What Justin Martyr Actually Said, Transmission of the Text, Open Phones

We started about half an hour early from what we'd announced, mainly because I could get in earlier and since I've got a trip coming up and a lot of packing to do and a lot of details to this one because I'm doing a bunch of different things.

Don't forget that starting on Sunday, I will be speaking at Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, outside of Salt Lake City, where it's going to be cold, relatively speaking. For me anyways, get a little bit of winter.

I'll actually be able to bring my sweaters and get to wear them and actually use them for a little while. It will be below freezing a couple times while I'm up there. I think it got down to 39 one night here.

I think we actually got down to 39 here once. Just once. It's going to be a long summer. Anyway, we're going to be up in Salt Lake City. I'll be at Christ Presbyterian on Sunday and Monday, primarily on the Doctrine of the Trinity and appropriate in light of some Lulu's on the web recently.

And then Tuesday is the televised, live, three-hour debate with Sean McCraney on his television program. I'm looking at this as an opportunity. Look, I'm walking in there going, Sean, you're confused.

And let me explain to you why Christians believe what they believe and do my best to keep it focused. And how that goes is totally up to the Lord. I appreciate your prayers for it, but I just want to try to explain to people why modalism is utterly untenable and why you cannot consistently hold to Scripture.

Oh, I'm sorry. You're going to start getting phone calls. I mentioned that word. Anyway, and that's just what we're going to do. And we'll see how that goes. And then I've got some more traveling to do, lots of family stuff, but I'll be driving across Utah and the Nevada, and hopefully a great weekend after that, and then just a brief time with the grandkids on the way back home.

But my plan right now, now this could actually change with weather, but my plan right now is to get back in time on that following Tuesday to just sort of come straight here and do a program. So we'll see if we can make that work out.

So those of you up in the Salt Lake area, and I imagine at some point we'll probably post the link to the live YouTube thing, so you can watch the thing Tuesday night on Sean McCraney's program. He should have the largest viewing audience he's ever had.

If we promote it, he will. So if you want to watch—I know that Jeff Durbin will be watching. That much I know. He was all excited about this. I guess he knows something about that situation and actually wanted to go up there.

I'm like, dude, it's going to—no, don't worry about it. Anyway, so that's what we've got coming up, and so I've got plenty of stuff to do between now and then, and so if we can get done a little bit earlier, great.

I need the time. We will be opening the phones. 877 -753 -3341. I still have the phone number that has been sitting there taped to one of the microphones. You know, I don't know how old that piece of paper is.

I'm really surprised that the packing tape still holds it where it is. It used to be up there, and it got moved so we could put a light thing up there. You would think that it would just be natural just to go 877 -753 -3341.

Every time I look at it, though, I see there are three 7s and then there are three 3s, and I start doing the addition thing with the numbers, and it throws me off. It's a little bit weird. Because, see, the 5, 877, there's three 7s, and then 333, there's three 3s, three 7s, and then the 5, you have a 4 -1, 4 plus 1 is 5.

So that's just—. Just stop. Stop it! Just stop it! Yes, that's how—yeah. Are you going to take some calls now? No, I've got a couple things to cover, but I figured people would want to—Rich doesn't want to talk to you right now.

Okay? Rich is sort of antisocial. Sort of like I am, actually. So he doesn't want to talk to you right now. So I'm sorry. I guess I was early. But see, I won't remember to announce it while I'm doing the teaching part.

I ignore you while I'm teaching, like I'm ignoring you right now. So anyway, there are two things I wanted to get to. And one was—the first was prompted by the—well, three things. Let me just go ahead and say something about what's going on Twitter right now, since we're live and since it's there.

Could we grow up on Twitter? Could we try to get above the 6th grade playground stuff? The stuff that I see being posted by Christians, just—if we didn't have so much evidence of helping people through social media, if it wasn't for the fact that there's some of you that send me really good links via Twitter that have produced really good segments in the program, and very helpful to me in finding information, I would just shut it all down.

Because it is so depressing every day to go online and see the way Christians behave in social media. It's just—and I could spend the rest of the hour just going through the various kinds of things. You know, some guy was coming after me a couple days ago, and he's going, well, hey, Leighton Flowers said this about you.

It must be true. Doesn't seem to know anything about the background and everything else that went behind that. But hey, you know, you're in sin because Leighton Flowers said you're in sin. This kind of stuff, you run into that.

But right now, I'm just talking about the level of childishness. One thing was in reference to a brother. I did not know that this brother is a trophy of grace. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have this thing called a Bible, and in that Bible, we have this really important passage of Scripture, 1 Corinthians 6, which we've looked at many times before.

Or do you not know the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God, do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor adulterers, nor feminine, nor homosexuals, or as the ESV says, homosexuals, I think it's the male and female, acting male and active and passive partners in homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. We have a tremendous message. And this came out in the debate with Adnan Rashid.

You know, Adnan quoted verses 9 and 10, who can be saved? And the very next verse says, and such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God.

That's the very power of the gospel, that people who were engaged in these sins, including homosexuality, have been saved. And I saw a situation, it was just pointed out to me this morning, it happened yesterday, of a quote-unquote minister who, knowing that someone else that he disagrees with, and of course, this man disagrees with almost anybody, openly in his own testimony confesses to have once been involved with homosexuality.

But he has been saved. He has been washed, he has been sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. Despite that, this minister took a childish shot at his former life because he disagrees with this minister.

And I just sit there going, first of all, how can you pretend to be proclaiming the gospel when you mock its power to change anybody? But secondly, how can you just be so childish? How can you live on the playground?

Why do you think that because there's a glowing screen and a keyboard, you can let fly the most base elements of your childish immaturity? Do you not know you will be held accountable for everything you type as well as everything you say?

It is stunning to me. And right now, online, we have people who on the one hand will say, this charismatic stuff, it's central, it's vital. And so we'll address it with pure mockery. We'll address it with a graphic that has just been posted on Twitter again that is nothing but childish mockery.

But it's very serious. Well, then it's very serious. Stop using mockery. Try using serious argumentation. You're contradicting yourself. It's just, we wonder why people sit back and watch this stuff and go, it's sort of hard to take y 'all seriously.

Yeah, I can see why. Grow up, people. Grow up. I am so tired. I don't know which ends up. I really don't. Just grow up. In the hope of helping people to grow up, can we address some serious things? We had a caller on the last program.

And I ended up spending a whole lot more time with the caller than I expected to, but that's okay. I could tell immediately upon talking to this individual that I'm talking to a person who is doing everything they can to swim across the Tiber River to the western shore.

If you know the geography of where the Tiber is in Rome, that's all a story about, it's all an analogy, a metaphor for conversion to Rome. And he made reference to Justin Martyr. And I pointed out that Justin is an interesting fellow, and he says a lot of great things, but he doesn't even have a completed canon of scripture, and there are inaccuracies.

And if you didn't have Romans and Hebrews and things like that, to be as orthodox as he was was quite an accomplishment, actually. But I did not, because that's one of the things. Live call-in stuff.

You need to realize a lot of people that do live call-in stuff have people sitting around them, grabbing resources and putting stuff on screens, and I don't have that. Sorry, Rich just sits there and tries to ignore me and chats on the phone and does stuff in YouTube chat.

He's not sending me stuff like that. Yes? Like what? Oh, INC guys, yes. I do not have an entire platform full of people who are grabbing books and handing them to me and things like that. So that's one of the out-of-control things in regards to open phones that's a little disconcerting as I get older.

Like I said, we're going to do more open phones because people really seem to like it, but when you call in with a subject that is not in my wheelhouse, I'm going to tell you. And the problem is people invest in whatever I say about anything the same level of authority as when I'm speaking on places where I am an authority, and you shouldn't do that.

You shouldn't do that with anybody. I don't care if you call yourself a Bible Answer Man or a Tradition Answer Man or any type of Answer Man. All of us have areas where we do much more reading. There aren't any Renaissance Men anymore.

And so it concerns me because people call up and they'll ask about something and it's going to become like a broken record. I'm going to say, well, not my area. I can give you a somewhat informed, given what I've studied over the years, I can give you a somewhat informed opinion, but it's not like that's what I'm studying right now or have ever really studied.

And I'll just make sure that people understand that. Not that it's going to change anything. It won't. People will still hold you to a standard that is really not all that reliable. Anyway, so when the caller calls in, I'm hearing him swimming the river.

He's going over toward Rome. And so I want to get to the key issue, and that is, if you really do understand what you've professed to believe, that your entire hope is found in the perfection of the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf, that His righteousness is all that's going to avail before a holy God, how can you trade that in for the constant treadmill of penances and imperfection of the Roman system?

Which did not allow me to then have the time to go through what Justin actually said. I told him, because I've read it in the past, I've dealt with this stuff in the past, but it was probably 15 -20 years ago.

And so, the wife texts right then. You see it like, oh yeah, I forgot to do that. Yes, I do have that information. I'll try to remember to do that. Blah, blah, blah. So, you don't have the opportunity to bring it up and to read it.

And so I'd like to do that right now. Specifically, I want to look, you know, what I had said was, look, what Justin was talking about was in Malachi's prophecy about this offering around the world. Rome says, see, that's the mass.

Now, at the same time, they will inconsistently say, well, yeah, our current understanding of the concept of the Eucharistic sacrifice evolved over time. And it didn't exist in Justin's day. But we'll still look back to that and say, this somehow fits together.

It doesn't. I tried to sort of bring some of that stuff up. But it comes out just by reading Justin. And so, in chapter 117, this comes out with the most clarity. There's three places in Justin's dialogue with Trifo this comes out.

But it's very, very clear here. His argument is this. Trifo is a Jew. So he is arguing with Trifo, the Jew. And he's saying, your religion cannot give a fulfillment of what is in Malachi 1, verse 11, where you have this prophecy.

And it's not quoted here. So, for from the rising of the sun, even to its setting, my name will be great among the nations. And in every place, incense is going to be offered to my name, and a grain offering that is pure.

For my name will be great among the nations, says Yahweh of hosts. But you are profaning it, verse 12, in that you say, the table of the Lord is defiled, and as for its fruit, its food is to be despised.

So, Justin's argument is that this has never been and cannot be fulfilled amongst the Jewish people. It never has been, and it cannot now be fulfilled amongst Jewish people. So what is this making great of his name?

Or this incense? Or this grain offering? What is this all about? Justin's argument is that is fulfilled in the thanksgiving—he kept saying Eucharist, and what he's doing is he's taking a later development, reading it back into the thanksgiving prayers of the Christian people around the world.

It has nothing to do with the whole concept of transubstantiation, Eucharist as a perpetuatory sacrifice, the necessity of a priesthood, and all the rest of that stuff. None of that is present in what Justin is saying.

And this comes out in his own words. Section 117, dialogue with Trifo, Justin, Accordingly, God, anticipating all the sacrifices which we offer through this name, and which Jesus Christ enjoined on us to offer, that is, in the Eucharist, that is, the thanksgiving of the bread and the cup, and which are presented by Christians in all places, which are presented throughout the world, bears witness that they are well-pleasing to him.

But he utterly rejects those presented by you and by those priests of yours, saying, And I will not accept your sacrifices at your hands. For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is glorified among the Gentiles, he says, but you profane it.

That is, verses 10 -12, so that's the same section. Yet even now, in your love of contention, you assert that God does not accept the sacrifices of those who dwelt then in Jerusalem and were called Israelites, but says that he is pleased with the prayers of the individuals of that nation when dispersed and calls their prayers sacrifice.

So in other words, Trifo's arguing that there is fulfillment in the dispersion of the Jews in their prayers. Now, Justin then says that prayers and giving of thanks when offered by worthy men are the only perfect and well-pleasing sacrifice to God, I also admit.

So Trifo has argued, Well, the fulfillment is found in the dispersed Jews and their prayers. And Justin says, Well, you know what? The prayers of just men? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Not a Eucharistic sacrifice, not transubstantiation, nothing like you have in the modern Roman mass, but in the Thanksgiving prayers of the Christian people.

For such alone, Christians, such alone have Christians undertaken to offer and in the remembrance, anamnesis, remembrance, not repetition, not representation, anamnesis. Remember, we have an anamnesis of a sin bearer, whereas under the repetitive sacrifices, you have reminder of sin, which is what you have in the mass.

For such alone, Christians have undertaken to offer and in the remembrance affected by their solid and liquid food, the bread and the cup, whereby the suffering of the Son of God, which he endured is what brought to mind, not represented, no transubstantiation, not there, whose name the high priests of your nation and your teachers have caused to be profaned and blasphemed over all the earth.

There's Justin's own explanation of his own understanding of Malachi 1, and it has no place in the modern Roman system. So I had said to, I think it was Joe was the caller, he actually tweeted me this morning, I said to Joe, I said that he was talking about Thanksgiving, he wasn't talking about some type of Eucharistic sacrifices involving transubstantiation, propitiatory sacrifices that do not perfect those for whom it is made, etc., etc., etc.

There's the words of Justin himself. Wanted you to see it, there's straight out of the Antonicene Fathers, Volume 1, Section 117, Dialogue with Trifo. You gotta go to the documentation. Speaking of which, I didn't start this up, and unfortunately now it's going to be fun to try to do this.

I didn't tell him I was going to do this, but you know what, I'm just going to give you, I'm going to ask you to, I'm going to send the full screen, and I just want the manuscripts, the pieces of papyri here, if that makes sense to you.

You can zoom in on that and crop that in, I hope. What I want to show you, and it's already six minutes till, it's not coming through? I'm sending you the Dell with the full screen. Okay, I'm selecting the screen region now.

So you can't show this. Okay, I hate this program. Okay, how about now? I'm sending a single thing, and you're not getting anything. Okay, well, I guess we should have tested this before we started, because evidently our thing won't work, and so that has thrown me a major curve.

The only other thing I can try doing is putting it on the other screen and hoping that maybe that will do it. How about now? I'm sending you my whole other screen. No? Oh, well, all right. Okay. Not going to be able to cover that today.

Scratch that one. We'll just have to open the phones, because that was the next thing I was going to do, and we can't do it. So, there you go.

I have to at least explain the problem is that we are in between technologies, and I've got you plugging and unplugging things that we haven't thoroughly tested, and that's on me. Sorry about that.

877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. You can rescue me now, and I'm sorry. Now what works? Okay, now what? Well, do you have something now? Okay, all right. Well, okay. So, what happened?

What the background here is that, well, sort of. There's actually two of them. Yeah, I guess I'm saying the full screen. So, they look a lot alike. They're different. That's good enough. Okay, we'll go to that in a second.

So, I get this message from my son yesterday, and I assume he's talking with somebody. He's been writing in some Black Hebrew Israelites and stuff. And so, he says, so, what's the textual background, and how thoroughly documented and firm is the documentation?

No, those are not the normal things that my son and I are talking about in WhatsApp, but that's what he asked yesterday. And so, what I did is I sent him these two pictures, these two pages, which you just saw briefly up on the screen, and he sort of guessed, that's probably from P45, huh?

And I said, yeah, it's from P45. It just so happens that our earliest and fullest manuscript of the Gospel of Mark is the papyrus manuscript that I'm working on, a PhD in textual criticism, at Northwest University in Pachosum, South Africa.

And so, yeah, it was sort of easy for me to grab some high-quality scans of P45. But here's what's interesting, and this is the point I want to get to. If we look at the manuscripts, that is, if I can get Rich's attention long enough to get us to look at the manuscripts, because now he's doing stuff with the phones.

If we look at these two manuscripts, if we look at these two manuscripts, hey, there we go, you will notice that they look very similar, but for example, you can see the damage down here is similar to this side.

But if you look carefully, they're not the same page. They've experienced similar damage, but they're not the same page. This is the sixth folio. This is the seventh, if I recall correctly. What we do have is, you can see up here, this is the top margin.

There's nothing written above here. You can see very clearly the top margin on this side. But the text goes all the way out here, all the way. That might be the margin. No, no, it goes beyond that. You've got some writing over here.

So the margins on both the right and left-hand sides, and then you've got writing all the way down to here, writing all the way down to here. The bottom of the page is missing. The bottom of the page is missing.

And so the problem is that that specific text in Mark 7 that has the statement declaring all foods clean would be somewhere down here. Because this section here is after that. This starts at Mark 7 -3, and this starts at Mark 7 -25.

And that's in between that, but it's not here. It would be down below here. And you can see, obviously, we only have a portion. This is going to be extremely hard to read in here. I mean, you can make some out over here.

You can sort of figure out what's there just by counting letters and stuff like that. But the issue, though, is this. Some of you may recall, I don't know, about a year or so ago, we responded to the assertion of Ijaz Ahmed that P66 is not supportive of the reading God in John 20 -28.

And what we did, as we pointed out, was, well, actually, it's fragmentary at that point. And you don't, just because a manuscript is fragmentary at a point, assume that it has a reading other than the standard reading of the manuscript tradition.

And so I think I'll just put this sort of up on the same section here, and we can sort of just wing it here. Oh, back of my thing came off. My little tablet thingy sort of fell apart. So here's the idea.

We have the first manuscript. We have the first page here. And then the second page here. And the section that's missing is down here. Now, can we, with some level of honesty, say, well, there's no question about what the original reading was?

I think we can. Because here we have a papyrus, and it's, let's say, here's 100, here's 200, here's 300, here's 400. Okay? P45 is right around this period of time. It's right in this time period between 200 and 220.

Could be as early as 180, but let's just go 200 to 220. Now, we have around 325, so about here, we have codices like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. And in P45, in Mark 7, you have the same text in, let's say, verses 3 through 17 and 25 and following as you have here.

So you have, in that section, you have a straight line of transmission. And so when you come to a lacuna, what's called a hole, in here, that is not here. This contains all of that. Here, you have this line here.

It matches. The transmission line's the same between the two. When you have a lacuna, then you can properly and safely assume that what is missing in the early papyri, but is found here, was initially in the papyri.

Because if there was something else up here, there would be a different line of transmission that would go this direction, and we'd have manuscripts over here that have completely different readings. But we don't.

Not only that, but if we go back to this here, we know from other pages of P45 the average number of lines per page. And we know how wide they were. So we know the average number of letters that would be written across.

Okay? So you can't assume that in this one little section down here, there was some whole new story about something completely different. Because we know there's only a certain amount of information between here and up here.

And it just happens to match exactly what we have in later manuscripts. So the idea that, well, this stuff was missing or was added at some other time is simply impossible. This is the very next page.

There are only a certain number of letters and lines that can be fit down here, and we have that information in Sinaiticus, in Vaticanus, in Washingtonianus, etc., etc. And so sometimes when people say, well, basically my answer to my son was, while P45 doesn't contain that specific verse, there is no question that it originally did.

And people say, well, but it's not there. It doesn't matter. It's fragmentary. There is not a single manuscript anywhere that gives testimony to any kind of other transmissional history of Mark chapter 7.

And so it is pure conjecture on someone's part that there was something else there than what is found in the manuscript tradition. And so the fragmentary nature of the papyri can be frustrating at times, because when there is a variant, sometimes it'd be like, oh, it'd be so wonderful.

Wouldn't it be great to have a papyrus that would cast some light on this particular reading or that particular reading? Mark 1 -1, that'd be great. And maybe we'll someday find something like that. And we keep finding new stuff.

But until then, you cannot simply assume that because it's fragmentary, as long as there is a consistency in the transmission of that text in the manuscript tradition as a whole, it is absolutely appropriate to say, yeah, it was in P45.

And there's no question about its originality, etc., etc. So just wanted to bring that to your attention, show that to you. And I'm glad we were able to make that work. Okay, with that in mind, I guess I'm going to have to grab this little thing or I'm not going to be able to hear what people are saying.

Let's get to the calls. And let's wait, it looked like they all have the exact same. Oh, well, I guess since we talked about it, we'll just jump down there real quick. And we won't spend 25 minutes because we don't have 25 minutes to do it.

Let's go ahead and talk with Joe and Charlotte. Joe, did you hear what Justin Marder actually said?

Yeah, I heard the last end of your discussion of it. I read it the night you first talked to.

Including section chapter 117? I believe so, yeah. He mentioned it three times. And the third time, it's very, very plain, that has nothing to do with the idea of Eucharistic sacrifices, perpetuatory sacrifices, transubstantiation.

It is the faithful prayers of Thanksgiving of people around the world that he has in mind there, which, you know, whatever you do with Malachi 111, that's what he was arguing with Trifo about. So hopefully you had an opportunity to catch that.

Yeah, the sacrifice of praise and the perpetuatory sacrifice distinction, I think, is a pretty good one. The question I have now is that, you know, given that he's speaking of it as a sacrifice of praise and not a perpetuatory one, as Catholics tend to try to argue, why then does he seem to still think that the true presence is a thing?

So I've been asking Catholics this recently, like, why is it that early Christians tended to think, to believe in the real presence? And then they tend to argue that, well, they first had this idea of a perpetuatory sacrifice being a part of the Eucharist, and so that necessitates the victim being Christ himself.

And then that's where the true presence kind of developed. Backwards. Where I'm kind of wondering how the true presence developed if they only viewed it as a sacrifice of praise.

Yeah, no, that's backwards. Keep something in mind. When we look at, and you can look this up in the Catholic Encyclopedia, if you want, in the early church practice, and I'm hopefully going to be reading Michael Kruger's new book on second century Christianity while I'm traveling over the next couple of weeks.

I'm not sure if he addresses this as I haven't asked him about it or not. But one of the things to keep in mind is real presence and transubstantiation are two different things. The early church most definitely believed that Christ was present with them in their worship and especially in the elements of the supper.

They did believe that. But what they clearly did not believe was that that resulted in what was eventually defined as transubstantiation. You know how we know that? Because when you would have the elements that had been blessed in the service, there would be certain people who would not be able to attend because of sickness or illness and things like that.

And so they would take the elements to the sick and distribute them to them. And that certainly shows that the early church had a higher view than most evangelical churches do, which would never think of doing anything like that.

And by the way, by the way, Reformed folks, and I don't want to even get into the Calvinism stuff, but Reformed folks have a very high view of the supper, which you may not be familiar with. If you've not read the chapter in the London Baptist Confession of Faith on the Lord's Supper, I'd encourage you to do so.

You will probably faint when you do because it's an extremely high view of the Lord's Supper. But here's the key. Once they distributed the elements to those who were sick, what did they do with them?

If they believed, what does Rome do with consecrated elements today?

Or the expense of it in some respectful way, I'm not entirely sure.

Well, but the point is, if you walk into Roman Catholic Church, why do you genuflect? Some leftover in the tabernacle. The tabernacle, the monstrance, the zborium, the picks, they carry them in procession, etc., etc.

The early church never did that. Once the elements were distributed, they did not have any kind of special treatment. Once the actual corporate act of worship and thanksgiving was completed, the elements were just food.

The elevation of the elements after the words of consecration didn't happen until the 600s or so, I think.

Exactly. So there's the issue. The reason that modern Roman Catholic theology and apologetics has had to adopt the mechanism of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Are you familiar with Newman? Yeah, I'm working on his book right now.

Okay, well, Newman's not easy to read, but if you're reading Newman, then I absolutely demand that you read George Salmon's The Infallibility of the Church. Because Salmon responded to Newman and documents how Newman has basically abandoned the historical field of battle.

Because once you adopt the idea of the acorn and the tree, then anything can happen. I mean, look, I don't know if you've heard my debate with Peter D. Williams on Mary. But if you want to see what happens when Newman goes to seed, then that's the one to watch.

Because fundamentally, Peter D. Williams was willing to debate the Marian dogmas, which most Roman Catholic apologists are not willing to do. So I give him credit for that. He and Bob St. Genes have been willing to step out there.

But once they step out there, what you discover is a vicious circularity that demonstrates that what you have as dogma today in regards to bodily assumption of Mary, utterly, absolutely unknown to the early Church.

Unknown! But they simply have to assume it. Well, because Rome has said so. Because Rome has said so.

I understand the difficulties with the Catholic Church and the development of doctrine. But my question is more—because I do believe that Justin believed in a true—it wasn't necessarily a transubstantiation.

No, it was spiritual. When you look at his words, he does seem to think that Jesus becomes present, the bread is blessed. So that makes me think that there's definitely some sort of consecration that's happening that—.

But not by a priest.

That's still future, too. Yeah, not by a priest. It is the Church. It is the gathered body, because it is His body. That is what makes the worship of the Church so special, and that's why the early Christians were willing to risk their lives to go to Church.

I do not—I mean, if you can find a Calvinist Reformed person who writes just like this, that'd be amazing to me, because he's wording it right here that it's after it's been prayed for, you know, it's now—it says it is the flesh and blood of Jesus who was made flesh.

And to me, that's such strong language there. You haven't—. And it seems like he thinks that after the words of consecration, it actually becomes Christ. In some respect, maybe not necessarily transubstantiation, you know, whatever he thinks of it as.

But my question is, why in the world is he thinking this? Because it makes sense to me, oh, if you believe in some sort of propitious—well, I can't say the word, whatever— the propitiatory element of the sacrifice of the Mass, and it kind of makes sense why the True Presence would develop along with it, but I don't understand how in the world it's developed if you just have the Eucharist as a sacrifice of praise.

Well, you're assuming that the only thing that guides the development of tradition over time is something that is apostolic. And that's the problem. The Marian dogmas, the papacy, the priesthood all demonstrate that tradition developed away from apostolic norms, not toward apostolic norms.

You already had the clarity of apostolic teaching. So if you're going to have development, it's not going to go deeper into that. It's going to go away from that, especially in light of the corruption of the hierarchy of the Church through politics.

And it happened in both Eastern Orthodoxy and in the West. It took different forms because of the differences in history. But let me just read something for you, and then I've got to go to other callers, but let me just read something for you.

Let's see here. Yeah, okay. At the same time, receive and feed upon Christ crucified and receive all the benefits accruing from his death. This they do really and indeed, not as if feeding upon the actual flesh and blood of a person's body, but inwardly and by faith.

In the supper, the body and blood of Christ are present to the faith of believers, not in any actual physical way, but in a way of spiritual apprehension, just as the bread and wine themselves are present in their outward physical senses.

All right, so who said that? That's the London Baptist Confession of Faith.

Oh, okay. I was waiting for you to have some finger, like, this was a pope, and I was like...

No, chapter 30, section 7. If you want to look it up, you'll find it online, and I think you'll be surprised by taking a look at it. So there are really good Reformed works, not just Reformed Baptists, but Presbyterians, on the subject of the Supper.

Richard Braselis has written on the subject of the Supper from the Reformed Baptist perspective. There are good works out there, and I would take the time to track them down because I think if all you've had has been a...

Look, again, I'll be straightforward here, and not trying to get into Calvinism stuff, but Reformed theology has always had a much higher view of the Church and the ordinances, even using the term sacraments, than, say, a major portion of Southern Baptists.

Look, you can find the Founders Movement, you can find in Beuys a higher view, because there's been that Reformed strata even amongst the Southern Baptists. But it sounds like what you've been exposed to is the much more disconnected-from-history version.

Take the time to even read Calvin and the Institutes on the Supper.