Ehrman/Evans Debate

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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. And greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. I have absolutely nothing in my headset, so that's okay.
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I don't know what you all are doing in there, but you know, there's too many switches and lights and stuff like that in there,
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I guess. Yes, it did, because it was so loud, it was like rattling the books in my office.
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You are never supposed to change that knob, ever, ever, ever. You change the other knob, but never that one.
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Okay, so anyway, I will adjust whatever
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I need to adjust to be able to work in my office there, sir. That's just all there is to it. Don't have it blasting so that the window's bouncing around, you know, like one of those low riders is driving by outside going boom, ba -boom, ba -boom, ba -boom.
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I showed you the buttons to push, you turned another knob. Okay, there we go. Anyway, 877 -753 -3341.
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We actually have a phone caller online, but we have no idea who it is because certain people haven't gotten around to it. But anyways, I want to start with something a little lighter today.
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I have been preparing for the debate with Robert Price, and one of the things I want to do is read a lot of background material because Robert Price is the
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Bible geek, and he has sort of an encyclopedic memory of all sorts of information about the backgrounds of the
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Bible and things like that. So one of the, I mentioned this last time, I wanted to play this for you, one of the books
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I've been listening to is on the Gnostic Gospels. I was listening to it, as I've mentioned, if I have it, really, even if I only have it in my
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Libronics library, I can now put that on my iPod as well. It's not as fast as if it's in Kindle, but anyway,
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I can listen to books while writing. And so I was listening to the Gnostic Gospels, and I thought you all would like to hear what it sounds like when an
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Amazon Kindle attempts to speak in tongues. Just to give you an idea, this will give you about 30 seconds worth of the book itself, and it's the,
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I think it's the Secret Gospel of the Egyptians, as I recall, or the Secret Gospel of the Great Spirit, Seth, something like that.
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Anyway, you'll sort of get an idea of the character of the book, and then there is ecstatic utterances involved in the text.
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And I wasn't expecting this, okay? So this just sort of caught me off guard.
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But here's one of the things I'm listening to as I'm writing along. This is from the Gnostic Gospels as read by an
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Amazon Kindle. Oh, it would help. There we go.
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All right, here we go. Have we got me potted up in here? Got me potted up? Okay, thank you.
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Glories and incorruptions. So from the great invisible spirit came three powers, 42, three realms of eight, that the
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Father conceives from within, none in silence, with four thought, the Father, the Mother, and the Child. The Father the first realm of eight, ten for whose sake the
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Child, that is three times male, came forth. Upward incorruptibility, life, eternal will, mind, foreknowledge, the androgynous
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Father, the Mother the second power or realm of eight, the Mother the virgin barbello eleven epitoshia chamomaniaman, who is over heaven carved twelve adonai thirteen.
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The inexplicable power the ineffable Mother fourteen she shone and appeared, and she took pleasure in the Father of the silent silence.
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The Child the third power or realm of eight, the Child of the silent silence, the crowned of the silent silence, the glory of the
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Father, the virtue of the forty -three Mother. From within, the Child produces seven powers of great light, which are the seven vowels, fifteen and the word completes them.
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These are the three powers or three realms of eight, that the Father conceived from within through four thought. The Father conceived them there.
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The realm of Daksamana and Amidan Daksamana appeared, the eternal realm of eternal realms, with thrones in it, powers around it, and glories and incorruptions.
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The Father of the great light, who came forth in silence is, the great, realm of Daksamana, in which, the triple, male sixteen child rests.
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The throne of its glory was established in it, and the undisclosed name, is inscribed, on it, on the tablet, the word, the
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Father of the light of all, who came from silence and rests in silence, whose, forty -four, name is in an invisible symbol.
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A hidden, invisible, mystery came forth, ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -ay -
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Well, you know,
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I'm not sure that the folks at Amazon had ever really considered how the
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Kindle would handle speaking in tongues, because no interpretation was provided, so it's not really a biblical example.
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Ah, there you go. I'm not sure which is weirder. The tongue speaking or the stuff that came before and after it.
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Those are pretty much equally, equally odd. But yes, believe it or not, there was three hours of, not of the tongue speaking,
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I wasn't bothered with that, but three hours to listen to just that one book on the
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Gnostic Gospels. And as I've been telling a lot of my friends, I read and listen to all this bad stuff, so you don't have to.
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That's our job here. Ah, yes, The Apollonius of Tyana.
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I'm looking at my Apollonius stuff here. Let's see, an hour and a half, three hours, 41, so that's four hours, five, five, 10, plus another four, 20, so that was seven and a half, at least, no, nine and a half hours.
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That's a lot of time to be listening to Apollonius of Tyana, but I did, all in preparation for the debate coming up in barely over a month now in Tampa, Florida, very much looking forward to that.
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Now, I have some other material to get to, but we have a number of phone callers already, so we'll just go ahead and go with those, and let's start with Roland.
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Hi, Roland. Hey, how you doing, Dr. Brown? Doing good. I've got a question, a follow -up question from your debate with Dr.
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Brown. I interacted with him on his blog, and I asked him a question regarding 1
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Corinthians 4 .7, who makes a thief different from another? And I know you kind of touched on it when you were talking about the 7 ,000 and why were they reserved.
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And, basically, he told me that that doesn't even speak of salvation, which I understand that, but my question to you is, do you agree that it is a valid question, who makes thieves different from another, and have you had any experience with any
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Armenian answering this question outright? Because, again, I got kind of frustrated, because I couldn't get a straight answer.
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I didn't feel it. I wasn't trying to be disrespectful, but I really didn't feel I could answer the question. So have you ever posed this question, and have you ever gotten an answer?
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I don't recall if I have ever mentioned it in passing. It is a text
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I know that we use a lot at our church, and so it might have been just in passing that I made some reference to who makes us to differ.
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But if we don't have a view of God's decree as being behind why
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I have the gifts that I have or live where I live, when I lived, in the situation I live, and an overarching purpose in God's mind for all of these things, then you're just not going to see significance in many of these things.
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And I don't want to answer for somebody else. I don't know how an
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Armenian would answer the question. I would assume an Armenian would say something along the lines of, well,
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God gives us general gifts and abilities, and then we use them from there.
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But even from the perspective that it sounded for a moment like Dr. Brown was going with, a
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Molinus perspective, that even causes more problems, because from the
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Molinus perspective, middle knowledge is based upon what knowing what these free creatures would do in any given situation, and yet that's not determined by God's decree.
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So the answer for them would be, well, no one made them to differ, I guess.
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But I don't know how they would answer that question. I can't answer that question.
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I can't answer the question how they'd answer the question, let's put it that way. I was just wondering if you've ever had anyone actually answer the question, because like I said,
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I've tried to ask that question several times to several people, and I just can't seem to get a straight answer, in my opinion.
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And I think that this, again, goes back to what lies behind the entirety of the narrative of what
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God is doing in Scripture, is that it's not that God is looking around and goes, ah, here's
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Pharaoh, here's this guy, he's dishonorable, I know he's going to be dishonorable, so I'll make him
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Pharaoh so that I can fulfill my purposes in him, but I wouldn't make an honorable guy that way, see?
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So the idea that God's looking around and he's trying to make things work out, but he only has limited resources to work with, he has to find dishonorable people to put in the position of Pharaoh, or something like that, which in essence is what
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I heard Michael saying when we talked about that particular text, is just a completely different way of looking at things than to see
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God's sovereign decree as that which forms the very fabric of time. And it really does,
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I think, end up impacting how we answer all sorts of questions, and so yeah,
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I would agree with you, I don't know how they would answer that, and it's a good question to ask. All right, thanks for your time,
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I appreciate it. Okay, thank you, Roland. All right, bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341,
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Dabney, hello, Dabney. Hey, Dr. White, I met you at the PRBC about two weeks ago,
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I had screaming kids. Oh, yes, sir. Thank you for the charismatic beginning to the dividing line, that was great.
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Now, Dabney, it sounds like the phone you're on is really muffled, so you're going to have to enunciate rather clearly, because it sounds...
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I'm sorry. That's all right, I'm just letting you know so that I don't misunderstand what you're saying. Okay, I did get the two books that we talked about,
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Christ and the Covenant, and The Israel of God by our old pal Robertson, but I did have one quick question for you.
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Me and my teachers have been talking about this, because the more I've expelled my view on The Israel of God and those things, the more they have some questions for me to answer.
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So I wanted to ask you, exactly how were Old Testament people saved?
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What exactly did they have to believe in, or what exactly did they have to do in order to be saved in the
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Old Testament? Well, actually, as we had discussed at that time,
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I think the discussion in Romans explains this in a fairly straightforward fashion, specifically the assertion that God had looked over, this is in verse 25 -26 of Romans chapter 3, whom
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God put forth as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in His divine forbearance,
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He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present times, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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And then it goes on to discuss Abraham as the very paradigm of this faith in Romans chapter 4, and how is
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Abraham justified before God? Well, he is justified before God by his faith, not by his works.
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For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. Romans 4 -2, for what does the scripture say?
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Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. So if Abraham becomes the paradigm that explains how it is that we are saved, then that remains the case to this day.
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Now, what was the object of his faith? Well, it was not as full an object as we have in the sense of the amount of revelation, but acceptance of the promises of Yahweh required the work of the
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Holy Spirit to create that true and living faith just as acceptances of the promise of Yahweh that we accept in His incarnation, the second person, the
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Trinity, becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ, outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We are still believing the promises of Yahweh, except they are just much more explicit and much fuller in our understanding of what they are.
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But the promises have remained the same and the God that is being believed in by faith has remained the same as well.
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And so there is this covenant of grace that extends from beginning through to the end and while there are different ways in which
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God deals with His people during that period of time, and I avoid the use of the term dispensation at that point, but while there are different ways in which
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God deals with His people, the means by which people are saved is the same all the way through and that is by faith in the one covenant
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God who has revealed Himself now in the intertestamental period in the incarnation of Christ is death, burial, resurrection, outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit. So if Abraham can be the paradigm then there has to be saving faith there and then that becomes the foundation of saying, well, this is always how
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God's people have been, the true Israelites have always been those who have had that circumcised heart, etc.,
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etc. It wasn't just the genetic relationship to Abraham that never saved anyone.
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It was—that faith relationship has always been central. I was wondering, was one of those promises always the coming
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Messiah? That was one of the things that they were believing in? Well, Jesus said that Abraham rejoiced to see his day, he saw it and was glad.
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I don't know that—I think that that has to do with the encounter of Abraham with Jehovah by the
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Oaks of Mamre, but there are some who have felt that there have been very explicit promises of the coming of the
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Messiah. I'm a little bit uncomfortable because I can't prove that. I have to go with what the text provides to me and the promises that are provided in Genesis 12 and 15, there is a promise that all the nations would be blessed through his seed, but whether that is as explicit as what we would have in a
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Micah or a Psalm 2 or Psalm 22 or Isaiah and things like that,
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I think there is a growing clarity to the revelation of the coming of the
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Messiah just as there is anything else. And so, I mean, you can go all the way back to the
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Prodevangelium in Genesis 3 and there is the seed of the woman, but if that was all you had and you didn't have the rest of that revelation, how explicit would that promise be?
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It would be very difficult to put a whole lot of detail into that just based upon what you have in those particular early, early texts.
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Thank you so much. And just following up the last thing, wrongly dividing the word of truth by John H.
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Gerstner, would you recommend that as a read for me or no? Well, yes, but just realize that if I have the reputation as a directly speaking individual, shall we say,
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John Gerstner has a much greater reputation as one who cuts it straight, shall we say.
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So, be prepared for straightforward language, not in a sense bad, but just very straightforward.
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As long as you're ready for that, then the information would be fine. Yeah, I think it will be.
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You know, I really have been jumping off ship of the dispensational boat over the course of the last few months, and I'll be going to Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Milwaukee with my wife this
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Sunday night. Well, that's great, but Dr. Gerstner will pick you up off the boat and throw you headlong into the water.
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Well, good. I'll get ready. Thank you so much, Dr. White. All right. Thanks, Dabney. Bye -bye. And he will.
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There's no two ways about it. Well, some of you saw the article that I posted last evening where I responded to a blog post that was tweeted to me.
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I had not actually seen this particular.
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By the way, I wanted to make sure you could get hold of me by Twitter as well. I forgot to mention that.
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Are we taking Skype calls today? You're working on it. Okay. We are now.
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Okay. It's 11 .18, and we're ready for the Skype calls. That's good. And the address would be
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Dividing .Line. Dividing .Line for Skype calls and Twitter at DrUgless1689. Some of you saw the post last evening with Jim Eliff's comments.
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It was interesting, and again, a little bit later, I might actually get into a discussion of last week's big thing and that is the
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John Piper Warren situation. And one of the things that I will mention is that I don't have much standing upon which to discuss it simply because you've never heard me invited to any of those big conferences and you probably never will.
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You've never seen me at Desiring God. You've never seen me at Ligonier. You've never seen me at Shepard's Conference.
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I think I scare people. I mean, I'm a C -level speaker anyways. But even when it's on subjects that are directly relevant to what
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I do and that I might have some fairly unique experience in, you don't see the invitations come in my direction and I think there's some reasons for that.
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I speak fairly plainly. Not as plainly as a lot of people like to assert that I do, but I speak fairly plainly.
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And interestingly, one of the issues that sort of relate the two together was
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I saw Jim Ellis' commentary on a debate that had recently taken place at Midwestern and he made reference to a previous debate that Bart Ehrman had done at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and his honest statement that Ehrman won both debates, but he didn't want to name any names because he wanted his statements to be a little bit more, shall we say, generic and usable in other situations.
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But what he was talking about, and this is where we differ, is this is where I come out and say, well, the debate was this and it took place at such and such time.
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Here's the discussion of it. The debate was between Craig Evans and Bart Ehrman.
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It took place last Thursday at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. And I managed to get hold of the sound file this morning.
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I have not had a chance to listen to all of it. I was immediately taken aback when
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I saw the size of the file. What I mean by that is the entire thing was only an hour and 26 minutes long.
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And the first five minutes or more were all introductions. And hi, how are you doing?
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So we're taught this isn't, I don't even know if you can describe this as a debate. And given that it's in regards to the reliability of the
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New Testament, as a witness to Jesus, 90 minutes, 80 minutes, you can barely provide any kind of foundational statement.
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This is what's making doing in -depth debates in our day a lot harder.
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Because in the past, you could assume a certain level of knowledge on the part of the individuals that would be listening to the debate.
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You can't assume that anymore. And so the shorter the debate gets, and is this just because our society has a shorter and shorter attention span?
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I mean, a lot of folks find attending a three, three and a half hour debate just to be too exhausting. It's just too hard.
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I can't listen that long. What have all of our gadgets, and I love gadgets, but what have all of our gadgets done to us?
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I was sitting at a stoplight yesterday, and I looked over and there's two guys in a truck. And neither one of them is looking up.
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They're both sitting there with their Blackberries, iPhones, whatever in their hands, and they're texting folks. And I know that as soon as this light changes,
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I'm going to take off and he's going to be sitting there because he's not watching the light. He's texting and he's just expecting that once he sees other vehicles moving, then he can get moving.
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I think even our traffic moves slower, thanks to stuff like that now. But the attention span that people have has just absolutely collapsed.
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And so I did start listening to it just briefly just so I get a sense of, I don't know that I've heard
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Craig Evans speak. I think he was on a program I listened to back during the Talpiot Tomb stuff.
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He was interviewed at that particular point in time. But I ran across a section of classic
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Uriman. And since I just wanted to play it and make some comments on it.
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That's what we do around here. So let's listen to just a little bit. This is only last
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Thursday. So this is about as fresh as you can get. Here's some of Bart Uriman's comments. In the male virgin.
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That's the wrong one there. Let's see. And there. We want to get proper introductions tonight.
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No, that's not what we wanted to do either. It went back to where it wasn't supposed to be.
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Let's just sort of guess here. Archaeologists dig to find material remains from antiquity.
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And their digs are not based on the study of literary texts such as the New Testament Gospels, as any bona fide archaeologist will tell you.
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But historians, of course, do use the Gospels as sources, principally as sources for knowing about the life of the historical
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Jesus. They have to, because there are no other sources that are reliable that exist, which leaves us with a problem, since the only sources that do exist are the
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Gospels, and they're not reliable either. There's no doubt that the historical Jesus is the most important person in the history of Western civilization.
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There is no doubt of that at all, in my opinion. But the unfortunate thing about Jesus is that we have such scanty documentation about his life.
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Now remember, we have more documentation about what Jesus said and did than almost anyone else in antiquity at all.
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Political leaders, world leaders, anything like that, from much closer to the time period of his life than almost anyone else at all.
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But you see, Bart Ehrman and these others have adopted this historiography that destroys history. This extreme skepticism, not only about the transmission of the text, but given the allegedly huge time period between the actual events and the recording of the events, this is what
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I'm encountering in an even more virulent form in Robert Price.
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I mean, Robert Price, and this is going to come up in the debate, I assure you, it's going to be my opening statement, Robert Price, I'll play the quote for you maybe over the next couple weeks, has said that if the gospel writers had recorded the gospels 10 minutes after the events happened, we still couldn't know what had actually taken place.
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So in other words, you have, and what's going on is the modern student unaware of how history has been done and unaware of the limitations of history in the sense of that it comes down to us over time, adopts a post -enlightenment modernistic concept of what you would need to know to have any knowledge of the past and in essence it's, well, hopefully
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CNN was there. If it wasn't, we can't know. If we don't have video or at absolute minimum audio recording, then there's just no way of knowing.
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And of course what this means is we can't know anything about history, but here's the problem. If you adopt that idea, we don't know, it's amazing how dogmatic people who say we don't know can be when it comes to, well, we do know that didn't happen.
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But just think with me for just one moment about something. Did the past happen?
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I mean, we can tell that there were large cities like Rome and we can tell that there were political entities and armies and wars and literature and art and all sorts of other things.
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We know history happened. So if you adopt a historiography that forces you to say, well, yeah, something happened, but we just don't have any clue as to what, how helpful is that?
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I mean, isn't that just simply capitulating to rank skepticism and ignorance?
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Something happened. There is a true narrative of history.
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Now, of course, if you're a philosophical naturalist, you might say, well, there may be a true narrative of history.
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But since there's no supernatural realm and since there's no
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God who would want us to have true knowledge of history, then there's no way we can know anything that happened in history at all.
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We can talk in very broad outlines. There was clearly a Roman Empire, but really what they did and when they did it, we've got their version, but the victors always change history, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And what is the overarching purpose in this modern attack upon all of history itself but to exalt us, to exalt modern man and his abilities and his theories and his philosophies?
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There's a huge amount of modern hubris involved in these debates, and I'm seeing that more and more as I listen to these things.
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Most people don't realize this, but Jesus is never mentioned in any
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Greek or Roman non -Christian source until 80 years after his death.
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And that would be true of 99 .99999999 % of all of humanity who lived, millions and millions and millions of people.
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Does that mean they didn't exist? Does that mean we can't know anything about them? That's like the there's 400 ,000 textual variants.
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It sounds real good when you announce it with all your scholarly vim and vigor, but what does it mean in context?
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There is no record of Jesus having lived in these sources. In the entire first Christian century,
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Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher, or poet.
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And what does that mean? Once again, who does this appeal to?
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It appeals to the CNN age. It appeals to the people who are thinking only in that context of, well, if there's no evidence,
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I mean, we can't Google them or anything. We are living in an information age.
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We are living in an age where there's documentation and there's records and there's Google and there's ways of finding out what almost anybody has done.
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That is very much an extremely modern situation. Anyone who has done genealogical research knows this.
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The farther back you get, the scantier and scantier the records become. So those words could be said, again, about just about every single human being who ever lived on the planet.
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And what's the whole purpose of saying this? Well, because if Jesus was who he claimed to be, then there should have been records.
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There should have been videotapes. But we don't listen. No. Why? How? Those are some of the questions.
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We're going to take a break and be right back. 877 -753 -3341. We'll listen a little bit more to Bart Ehrman and your calls on Skype as well, dividing .line
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and via Twitter at DrOakley1689. We'll be right back. Answering those who claim that only the
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King James version is the word of God. James White, in his book The King James Only Controversy examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt scripture and lead believers away from true
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Christian faith. In a readable and responsible style, author James White traces the development of Bible translations, old and new, and investigates the differences between new versions and the authorized version of 1611.
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You can order your copy of James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, by going to our website at www .aomin
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.org. Pulpit Crimes The criminal mishandling of God's word may be
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James White's most provocative book yet. White sets out to examine numerous crimes being committed in pulpits throughout our land every week, as he seeks to leave no stone unturned.
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Based firmly upon the bedrock of scripture, one crime after another is laid bare for all to see. The pulpit is to be a place where God speaks from his word.
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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 www .aomin
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.org. Hello everyone, this is
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Rich Pierce. In a day and age where the gospel is being twisted into a man -centered self -help program, the need for a no -nonsense presentation of the gospel has never been greater.
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Thank you. And welcome back to The Dividing Line.
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We're listening to a few comments from Bart Ehrman. I'd actually queued something up, but I'm doing this from my other computer at the moment, actually.
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Remotely just opened my thing up, and for some reason it lost the point that I queued up. But this is good stuff anyways.
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We'll see if he gets the same comments at some point. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence, zero zip references.
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Except of course that New Testament stuff, which, even though he dates much later, there's absolutely no reason to date as late as he does.
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There's no reason to not believe that the earliest materials in New Testament—oh wait a minute, those were letters.
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I'm sorry. Ah, that Pauline epistolary stuff. Wait, just put that stuff aside. Outside of this, see?
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But the problem is, the New Testament is a bunch of documents written by multiple people from multiple places at multiple times.
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And so it doesn't represent just one group. It represents a whole bunch of people spread out across the
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Roman Empire. Letters written from Rome, letters written from Corinth, Ephesus. Hmm, that would seem to indicate an exceptionally wide base of information.
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I wonder why it gets dismissed. Oh, because it's Christian. And in modern day scholarship, the one thing that we can't even suggest would possibly be the case is that what the
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Christians have always believed about it was actually true. The first time
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Jesus is mentioned in a Roman source or a Greek source is by the Roman governor of a province of Asia Minor, a governor named
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Pliny, in the year 112, 80 years after Jesus' death.
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And even then Pliny doesn't even name him Jesus. He simply refers to his name Christ in passing.
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That is the only reference within 80 years of Jesus' death. Which makes him referenced earlier than 99 .99999999
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% of the rest of all of humanity, which clearly lived at that time.
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And that's even laying aside all of the New Testament documents themselves.
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Jesus is mentioned two times, very, very briefly by the Jewish historian Josephus in the year 93.
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Over 60 years after his death. But he's mentioned in no other Jewish source of the first century at all.
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What other Jewish sources are there? See, it's real easy to make these none whatsoever.
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Why don't you explain just how vast these sources are? Because a lot of people figure, oh, there's just, you know, boy, there's a whole shelf worth of books from the first century from Jewish sources.
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There isn't. These are extremely fragmentary materials. And so it's so easy that Ehrman has become the spinmeister.
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He makes money from doing this. Look at his last book. His last book is nothing but a collection of anti -Christian argumentation that's as old as the hills.
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But if you're an apostate, you get paid to be an apostate.
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I have a question. It seems to me that there was a little something that happened around 780
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AD. You know, when the Roman soldiers come in and they burn your entire town to the ground.
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Might have something to do with your literary output. They just destroy all the records and the, you know, kind of. Would have an impact, yeah.
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Yeah, it sort of does. But remember, those who were at the debate, when I debated Ehrman, every time
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I mentioned persecution in the early church, people reported to me immediately, even at the break during the debate, that he was rolling his eyes like, oh, see, persecution.
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Now, I don't know if he thought that I was trying to connect myself to the persecuted people as if he was a persecutor or something, which would be silly.
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But the reality is that persecution, not only against the Jews, but especially against the
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Christians, was an extremely relevant issue at that point in time, and especially in regards to the transmission of the text in the
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New Testament as well. So yeah, that all plays in. If you want to know about Jesus, you have to turn to Christian sources.
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There is no choice. The earliest Christian source is the Apostle Paul. But to the surprise of many
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Bible readers, Paul scarcely mentions anything about Jesus' words and deeds while he's living.
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Now, catch the Ehrmanisms here, because once you start taking him apart, you discover he doesn't really have much to say.
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I'm saying that very seriously. There's nothing new here. I told a Muslim in Channel recently, he doesn't come up with anything new.
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He's just retreading old stuff that I've known about for years and years and years and years. Why? Did you hear that?
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To the surprise of many Bible readers, why? Why would that be to the surprise of many
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Bible readers? I don't understand that. It doesn't surprise me whatsoever that the
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Apostle Paul is not writing a gospel, that he's not writing a life or narrative of Jesus.
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Why would he do that? The very living tradition of the church, the community to which he has been joined, is soaked in the stories of Jesus.
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What is written in the Gospels was already the common knowledge and possession of Christians.
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Why would he rewrite these things? It is amazing to me. When I hear these scholars, it's amazing and sad when
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I hear Muslims buying into it, repeating the same stuff. Well, it doesn't seem that Paul knew almost anything about the life of Jesus.
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Why would you expect him to repeat what every person who'd been in the first service he walked into, and nobody ran away from him at, already knew?
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Why would you do that? I mean, if you were to look at the books
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I write, do I repeat everything in the New Testament? No. So, why would you expect
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Paul to be doing the same thing? It's just amazing where people come up with this kind of stuff.
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He says a lot about Jesus' death and resurrection, but almost nothing about his words and deeds while alive.
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Except when the Apostle in 1 Corinthians is talking about marriage, and he says, the
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Lord, and then later he says, now I have no command from the Lord, but I say, and how many times have we heard people glom onto that and go, oh, see, here's
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Paul saying he's not inspired. What was actually going on there is, when he answered the preceding questions, he knew of the tradition, the gospel tradition, where Jesus had addressed those matters of marriage, and guess what?
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When we go to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we find that he did exactly that. But then when other questions come up that are not a part of what we have in the gospel narratives,
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Paul says, and this is interesting, isn't it? He's writing before the gospels, and yet his knowledge of what is there and what isn't there matches what's written years later.
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Isn't that interesting? It most certainly is. When he says,
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I, not the Lord, what he's saying is, Jesus didn't address this, but I, as an Apostle who has the
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Spirit of God, say this. And yet I can't tell you how many times I have heard people glom onto that section and say, hey,
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Paul says he wasn't inspired, he's just giving his own opinion, blah, blah, blah, and they don't even realize what's going on and how it is a testimony.
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To the ubiquitous nature of the gospel materials, even before the first written gospel is committed to writing.
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Which means if you want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus, the earliest sources are the gospels, but these are filled, absolutely filled with discrepancies, historical mistakes, errors, contradictions, stories that have been changed and re -changed and changed yet again in the process of telling and retelling before the gospel writers living 40, 50, 60 years after Jesus' life were able to write them down.
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Wow. He's really starting to sound a little desperate at times. I mean, he's really getting rather preachy.
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I mean, I thought he was preachy in our debate, but I mean, he is very forceful there.
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Of course, every time we take the time to go through, as I've done this before, I did this in St. Louis about a month before the debate.
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Those recordings are available. I've done it in other contexts. I'll go through his list of contradictions and errors in the gospel accounts in regards to when did
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Jesus die. Well, it depends on which gospel you're reading. And we go through all these, and if you just go through them, examine each one, you discover that someone's very biased against these accounts and doesn't seem to want to allow them to, well, he would say,
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I'm just letting them speak for themselves, which is code for, I will not allow for harmonization.
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My reading, which makes them contradictory, has to be the right reading because it makes them contradictory.
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Because if they're not contradictory, then there would be something, well, weird going on here, like maybe something supernatural. We know that can't happen.
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You see the circularity? You've got to learn to see this. If you can see it yourself, then you've got to see it with such clarity that you can explain it to somebody else who is influenced by men like Bart Ehrman.
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You have to be able to do this. You cannot just say, well, go listen to this guy over here on this webcast. You have to understand these things.
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It's your kids, the people in your church, your neighbors, your coworkers, that you can become the means by which they can see the circular nature of rebellious thinking.
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And that's what we have here. We have a man who has abandoned the faith, and as such, he thinks in a rebellious fashion.
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It's not morally neutral. It's sinful. I know that catches people up all the time, but think about it.
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When those who are created in the image of God think in such a way as to deny his very ability to communicate himself, that is sinful rebellion.
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There is no moral neutrality in these issues. And you need to be able to recognize this kind of circular thought.
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Craig has said, well, eyewitnesses are still alive, so they'd be able to check the accuracy of the stories being told.
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I've never understood this argument, even though I've heard it for 40 years. Christianity started out as a small group of Jesus followers in Jerusalem.
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40 years. I guess he's saying from the time that he—I mean, that would put it right at the time of his initial conversion,
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I guess. So expanding the numbers a little bit, I've been doing this for all these, you know, scholarship for all these years.
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May I remind you that Bart Ehrman himself said about 10 years ago that he's pretty much not involved in textual criticism anymore?
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And yet when that issue comes up, all of a sudden he's, you know, still the greatest living expert on the subject, even though, as he himself puts it, he's not involved with it anymore.
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Got to keep that kind of thing in mind as well. Right after his death, within 30 years, there were
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Christian communities that were established throughout many of the urban areas of the Roman Empire.
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There were Christian churches in Palestine, in Syria, in Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey, in Greece, in Rome, possibly in Northern Africa, almost certainly in Alexandria, Egypt.
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Hundreds of people were converting, thousands of people were converting. How did they convert? By people telling them stories about Jesus.
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Who was telling the stories? If I convert you, and you convert your wife, and your wife converts her next door neighbor, her next door neighbor converts her husband, and her husband converts a business associate who goes to another city to convert his business associate, who's telling the stories?
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Is it eyewitnesses? Are the 12 apostles of Jesus talking to everybody who's telling a story and saying, make sure you get that right?
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The eyewitnesses are probably in Jerusalem. Where are the eyewitnesses in Ephesus? Where are the eyewitnesses in Tarsus?
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Evidently, Dr. Ehrman thinks that eyewitnesses are limited to one particular place.
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I thought they were scattered all over the place. Again, I haven't listened to this whole thing.
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I normally don't do this, but I just picked a spot here, and I thought this was close to where I had queued up, but it wasn't.
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But it's interesting anyways. Is he going to interact with Balcom? I'll be interested to find out.
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If he does, I'll let you know. Balcom's Jesus and the eyewitnesses. It just seems like right now that this is argumentum ad authority.
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I've been doing this forever, and you need to listen to me, and it just doesn't make any sense to me.
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Therefore, it shouldn't make any sense to you. That's not really a sound basis upon which to look at things at all.
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Anyways, 877 -753 -3341, we're getting close on time here, so we need to make sure to have time to get to another caller here, since I haven't seen anything on Twitter or haven't gotten any
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Skype calls. So we have the plain old phone line is active once again, and we're not going across the pond here, but sort of, only in the sense of background and history.
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Let's talk with John. Hi, John. Hey, my friend. How are you? I'm doing pretty good.
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How are you? All right, Ed. All right. All right? You know,
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I was over in London recently, you know? Yeah. I've been following that. Oh, it's wonderful. Have you ever been in Angel Station?
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Angel Station? Never. No. No, really? No. Oh, they have the longest escalator in Europe at Angel Station on the
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Tube, and there's a video on YouTube. You'll have to go to YouTube and look up Angel Station.
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There's a video on YouTube of a guy, like at two o 'clock in the morning, he rides up the escalator, and when he gets off, he jumps down, he puts skis on his feet that he's been carrying with him, and he skis down the center part of the escalator there in Angel Station, which is completely illegal.
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But he did it and got caught, but it doesn't matter because he's famous now. So you'll have to go check that out.
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It was worth the prison time, then. No, he didn't get... I'm not sure if it was prison, but the worst thing that could happen to you if you live in London is to be banned from public transportation.
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That would just be... Yeah, that is. That's true. That would be it. That would be worse than going to prison. Yeah, the way traffic is, absolutely.
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Oh, yeah. So what's up? Hey, very quick question. Forgive me if you've actually dealt with this elsewhere.
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It's regarding the autosalutists, the Regeneration Preceding Faith, and you dealt with 1
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John 5 -1 very, very thoroughly. Just in conversations
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I've had, people sometimes come back with John 20 -31, and I'm sure that's not news to you.
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I was just interested in how you dealt with that, the difference, obviously, between 1
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John 5 -1, where the time sequence is you're born of God before believing, or, in other words, if you see someone believing now, it's evidence of the fact they are or have already been born of God.
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1 John 20, the English text simply says, by believing, you may have life in his name.
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How would you approach that? Is that a time sequence statement? Well, again, I think it's important to emphasize my emphasis has always been in 1
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John 5 -1, in not so much attempting to establish some type of temporal order as a logical order, and that is that John's point is that the exercise of saving faith, the person who has saving faith, that present tense hapist euon, is so important in the
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Ohanian corpus. It's there in John 5. It's there in John 6. And that is his shorthand for real believers.
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The one believing in me will have eternal life. The one believing in me will not hunger and thirst and so on and so forth.
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And so the point is that that kind of believing is dependent upon divine action, and that divine action is that bringing to spiritual life.
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Here in John 20 -31, these things have been written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the
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Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Son of God. And so this is continuing the reason why it's been written.
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In order that, believing, present tense participle, but since this is where it is here,
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I would take this as a participle being used as means. In order that, by believing what
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I just said, that is, Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, you would have life in his name.
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So it's not even talking about hapist euon or anything like that.
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It's a Hinnah clause with the present active participle being utilized in explaining the transition here.
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And the transition is, and having, by means of believing, you have life in his name.
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Now, if someone were to say, well, having life in his name is the same thing as gegeneitai, being begotten, regeneration.
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But zoenekete, that is normally used in the context of having eternal life.
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And that is a present possession of the one who is hapist euon in John 5 and John 6 and places like that.
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So it would be significantly less possible to try to derive some kind of a order out of a
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Hinnah clause that is basically saying, well, I've written these sayings, you might believe this fact, that is, that Jesus is the
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Christ, the Son of God. And in order that, when you believe that, in order that, when believing that, you would have life in his name.
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All of this is stating the purposes. You have two Hinnah clauses there. In the first part of verse 31, tautade gegreptai,
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Hinnah, in order that you might believe, and in order that, believing, you might have life in his name.
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So both are just explaining why it is that John has written these particular words, which interestingly enough then goes on to, that sounds like, a lot of people say, that sounds like the end of the book.
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But then you have chapter 21 tacked on at the end, and so they go on from there. But so it would be very difficult to attempt to create some kind of an ordo salutis out of Hinnah clauses in regards to why a book was written.
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But if someone, I suppose, were to say, well, having life in his name, the problem is the particular verb that is used here is in the subjunctive.
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And once you leave the indicative, doing stuff with subjunctives, especially in Hinnah clauses, and establishing time parameters and orders and things like that becomes even more problematic in the process.
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But again, I really think that the first John 5 one thing really goes back to an illustration of the baggage that we carry into this particular discussion.
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And that is, if we have a non -biblical anthropology, if we have an anthropology that does not take seriously what is said concerning the inabilities of man.
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I mean, think of John. How many times does he emphasize the ability of God, but then uses u -dunatai of man?
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Not able, not able, not able. John chapter 6, John chapter 8, John chapter 10, over and over and over again.
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Unless a man be born again, he cannot. He cannot, cannot, cannot. It's all over the place.
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But if your mind has been trained to read cannot as can, then you might balk at looking at first John 5 one and saying, oh yeah, clearly here the fact that I have any type of ongoing faith is because of the preceding work of God.
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It all comes from whether you're going to allow all the text to speak or not. And it's not so much, and I think some people have picked on me for this, thinking this is what
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I'm doing, but it's not. It's not, well, I can find a way of sneaking something into a text over here or sneaking something into a text over there.
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I'm not trying to do that. I think if you simply sit back and say, what is John's doctrine of man's capacity and ability outside of ge -genetai, being regenerated, it's pretty clear.
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But people don't do exegesis that way anymore, evidently, at least in large portions of evangelicalism.
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They just sort of let that stuff slide. And so, yeah, John 20, 31, great, great text.
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But if someone's trying to create an ordo out of it, the problem is that you have a present participle then with a subjunctive, and it's expressing means, purpose, result, things like that.
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It's not functioning in a syntactically parallel way to first John 5 one.
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It would need to say a lot more than one. Oh, yeah, very much so.
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Thank you. That's the fullest explanation I've heard, and it's very, very satisfying. Thank you. All right. Thanks, John.
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God bless. Bye -bye. All righty. Well, that's going to do it for The Dividing Line today.
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We will be back on our regular time Thursday. This will be the first Thursday we've been on the afternoon for a while because we had the debate with Michael Brown.
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But we'll be back regular time on Thursday, Lord willing. We'll see you then.
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God bless. I believe we're standing at the crossroads.
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Let this moment of slip away. We must contend for the faith our fathers fought for.
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We need a new reformation day. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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