Dr. White Answers Critics on Apologia TV

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Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

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What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Apologia Radio and actually right now

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Apologia TV -ish is what's happening right now. This is going up on YouTube. You guys will be able to actually look at the content and when you do, you will see sitting next to me is

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Dr. James White and this is the first time I've done a show in the studio sitting in the side like this.

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It's a different perspective, isn't it? That's right. It is very different. Yeah. I feel just like a lack of power and authority.

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Get used to it, son. That's right. Dr. White is in the hot seat and he's going to direct the whole show today.

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So it's actually the easiest show we will ever do, I think. I don't have to do anything. No, I'm going to ask you questions. Okay. That's the problem.

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I'm glad I have Google. We're also not using headphones. I don't know how this is going to sound. Are you totally thrown off right now?

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I'm totally thrown off. I don't know how loud I'm being. So that's Luke the Bear and he's wearing a B .B.

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Warfield. Benjamin. No, this is J .C. Ryle. Oh, that's Ryle?

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I had to look and see which one I was wearing. Yeah. Okay. J .C. Ryle, Holiness. Best book, I think, on sanctification.

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And I like to try to read, as I've said before, J .C. Ryle's Holiness at least once a year and get my teeth kicked in. Yeah. It's always good.

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And get humbled a bit. And that's Jerry over there. I'm glad to be here. Just hold on for this wild ride.

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Oh, yeah. All right. So. I learned everything I know about this from him. Oh, from Jerry. Okay, good. I think it needs to be mentioned.

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So just to sort of introduce everybody to what's happening here. If you haven't read Dr. James White's book,

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The King James Only Controversy, you ought to read it. It was actually the first book that I read as a

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Christian and that's rather unusual. It's just I didn't know anything about Bible translations and I didn't know anything about really

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Scripture and I got thrown into the controversy early in a Christian bookstore and I got the book and so I read the book and I got into some of these issues early on and they're important.

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Let me just sort of bring you into it. If you look at some of the content we put up over the last week and we're putting a lot more, actually, we've got some good conversations from the

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Mormon Temple in Mesa, Arizona. You'll see a pretty consistent pattern in every conversation that we have with a

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Mormon. We're preaching the gospel to them, we're bringing them to the text of Scripture. When they see their worldview, their beliefs confronted with Scripture, it's an autonomic response for the

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Mormon. They immediately respond with, it's been corrupted, there's the translation issues.

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The Eighth Article of Faith? Oh yeah. As far as it's translated correctly. As far as it's translated correctly. That's what they're taught in their community.

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It disagrees and so it must be corrupted and so it's their fallback and I do want to say that if you're going to do any kind of evangelism with a

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Muslim, with a Jehovah's Witness, with a Mormon, with an atheist, I mean, across the board, you need to understand, we need to understand where we got our

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Bibles from, how we can show that when Jesus says in Matthew 24, heaven and earth will pass away, my words will by no means pass away, how he has in kept that word.

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It's important for us to know and so I wanted to say this ahead of time, I'm going to hand this over to Dr.

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Whitey, he's going to lead us through this whole conversation, but this is going to be difficult, maybe for some people that are new to the show and you're new to these issues.

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I want to say this, don't be frustrated by it and don't check out. Take the time to understand the issues and I would say, again, get

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King James Only Controversy, it's a fantastic introduction to the whole issue of the transmission of the text of the

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Bible, and listen to this episode several times. Okay, Dr. White. Yeah, I was, you know, we're doing this partly due to sickness,

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I was going to be addressing this on my own program, but my partner is ill today and you said, hey, let's do this, and there was a lot of discussion about it, but one of the things

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I would have said right off the bat is this is a topic that most people are ignorant of, primarily because it is so sensitive and it is something that we have failed to teach our young people about.

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We send them off to university, they don't know where the Bible came from, they don't know what its history is, they don't know what its background is, and they have false ideas in their mind that the

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Bible floated down from heaven in calf skin with thumb indexing and gold page edges, and that's not how it came about.

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And as soon as they run into professors who are very good at demonstrating that's not how it came about, all of a sudden their whole world is rocked, and a discussion of variations in the text of scripture, different manuscripts, manuscript families, a lot of people say that's just too much.

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The fact of the matter is it's not too much for our enemies, and it's not too much for people who have access to the internet, and so we don't have a choice.

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My great grandparents probably didn't have to deal very much with this subject. They're not with us anymore, and that's not the society that we're dealing with.

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And so it's a tough area, we're not going to be able to cover everything because I'm looking at a specific aspect of this subject today, but I think it's one of the most important topics to be addressed.

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In fact my most popular presentation is on the reliability of the text of the New Testament all around the world, and so what

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I'd like to ask you to do, if you've got your computers or Bibles or phone,

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Jerry has his phone, Jerry needs to have his phone, Jerry always has his phone, that's an important thing, it's permanently attached to his hand.

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Turn with me to Revelation chapter 15, Revelation chapter 15 verse 3. Here is the new

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American standard, and they sang the song of Moses, the bond certain of God, and the song of the Lamb saying, great and marvelous are your works,

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O Lord God, the Almighty, righteous and true are your ways, King of the nations.

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Now almost everybody is going to have a Bible that is going to have a little note, a little number next to the word nations, and most of the time people ignore those numbers, sometimes you look down at the bottom of the page, some translations give more information than others, but the reality is that there is a textual variant, there is a difference in the manuscripts of the

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New Testament at Revelation 15 .3, and the reality is, of all the books of the

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New Testament, we have the fewest copies of Revelation.

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Most people think, well a New Testament manuscript must be Matthew through Revelation, no, not at all. Certainly later manuscripts do tend to be of the entirety of the

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New Testament, but earlier on manuscripts tend to be either of a gospel or the gospels, a gospel collection, a collection of Paul's epistles, something like that.

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The one we have the fewest of is the book of Revelation, and that reflects the fact that there was great controversy in the early church over the acceptance of the book of Revelation into the canon of scripture, and I'm very glad about that,

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I am very thankful that the early church wasn't sitting around going, hey, you know, we don't have enough books with seven -headed monsters in it, can we have some more books with seven -headed monsters, you know, and beasts and things like that.

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There was a serious dialogue as to what does this mean, was it connected with apostles, apostles, things like that, and I'm glad that that was the case.

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But the book of Revelation has an extremely unique history of transmission over time, and there are a lot of variations in that text, because we have the smallest number of manuscripts for it as well.

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And king of the nations, the ethnon, the ethnos, you've heard that term, so you know,

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Gentiles, nations, ethnicity, et cetera, et cetera, king of the nations is one of the readings, and that's primarily what we would call the majority reading.

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But then you also have king of the ages, which is found in one of the earliest manuscripts of the book of Revelation, P47.

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We only have a couple papyri manuscripts of Revelation, and P47 has king of the ages at that point.

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Now what's important here, and the reason I'm raising this, is that when we go to the

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King James version of the Bible, and when we go to the manuscripts, or actually the text type from which the

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King James was translated, we have the king of saints. Saints.

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Okay? Now, what you need to understand, what's very important here, and what we want to address here, is the

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King James version of the Bible, venerable translation that it is, was not a translation from specific manuscripts of the

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New Testament. What happened was, in the century prior to the translation of the

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King James, which took place between 1604 and 1611, so over that seven years, multiple different committees of great scholars met and translated the

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Bible, however they were really working with previous translations, the Bishop's Bible, Geneva Bible, Tyndale, Wycliffe, they all had deep impact upon the translation of the

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King James version of the Bible. But they were not doing a new study of ancient manuscripts or anything like that.

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They were operating primarily from printed editions of the

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Greek New Testament. Most people don't realize that. There were seven printed editions of the

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New Testament that they had access to and utilized in translating the New Testament.

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They used the 1525 Hebrew text, what's called the 1525 Bomberg text of the Old Testament. We're not really going to be talking about that today.

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But they had seven printed editions of the Greek New Testament. They had five editions by Desiderius Erasmus.

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Now Erasmus was the Dutch humanist scholar, and when we say humanist everybody goes, ah! But humanist back then did not mean what humanist means today.

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The humanist movement, the Renaissance movement, the idea of ad fontes, going back to the sources, he was one of the last

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Renaissance men, an expert in almost all fields of human knowledge.

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And starting in 1516, he had started putting out, initially for him, it was his own

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Latin translation that had him most worried. Because for 1 ,100 years, the Latin Vulgate had reigned supreme in Western Europe.

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Very early on, the Christian church in the West switched from Greek to Latin as its primary language.

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And so the Latin Vulgate was the official text of the church. Sixtus V, Pope of Rome, eventually put out an infallible

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Latin Vulgate, which had to be corrected very quickly, but that's another story. But the

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Vulgate reigned supreme. So any questioning of that text could run you afoul of the authorities, and these are the days of the

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Inquisition. So his primary concern was he was providing this fresh

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Latin translation, but he made it a diglot, which means on one side of the page you'd have the

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Latin, on the other side, the Greek. Because he recognized Greek was the original language.

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But he didn't put a whole lot of work into the production of the Greek at first, his focus was upon the

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Latin. Well, he got into a lot of problems with the Greek. In fact, he moved to Basel, Switzerland because he was finding so few

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Greek manuscripts to actually work with. And in that first edition, he had about half a dozen manuscripts.

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The primary one was from the 14th, 15th century. So he wasn't working with ancient handwritten manuscripts, and he only had about half a dozen, and the best manuscript he had actually, he didn't trust all that much.

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So he used later manuscripts. Over the course of his life, up to 1535, he released five editions.

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After the second edition, he got in big trouble, because he had not included in any of the first two editions what's called the

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Commiohonium, 1 John 5, 7. And so he was attacked by his enemies as denying the

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Trinity and all the rest of the stuff, and he said, hey, it's not in any of the Greek manuscripts that I had. And so a codex, which

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I've examined in the reading room of Trinity College in Dublin, Codex Monfortianus was actually written to confute

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Erasmus, and he actually then inserted the Commiohonium into this third edition and the ones after that, and that's why it's in the

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King James Version to this day. But five editions between his first and the last, and the end of his life, 1535.

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Then you have the work of Robert Estienne Stephanus, who was Calvin's printer. And I didn't have time to grab it, but I have a 1550

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Stephanus text, an actual 1550 Stephanus text. And it was the last one printed without, he was the one who inserted the verse divisions after that edition into the

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Greek New Testament. We didn't have verse divisions until that point in time. Chapter and verse divisions are modern innovations.

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So all the numerology stuff you see based on that, irrelevant for the vast majority of the history of the text of the

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New Testament. Stephanus' 1550 text became extremely popular.

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Many people utilized that particular text. And then Calvin's successor at Geneva was named

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Beza, and Beza was really into studying the text of the New Testament, and he produced his own edition of the

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Greek New Testament in 1598. Those are the seven editions that the

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King James translators utilized. And even then there are differences between all five of Erasmus, and Stephanus, and Beza.

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So every individual committee had to make choices based on the differing texts they have.

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So each of the committees were doing textual criticism of printed texts. But Stephanus had to do textual criticism,

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Erasmus had to do textual criticism, that is he had to look at, there were differences between his manuscripts. He inserted things from the

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Latin Vulgate that none of his Greek manuscripts had. And these were all, and by the way, in case you don't remember this,

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Erasmus was a Roman Catholic priest. He wrote a small book in defense of transubstantiation. For anybody who's like, oh,

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Erasmus was this wonderful guy, he was. And he came as close as you could get to leaving

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Rome, but didn't. And so people would go, yeah, well, I don't like the fact that Roman Catholics are involved with this, that, or the other thing.

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Well, if you're into the Textus Receptus, you might want to keep in mind that he had a lot to do with that, and himself was a

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Roman Catholic. So those seven texts then become the basis for the

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King James version of the Bible. Now, you will see folks, again, we did this really fast this morning,

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I didn't have time to grab it, but you will see folks carrying around a little blue case -bound New Testament published by the

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Trinitarian Bible Society, it'll say TBS on the bottom of the back. And it is a Greek New Testament.

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Now, when you open it, you won't find any notes in it. It's just simply a plain Greek text.

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That is generally what is called the Textus Receptus, or the TR today.

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That is a text that Scrivener created on the basis of the

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King James Bible. So it's a Greek text based upon an

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English translation of five printed Greek texts, which came from half a dozen

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Greek manuscripts. And what he did is he took those seven editions, then he went to the

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King James, and when they differed from one another, which one did they choose? And that becomes the reading.

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So that's where the case -bound blue Textus Receptus that people have today and utilize came from.

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And so the reality is there are many Textus Recepti, there's not just one, but that's become the most popular one simply because of the vagaries of history.

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No church council has ever sat down and said, okay, we are going to create the final text, we're going to examine all the variants, and we're going to make a, you know,

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Sixtus V sort of did that with the Vulgate, but Rome has run away from that screaming in terror because it was filled with errors and it was really bad and all that infallibility stuff we need to, you know, that's, he wasn't speaking infallibly, blah, blah, blah.

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So we come to today, and majority of the people in the audience are probably using an

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ESV or a New American Standard or an NIV or a Holman Christian Study Bible, or maybe even a

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New King James or something like that. But there are many people who still use the King James, I was raised in the King James. There are differences in the translations, partly because of translational issues and partly because of the text from which they're translated.

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The King James and the New King James are based upon the Textus Receptus, as vaguely defined as that is, but it's based upon the

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TR. That's different from what's called the Majority Text, and there are different versions of the

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Majority Text. You've got the Robinson Pierpont Majority Text, and you've got the Hodges -Farstad

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Majority Text, and there are differences in the sources and methodologies that they used. But generally, a

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Majority Text theory is, if you have 500 manuscripts of 1

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John, and 1 John 3 .1, there is a phrase missing from the

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King James and New King James. The phrase is, and such we are, talking about being called the children of God.

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And if there are 500 manuscripts of 1 John, and 400 of them don't have it, and 100 of them do, well what you do is you count noses.

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So you go with the majority. And so the Majority Text wouldn't have that phrase.

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Modern translations, NASB, ESV, are based upon an eclectic methodology, which is based upon weighing manuscripts, not counting manuscripts.

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But what do you mean by that? Well, it's simple. If you have a manuscript that was copied within 100 years of the original, the theory is it has more weight than one that was copied 1000 years after the original.

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Now there are small exceptions to that. Technically, you could have a manuscript that was copied 100 years after the original, which is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

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And you could have a manuscript that was copied 1000 years after the original that's actually only a copy of a copy. Because if the guy 1000 years later had a really really really really old manuscript, then there could only be one or two generations, even though there's 1000 years.

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And you could have one, which is a copy of a copy of a copy, even with 100 years. That's pretty rare. That's a real rarity.

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In general, the older and closer to the original you are, the fewer generations of copying there are between the manuscript you have and the original gives more weight to those earlier manuscripts.

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So, in the 1930s we found a bunch of papyri. And papyrus was the earliest manuscript form, material upon which

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New Testament was written. And these took us back into the 2nd century.

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Up until, for example, the discovery of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Some of the earliest manuscripts we had in the

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New Testament were from 900 years after the time of Christ. And all of a sudden we leap back centuries to the 2nd century.

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Now papyrus, papyri are normally fragmentary. I mean, how are we all going to look 2000 years down the road?

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We're not going to look very good. And papyrus has been around, survived beetles and dust storms and fires and everything else.

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And so, some of the papyri we have are just little fragments. But they take us back to an extremely early period in the transmission of the text of the

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New Testament. And so the majority of believing Christian scholars, and I want to emphasize that, there are believing

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Christian scholars and then there are unbelieving biblical scholars. Okay? There's a difference here.

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I am a believing scholar of these issues, not an unbelieving scholar.

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Some people want to try to say otherwise, but be that as it may. Believing Christian scholars, the vast majority, recognize that there is more value, more weight in the textual testimony of manuscripts like P72 and P66, and these are early gospel manuscripts or P45 and P46, early collection of Paul's writings that go back to the 2nd century.

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That type of a manuscript has more weight than one written in 1000 or 1300

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AD, because it is much closer to the original. Now, we also need to recognize that early on, the

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West abandoned Greek and began using Latin. So we have over 20 ,000 manuscripts of the

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Latin Vulgate. We have just under 6 ,000 Greek manuscripts. Also need to remember that something called history took place, and that is manuscripts were being produced all across North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, ancient

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Israel, for hundreds of years. But then something really important happened between 632 and 732, and most people don't make the connection, but Muhammad died in 632.

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By 732, Islam had gone from what we call Saudi Arabia today, all the way across North Africa, across the

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Straits of Gibraltar, into Europe, all through Spain. It was only stopped in 732 by Charles Martel at the

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Battle of Tours, and had gone all the way up to the gates of Constantinople, into Iraq, all the way toward India, and many of those areas had been very important areas in the production of Greek manuscripts.

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Well, Islam isn't really good for the production of Greek manuscripts, if you know what

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I mean. And so, the area in which manuscripts were being produced, especially

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Greek manuscripts, was shrunk down to Greece and the area around Byzantium, ancient

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Constantinople, modern day Istanbul. And so, the text type, the readings that had become popular around Byzantium and their manuscripts in that area, because obviously, you're going to have certain manuscripts that are going to be copied and re -copied and re -copied in a particular area.

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People didn't move around as much as we do today. Mobility was just not the way, you know, look at poor

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Paul's trip to Rome, didn't go really well, you know what I mean? Right. Nobody had bicycles. Bicycles, or airplanes, or fax machines, or anything else.

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And so, the reality was you would develop regional text types, and the text that became popular around Byzantium then, manuscripts continue being produced there all the way until when

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Constantinople falls, and everybody knows when that happened, 1453.

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Yeah. Exactly.

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1453. So, when Constantinople, when it was clear Constantinople was going to fall, many of the scholars fled westward and brought their manuscripts with them.

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That was vitally important in the Renaissance and everything that happened in the

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Reformation. I love teaching church history and the hand of God, the providence of God, fascinating how all that happened.

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But, the point is, the vast majority of manuscripts that we have, numerically, come from after 1000

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AD, which makes sense. I mean, wars, bombing, fire, stuff like that destroys manuscripts.

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They're sort of defenseless. They can't run. Right. The vast majority of manuscripts we have come from after 1000

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AD, and hence, where were they produced? Around Byzantium. So, guess what text type they are? The Byzantine text type.

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Yeah. So, the majority text is a Byzantine text. So, the translations that we have today, modern translations, look at that and say, okay, there's the

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Byzantine text type. You have what's called the Western text type, which is basically what you have in the Latin Vulgate, but there are

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Greek manuscripts that have the Western type. And then you have what's called the Alexandrian text type, which is an

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Egyptian. Now, we don't know exactly where these came from, but they are generally located in that way.

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And it turns out that when we find the papyri, guess what text type they are?

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Well, Alexandrian, because papyri manuscripts don't do well in Northern Europe where it's cold or wet, where there's such things as fungus and stuff like that, it's going to eat papyri.

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But the sands of Egypt are nice and dry and actually help to preserve these things. And so, as we've found these papyri, lo and behold, what do they have?

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They have an Alexandrian text type to them. And so, we have a massive wealth.

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I mean, people who study Plato or Homer, well, Homer's got a lot of manuscripts, but still in comparison to the

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New Testament, not very many. They look at us and go, I don't know what you people are complaining about because we have such a massive amount of information in comparison to any of these other ancient works.

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But it's that huge amount that does cause a problem. Because even as it is, the

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Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts running around the world today, trying to digitize all these manuscripts, because it's hard to get all that information in one place.

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Now, don't get me wrong. We live in a day where we have more information about the text of the New Testament than ever before. Ever before.

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It is amazing what is sitting on the screen in front of me right now. Absolutely amazing. I mean, I've lived to see this come into existence.

27:48

When I was doing my bachelor's degree in Bible in the 1980s, you didn't have any of this stuff. If you wanted to study constructions of the

27:55

Greek New Testament, you sat there with the Greek New Testament and you went from page to page to page, running your finger up and down the page.

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That's how you did it. And that's how Christians had always done it up until just the past few decades.

28:07

And so we have more information now than we've ever, ever had before. But now let's get to the issue.

28:15

When we look at something like Revelation 15 .3, we finally get back to it. We look at the

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King James and it says, King of Saints. And the question becomes, how can we defend that reading in light of the fact that when we look at the

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New Testament texts themselves, really there's one manuscript that reads saints.

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And that's a manuscript that came after Erasmus' printed

28:47

Greek New Testament. Just one? Just one. Just one. Actually, I think there's actually, if I'm recalling correctly, there's another one, but both are post the printed edition of the

29:00

Greek New Testament and hence are probably handwritten copies of the printed. They couldn't afford to buy the printed one.

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And so they hand copied that. So as far as having a textual value, they don't have any textual value.

29:12

The majority text, the earliest text, whatever theory you use, all the majority text advocates, all the

29:21

Byzantine text advocates, all the advocates of an eclectic methodology are all agreed, it shouldn't say saints.

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And yet you will find documents out there on the web right now, defending this reading vociferously because King James only folks take that perspective.

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Now what methodology, if you're a pastor, if you're a Bible study teacher, if you know that in your class on Sunday morning, there's going to be a whole range of Bible translations, you need to deal with the fact, if you're going to be speaking about what was going on in Revelation 15 .3,

29:58

it's always a good idea to look down at the bottom of the page. Yeah. And if you read

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King of the Nations, you should be aware of the fact that there are going to be people that are reading

30:09

King of the Ages. And then there's going to be other people with a King James or a new

30:15

King James that are going to be reading King of Saints. And if you end up making your strongest points in your sermon about King of the

30:24

Nations, and you want to talk about, well, the Lordship of Christ over the nations and all the rest of that kind of stuff, and you don't even make mention that's

30:33

King of Ages in some of their translations and King of Saints. I mean, you're going to make a different application if it's

30:40

King of Nations and you are King of Saints. Yeah. All are true. Sure. You can make an argument of that.

30:46

However. But the question is, what does this text specifically state? And it's really, really troubling to people when you preach on a text and don't explain this, but it's almost equally troubling when you try to explain it because people are afraid of, they just want black and white.

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I don't want notes down at the bottom of the page, black and white. And here's, and I stole this unashamedly from Dr.

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Daniel Wallace at Dallas Seminary, who is one of the leading textual critical scholars of our day, believing textual critical scholars of our day.

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I heard Dan say this years and years ago, and it, and it, and it stuck with me. He said, there are many, many people who are willing to trade the truth for certainty.

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There are many people who are willing to trade the truth for certainty. And many of those people are sitting in the pews of our churches.

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They don't realize what they're doing, but they are willing to close their eyes to factual evidence.

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I don't want to know about this because that threatens my sense of certainty.

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Now we both, everyone sitting on this table has realized, wait a minute, if you trade away truth, you don't have certainty. That's right.

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And I've talked to many Amora missionary that was absolutely certain that the Book of Amora was true, but that doesn't make it true.

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Right. The only true certainty is one that is built firmly upon the truth itself.

32:22

That's right. And so my concern is, um, in our discussion today is in the reform community, reform community.

32:34

Um, the, what happened that sort of triggered all of this is there's another text.

32:42

Let's say, let's take a look at another text. I was going to look at some of these, but I've already talked way too much and I, and I apologize for talking so much, but no, no, that's fine.

32:48

Take a look at John chapter seven, verse 53.

32:57

And if you look at your Bible, there will be a note.

33:03

There should be a note somewhere. Yep. And a bracket, double brackets depends on the translation.

33:12

NASB. NASB has single or double brackets? Uh, has single. Single brackets. Okay. All right.

33:18

There are two major multiverse textual variants in the

33:23

New Testament. Every Christian today should know exactly which two they are because once you've known, once you know them, once you've studied them, there's nothing else this big.

33:34

There's nothing else going to jump out and bite you. And you've just disarmed Bart Ehrman and all the

33:40

Bart Ehrman gnomes that infest community colleges and universities all over, all over the land.

33:47

And Facebook chat boxes. And Facebook chat, chat com boxes. Believe you me. If we would teach our people these things, we would absolutely disarm

33:57

Bart Ehrman and his people. Okay. The reason he gets away with what he gets away with is because we're afraid to talk about these things because there are people go,

34:04

I don't like that you're saying these things or I don't, you know, okay. But for crying out loud, for the sake of our, for the sake of the children, we've got to do it.

34:14

Okay. I mean, we've just got to get over the fear to do this. There are two major multiverse, 12 verse textual variants in the

34:23

New Testament. The longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20 is a major textual variant.

34:30

And the Percocet adultery, John 7, 53 through 8, 11. Now, interestingly enough, when you look at the manuscript evidence, there's always a bunch of variants within them.

34:43

So for example, 7, 53 through 8, 11. Yeah. But some of them, it's only 8, 3 through 11. They didn't have 7, 53 through 8, 2.

34:50

And, and there's, there's, there's all these variants, but, but those two 12 verse segments are the major textual variants in the

35:02

New Testament. There just isn't anything else. Yes, there are also, there's, there's all sorts of other variants, but not that, not large blocks of text as you have in those two places.

35:11

Now there's far more, there's far better manuscript evidence, the longer ending of Mark than there is the

35:17

Percocet adultery. All right. As Dan Wallace says, the story of the woman caught in adultery is his favorite story.

35:24

That's not really in the Bible. Yeah. Is how he puts it. And when you look at it, it appears in every

35:33

Jesus movie. Even, even Mel Gibson managed to get into the Passion movie as a flashback.

35:40

Right. Because it just had to be there. It had nothing to do with the actual story, but it had to be there. Right. And so you trigger the traditional emotions.

35:50

If you dare say anything about this text or you dare, what, what happened was someone in what's called the

35:58

Reformed Pub on Facebook asked a simple question. Would you preach?

36:03

John 7, 53 through 8, 11. If you're preaching through the gospel of John, that is a question I have answered.

36:09

I have raised and answered over and over and over again, because I think it's an important question because it allows me to ask the question.

36:17

What do you want to preach from the pulpit? That which John wrote or that which later tradition thinks

36:22

John wrote. Okay. I want to preach what is Theanostos, what is God breathed.

36:28

I don't want to preach what scribes hundreds of years later thought was. And many people in the

36:35

Reformed Pub disagreed. They disagreed because, but the church has used this.

36:44

Now, immediately as a, as a person who has taught church history for years, I just,

36:51

I just get goosebumps because that was the exact argument used against Erasmus when he dared change the

36:58

Latin Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate had been used in the church for 1100 years.

37:06

Who do you think you are modernist humanist? You changing what the church has had and God has blessed for 1100 years.

37:15

Very good. And I have had many King James only folks. God has blessed the

37:20

King James for 400 years. Well, that's barely, that's just a little over a third of how long he blessed the

37:27

Latin Vulgate. And he did bless the Latin Vulgate. There were lots of people who, who served

37:32

Christ faithfully using the Latin Vulgate, but that doesn't mean that the

37:39

Latin Vulgate becomes the standard at that point in time. Most people recognize that until we get into this area where you get these vague nebulous assertions that, well, actually church usage needs to be how we determine what the text of the new

37:57

Testament is. I had a disputatio with a friend of yours,

38:02

Doug Wilson on this very issue, because he promotes the concept of the ecclesiastical text.

38:09

Now there is no one ecclesiastical text. And unfortunately, when you ask someone, well, what is the ecclesiastical text?

38:18

Some people will say the Textus Receptus is the ecclesiastical text. Why? Well, because it was the default text, the

38:25

Reformers. That's not really true. If anyone has read Calvin's commentaries, there's a number of places where he'll go, he'll say certain manuscripts say this and certain manuscripts say that.

38:37

It didn't bother Calvin to say that, by the way. And by the way, the King James itself had, it's a shame, most published

38:43

King James today don't have the notes in the column that the King James translators themselves provided. But there were hundreds, well, there are thousands of notes, but there were hundreds of places where they noted, for example,

38:55

Revelation 15 .3, they noted that other manuscripts read differently than what they had in their text.

39:02

And so the King James translators themselves had no problem in recognizing the existence of textual variation and providing alternate translations in the margin.

39:12

Most of those, unfortunately, are no longer published with the King James. And so people can use that without recognizing, oh, the translators didn't have any problem mentioning this.

39:20

So anyway, but what is the ecclesiastical text? I pressed

39:25

Doug Wilson on that. And you can still find the Disputatio. It's available online. We have it on our website, aomin .org.

39:32

If you just look up Disputatio, you'll find, and it's not long because it's,

39:38

I think we only had, if I recall correctly, 150 words per exchange. Wow.

39:43

So, and that's better than 140 characters, I can guarantee you that. But 150 words per character.

39:50

And you can make a real nice presentation of the concept of the ecclesiastical text.

39:59

You know, the church is the method by which the word of God is preserved and the means and the usage of the church over time.

40:09

And that way we don't have to worry about textual critics and all that kind of stuff. And it sounds great.

40:15

And it sounds wonderful. And you can get all Vantillian about it and presuppositional about it and all the rest of that stuff until one thing happens.

40:23

What's that? And this is what happened when Doug Wilson and I were doing this. Until you go, okay, then what is the reading at?

40:30

And you get specific. Because vague generalities do not produce specific texts.

40:37

And I brought up Luke 2 .22 specifically to Brother Wilson, where there is a real issue with the text.

40:48

But what the original text is, is rather clear. And the later ecclesiastical text is very clearly not what

40:56

Luke himself originally wrote. So what are you going to do? Where's your commitment?

41:02

My commitment is I want to know what Luke wrote. Because as you said, all scripture is

41:12

Theanustos. Not the writer, because Theanustos means God breathe.

41:18

It's what he wrote that is Theanustos. Yes. And so the question then becomes, has

41:25

God then made sure that what he wrote has come down to us today? I absolutely affirm he has done so.

41:31

I don't affirm that he has done so in the way that either King James only us or TR only us or ecclesiastical text only us say that he has done it.

41:42

I believe he has done it through the entirety of the manuscript tradition. I view the discoveries we've had over the past couple of hundred years as great gifts to the church, given to the church at the very time when we need them most.

41:56

Yes. And unfortunately, if you take the ecclesiastical text perspective, you end up basically saying that these papyri manuscripts are garbage.

42:08

They were found, a number of people in the pub, found under a rock, thrown away in a trash can or whatever else it might be.

42:18

And they have to attack them because, well, the ecclesiastical text of the church.

42:24

Well, again, I go, what church are we talking about here? The ecclesiastical text of the

42:30

Western church was the Latin Vulgate. Right, right. They didn't use the Greek manuscripts as their primary authority for a thousand years.

42:37

So are we talking about Eastern Orthodoxy here? Are you really going to go to the Eastern Orthodox as the church at this point?

42:43

Yeah. And make them the standard? And even then they used the Byzantine text because that's all they had.

42:51

They had the Muslims knocking on their door from the middle of the 8th century.

42:57

You couldn't get down to Alexandria. Alexandria was taken by the Muslims early on in the expansion outward.

43:05

And so what do you mean when you're talking about the quote unquote ecclesiastical text?

43:11

And if it's going to be such a vague thing, why criticize those of us that can actually produce a text from which you can make

43:19

Bible translations when you can't produce a text from which you make Bible translations? That's important. Yeah. Okay. This is sort of an important thing.

43:26

Right. And so what I did is I responded to, you know, some people started saying, for example,

43:36

Paul Barth quoted from Augustine. And Augustine wrote a short little book.

43:43

It's available in Latin online. I pulled it up when we got here quite easily. And here's one of the translations.

43:50

Certain persons of little faith or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing I suppose lest their wives should be given impunity and sinning, remove from their manuscripts the

43:59

Lord's act of forgiveness toward the adulteress as if he had, he who had said sin no more had granted permission to sin.

44:05

And so Augustine made a comment about the Percupe adultery and, and Augustine's primary text was the

44:12

Latin. He could muddle around with Greek. He could not read Hebrew.

44:19

Quiz for the people around the table here. Gonna wake you up. You ready? Yeah. Ready?

44:25

No Googling. Two major, the only two major early church fathers. They could read both

44:31

Greek and Hebrew. Oh, this is a tough one. Paul, Paul.

44:36

We have a problem in defining the term early church. Can we say Jerome? Jerome's one. Jerome.

44:42

And, uh. The other guy was not nearly as Orthodox as even Jerome. Oh, um, uh, hold on.

44:48

Allegorical methodology. Yes. I lost in my head here. It's, uh, uh, oh, uh, origin, origin.

44:54

There you go. Thank you very much. Yes. Everyone who takes my church history class. Ends up having these ideas tattooed on their brains.

45:03

Yes. Anyway. So only two were able to actually deal with the entirety of the

45:11

Bible in its original languages. Origin and Jerome. And origin didn't do a very good job of it, actually. And so Augustine, for example,

45:20

Augustine defended the Deuterocanonicals or the Apocryphal books.

45:25

Yeah. Because they were in the Greek Septuagint. And he thought that represented the

45:32

Hebrew canon. Yeah. He was wrong. Right. Right. And as a result. The, which, which of the early church councils that end up promoting the

45:43

Deuterocanonical books, but the ones over which Augustine ruled councils of Carthage and Hippo. So you see what happens when you don't actually have access to the original languages.

45:52

Right. Origin and Jerome knew better because Jerome had access to the Hebrew and therefore knew that the

45:57

Hebrews had never accepted those books as canonical in the first place. Okay. Vitally important to church history, development of canonical issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

46:06

So. It affects worship. It's, this is important stuff. Yeah. And, and that's why I'm going to be teaching.

46:13

I taught church history at PRBC years and years and years ago. We're starting it again. Well, actually we started it last

46:19

Sunday. So. Is it on sermon audio? Sermon audio. Yeah. I'll be teaching church history probably for quite some time because it took me over 11 years to teach synoptic gospels.

46:28

Yes. So yeah, that was, well, but I'm not there all the time. That's straight. That's straight Puritan right there.

46:34

That is very, no, that was just, I'm slow. Now going back to Augustine, how did

46:41

Augustine know what manuscripts in Greek in Caesarea said when he is in Hippo and can barely read

46:52

Greek? Right. How does he know what motivations there were? Seer stones.

47:01

Now Paul, Paul Barth's response when I said, when I questioned Augustine on this was quote, but apparently modern liberal scholars know better than someone who lived contemporaneously with Codex Sinaiticus, silly

47:12

Augustine and his tinfoil hat. Oh, that's poisoning the well a bit. That's not dealing with the issue.

47:17

Right. The fact of the matter is Augustine would not have had access to the information that we have today now on the screen.

47:26

And we're going to hopefully be showing this on the screen. At the bottom of this is, let me tell you something. I am so thankful to God for what

47:33

I'm looking at on the screen here. And I know you guys can't see it, but I have my bio program up here. It's called accordance at the bottom of the page is the

47:42

UBS five apparatus. There's a, there's a bunch. I mean, the amount of textual data that we have available to us today is astounding and something to be greatly thankful for.

47:53

I mean, I am truly thankful, but let me just give you the textual information on the

48:00

Percocet adultery. The first Greek manuscript manuscript to, to include it is codex

48:07

D, which is called Beze Cantabrigiensis. Now Beze Cantabrigiensis is the living

48:13

Bible of the ancient church. Codex D is a Latin Greek diaglot that contains all sorts of really weird additions.

48:25

For example, when Peter is freed from prison and he, he, the angel lets him out and he's going back to the believers, you know, yeah.

48:33

Codex D tells us that he descended 29 stairs to the street.

48:38

Oh, it's very exact. Yes, very exact. There's a bunch of stuff like that. And every, it's called

48:45

Codex Beze Cantabrigiensis. Beze, Beza, Calvin's successor.

48:51

He's the one who came into possession of it. And when he donated it to the school, he said, because of its character, he said, this is better to be stored than studied.

49:01

Okay. So he even recognized that's the first place it's found. And that immediately should set off all sorts of red alarm bells.

49:12

Okay. But it is omitted by P66 and P75. The two earliest papyri manuscripts we have of the gospel of John.

49:22

Okay. Okay. The two earliest manuscripts we have. It's omitted by Sinaiticus, apparently omitted by, uh,

49:30

Alexandrinus. It's omitted by Vaticanus. There's a long list of unseals, lectionaries that omit this.

49:37

The Coptic -Sahitic, part of the Boheric, Armenian, Georgian, Slavian, all sorts of every bit of kind of evidence you can have, translational evidence, so on and so forth, omit this.

49:53

It is unknown in the first 400 years of the church with one possible exception in a early church father.

50:02

Now, let me just mention very quickly, when we talk about early church fathers, you got to remember something. When someone says, well, uh,

50:09

Irenaeus mentioned it. Well, not this, but if someone says, Irenaeus mentioned it, how do we know what Irenaeus wrote?

50:15

Irenaeus' writings were transmitted to us. How? By facts? No, they were handwritten just as much as the

50:24

New Testament manuscripts were. And when you're, you're, we got, got a few preachers here.

50:32

Yeah. Have you ever paraphrased a text of scripture from the pulpit? Yes. Never.

50:39

Just kidding. I'm kidding. All the piety. I've paraphrased one on Facebook.

50:45

There you go. So how do you know when you encounter something in a written sermon from early church father, if he's quoting or paraphrasing, if he's meaning to give us what is actually in the manuscript in front of him, or whether he is not meaning to intend to do that.

51:03

And if he differs from what has become the standard ecclesiastical text of a scribe a thousand years later, and they're copying him, what's the probability that that scribe is going to think he just blew it and change what he wrote to what's acceptable to that day?

51:21

Yeah. Early church writers are relevant to the text of New Testament, but their testimony always must be subjected to what's found in manuscripts themselves.

51:34

Okay. Must be. Must be. And so it is not in any of the earliest manuscripts of the gospel of John, but here's this guy's is why there really isn't any question about this and why the vast majority of believing scholarship, vast majority recognizes the pre -adultery is not original.

51:59

This story, and everybody loves the story. Right. And what you'll normally hear is people say, well, you know, yeah, it probably wasn't written by John, but it's such a wonderful story.

52:09

And maybe it goes back to the days of Jesus and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I get it. I get it. Wonderful. But it's not just here in the gospel of John.

52:20

This story is found in multiple other places. First of all, it's found after John 21, 25.

52:27

Let me pull this up here. So, okay. In manuscript 225, it's found after John 7, 36.

52:39

In manuscript one, it's found after John 21, 25. And here's the important part.

52:45

In a group of manuscripts called family 13, it's not in John.

52:52

It's after Luke 21, 38. And in manuscript 13, 33, it's in, it's after Luke 24, 53.

53:02

Now, when you have a story not found in the earliest manuscripts of a book that actually ends up finding a home in four different places.

53:11

Yeah. Yeah. That is absolute evidence that it was a story, very popular, looking for a place to call home.

53:22

And it found that place in the majority of manuscripts in the Byzantine manuscripts after John 7, 52.

53:31

So, what are you going to do with this? There's your evidence.

53:37

All right. Bart Ehrman uses this all the time. Yes, he does. This is one of his favorite ones to utilize.

53:46

And he only gets away with it because we never talk about it. Because we don't explain the evidence.

53:54

We don't explain that the New Testament came to us in certain forms. But here's the real issue. Let's, because I'm taking forever here.

54:00

And I'm sorry, even though I'm talking as fast as I can. No, it's good. This is awesome. Here's the real problem. The ecclesiastical text contains this.

54:13

The majority text contains this. Now, here's one of my problems. And I asked someone in the

54:20

Reformed pub about this. There are majority text advocates. And I said, which majority text?

54:27

Well, I like the Robbins and Pierbont. I said, I don't mean that. If we look at the manuscripts, the majority text in the year 1000 is going to be different than the majority text today.

54:40

And the majority text in the year 500 is very different from the one in 1000. This is one of my main problems with the whole majority text theory.

54:49

Is that it changes depending on what century you're in. And so in the year 500, the majority text would not contain this.

54:59

And so those who are ecclesiastical text advocates who say it's church usage, I guess the church for the first 400 years is just irrelevant.

55:09

Right. Because they didn't have it. So what about their testimony?

55:15

Yep. So again, it comes down to this nebulous, vague definition of church.

55:22

And now let's get a little bit more specific. I've been told,

55:28

I've been accused of not being confessional as a

55:33

Reformed Baptist elder. There are Reformed Baptists. And I'm an elder in Reformed Baptist Church.

55:40

We use the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. And there are people who just honestly will say, you shouldn't be in that position.

55:50

You should not be in that position because you do not have, you do not hold that position.

55:55

In fact, that view. In fact, there was a quote here. Yeah. A fellow by the name of Sean McDonald wrote to me and said,

56:01

Mr. White, other than the line about continuing revelation, what would be inaccurate of what I stated? It is demonstrable that your doctrine of the preservation of Scripture is not that of the

56:13

Protestant Reformers or of the Puritans who drew up our confessional standards. Okay.

56:18

That was this morning. All right. Now, here's some of the issues.

56:26

First of all, I do believe in the providential preservation of Scripture. I have defended that.

56:32

I've, you know, it's funny. A lot of these folks who love to take shots at me have never debated Bart Ehrman or John Dominic Crossan or Marcus Borg.

56:40

Um, never defended the inerrancy of Scripture staying in a mosque in South Africa. It's real easy behind the keyboard to lob the bombs, but some of us actually take this out there in the real world.

56:51

I just want to comment real quick. The very first book I've ever read by you was Letters to Mormon Elder and chapter two is called, but it is translated correctly.

57:00

That's one of the very first things I ever read. It was on the reliability of the Bible, which is all about what you're talking about now.

57:06

Oh yeah, most definitely. There's, there's, there's no question. No one, no one can question my bona fides when it comes to defending inerrancy, believing the providential preservation of Scripture.

57:15

The problem is when you decide that your theory of how that is done is the only one that can be out there.

57:22

Yeah. That's where the issue is. Because you see, as I've likened it to this, um, well,

57:29

I, I didn't liken it. Rob Bowman presented an illustration to Dan Wallace once that even

57:36

Dan hadn't heard. And Dan went, Hey, that's really good. So I am again, very honestly admitting my, my sources here, but Rob Bowman put it this way.

57:47

He said, what we have in the new Testament is like having a jigsaw puzzle, a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle.

57:56

And we have 10 ,100 pieces. Now, what does he mean by that?

58:03

The tendency of later scribes was to expand. Right. Not to contract.

58:10

Um, for example, I love, have you ever, have, what, what translation you got there?

58:16

This is NASB. Okay. Ah, we can't, can't really do it, but I, I, back before the days of YouTube, I love to role play

58:24

Amora missionary. I had a name badge and my white shirt, the whole nine yards.

58:30

And I would come into Sunday school classes and stuff like that. I'd be elder Lucas, um, because that's white and Greek.

58:37

So it was, you know, you should have been older, white and delights them. White and delights them. Except it's pure and delights them.

58:43

Now you gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta keep up with the current edition of the book of Mormon there. Anyway. And I would, when

58:50

I would love to get people to, I'd say, well, so you don't believe there's differences in the

58:55

Bible. Well, okay. Who has a King James version? Who has a, you got an NIV? Okay. NIV read for me, please.

59:02

Gospel of John chapter five, verse four. There is no John five, four. It goes from five, three to five, five

59:08

ESV NIV. There is no John five, four. It's at the bottom of the page. And that little teeny tiny micro font that at my age,

59:15

I can't even see anymore. Um, it's there, but it's not in the text. And you should see the look on people's faces when they go three, five, three, five, three, five.

59:26

I mean, they want to throw stuff at you because they didn't know they've never seen it before. And that bothers people.

59:34

And it should, it should, because we obviously halfway through the class stop and go, okay, I'm really

59:39

James White. And then we go back and cover all this stuff and do the, do some repairing of the damage we did. But boy, they listen well.

59:45

Let me tell you something, works really well with junior high schoolers who never listened to anything else anyways. So that's a really, really good way of doing it.

59:51

But, um, there is no five, four. Why? It's the explanation of the angel coming down, troubling the waters.

59:58

Now, you know how that got there? In all probabilities. I can't prove this. I can't, I don't have an, I don't have an

01:00:04

MP4 video of the day that this textual variant entered into the transmission stream, but in all probabilities, that was a marginal note.

01:00:13

There were people in the ancient world that actually wrote in their Bibles. And that's shocking. And it, and when you think about, when you read the story, why are these people lying around this pool?

01:00:23

And a preacher had probably explained it, had given the background. I go, Oh, and they wrote it in the margin. And then someone else is copying their manuscript.

01:00:31

Maybe that poor guy's gotten fed to the lions, who knows? But the tendency was, even if it was written in the margin to include it in the text, lest you lose anything.

01:00:42

So the Byzantine text type is a couple of percentages bigger than the Alexandrian text type is.

01:00:48

It's grown. The other thing that has grown is titles. Jesus comes Lord, Jesus, Lord, Jesus comes

01:00:53

Lord, Jesus Christ, that type of thing. That's very common too. Expansion of piety. Expansion of piety. Dr.

01:00:59

White, would this be an example? For example, someone was translating today and let's just say they had a section of, let's just say the

01:01:05

MacArthur study Bible. And they somehow, someone was translating it from into another language and they use the, some of the footnotes of describing verse four.

01:01:16

Sort of, except there weren't study Bibles back then. I mean, I mean the way it was laid out, but you see the problem was in those days, you need to understand something.

01:01:22

And this would be a little bit easier if I was projecting images, but the Greek of the New Testament for the first 900 years was written in something called unseal or maguscule text.

01:01:34

What's that? All capitals, no spaces between words, almost no punctuation.

01:01:39

Think about what that looks like. And what would happen is as you're copying a manuscript, you might look back and go, oh man,

01:01:47

I missed something. Well, parchment was, especially parchment wasn't cheap. I mean, it was made from animal hides, you know, don't kill

01:01:55

Betsy. I made a mistake. That really wasn't something you can, you can really pull off real, real easily. And so, so you would have, even in the best manuscripts produced in a scriptorium, you would have marginal stuff put in the side.

01:02:09

You look at Codex Sinaiticus, clearly done in a very high end scriptorium and yet there are marginal notes.

01:02:17

And so if you didn't know whether it was an explanation or whether it was in the text, you'd include it.

01:02:23

That's where John 5, 4 came from. That's where John 5, 4 came from. So, but that's become the ecclesiastical text.

01:02:33

So what do we do with that? Yeah. How do we, how do we do that? Now here's, here's the real issue.

01:02:40

I'm going to try to wrap some things up here. Am I non -confessional because I believe it's important to utilize everything

01:02:50

God has given us in the defense of the New Testament? Well, I always ask, as I mentioned before, okay, show me where the church examined the evidence about the pre -copay adultery and said, no, this is what

01:03:10

John wrote. And no one can do it. Well, but they used it for a thousand years.

01:03:16

Yeah. They use stuff in the Latin Vulgate for a thousand years too, that you don't believe in scripture because it's not in your edition of the

01:03:22

Greek New Testament. So there's no way, I do not believe there's any way for the ecclesiastical text advocate to be consistent in their argumentation without radically altering the text of the

01:03:36

New Testament. Um, because if you start making, uh, for example, someone linked to an article in, on a

01:03:44

Revelation 15, 3 saying, well, these few early Latin early church fathers said king of saints.

01:03:53

Well, if you start making the Latin version of early church fathers, the standard for the New Testament, you have to change everything in the

01:03:59

TR because they said all sorts of things, but they don't do that because what they're really doing is, is defending a tradition.

01:04:07

Just as the Vulgate had become a tradition in its day and the reformers had to fight against that.

01:04:14

Now we have people following the reformers defending a tradition the same way that Rome had defended a tradition before.

01:04:21

Did you know that when the Vulgate was first translated? And if you've read the book, you remember the story when the

01:04:26

Vulgate was first translated, there was a riot in Carthage, there was a riot when it was first read publicly because Jerome had accurately recognized that the gourd that grew over Jonah's head was a castor oil plant.

01:04:38

And so he rendered it accurately, but that was different than the Greek septuagint and they rioted in the streets.

01:04:43

Wow. They rioted in the streets. Well, things have changed a little bit since then. We just have angry

01:04:48

Facebook. Now we just have angry Facebook stuff. That's exactly right. Believe me, I know angry

01:04:54

Facebook stuff. Yes, yes, yes. I've been, I'm the object of it all the time and I will be when this comes out too.

01:05:01

Yeah, we understand. We're in it with you. Oh yeah, but the point is, I don't believe that the ecclesiastical text theory can produce a meaningful text that could then be put out there and debated against a

01:05:15

Bart Ehrman or a John Dominic Crossan or anybody else. Because you can't define what the church is and then you can't answer specific questions about what the text is supposed to be.

01:05:26

Because as soon as I start pushing on, for example, a Revelation 15 .3 or a Revelation 16 .5 or an

01:05:31

Ephesians 3 .9, where there are clear errors in the textus receptus, well, you know,

01:05:36

I'm not saying that the textus receptus is the final authority, but then what is, where is this text?

01:05:43

And they'll go, well, the Robinson Peer Report. Dr. Robinson is not an ecclesiastical text advocate.

01:05:48

He doesn't believe that you should hold the Byzantine text platform because the Westminster divines happen to have that text.

01:05:57

That's not the reason you're supposed to do that. But here's the question. Well, didn't the reformers have a default text?

01:06:04

Didn't they choose that text over against the Alexandrian? No, they didn't know about the Alexandrian. They did not know about text families.

01:06:13

Erasmus, for example, when he was in the controversy about the Kamiohonium, wrote to a friend of his named

01:06:19

Bombastius in Rome, and he said, could you go look at the Vatican manuscript and tell me whether it contains this text? What's the

01:06:24

Vatican manuscript? Codex Vaticanus, which is one of the most Alexandrian manuscripts out there.

01:06:30

Did he know that? No, but he wanted to know if it had it in it, and it didn't. They did not know what we know today.

01:06:41

Erasmus only has half a dozen manuscripts he's working with. And so to force the framers of the

01:06:47

Westminster Confession of Faith or the London Baptist Confession of Faith in 1689 into a position of answering questions that they were never asked is unfair and it's unhistorical, it's anachronistic, and it is an abuse of history.

01:07:05

I'm just being straightforward about how I feel about this. It is absolutely inappropriate to say that because they used this text,

01:07:13

I mean, I've had people say the London Baptist Confession quotes the Kamiohanium at one point. Okay. If that's what they had, fine.

01:07:21

If they had been shown, if they knew what we know today, would they have done that? Well, we don't know.

01:07:28

So we really can't drag them into the middle of this, can we? Well, then you're not confessional. No, I just think there are some people that may go beyond confessionalism to traditionalism.

01:07:38

And I believe in Semper Reformanda. And if the reformed doctrine of scripture is so set in stone that the state of affairs in the middle of the 17th century, that's it.

01:07:53

Can't go beyond that. God can't give us the gifts He's given us. He can't give us these more tools that we have to be able to defend the text of New Testament.

01:08:01

We just have to stick with what was there in the middle of the 17th century. If that's confessionalism, okay, then

01:08:08

I'm not confessional. But I think that is a gross abuse of the confessions themselves.

01:08:15

And that's why, as far as I understand it, the vast majority of reformed believing scholars today don't view it that way.

01:08:24

I mean, go to Westminster in Philadelphia. Go to Westminster in California. Go to any of the

01:08:29

RTS campuses. Are they promoting ecclesiastical textism?

01:08:36

Not that I know of. Not that I know of. I've lectured at Westminster West.

01:08:43

I just got done teaching at RTS in Charlotte. And nobody said a word about, oh, well, we just need to use a textus receptus.

01:08:51

They use an Esialen text and the UBS text and so on and so forth. And so there is a very, it's a small spectrum.

01:08:59

But here's my final concern. There's a lot more I was going to address here and things like that.

01:09:04

Um, yeah, I should mention one thing and then

01:09:11

I'll wrap it up. Okay. Don't you believe in inerrancy? Of course, I believe in inerrancy. The Chicago Statement, I think, is an excellent thought through discussion of what inerrancy does and does not mean.

01:09:25

And it has never referred to later manuscripts and saying that somehow, like Bart Ehrman theorizes, that if God really inspired the

01:09:36

Bible, that at some point, when a scribe's about to make a mistake, there's going to be like, and he gets it right and then moves on.

01:09:45

Or he's just about to write the wrong word. And boom, he blows up and lightning and, you know, that whole theoretical thing is absurd.

01:09:56

But there's many people who believe that. That's pretty much where the King James only us are. And that's where Bart Ehrman is.

01:10:01

I mean, it's a circle and they meet on the other side. Stephen Anderson sitting right next to Bart Ehrman.

01:10:07

What a weird, weird boy. I'd love to see those two meet. That would be, that would be interesting.

01:10:13

But anyways, I wouldn't actually wish that on Bart Ehrman. But anyway, that whole idea misses.

01:10:23

There's a lot of category confusion here because my Reformed brother is saying, well, don't you believe that it takes the witness of the

01:10:30

Spirit to accept the authority of the Word of God? My goodness, how many times have I said that in my own books?

01:10:36

I fully recognize that the greatest scholar in the world might recognize the purity of the scriptures of the

01:10:44

Word of God, but unless their heart is changed, they will never submit to it. They will never see its beauty. I believe that the testimony of the

01:10:51

Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary for anyone to truly believe the Bible's Word of God. But that doesn't mean that the result of that is you sit back and ask the

01:11:03

Holy Spirit to tell you which of the three readings at Revelation 15 .3

01:11:08

is the right one. I don't get a warm feeling about that. The Spirit uses means.

01:11:15

I thought all Reformed people believed that the Spirit uses means. Yeah. And if the means of grace are the means by which

01:11:24

God sanctifies me and conforms in the image of Christ, then why isn't this massive amount of data that He has preserved for us the means by which we are to determine the actual reading of Revelation 15 .3?

01:11:38

Yeah. Not some subjective feeling. And when we buy into that stuff, you know, the atheists love to throw out these articles where they'll give little snippets of something, and then

01:11:51

I'll say, so does the Spirit tell you that's Scripture or not Scripture? And, you know, part of it will be from the

01:11:58

Quran, or part of it will be from some pseudepiggle for writing, and then they'll come up with some nasty thing out of Deuteronomy and, oh, that's not

01:12:04

Scripture. And demonstrating that the idea that the Spirit testifies to the canon is absurdity.

01:12:10

Well, look, I recognize, I agree with what Dr. Kruger has said in his books about God using the church when it comes to the canon, but canon and text are two different things.

01:12:23

Right. Revelation is Scripture. That's not going to give you a meaningful answer as to whether it's

01:12:28

Haggion or Ionios or Ethnon at Revelation 15 .3. You've got to look at the manuscripts.

01:12:35

And everyone has always agreed with that. But it's people who fall into the trap of,

01:12:42

I don't want there to be any gray areas. We need to have certainty.

01:12:48

You know what? Certainty comes from studying the truth. You don't trade the truth off to get certainty.

01:12:58

So these things, this is great. This is very, very, a real concern to me that amongst

01:13:08

Reformed people, they are committing a category error and taking what is true,

01:13:16

Ventilian presuppositional thinking, and moving it into an area where the application becomes skewed.

01:13:25

Right. And you're actually ignoring the foundational material that has always been used, even by the leading people in the church to recognize what the truth is.

01:13:37

Okay. So finally, what happens is, we are the ones that have the message to bring to the world.

01:13:48

You know, I've said for years, look at when Reformed men engage Roman Catholicism. We have the strongest criticism.

01:13:56

We can talk about the finished work of Christ. We can talk about, we can focus in upon the mass and the idea of a perpetuatory sacrifice.

01:14:07

And man, we've got it. And when it comes to defending the existence of God, you know, you guys' debate you did just a while back and stuff like that.

01:14:17

But what I'm really concerned about is Ecclesiastical Textism sounds great in the

01:14:23

Reformed pub, but it can't survive outside that realm. Yeah.

01:14:28

You can't take it into debate with Bart Ehrman. You can't take it out there on the university campus, because it requires the acceptance of ahistorical, self -contradictory presuppositions that are just simply indefensible.

01:14:46

And you can't, those guys are going to ask you the same questions I am. They're going to ask you about Ephesians 3 .9.

01:14:51

They're going to ask you about Revelation 15 .3. They're going to ask you about the problems of the Texas Receptus, and even problems within the

01:14:58

Byzantine Text Type. They're going to ask you about the Percopae adultery. And if you can't engage those things in a head -on manner, you're going to be silenced.

01:15:08

And so I have a real concern as an apologist, as a Reformed apologist. This isn't just me justifying myself.

01:15:17

Yes, I'm confessional, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hey, if you want to say I'm not confessional, you know, if you want to point to the fact that we've all got something on our arms.

01:15:25

You can find something. If you want to find a way to get rid of me, fine, go ahead, whatever.

01:15:33

I'm much more concerned about the South African students in Pretoria and Johannesburg.

01:15:41

When I was speaking there a while back and I had these young men, yes, they were black young men come up to me and say, if it hadn't been for the dividing line,

01:15:55

I would have lost my faith in university. You answered the questions that they were constantly throwing at me.

01:16:04

My concern is if more and more young Reformed men keep going that way, we're going to stop answering those questions with meaningful answers.

01:16:13

Right. And so I'm concerned about it. That's big. And so this discussion is not, again, not about the wacky

01:16:21

King James Version onlyism, but it moves its way into really pretty solid guys. I know the men that were commenting on that, they love

01:16:28

Jesus, they're solid, solid dudes and reliable guys. But this question is of great concern because of exactly your last point, how does it impact the conflict we have with the skeptics?

01:16:40

That's big. Well, and we cannot, we've got to be careful that we don't develop a little culture that just feeds on itself and it only exists within little walls.

01:16:52

Yeah. If we don't take that outside, what are we doing? Right. And why are we doing it?

01:16:58

Yeah. That's the question. Yeah. These guys will eat you up. If not, I mean, the guys

01:17:03

I'm seeing on the street, the people that are being pumped out by the secular universities, they'll eat you right up. If you're not consistent in this area, if you don't know the answers.

01:17:10

Last thing I'll ask you, this is a quick one. Sure. So you have a Christian for the first time now, listening to what you just talked about, and their head's spinning and they're saying, what's printed in text and everything else.

01:17:21

Again, don't be frustrated. Look into this, get King James Only controversy, start listening to Dr.

01:17:27

White's dividing line, get some past episodes of his show. Specifically on this question, we did a show, kind of what's in the light of Steven Anderson and his

01:17:35

King James Version Only -ism a while back, that's in our apologyorradio .com. But...

01:17:41

Michael Kruger's book on Canon. Canon Revisited, very, very good. But okay, so they hear for the first time,

01:17:47

Dr. White, and they didn't know this. I thought Jesus spoke King James Version English. I thought there was one text.

01:17:54

And I grew up in Kentucky and that's what we were taught. My wife actually thought Jesus spoke

01:17:59

King James Version Only. So when we got married, there was a lot of discussions we had. Yeah, so...

01:18:04

I'll let you take all the heat for that one. She was from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and that's just what she thought. But they hear for the first time, okay, you have these variants and everything else.

01:18:13

So does that mean we don't have a reliable text in front of us when I'm reading the

01:18:18

Bible? How do I know that I have the words of God in front of me? And does that mean that we can in any way really get to the autographer and what the original text said?

01:18:28

Well, let me go back to the illustration that I used earlier about having a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle.

01:18:34

Right. We would have a real problem if we had 9 ,900 pieces.

01:18:41

I've never done one of those big, huge jigsaw puzzles. And you get to the end and the cat ate the last piece.

01:18:47

You know, okay. That's a real bummer, especially if you wanted to then seal it and frame it and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

01:18:55

Can't do it because there's something missing and you'll never really know. And if you had only 9 ,900, there's a lot of holes left.

01:19:02

We don't have 9 ,900. We have 10 ,100. In other words, what we're doing is dealing with the extra, not with having lost anything.

01:19:14

And this is why if people will listen to my debate with Bart Ehrman with this stuff in mind, the questions

01:19:20

I asked him during the cross -examination were specifically to get him to say certain things.

01:19:26

And when I asked him, can you show us where in the

01:19:31

New Testament do you feel that we no longer have the original reading of a text?

01:19:38

Now you would think for the leading critic of the New Testament in English, in the English speaking world today, that he could have gone on for two hours.

01:19:46

One example, he had one example in Peter where he thinks that it originally said something about Enoch and it's missing.

01:19:53

That's all he had. Nothing doctrinal, nothing of any relevance whatsoever. I am absolutely convinced of what's called the tenacity of the text of New Testament.

01:20:03

Once a reading appears in the New Testament manuscripts, it stays there. That means errors stay there, but it also means the originals are still there.

01:20:13

And so one of those two readings of Revelation 15 .3 is the original.

01:20:20

Now people, I don't want it to be in a footnote or something like that. Well, get a good translation that gives you both the possibilities and make sure that it's there.

01:20:29

One of those two is the original. Well, I don't like that. I want it just to be black and white. I don't want to have to think about these things.

01:20:35

Well, then what you're demanding is that God could not have inspired the Bible until when?

01:20:42

Printing press. No, not printing press. There's all sorts of, don't you remember the adulterer's Bible? Yes, yes.

01:20:47

There's all sorts of errors in printed texts, aren't there? Because how do you have to set up a printer? You have to hand insert the things.

01:20:54

No, the first time would be the photocopier. You know when that was invented? 1949. So if you make that the standard as Bart Ehrman does, then

01:21:03

God could not have given a scripture until 1949. Yeah. Well, that's not how he did it. And you know what?

01:21:09

There are variants between Hebrew manuscripts too. And Jesus still called it the word of God. That's right. He still called it the word of God.

01:21:16

Keep that in mind. So don't come up with a standard that Jesus didn't use. That might not be a good idea. That might not be a good idea.

01:21:22

Amen. All right. With that mic drop, we'll end up. So thanks for coming in and doing that on this show.

01:21:29

This is an awesome, awesome episode. I think that will go down as a good teaching tool for a long, long time.

01:21:37

So go guys and go to Dr. White's ministry, aomen .org, aomin .org.

01:21:44

Pick up his debates. Pick up some books. Pick up the dividing line episodes.

01:21:49

Very, very helpful. And it's a great tool for you as you grow and walk with the Lord. So what's up?

01:21:56

What's coming up soon? So ReformCon, reformcon .org is where you guys go.

01:22:01

Dr. James White, John Sampson, myself, Dr. Scott Oliphant, and all the crew and staff at Apologia Studios and Church and lots more coming.

01:22:13

So reformcon .org, June 1st through 4th here in Tempe, Arizona. That's what's coming up.

01:22:18

So go get your tickets, reformcon .org. And there's also a family discount and a group discount as well.

01:22:24

Okay. Awesome. Correct. And we're going to have some stuff for kids. There's family integrated stuff.

01:22:30

So we have stuff for the kids. You bring your family, you're going to have things for them, activities for them to do. A lot of fun.

01:22:36

April the 8th. This is a very important thing, guys. April the 8th, we are having an important gathering and talk.

01:22:44

We're going to have legislators, local legislators, the Pro -Life Coalition in Arizona, including

01:22:50

Arizona Right to Life. It's going to be a big event where we are actually going to speak on the issue of abortion and how to end abortion at the state level.

01:22:59

We're going to talk about the biblical case of how do we speak about abortion? What does God say about it?

01:23:04

We're going to talk about abortion as a gospel issue for the church and ministering in this area with the good news of Jesus Christ and not just making it just a simple political issue or trying to take a backdoor approach, but actually making it specifically an issue of where we stand on the word of God.

01:23:20

We're also going to talk about the duty of the lesser magistrate. We're going to talk about the constitutional issues involved in ending abortion at the state level.

01:23:30

And so it's going to have a wide spectrum of people. Again, we're talking about pro -life groups from a lot of different backgrounds.

01:23:39

And so we're going to be speaking directly to that issue. And this really, I think, is going to be a paradigm shift in the fight against abortion in our culture in that we're really trying to say we need to speak to it more consistently as Christians and end it immediately at the state level.

01:23:55

And so we have some big things happening. You're going to be able to watch it all at endabortionnow .com. That's right, right?

01:24:02

Endabortionnow .com. Yes. April the 8th, starting at 5 p .m. Arizona time.

01:24:07

It's going to be live streamed across the nation. So you get your church groups, let your pastor know that it's going on, get your abortion mill ministries, and we're going to be able to sort of lay down the case in this live stream.

01:24:18

And so let people know, endabortionnow .com. And I think that's it, right? I think so.

01:24:24

Yeah, okay. A lot coming up. That's right. So don't forget to go to missionaware .com. Yes, sir. And get an awesome J .C. Riles shirt.

01:24:30

Do they have any James White shirts? No, but I was talking to Claudia the other day and he suggested that they should do one that says

01:24:38

Grandpa Jimmy. Grandpa Jimmy. Speaking of.

01:24:44

All right. All right. All right, guys. So that's apologiaradio .com. That's where you guys get us. Don't forget to get the all access.