How are you doing? Hey, Dr. White. How have you been? Doing pretty good. Good. I had mentioned to you a few weeks ago that I saw

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Karen King in Philadelphia, and as luck would have it, John Dominick Crossan and John Shelby Spong are coming for the same book festival.

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Two very different individuals, let me assure you of that. Yes, yes, you know, with radically different things to say.

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And I need to get up to speed quickly because it's about a two -week time, and I know you did a couple of debates, and I'm going to order

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Jesus and Eyewitnesses ASAP. Yes. But I was wondering, especially

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I'm going, I wanted to kind of prepare myself for kind of, I'm going to look into as much as stuff

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I can find from them just kind of for general themes, you know, what they're going to say over and over again.

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But I was thinking more along the lines of from a presuppositional point of view, where to go, what would be a good place to say.

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Are you actually thinking you're going to have an opportunity of dialoguing with either one? The way it usually works at this place is ask questions or comments, author responds, no chance for rebuttal.

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Well, here's what I would say. Only one of those two gentlemen is actually going to listen to your question.

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Okay. Only one of the two of them will, and it will be Dom. Crosson, John Dominick Crosson, will listen to your question.

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And if the question is well formed, he will seriously consider it and will give you a thought out answer.

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Spong has no interest, if you indicate at all in what you have to say, that you are one of those redneck nutcases that actually believes that God has spoken in all of Scripture and he's done so infallibly and inerrantly.

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He has no interest in hearing what you have to say. He has no interest in examining what you have to say, responding to what you have to say.

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That's not to say he will not respond, but if your question is close enough to a more comfortable question, he'll go off after that and there's nothing you can do.

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John Dominick Crosson, if you watch the clips, and I'm going to probably put some more of those up over time, but even in the small amount that I've put up, when we are doing cross -examination,

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John Dominick Crosson was listening to what I was saying, and he was doing everything he could to understand what

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I was attempting to communicate within my own worldview, which wasn't easy for him to do because I don't think he's run into a whole lot of people like me in the past.

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So he found it fascinating, but my point was he is one of the few people,

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Mitch Packwood does as well, who actually listens to the question and attempts to hear what you're saying and respond to it in the context in which you ask the question.

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Therefore, if you take some time to listen to some of, and I can, drop me a note,

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I can direct you to the resources I used. Well, actually, what was really useful to me was there was an entire website, the

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Chautauqua Conference Center, I think, and don't ask me to spell that because it's

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Indian, so I haven't a clue, but I could probably track it down again because I had to buy a membership and I had to buy these

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MP3s and stuff, but he has spoken a number of times at this conference center.

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So has Spong and Borg and it's a real, you know, a Birkenstock type of place. And he did a whole series of lectures, which really helped me to completely immerse myself in his worldview and fully understand where he's coming from and get to appreciate him as a person and understand what he's saying and stuff like that.

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And so if you're going to ask Cross in a question, it can be stated, it can be phrased in such a way that he will actually give you a meaningful response.

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Now, you know, since you don't get to redirect, you can't necessarily force him into a position of actually dealing with what you're saying.

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But clearly, if you take the time to listen to the debate that I did with him and the

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CrossEx and stuff like that, that would help a great deal. But also just listening to him in his own sort of native context, lecturing on certain things.

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He did his his debates with N .T. Wright are very useful along those lines.

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When he was at the Southern Baptist Seminary in New Orleans back in early 2005, there are

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MP3s of that available as well. That helps, especially the audience questions there. In fact, I raised one of the audience questions from that debate to Dr.

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Cross in our cross -examination period as well. And those would be very useful because that was the one where we had a fellow with a real deep

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Southern drawl. I haven't posted this on the website yet, but I'm going to. I have recorded it. This guy with a real deep

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Southern drawl asks him in light of what he said that the Romans could have won out, the

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Gnostics could have run out, won out. Christianity might be completely different. It might be Gnostic. The Romans might have wiped it out.

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You know, there's really no God in control of these things. It just happens that Christianity survived and became predominant, but it could have been destroyed.

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And this fellow gets up and basically asks him, well, if what you've said is true,

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Dr. Cross, then it sounds like your choice to believe what you believe and my choice to believe what

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I believe is completely arbitrary. There's actually no mechanism for determining right and wrong.

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And the guy was right. The guy nailed it right on the noggin, and that comes up in the cross -ex too.

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So that would be my recommendation as far as the direction to go there. Well, even with Spong, a lot of times,

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I've done this in the past with Dawkins and with the Karen King at the same place, and generally it's more valuable.

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I'm not trying to change the mind or interact so much with the author, but it provides a lot of opportunities afterwards for talking with people in the crowd.

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Yeah, well, you could obviously ask Spong why he continues to identify himself as Episcopalian in light of the fact that he does not believe in a personal

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God and that he has made that very clear. You can quote him directly out of the Sins of Scripture where he makes that statement. I can give you the exact citations, and that can certainly open up some meaningful dialogue after that particular point in time as well.

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So, yeah, if that's what you want to do, that's great. But I think Crossan's going to be a much more likely candidate to actually give you a meaningful response to your question.

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Well, yeah, I mean, I had problems with Dawkins giving me a meaningful response. Well, Dawkins honestly reminds me, and some people are going to laugh at this, but Dawkins reminds me of a

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King James -only Fundamentalist Baptist. And what I mean by that is he is so radical in his atheism, so closed to any possible examination of what he's saying, that there's no critical thought going on there.

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Well, I basically read a large section of his book within like a week's notice, and just kind of picked out a bunch of different stuff, and I went very presuppositional on him.

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I gave him the argument for reason, and I did some arguments from morality, which he was using.

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He was using morality. And then at the end, I said, I want to remind you, as a materialist, that you're going to use the laws of logic, which are immaterial, to respond to me.

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And he had no idea what to do with me. Just no idea.

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This is not a man who is well -read in philosophy or theology. And I'm not mentioning this to kind of toot my own horn.

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Not at all. It's kind of like what you mentioned with Spong, how he...

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I guess why I'm bringing it up, not to toot my own horn, was just to kind of say, the level of ignorance in kind of the people who get popular is very astounding.

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It is astounding, but it should make sense in light of the world that we live in, because they do not believe that our worldview, that our scholarship, that our writing is worthy of enough respect to actually even study it or represent it accurately.

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Their level of disdain, you saw it in Barry Lynn. You see it in Spong. You see it in Dawkins.

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The level of Stravinskis, to be perfectly honest with you, showed the same disdain for Protestants. They do not believe.

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That's what I've tried to illustrate when I said I'm sure that Barry Lynn and Stravinskis heard Baptist in Arizona and thought I was going to show up and cut off jeans, my hound dog, and half my complement of teeth, because they honestly think that people from...

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If you're a Baptist from Arizona, you just have to have an IQ that's about that of a wet shoelace.

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And so they don't respect it. So they don't study it. They don't read it. They've never listened to Bonsenstein.

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Or if they did, they only got through the first five minutes and turned it off, said that's ridiculous. They'll never run into anybody who would argue like that, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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So, hey, Jeff, I've got another call. I've got to sneak in real quick. So I appreciate the call. Thanks a lot. Bye -bye. All right.

54:48

Let's real quickly grab Cary. Hi, Cary. How are you doing? Hey, James. Good. Given my recent conversion to the

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Reformed faith and my understanding of irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints, how should

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I interpret Romans 11, verses 21, neither will he spare you, or 22, otherwise you also will be cut off, especially in light of verse 29, for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

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What's the purpose of Paul in providing that warning? Well, I think you need to look at Romans 11 as a whole and recognize that it's not talking to individuals.

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It's talking to groups. It is talking to the Gentiles and warning them in light of what's happened in 9 and 10, that is that God has used the faithlessness of Israel as the means of bringing the

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Gentiles into salvation itself, that while the Jews had been seeking a form of righteousness, they had not sought it in the only place they could find it.

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They sought it as if it was by works rather than by grace. Now he's warning the Gentiles.

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And this is a warning that certainly medieval Catholicism ignored completely and many in the early church ignored completely.

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And that is that there can be an arrogance on the part of the Gentiles against the

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Jews in saying to them, well, you were in the natural olive tree and you've been broken off to make room for me.

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And there's an arrogance and a boasting on the part of the Gentiles. And you'll notice that that is being addressed to that as a group and saying, look, you know, behold then the kindness and severity of God.

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To those who fell, severity. That is to those who were seeking by their genetic relationship as Jews, seeking by the keeping of the law.

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They fall and there is severity. There is a hardening that's come upon them. And look at who the enemies of the gospel are now.

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And, you know, Paul's whole experience. I mean, they've chased him all the way to Rome for crying out loud. And there's clearly the evidence of God's judgment and severity upon those in that situation.

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But to you, God's kindness, yes. But if you then develop the very same kind of haughtiness, if you,

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I mean, honestly, a regenerate heart is never going to be a heart that can begin to act like the

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Pharisees we see in the gospel. Right. So this would not be then directed for a truly regenerate member that's elect of God.

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Well, remember, like I said right at the beginning, this is addressed to groups, not to individuals. And so making the leap from individuality, from group to individuality, is sometimes something you can do if you have warrant to do so.

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But when you turn Paul, who has just emphasized in Romans 8, there is no power under heaven and earth and on the mediator and all the rest of that stuff.

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When you turn Paul against Paul, you might want to step back and go, oh, wait a minute, he's changed the audience that he's addressing here and the means he's doing so.

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And that's a trap I don't want to fall into. But then to those truly that would be concerned, this warning would not be a warning to them.

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But to those who would have no conception of it, it's going to be irrelevant. But really quickly, the music's up, so let me just answer the whole idea of warning passages.

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I find warning passages a tremendous guidance in the Christian life. They reveal to me the very attitudes that God finds to be the most disturbing, and they cause me to pray to God, protect me from even having those attitudes, because that is a danger.

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We may have the word of God in our possession, but we may have a heart that really does not understand its heartbeat, its real spirit.

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Hey, we're out of time. Thank you, Kerry, for your call today. Thanks for listening to The Dividing Line. We'll see you next time. I believe we're standing at the crossroads.

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We need a new Reformation day. I stand up for the truth.

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59:43

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