James White "Admits" What?

Misrepresenting James White by Ignoring Context

This will be a fairly short video because the video I'm responding to is pretty short as well, barely a little over a minute long. It's from the callingchristians .com website. Evidently, they were behind the last one that I had to respond to as well.

And unfortunately, the last one was identified as being pretty bad. This one is even worse. They're trying to keep up their record or something, I guess. It's amazing to me. I fail to understand how it is that a person, for example, could publish an entire book that is fairly well known.

I mean, a lot of people have seen the book, an entire book, and then do literally dozens of debates on a particular topic where you consistently say the same thing all the way through. And then in the debate that you're reviewing, you make it very clear.

In fact, it's the entire central thesis of your opening statement that you are still saying the same thing. And then in the video that you're reviewing, you can make the same arguments. You can ignore all of that, find one sentence, ignore all that context, turn the person's position on its head, and call that argumentation.

How does that work? I do not understand the utter irrationality that Islam has produced in the minds of some of these people. It seems today you either have this kind of stuff where it's chop stuff up, ignore context, don't even try to be honest, don't even try for any type of intellectual integrity.

Or you've got the folks who are in love with Bart Ehrman and all the liberals and all the people, they would reject everything they say about the Quran, but they love what they say about the Bible, and so they contradict themselves that way.

That seems to be almost all we have when it comes to the dawah being offered today by Islam. Either contradict yourself and attack the Bible, or just engage in this kind of utterly irrational kind of ignoring context and just making absurd statements.

Take a look at this video,.

The Claim That Jesus' Deity Arose After the Apostles

And you'll see exactly what I mean. After the debate with Brother Shabir Ali on the topic the Jesus-claimed deity, James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries released a video in which he made a very startling claim.

In the following excerpt, he clearly states that the belief of Jesus being a deity originated from the period after the apostles. Note, he does not say from Jesus, nor from the disciples themselves, but from the period of time after the apostles.

If James White believes this, why then does he continue to preach that Jesus claimed to be God? Why then does he.

Worship Jesus as a god? One of the main reasons I did this is because Shabir Ali always says, he points to the Council of Nicaea. Many Muslims mistakenly point to the Council of Nicaea. Well, here's where it developed.

No, it was a belief from the very first generation after the apostles. Now, let's try to introduce, I believe his name is Abdu 'l-Khaliq. Let's try to introduce him to something called context. This is how we communicate as human beings, okay?

You listen to what someone's saying in the context in which they said it. Now, the thesis of my opening statement in the debate had been what? It had been that the belief in the deity of Christ came from Jesus.

I traced the line all the way back to Jesus. If you're going to argue with what I said, then you've got to deal with what I said, and you aren't doing that yet. So, that was in the debate. In the video, I likewise corrected misapprehensions about what the thesis was.

And one of the things I pointed out is that Shabir Ali likes to find the point of origin of modern-day orthodoxy in the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. And all I'm doing in this clip, now elsewhere, I make it very clear.

Jesus taught this. The apostles taught this. I've published books. I did it in the debate. It is absurd beyond belief to take what I'm talking about, the Council of Nicaea, and throw all the rest of that out, except that's exactly what this video is all about, is just completely ignoring context and everything that I've said.

What did I say? I contrasted Shabir Ali's statement about the Council of Nicaea, which is 325 AD, so you're talking about 300 years after the events of Christ, with the fact that I demonstrate that it's found in the initial generation right after the apostles.

Now, I elsewhere said it came from Jesus, but my point is that on a historical level, you can demonstrate that Shabir Ali's statement is untrue because there is an unbroken line of witness to the deity of Christ historically from that first generation onwards.

It has nothing to do with the New Testament. It has nothing to do with where the actual belief came from. And any rational person would know this. So, what causes this kind of apologetic irrationality on the part of Muslims?

It is an overwhelming commitment to a position that absolutely blinds them to even having the ability to hear what the other side is saying. In my experience, there are Christians who do not hear what Muslims are saying.

But in my experience, the vast majority, the vast majority of serious Christian apologists do hear, we seek to understand, we study, we read. The vast majority of Islamic apologists do not. They don't care.

They don't want to know what we're saying. They have their script, they have what they're told to say, and they just repeat it. That to me is one of the strongest evidences that the vast majority of Islamic dawah is simply untruthful.

It has no concern for truth at all. And I call upon the serious Muslim apologists. There is nobody. I'm sitting here looking at the the video right now. Maybe it's because nobody knows this guy. That's a possibility.

That's a possibility. It hasn't had lots of views. I have a whole lot more views now that I've said something about it. But there's nobody. Where are the Muslim apologists? And you know who I'm talking about, who are policing your own side saying, come on guys, we've got to be truthful.

We tell the world we believe in the truth, and then we put stuff like this out? I mean, we do that. When I find people doing this kind of thing, I pointed out I don't spend all my time chasing these folks around, but it just seems to me that there is a, again, a gross double standard.

Serious Christian apologists want to hear and understand what Muslims are saying and communicate with them in their language. Very few, very few are the Muslim apologists who attempt to do the same thing.

And here's a good example. So, as I've said many times before, step up, man. Show some seriousness when you talk about we have the truth. We're trying to present the truth to you. Because this kind of stuff, really, after a while, it's really hard to look at it and to not go, well, there you go again.

More of an example that many of the people who claim to be followers of Muhammad have no concern about truthfulness or accuracy at all. Thanks for watching.