A Little Bill Johnson, a Bunch of Islamic Material, and an Intro to the Ehrman/Licona Debate

Greetings and sort of welcome to The Dividing Line, if you could have seen Rich running around a few seconds ago, turning on the cameras. Nothing like preparation to get things going, and give me lots of confidence that, though I've spent hours preparing for this program, that the support cast is ready to go.

I mean, literally, literally, the music was playing, and it's like, oh no, there's nothing there. There's a reason for that. We sort of forgot to turn the cameras on, but hey, you know, we didn't need cameras back when we first started doing this.

We just, we, we had a stick and a rock, and that's, that's how, how we did it back in my day. I was, I was at the top of, I still call it squat peak, sorry. I always will. It's just, that's what I grew up with.

I was at the top of squat peak this morning. Hadn't climbed that thing in a long time, and just to make it fun, I ran like two miles to get there, and then two miles afterwards, so just make sure you're nice and tired when you get there.

It's a, if you haven't done it, it's a, it's a pretty tough climb, especially in the dark. I had a light, but the light doesn't really give you a depth perception real well, so it was, it was tricky, but I was talking to, to some young people up at the top, and one of them said something like, maybe I had never done this before, and I said, son, I, I think probably the first time I climbed this was about 1981 or so, and he just looked at me, and I said, you weren't, you weren't around 1981, were you?

And he said, no, I was born in 97, and I'm like, yeah, mm-hmm, okay, yeah, so he didn't offer to, like, carry me down or anything, you know, just, you know, help the old man across the street, help the old man down the mountain, whatever else.

Actually, he got down just a little bit before I did, because going down is tough, man. That's tough on the knees. I remember when I was much younger, I would run down that thing, and now I think about doing that and go, no, no, no, no, that's, that's called, that's called stupid.

Anyway, good to be with you. We have a lot to get to today, a bunch of stuff to get to today. One of the things that I did on that little two-hour jaunt this morning was, yesterday on Twitter, some stuff developed, a conversation developed that Michael Brown jumped into, and so I spent a little time yesterday that I grabbed a couple files, and what I did is I, as people were chatting on Twitter, and thankfully, it stayed civil, which is, I don't even know how that happened, well, it's possible that it seemed civil to me because I've blocked so many or muted so many people that I just don't see that part.

Sometimes I fire up my phone, and for some reason, whatever I use on my phone could care less about my ban or mute list, and so I see everything, and so I didn't look there. But anyway, it was, it was, it was interesting enough that someone had, someone mentioned that Bill Johnson, who is the lead elder at Bethel in Reading, had spoken in Dallas at a church near them, and that they had written up sort of a review.

Now, I didn't read the review. I read part of the first page. It was broken up into parts. But I sort of found the sermon to be sort of a summary of his thinking and stuff, so it was, I grabbed it. I grabbed the audio of it, and I threw that on my iPod, and then I grabbed Michael Brown's interview with him and put that on the iPod as well, and that's what I listened to, at least on the climb up.

On the rest of the way, I was listening to Carl Truman lecturing on inerrancy in church history, which was a pretty interesting lecture as well. Anyway, it had nothing to do with that. I'm not sure I could think of more different topics than what I listened to there.

But anyway, I do not have the time to grab more and more stuff and listen to more and more stuff and become an expert in Bill Johnson. One thing, the sense that I got in listening to what I listened to was that at least what I have seen as criticism of him seems to be missing the most important point, and that is what I heard was a really sharp guy, and the real problems are theologically presuppositional from my perspective.

In other words, the criticism I'm seeing is all based on the stuff that's easy to see. Let's talk about glory clouds and gold dust and feathers. That's easy. If you want to get people all riled up to support your jihad or whatever, that's the easy stuff.

The hard stuff, and I'd like to know if someone out there has done the actual hard work. Well, what would be the hard work? As I'm listening to this guy, and again, I think I do have an advantage here.

The advantage was the years I spent doing my first master's degree at Fuller Seminary. That made me hear things that I've heard before. It's been many years now. It's been many decades now. And I'm recognizing where some of the theology of all this is coming from, and what that allows me to do is to sit back and go, the real issue here, and he even said it.

I think he said it in the interview with Michael Brown, is how we are going to experience God depends upon what we believe about him and who he is and what he does. And my biggest concern with Bill Johnson is the imbalance at that very point.

At that very point. I did yesterday watch a testimony that he'd been given. It said Bill Johnson's testimony. What do you expect that to be? You expect that to be a person's testimony of salvation. Well, it wasn't.

It was from up at Toronto, and it was much more a testimony of Toronto. Than anything else. But what did come out in that was this. I came back to my church, and we made the decision, and we have lived in light of this for I think it was like 14 years at this point in time.

We made a decision that we were going to live in the light of the presence of God. And the whole context was this was going to be our thing. This is it. And it was in the context of not any of the other things we had been doing.

In other words, we are not even seeking to be balanced. We're not even seeking to be balanced. I mean, obviously, I believe very strongly. And I think this is and I can only allow I can only enunciate this and illustrate this.

And then let the Spirit of God make application to his people. But I believe very, very strongly that the central act of worship of the church is the full and careful and balanced ministry of the Word of God to the people of God gathered together to hear what God has to say.

So, meaningful, sound, solid exegesis. Everything we do before and after, if there is anything after, everything we do before and after is simply meant to heighten and to prepare us, to put us in the proper frame of mind, to be obedient and to have hearing ears.

Anything that we put into that worship service that closes our ears, distracts us, in any way shuts down our ability to hear the Word is wrong. It's going the wrong direction. And the most important thing that a shepherd of the sheep can do is to faithfully communicate not just the part of the message that you think is all-fired important, but if you really believe that Scripture, that all Scripture, not just some, but all Scripture is theanoustos, God-breathed, then you need to deliver all of it.

All of it. And that means covering some stuff that ain't gonna make people see gold dust coming out of the ceiling. I mean, there's some tough stuff to handle. There's some difficult stuff in there. And that means that there are going to be services that are highly instructional.

There are gonna be services that are incredibly uplifting. There are gonna be services that do bring you into the very presence of God in heaven. And then there'd be others that absolutely smack you down into the dirt when you realize how much of God's grace you take for granted and how few of the duties that are ours we actually pursue with the proper zeal of redeemed people.

And in other words, it's going to be balanced. And the balance is determined not by us, but by what is found in the Scriptures given to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. That canon of Scripture that God has given to us, that is where our balance is to be found.

And so as I was listening to all of this, the stuff I listened to yesterday and this morning, I see fundamental imbalances on the theological level in the theological underpinnings. This is not a stupid man.

I mean, honestly, just sitting back listening to videos and stuff that I've seen, I just sort of figure you're going to get sort of an airhead type weird guy. No, this is not an airhead weird type guy.

He can speak very soberly. And that's the problem. When you don't respond presuppositionally, and I would say in this case, the only way you could, I think, provide a meaningful critiquer is from a Reformed perspective, to be perfectly honest with you.

I could expand upon that, but I won't. When you don't respond to the best the other side has, and you go for the cheap stuff, you're not helping anybody. And you're making it so much easier for them to defend themselves.

That's really one of the problems here. So maybe somebody has done the deep theological. If you can't see that the glory clouds and all that stuff is just out here, and the real issue is in here, theologically speaking, you're missing the whole thing.

You're missing the whole thing. And I don't want to go into a bunch on this. I just want, I saw just a few minutes ago on Twitter that certain individuals, I'm not even giving them the free airtime, certain individuals had posted an article, you know, am I finally getting it about Bill Johnson?

It's like, you know, there are certain people that just, they don't have a place at the table. They don't deserve it. They haven't earned it. They don't have the credibility, the history, nothing. I'm not interested in what they have to say any longer.

They're done as far as I'm concerned. But my concern here is, why do you take the position you do about Bill Johnson? If you do it because you've just heard what somebody else says, if you do it based upon a five minute clip, you're probably not actually putting yourself in a position to actually help anybody who's actually involved with that.

There's a little bit more to it than that. There's a little bit more to it than that. And so I just wonder if anyone has gotten into what is at the foundation, because see, from his perspective, it's what we are called to be in light of who Christ was.

This is a theological issue that ends up having very practical ramifications as to how things are done at Bethel Church. There's got to be somebody out there that's done that work. And maybe somebody will send me a link and I can direct you to it or something like that.

But it was useful for me anyways to listen and to go, yeah, I'm not overly shocked that most of what I've heard is just missing the point. There are real problems here, but the real problems are much more presuppositional.

They're much more foundational. And I really think, honestly, the older I get, the more I recognize now why it is that God kept us where we were and had me go to school where I went, because I'm like, oh, yeah, I know where that comes from.

Oh, okay. Which I wouldn't have been able to do if I had ended up in a seminary that just mirrored what I already believed. You know, there's good things about that. You know, Dr. MacArthur has said you shouldn't go to seminary to fight a war.

Well, for a lot of people, they're just simply going into pastoral ministry. That's true. Obviously, that's not what the Lord called me to do. So it was good that I had to fight the war and that's given me some advantage here.

So just want to briefly mention that we've got so much other stuff to get into today. I'm not going to spend much time on it. All right.

I need you to hear this. You better be careful here. I know, I know. And look, you wondered why it is that I suddenly had this theological journal push and dragging up the old articles and getting out the scans.

Plus, we've been doing this for over a year, but I finally found a way to get them out there. But one of the reasons why, actually, the main reason why I felt the urgency right now is because I wanted to see us go back to reminding people why and how you do apologetics.

And the very first article we ran with was from 1990 and how apologetics is to be done. I'll give an example. In the late 1980s, when I was training and studying with Mike Beliveau to teach the How to Witness to Mormons class oh, come on now.

Stop this. I'll look the other way. I was going through and learning the material, but then I had to actually go into class with Mike and see how he was doing things. And in the very first class I sat through, I'll never forget the first thing he said.

It was not in the notes. And he looked around the room and he said, if you're here to get ammunition, you need to leave now. That's not what we're doing here. And two guys in the front row took issue with him over that statement.

They went back and forth for about 10 minutes, and he put them out of the room. He kicked them out. And the point was, look, we're here to reach these people, not to get ammunition so that we can have something to go after our friends or relatives that are Mormons.

We're here to actually learn things so that we can communicate with them and that we can actually reach them. And I see that ammunition thing going on within groups today. And in the theological journal, I'm putting out articles from 30 years ago.

Which make me nervous. That show how this is supposed to be done. We've been doing it for 30 years, and we've been doing it the same way. I think we've learned something along the way. I think the fact that I put out an article two weeks ago that you wrote when you were 26 years old that a lot of these young whippersnappers couldn't even touch with a 10-foot pole today.

26 years old? Yeah. So there's an example that needs to be set. Apologetics should be done surgically, not with a machete. That's my comment for the day.

Thank you very much, Rich, who has to answer the phones. What you need to understand is that was therapeutic. Rich has to say this to so many people on the phone, that this way he can just go, go listen to what I said on The Dividing Line.

Here's the time index. Leave me alone. Go away. And it's true. But it's also true that it makes me nervous, this stuff from the 90s or something like that, because I'm sort of like going, have I learned something since then?

Someone could call up and go, hey, you said and such. Oh, I'd forgotten that. So we'll see. I haven't had that happen yet. So we'll see. Anyway, all right. It's going to be an eclectic program. Got a lot to get to.

I'm going to try to not preach, but also try to be clear. It's fascinating to me that a bunch of stuff all hit at once. And I said, I'm going to take this as an indication. This is something we need to address.

Let's go ahead and start with this one. Um, I guess I need to put this over. I think this is the one that I think this is the side you need to use. Okay, so if we can go with that. Okay. Now, this was posted by a Muslim friend of mine.

But he stole it from somebody else. He admitted that. And the person that posted it said, Dr. David Wood's career ended in one quick question. And I responded that by saying, drama much? You know, I've seen, I've lost track of how many videos there are on YouTube talking about how I was destroyed in 20 seconds by this person or that person.

And, you know, maybe there are a few millennials that are impressed by that. But I can't possibly imagine any thoughtful person who could be impressed by that kind of language. And I'm thinking right now, not so much about this video, as about my son's experience over the weekend.

Some of you may have seen where he did a discussion with, you know, there's different kinds of Black Hebrew Israelites, okay? You know, there's all these different camps and all the rest of this stuff.

And there are some that aren't vile in all their language. And, you know, we've talked a little bit about a few of them. But there's a clear gradation and it goes really low. Well, these folks are about as low as you can get.

I mean, they wouldn't refer to my son by his name. He was either Edomite or White Devil. You Devil. White Devil. I mean, these people are racist in such a way that the KKK looks like amateurs in comparison to these guys.

They get away with it because they're of a different color. And you can be racist if you're that color. But these people are just, this is the worst example of using and abusing religion as a cover for racism that you'll ever see.

And it's hard to take these people seriously. I mean, when they said Paul was a Jamaican, that was, to me, that was, I mean, it's, you can't take this stuff seriously. I mean, it is just so far out there.

And they're the worst example of the kind of titling of videos and stuff like that. And the sad thing is, people are influenced by that. They shouldn't be. I mean, in this day, you would think that by now, everyone would be taught homeschool, public school, anyplace else.

Public school, yeah. To think logically, to analyze arguments. But if we were, half the advertising that's being done wouldn't work on us. We'd see right through it. So I guess that's why it's not the way it is.

But anyway, right at the exact same time that my son was dialoguing with these guys who are wearing, I don't know what they're wearing, okay? I think they're trying to look like Jewish high priests or something.

But they've got short-fingered gloves and sunglasses on inside. They're inside. And these headband things and these robes. Oh my, seriously, wow. It's just, it's so laughable. It's hard not to. You get past a point where it's just, you know, extending respect to that kind of stuff is just next to impossible to do.

Anyway, he was very patient with all of their abuse and everything else. Though my suggestion in the future would be, you've got to have a moderator. Because they talked for 50 minutes out of the hour.

So you've got to have a moderator. There's just someone who can control it and make sure that it's done in an even fashion. But at the exact same time that was going on, David Wood had a debate with Shabir Ali.

And I could have told you, since it was on the crucifixion, exactly what was going to happen. I debated Shabir on this. Though it's interesting, I think there has been some change. I think Shabir has gotten more and more and more and more and more willing to use a wild range of ultra-liberal, utterly incoherent scholarship.

I mean, Shabir has given up, quite honestly, on even trying to present, even pretending to present, a consistent perspective. I mean, I remember quoting to him, maybe in our first debate, maybe in a second, his own quotation to Robert Morey years and years and years ago.

When Morey made an attack upon the Qur 'an, his response was that, you know, you need to engage in meaningful exegesis. You can't force external sources upon the text of the Qur 'an. So he knew exactly what needed to be done.

But since he just won't do that with the New Testament at all, I think he's just given up on even bothering. And so I was, I mean, when you're quoting people who don't even believe Jesus existed as some of your sources, Dr. Price, who I've debated, when you're quoting Price as one of your sources, as a Muslim, I give up.

I mean, you aren't even pretending any longer to use any kind of consistency in the sources you're using. It's just, I'll throw everything at you, including the kitchen sink. And it doesn't matter if everything I throw at you is utterly contradictory to everything I believe.

I'll still use it. It's a shame. Anyway, so I didn't get to watch most of that debate, because I switched over once I heard about what Josh was doing. But there's always Q &A, always Q &A in debates. It's sort of how many debates die slowly.

Instead of ending, they just die slowly. And so here is a question that was asked. And so I'll let you hear the question. Then we'll listen to David's response. Then I'll go more slowly through Shabir's reply, because both of the things, two of the things we're gonna look at on the subject of Islam today are relevant to the crucifixion.

And what they both communicate to us, and what we're gonna see is, here's Shabir Ali, Dr. Shabir Ali, educated in the secular university up there in Canada, widely read, can quote all sorts of different sources, even though the sources all contradict each other, but he can quote from all of them anyways.

And then we're gonna have a Muslim from down in Australia who clearly hasn't read almost anything from the Christian perspective at all. And yet both completely miss the heart of the Christian perspective.

And Muslims that will watch this and are watching it right now, you need to understand when you guys tilt at windmills, when you burn straw men, where'd my straw man go? Ah, when you're going after guys like this, especially when it comes to the cross, and consistently, that tells us that you don't have a real good argument against the reality of what we believe.

Now, I will admit, this is not the case with Shabir, because almost everything Shabir says, I have dialogued with him about and refuted him in the past. So that doesn't matter. But the fellow down in Australia, maybe all the Christians he's talked to have really not had a meaningful understanding of the atonement.

I've often said, you can hear in the sermons that I've delivered on this subject over the decades, that I think most evangelical Christians have a sentimental doctrine of the atonement, not a biblical or theological doctrine of the atonement.

Okay, so maybe if that's, you know, it's like when I talk to a Muslim in South Africa, I cannot assume that they have dialogued with a Christian who's even properly Trinitarian, given the state of the church in South Africa.

Now, there are good churches in South Africa, just not many of them. They're in a small minority, unfortunately, in comparison to the word-faith stuff and the general shape of charismatic churches in South Africa, which is pathetic.

So I understand if that's all you've ever heard. And my hope is that in providing a response, maybe you'll be prompted to do some serious reading. You know, I don't expect the vast majority of Muslims to go read John Owen.

They're not going to understand John Owen. Most Christians don't understand John Owen. But there are good works on the subject that would help them to understand a whole lot better than the way they are.

So anyways, let's dive into this. Here's the question and the dialogue.

How do we understand the claim that Jesus, peace be upon him, was crucified on a cross, tree, or pole in light of Deuteronomy chapter 21, verses 22 and 23, and Galatians chapter 3, verse 13, which states that whoever is hung on a tree or pole or cross is cursed?

Thank you. Well, I'd say you're about that close to understanding the gospel, right? Because we know Jesus is righteous, according to both the Bible and the Quran. Muhammad in the Hadith said that Satan touches everyone who comes into the world, but he couldn't touch Jesus or his mother.

Everyone else, Muhammad, everyone,.

Satan could touch him, but not Jesus. I didn't see all the ads when I first watched it.

And so you're right. How do we reconcile our belief that Jesus was righteous with the Old Testament claim that anyone who's hung on a tree is cursed? And it seems that we would have to say that Jesus...

Now, yeah, I didn't even notice all this because I could care less about... Like I said, these are the guys that had the weird, hey, it gets destroyed, all this stuff. What was useful is the stuff over here on the side.

And that is Deuteronomy 21, and if a man have committed a sin worthy of death and they didn't even put it up there, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him, they even use King James, hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day, for he that is hanged is cursed of God, that thy land be not defiled, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for inheritance.

And then Galatians 3 .13, Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for his written curse is every man, everyone that hangeth on a tree. So the point is that Muslims struggle at this point with understanding what Christians believe about this.

It's a shame to me that many Christians struggle to answer. But what you need to understand, what we're gonna see a couple times here over this video and the next, is that the voluntary nature of the self-giving of the Son in perfect union with the will of the Father through the work and cooperation of the Holy Spirit is not a part of the Muslim's understanding of Christian theology.

Even though you can, all I gotta do is go read Augustine. Augustine wrote hundreds of years before your prophet came along. So here's somebody, we don't even have to argue interpretations here, very clearly, the most important Christian writer between Paul and the days of Muhammad made this very plain.

It's not difficult to find. This is not a disputable issue. Christians believe that Father, Son, and Spirit together were involved, that the Son voluntarily, I mean, it's directly stated in scripture.

He made himself of no reputation. That uses what's called a reflexive pronoun. This is something that the Son himself did. He took on human flesh. He had the divine power to be able to do that. I know it's not the Jesus that you believe in because you don't believe in the Jesus of the apostles.

But the Jesus of the Bible had the ability to do that. He does it voluntarily. And so all this stuff about God committing suicide and the Son being abused by the Father, all the rest of the stuff, utterly irrelevant to what Christianity actually believes.

It's straw man. It is not worthy of being repeated in the future on your part. When you repeat it, what you're doing from your perspective is a little more than what some Christians do in attacking the worst misunderstandings of Islamic theology and practice and making them normative for all Muslims, ignoring the fact that there are Muslim scholars, there's Muslim jurisprudence, there are Muslim works down through the ages that have obviously expressed many of these beliefs in a much more consistent and meaningful fashion relating various elements of Islamic tradition and theology together in a much more consistent whole.

You're just doing the same thing reverse. As long as all of us keep doing that, we're never going to accomplish anything other unless it's your purpose just to keep Muslims, Muslims and Christians and Christians and we just keep lobbing bombs at each other.

I guess I shouldn't use that term, but verbal bombs on the internet. If that's what you want, then that's what we'll get. But the real question is, do you want to be truthful? I've mentioned many times before one of the 99 beautiful names, Al Haqq, the truth.

You want to be truthful? Your own faith seems to indicate that this should be something that is of a high priority to you. So this is where the confusion is coming from and David is seeking to address that.

In his response, Jesus was cursed in spite of being righteous. And that's exactly what the gospel says, right? The one who was without sin became sin for us. So yeah, if we left those things out and you would wonder, oh, was Jesus cursed?

Well, Jesus was righteous and yet he was cursed. And notice he was hung on a tree according to Shabir as well. So he's under a curse according to both.

Now, let me just mention, it's one of the reasons it makes it difficult to debate Shabir Ali on this is he does not hold the standard Sunni position on this. He does believe Jesus was crucified. He just swooned, he didn't die.

Vast majority of Sunni Muslims do not believe that Jesus was hung upon a tree. They believe he was taken up to heaven. Someone else was made to look like Jesus. I think Shabir recognizes that it's actually impossible to defend that idea from a historical perspective.

So maybe that's why he takes, the Ahmadi take a similar perspective, wouldn't be identical, but similar perspective as Shabir. So when you debate Shabir on the subject, you end up not really addressing most of the Sunni Muslims in the audiences.

That's what he was just mentioning, that even Shabir believes that he was hung upon a tree.

Views on the stage tonight. And so if Jesus was under a curse, well, what do we do there in Christianity? He's under a curse for a reason, right? He's under a curse for a reason because he's becoming a curse for us, right?

So that we can be forgiven.

See, what I would emphasize there in David's response is the freeness, the voluntariness of this action, both on the part of the father and the son, that this is not the son being forced to do something, that this is the central mechanism whereby father, son, and spirit bring about their own self-glorification.

And this was chosen, they chose to do this in eternity past. And so when you have a strong doctrine of the atonement, and understand the book of Hebrews and what it teaches, then it is that freedom of God that is expressed, that freedom of God that is expressed in the cross that I think can really help Muslims understand this.

Now, let me just mention something, especially when we look at the second video. The second video, honestly, is, it's not on the level of the Black Hebrew Israelites, but as far as understanding of Christian theology, it sort of is.

And I don't say that disrespectfully, it's just the fact, as we're going to point out. And for a lot of people, especially if you don't live in an area where there's a lot of Muslim immigrants or something like that, where you just haven't had any interaction with folks, the question might cross your mind, why even bother?

I mean, this is so far out from a truthful representation, but you have to recognize. Remember, what year was that? 99, that long line of Muslims staying there asking, getting ready to ask me questions in a very warm, humid church building.

On Long Island. And, you know, the guy asking about the fig tree. And, you know, the fig tree question. And then, to me, still one of the most hilarious of my debate experiences, the guy who goes on and on and on to eventually get around to asking, was Jesus a white man or a Black man?

It took him five minutes. And the process, he's gesturing so much that he hits the microphone, which is a wireless microphone. And it goes flying down. And he has to go run after the microphone, go get it.

It was hilarious. But what it illustrated all the way back then, and I look back on it now and go, oh, man, did I have a lot to learn at that point in time? And here was the beginning of my education, was what are you gonna do with these folks?

The sad tendency. Let's be honest. Let me talk to my fellow Calvinists here. The sad tendency amongst us is to go, beneath me, not worth my time. Not worth my time. They are worth your time. There is a huge difference between the errors we're gonna see in the second video we're gonna look at in a moment, which is on the same subject, and the attitude of those Black Hebrew Israelites.

This is based upon ignorance. It's based upon tradition. It's not the kind of white devil stuff. Now, there are Muslims that get down there too. The ones that every other word is koffer and just have this obviously deep detestation of any Christian at all.

They don't make any distinction between us or anything else. There are some that get down there too, obviously. But there are many, especially those who come from other nations. It's all they know. It's all they know.

So keep that in mind as we address this.

As far as other interpretations, I guess he's under a curse because he was hung on a tree, but I don't know. Shabir's about to answer so he can explain what he would think about Jesus being hung on a tree.

I agree that Jesus was righteous, and I don't agree that he was a curse. And the Deuteronomy passage actually refers to a person who was hung justly for his crimes. So he's under the curse of God, according to Deuteronomy.

Paul misunderstood this, and though Jesus was unjustly hung, Paul said Jesus became a curse, but he's a curse for us. But that's problematic because...

Now, notice for Shabir, Paul is the big baddie. Now, I have never seen Shabir even attempt to be fair to Paul at all. There are excellent works. In fact, I would suggest that for anyone who's going to be involved in Muslim apologetics, the books, Paul, Apostle, The Heart Set Free, F .F. Bruce, and then those that have been done since then, that are fair biblical examinations of just a chosen servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.

I mean, when you're dealing with Muslim apologetics today, you're going to be dealing with people who have been poisoned, incoherently poisoned against the apostle Paul. They will not give... They will not read a word he says with the slightest bit of fairness.

And unfortunately, they draw from a whole range of anti -Paul rhetoric that is common in modern day theology. And so he says, you know, Paul did not understand. Paul perfectly understood this. Paul read Hebrew better than Shabir ever will.

Paul was trained the feet of Gamaliel. He fully knew what the context was. The point was that the methodology of death demonstrated the cursedness of the person who died in this fashion. And Paul's whole argument in Galatians 3 is Christ has borne the curse of the law in his body upon the tree in our place.

Therefore, the idea of our having to enter into the old covenant and keep the law and be circumcised and do all the rest of this stuff so as to actuate something on Christ's part, there is nothing we can add to what Christ has accomplished in his voluntary self-giving upon the cross.

He has borne in himself. Now, this requires Jesus to be a whole lot greater than the Muslim Jesus. There's no question about that. A Jesus who... Going off the top of my head, I didn't look it up, but I think in that Hadith where Muhammad goes to the levels of heaven and, you know, when he finally gets to Allah, he's given, you know, 50 prayers and 30 prayers and he and Moses have that thing that sort of looks like it's sort of based a little bit on what happened with Abraham and Yahweh in regards to Sodom and Gomorrah and stuff, you know, finally whittled the number of prayers down to five and all the rest of that stuff.

But if I recall correctly, Jesus wasn't on the top level of heaven. If I recall correctly, he was on the second, wasn't it? I'm just going off the top of my head. I didn't look it up. I think he was on like the second level.