Textus Receptus Debate: Dr. James White & Dr. Peter Van Kleeck

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Good afternoon, everybody.

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My name is Chris Arnzen. Is this on? My name is

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Chris Arnzen, and I am the host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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I hope that if you are not already listening to my program that you begin to. I understand flyers have been passed out to you.

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And I have interviewed some of the most prominent thinkers in the

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Christian faith of the 20th and 21st centuries on the program, including some world -renowned names like Dr.

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R .C. Sproul, who's now in glory with Christ, Dr. John MacArthur, one of our debaters here,

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Dr. James R. White, and many others who I'm sure you would recognize. I hope you begin listening to the program

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Monday through Friday at 4 to 6 p .m. And when I'm interviewing authors on a book, we always give away books to those who submit questions.

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So that's a great way to add to your library by listening to my program as well.

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So please keep those flyers, bring them to your churches, actually, and hang them up if your pastors will allow you to.

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And I hope to begin hearing from you with questions for my guests. A part of what

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I have been doing as a person involved in Christian radio, in fact,

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I've been involved in Christian radio going back to the late 80s, and most prominently with WMCA Radio, which is an affiliate of Salem Media, the largest

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Christian radio network in the world. I worked there for 15 years. And it was while working there, in 1996,

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I began conducting debates just like this, most of them which featured

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries who's sitting there. And with a couple of years of hiatus,

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I've been pretty much organizing debates every year since 1996.

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And if you go to the Alpha Omega Ministries website, AOMIN .org, you'll at least find out about all of those debates that featured

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Dr. White, and they included debates with Roman Catholics, debates with Muslims, debates with anti -Trinitarian cults, with leftist

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Protestants, all kinds of folks, and also in -house debates like we're having today.

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These two men are not only brothers in Christ, they're also Reformed Baptists, both of them, and they're both confessional

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Reformed Baptists, both adhering to the 1689 London Baptist Confession, and today would be considered an in -house debate amongst brothers in Christ.

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And the debate thesis, which my moderator will repeat momentarily, is the

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Textus Receptus as the Word of God is equal to the New Testament Autographs, and Dr.

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Peter Van Cleek will be affirming that thesis, and Dr. James R. White will be opposing that thesis.

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So, let me introduce first of all to you, he's not standing anywhere near, but I want to thank him, and I've been failing to thank him, and I have been kicking myself for failing to thank him.

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But Andrew McMillan is providing us with the audio -visual of today's debate, and he did so with the

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Pastor's Luncheon that just took place on Thursday. He's also live -streaming this event, as he did with the

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Pastor's Luncheon, and I want to thank you so much, Andrew, you're one of the unsung heroes of these events, as most audio -visual guys are.

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Let's give him a round of applause. I also want to thank

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Pastor Doran Ray and all of the elders and the fine folks of Church of the

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Living Christ for allowing us to have these beautiful, spacious facilities for not only my

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Luncheon speaking segment, where the keynote speaker has given his message, but also for this debate today, and I hope to God that they are so pleased that they will allow me to continue to use these facilities, and thank you,

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Pastor Doran Ray and the folks at Church of the Living Christ. Let's give them a round of applause, too, please.

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I'd like to introduce you to my moderator for half of the debate, a dear friend of mine,

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Dan Buttafuoco. He is with the law firm of Buttafuoco and Associates, and as long as I have been in broadcasting, has been a key sponsor of not only advertising for me, but when

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I worked for WMCA, but also my radio program, and a sponsor of events such as this today.

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And not only is he an attorney, but he is a Christian apologist and actually is the founder and director of the

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Historical Bible Society, and Dan visits churches and schools and other organizations and institutions with a breathtaking, phenomenal selection of Bibles, very rare Bibles of antiquity, and very rare Christian books, like a first -edition

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Fox's Book of Martyrs, first -edition 1611 King James Bible, and on and on I could go.

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And I'm sure Dr. White will even be telling you about the Stephanos text that Dan gave him as a gift a number of years ago.

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But Dan has not only been heavily involved in everything of importance

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I do as far as the faith is concerned, he's become one of my dearest friends on the planet, very interesting guy.

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Dan is not only a Calvinist, but he's also Pentecostal, and that makes him the first Christian I've ever met who excommunicated himself.

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So it's kind of an interesting situation with Dan. But the second half of the debate, the moderator will switch because Dan has to leave here earlier.

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The second half of the debate will be moderated by the pastor I just mentioned of this fine establishment,

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Church of the Living Christ. So I hope that you will all greet him when he takes

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Dan's place midway through. There is going to be a break in the middle of the debate to give you time of refreshments, which will take place after the first cross -examination session.

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We'll have a 10 -minute break and then we'll all come back for the rest of the debate. Oh, I'm sorry, after the rebuttals.

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And so don't be worried about having to miss anything as far as refreshments and bathroom breaks and all that.

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Well, first I want to thank, as far as the debaters are concerned, I want to thank Dr. Peter Van Cleek, who with very, very short notice,

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I think it was only about three weeks ago, right, something like that, three weeks ago, I contacted him to see if he'd be interested in debating the thesis that we have today, and he immediately, eagerly accepted the challenge.

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And let me tell you something about this brother, Dr. Peter Van Cleek, graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary East, and he is, by the way,

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Dr. Peter Van Cleek, Jr. His father is also in ministry and even writes with him on the subject that is being debated today.

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He graduated Westminster Theological Seminary East with an MAR at Calvin Theological Seminary with a

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THM, and at Liberty University with a PhD. His dissertation utilized

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Reformed epistemology to argue in favor of Scripture beliefs as warranted, rational, and basic.

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Peter is currently in his fifth year as a professor at Trinity Baptist College in Jacksonville, Florida.

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He is also the founder of wisdomgap .org, an apologetic ministry to college students.

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And please give a warm welcome to Dr. Peter Van Cleek. I really love

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Dr. Van Cleek's last name, very interesting name. And after this debate, for time immemorial, if he wins this debate, people will be approaching anybody who lost at a sporting event or anything.

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They can say to them, you've been Van Cleek, dude. And of course, if he loses, people can say to those losers, you just pulled

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Van Cleek. So I just love the name. Dr. White's last name is too boring to attach to anything like that.

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And now that leads me to introduce you to Dr. James R. White, who's been a dear friend of mine since 1996.

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He is an author, an author of numerous books, dozens of books.

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He is a New Testament Greek scholar. He's a seasoned debater, as I've already mentioned.

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And today, he is also a professor of history and apologetics at the

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Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas. And I hope that you will all make sure you take advantage of his resources and materials as well.

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And here he is, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Well, I'm now going to turn over the debate to the moderator.

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And I would like him just to very briefly let you know a little bit more about the

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Historical Bible Society, since they have been so generous to Iron Trump and Zion Radio and are a key reason that we even exist.

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Thank you. Thank you, Chris. And thank you, everyone, for coming out tonight. The Historical Bible Society grew out of a private collection of Bibles that I had started to accumulate in the 90s and realized that God had a wider purpose for them other than for me to just show my friends and pull them out of my closet and sort of have a neat little artifact to facilitate a discussion.

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When I saw the response of people to looking at real, true, accurate biblical artifacts, the type of stuff you'd see in the

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Met Museum, the type of stuff you'd see in the Morgan Library. We've actually given two books to the Morgan Library.

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We've also lent two books to the Museum of the Bible in Washington. That demonstrates the quality of the collection.

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But upon seeing the reaction of people and the discussion that was stimulated by looking at these rare texts and the opportunity it was that it presented to witness for Christ and to get people interested in the

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Word of God, which is really of preeminent importance, I realized that this had wider application than just a private collection.

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So we organized the Historical Bible Society and we were actually – I gave a presentation here in this church.

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Pastor Doran Ray was kind enough to have me here. I spoke to about 150 pastors or so and it was well -received.

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We go to schools. We go to churches. And what we do is we use these books as,

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I call it, eye candy to get people to come out and then we explain to them why we believe the

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Bible is the Word of God. And that is certainly in short supply today, that idea, with the way society is.

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We want to come back to that which tethers us to reality and to truth and to eternity.

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So I'm a big promoter of the Word of God. I'm a big promoter of these debates and a big promoter of truth in general.

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And so with that, I'm going to tell you about what we're going to do today. First of all, the goal here is to get to the truth.

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It's like a trial. I'm a trial lawyer. I handle cases. I've tried many jury trials over 41 years.

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And what we tell every juror is to come into the courtroom with an open mind. Thank you.

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With an open mind. That is, to come in here and listen to what each side says with an open mind towards what is the truth.

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Because ultimately, all truth is God's truth. And we want to get at the truth here because the truth is important.

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Truth is important for its own sake and it's certainly important in a Christian context. We have two very learned and educated men here who are going to have a fierce clash of opposites.

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And through this, we hope and pray that the truth will come out and that we will have a better understanding of the

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Word of God and our faith and our relationship with Christ. So with that in mind, let me just open with a word of prayer real quick.

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Heavenly Father, we just thank you for your goodness, for your mercy, for these learned men here who have given of their time and their talents.

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We ask a blessing upon them and upon everyone here. We pray that everything that is said here would glorify you and that ultimately your truth would shine forth and that it would be clear what it is that we are to believe.

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And we thank you for that. And we thank you for this opportunity and I thank you for the opportunity to be part of this in Jesus' name.

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And so, let us begin. The thesis here, which Dr. Van Cleek is going to defend and Dr.

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White is going to oppose, is this. The Textus Receptus represents the autographic text of the

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Apostles in perfection. The format will be as follows.

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There will be opening remarks, Dr. Van Cleek will go first, he'll have 20 minutes. Dr. James White will follow with 20 minutes.

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And then after that, there will be rebuttals, Dr. Van Cleek 10 minutes, Dr. White 10 minutes. We will then have a break because we are old people and we need a break.

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Then there will be cross -examinations. Round one, Dr. Van Cleek will question

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Dr. White for 20 minutes. And then after that, Dr. White will question Dr.

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Van Cleek for 20 minutes. Cross -examinations are a wonderful vehicle for bringing out the truth. It's very important.

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And then we'll have cross -examinations round two in which Dr. White questions Dr. Van Cleek for 20 minutes and then

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Dr. Van Cleek will question Dr. White for 20 minutes. And finally, after that, we'll have closing arguments, five minutes each, first Dr.

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Van Cleek and then Dr. White. So with that in mind, let us begin.

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Dr. Van Cleek, you have 20 minutes to begin your presentation with your opening remarks. And there was one correction, a very important one, is that the paperwork that Dan was reading from had an older thesis on it that we changed to the textus receptus as the

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Word of God is equal to the New Testament autograph. So I apologize, that was actually a blunder on my part with the paperwork that I gave with the format of the debate.

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So thank you for your patience. Let us begin. I want to extend my thanks to Chris Arnzen for inviting me to participate in tonight's debate.

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As well as Dr. White for agreeing to provide a foil for my arguments. I hope this can be a time of learning and profitable discussion for all in attendance.

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Before addressing the main line of my argument, let us consider briefly what is not at issue. The collection, collation, and examination of ancient

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New Testament texts can be a kingdom building enterprise. Manuscript evidence can play an important role in presenting a robust Christian worldview.

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The message of the gospel is taught in the NA28, as well as many translations which are based on the

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NA28. I believe a large portion of the NA28 is equal to the New Testament autographs.

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Most importantly, while I disagree with some of Dr. White's bibliological and philosophical deliverances,

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I believe he is my brother in Christ. Furthermore, I am thankful for much of his work and his persistence over 30 years to further

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Christ's kingdom. As with all controversial discussions, we must begin by defining our terms, and particularly the terms of the debate topic.

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First, I take Texas Receptus, as defined in Richard Mullard's dictionary of Latin and Greek philosophical terms, to mean the text supported by the

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Protestant scholastics as the authentic text, quo ad verba. The Protestant scholastics understood authentic, or authentical, to mean, quote, authority, originality, genuineness, the power, dignity, or influence of a work that derives from its author.

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Quo ad verba means, quote, with respect to the words, was understood in the context of infallibility, as in, quote, the infallibilitas of the originals is both quo ad verbum and quo ad res, end quote.

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As such, the TR was regarded by the Protestant scholastics as equal to the autographs with respect to the words, quo ad verba, and the meaning of those words, quo ad res.

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Continuing our definition of terms, within the context of Christianity, I take word of God to mean scripture, and scripture to mean the word of God.

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Lastly, I take New Testament autograph to mean the original document written at the hand of the original penman.

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I believe these texts to be complete and without error as pertaining to the words, quo ad verba, and as pertaining to the meaning of those words, quo ad res.

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My aim tonight is to frame the textual debate for Christians. This debate between two

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Christians is in the midst of a Christian audience. As such, tonight's debate is not about subjective interpretations of manuscript evidence, but rather, it is about what the spirit of God, through the word of God, tells us to believe about the words he has preserved for us.

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I appreciate Dr. White's robust, though narrow, evidential argument in defense of scripture, which he regularly employs against Muslims, Mormons, and atheists.

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But tonight, that argument will not do. And it will not do because in large part, few, if any, of our Christian beliefs are primarily based on evidential grounds.

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Beliefs like God created the world in six literal sequential days. That Adam was created in God's image.

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The parting of the Red Sea. That Jericho fell by marching around its walls. That David killed Goliath. That Thomas was a disciple of Christ.

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That Jesus raised Lazarus. In this manner, belief in the Bible is not special, simply because we have thousands of manuscripts.

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Christians believe their Bible to be God's word in the same way they believe the aforementioned beliefs. By the spirit of God, speaking through the words of God, to the people of God, who then receive the words of God by faith.

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In short, this simple reframing is to ask you to believe in each word of your Bible like you believe Elijah called down fire to consume his water -drenched sacrifice.

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Or like you believe King David was once a shepherd boy. In affirming the thesis, the TR as the word of God is equal to the

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New Testament autographs, I offer the following three arguments. One, God's word regards itself in autographic terms.

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Two, because God's word regards itself in autographic terms, the reformers historically regarded the TR as equal to the autographic

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New Testament text. And three, the probability that the TR is equal to the autographic New Testament is very high.

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Beginning now with my first argument. God's word regards itself in autographic terms. Tonight's debate is truly a question of that in the garden.

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Yea, hath God said. More pointedly, our debate tonight focuses on whether the TR is what God said in the

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New Testament autographs. Admittedly, the Bible nowhere names the TR, but it does tell us how we ought to think and believe about God's word.

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In Genesis, we recognize and mark the doubting nature of the serpent's question and the added words of Eve. We see

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Noah building an ark without any evidence of rain and for 100 years preaching a truth for which he had no evidence other than that of the word of God.

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God's word declared to Abraham and his wife that they would experience a kind of resurrection of the body and being able to bear a son.

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Again, we recognize and mark their lack of faith in the particulars of God's word and the conception of Ishmael.

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When Moses, who then Moses who declares to Israel concerning the word of God, quote, you shall not add unto the word which

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I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it. That you may keep the commandments of the Lord, which your God, your

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God, which I command you. And later he says, what things whoever I command you observe to do it.

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Thou shalt not add thereto nor diminish from it. And we are careful to mark when Nadab and Abihu added or diminished from God's word in the slightest.

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For not even the mercy of God could spare them from God's fiery wrath. Then we get the host of psalmic declarations regarding the word of God.

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Holy, sure, true, truth, right, good, pure, righteous, and quickening.

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Note the conspicuous absence of language like sufficiently reliable or adequate with regard to God's statutes, commandments, and precepts.

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Then we have the constant chorus of the prophets, and thus saith the Lord, as well as Isaiah's invocation of the triune

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God declaring, quote, as for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord. My spirit that is upon thee and my words which

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I have put in thy mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the

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Lord from henceforth and forever, end quote. Into the New Testament, Jesus tells us not one jot or tittle will pass from the

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Old Testament, even while speaking of a copy of a copy of a copy. Again, Jesus tells us to search the scriptures, plumb their depths, look at every word, because in those words are eternal life and testimony to the archetypical word of all other words.

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Paul tells us that all scripture, in a collective sense, is God breathed, and is speaking of the holy scriptures mentioned in the prior verse, which are a copy of a copy of a copy.

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Peter, in his second letter, tells us that we have a more sure word of prophecy in the scriptures than we do from an eye and ear witness of Christ's transfiguration.

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The writer of Hebrews tells us that the Son speaks to us now, and does so through his word and spirit.

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Indeed, John tells us that the witness of God is greater in excellency than any human witness, and there should be no doubt that the

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Old and New Testament are such a divine witness. John, in Revelation, warns all who would add or subtract from the text as pertaining to the words of scripture, quod verba, would endure far worse judgment than that of Nadab and Abihu.

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In the end, it is these things which we ought to believe about our Bible, which ought to remain primary and superior before and after any appeal to manuscript evidence.

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But what of the fact that the scripture nowhere says the TR is the Bible? Pastors, the

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Bible nowhere names First Baptist of Czech or Apologia Church, and yet the Bible calls you to treat your church as Christ would.

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Missionaries, the Bible nowhere names the foreign land to which you are to go, and yet the Bible calls you to be salt and light there.

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Husbands, the Bible nowhere names your wife, and yet the Bible calls you to love her as Christ loves the church. Wives, the

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Bible nowhere names your husband, and yet the Bible calls you to submit to his leadership as the church does to Christ.

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Church, the Bible nowhere names your pastor, and yet the Bible calls you to honor and obey him in the Lord. In the same manner, the

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Bible does not name the TR, but it does call you and I to treat our Bible like it's the autograph. My Bible is the

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TR, therefore I treat it like the autograph, because God's word regards itself in autographic terms.

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Argument number two, because God's word regards itself in autographic terms, the reformers historically regarded the

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TR as equal to the autographic New Testament text. First, let me remind you that the Protestant scholastics regarded the

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TR as the authentic text quo ad verba. Let us now observe how the Protestant scholastics spoke of the

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TR. William Whitaker, the most quoted man by the Westminster Assembly, writes, quote, it behooves a translator of scripture not merely to take care that he does not corrupt the meaning, but also as far as it is at all possible not to depart a hand's breadth from the words, since many things may lie undercover in the words of the

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Holy Spirit, which are not immediately perceived and yet contain important instruction, end quote.

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Whitaker here rightly challenges the assumption that man is able to declare this or that word of less importance without the

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Holy Spirit say so through the scripture. Edward Lee, who had a seat on the Westminster Assembly, asserts of the scriptures that, quote, formally, that is pertaining to the words, in itself there is no mixture of falsehood or error, no corruption or unsoundness at all in it, end quote.

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The presence of man's words among God's words would amount to error, corruption, and unsoundness. Here Lee asserts that not a single word of God's word is a pretender, a word of man pretending to be a word of God.

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Then, of course, the words of the Westminster Assembly and the London Baptist Confession attest to the same when the former writes, quote, the

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Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek being immediately inspired by God and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages are therefore authentic.

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Here again we see the word authentic as that mentioned in Muller's definition above regarding the Texas Receptus, as the original authorial word for word copy of the autograph.

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Francis Turretin writing in 1696 concludes, quote, unless unimpaired integrity characterized the scriptures, they could not be regarded as the sole rule of faith and practice.

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And the door would be thrown wide open to atheists, libertines, enthusiasts, and other profane persons like them for destroying its authenticity and overthrowing the foundation of salvation, end quote.

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Here Turretin, a reformed scholastic, so emphatically asserts the unimpaired integrity of the TR that he goes on to reject corruptions, quote, only in smaller things which do not affect the foundation of faith, end quote.

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As well as the old but resuscitated assertion, quote, that divine providence wished to keep scripture free from serious corruptions, but not from minor, end quote.

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Indeed for Turretin, corruption in smaller or minor things had the power to overthrow the epistemic foundation of salvation.

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Turning then to John Owen, we read, quote, the sum of what I am pleading for as to the particular head to be vindicated is that as the scriptures of the

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Old and New Testament were immediately and entirely given out by God himself, his mind being in them represented unto us without the least interveniency of such wills as were capable of giving change or alteration to the least iota or syllable.

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So by his good and merciful providential preservation in his love to his word and church, his whole word, as first given out by him, is preserved unto us entire in the original language.

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Owen, carrying the torch, declares that God has preserved his word entire down to the least iota and syllable in the original language, or the

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Texas Receptus. Abraham Kuyper, in the same vein, declares, quote, in a number of Jesus' arguments from scripture, that in the main, they do not rest upon the general contents, but often upon a single word or a single letter, end quote.

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Again, as we saw with Whitaker, we see here with Kuyper, to say that some words are of little importance, or to claim that 98 % of the

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New Testament is good enough, is to ignore the fact that our Lord himself regarded single words, even single letters, to be of the utmost importance to his revelation and teaching.

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Again, the Holy Spirit alone is qualified to determine what is or is not a word, syllable, or letter that affects doctrine.

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Echoing John Owen, Richard Muller writes in his Post -Reformation Reform Dogmatics, quote, the un, the Orthodox response was directed toward the preservation of the canon entire, and it included the insistence that there is nothing in scripture of no importance, canon and words together.

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Indeed, he explicitly states in another place, quote, the reformed Orthodox do thus engage in a concerted textual effort to maintain their doctrine of purity and perfection of the text of scripture, end quote.

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Simply put, before moving to my final argument, since God's word regards itself in autographic terms, we should expect that God's people, through the

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Holy Spirit, would treat their Bible as the autograph. And so we see the phenomenon of the reformers treating the

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TR as the autographic New Testament. As such, it should come at no surprise that such a phenomenon continues to this day in the form of the declaration, the

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TR, as the word of God, is equal to the New Testament autographs. Thus far, I have argued that one,

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God's word regards itself in autographic terms. Two, given argument one, the reformers historically regarded the

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TR as equal to the autographic New Testament text. Finally, my third argument is the probability of the

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TR is equal to the autographic New Testament, and this is very high. In order to make this argument,

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I borrow certain argumentative scaffolding from the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne in his argument for the resurrection.

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If we are to make analysis of a given historical event, like the TR is the word of God is equal to the New Testament autograph, then we would expect to find three kinds of evidence.

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The first kind of evidence we would expect to find is posterior historical evidence, like artifacts, manuscripts, and testimony regarding the autographs.

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The second kind of evidence we would expect to find is called background evidence. This kind of evidence asks if there has been any past behavior on the part of the author of the autographs which would precipitate the existence of the autographs.

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Third and final, the third and final kind of evidence we would expect to find is prior historical evidence, or the evidence that the author of the autographs would have good reason to bring the autographs into existence.

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In short, if the TR is the word of God is equal to the New Testament autographs, we would expect that one, God is the kind of being that created and preserved the autographs.

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Two, God would have good reason to create and preserve the autographs. Three, we would then expect to find artifacts, manuscripts, and testimony of the creation and preservation of the autographs.

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For the Christian, that God is the kind of being that created and preserved the autographs seems obvious, seeing that God has promised to preserve his words, and given the fact that the autographs are said to be

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God -breathed. Furthermore, God has made the church to be of such a nature to receive these autographic words, because the same

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God who gave these autographic words by inspiration also indwells the church. Given number one, that God would have good reason to create and preserve the autographs is very reasonable for the

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Christian. And that as the Westminster Confession put it, God reveals himself through the autographs, quote, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, the malice of Satan, and of the world, end quote.

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As a result of number one and number two, we would expect to find the autographs and testimony to them among God's people.

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As I pointed out in my second argument above, that is indeed the case for the Protestant scholastics. In some, we see that God is the kind of being that would create and preserve the autographs.

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Additionally, God had ample good reason to create and preserve the autographs. As a result, there is a robust testimony to the fact that we do indeed have the autographs in the

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Texas Receptus. Let us now employ Bayes' theorem to determine the probability that the TR as the word of God is equal to the

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New Testament autographs, given the evidence mentioned immediately above. Let the conjunction of these three types of evidence, posterior, background, and prior, be represented by E.

31:47

And let the assertion, I'll put it up here for you guys. And let the assertion that TR as the word of God is equal to the

31:53

New Testament autographs be represented by T. As a result, we get the following probability equation. The probability of T given

32:00

E equals the probability of T given E, which is high, let's say 0 .9. That number multiplied by the probability of E given

32:07

T, which is also high, again, let's say 0 .9. This equals 0 .89. We then move the numerator into the first set of brackets in the denominator and add that to the probability of not

32:19

T given E, which is low given the converse in the numerator, let's say 0 .1. Multiplied by the probability of not

32:26

E given T, which is also low given the converse in the numerator. As a result, we get a 0 .89

32:32

over 0 .9, yielding a probability of 0 .98 repeating or greater than 98 % probability.

32:41

Which is to say that under these conditions, the fact that the TR is equal to the

32:47

New Testament autograph is nearly certain. Furthermore, it is highly improbable that God would create and preserve two contradictory autographs given our background evidence and prior evidence.

32:56

Seeing then that the TR accords with the requisite background, prior, and posterior evidence thusly presented, and that my opponent nowhere claims that he has an alternate but commensurate autograph, it remains highly probable that the

33:07

TR in the New Testament autograph, reminds highly probable that the TR is the New Testament autograph, seeing that no meaningful undefeated defeater has arisen in the form of an alternate and superior autograph, which is also consistent with E.

33:20

In conclusion, I have offered three arguments in defense of the proposition the TR is the word of God is equal to the

33:26

New Testament autographs. Argument one, God's word regards itself in autographic terms. Argument two, because God's word regards itself in autographic terms, the reformers historically regarded the

33:38

TR as the autographic New Testament text. And argument three, the probability that the

33:43

TR is equal to the autographic New Testament is very high. As such, I encourage you, based on the autographic terminology of scripture, robust reformed bibliology, and the overwhelming probability that the

33:54

TR is equal to the New Testament autograph, that you too accept the TR as the word of God and equal to the

33:59

New Testament autographs. Thank you. Dr.

34:10

White, opening remarks, please, 20 minutes. I'm sorry?

34:48

Yes, Lord? What? All right, well, good afternoon.

34:56

We have a complicated subject, but not quite as complicated as we just heard. I'm gonna simplify that for you just a little bit.

35:04

This is a vitally important subject because it really, as I have titled it, a debate about the future of reformed apologetics.

35:12

This is, will we utilize the gifts that God has given to us to defend the text of scripture in our day against the greatest attacks that have ever been launched against it, or will we abandon everything

35:24

God has given to us and retreat back to the text that was based upon about a dozen to maybe 20 manuscripts that was put together haphazardly during the 16th century, finally put together in one form in the beginning of the 17th century called the

35:41

Texas Receptus, or will we use the 5 ,600 manuscripts we have today, the other foreign language manuscripts we have, and the fact that we now have manuscripts that go back to within decades of the originals, rather than the fact that what

35:55

Erasmus used, the oldest he had was 1 ,000 years after the time of Christ.

36:01

That's the issue today. Will we retreat or will we utilize what God has given to us?

36:06

I think it's very important, but we need to understand some things. Texas Receptus, I don't think we go to Dr.

36:12

Moeller for the definition of that. The Texas Receptus, this is what most people think of the

36:17

Texas Receptus today, published by the Trinitarian Bible Society, but I also have the 1550 Stephanus over there, that would be considered one of the various forms of the

36:25

Texas Receptus, is a series of printed Greek texts of the New Testament encompassing the editions of Erasmus between 1560 and 1535,

36:35

Stephanus, the 1550 I'll show you later, and Beza, primarily his 1598 edition.

36:42

These were the basis of the KJV New Testament when it was translated between 1604 and 1611.

36:48

The translators did not go to manuscripts. They used printed editions, Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza in doing their work in the

36:57

New Testament. Now, the phrase means the received text, and it did not come from a church or a council, but from an advertising blurb.

37:07

In the early 17th century, that's where Texas Receptus came from. You advertised in Latin back then.

37:13

They did school better than we do these days, I'm afraid. Today's TR is a compilation.

37:19

This one, which is what most people point to, is a compilation made by FHA Scrivener in the late 19th century.

37:26

What's interesting is this is a Greek text that's actually based upon an English text. So what

37:32

Scrivener did is he took those Greek compilations, the printed Greek texts that the

37:38

King James translators used. He looked at what choices they made because they differ from one another. They have variants between them.

37:45

We will talk about that tonight. There's differences between those printed editions. The King James translators had to make a decision.

37:52

What wording are we going to use? And so Scrivener looked at those printed editions, and he put together a

37:59

Greek text based upon the decisions made by the King James translators.

38:05

So this is actually a Greek text based upon an English translation based upon a number of printed

38:11

Greek texts, which themselves were based upon a small number of handwritten manuscripts, primarily through the work of Desiderius Erasmus, a

38:20

Roman Catholic priest and humanist scholar between 1516 and 1535.

38:26

So that is where some of the definitions we need to understand. So as I said,

38:31

TR is primarily the work of Erasmus. A few changes made by Stephanus. And autocorrect does not like Stephanus.

38:38

It does not like any Latin at all. So Stephans is supposed to be Stephanus. And Beza. Now, as I said,

38:45

Erasmus had access to only around, at most, a dozen manuscripts, the oldest of which was from 1000

38:51

AD, and he trusted it the least. It represents one particular branch, what is called the

38:57

Byzantine text type, and does not represent the best or the earliest form of that text type.

39:04

It must be remembered, please keep this in mind, there is not a single Greek manuscript known to scholarship that reads identically to the

39:13

TR. Not a single one. It is an edited, reconstructed

39:18

Greek text based upon a small minority of very late manuscripts.

39:24

That's what the Textus Receptus is. Now, the critical text normally refers to the

39:31

United Bible Societies, Nessialan Greek New Testaments, or to the Edicio Critico Mayor, which is currently being published and worked on primarily out of Münster in Germany.

39:43

And a few books have already been published, Acts, Mark, and some of the

39:48

Catholic epistles. Another recently published critical text is the Tyndale Greek New Testament, the small red one over there, which is also a fascinating work as well.

39:59

These texts are based upon the more than, I think that typo again, 5 ,000 currently catalogued

40:05

Greek manuscripts together with the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, et cetera, comprising more than 25 ,000 written witnesses along with critical usage of the writings of the early church fathers as well.

40:18

In other words, the critical texts are based upon everything we possess that would give us information about what was originally written by the

40:28

New Testament authors. I believe the central issue that must remain front and center in any discussion of the text of the

40:37

New Testament is this. It's not Bayes' theorem, okay? It's not a probability theorem about a compilation of a dozen

40:47

Greek manuscripts. The question is, what did the original authors of the

40:53

New Testament actually write? That is the first and foremost, when

41:01

I go into, go watch the debate I did with Adnan Rashid in London. And Adnan Rashid is a

41:09

Muslim apologist, and we did a two -part debate in London on the transmission of the text of the

41:15

New Testament in comparison to the transmission of the text of the Quran. And I pointed out in that debate that the free transmission of the text of the

41:25

New Testament, that is, there wasn't anybody in charge of it, there wasn't anybody that was editing it, it was widely distributed immediately across the

41:34

Roman Empire, that that mechanism of the transmission of the text of the

41:39

New Testament, because we, everybody on this stage believes in the providential preservation of the

41:44

New Testament. The question is how, okay? So, that free transmission of the text is greatly superior to the edited, redacted transmission of the text of the

41:58

Quran. See how that ends up working out. Take a look at the debate, it's on YouTube, you can watch it.

42:05

If we lose sight of this simple question, we will waste our time and never advance the topic. The two sides tonight disagree fundamentally on how one even goes about to answer this particular question.

42:19

Now, the standard reformed answer, because I will be perfectly honest with you, to my knowledge, Dr. Van Cleek is the only person who has ever enunciated the theory he presented to you this evening.

42:30

I am unaware of anyone who ever presented this kind of an argument before with the specifics that were just presented to you.

42:40

In fact, the people that are cited there, none of them came to the conclusion that the TR is the autographic text of the

42:48

New Testament. Plantinga and the other people that he utilizes in Reformed epistemology, they don't come to that conclusion.

42:55

And so, what is the standard reformed answer you would get from the New Testament department at Westminster or any of the other places you might inquire at?

43:04

Well, it is that God providentially preserved His word through the immediate and wide distribution of manuscripts through the early church.

43:13

By having multiple authors writing to multiple audiences at multiple times, the New Testament was never under the control of a single man or group of men, and hence could not be edited or changed by them.

43:27

So much for all the New Agers who say, Bible use of teach reincarnation. No, that's not really possible. The free transmission of the text is vital, for if the transmission of the text were controlled, the content could be edited.

43:39

So, let's look at it. I did put together these graphics myself. And so, if you cannot control oohs and aahs and things like that, please feel free,

43:51

I will not be offended, as you see the manuscripts moving around the maps. It's about the level of my graphics ability, but hey, there we go.

43:59

So, we have different authors at different places. Paul's writing to Corinth, and Paul writes to Rome, and Paul's writing to Thessalonica, and John's writing, and we're not even sure exactly where he was, and where his epistles were initially sent, other than the letters to the seven churches.

44:16

And so, you have the beginning of the New Testament, and it's dispersed. There isn't anyone controlling the distribution of these things.

44:24

And so, Paul writes, for example, to the Colossians, and in Colossians 4 .16, he says, read the epistle that's coming from Laodicea, right?

44:32

How many of you did your morning devotions this morning in Laodiceans? Yeah! Some of you probably did, because in all probability, that is a reference to Ephesians.

44:43

Ephesus is the primary city in the Lycats River Valley, and they would have distributed those letters around the churches, and each church would make copies of those letters as they would be brought through, and that's how, over time, you have collections of manuscripts begin to come together.

45:01

And so, for example, we have P46, which is the earliest manuscript we have in papyrus form of Paul's epistles, at least the major epistles, not the minor epistles.

45:12

They are collected together, and that's how the New Testament starts being formed.

45:19

But it's not in any one place, it's not under anyone's specific control, and so you have multiple lines.

45:28

What's important about that is, very often, the enemies of the faith will say, well, you see, you've got this single...

45:34

It's like the phone game. Remember the phone game back in kindergarten, first grade, where you'd whisper something in somebody's ear, and then they'd whisper it in the next person, and by the time it gets around and comes back to you, it's in Swahili, you know?

45:45

It's not even close to what you actually said, and everybody laughs, and that's very funny. That's how it's presented, very often, by people like Bart Ehrman, that that's how the text was transmitted.

45:55

It wasn't. It was transmitted with multiple lines from multiple different places, and so if there was a disruption or a change in one line, that would stand out in comparison to the other manuscripts.

46:07

It's very important to keep that in mind as to how this took place. And so, how was it preserved?

46:15

It was preserved in its immediate distribution all over the known world. So, remember

46:21

Shirley MacLaine? Remember Shirley MacLaine did it? You have to be old to remember this, sorry, young people, but I'm old, so I can talk to old people.

46:29

Remember Shirley MacLaine did that movie back in the 80s, Out on a Limb, where she got into the new age, and she had a guru who was telling her, you know, they're walking along the beach, going, you are

46:38

God, you are God, and you are God, and the entire population of the United States is watching, going, no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not.

46:44

And she would say that reincarnation used to be in the Bible, but they took it out of the

46:50

Council of Constantinople. Now, how many of you have been studying the Council of Constantinople recently?

46:56

Probably not many of you. And so how do you respond to something like that? Well, think about it. The Council of Constantinople is 381.

47:03

We have manuscripts of the entirety of the New Testament. They're 50 years older than that, and we have shorter papyri manuscripts that are 180 years older than that.

47:16

They were already buried in the sands of Egypt by that time. So if a council came along and decided to mess with stuff, what they would come up with once we find these older manuscripts would be very, very different, but that's not what we find.

47:31

What we find when we find P52, P75 manuscripts like this, they have the same text as we have in the later manuscripts in the great unseals like Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrus, and in the bulk of the later manuscripts after 1000

47:45

AD. And so the documentation demonstrates that that kind of change has not taken place, but we need to look at all of it.

47:55

We have been given a tremendous gift. We can go back to these papyri. There's one papyrus,

48:02

P75, that we know is a relative of Codex Vaticanus.

48:07

Now, P75 was written around 175 to 200, and Vaticanus is written 325 to 350.

48:16

Now, Vaticanus was not copied from P75, but they have a common ancestor which goes back to at least 150 to 125.

48:26

So this is a gift that we have been given by God's grace that today, remember, the reformers had no access to any of this.

48:38

Even the idea of knowing what manuscripts we have, having a consistent way of identifying them, knowing what they contain, is a very, very new reality.

48:47

And so any quotation from anyone prior to the discovery of the papyri on this subject is really irrelevant, because they did not have the information in their hands.

48:59

So for example, the reformers were not comparing these, because they didn't have this.

49:06

They didn't know about any of the information this has. This was all they had, all they had.

49:13

And in fact, it's fascinating. The book of Revelation in this is particularly bad as far as the

49:20

Greek manuscripts are concerned. Why? Because when Erasmus did the book of Revelation, first of all,

49:26

Erasmus didn't really think Revelation was scripture. So he didn't really care much about it. But secondly, he couldn't find a single

49:34

Greek manuscript of the book of Revelation. So he borrowed a friend's Latin commentary on Revelation that had the

49:41

Greek in the Latin commentary and had to drag it out of the commentary for his first edition.

49:49

And then when he got to chapter 22, the last pages had fallen off. And so he had to back translate from his own

49:56

Latin into the Greek, producing all sorts of readings that no one had ever seen before in the entire history of the church.

50:04

Now you might wonder, well, you said he did five editions. Why didn't he fix it later on?

50:09

He was in a hurry to get the first one out. We get that. But he had, that was 1516. He had to 1535.

50:15

He had almost 20 years. Well, here's a funny story. When he did his second edition, he told his printer, look, go get the

50:23

Align Greek New Testament. After he had put his out, Align, the Align brothers had put theirs out.

50:31

Erasmus knew that. And so he said, go get theirs and use their copy of Revelation.

50:37

Give their readings of Revelation. Just take mine out and replace it. He knew his was bad. Go get theirs and replace it.

50:44

There's only one problem. Align had used his first edition for their book of Revelation.

50:52

And he never knew it, never fixed it. And to this day, all those readings are right here and in the

50:59

King James Version of the Bible. Readings that no Christian had ever seen for 1 ,500 years.

51:07

And they're right here. You see, this book has a history. And when you stop treating it as a historical document, as if it just floated down out of heaven without the history behind it, you turn it into something that it's not.

51:21

And the opponents of the Christian faith know this. Muslims can read our books too.

51:28

Atheists can read our books too. Mormons can read our books too. And so you must recognize the history of these texts and these manuscripts.

51:38

Now, I'll call it the Van Cleek hypothesis. Basically focuses very, very carefully.

51:44

And I have the books over here. I've read the books. The last one that I think has the most importance of it wasn't even published until June of this year.

51:52

And so it's brand new. And so the focus in that book is on Matthew 5, 18.

51:59

"'Truly I say to you, "'until heaven and earth pass away, "'not one iota, not the least stroke, "'shall pass from the law until all takes place.'"

52:06

And so read it for yourself. There's an entire section that talks about canonical iterations.

52:11

I'll be asking what in the world that means, because again, this is new terminology. The Reformers didn't use this kind of terminology.

52:18

They didn't make this kind of application. And so we need to find out exactly what this is all about. But it's very much based upon an interpretation of Matthew 5, 18, that what's being said here is about the transmission of the text of Scripture.

52:32

The problem is the verse is not addressing the transmission of Scripture over time, but the permanence and fulfillment of the law of Christ, of the law in Christ, his fulfillment of that law.

52:43

And in fact, the very next verse talks about the least of the laws. If you teach anyone not to follow the least of these laws, you'll be least in the kingdom of heaven.

52:51

It's a real stretch to try to make that connection. And yet that is absolutely central to the hypothesis that is presented in the books.

53:03

But very quickly, and I only have a minute, 50 seconds here, the central error of the

53:08

Van Cleeck hypothesis involves the confusion of canon and text. Canon and text. The book of Isaiah is canonical, but that does not mean that the photocopier was invented prior to 1949.

53:21

That is, until only recently, all Christians understood that the canon was one thing. The specific readings of manuscripts was another.

53:29

No one, until our president came to power, dreamed that unanimity on the one, the canon, meant every copy of the scriptures were identical in handwritten form.

53:38

This is a massive error and a massive anachronism that we need to recognize this evening.

53:44

So the reality of this error is seen directly in the text of the New Testament. There were multiple traditions in the

53:50

Hebrew manuscripts of the first century. For example, some Hebrew manuscripts say, pierced my hands and my feet, while others have, like a lion, in Psalm 22, 16.

53:59

Likewise, the Greek Septuagint contained numerous variations from the different Hebrew lines. In Hebrews 8, 9, the author cites the

54:05

Septuagint, I did not care for them, over against the Hebrew reading, though I was a husband to them.

54:12

How is this relevant tonight? Clearly, the writer to the Hebrews viewed Jeremiah as canonical, but that did not mean there were no variants in Jeremiah.

54:22

We can say Jeremiah is scripture and still deal with the fact that there are major textual issues to be dealt with regarding Jeremiah.

54:31

And so, very quickly, here is what we need to keep focused upon this evening. What did the original authors write?

54:40

That will be the determiner of how this debate comes out and how benefited we are by it.

54:48

Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you,

54:56

Dr. White. Dr. Van Cleek will be offered a 10 -minute rebuttal. Before, I've listened to over 1 ,500 minutes of Dr.

55:24

White's material in preparation for this debate. I have seen those slides and heard that even some of the jokes are repeated.

55:33

So why not Dr. Muller? Okay, I mean, if you wanna disagree with a preeminent church historian, wrote post -Reformation

55:40

Reform Dogmatics, fine. He's not alone. Richard Muller is not a TR guy and nor is

55:47

Richard Brash, but he also came to the same conclusion and his journal article was just published in 2019, making the same case that I'm making today as far as the

55:55

TR and it being a standard. Not one

56:01

Greek text is identical to the TR. I don't think you can find one Greek text that's identical with any other Greek text, so don't find that as even remotely problematic.

56:10

The critical text is based on everything we possess. Everything we possess is not everything we've had, all right?

56:16

And if you listen to Dr. White, he's clear in bringing this out. You've got fires in Alexandria, you've got wars, you've got bugs, as he says, and you've got weather, it destroys manuscripts.

56:27

So honestly, we don't know how many we've ever had. And to claim that we have more now is simply irrational because you can't know how many they had in Alexandria or how many they had in Constantinople.

56:36

It's simply inscrutable. Every reading is a probability. So if I use

56:41

Bayes' theorem as a probability calculus, every reading that you get in the Nestle Law 28 is a probability.

56:48

No one's gonna tell you for certain this reading right here is actually the autograph. No one's gonna tell you that.

56:54

They're gonna say based on the evidence and based on our expertise, we're gonna make the best play that we can. Well, this is simply false, all right, to claim that somehow

57:01

Bayes' theorem can't apply. It absolutely does apply. It just doesn't apply the way he would like it to, right?

57:06

Oldest, shortest, best, internal, external evidence. I just bring in Bayes' theorem and say, hey, there's a different way we can do probability. There's nothing wrong with that.

57:16

He says, is this the standard response from your average New Testament department? Yeah, I mean, I've got two master's degrees and a

57:21

PhD. I've been in those average New Testament departments. I know that that's the answer. The point is I wanna take them to task on it.

57:26

I think I can legitimately do it, right? To say that I'm a loner, that it's the Van Cleek hypothesis, which is cool, I appreciate that.

57:32

But in the end, it's not my idea. I got this from studying under guys like Richard Muller and Richard Gaffin.

57:39

They took us all the way back to the history and they said, well, we don't believe that now because of the manuscript evidence, but that's what they did believe.

57:44

I'm just holding on to an older idea. That's what it ultimately boils down to. So it's not mine. I have teachers and they taught me.

57:51

They just happened to all be dead. This looks like the presentation Dr. White offered before I noted that. No one is controlling the distribution of the

57:58

New Testament. All right, I would say that that's false. That is so unchristian.

58:04

The Holy Spirit is guiding the New Testament. This is obvious. Like, why would you say no one's doing it?

58:10

Why, because his paradigm right now is naturalistic and that's why in my opening statement I said it's narrow. He needs to broaden his perspective.

58:17

Understand, if you're writing a paper for a journal and they don't want you to bring in your Christian pre -commitments, fine.

58:25

Write the journal and see if you can get it published. That'd be great. But we're among Christians. As Christians, in this environment, we can bring in evidence like the

58:33

Holy Spirit moves people. That's legitimate evidence. It's legitimate evidence anywhere, but definitely here.

58:39

My argument accounts for White's wide distribution. Right, I love that slide. It's a very cool slide. But in the end, mine accounts for that.

58:46

I still have sufficient explanatory force and scope. I can absorb his position and still maintain mine, which in the end, as worldviews go, mine's better because I am not violating

58:57

Occam's razor and I can still make the case. So I can absorb him and still make the case. He cannot absorb mine.

59:03

He doesn't absorb mine. He continues to make the naturalistic argument. The reformers were aware of the issues.

59:10

All right, they were. Now, they didn't have as many manuscripts, at least not that we know of, but again, that's inscrutable. But you can look at Francis Turton.

59:17

He knew that the woman caught in adultery was problematic. At his time, 1696, he knew the long ending of Mark was an issue.

59:24

He knew 1 John 5 -7 was an issue. He knew that. And he didn't have all the plethora of manuscripts, but he still defended those readings.

59:31

Follow me? All right, he continues to make the argument for we need the papyrus.

59:36

If you guys are into this, you need to read Myths and Mistakes. It's a great book about textual criticism. I really appreciate the work.

59:42

I had several conversations with Elijah Hickson. Just consider this.

59:48

It is further evident from the papyri that closeness and proximity to the physical autographs does not necessitate a reliable and more accurate copied text.

59:56

Again, it is unlikely the New Testament autographs still existed and influenced the text by the time of their earliest copies.

01:00:02

Even if they did, this alone would not have guaranteed that the existing manuscripts are reliable. And then my last one, two factors that are most important in determining the reliability of a historical document, the number of manuscripts copied in existence and the time between when it was first written and the oldest existing copy.

01:00:17

They say, don't make that argument. Dr. White's making the argument right now. The guys in Myths and Mistakes say, don't make that argument.

01:00:23

They're all trained textual critics. Like, actually do it for a living, wrote their PhDs in textual criticism. They say, in answer to that, aside from the conflation of textual reliability with historical reliability, which is what happened here, which is a logical fallacy, he's equating, well, because we have the papyri, we know better than the reformers did.

01:00:40

That's conflating textual reliability and historical reliability. Apart from that, such claims commit the logical fallacy of assuming that a larger number and an earlier date necessarily equate to more reliability.

01:00:52

So it doesn't matter if the Protestants didn't have the papyri. This is his big case. But it doesn't matter if they had them.

01:00:59

Because in the end, even the guys, they don't agree with me. None of these guys from Missing Mistakes agree with me. Not one of them. But they're ready to say, let's be honest about the science, this is a bad argument.

01:01:10

I mentioned Brash and Muller. Matthew 5 .18, OK, so he says it doesn't mean jot and tittle. Yes, it does.

01:01:15

See how that argument works? You can just get up and hand wave and be like, it doesn't mean jot and tittle. It means law. And I'd be like, no, it actually does mean jot and tittle.

01:01:22

And then we could fight about it. He could say, well, I got guys nowadays, and they're going to say it doesn't mean jot and tittle. It means law. And I'd be like, I got guys who say it actually means jot and tittle.

01:01:29

I quoted guys to you in my opening statement that said words, syllables, and letters. Sound like jot and tittle to you?

01:01:36

Sound like it was from the Protestant Reformation? Yes. All right. So canon and text was not confused.

01:01:42

I don't believe it's confused. He says, well, yeah, I mean, Isaiah is canon. It's one of the canonical books. That's true. It is one of the canonical books.

01:01:48

But it's not empty. The canon is not just a list of names. It's a list of revealed words from the living and true

01:01:57

God. So if you say, well, canon doesn't have anything to do with the words, it has everything to do with the words. And even my quote from Moeller clearly stated that for the

01:02:04

Protestants, it came down to the text. And they conflated text and canon, that the canon and the text went together.

01:02:13

You can't just be like, we have 66 names of books, and here's our list, and that's the canon. No, the canon represents an actual book populated by words, and sentences, and phrases that are all said to be from the living and true

01:02:22

God. So this is not a confusion. So with whatever time I have left, all right, how many?

01:02:29

Three minutes. After listening to nearly 1 ,500 minutes of Dr. White's lecture, podcast, and debate on this topic, and giving his opening statement,

01:02:36

I offer the following rebuttals, in addition to what I've already done. Some will be immediately relevant, some more preemptory.

01:02:43

If Dr. White does not do what I expect him to do, then that'll be good for him. If he does do what I expect him to do, well, then maybe not so good.

01:02:50

So the more evidence than ever before, it's impossible for Dr. White to make this claim, seeing that he doesn't know, for example, how much and what kind of evidence was possessed by the

01:02:57

Constantinople Scintoriums, or the Alexandrian Library. And I'm just using those as examples. It doesn't have to be those. It could be anywhere, all right?

01:03:04

Whether we have more evidence now than those repositories of antiquity is inscrutable, and any assertion to the contrary is fallacious.

01:03:12

Evidence dependent for this set of Christian beliefs, right? This whole argument so far has been evidence dependent.

01:03:18

Well, what I called in my opening statement posterior historical evidence. Dr. White's position is almost exclusively based on posterior historical evidence.

01:03:26

As such, Dr. White's position is not distinctively Christian. Anybody can make this argument. I can have a

01:03:31

Muslim come up here. I can have Bart Ehrman come up here and talk to me about how there was separated, right, multi -vocality of the textual tradition, and that we have more than anybody else.

01:03:42

Bart Ehrman can make that case. He could have used every line from his opening statement and not violated his atheistic conscience.

01:03:48

Now they come to different conclusions, but as far as a presentation, it's not distinctively Christian. These are the same stale, old, dead arguments, right?

01:03:56

He's like, I've never heard this before. Well, that's part of theology. That's why we get PhDs, guys, because the world is new, and there's new fights to be fought.

01:04:05

Now we're arguing the same line. We're arguing for the authority of Scripture and its inspiration, its preservation, but you don't have to do it the same.

01:04:12

That's one thing I find out about arguing with these guys. They seem to lack any meaningful structure and philosophy.

01:04:19

Theology is almost completely taken out, and when we get to cross -examination, we'll talk to Dr. White about Dr. Wallace and what

01:04:24

Dr. Wallace thinks about a prioris, theological a prioris, but these are the same ones. In fact, it just seems like we had a rehashed presentation.

01:04:35

All right? Category error, I gotta throw this one in here because this is one of Dr. White's favorite ones.

01:04:40

First time I interacted with him online, he accused me of category error. If he wants to do that tonight, I brought, actually, the

01:04:45

Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy and we'll see if it's actually a category error. That'll be fun. 30 seconds.

01:04:51

How many? 30 seconds. In the end, I want to leave you with this. It's gonna come up multiple times.

01:04:57

I think the thing that's different between him and I is I just don't doubt my Bible enough. If I doubted my Bible a little bit more, if I doubted 1 % of my

01:05:04

Bible, I don't think he'd be after me. He wouldn't be after my position, but because I don't doubt my Bible to the specific accuracy he desires me to doubt it, now we're up here debating.

01:05:13

So the thing is, Pete, you know what your problem is? You believe your Bible too much. I wish you'd back that off a little bit and then you'd be fine.

01:05:20

Dr. Cleek, your time is up. Dr. White will have 10 -minute rebuttal.

01:05:44

Okay, let's keep our eye on the ball because I think we just had the eye taken off the ball pretty badly there.

01:05:52

We were just told that everything we possess is not all that ever existed. Well, of course, but again, here's the issue.

01:06:01

Our friend here is saying this must be your standard. This has been accepted by the church. The church has spoken, and if we're sanctified, we'll recognize the voice of Christ in this to perfection.

01:06:15

And I have simply pointed out to you that this has a history. It's a snapshot of what the text looked like in one area,

01:06:24

Basel, Switzerland, primarily, at one period of time in history. And we have had nothing presented to us that would even begin to substantiate the readings that this contains over against the readings of the larger testimony that is found in the critical text, nothing.

01:06:47

So I'm gonna be asking about specific readings once we get into the cross -examination. And I'm gonna be asking about, okay,

01:06:54

Ephesians 3 .9 in the Textus Receptus contains a reading that came from one manuscript from around the year 1200.

01:07:05

Other than that, every other manuscript has the same reading. And everybody he quoted, everybody he quoted, everybody in the book that he quoted about errors would agree with me on this, and none of them hold his position, not one.

01:07:17

And I wasn't saying, he's misunderstood. I want you to, got the books.

01:07:23

There's another book that's only available in Kindle that I want you to be aware of. It's called And Then He Poked the

01:07:29

Bear, I think, is what the title is. I wish it was in print because Dr. Van Cleek wrote it.

01:07:35

It is the most skeptical attack upon any critical approach to the

01:07:40

New Testament I've ever seen in my life, ever. And the problem is, if you apply it the way it was applied in that book, it would defeat everything that Erasmus himself said about how he put this together.

01:07:54

So you have a text, it has a history, but you're not, Bayes' Theorem, as it was presented, did not view this as having any kind of history at all.

01:08:03

There was nothing in there about how it came to be. It just assumes that it exists, and therefore, it can be the autographs.

01:08:10

That is not how textual criticism is done. No one's ever done it that way. The church has never said, just pray about it.

01:08:17

The more sanctified you are, the more you're gonna lean to one manuscript or another. That is not how

01:08:22

Erasmus did it. That's not how Stephanos did it. That's not how Bayes did it. That's not how Calvin did it.

01:08:28

It is completely anachronistic to try to drag them in because they didn't know about the rest of what's in here.

01:08:36

They didn't know about the rest of the history of the text. Turretin, who was quoted to you, a wonderful scholar, said that the majority of the

01:08:45

Greek manuscripts contained 1 John 5 -7. He was factually wrong. So here's the question. Do we continue following his factual error?

01:08:53

Or do we recognize that he lived in a day where he couldn't go online and find out what manuscripts contained what materials?

01:09:01

There was no way for anyone to know. They hadn't even designed a system to be able to identify manuscripts.

01:09:09

There wasn't such thing as a card catalog anywhere for us older folks. They didn't have interlibrary loan, any of those things.

01:09:17

That's why it's utterly anachronistic to try to bring them in when they did not have one one -thousandth of the information that is available to us today.

01:09:28

That's just the reality. Erasmus would have loved to have had what we had today, and if he had had it, the

01:09:34

TR would look completely different than the TR we have right here. But here's the question.

01:09:42

When we talked about probabilities, everything's probability, well, okay, but what's the probability of readings that are simply errors?

01:09:50

What's the probability that the Book of Revelation, as John wrote it, was the way that Erasmus published it when he himself recognized how bad it was and how many mistakes he had made?

01:10:03

When I mentioned the free distribution of the text versus controlled distribution of the text, did you hear the response?

01:10:12

Other than saying that I'm dealing with this in a naturalistic way, which is just, we are dealing with the historical reality of the mechanism that God used to preserve his word.

01:10:22

That's not naturalism. And anyone, I think, should be able to recognize the difference between controlled, that is, in the

01:10:30

Quran, Uthman and the caliphate controls the text of the

01:10:37

Quran. Only we can make copies, you can't make your own copies. You've got to get rid of Ibn Masud's copies.

01:10:44

That's controlled. And to confuse that with the idea that the spirit of God is providential in time is astonishing.

01:10:52

It's astonishing, but let's see what it leads to. Because if what we're being told is, well look, all of the things of history led to this.

01:11:03

The spirit of God gave us this. This was not at the Council of Nicaea when the deity of Christ was defined and defended.

01:11:13

Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, they didn't quote from this when they were dealing with the

01:11:20

Christological issues all through the fourth and fifth centuries.

01:11:26

Nobody had this in their hand. I can document different reading after different reading after different reading all through this.

01:11:36

And yet, if we're being told this is what the autographs read, where's the historical evidence?

01:11:43

Who in the first century? Who in the second century? Who in the third century? The reality is you can look at what anybody gave us in their sermons and their citations and they will differ from this over and over and over again.

01:11:59

Now, before we get into anything else here, I want you to understand something.

01:12:05

This is vitally important. The importance of our conversation is whether we as Reformed people will be able to defend the text of the

01:12:15

New Testament in a meaningful fashion or whether we're simply going to run back to the time of the Reformation and take this, ignore its history, ignore its background, and just say this is it and we're not gonna answer questions about it.

01:12:26

That's what it's about. It's not about what Christianity teaches because I'm gonna tell you something. If you take these two books and you apply the same method of exegesis and hermeneutics to these two books, you will not come up with a different doctrinal system.

01:12:50

The major differences, longer ending of Mark, the woman taken in adultery, those are the two 12 -verse differences, have almost no theological impact whatsoever.

01:13:03

None. 1 John 5 -7 could not possibly be original. If it is, then the entire

01:13:08

Greek manuscript tradition could be corrupted and important readings fall out and have to be restored from the

01:13:13

Latin, so that one's a whole different issue. But the reality is these both teach the

01:13:20

Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection. Blood atonement, everything are in both of these.

01:13:27

And if you apply the same standards, you're gonna have the same teaching. So why are we here? Because I don't care if you use the

01:13:35

King James version of the Bible, but the issue is when we engage in responding to someone like Bart Ehrman, who is corrupting the faith of many, are we going to utilize the entire spectrum of the gifts

01:13:55

God has given to us in the papyri, in the early unseals, or are we gonna throw all of that out and say it's completely irrelevant?

01:14:05

Because think about it. If we had the autographic original in, say, no later than 1644, why are we bothering to do any textual criticism today?

01:14:20

What can it lead to? What can it lead to? I mean, it's led to us being able to identify all sorts of places in here where the reading that this contains is not what anyone in the early church was reading.

01:14:35

Everybody who read Revelation 16 .5 in the early church read about he who is, who was, and is the

01:14:44

Holy One. The Holy One, hosios. No one had ever read esaminos, the plural form.

01:14:54

That's what's in here, because Theodore Bezos felt it fit better, and that's what's in here.

01:15:00

Aren't we still connected to the church that read Revelation chapter 16 for 1 ,500 years before the

01:15:06

Reformation? Isn't that reading what the church had embraced?

01:15:14

Most definitely it is. And so that's what the issue, it's not about naturalism or anything like that at all.

01:15:22

It is what was originally written by the apostles, and how do you determine it?

01:15:29

Has he given us the historical documents to do that, or do we pray about it? That really is the issue this evening.

01:15:37

Thank you for your attention. And with that, we are going to take a break.

01:15:49

It's good to know you could get saved with either version of the Bible. I was getting a little worried there. God is good.

01:15:57

Well, thank you, gentlemen, for what's been a great debate so far. We're going to take a how long break?

01:16:03

It's gonna be a 15 -minute break. We will now move to the cross -examinations period.

01:16:22

Dr. Van Cleek will question Dr. White for 20 minutes. I will keep the time, and so I'll let you know at five minutes or one minute?

01:16:31

One minute will be great. All right, let's get started. All right, Dr. White, thanks for allowing me to ask you these questions.

01:16:41

You find online it's difficult to really have the undivided attention of someone, so I really appreciate this, and I consider

01:16:48

Dr. White to hold his position as he does, and as it appears, really, generally speaking.

01:16:56

So let's be good. We'll see what happens. In Kurt Eichenwald's The Bible So Misunderstood It's Sin, he writes, quote, no television preacher has ever read the

01:17:05

Bible, neither has any evangelical politician, neither has the pope, neither have I, neither have you.

01:17:11

At best, we've all read a bad translation, a translation of translations of translations of hard copies, copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on hundreds of times.

01:17:20

With that as a backdrop, is the NA28 equal to the autographs? I have no idea what

01:17:27

Kurt Eichenwald and his manifest ignorance has to do with the question, but I'll answer the question.

01:17:33

As you know, we believe that the NA28 represents the earliest text of the

01:17:42

New Testament, and that every reading that was in the original autographs is found either in the text itself or in the footnotes at the bottom of the page.

01:17:54

I do believe in the doctrine, not doctrine, but the concept of tenacity, as explained by Kurt Ahlund in his work many years ago, and that is that all the readings in the

01:18:05

New Testament persist in the manuscript tradition, including the original readings. I believe that is a vitally important aspect of why we do the work that we do.

01:18:16

Okay, just so we're clear, I purposely phrased these questions as I did because I recognize that the

01:18:22

Q &A time can be a time that can really absorb the other person's time, so I purposely phrased them as yes or no's.

01:18:28

If you think that it's not a fair question, you can say it's not a fair question. If you don't understand it, you can say that, but as best as possible,

01:18:35

I've purposefully sorted these questions out as yes or no's. If you want to object to it because you think it's a bad question,

01:18:41

I'm fine with that, but this could turn into a long talk, and really I'm trying to get through my questions.

01:18:47

So in the end, after you've concluded, would you conclude that the NA28 does indeed equal the autograph?

01:18:52

Well, again, I just answered the question. I said that the autographic readings are found in the text or in the footnotes provided to the text because that represents the entirety of the manuscript tradition where the autographs are found.

01:19:08

How about in the body of the text? I'm sorry? Is the body of the NA28 equal to the autographs?

01:19:14

No. Okay. Is the Gospel of John and the NA28 in the body of the text equal to the autographs?

01:19:21

I think I just answered that. So no? Yes. Or yes? It's a little frustrating because, once again, just so everyone can understand, when

01:19:33

I'm talking about you have the body of the text and then you have the textual notes at the bottom, so when you have a variation in one manuscript or other manuscripts, the readings are provided to you on the page.

01:19:44

Now, this is not an exhaustive text. The ECM would probably be the better thing to ask about because it's significantly closer to being exhaustive in the readings that it provides.

01:19:55

And so what we're talking about is, I'm saying the autographic readings exist in the manuscript tradition that's been preserved by God providentially over time.

01:20:04

That's what I'm saying. I think that's a pretty straightforward assertion. Right, so 1

01:20:10

John chapter four, is that equal to the New Testament autograph? I think, according to the NA28, there's 37 registered variants in that chapter.

01:20:18

Again. Is the body of chapter four equal to the autographs? Okay, I'll keep repeating myself because we're asking the exact same question.

01:20:26

The exact same question is, you have the body of 1 John chapter four and then you have the references and all the original readings are contained in one of those two sources.

01:20:37

I'll keep answering the same way if we need to do it, but it would be better if we got to something more substantive. So is there any verse in the

01:20:44

Gospel of John in the body of this text that's equal to the autograph? Oh, certainly. There are plenty of verses that don't contain variation.

01:20:52

Well, just because they don't contain variation, do you equate that to being autographic? Given that there's no evidence of any break in the transmission of the text, yes.

01:21:04

Is any, okay. So based on the evidence, if there was evidence found about anything, in any verse in the

01:21:15

Bible, if there was sufficient old evidence, papyri evidence from the second century, is there any verse that you would not change if we could find evidence for that change?

01:21:31

The theoretical question being asked is, could we find a papyrus that contains, say, one chapter from the

01:21:40

Gospel of John that would have new readings in it? It's extremely unlikely that that would happen because of the fact that we already have those very, very early papyrus manuscripts, and we know what the

01:21:55

Gospel of John looked like all the way up to possibly as early as 100 AD. So would we love to have such new discoveries?

01:22:07

It would be wonderful. Would those in any way disrupt the message of the Gospel of John? There's really no reason to think that that could happen.

01:22:16

So again, if we could find a second century manuscript that changed the

01:22:21

Gospel of John in some way that you don't think it should be changed now, would you be willing to change it? Asked and answered.

01:22:27

I just answered that question. Okay, so I suppose it's a yes. The reality is that there is an assumption, a hidden assumption being made that you could have a second century manuscript that has no copies that had nothing to do with the transmission of the text over time.

01:22:46

And we have not yet encountered anything like that. And so it's a theoretical question that's a fantasy.

01:22:56

It doesn't have anything really meaningful to do with actually doing textual criticism. Yeah, it's not a hypothetical question.

01:23:02

It's a real question that speaks to how you would treat the Bible. So again, it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, right?

01:23:09

Tell me if I'm wrong, that if we found evidence to change a passage of scripture for any verse in the

01:23:15

New Testament, you would be willing, not to say that you would, but you would be willing to change any verse in the

01:23:22

New Testament based on the evidence. Again. Is that correct? Again, you're wrong because you don't, with all due respect, having read your book about poking the bear,

01:23:33

I don't see that you've ever done textual criticism and hence you are making up fantastic theoretical ideas that don't work in the real world because we are talking about how a text has come down to us and it's come down through multiple lines.

01:23:51

So you're talking about one line, I'm talking about multiple lines, unless you can refute that it has come from multiple lines, the rest of it really doesn't make any sense.

01:24:00

Yeah, so I guess I'm just not gonna give my questions answered tonight. So Dr. Riddle asked you this question before.

01:24:05

You gave a similar answer. And so I guess I'm pressing you on it again. This is an opportunity, someone who has a doctor's degree to answer the question whether or not there's a single verse of the

01:24:14

Bible that you would not be willing to change if there were evidence to change it. This is a simple question that could be answered by someone with master's degrees, 170 some mediated debates.

01:24:26

Like I think that this could be something you could answer. So is that a yes or a no? Out of respect for the audience, asked and answered.

01:24:32

I have already answered the question. You are assuming things that are not in evidence, provide things that are in evidence, we can have meaningful conversation.

01:24:38

Okay, how many of your Christian beliefs are primarily based on posterior historical evidence? Very few at all, if any, but of course, there is a vast difference between my

01:24:50

Christian beliefs and the readings of manuscripts, which are historical realities. So my belief in the

01:24:57

Genesis flood is not parallel and it is a major category error to make it parallel to the readings of say the manuscripts that Erasmus possessed.

01:25:15

So, okay, I can accept that. If the evidence is overwhelming in favor of some X, whatever particular that may be, do you believe it is best concluded that X is true?

01:25:26

Some X? What is X? As a placeholder, X is a placeholder. So, you know, it could be like where you wanna go to eat or it could be a manuscript, it could be a reading, some belief, right?

01:25:38

So if the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of some X, whatever you wanna put in there, do you believe it is best to conclude that X is true?

01:25:48

We would have to define whether we're talking about historical statements, scientific statements, mathematical statements.

01:25:56

I mean, there are all sorts of different ways. How, what kind of evidence do we have? I mean, we're told that there's overwhelming evidence of the evolutionary theory.

01:26:03

I don't believe it. So, I don't know how to answer the question because it's not specific enough.

01:26:11

Well, that's helpful. So would you agree that a mountain of evidence is not necessarily determinative of truth?

01:26:18

If the mountain of evidence is actual evidence in relationship to the subject being addressed, of course it is.

01:26:25

But when it comes to evolutionary theory, it's the fundamental foundations of how you analyze evidence that's up for grabs.

01:26:34

Would you consider evidence to be part of arguments? Of course. 64 days ago on the dividing line, you quoted at minute 36, "'Put your hand on the

01:26:48

Bible "'and swearing by a higher authority than you, "'the collection of man's arguments can't be piled up "'to equal an authority higher than God.'"

01:26:54

Do you concur with that? Of course. So if a collection of man's arguments, which include evidence, cannot conclude or reach the authority of God, then why is it that you do this with manuscript evidence?

01:27:08

Category error. We're talking about historical reality of determining what the original readings are. We are not talking about the ultimate authority of God to define law, truth, meaning of history, everything else.

01:27:21

We are talking about how you determine what the readings that showed up in this are and why they were not the readings that people before this had.

01:27:33

Very simple difference. Can you define a category error for us, please? Of course. We've heard a number of them this evening.

01:27:40

It's where you make application of an argument or facts and data that have application in one specific area, and you move that over to another specific area.

01:27:55

So using Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology and Warranted Belief and applying it to historical documents, which he never did, would be one example of a category error.

01:28:07

Confusing canon with the text, so in other words, specific readings like in Jeremiah, is another example of a category error where you are moving the data out of where it has meaning into an area where it does not.

01:28:22

So according to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, quote, it is thought that they, that is category mistakes, goes beyond simple error or ordinary mistakes.

01:28:34

As when one attributes a property to a thing, which that thing could have but does not have, since category mistakes involve attribution of properties of things, two things, that those things cannot have.

01:28:48

So the idea of using a category error, if it cannot have, Dr. White, have you demonstrated that my categories cannot have these properties?

01:28:59

Yes. Or have you simply just said, there are category errors? No, I have, because you have confused the canonicity of the

01:29:09

Gospel of John with the specific readings of the text of the Gospel of John. We all recognize that we can see that the

01:29:16

Gospel of John exists as a body of literature, but the specific readings of manuscripts down through time are not the same as the canonicity of the

01:29:27

Gospel of John. And nobody prior to the modern period of printed texts and electronic texts and everything else could have ever even imagined of not recognizing the distinction between those two things because they all lived in a world where every manuscript they read was different than the same manuscript of the same book because they were all handwritten.

01:29:50

Is the canon inspired? Is the canon inspired? Not in the sense of scripture.

01:29:56

The canon, I agree with Dr. Kruger, and I gave a good presentation, I think, on this at G3 a couple years ago.

01:30:04

The canon is an artifact of revelation. It's not the object of revelation because if it's the object of revelation, then it's the 28th book of the

01:30:11

New Testament and needs to be recognized as such, and now you end up dealing with Rome on the issue of who's the source of the canon.

01:30:19

Okay, so again, just for all the audience, would you be willing to say for all of them that the canon is not inspired?

01:30:26

In the context in which I just said, the canon is the artifact of inspiration, not the object of inspiration.

01:30:33

If you want me to explain that, I did in my book, Scripture Alone, you can look it up, but it's a very, very important distinction.

01:30:42

Okay. Are the words of Scripture inspired? Of course. How are they differently inspired than the canon is inspired?

01:30:50

Because the canon is an artifact of revelation and not the subject of revelation. Yes, can you explain what an artifact of revelation is for all of us?

01:30:56

Sure. Now I get to explain to you how the canon came about. That's great. Since God inspired some books and not all books, then the canon of Scripture comes into existence when he inspires the very first books and when he finishes inspiring the last book.

01:31:17

You have a canon that exists and God has perfect knowledge of it. It is totally different than our coming to understand what the canon is over a process of time and history.

01:31:29

If you do not recognize that distinction, you will have a very difficult time dealing with Rome's claims to being the source through the church of what the canon actually is.

01:31:43

Is it true that you're not a fan of Anthony Fauci's mask and social distancing mandates? Is it true that I'm driving a fifth wheel even today?

01:31:53

Yes, it's obviously true. Did it bother you that the experts first said no mask, then flipped to yes mask, or first no vaccine, then definitely vaccine, then in some places vaccine card to travel?

01:32:06

Worst thing was that data already existed prior to March of 2020 in regards to effectivity of masks and so on and so forth.

01:32:17

So the experts were just getting their money. Are you an epidemiologist?

01:32:24

Nope, but I did major in biology in college. It was Department of Fellow of Anatomy and Physiology, so I am not untrained in the area.

01:32:32

If you're not an expert, then why do you reject the experts? Oh my goodness, because many experts reject the experts, and the fact of the matter is, when you have the largest private transfer of wealth to other people, including big pharma,

01:32:48

I recognize the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil. Is it true that Bruce Metzger regarded the

01:32:58

Byzantine text type to be corrupt and disfigured? I would imagine so. Don't remember the exact quote, but probably.

01:33:05

Okay. It is in Textual Guide to Greek New Testament, page 26. Is it true now that the

01:33:12

CBGM scholarship regards the Byzantine text type to contain very old texts? I'm sorry, what? Is it true now that the

01:33:19

CBGM scholarship regards the Byzantine text type to contain very old texts? There are representatives of the

01:33:26

Byzantine texts, for example, in Manuscript 33, that the CBGM analysis, and if you want me to explain

01:33:32

CBGM analysis, I will, but the CBGM analysis has placed more weight upon them.

01:33:39

However, if you look at the Pastoral Epistles, not Pastoral, the General Epistles and Acts and Mark, there have been a very small number of actual changes between the

01:33:52

Nessiolan text type and the result of the running of the CBGM analysis. I think it was 30 changes, almost none of which impacted the meaning of the text whatsoever in the

01:34:03

General Epistles. How much time do I have? Two minutes and 28 seconds, right?

01:34:21

I'll leave it there. Okay. Dr. White, it's yours.

01:34:37

Dr. Van Cleek, if we were able to examine the autographs, would they be identical in every respect to Scrivener's edition of the

01:34:44

TR? Yes, that's the case I would make. Is it your position that the church on earth has possessed the

01:34:51

TR in every age, or did major portions or eras of the church have less than the perfect version of the word of God?

01:34:58

I would say that the church has had the autographic text, but not always between two covers.

01:35:07

Okay. Well, all right. Can you identify anyone in the second century who possessed the

01:35:15

TR in quotes from it? No. Third? Third century?

01:35:24

I can't identify them, no. Anyone from the fourth century? No. 10th?

01:35:30

10th? Nope. Okay, so you are saying this is the autograph, but when

01:35:38

I ask you who in church history is utilizing this in distinction from the readings of the

01:35:48

Nessie Olin, you can't give us anyone up to, well, who's the first one?

01:35:53

Is it after Erasmus? Simply because I can't name somebody doesn't make it necessarily wrong.

01:36:01

It's a fallacy in logic. Just because you can't name how your phone works doesn't mean you can't know your phone works.

01:36:08

Like, it's the same thing here. I can't name somebody from the third century, therefore I have to be wrong. Like, that doesn't work anywhere.

01:36:14

Okay, so you're making the claim that the church has always possessed this. Did the church purposefully recognize this over against this?

01:36:26

The church purposely recognized the autographs. Okay, so the church purposely recognized this in history?

01:36:37

Yeah, they recognized the autographs in history. And yet, when I then ask you for someone from the church in history that did that, you say

01:36:45

I can't give you anybody, and that doesn't mean anything. Well, let me give you an example. So, in myths and mistakes again, if you look at the first four centuries of the

01:36:53

Book of Mark, there is absolutely zero attestation for six chapters of the

01:37:00

Book of Mark in the first four centuries. And now I'm supposed to be like, aha, look, we don't have six chapters of the

01:37:05

Book of Mark because we don't have attestation in the first four centuries to it? No, this is simply because you don't have attestation or you can't name a person's name doesn't all of a sudden make it not true.

01:37:19

So, you don't see a difference between the recognition that our earliest manuscripts of Mark are fragmentary, and yet when we do have full manuscripts of Mark, they all read the same thing.

01:37:30

You don't see a difference between that and my asking you to give us evidence when you claim the church said this is it, and I go, when and where, and you go,

01:37:42

I can't tell you. You don't see a difference between those two? No, I don't think so, no.

01:37:48

All right, okay. One thing that's really important about this is that where Dr. White and I disagree,

01:37:54

I think, fundamentally, is that Dr. White's position seems to me to be utterly naturalistic.

01:38:00

He continues to propound the idea of the necessity of evidence, except almost none of your beliefs, he admitted almost none of his beliefs are founded on evidence, and yet he harps on the principium cognoscendi.

01:38:15

The word of God is where you get all of your Christian beliefs from, so the fountain from which you get all your beliefs from is predicated on evidential method, except you don't do that with anything else, and that's where we disagree, because I don't think that's.

01:38:29

Okay, Dr. Van Cleek, is the reading of fellowship at Ephesians 3 .9

01:38:37

in the Textus Receptus the same category as my believing that the flood took place, are they the same thing?

01:38:46

Well, not for you, no. They are for you, though? Indeed. Okay, so in Ephesians 3 .9,

01:38:54

there is one manuscript that has the TR reading. Every manuscript throughout church history has a different reading, oikonomia, rather than koinonia, and that to you has the same level of authority.

01:39:10

That one manuscript has the same level of authority as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No, no, no, again, that would be truncating this.

01:39:17

The entire argument that you're doing is all based on posterior historical evidence. My argument is much broader than that.

01:39:23

The reason why I believe fellowship, or the reading there in the TR, is because in the end, it is not really my choice, right?

01:39:34

It is that the church, particularly the Holy Spirit, working through the church, as he does with all your other beliefs, by the way, everything that you believe is the

01:39:43

Holy Spirit teaching you how to be a good husband or a good wife, how to be an obedient child, how to submit to government, and maybe not, right?

01:39:53

All of that boils down to the Holy Spirit teaching you. This is how you do Christian belief.

01:39:59

So when we say, okay, well, should I believe the woman caught in adultery is the word of God? The question is not manuscript evidence, primarily.

01:40:07

It's whether or not the spirit of God working through the people of God by the word of God convinces you of such.

01:40:12

So, Dr. Van Cleef. And this is where it begins. So what you're saying is that the church, at some point in time, changed what it said about Ephesians 3 .9.

01:40:24

Well, the church has changed its mind about a lot of things. By the Holy Spirit. Oh, no, it can't be by the

01:40:30

Holy Spirit. We do make errors, that is for sure. Okay, so for the first 1 ,200 years of church history, the church had oikonomia at Ephesians 3 .9,

01:40:41

and then the church changed to koinonia, and when did it do that, and when did the church gather, who was at the council, and what did they examine in their analysis of that text?

01:40:54

Again, I just think that this is a broken way to look at it. Because we have about 5 ,100, according to recent tallies, 5 ,100

01:41:02

Greek manuscripts. 5 ,600. It's actually 51, according to Missing Mistakes. They said that's probably the better average.

01:41:11

Anyway, the point is is that if you end up having a text that is the way that he's described it, the point is there are so many manuscripts that we're missing across time that he cannot account for, and so he's making us make a decision based on what we have right now, as if the church has only been able to make a decision about what we have right now.

01:41:35

The point is is he's arguing from absence of data and trying to propound a positive argument.

01:41:42

He doesn't know what the church had 1 ,000 years ago. He guesses, but he doesn't know, and so he doesn't know what the church was writing, and so now he's making me give an account about where that reading came from, when the vast majority of the manuscripts we do have, or the vast majority of the manuscripts in Christianity are lost.

01:42:01

We have a fraction of a fraction of the New Testament manuscripts, so, and he says, now you have to make a choice based on a fraction of a fraction.

01:42:09

No, I don't have to make a choice. So, Dr. Van Cleef, you can't show me one person who preached a sermon and gave your reading, quoted a verse and gave it your way, but you are telling us that the church, by the

01:42:25

Spirit of God, tells us this is the reading. Is that how you do textual, is that how

01:42:30

Erasmus derived this? Everybody see this? Everything is coming back to textual criticism, a bit of a

01:42:38

Freudian slip there. It's all coming back to how you make an analysis of the evidence. Again, this is a straight up Bart Ehrman, unchristian, atheistic argument.

01:42:47

He has made no argument at all from scripture and how Christians formulate belief.

01:42:53

He could make an argument from philosophy if he wanted. I even let that, I left that out of my arguments, all right?

01:42:58

I could have brought that in here, but no. No, we're all just stuck up on the evidence. But none of you believe what you believe based on evidence.

01:43:06

Except, you know what? For the Bible, you better believe it. Because James White, Dr. White says, you know what?

01:43:12

The evidence says it should be a different word. So, that's how we come to the conclusion. Dr. Van Cleef, should your beliefs be determined by the content of scripture?

01:43:25

Yes. So, therefore, your belief about what Ephesians 3 .9

01:43:30

should be determined by the content of Ephesians 3 .9, right? Yes.

01:43:37

Okay, so the reading that Paul wrote in Ephesians 3 .9 should be very important to us, should it not?

01:43:44

Yes. You cannot give us any instance where the church has spoken about the proper reading of Ephesians 3 .9,

01:43:55

can you? Well, right here. It's been this way for a very long time. It's been this way for hundreds of years.

01:44:02

Hundreds of years, okay. So, the Latin Vulgate was used by God in the Western church for 1 ,100 years and has numerous readings in it that this rejects.

01:44:12

So, which was the Holy Spirit? Well, we would say that just like normal church, at least this is a great thing.

01:44:17

Everybody know about federal vision? Big fight among Presbyterians about whether who's in the covenant and who's not.

01:44:23

It's a big Presbyterian fight right now. All we're saying is that in the end, yes, sometimes the church can make a mistake.

01:44:31

But saying that does not all of a sudden say, well, then we gotta get rid of the church in making the decision because it makes mistakes.

01:44:38

No, that's the way God laid it out for us. You come to your conclusion by the Holy Spirit, speaking through his words to your heart and you submit to those words by faith.

01:44:46

That's how you come to any belief, including the words in Scripture. And so, if that's the way it gets done, can mistakes happen?

01:44:53

Certainly can. But does that recuse the church from its responsibility? No. Same thing.

01:44:58

Your husband can make mistakes. Your wife can make mistakes. Well, then let's abolish marriage and let's do something else. It's a ridiculous idea.

01:45:04

Do you, Dr. Van Cleek, do you really believe that the list of beliefs you just laid out has anything whatsoever to do with answering the question when you are saying that this is what we must follow and we ask you, where did this come from?

01:45:24

And your answer is, we pray about it. Is that how you, have you prayed about every variant in the

01:45:32

New Testament? Have you? The answer to the question is just to tell you that this is how belief works.

01:45:41

Like, I can't even believe I have to defend this. Like, I'm in a group of Christians trying to say, hey, you know how you believe in your

01:45:47

Bible? Like, you believe in everything else. You know how you believe in a reading in your Bible? Like, you believe in everything else.

01:45:53

And now I have to defend that, though. Like, it's like, no, no, that's incorrect. You can't believe in the Bible like you believe in everything else because the

01:46:00

Bible's just so different because, you know, we have manuscripts. So when I ask a

01:46:05

Mormon, when a Mormon missionary says, I prayed about the Book of Mormon and the

01:46:10

Holy Spirit testified to me that the Book of Mormon is the Word of God, how would you respond?

01:46:15

Because you just told us the only way we can know that the Bible's the Word of God is by praying about it.

01:46:21

I would respond like a good presuppositionalist and say, you don't serve the living and true God and you don't believe in the authority of the

01:46:26

Word of God. Therefore, you're wrong. It's not the Holy Spirit. It's something weird. That's nice, and he's gonna respond by saying, well, you've got a different Holy Spirit, and that's really weird.

01:46:35

So are you seriously suggesting that what the, are you seriously suggesting that John Calvin taught us to pray over differences in manuscripts?

01:46:47

Can you give me a single place in the voluminous writings of the Reformer of Geneva where he taught us to pray to determine when the

01:46:59

Greek manuscripts differed from the Latin Vulgate, for example? Dr. White said he read my books. Yes, he did.

01:47:05

And if he read my books, then he knows it's not prayer. He knows that in the end, it is properly functioning faculties in an environment that's conducive to those faculties according to a design plan aimed at truth and properly so aimed.

01:47:18

That's not prayer. That is how the Spirit of God works in this world and by regeneration.

01:47:25

So no, I don't have to do that. But to his question, Alvin Plantinga calls what

01:47:31

I just described to you the Aquinas -Calvin model, which means yes, we do make the argument from Calvin for those five steps, properly functioning faculties in an environment conducive to those faculties according to a design plan, properly aimed or aimed at truth and properly so aimed.

01:47:48

Okay. So yeah, I guess the answer is yes, I can point you to Calvin. Okay. It's Calvin's theology. And the reality is that neither

01:47:55

Plantinga nor Calvin ever made the application to the text of the New Testament that you do. Incorrect. It's incorrect, actually.

01:48:01

Can you now give me the example where Calvin gave that in regards to how we are supposed to do textual criticism?

01:48:07

Now, you said Plantinga, and so Plantinga makes an argument when he gets to making his Aquinas -Calvin model.

01:48:12

It's only at one spot because what he wants to do is he wants to stick with kind of the bigger confessions or the bigger displays or summaries of the

01:48:20

Christian faith. But he does point out that there is one, I think it's the Helvetic Confession, that does indeed say that we need to ascribe to every word spoken by God.

01:48:30

And then he says in warranted Christian belief, he says, but I'm gonna put that to the side because that's not my argument.

01:48:37

My argument is for the doctrine of God. And that's what my PhD was about because I watched Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the greatest

01:48:43

Christian philosopher alive, say this is something we could talk about, but I'm gonna set that to the side.

01:48:50

And that's what you're supposed to do with PhD dissertations. You pick up something that somebody put down. So again, this is incorrect, and that's partly because I don't think

01:48:56

Dr. White has read Plantinga on this point. Does Alvin Plantinga use the Texas Receptus Only position? I don't think so.

01:49:04

So he doesn't make the application you did. So you might have misunderstood him. Is that possible? I clearly didn't misunderstand him because he said you're allowed to apply the

01:49:11

Aquinas -Calvin model, particularly the extended model, toward scripture. But he hasn't done it, right?

01:49:17

Well, he hasn't done a lot of things. Okay, all right. So only you've done it, but you're claiming that authority.

01:49:22

All right, so Erasmus. Erasmus had manuscripts in his hands that had variants in them.

01:49:34

Is that true? I would imagine so. And Erasmus had to make decisions as to what he put into what became the

01:49:43

Texas Receptus, right? He did make decisions, yes. Was he inspired? Negative.

01:49:50

So the choices that he made were providentially ordered somehow?

01:50:00

Well, I mean, I guess general providence, yeah. Okay, so he's doing textual criticism on his manuscripts, and that's what creates the

01:50:12

TR. Was he infallible in his work? No.

01:50:18

So he may have made mistakes that are now part of the TR. Part of my

01:50:24

TR? Yes. No. Okay, so he was infallible then.

01:50:30

Negative. So you have something other - Have you ever taught college? So you have something - You can make seriously good guesses.

01:50:36

So you have something other than Erasmus's work that you would be pointing us to?

01:50:42

Ultimately, yeah, I guess. It's the bulk, it's in large part Erasmus's work, but yeah. Okay, 1550

01:50:47

Stephanus. Beautiful text, by the way. It is. I love that. Like, that's the original paper, right?

01:50:55

This is a 1550 Stephanus. It is the real thing. Do you touch it with your hands? I do. Okay, so was

01:51:04

Stephanus infallible in the work that he did with Erasmus to produce this?

01:51:09

No, he's not infallible. Okay. So the various printed texts that eventually became this, was it

01:51:20

Scrivener then that was infallible? Or are you saying you can have an infallible text?

01:51:26

Do you believe it's infallible? I believe that is every word in the autograph of the New Testament. Okay, so the process whereby these words came into this book was a fallible process because you've said

01:51:39

Erasmus and Stephanus, we might as well throw Beza in there, were not infallible. So it was an infallible process that produced an infallible document.

01:51:48

No. Okay. No, I wouldn't say that because in the end, it is the Holy Spirit who preserves his text.

01:51:55

And he hadn't preserved that text. And the Holy Spirit doesn't make mistakes. Okay, and yet the Holy Spirit is the one who gave

01:52:02

Erasmus the manuscripts that he had to analyze that had errors in them, right? No, the Holy Spirit didn't give some,

01:52:08

I mean, unless you have some kind of like odd view of second causes. Okay, so Erasmus has to make textual critical decisions.

01:52:21

Were those naturalistic, since you used that terminology, was he being a naturalist when he did that? That I don't know.

01:52:27

I don't know what's going on in his heart. I don't know if he was just looking at it just like a book or if he was actually doing it as an act of worship.

01:52:35

It seems when I listened to you, I listened to other guys, he was actually trying to do some Latin first before he actually moved to the

01:52:42

Greeks. So the Greek wasn't really on his radar. Right, I agree completely. And so his is the foundation.

01:52:51

It was not infallible. Stephanus is not infallible. Baze is not infallible. At what point did the readings that Erasmus came to, fallibly, become infallible?

01:53:05

Again, you keep, this is again, this is where you're kind of just stuck here. You're stuck on this.

01:53:10

Yes, I am stuck on the history. No, no, no, not the question. Because this is a historical document, yes. No, no, no, right, right, that's the idea.

01:53:16

So what we're doing is we are, the language that my dad and I use, that the argument is transcendent -less.

01:53:24

That it is merely historical. And that's where he just keeps dragging us all back there. Dr. White, one minute.

01:53:30

Not to this, not yet. Not one time has he argued for the role of the spirit in your heart and mind to believe your

01:53:39

Bible. Every one of these is boiling down to somebody you don't know, in a manuscript you don't know, and you're supposed to believe it because some smart guy put it in there.

01:53:49

Dr. Van Cleek, you're preaching, I would like you to answer the question. That's the answer to the question. This is a document of history.

01:53:56

It has a history. Not merely history. Not merely history. So when did the spirit of God 30 seconds,

01:54:04

Dr. White. Change the fallible activities and fallible readings into the infallible readings that actually represent the autographs that you can't show us down through history at all?

01:54:17

When did it happen? Yeah, so you just move, talk about a category error. You just move from readings to people, or from people to readings.

01:54:25

The point is is that the way we get from Erasmus and Stephanas and Beza until we get to the Trinitarian. Time, I'm sorry gentlemen,

01:54:30

I have to. Can I not answer that question? Go ahead, go ahead please. Go ahead. The way it works is, it's just like all other belief, that we all grow in our belief.

01:54:41

And so the church grows. We would say that the church grew out of the first century, we get into the Middle Ages, right?

01:54:47

And then we would say in a lot of ways the church didn't grow. In a lot of ways it did. But in a lot of ways it didn't. Made some really wrong turns.

01:54:53

And then the Reformation happens and we see the church grow. I'm not talking about just individuals, though individuals are growing because the church is growing.

01:55:00

And so the same thing happens with our belief in the Bible. Same thing happens with each one of your individual beliefs.

01:55:06

You grow, it's called sanctification. And so the church had Erasmus, so we got away from the

01:55:12

Latin, we went to Greek, which is a huge change. And then we get Beza and Stephanas. And then we get the

01:55:17

TR. Each one of these iterations is a growth. Not because the men, of course the men are fallible.

01:55:23

Yeah, I'll give that to you. But the Holy Spirit is guiding his people, leading his people to believe in his words.

01:55:31

So it's like he believes in everything else. Paul's just, I know I'm not supposed to do this, but so then could the advancement of the critical text and the addition of the other texts be a growth in that same vein?

01:55:44

So the moderator just asked me a question. I'm sorry, I'm new at this, I'll say. This is the hardest part of this job is to keep my mouth shut.

01:55:55

I'm going to stop us now. Anyway, we do have a next section of a cross -examination.

01:56:02

We just finished round one. And so we will go to round two. I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Van Cleek, I feel terrible now.

01:56:08

Anyway, we will go into round two with Dr. White questioning

01:56:15

Dr. Van Cleek. I thought it. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Or are we done? Well, this does reverse it.

01:56:21

You want to keep it going the same? Yeah, like we were going to have to ask questions for 40 minutes straight. Yeah, yeah. If you want to, yeah.

01:56:28

You want to switch it? Which would you rather have? We can switch it. I hadn't seen that, so. That is fine. So in that case,

01:56:34

Dr. Van Cleek, your floor beginning now. All right. 20 minutes. So back to the line of questioning about the

01:56:41

CBGM. Is it true that the original aim of textual criticism was to find the autograph? Yeah.

01:56:47

Is it true now that the aim of textual criticism has implemented terminological change and it now seeks to find the initial text?

01:56:54

Yeah, they're talking about, they'll talk about Ausgang's text as the earliest attainable or something like that.

01:56:59

But for a believing textual critic, the Ausgang's text is the autograph. So it's not really much of a difference.

01:57:06

Is it also true that the initial text per Gerd Mink is multifarious in meaning and therefore can, but regularly does not mean autograph or original?

01:57:15

He had a lot of interesting viewpoints, but I practice textual criticism as a believer because God has given us his word and therefore

01:57:24

I want to know what was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. When you do textual criticism, do you allow it?

01:57:29

By the way, I was not saying he was not a believer. I'm just simply saying German textual critics are a unique group.

01:57:39

They're smart, but they're unique, just so you know. Does it bother you at all that the textual experts first said one thing and now are saying something very different about the

01:57:47

Byzantine text type and the autographs? No, not at all. Okay. Can you understand why some are skeptical of textual scholarship, where at one point text types were important and now text types have largely been abandoned?

01:57:59

No, first of all, most people don't even know that. And secondly, the issue always is what is the best understanding of the state of the material that we have in regards to what was originally written by the apostles?

01:58:15

We must, we have to approach that in such a fashion that it is defensible and not merely a circular argument because it's a historical reality.

01:58:29

So I think it's great. There has to be advancement. There is being advancement. It's very challenging, but I think it's great.

01:58:36

Can you understand why some are skeptical of textual, I already asked that, can you understand why some are skeptical of the same thing, textual scholarship, where at one point the aim was explicitly the autograph and now the aim is the initial text, which is at best a relative implicit aim at the autograph?

01:58:51

The vast majority of people are not even familiar with the argumentation about Ausgang's text or anything else, and believing textual critics are still focused upon one thing.

01:59:01

We want to know what was given to us by the Holy Spirit of God in the first century in those written documents, and the more and more data that we are able to come up with and now the fact that we have now collated far more manuscripts than have ever been collated before, that is we know all their readings and we can compare them with one another is a fantastic advancement.

01:59:24

It's a great gift from God and should not cause anybody a problem at all unless you think that recognizing the transmission of the text over time is a bad thing.

01:59:38

So again, if you do know about the Ausgang's text, if you do know about initial text, if you do know about the abandonment of text types, can you understand why some are skeptical?

01:59:49

No, no, I can't, only if they're ignorant. Ignorance could make you skeptical, but it's just, it's ignorance.

01:59:56

Can you understand why some are skeptical? At one point the Byzantine was disfigured and corrupt and now it tells us that there are very old texts that are to be found in the

02:00:05

Byzantine. No, I think it's wonderful because it's well known that since the days of like Dean Burgan, we've recognized that Westcott and Hort had too much reliance upon Sinaitics, the

02:00:15

Vatican and so on and so forth. Manuscripts like 33, some of the ancient readings in the Byzantine manuscript tradition, that's wonderful.

02:00:21

Why? Because it all takes us back closer to the original and that's what we want. We want to have that level of information.

02:00:28

So there is a self -correcting mechanism involved in scholarship if scholarship doesn't get tainted by money and stuff like that and that's the problem.

02:00:39

Indeed. Can you understand why some are skeptical of textual scholarship when at one point the

02:00:45

New Testament text is settled, but Wasserman and Gurry with the CBGM has increased the number of uncertain passages in Acts by 100 % and in the general epistles by 33 % per their introduction to the

02:00:55

CBGM? Again, people need to understand what's being said there because there's an assumption that really doesn't mean a whole lot and that is in the

02:01:05

UBS text platform there had been an A, B, C, D rating that had been given to various variants only in the

02:01:15

UBS. It was only in the translator's version. And then CBGM has changed that and is now actually giving, like when there's two readings that have very, very close, what's called coherence.

02:01:30

I don't have time to go into what all this is about, but it's fascinating, it's wonderful. Then they mark that out for the person who's studying these things.

02:01:38

Believe me, Erasmus would have just loved this.

02:01:44

He would have thought this was just great to be able to have that kind of information. He really would have. We talk all the time,

02:01:51

I'm pretty old. Yeah, exactly. Can you understand why some are skeptical of textual scholarship when 80 % of the changes suggested by the

02:02:02

CBGM are derived from the supposedly corrupt and disfigured Byzantine text form? Nope. Okay.

02:02:09

Because I've actually examined what those differences are and almost none of them impact the meaning of the text, the translation of the text.

02:02:20

They're almost always very, very small and minor things. And where there have been major changes, like in Jude 5, that wasn't a

02:02:29

Byzantine versus anything else type of a situation anyway. Who gets to make the claim that it is small or doesn't affect the text?

02:02:37

Who has the authority to make that claim? Well, if I have to explain to you an obscure element of Greek grammar to even explain why the variant even exists, that makes it minor.

02:02:50

If it does not impact the translation into the English language, if the content of the meaning is not impacted, then that's obviously minor.

02:02:59

If you read Jesus or Lord at Jude 5, that's important. That's very important.

02:03:06

So I think most of us can recognize that there is a difference between those two. Why should we trust your opinion on that?

02:03:12

Well, you can learn Greek and discover that I'm telling you the truth too. Same thing. And then

02:03:17

I would find that you're an error, right? So do you agree with the famed evangelical text critic Dan Wallace when he writes, a theological a priori has no place in textual criticism?

02:03:30

I think what Dan was actually talking about there was not a theological a priori in regards to a belief in inspiration of scripture or something like that.

02:03:37

He was saying, if you go to the manuscripts and you have a certain doctrine, let's use one we can all understand.

02:03:46

If you have a certain eschatology that you're really big on. And there is, for example, a variant at Revelation 5 in regards to being a kingdom of priests as to whether it's future or present.

02:04:00

It has eschatological implications. His idea is you can't allow your theological a priori to influence your reading of the evidence just to try to make sure that the resultant reading just happens to support your eschatological perspectives.

02:04:20

That's what I understand Dan to be saying. I don't believe that you were correct. I almost called and asked, but I didn't.

02:04:28

But I don't think you were correct because of his own statements elsewhere in stating that what that means is you can't have a theological a priori.

02:04:37

I'm dealing with the word of God. Of course, as a believer, I'm dealing with the word of God. But all that means is

02:04:43

I need to be all that more accurate in my handling of it. Nothing more than that. You agree with Daniel Wallace that we should be more like the new generation of evangelical scholars and be, quote, far more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.

02:04:58

I think what he's talking about there is something that I do agree with him 1 ,000 % is that is there's a lot of people that are willing to trade truth for certainty.

02:05:07

There are a lot of people that are willing to trade truth for certainty. My King James Only friends trade truth for certainty.

02:05:16

They absolutely insist, I am certain. I need to have an absolutely certain text.

02:05:21

Even though the King James had all those different readings and stuff in it in the margins, I ignore all that. I need to have an absolutely certain text and they'll trade truth for that certainty.

02:05:30

I think that's probably what he was referring to there. I don't have the context to say that for certain, but that's probably what he was saying. Same context.

02:05:36

Do you agree with this new generation of evangelical scholars that, quote, we may not have an absolutely pure text, nor can we have certainty about everything we do have?

02:05:47

Absolutely pure text in what way? I don't know what the context was. Well, I don't know. Did you not read Myths and Mistakes?

02:05:53

Yes, I did, but I did not memorize it. Did you? Well, I mean, I thought that would be a pretty potent thing to remember, but perhaps not.

02:06:01

All right, continuing on. Would you be in favor of this? Are you in favor of including in the

02:06:06

Bible textual footnotes representing the prevailing conclusions of science and textual criticism? Like the King James translators did, yes, that's a very good idea.

02:06:15

The fall of Jericho never happened according to prevailing archaeological conclusions. Would you be in favor of placing a footnote in the margin of the

02:06:21

Bible to this effect? As long as you have a footnote that says, and there's all sorts of really good evidence that it did.

02:06:27

No, there actually isn't. I'm sorry? There actually isn't. This is in the book on Five Views of Preservation, I think it is, and in that,

02:06:37

Pete Enns argues that there really hardly is maybe one study. I disagree, and so that is not, again, huge category error.

02:06:48

What's relevant in a footnote, it's what's relevant in the column, is what the manuscripts read, and that's what the

02:06:54

King James translators gave us. They gave us what manuscripts read and what other possible translations there would be, either because of that or just it's a difficult text to translate and it could be translated this way.

02:07:07

That's the type of information that is, I think, vitally important to be put into a text, not commentary on archeological stuff.

02:07:17

If you wanna have a archeology study Bible, I'm sure there's probably 20 of them. I don't get into study

02:07:23

Bibles personally, but if you wanna have that, that's fine, but I was talking about the actual main text of a translation. Are manuscripts under the discipline of archeology?

02:07:36

Their provenance is, not their interpretation. Okay. So where they were found, when they were dated, stuff like that.

02:07:46

64 days ago, you wrote the author thereof, again, quoting from the, I believe, Lundenbaps Confession, if you believe

02:07:52

God is the author of all scripture, you are a small minority. If God speaks it, it is true by nature, not by proof.

02:07:59

Oh, look at that archeology over there. Am I diminishing archeology? No, but that is not sufficient to establish

02:08:06

God is speaking. So given that manuscripts are under the providence of archeology, would you conclude that manuscripts are not sufficient to establish

02:08:17

God is speaking? Well, I think that's one of the major errors in especially the poking the bear book is that you assume that textual criticism is actually supposed to prove that the

02:08:30

Bible is the word of God. I don't believe that. We wanna know what was originally written. It's the spirit of God that makes me obedient to that and makes me wanna submit to that.

02:08:39

Those are two different things. Amen. They are absolutely two different things. So it has never, never been, never anywhere suggested that the study of manuscripts is meant to bring you to faith that that's the word of God.

02:08:53

We study the manuscripts to know what was originally written and to defend them against critics that would say that we can't know what was back there and things like that.

02:09:03

Or to be honest, this evening say, we can't know anything. Therefore, we just simply grab one, say this is it and make it an ahistorical document.

02:09:12

And that's what's really concerning to me tonight. Creation did not happen in six literal sequential days according to prevailing scholarly conclusions.

02:09:21

Would you be in favor of placing a footnote in the margin of the Bible to this effect? Could we get to some serious questions on the subject?

02:09:26

Cause you know the answer then. So is that a yes or no? No.

02:09:33

Is Ed Halman in by the way? But that's okay. No, it's not. I think so. Look, look, brother. Question me whether I'm serious.

02:09:39

Let's stay focused on the topic. You know where I stand on these things. If you've listened to everything that I've said and all the stuff that you say you've listened to, let's not, let's show respect for the audience.

02:09:50

Let's stick to the subject. The Exodus was probably a small band of Jews according to prevailing archeological conclusions.

02:09:56

Would you be in favor of placing a footnote in the margin of the Bible to this effect? Asked and answered. I'm sorry?

02:10:02

Asked and answered. So I guess yes? Asked and answered. Currently our best scholarship maintains that man originated from a species of less evolved light forms.

02:10:12

Would you be in favor of placing a footnote on the margin of the Bible to this effect? Are we gonna do six minutes and 23 seconds of this silliness or are we gonna get to something about the subject of the debate?

02:10:18

It's my time. No, but it's these people's time, sir. Respect them. I definitely am.

02:10:25

Point is that you're in favor of certain textual scholarly footnotes and you're not in favor of other scholarly footnotes and you have no mechanism to defend it.

02:10:33

Dr. Van Cleek, everyone in this room can tell the difference between the things you're inserting that have to do with unbelief and the issue of the actual factual reading of manuscripts, what is necessary to know to be able to know what the scripture actually says.

02:10:49

Incorrect. That's completely different. Incorrect. From the issue of evolution. That is incorrect. I would say that you are.

02:10:55

Sir, this is your time to ask questions, not preach. Well, you're preaching and you're not answering questions. So you might wanna calm down a little.

02:11:03

Regarding textual tinkering, do you stand by your claim in your second debate with Jeff Riddle as well as session three and four of the

02:11:10

Reliability of the New Testament Text Conference held this year that the text is so settled that all text critics are doing is tinkering?

02:11:19

That's actually a quotation from Bart Ehrman. And the reality is even Bart Ehrman recognizes that we know what the

02:11:26

New Testament says and that everything we're looking at is really at a very, very minute level.

02:11:34

That's why I said you can pick this up and this up and preach from both of them and you've got the same message.

02:11:40

Tinkering is defined as, quote, an attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or half -hearted way, often to no useful effect.

02:11:47

That's not how Ehrman defined it. That's how he defined tinkering. Using your own words and the definition of tinkering, then is it fair to assume that your attempt to repair the

02:11:55

TR tonight is casual and quite probably of no useful effect? No, sir. Has there been a recent major discovery

02:12:01

I am unaware of which affects major Christian doctrines since you debated Jeff Riddle, so as to turn textual tinkering into something more than tinkering?

02:12:10

Obviously, what we have now here is I'm quoting somebody in one context who's defining tinkering in one way.

02:12:17

You redefined the term and now trying to make an argument. It's invalid argumentation and I think we need to get to some more serious stuff.

02:12:25

I don't think that you've established that it's been used differently. You've just asserted it's hand -waving. Since I used the term,

02:12:31

I get to define how I used it. You quoted Bart Ehrman. You didn't use the term. That's right, and he was placing it in the context of saying that we know what the

02:12:38

New Testament is actually saying. We know what his message is. This is not simply a matter of playing games or doing something haphazardly.

02:12:48

That was not a part of his context or my citation of it. And I just disagree because in your debate, he had no problem saying at least that much.

02:12:57

All right, how much time do I have? Three minutes, 36 seconds. Okay. You enjoy the idea of the tenacity of the reading.

02:13:08

Do you remember the story of when the adversary sowed tares among the wheat and the tares were preserved with the wheat for the sake of the wheat?

02:13:15

Yes. Given this is a paradigmatic way of God's preservation of his people, do you agree that such preservation may also take place in the preservation of the text?

02:13:26

There is no reason to connect Jesus' parable to the historical transmission of the text of the New Testament, no.

02:13:32

No, just the idea of preservation, that maybe it's possible that God preserves his people in a similar way that he preserves his words?

02:13:39

No. So there's this big debate in Psalm 12, six and seven, whether or not he preserves his people or he preserves his words, and we've been fighting about it forever, and he's telling me there's no connection.

02:13:50

Is that correct? If you wanna bring up Psalm 12, I'd be glad to talk about it, because it is a text that says that God will either preserve the people from those who are attacking them, or preserve his words of promise toward them, but there is nothing in Psalm 12 that has anything to do with this from 1644.

02:14:12

Apparently. That is a wildly isogedical application.

02:14:20

Would you agree that God, for the sake of preserving his words via special providence, also preserves corrupt readings via general providence right along with his words?

02:14:29

Yeah, it's what tenacity is talking about, yeah. As the story of the wheat and tares goes, who determines what is a wheat and what is a tare?

02:14:37

Well, God's going to, but that has nothing to do with manuscripts. Can we agree that the tenacity of a tare does not transform that tare into wheat?

02:14:44

We can agree that this entire line of questioning I've already said has nothing to do with the manuscript tradition. It's just a yes or no question.

02:14:50

Does the tenacity of a tare transform into wheat? Is that a no?

02:14:57

Ask and answer. As such, does it not stand to reason that God the

02:15:03

Holy Spirit determines what is an authentic reading, and what is spurious, rather than our subjective interpretation of a reading's tenacity?

02:15:11

Actually, it is the Holy Spirit of God that gave us those readings, and it is our job, because the way that God preserved the word through manuscripts, which means handwritten manuscripts, it's our job to identify what those original readings were, and every single generation of Christians, starting with just a martyr on down, has recognized our responsibility, and not one of those generations has ever come up with this kind of idea of how to protect the tradition.

02:15:38

One minute, Dr. Dinklage. Not a one. How much? One minute. In your last statement, what counts as our?

02:15:44

You mean all these people out here who don't know Greek, or do you mean the scholars? Our in what context? You just said,

02:15:49

I don't know, you said it. You said our. I said a few things. You'd have to identify which our it was.

02:15:57

I have no further questions. Thank you, Dr. Van Cleek. Pause.

02:16:04

Dr. White, the floor is yours, beginning now. In your, what you have identified and wish to present to the church as the autographs, this textus receptus, at James chapter two, verse 18, this one says, show me your faith, show me your works apart from your faith.

02:16:39

And in the Stephanos text, it says by your faith.

02:16:45

So this says apart from, this says by. Which one is the correct reading, and how do we determine it?

02:16:54

The correct reading is apart from your faith, and we determine it by the Holy Spirit of God speaking through the words of God to the people of God to accept those words by faith.

02:17:04

That's how we do it. And when did the Holy Spirit of God speak through the people of God? When did the

02:17:11

Holy Spirit of God speak through the people of God to answer that question, since I would be willing to bet that almost no one in this room even knew there was a variant there.

02:17:21

So were they all left out of the Holy Spirit's work? I know people in this room that read those very words, and they recognize them as scripture and preach from them, so I wouldn't say.

02:17:30

No, but how many people knew that there was a variant between Stephanos and the

02:17:37

Scrivener text at that important section so that the church could decide?

02:17:44

Are these people not part of the church? Again, the whole idea is coming back to whether or not you know and can read his

02:17:50

Greek text. This is fallacious argument from a Christian perspective.

02:17:56

None of you need to know what's in the Stephanos. None of you. Read your

02:18:01

Bible, trust what it says. So the question itself is grounded in pure naturalism where you have to get locked down to this kind of argument before you could ever know your

02:18:14

Bible. So if it's in the King James, then the church has spoken.

02:18:21

Right, we're not talking about the King James. Well, but you said no one here could read the Stephanos. Read your

02:18:27

Bible, they're reading an English Bible. But if their English Bible is translated from the

02:18:33

Stephanos, it's gonna be different than it's translated from this, and therefore the question still remains that we have to have a mechanism by which we determine when there are differences even between the

02:18:44

TRs as to what we read. And when did the church speak to this?

02:18:50

Okay, so here's the mechanism. The mechanism, and this is another thing that's a huge problem, I think. And the huge problem is based on what

02:18:57

Dr. White's argument is at its foundation. And that is that we put manuscript evidence very high on the decision -making matrix.

02:19:08

It's very high. I'm saying bring manuscript evidence, but it's very low on the decision -making matrix.

02:19:15

That guys who are textual critics are servants, bond servants, or if you like,

02:19:21

John MacArthur, slaves to the church. And so they submit like servants to the church.

02:19:27

Their deliverances, their arguments, their papers are all in submission to the church.

02:19:33

Because farmers and coaches and stay -at -home moms are fully equipped to recognize what is and is not the word of God, because you are indwelt by the

02:19:46

Holy Spirit. So do textual criticism, that's what I'm trying to say. I can absorb his position.

02:19:53

Do textual criticism. I don't have a problem with you doing it as a science and as a academic discipline, and certainly if you wanna use it as apologetic support against other worldviews, absolutely.

02:20:05

But to put it high on the decision -making matrix is unbiblical. You can't make that argument anywhere in scripture.

02:20:11

Let me, one last thing, hold on, one last thing. One last thing is this. Nobody had this manuscript tradition like he's talking about, right, this idea of, not the tradition,

02:20:22

I'm sorry, the method. Nobody in the church had it until around the 1800s. Somehow the church survived without the 1800s methodology that he is propounding, and you know what?

02:20:33

We still got the Bible. People are still getting saved. Dr. Van Cleek, how did

02:20:39

Erasmus derive these if he didn't use the methodology and it didn't develop until the 1800s? I'm sorry, what?

02:20:45

Erasmus had to do textual criticism to produce this. Have you not read his annotations?

02:20:51

I've read part of his annotations. Okay, then you know that he utilized the same methodology of examining readings and comparing readings and longer readings versus shorter readings and scribal errors that we use today.

02:21:04

You just said that was developed in the 1800s. When was this made? No, no, no, no, yeah, again, that's just a little detail that would just need to be modified.

02:21:12

The fundamental, and this is one thing I think where you and Jeff Riddle could not agree, and I don't think he should have agreed with you, and I'm glad he didn't, but the idea is the method that I'm talking about actually scraps the church's

02:21:24

Bible and starts fresh, which means the ground floor, if you read Westcott, don't,

02:21:30

I mean, this is not crazy. Read Metzger. They talk about how finally we were unshackled from the

02:21:35

TR, that we were free from it. This is the language that they used, because then they were free to do their scholarship without the church nosing in and saying, that's our

02:21:43

Bible. Don't mess with the Bible. You've stepped across too many lines. So they were freed, and this is something that Erasmus did not suffer from.

02:21:52

He wasn't like, oh, let's just toss the Bible, guys. He started with the church's Bible, the Latin, and then put a polyglot

02:21:57

Greek in, so he was still with the Bible. His position, not with the Bible. Start over.

02:22:05

The Latin was a new translation from Erasmus, and it got him into a lot of trouble, because he was challenging the accepted

02:22:11

Latin text of the Roman church. Is that not true? It is true, but the point is, is he didn't get rid of it.

02:22:17

He wasn't like, we're starting from zero, boys and girls, and we're just gonna start with Sinaiticus and Vatican. Who says we're starting from zero, boys and girls?

02:22:24

I would say, if you read Westcott and Hort, but particularly when you read Metzger, that's the one that's coming to my mind right now,

02:22:31

Metzger uses the language of finally. I've actually heard you now that I think about it. You did a conference in January, where you were talking about finally, we were able to not have the

02:22:41

TR as the grounding text, as this text from which we start, right?

02:22:46

You were happy that that happened. That's what I'm talking about. I don't even know what you're referring to, but again. Erasmus did not do that.

02:22:53

He wasn't like, yeah, you know what, guys? We're just gonna get rid of the church's Bible, and then we're just gonna use my brilliant mind, and we're gonna start over.

02:23:00

No, he started with the church's Bible. Did he make changes? Yeah, did he get in trouble for it? Yeah, but he started with the church's Bible.

02:23:05

So when I say that the methodology is from the 1800s, that's part of the methodology, where you start, right? That's Aristotle. So I asked a question about,

02:23:12

I don't know, seven minutes or so ago, as to how anyone could know which the proper reading was, and so far,

02:23:21

I've gotten something about sanctification, and the church, and the spirit, and that all sounds wonderful, but it doesn't produce a text.

02:23:31

I just explained to you. So let me give you a different one. I don't get rid of textual criticism.

02:23:37

I just explained that to you. I just say I put it low on the decision -making matrix. So make your decision, but don't pretend like it has any authority on the people here.

02:23:45

So make a decision. Not a single bit of authority. So you say we are to make our decision without putting the actual data down here, and our sanctification is higher than that?

02:23:59

So our sanctification will determine how we read manuscripts. Is that what you're saying?

02:24:04

No, the Holy Spirit determines what's autographic, and that's what the question is tonight. It's not about manuscripts. I said that in my opening statement.

02:24:10

We're talking about what's autographic, and the Holy Spirit speaks through his words. When you read the Bible, you hear the shepherd's voice in those words.

02:24:18

It doesn't say, first, let me sort this out for you because I'm a genius, and then after that, then you can hear Jesus's words.

02:24:24

Nobody says that. Dr. Van Cleek, you are telling everyone in this room this is the autograph, and whenever I ask you for the specifics of how this came to read the way that it reads, all you tell us is it's always been that way, and don't ask for any type of historical evidence.

02:24:38

Now you're misconstruing the argument. The argument was there's a difference between having the autographic words between two covers and having the autographic words preserved throughout the course of the church.

02:24:47

I did not say that. He's misconstruing the argument. Okay, so not between two covers, but when

02:24:53

I asked for anybody, all the way up to Erasmus, who possessed this, you said

02:24:59

I can't give you anybody, right? But we just talked about how you can't give you anything from Mark, like six chapters of Mark.

02:25:05

Okay, all right, all right. I hope that everybody already heard that. At Revelation 11 .2, my

02:25:11

Stephanus text says inside the temple, and Scrivener says outside.

02:25:19

Would you agree with me that inside and outside are pretty much the opposites of each other? They're very different.

02:25:25

They're very different, okay. So what makes, what's interesting is the reading here is the same as the critical text, and they agree against Stephanus.

02:25:40

So the methodology, when you're preaching a sermon in Revelation chapter 11, are you saying that you should put the textual evidence low and the higher evidence should be what?

02:25:59

Well, again, like, well, two things. Don't you guys find it interesting that I get in trouble for holding to a standard, but like most of y 'all

02:26:10

Bibles are standard, right? English standard Bible, right? Christian standard

02:26:16

Bible, right? Legacy standard Bible. Are we gonna get an answer to my question? No, I'm getting there,

02:26:21

I'm getting there. My point is that holding to a standard, right, somehow is bad, but y 'all are, most of us stick to it.

02:26:29

So how does this work? How do we establish the standard, not just of the Bible, but the reading?

02:26:35

And the conclusion is it's the Holy Spirit who speaks through the words. So you make a choice.

02:26:40

Let me see if I can give you a hypothetical. You make a choice. The servant of the church makes a choice who believes it's not authoritative because he recognizes that it is

02:26:49

God that must determine it through his people. So he says, as a servant, this is what I think.

02:26:54

This is the best I can do, and I act as God's servant. They hand it to the church. 30, 40, 50 years later, multiple generations of people have looked over the word, and men have preached from the pulpit that word.

02:27:07

And in the end, they say there's something wrong with that text, or where is the woman caught in adultery? All right, and then the, all right, that's the bad side.

02:27:16

Let's say it's a good side. Let's say an actual change was made, and the Holy Spirit speaks to your heart.

02:27:22

What is he speaking to your heart through? Through the change, not through the scholar, not through the evidence, not through the manuscript tradition, through the word.

02:27:33

And so when you submit to it, you're submitting through the voice of the shepherd coming through the scripture.

02:27:40

That's what it would take. But what we're dealing with now is they have NA28. Couple years, we're gonna get more of the

02:27:46

CBGM, which means once we get the ECM, the editio credulco mayor, once we get that, we're gonna change the

02:27:54

Bible again. And then maybe we change it again. Who knows how many times we're gonna change it, and how many times it changed? Every couple of years?

02:28:00

You don't even have time. Some of you, could you imagine your Bible changes every two years?

02:28:05

Dr. Van Cleek. Like, how are you supposed to know which one's God's word when - You're supposed to be answering questions right now, not preaching, and you are preaching.

02:28:12

So I'm gonna take you back to the question. I answered it. So the use of the church over time is how you determine the reading of Revelation 11 .2.

02:28:25

That's what you just said, 30, 40 years, something along that. They've preached that text. So it's the preaching of the text over time that determines the reading, not the manuscript evidence.

02:28:35

No, no. It is God's people, which includes the preaching of the word, but it also includes family devotion.

02:28:42

It includes personal devotions. It includes the use of the text, submission to the text, obedience to the text, growth of the church.

02:28:50

All of these things are Christian evidences that we would look toward, not just manuscript evidence, background evidence, prior evidence.

02:28:56

Dr. Van Cleek, for 1 ,100 years, believers read in the

02:29:01

West the scriptures in Latin, and they had numerous readings that are not in the TR. Indeed.

02:29:07

Did the Holy Spirit bless those non -autographic readings to those people when they preached them?

02:29:14

No, the Holy Spirit only speaks through His own words. Okay, so when

02:29:21

Erasmus asked his printer to change

02:29:26

Revelation, just tear out what he did, and use the Align reading, if the

02:29:32

Align had used almost any Greek manuscript, the book of Revelation would be completely different in here than it is now.

02:29:40

Would that be the autograph or not the autograph? It's hypothetical. No, it wouldn't be the autograph because it's not the autograph.

02:29:47

Because the autograph was in the Latin commentary, and the autograph was also in Erasmus' mind when he translated from Latin into Greek for the last six verses of Revelation chapter 22.

02:30:01

That was the autograph that no Christian had ever seen. Or do you say that all Christians had seen that, and Erasmus just happened to smack dab get it right in producing this?

02:30:13

No, it's a false choice. In the end, Erasmus, this is one thing. When you quote from, say, the

02:30:19

Patristics, right? I mean, he put it up on the board. He talked about all the Patristics and Patristics citations, right?

02:30:25

But Erasmus, he can't get it right. But the Patristics, like, oh yeah, the Patristics, like, they had it nailed because they were close to the original.

02:30:33

But Erasmus, he can't do it right? No, that doesn't fly. Yes, Erasmus can do that.

02:30:38

I have a quote right here. Hold on, let me add to my answer to that question. I didn't say Erasmus didn't get it right.

02:30:45

I said - You were using language like being inspired or that he had it right, it was in his head and on one manuscript for his commentary.

02:30:51

Maybe you don't understand. Let me try it again. Erasmus did not have a Greek original for the last verses of Revelation chapter 22, and so he translated from his own

02:31:03

Latin, not the 1100 year venerable Vulgate, but from his own

02:31:09

Latin translation back into Greek and produced readings that have never been found anywhere but in his translation.

02:31:19

So if that is the autograph, then the autograph had disappeared for the entire history of the church that we are aware of.

02:31:28

Are you seriously suggesting to us that we just don't have enough manuscripts to know that yes,

02:31:36

Erasmus got it right when he translated this and all the other manuscripts we have down through church history and every sermon ever preached on it -

02:31:45

So we're gonna get a question at some point? Was just wrong, was just wrong. Is that what you're telling us? It was like five questions, like what do you want me to answer?

02:31:53

Okay, I think everyone understands exactly what I was asking you and I've got a lot of people saying they want an answer.

02:31:59

So I'll make it very, very clear. Are you telling us that the end of Revelation in here is what

02:32:06

John wrote autographically, it disappeared from every bit of history - Okay, stop.

02:32:11

All right, I gotta answer that one first. For him to say it disappeared is for him to say, no, we don't have it now.

02:32:17

Yes. This is a horrible argument. Just because you don't have it now, all of a sudden doesn't make it false. So what you are saying then is that it was there, it's disappeared from history -

02:32:29

No, it's just disappeared from our history. Okay, what other history do we have, sir?

02:32:36

Because history has fallen along a course of human existence so simply because I don't have it doesn't mean the medievals didn't have it.

02:32:43

Simply because I don't have it doesn't mean that the patristics didn't have it. Simply because I didn't have it doesn't mean the reformers didn't have it. But you don't have any evidence whatsoever.

02:32:50

I do, I just explained to you. There's three kinds of evidence, posterior, prior and background evidence. And because I believe the

02:32:56

Holy Spirit speaks to God's people, that counts as evidence. Unless you're working with a naturalistic paradigm and you don't count the church as evidence.

02:33:04

Thank you. I think we just saw exactly what is going on here. I don't even want to confuse anything more.

02:33:13

I will yield my time. All right, lovely. Dr. Van Cleek, you have a five minute closing argument.

02:33:22

Please feel free to do that. Yeah, I'll just do it from here. Okay, would you like to start now?

02:33:32

Good. Yep. All right, thanks for showing up everybody. I really appreciate it. Good times. Took time out of your

02:33:38

Saturday and listened to something, I don't know, maybe a little bit more academic than you would do on a normal Saturday night.

02:33:46

Not at this church. Yeah. Right. First, I'd like to say that I can now say

02:33:53

I debated a guy who debated Bart Ehrman. So, this is going on the resume. I think that in the end, none of my arguments set forth tonight were refuted.

02:34:05

Not a single one. In fact, I don't even know if they were even remotely addressed. I don't think he dealt with the idea that the

02:34:11

Bible speaks of itself in autographic terms. I don't think he did anything to overcome my historical argument and he didn't even touch my probability argument and he could have.

02:34:21

Like, you can do that, but there's things you'd have to admit. You'd have to admit something like the NA28 is the autograph in the body of the text and that the church has received it.

02:34:30

Then you could maybe make a good probability argument similar to mine. But he didn't do any of that. So, in the end,

02:34:35

I win the debate because he didn't defeat a single one of my arguments. And he's capable, 170 some moderated debates.

02:34:45

This is my first one. And can you believe that? He is definitely capable. He has the prodigious mind for it, but that's not what happened.

02:34:54

I just wanted to conclude with this. Did everybody know the Ligonier does the state of theology?

02:35:01

Yeah. So if you read it, it just came out not too long ago. This is what they stated.

02:35:07

The 2022 state of theology survey reveals that Americans increasingly reject the divine origin and complete accuracy of the

02:35:14

Bible. He argues that the Bible is not completely reliable.

02:35:21

There are parts of it that are not, but most of it is. Maybe like 99 % of the Bible is completely reliable or accurate.

02:35:30

But we're seeing things go down, right? When it comes to divine origin and complete accuracy of the

02:35:35

Bible, all right? There's something that goes with that. With no enduring plumb line, right?

02:35:43

A plumb line, anybody here work construction? You know about measurements? My son's a carpenter. You can't have two different measuring tapes.

02:35:52

You can't have a crooked plumb line. You can't have a 99 % straight plumb line or 98 or a merely reliable plumb line.

02:36:04

With no enduring plumb line of absolute truth to conform to, US adults are also increasingly holding to unbiblical worldviews related to human sexuality.

02:36:14

So for Ligonier, if you blow it with the Bible, you get all the sexual perversion that we deal with now.

02:36:21

Direct connection for Ligonier. His argument has been running the show for the last 150 years.

02:36:29

Do you know we are more sexually corrupt in this country than even the ancient Greeks were? The ancient

02:36:35

Greeks would not give same status to same -sex couples. Marriage was first because you could have children and if you had children, you could continue to propagate the state.

02:36:46

So we are more debauched than the ancient Greeks. And his guys have been running the show trying to tell us that we can trust our

02:36:55

Bibles. Ligonier says, apparently we can't. At least that's what people are believing. In the evangelical sphere, doctrines including the deity and exclusivity of Jesus Christ as well as the inspiration and authority of the scripture are increasingly being rejected while he's keeping watch.

02:37:14

While positive trends are present, including evangelicals views on abortion and sex outside of marriage, an inconsistent biblical ethic is also evident.

02:37:24

And with more evangelicals embracing a secular worldview in the areas of homosexuality and gender identity.

02:37:31

That's their summary, not my summary. If the people who have been standing on the wall are giving us this, maybe we need to rethink it.

02:37:40

We got an old presentation. We got old arguments. They're tired, they're dead. And so I'm trying to offer you new arguments, stuff that we're working on, right?

02:37:52

Stuff that we're involved in, not just like regurgitation, like birdie arguments where the mom chews it up and then pukes it into the mouth of the birdie, right?

02:38:02

That's these kinds of arguments. They're dead and they're old and they're stale. 30 seconds. What's that? 30 seconds.

02:38:08

Proverbs 20 verse 10. Diverse weights and diverse measures, both of them are a like abomination to the

02:38:15

Lord. Is it any wonder then that we have sexual abomination in our own country because we have diverse weights and measures in our own church?

02:38:26

Thank you, Dr. Van Cleek. Dr. White. Thank you. There has not been a single meaningful argument presented this evening that would cause anyone to believe that the textus receptus as it exists today are the autographs.

02:38:43

What has been presented is you just saw, and I hope you remember, right at the end of the cross -examination,

02:38:51

I finally gave up my time. There wasn't any reason to continue. Because when I asked about the fact of the reading that contradicts between various forms of the textus receptus, what we heard was we know it's the autograph.

02:39:06

We shouldn't even try to give you any historical evidence that anyone ever believed these things.

02:39:13

We're gonna tell you this is what the church has always possessed. But when we can't show you anyone who read it that way, we're just gonna assume it was there and the manuscripts got lost.

02:39:24

Nobody preached sermons about it. But you see, you start with the TR. It is a circular, vicious cycle that is indefensible.

02:39:36

This could never survive in a mosque. This could never survive in Salt Lake City dealing with Mormons, and it could never survive with someone like Bart Ehrman.

02:39:45

It is an absolute abdication of our responsibility as Christians to give a meaningful defense.

02:39:54

This is not naturalism. The TR is a historical document, and it has been removed from history tonight by Dr.

02:40:02

Van Cleek. And the result is it therefore has no meaning. It has no foundation.

02:40:07

The reality is we can say that God has preserved his word in a way that he has not preserved anything else, and he did it in a marvelous way through the manuscript tradition.

02:40:20

But we don't have to stand there and say, well, if you ask me a specific question about a specific reading, and I have to answer these questions all the time.

02:40:28

I've debated in the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere on the subject of the deity of Christ, and my opponent, a well -read

02:40:35

Muslim, questioned the textual reading in John chapter one. And if I had responded with that presentation,

02:40:44

I would have, the whole argument would have collapsed right then and there. But I could give a meaningful answer in defense of the deity of Christ there in that mosque because I don't take the

02:40:56

TR and just simply say, this is my final authority. I recognize the mechanism by which

02:41:02

God has preserved his word, and I am thankful for it. I am deeply thankful for it.

02:41:08

There is not a single early church father. There is not a single translator of the King James Version of the

02:41:13

Bible that would have even recognized what was said to us this evening. They wouldn't have even understood the categories.

02:41:20

They didn't believe this kind of stuff. And from starting from Justin Martyr onwards,

02:41:26

Christians have dealt with the realities of differences in their manuscripts, and they did not present the

02:41:32

TR because it didn't exist. It came into existence at a certain point in time, and turning it into the autographs is a complete denial of the mechanism that God has used to give us his word.

02:41:47

And so I am passionate about this because I believe that reformed people are the people that can give the strongest, clearest response.

02:41:56

But if we have people in our midst who are looking at history, looking at the very means by which the

02:42:01

TR came into existence, and calling that naturalism, and then turning around after I have debated more people on the subject of same -sex marriage and homosexuality than all my critics combined, and say,

02:42:15

I'm part of the reason why that's happening, is a level of absurdity I don't think I've seen in 178 moderated public debates.

02:42:24

And I've had some doozies. This is a vitally important subject.

02:42:32

And so I hope and pray that you will take the time to come to recognize that God has preserved his word down through history, and every part of that historical transmission is important.

02:42:47

The church of Nicaea had to have the word of God, and they did not have the TR. The church that dealt with the

02:42:55

Christological controversies had to have the word of God, and they did not have the TR. 30 seconds.

02:43:00

And to say that they had it is to engage in pure fantasy. Don't hide that behind some kind of, well, you're being a naturalist.

02:43:09

No, history is where God works, and that's not naturalism. That's where God's providence is seen.

02:43:17

Thank you for being here this evening. God bless you. All right, ladies and gentlemen.

02:43:30

Huh? Yeah, 15's fine.

02:43:36

Are you okay with taking some questions as well? All right. Well, sure,

02:43:41

I'll do whatever I wish, I think. Pastors are jerks.

02:43:50

All right, we do have a number of things. We will not be able to get through all of these.

02:43:55

I will leave out the various compliments on beards. Both of you received them. And so,

02:44:06

Dr. Van Cleek, first question for you. Okay, first, excuse me. Is this gonna be only one person answers a question for 30 seconds, 45 seconds, one minute?

02:44:16

Or is it gonna be a situation where you have one minute to respond, and then 30 seconds? I'm going to go back and forth with questions for each of you, and then a question for both of you.

02:44:25

Okay, and then how long do you have to respond? I believe that I will determine that. So, in other words,

02:44:33

I can turn my timer off, and I'll be well. You can turn it off, and I'll tell you you're done. We do pick up,

02:44:38

Dr. Van Cleek, back to it. You stated that no two manuscripts agree totally, and that we don't know which ones we are missing.

02:44:44

So, which TR is the real one? Which TR has the autographs, and how can you be sure you have the correct

02:44:51

TR? Yeah, the short answer is that each TR would be an iteration of sanctifying work through the

02:44:59

Holy Spirit in God's people. And so, I would say, now, it's the TBS TR, because that's where we are now.

02:45:08

But if there is no TBS TR, like he was talking about these past folks at Nicaea, then there was no

02:45:14

TR there, but the autograph was there. And so, before the TR, you got Beza, for example, or Stephanus, or Erasmus' TR, but that was in time.

02:45:24

As soon as you take it out of time, you're like, well, Erasmus' TR and your TR are different, therefore, there's gotta be a contradiction.

02:45:30

I would say, no, it's not a contradiction. It's that God was working through Erasmus, and then Beza, and Stephanus, and now he has worked through the

02:45:38

TR, the TBC TR. And so, it's an act of sanctification through time, like every other

02:45:44

Christian act of sanctification. Okay, Dr. Weick, this is, with the work done by textual criticism, why has scholarship not been able to identify each faithful and correct word of each individual text of Scripture?

02:46:00

Well, again, I wanna emphasize, I believe very firmly in the tenacity of the

02:46:05

New Testament text, and so I believe that all the original readings continue to exist, and God has preserved them.

02:46:11

The question is, why are there still some that are difficult readings? Well, because they're very challenging readings, and we only have so much material to draw from.

02:46:22

But there can be further findings that could help clarify things in the future. But you just need to understand something.

02:46:29

We, in the modern period, are used to being able to hit Control -C,

02:46:35

Control -V, and that has never happened before. Up until 1949, when they invented the photocopier, there were always errors in printing.

02:46:46

Remember the Adulterer's Bible? Ever heard of the Adulterer's Bible? It was a version of the King James where the printer forgot the word not in the commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery.

02:46:56

He got thrown in jail for it. But even after printing came into existence, that was a regularity.

02:47:03

This idea that why isn't it down to, why haven't we just gotten all this taken care of, just simply doesn't understand how texts have been translated down through history.

02:47:12

All right, for both of you, Dr. Van Cleek beginning, in the context of historical realities, how should we view ancient texts?

02:47:20

That's a huge question. Quick answer. Quick answer would be we're supposed to view ancient texts as an expression of belief in that moment in the church's history.

02:47:31

We're supposed to view those texts as the preserving work of God, so long as the words of God are being preserved in those texts.

02:47:39

We're supposed to see those ancient texts as objects of scholarly study. We're supposed to see those ancient texts as objects of apologetic inquiry and support.

02:47:50

We're supposed to see those texts as inspired, equal to the autograph, insofar as the words of the autograph are present in them.

02:47:59

Like, there's a lot of ways that we should approach those ancient texts. Dr. White, same question. I would agree with the vast majority of that, other than I would not, this strange language of iterations, it's very much in the books, but I think each of the ancient manuscripts is a testimony to the state of the text and its transmission at that time, and so when you look at P72, which is our earliest manuscript of 1st and 2nd

02:48:27

Peter in Jude, it gives you a really good idea of what a Christian individual, who may have been risking their lives at that point in time to even copy this manuscript, had in their possession around the year 200, and so that is a vitally important witness to the transmission of the text over time that then builds a bridge to the later unsealed manuscripts, the maguscules we have in Sinaiticus, Vatican, and so on and so forth, and then to the medieval tradition from there.

02:48:58

So they're witnesses. That's the normal term we use for those manuscripts.

02:49:04

All right, Dr. Van Cleek, a question related to the previous, and I'll give you sort of the middle section of this question.

02:49:11

Where then, in your view, is the dividing line between writings that are equal to the autographs and those that aren't?

02:49:19

And I think what they mean by writings are texts. So how do I divide between what's autographic and what's not?

02:49:26

Yes. Yeah, so in the end, how I don't divide it, because I don't have the authority to divide it, the

02:49:33

Holy Spirit is going to have to move through His church to divide it, and that may take a lot of time, because we know it's hard on the church to do all kinds of things, because it's hard on us to be good fathers and good mothers.

02:49:44

It's hard on us to hold things together during COVID. And so there's a lot of things that are hard on the church.

02:49:50

So sometimes it can take a very long time, but in the end, it is God speaking, the person of the

02:49:55

Holy Spirit, speaking through His words to each one of you, and accepting those words by faith, and sometimes across generations.

02:50:04

But I don't make the call, right? And that's why I wholly reject this scholarly idea that somehow really smart guys in Germany get to make the call about what goes in, drop whatever they need to in the apparatus, and then from that perspective be like, well, we basically have got it.

02:50:19

That I find to be wholly unscriptural and out of line. Like they don't have the authority from the

02:50:25

Bible to make that call. So I don't do it, the scholars don't do it. I would make the case that you do it.

02:50:30

Okay. Dr. White, this is a bit of a complicated question, but I think I have an addition that may bring some clarity to it.

02:50:38

When you called the TR translation of the book of Revelation bad, are you saying that the

02:50:44

KJV's translation of Revelation is not trustworthy? No, the

02:50:49

TR is not a translation. The TR is an original language text. But there's a history as to how it came into existence.

02:50:56

And as I said, Erasmus did not have a high view of the book of Revelation. He left it to last.

02:51:02

He was under pressure to get done quickly. John Froben, his printer, was putting him under pressure. And so the only manuscript he could find was a

02:51:09

Latin commentary on the book of Revelation that had the Greek interspersed within it. And so he had to draw the

02:51:17

Greek out from the Latin commentary to produce the version of the book of Revelation.

02:51:23

There are numerous errors in it as a result. And then when he got to the end, the last few pages of commentary were missing.

02:51:31

So he had to back translate from his own Latin translation into Greek for the last portions, creating an absolutely unique text that had never been seen before on the planet.

02:51:43

And so I'm not talking about a translation. I'm talking about the actual text in Revelation. But they were specifically asking about KJV.

02:51:49

Yeah, the King James translated what was in here, and their translation of the

02:51:54

Greek is fine. But that's just a translation. The issue is the underlying text that you're translating.

02:52:01

A follow -up with that. I think there was a little bit of maybe imprecision that was happening.

02:52:07

So when you said Erasmus's version of Revelation looked completely different, when you used that phrase, completely different, did you mean to say that Erasmus's Revelation and what we have in Revelation are completely different?

02:52:25

Erasmus's, I was talking about Erasmus's back translation at the end of Revelation. He came up with readings that no one had ever seen before.

02:52:31

I think there was probably a misperception in the room about that. There were also other errors because of the sources he was using, but that was a different issue.

02:52:38

Right, and so that last part is my thinking. I'm thinking people are probably confused by that. Dr. Van Cleek, is it not evidentialistic to lean on the

02:52:48

Reformers as much as the collected discovered manuscripts of the latter is evidentialistic?

02:52:53

If not, why not? Yeah, again, I don't lean on the Reformers. I employ the

02:52:59

Reformers because I think, first of all, personally, I think that the Reformers represent perhaps the most comprehensive worldview able,

02:53:08

I believe, to conquer any other worldview, I mean, as far as an expression of Christian theology.

02:53:14

So in that sense, it's a personal take, and I don't lean on the evidence that the Reformers leaned on because I'm not leaning on Turretin and Whitaker to make my case for me, in the sense that Turretin and Whitaker don't get to pick what's scripture and what's not.

02:53:31

So I quote them because they're giving us theology, but they're not the bosses. The church is the boss, and by the church,

02:53:38

I don't mean the magisterium. I mean God's people who understand. Here, you don't even have to read it. If you hear it read in your ears, you'll know because you're

02:53:46

God's chosen person. You are God's saint. You're his child. So you don't even have to read.

02:53:53

If you hear the words of God, you will know it's the voice of the shepherd. So I don't lean on the

02:53:58

Protestant Reform to evidentially for their case or their text.

02:54:04

The point is that in the end, it boils down to the spirit of God working through the people of God through the word of God and accepting those words by faith.

02:54:12

Okay, so Dr. White, just a quick question for you. Where did Erasmus admit his errors in the

02:54:20

TR? Oh, well, in his annotations, in his many disputes, there's an excellent book.

02:54:28

I think that's what people are asking for. Oh, right here. Excellent book by Jan Krohn's, Beyond What is

02:54:34

Written, Erasmus and Beza's Conjectural Critics of the New Testament. Tremendous amount of information about how he handled textual critical issues, how he used the same methodology we use today to do textual critical study, how he expressed a dismissive attitude toward the

02:54:54

Book of Revelation. Excellent resource. Unfortunately, you may be recognizing it from a distance, that green and purple means it's published by Brill.

02:55:05

And what that means is it's really expensive. Someone actually said they had found it in PDF online for free, which always makes me a little nervous that it may not be supposed to be there, but I don't know.

02:55:19

But look it up, Beyond What is Written will give you just a tremendous amount of information about both Erasmus and Beza and their dealing with the text along those lines.

02:55:27

Okay, Dr. Van Cleek, and we are drawing to a close if you guys will keep your answers short. Dr. Van Cleek, is there any evidence of any kind, fully proven, that would change your mind in regard to the

02:55:39

TR? What kind of evidence would that need to be? The evidence would have to be the spirit of God moving through the people of God to accept the words of God by faith.

02:55:50

And in doing that would basically, I guess, I would be left behind, is what would happen.

02:55:55

I think I would have a difficult time giving up what I believe. Just for an example,

02:56:02

I don't know if any of you have ever been on either side of the Armenian Calvinist debate. If you've ever switched to the other side, you know how difficult that was.

02:56:11

Because it was hard for you to let go of these concepts of free will, for example, versus the sovereignty of God, or to look at the sovereignty of God and be like, you've obliterated my free will, and therefore,

02:56:21

I have to leave that and become more free will oriented. It's very difficult for you to move.

02:56:26

But in the end, the evidence of the spirit of God moving through the word of God and the people of God, maybe

02:56:33

I wouldn't give that up, and I would have to stand before God, and he would have to say, you should have given it up. You were stuck in some other place, and I moved

02:56:41

God's people to this next iteration. That may happen. But in the end, I'm not the one who gets to make the call.

02:56:48

So just because I have a PhD, and I've argued this since I was in my teens, doesn't all of a sudden somehow make me greater than any of you.

02:56:56

You could look at me and be like, you're wrong. The spirit of God speaks to me through this word, and this is the autograph.

02:57:03

And then that would be a huge discussion. The problem tonight is we're not told that there's an autograph. It's either in the text, or it's in the apparatus.

02:57:12

If you look at the apparatus, I could show you mine at the end. You look in the apparatus, it's not the Bible. It is a scholarly expression of manuscript evidence.

02:57:21

That's not scripture, and it doesn't show up in all of your Bibles. But he's gonna say it's either in a place that you can't see, or it's in the body of the text.

02:57:30

I don't make that call. I don't think I have the authority to make that call. Dr. White, if a manuscript that agreed 100 % with the

02:57:38

Byzantine text type from the second century were discovered, would that weigh heavily on your opinion of the

02:57:45

TR? Well, not of the TR, of the Byzantine text type. Remember, the TR is a very poor representative of the

02:57:52

Byzantine text type. So someone like Maurice Robinson can present a Byzantine priority perspective, and he's a wonderful guy, and I've engaged with him.

02:58:01

But he's not doing anything like this. He's doing text criticism, okay? So if there was such a second century manuscript that had consistently and across the spectrum early

02:58:13

Byzantine readings, that would be a bombshell, and it would be an important bombshell, and I'd be excited by it.

02:58:20

It's highly unlikely, but that's the difference here. We want the information, because why?

02:58:27

We wanna know what the original readings were. And so the Byzantine text is not my enemy by any stretch of the imagination, but the

02:58:36

TR has numerous variances from the Byzantine text. So when you turn this into the autograph, then the

02:58:44

Byzantine text itself becomes a competitor against the autograph. That's a bit of a problem, because this is not the

02:58:52

Byzantine text that has thousands of differences from the Byzantine text. All right, I think we will leave it there.

02:58:57

If your question did not get answered, it was simply an editorial decision made that some questions could be answered other places.

02:59:05

They just forgot to put the 20 on the card. So that's all right. That's exactly right. And some of those questions were too particular to be of use to the group.

02:59:14

So please feel free to ask in a different way, and I'm sorry if we did not get to your question.

02:59:20

And I do thank you for the spirited discussion tonight, for the usefulness of it, the utility to God's people.