Clement and Leighton Flowers Walk Into a Bar…

Iron Sharpens Iron, Purgatory, and the Problem of Historical Amnesia

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, James White along with you on a Thursday, third program of the week. It's not like I took yesterday off. I was on with Chris Arnson on Iron Sharpens Iron. We were talking about the debate from 19 years ago with Peter Stravinskis on the subject of purgatory.

That was fun, because that was, if you have not seen that debate, I do highly recommend it to you. What happens when a priest, not a Roman Catholic priest, he's an Eastern Rite priest, but it's Roman Catholicism.

What happens when a priest with two PhDs from Ivy League schools goes into a debate on the subject of purgatory with a Reformed guy that he has no respect for, and hence hasn't bothered to read anything that he wrote or listen to anything, none of that kind of stuff, and in fact spends his opening statement talking about a conversation he had with Jimmy Swaggart.

That's not going to go well. That's going to go really, really, really poorly, and it did go really poorly. He discovered that during the cross-examination period on 1 Corinthians 3, all of which is on YouTube.

If you get the opportunity, I think you would find it to be a useful discussion. In fact, we made the point yesterday, I think that debate exposed more about Rome's doctrine of justification than the debates on justification did.

I mentioned on Iron Chalmers Iron yesterday, the reason for that is that Stravinskis, I believe to be a lifelong Catholic, the guys that have debated on justification were former Protestants, former Reformed Protestants, and so they used the language to spin stuff.

It lacks clarity. It lacks the clarity that you end up getting from what? Why are you getting a mask out? Yeah, yeah, no, no, stop it. Why are you doing that? I'm not doing the program until you take that off, okay?

This is not correct. Yeah, it's great. Do I look like I'm asymptomatic over here or something, but a vector, a carrier? Is that what's going on here? See what I have to put up with? How do you expect me to even keep a train of thought when that's the type of stuff going on across the window, huh?

You all don't know. You all sit there everywhere I go, you're so mean to Rich, and you just have no idea. On the way in here, on the way in here, I'm listening. I started listening to Apology Radio because it's Luke and Jeff and Joy and my daughter.

They're doing a theologians mashup, and they didn't even tell me. I mean, my grandkids are there. I was not invited, and they did not even tell me, and so I'm complaining loudly in the chat, you know, and then I fired up in the car on the way in, and you know what they're doing all the way in?

They're talking about me. That is dangerous. Think about it for a second. What if your daughter was on a radio program talking about you? Would you be just a little bit nervous? Because I mean, what stories is she going to tell?

It was fun though, because Jeff actually texted all of us elders. He was listening to The Last Dividing Line when I got to the part about how the elect are helping to redeem the earth through digestion.

They replayed that on Apology Radio. I'm not making it up, folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, all right. You're preparing for the Manichaeans by putting the face mask on. That's understandable. I am not making this up.

When we get into it, the Manichaean idea was that the elect, and remember, there's supposed to be this parallel between the Manichaean elect and the elect in Augustine, and hence, Calvin never saw a Bible, never translated from Latin or Greek, Hebrew, anything like that.

He just, whatever Augustine says, I believe. You can't have any influences other than the Manichaeans, and so you've got this connection. And the fact is that because they believe that in this three moments cosmogony of Manichaeism, that this sparks of light have been trapped in these physical bodies.

It's a very Gnostic idea, but it's actually, the battle between light and darkness is pretty universal in all religions. This is just a weird way of putting it. And so it's also found in A Thing is Alive.

And so you had the elect, and then you had the hearers. And the hearers were not as strict adherents, and so they would prepare food for the elect. And the elect, to prepare food, obviously totally vegetarian, and obviously just very limited vegetarian range of things could be prepared.

But to prepare any food, you have to, you know, kill it, pull it out of the ground. So you'd be doing damage to the light sparks. So it had to be done in a particular way to do the least damage. And then the light sparks are released back to the realm of light through digestion of the elect as they eat and as they excrete.

And so as they free the light sparks by eating and digesting, then the light sparks go up and that's where the Milky Way comes from. So it's going to the moon, the moon becomes full, and then the moon wanes, and the moon becomes full.

And all those sparkly thingies that you would see on a particularly dark night, we call it the Milky Way, which we know is the rest of our galaxy. Those are the sparks of light that were going back to the light realm.

So if you died as one of the elect, that also could happen. But then you're also freeing the sparks by eating and excreting. And for some reason, Jeff found that particularly noteworthy, noteworthy, I think it's a term.

So anyway, how did I get onto that? I don't know. Anyways, so I had some thoughts. Oh, you're the one that distracted me with that silly mask. I had some thoughts and then so much stuff has happened so far today, developments taking place today, that I hope you will find this to be interesting because this is ongoing developments, okay?

Why Careful Church History Matters

When you're tackling something, when you're tackling a subject, you dig into stuff and that leads to something over here, leads to something over there. And then in this instance, I was forced to go back and to listen to some stuff and go, Hey, wait a minute.

What's going on here? We have been doing a lot on church history and some people, I haven't done like a poll or anything. I may do a poll. One of the complaints that the provisionists are putting out is just get to the point.

The problem here is the reason that certain theories can be floated amongst people today is most Christians don't know anything about church history. They've not had the opportunity or taken the opportunity to familiarize themselves with church history.

And let's just be honest, for independent style Baptists, church history goes back to Billy Graham and even that's starting to get into ancient church history now because he died. And then for Reformed folks, pretty much Martin Luther, maybe Wycliffe and Huss, if you know where they were, chronologically speaking.

But for most Protestants, that's about as far back as it goes. What percentage do you think if we were to do, if we did a test, a quiz at the next meeting, Sunday morning after church, and we were to ask evangelical Protestants to place Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius Loyola in the correct centuries of church history, what rate of success do you think we would have?

If I were to ask you, you individual listener right now, to put Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius Loyola in the proper context and centuries of church history, do you believe you could do it? How about Tertullian?

Ambrosiaster? You better have Augustine by now. When did Gottschalk live? The reality is that once you get past the Reformation going backwards, there is a lot of confusion and therefore, as long as someone comes along and uses an argument from authority, they can get away with almost anything.

We've been dealing with errors like this for a long, long time. Decades. We really have. Let me prove it to you. Well, I guess, yeah, okay. Is the more of my brother? If you, I was looking for the other edition of it.

I guess this is the one I have in here. In here, I deal with a doctrine called Theosis. Theosis. Why do I deal with a doctrine called Theosis? Why, starting on page, this is an appendix, starting on page 207, going to 227.

So 20 pages in this book. Got a real delay on the video today. Noticing that? I hope the audio is synced up. They're doing good? Okay. 20 pages in a book on Mormonism on Theosis. Why? Well, because Mormon apologists utilize the Eastern Orthodox concept of Theosis out of context to substantiate the concept of men becoming gods.

And so this was written in the late 1990s. This was actually, I forget what the original, yeah, 97, 1997, late 1990s. So, over 20 years ago, dealing with church history issues, and to do so, you had to provide context.

You had to talk about, you can't just say, this is why it's wrong. You have to provide some type of a context to be able to make meaningful historical statements that will have relevance to today. So, we enjoy teaching church history, but in this instance, what we're doing is teaching church history, not in the sense that you would in a class, but how to do historiography.

How to recognize bad arguments and abuse of history. Because there's so much of that out there. The less we know about it, the more that area can be abused. And we're also seeking to demonstrate that when you make references to church history, you need to do so with care.

We only have so much information. We can't go back and interview these people. There are some people we have so much material. In fact, some people we have too much material. And in others, we have just fragments.

And if you treat the people for whom we only have fragments the same as someone that we have 6 ,000 volumes for, then obviously you're making a mistake. You can be significantly more certain about someone when you have 6 ,000 volumes of their writing than you can when you have fragments quoted by someone secondhand, obviously.

So there are fundamental things that have to be done in doing church history in a meaningful fashion. And some people just want us to cut all that out. And I'm like, I'm going to make this an educational thing.

Clement of Rome, First Clement, and Pseudepigraphal Citations

At church, just a few weeks ago, we've been doing catechism questions since before I got there. But a few weeks ago, we added to the catechism section a thing we call voices from the early church. We've looked at two quotes from Ignatius.

And we just happened to be looking at Clement of Rome on justification right now. If you grab one of our bulletins, there it is. And that's one of the things that I do. I get to do a little mini historical sermon every week, basically, as I look at these quotations from early church fathers, we want to see the connection that we have to those who've come before us.

It enriches our faith to see those connections, to see those vital connections. And I think one of the greatest impoverishing things in modern Christian experience is how little connection most Christians have to those who've gone before them.

We say Jesus has been building his church. Do we believe it? Not if you think that everybody in the medieval period was just a pagan or something. You don't believe it. Independent fundamentalist Baptists don't believe it.

Well, they've got the trail of blood thing. So they'll say, well, yeah, he was building his church. But it was in a secret place that no one can find. So I'm not in any hurry. And you guys can't hurry me along.

Because actually, the more slowly and fully I explain things, the more clear the problems really are. That may be part of the problem. But could I point out something? A year at Oxford with access to the library and I'm supposed to have an answer in two weeks.

It's amazing that I've come up with so much already. Especially since I'm doing other things at the same time. Isn't that weird? Anyway, so what we've been doing, if you're just tuning in. We started with this book, OK?

People were calling Rich and saying, are you going to talk about this? Saw some reviews. And so I'm like, all right, it's not like I don't have a million other things going on. But OK, we'll we'll do.

So we got this. And I started reading through it, got on Kindle as well. And I was stunned. By what I was reading, not because, oh, I've never had this before, but how are you making the connections that you're making?

This is this is this is really bad. There's got to be what am I missing here? And so when I started making some comments, what you get is, well, you just you've got to do the dissertation, the hundred dollar dissertation.

And I'm like, well, I'm sorry, if you can't summarize your 400 page dissertation in 80 pages and make it accurate, I've done it with all sorts of stuff. You've got to justify as I point out the books.

I've done it. If you can't do that, then you never mastered your material. That's just a fact. That's just how scholarship works. And then. I ran across the interview from 2018 when Leighton Flowers interviewed Ken Wilson and at the end, in fact, let's go ahead and play this just just just because this is relevant right at the end of the interview.

We have.

I think this is it right here. And we look forward to seeing more. I don't know if you're ever game for something like this, but our generation, unfortunately, is not real good about reading large, thick dissertations.

But they're really good about reading small manuals or small books popularized that if you ever sat down and took maybe some of the best and most poignant points of your dissertation and put it in a book, I know Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary, Trinity Seminary would probably publish it for you if nobody else would.

But that kind of thing could be, I think, real valuable to the church to have just an easy, popular teaching on the doctrines of Augustine and historical teachings. I don't know. I know you're busy. You have surgeries to do and all that stuff, that nonsense stuff, if you want to save people's lives and all.

But if you want to stop and impair something down into a popular book, I know there would be probably people interested in publishing it.

Thanks. That's a good idea. I may end up doing that.

More feedback should allow me to summarize something, because it won't be as scholarly, obviously. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. More popular.

Well, thank you, Dr. Wilson. So I don't know if that was the genesis of this. It sounds like it. He didn't say, you know, I've had a lot of people telling me that. Yeah, I might do something like that.

That's where it came from. So here's the point. We're listening to this interview to see because what was the objection? Well, you can't just deal with this. That's not really the scholarly stuff. So this is inaccurate.

So if we're listening to an interview talking about these very things that came about before this, when only this existed and the same stuff that's in the interview is in here, then this is accurate. Right?

Yeah. That's right. OK, so and I need to bring this up while we're playing something else because I've got to pull it up. I apologize. Yesterday, Layton Flowers posted a screenshot. There it is. James White's fallacious approach with Dr. Ken Wilson.

I'm going to be looking at this. And, you know, all the fans are going, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. It's wonderful. And so I wrote I left a little note that I will debunk all of this, which we will because it is very easily debunked.

But in the process of looking at that. One of the issues that I, you know, the early church fathers and stuff like that. One of the questions that came up as I was marking the last of the things that I wanted to deal with in the in the interview had to do with the subject of Clement of Rome.

Now, I think it's the next one. So could you could you bear with me here for a moment? Let me see if this is what the this one is. I'm even going to pick up the pace a little bit, the speed of the recording, so we can listen to this a little faster.

Let me see if this is the one. Prior, even during the time of Jesus and, you know, Phariseeism, you've got the Sadducees. That is not it.

You know, the debate between foreknowledge and free will. I'm looking forward here. I've got stuff. Very important to distinguish that omniscience. I'd like to point out that God is eight.

It's it's it doesn't even exist hardly, which is also just it's like that first 300 years or 400 years of church history. This this debate can't be found, really. And in Eastern Orthodoxy, it's almost the exact same way.

You just you don't find this this parsing of Romans nine and back and forth and determinism. But in Western obvious in Western Christianity, you find it all over the place. Why is that? Why is Eastern Orthodoxy, though?

It has its other issues. Obviously, every every stream of Christian thought, because it's made up of human beings and sinful human beings, that that's going to have its problems. But why is it that Eastern Orthodoxy, it's just like this debate or this issue almost virtually doesn't exist?

Good question.

So it's OK. It was the section. And I actually need to pull up something else before I deal with that one, too. It was the section where.

So if you do that, if you're really honest about it, actually read the whole.

Did you find yourself having a bias to say, I'm looking for the free will stuff. I'm just going to skip over anything. It doesn't sound like it supports my view. Or were you objective in really studying both sides from, you know, from both perspectives to try to find the true meaning and intention of the author?

Surely. I mean, I didn't know when I started this. I had no clue what these guys were. So it's very simple. All I did was categorize and say, OK, I read the whole thing. Here's what this person says. Here's what this person says and why.

And so it was not a search for, hey, I got to prove free will against Augustus. What did these people say?

And how do I know? Say that Augustine was the first to clearly...

I don't know why I'm missing it. Sorry, because I don't believe I've played it yet. Sorry about that. Anyway, let me just summarize it. During the interview, we'll probably run into it in one of these other ones.

During the interview, Layton made a statement that he was asking Wilson about these quotations from early church fathers that are presented as if they are supportive of Calvinism. And he made the statement that he struggled with me in our debate on Romans 9 because he gave a quote from Clement of Rome supporting free will.

And I said, well, Clement of Rome spoke often of the elect as if Clement of Rome was a Calvinist. And they all chuckled about how silly that would be. And so I was going, well, you know, I wonder what he said and I wonder what I said.

I don't generally go back and listen to debates. But I thought, you know, I wonder what actually was said in our debate in 2015 on the subject of Clement of Rome. And would this have relevance here? And lo and behold, it did.

It did. So let's get in our time machines and let's go back to 2015. And this is the section of Layton Flowers' positive presentation. And see if he hasn't already been in touch with Ken Wilson. Let's see what we can hear here.

Okay, ready? Here we go.

Teach that this wasn't clearly taught until Augustine, who doesn't even teach this view of election until the 5th century. In other words, the way many people understand election today is not the way it was understood throughout Old Testament times, the New Testament times, or any time until a former Gnostic Manichean philosopher from Africa, who did not know Greek, came along 300 years after the time of Christ to systematize it for us.

The earliest church fathers, men like Irenaeus or Ignatius, who Ignatius was actually taught by the Apostle John himself, and we have some of their writings, they never taught an individualistic, Calvinistic view of election.

In fact, they repudiated this kind of interpretation in much of their writings. For instance, I want us to look at one early church father, the Clement of Rome. We're talking about a letter written to Rome, and he was likely in Rome and would have been very familiar with this letter.

Clement is actually referenced in Philippians 4, verse 3. We're told that the Apostle Peter himself likely commissioned Clement, and he followed Peter probably sometime as a bishop there in Rome. So it would be good to know what a 1st century person of the first church, an early church father, thought on this subject.

Well, we don't have to guess. We have a lot of his writings. I picked a short quote just for time's sake. He wrote this,. It is therefore in the power of everyone, since man has been made possessed of free will, whether he shall hear us to life or hear the demons to destruction.

You see, very few students, in my experience, are even aware of how the church understood the nature of man or the doctrine of election for the first 400 years of the church's existence.

Okay. So, that was not a extemporaneous statement. I can tell you, I was sitting on the stage, all of Dr. Leighton Flower's presentation was written out beforehand. All the questions, all the rebuttals, closing statement, not only written out beforehand, but encased in plastic.

Okay. So, this was not, Oh, you know, I just looked something up quick, or off the top of my head, answer to a question type thing. This was part, you can tell it's being read. This is part of the formal presentation.

So, there wasn't any time pressure involved, anything like that. Now, I want to go back through, there's some fascinating stuff there. But, he said he struggled with me, because I wanted to turn Clement into a Calvinist.

And so, I'm like, why did that happen? So, here's the questioning that I gave, and here's, see if I tried to turn Clement into a Calvinist. Ready? Here we go. Professor Flowers, you said that Clement, you quoted from Clement of Rome, yes?

Yes, sir. And you said we have a lot of his writings. Yes. Did you list them? List them all? Isn't the fact that we have one epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, and the rest are pseudo-Clements?

Thus, although we are born neither good nor bad, we become one or the other, and having formed habits, we are with difficulty drawn from them.

That's the quote, but you said we have lots of his writings. I've got five more. You want me to read them? No. Okay. Where are they from, sir? Clement. Okay. So, we have one epistle. Did he exegete Romans 9, that epistle?

No.

Not that I know of. We've got quotes that support his view of free will. We've got quotes that denounce the concept of individualistic, Calvinistic type of interpretations. Along with Irenaeus and others.

As you interpret it. Well, obviously, yes.

All right. You said that Calvinists….

But, Dr. White, not only as I interpret it, as Lorraine Botner interprets it, Stan Storms interprets it, I could list other Calvinists who admit that Augustine is the first one to clearly teach the….

So, you can show me where they've interpreted Clement's epistle to the Romans, to the Corinthians.

No, what I'm saying is that I have quotes from other Calvinists who admit that Augustine is the first one to clearly….

Which would be different than the application you're making. They wouldn't agree with the application you're making, right? Oh, no, no.

They would probably try to say that, well, Sam Storms, for example…. Okay. So, we went on from there.

So, nowhere did I claim the Clement of Rome was a Calvinist. Did not turn him into it. In fact, I didn't say anything about the elect there. So, there might be…. Maybe something else came up afterwards?

Because I didn't even mention the elect there. So, maybe there's something afterwards. I'm going to have to buzz through the rest of it, because he seemed to have a very strong recollection that there's something about the elect there.

There are, by the way. And I've made that statement. We're going to look at some of the references to the elect in Clement's. This is what I was preparing. I wanted to spend some time positively listening to what is found in that epistle that plainly is drawn from Pauline theology of the elect.

I think it's important to see those things. So, I was trying to find the background. Now, let's note some of the things that came up here. Let me pick up the pace a little bit. Now that you heard it, let me point a few things out for you.

…teach that this wasn't clearly taught until Augustine, who doesn't even teach this view of election until the 5th century. In other words, the way many people understand election today is not the way it was understood throughout Old Testament times….

Even though Paul interpreted it that way.

…the New Testament times, or any time until a former Gnostic, Manichean philosopher from Africa, who did not know Greek, came along 300 years after the time of Christ to systematize it for us.

Yeah, he did not know Greek or Hebrew, though he picked up some Greek later in his life. That much is true. To be honest with you, Leighton, I'm not sure how much of it you know. Is that somehow relevant at this particular point?

Because we're going to find out here in a moment, you've never read Clement in Greek, so does that somehow vitiate your conclusions? You just used it, you're the one that raised it. So, just wondering what the connection is.

The earliest church fathers, men like Irenaeus or Ignatius, who Ignatius was actually taught by the Apostle John himself, and we have some of their writings, they never taught an individualistic, Calvinistic view of election.

In fact, they repudiated this kind of interpretation in much of their writings.

They repudiated this interpretation. Well, that would be interesting to see if he could substantiate that. We're going to find Clement teaching what Leighton says he doesn't teach.

Since I want us to look at one early church father, the Clement of Rome. We're talking about a letter written to Rome?

It is not a letter written to Rome. First of all, we don't know who wrote this letter. Clement's name has been associated with it traditionally. And, of course, then it was connected with the Clement that is mentioned by Paul, and then tradition ended up later, 100 years later, associating Clement as one of the earliest presbyters, and then eventually, once it was lost sight of the fact that the early form of church government in Rome was not a single bishop.

It was a plurality of elders, as is seen in Ignatius' letter to the church at Rome. These are not things that would be a part of Leighton Flower's world because it doesn't debate Roman Catholics on the subject of papacy, on the basis of early church history.

But those of us who do are aware of these issues, and so we would know that the identification of Clement in this way is traditional. It's not in the text. It's not in the text of the epistle itself. It is a letter written by the church at Rome to the church at Corinth.

It's not written to the church at Rome. So he's wrong immediately. He's not even aware. And I don't know how you could have read the letter, and I'll be honest with you, I do not believe that in 2015, Leighton Flower has ever read Clement's epistle, what's called First Clement, Clement's epistle.

And, of course, there's all sorts of other Clementine writings that are either pseudepigraphal, they're forgeries of later centuries, and then a lot of people confuse Clement of Rome, one epistle, with Clement of Alexandria.

Lots of epistles, but a lot of weird stuff in those epistles, too. And so you have an epistle written from Rome to the church at Corinth. If you read it, how could you not know what it was about? Because it is about the Corinthians having kicked their elders out and basically have divided the faith.

And we'll be looking at that in just a moment. So it is not written to the church at Rome. It is written from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth.

And he was likely in Rome and would have been very familiar with this letter.

He was likely in Rome and would have likely been very familiar with this letter. That does not make a lick of sense. If he wrote it, probably would be familiar with it. But if it was written to Rome, why would he be in Rome?

Makes no sense. Clement is actually referenced in Philippians chapter 4, verse 3. We're told that the Apostle Peter himself likely commissioned Clement, and he followed Peter probably sometime as a bishop there in Rome.

Okay, that is all much later tradition. Much later tradition. And in fact, what's strange is how many things that both Leighton and Wilson will say that are fundamentally Roman Catholic in their orientation.

I don't think either one of them knows that. I see no evidence that either one of them has had any meaningful interaction with Roman Catholic apologists. But they're buying into material. It looks to me, this is my interpretation as I see it, that they're just grabbing everything they can to get as big a pile of stuff to defend provisionism, whether it's consistent or not.

And one of the things that has helped us to not engage in that type of activity is we have to deal not only with the Roman Catholics, we have to deal with the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Unitarians and the Muslims and everybody else dealing with church history.

So we have to be balanced, because we've got people all around us that'll get us if we become imbalanced. And it really helps. I'm really thankful that's how we've ended up having to do things.

It would be good to know what a 1st century person of the 1st century...

Okay, so he's saying 1st century. So there is only one work of history associated with Clement of Rome from the 1st century. Now, where in the 1st century? Like I said, we talked about it before, some people argue for a pre -70 date for it, some people say it's in the 90s, both would be 1st century.

But he's talking about a 1st century sorcerer, and there is only one epistle. Just one. There's nothing else. There is some pseudo-Clementine stuff from the 2nd century, then you can go to the 3rd, 4th century, and get like 4th Clement, which is what he ends up quoting from, but there's just one epistle.

Just one.

Early church father thought on this subject. Well, we don't have to guess, we have a lot of his writings. I picked a short quote.

We have a lot of his writings. I picked a short quote. We have one epistle. This was plainly taken from the web, and I think I've found the source. I think I tracked it down. I found one version of it, because it's all the same version, exact same order.

I found a version of it from 2012, three years before the debate. I found another version from 2018, by someone who specifically identifies as a provisionist and links to Soteriology 101. So I think this list has been passed around amongst Leighton's group.

And I think this is where he got it, because he didn't get it from reading Clement. I'm showing my datedness here. This is the life at Harmer. There have been some great critical editions of the Apostolic Fathers put out over the past number of years.

Holmes and stuff like that. But you'll notice this is a Greek-English. Not facing pages. You've got the Greek and then you've got the English. But it's been sort of a standard work for a long, long time.

This is what I used when I taught Development of Patristic Theology at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. You can check with them to verify that. And that includes Clement's epistle right here.

If you read it, then you'd know this quote isn't in it. So what's the quote?

For time's sake, he wrote this. It is therefore in the power of everyone, since man has been made possessed of free will, whether he shall hear us to life, or hear the demons to destruction.

So we've been told here in the debate that in the first century, as a representative of this consistent denunciation of Reformed theology, and by the way, this was in a debate on Romans 9, that this quotation appears.

Now, you've already gathered, I'm sure, that that is nowhere to be found in Clement's epistle to the church at Corinth. It is from a 3rd or 4th century work called 4th Clement. It is found there. The list of quotations didn't have much in the way of actual references.

So it would be easy to become confused if you didn't check your sources. So when I then asked questions of him, what I was asking him was, you say we have lots of his writings. What do you mean? And you can tell by the responses that he had no idea what I was talking about.

He had no idea how many genuine works of Clement we possess. Now, that was his opening statement. I had never seen it before. It would be nice if I had been able to, maybe if we did things like the Iglesia Ni Cristo does, and I had five guys, I could have said, you, look that one up.

You, Google that one. Maybe that's the advantage of doing stuff like that. But you rarely have time to really get into all of that kind of stuff. But the fact of the matter is, the quotation comes from a much later source, and it's a pseudepigraphical source.

It was very common in the ancient world for people to write books and to attach the name of someone with authority to those books. In fact, church history is filled with that. It's absolutely filled with that.

And I've made reference to this many, many times before regarding what's called the Donation of Constantine and the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals. And I recognize that sometimes that stuff just goes flying by because people aren't familiar with it, but I've used it as an illustration.

The Donation of Constantine is a forgery that was fundamental to the development of papal power, as were the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals. It was far too frequent an experience for someone to create a list of citations.

They would include real citations, so that you could go, yeah, I've heard that one before. But then they would insert the false citations. If you think it's tough enough to look things up on the Internet, try before then.

Try before even the organization of universities. It was next to impossible to do critical analysis of literary sources in years past, the way that we can today. And so, as a result, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals vitally important in the medieval period in the development of the high-water mark of the authority of the papacy under Innocent III and people like that, especially in the struggles that they were having with the emperor and that kind of thing.

All sorts of quotations in there that were just completely bogus. And I mentioned on Iron Shepherds Iron yesterday, Chris Aronson set up a debate with Chris Ferrara, a Roman Catholic attorney on Long Island a few years ago.