September 23, 2003

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This is the Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. Well, good morning and welcome to The Dividing Line.
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My name is James White. It sounds like I have a cold or sinus infection at the moment.
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I sound very, very low and very, very muscly, but I'm not sure quite why that is because I don't have a sinus infection, everybody else seems to.
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We've got the person outside the wall coughing and sputtering and spreading disease about and I guess poor
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Bishy Wishy in the channel also has got the same thing. That's what happens in the fall. I guess the kids start bringing it home from school or something.
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I'm not sure what. But we're back. We were in Austin, Texas over the weekend and unfortunately at the very same time as Austin City Limits, the music festival thingamabobby, and boy do they have traffic problems in Austin.
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I thought it was bad around here, but I guess it's just bad everywhere, but it's really bad around Austin. I hadn't been there in quite some time.
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Back in 94, I was over there once or twice and that's when we did the debates of Robert Festigi and stuff like that.
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Boy, things have changed a lot in the past eight years there and especially the traffic.
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But I kept mentioning everybody that I saw over there that I had been with before, people like Dale Deloney and Larry Wessels and David Krill.
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When I saw them all this time, they looked better than they did eight years ago. That really depressed me because I didn't.
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Everybody had lost a lot of weight and they looked great and it was depressing.
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Anyway, we were over in Austin at Dayspring Fellowship. I did a very, very, very, very, very, very, very brief introduction response to New Perspectivism.
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I did three sessions and basically what I did was I explained
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N .T. Wright's presentation in what St. Paul really said, which is probably the most popular presentation of at least his spin on New Perspectivism, anyhow.
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And I tried to explain that in a way that would be understandable using about four pages worth of direct citations from the book.
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And then, of course, as I was giving it, I was critiquing it as well sometimes and then applied it to certain passages such as 2
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Corinthians 5 .21, Philippians 3 .9 and gave a response from there. And so those are actually those
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MP3s are actually already available at the Dayspring site. And I understand that Steven Luker is pulling them down and they'll be on the
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StraightGate .com site, which is back up. Ooh, yeah, StraightGate's back.
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And so you all who've been in withdrawals and whining and complaining and so on and so forth, you can emerge from your cocoon now.
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And anyway, that's what I was doing. And then Sunday morning was their 25th anniversary. And I spoke on Acts chapter 20.
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And then Sunday evening, I was at the Killeen Bible Church, which is right next to Fort Hood. They have, for example, 10 members of their church that are currently in Iraq right now.
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And I was asked to compress all three hours of the previous day,
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New Perspectivism, into one hour, down just, you know, and that's tough to do, you know, and to be fair to the material that you're doing, that's tough to do.
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But we we gave it our best shot. And hopefully from discussions, they're going to be headed back to Killeen Bible Church sometime in the future to do a whole conference, maybe on Mary or Roman Catholicism or something like that.
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But I had a good time. It's always good to go out and meet the saints. David Hughes and his lovely wife and two daughters were there.
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And I saw Nina from Channel. Nina and her husband were there and met various, every place
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I go anymore, people who listen to this program just all over the place. And what was really weird is
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I stayed Sunday evening with Dr. Gary Long. Some of you have seen Dr. Long's book on Definite Atonement, where he deals with 2
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Peter 2 .1. If you haven't seen that book, you want to get a hold of it. Simon Escobedo's article on 2
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Peter 2 .1 draws heavily from that, so it defends that against Chang's article in BISAC. That's on our website.
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And I stayed at his home, had a wonderful time chatting with him.
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But I came into Channel through his Internet connection at home. And one of the first things
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I discover is that one of our Australian users of the channel,
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Claytoys, had already listened to everything I had done the day before in Austin, Texas.
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And I had to stop and think about that. Here's someone in Australia and saying, hey,
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I really appreciated your presentations that you did yesterday in Austin, Texas.
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And he lives in Australia. And not only that, but that didn't cost him anything either, other than maybe the dial -up time or he's probably not on dial -up, who's not very many people.
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Well, lots of people are, I guess. But anyway, it was just amazing, you know, how quickly information gets around.
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Then last night, Baltazar Wallybalt, Dr. Price, now in Hawaii, he's sort of halfway to where he needs to be, he's left
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Australia, he's in Hawaii, half the distance anyway, he had listened to him and it was just absolutely amazing.
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So those are available and they, like I said, very brief, not nearly as in -depth as you'd like to get.
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You could, you know, looking at D .A. Carson's work coming out in regards to New Perspectivism, you can tell, you can go forever discussing a lot of this stuff, especially, well, you know, what kind of a
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Pharisee was Paul? Was he a follower of Shammai or Hillel, you know? And just all sorts of stuff like that.
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But anyhow, that's what we were doing this weekend and it's good to be back.
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And you may recall on the last dividing line, and by the way, the phone number here is 877 -753 -3341.
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That's toll -free, long -distance, 877 -753 -3341. Last Thursday, at least if I'm recalling correctly, we began taking a look at an article written by Dr.
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John Gee, a LDS scholar, on the alleged corruption of the
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Scriptures in the 2nd century. And I mentioned that much of what is said here is very commonly repeated by others, very commonly repeated in the context of other individuals.
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And as evidence of that, it just so happens that last evening,
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I came in, you know, you're sitting there going through your email, going delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. You know,
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I was gone for four days, left my email on and just sat there, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, all the way through this spam and garbage.
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And I personally am starting a movement, Capital Punishment for Spammers. I think that they should be strapped into an electrical chair, and then all of the voltage that it has required to transmit their garbage, all the copies of their garbage that they have spread across the
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Internet will be run through them. For many of them, that would result in instant
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Friville. It would be really bad. But anyway, last night, I was going through the email, and there was this very...
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Yeah, yeah, spammers need to be deleted. That's exactly right. There is this very interesting individual who has been coming to the channel with whom
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I had extensive discussion regarding abortion last week.
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And this person comes from a very non -Christian worldview in regards to that issue.
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But for some reason has a great fascination with church history and had encountered the lectures that I did on church history in our church on the web.
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And happened to ask if I knew a certain Bible scholar by the name of Robert M.
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Price. And the name rang a bell, but I, you know, it's like, well,
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I know a Dr. Price. He worked on one Bible translation. And, you know,
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I've known some people with the last name Price, but I wasn't sure exactly who he was referring to. And he mentioned that he had talked with this individual.
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This individual had been very helpful, had, you know, done a lot for him or her.
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I don't even know if this person I was talking to is a him or a her, to be honest with you. And anyway, meanwhile, someone else in channel, as so frequently happens in channel, pulled up some of the writings of this individual.
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Once it was mentioned that this person is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar. And it's like, ah, Jesus Seminar.
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Yes, you're right, wonderful. And looking at that particular article,
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I discovered that lo and behold, it was basically the exact same argumentation that John Gee was using is here being used by one of the fellows for the
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Jesus Seminar. And it was interesting to me to once again see the coalescence, the alliance of all of those who seek to undercut the reliability of Scripture.
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And here you have the exact same kind of argumentation being used by a
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Mormon scholar is being used by an individual who, interestingly enough, if you look at his writings, you know, he's, well, he's an apostate.
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Let's use the biblical term. Um, he, his own writings give testimony to that, uh, openly, uh, from fundamentalist to skeptic and so on and so forth.
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And, and, uh, so I, I was looking at an article last night and I have it up here. Apocryphal Apparitions, 1
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Corinthians 15, 3 through 11, as a post -Pauline interpolation. And, uh, basically the argument of the article, uh, is that the reference to the gospel, the death, burial, resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the, the resurrection appearances of Christ, uh, found in 1
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Corinthians chapter 15 verses 3 through 11, uh, is, was not original with Paul, but it was inserted during the second century.
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I'd like to read the sections of this so you can see, especially if you listened to the last program, then I'll go back to, uh, uh, to Guy and you'll see here you have atheists and Mormons arguing in the exact same way, again, for the exact same purpose.
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Uh, and that is to attack, uh, the validity, uh, and the accuracy and the, uh, well,
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God's preservation, uh, of his scriptures over time. And so, uh, uh, reading from Price's article, he's talking again about 1
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Corinthians 15, 3 to 11. Um, uh, he says in the present article, I will be arguing that this pericope presents us instead with a piece of later, post -Pauline
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Christianity. Uh, therefore, obviously what he's arguing then is that there has been a major textual corruption in 1
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Corinthians chapter 15 that has left absolutely, positively no evidence of its existence.
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And that is an important thing to, uh, to recognize, is that both of these men, uh,
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Guy in, uh, in his article and here Robert Price in his, are putting forward the idea that we can theorize about corruptions without providing any evidence from the manuscript tradition itself.
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For example, you may recall last week that Guy would, uh, for example, go to Clement, uh, of Rome, the, uh, the letter, the epistle of the church at Rome to the church at Corinth and say, well, see the writer here is, is quoting from stuff.
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He's quoting from a form of text we don't have anymore. And so what he's saying is the text was, was very different in the day of Clement than it is today.
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And we do not have any evidence of this within the manuscript tradition itself.
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Uh, and this is the exact same argumentation that's being used by Robert Price. And so he says, um, reading again from Price's work.
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And by the way, you can call in 877 -7533 -3341. Recent articles have tried to establish ground rules for scholarly theorizing that would rule out arguments such as mine from the start.
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Two of these prescriptions against heretics are Frederick W. Wyss, the textual limits to redactional theory, uh, in the
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Pauline Corpus, and Jerome Murphy O 'Connor interpolations in First Corinthians. These scholars seem to speak for the majority when they maintain that short of definitive manuscript evidence.
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No suggestion of interpolation of the Pauline epistles need to be taken seriously. The texts, as they stand, are to be judged innocent until proven guilty, which in the nature of the case can never happen.
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Otherwise, if we had to take seriously interpolation or redaction theories based on internal evidence alone, the result would be a state of uncertainty and diversity of scholarly opinion.
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Historians and interpreters in such a case can no longer be sure whether a text or parts of it represent the views of the author or someone else.
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The game would be rendered very difficult to play. Well, what he's saying here is that there have been others who have written on the issue, and what he is suggesting is a redaction theory.
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And most redaction theories do not have any manuscript support. You can't go to a documentable source.
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It is a theory based upon, as he uses the term here, internal considerations, based solely upon the concept of, well, internal evidence.
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And obviously, what internal evidence is depends upon the scholar who is promoting it.
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In this case, for example, Price will argue that some of the terms used in this passage are not used anywhere else in Paul.
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Well, of course, any time Paul uses the... Théâtousas is only used once in the entire
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New Testament by Paul. Does that mean it was not original with Paul? Of course not. But that's the kind of argumentation.
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Well, you know, this just isn't Paul's normal language. Well, that may be relevant when you have external evidence that a variation has taken place.
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When the manuscripts themselves demonstrate that there has been a variation in the tradition sometime in the past, then such issues as internal evidence, and whether one term is
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Paul's normal term or another, can at least be properly brought forward. But when you're dealing with a passage such as this, where there are no manuscripts that do not contain the passage, there are no manuscripts that demonstrate some sort of a textual problem here, then that becomes very, very light evidence, very, very thin evidence, indeed, to be taken seriously.
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And so I continue reading from Price's article. I see in such warnings...
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Listen to this. This is, again, very, very similar to how Mormons have to argue.
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I see in such writings... I'm sorry. I see in such warnings, essentially, a theological apologetic on behalf of a new textus receptus.
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An apologetic not unlike that offered by fundamentalists on behalf of the Byzantine text underlying the
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King James Version. And remember, this guy is a quote -unquote former Baptist. In fact, I think I saw on channel last night,
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Southern Baptists and American Baptists ordained at one point in time. And so, listen, he would know, at least be familiar with,
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King James -only -ism and things like it. And so he's saying an apologetic not unlike that offered by fundamentalists on behalf of the
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Byzantine text underlying the King James Version of the Bible. Just as the dogmatic theology of the latter group was predicated on particular readings in the
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Byzantine King James text and thus required its originality and integrity, so does the biblical theology of today's magisterium, interestingly enough capitalized, of consensus scholarship require the apostolic originality of today's
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Nessie -Owens UBS text. Herein, perhaps, lies the deeper reason for the tenacious unwillingness of such scholars to consider seriously the possibility of extensive or significant interpolations, or indeed, any at all.
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Well, that's an interesting statement. What he's basically saying is, well, the reason that modern scholarship is saying that theories of interpolation cannot be taken seriously without some sort of manuscript basis, something documentable.
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He's saying it's because of the same kind of commitment to the new Textus Receptus, which would be the text underlying modern translations, what's called the
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Nessie -Owens or the UBS text. They're the same text, just minor differences in punctuation, things like that.
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And, of course, that's simply ridiculous. And I can say that's ridiculous from every possible standing that you can say it's ridiculous.
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I can say it's ridiculous because I know King James -Onlyism. If there's one thing I know, it's King James -Onlyism, and I know what the arguments are that are promoted in its behalf.
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And to parallel the commitment of someone to the TR so as to preserve the
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King James version and say that the modern view that says we shouldn't look at an interpolated theory without manuscript evidence is somehow parallel to that is absolutely absurd.
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There are so many differences there that it immediately causes me to wonder and to say that demonstrates a very obvious bias that is destroying logical thought on the part of Dr.
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Price at this point. And that's just simply ridiculous. And then he continues to say, the issue resolves itself into theological canon polemics.
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If the integrity of the canonical scholarly text proves dubious in the manner feared by Wyss, the whole text will be seen to slide from the
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Eusebian category of acknowledged text to that of the disputed. That is the danger, not that a few particular texts will pass all the way into the spurious category and be rendered off limits like the long ending of Mark, but that wherever he steps, the
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New Testament theological exegete will find himself amid a marshy textual bog. The former would actually be preferable to Wyss since whatever remained could still be considered terra firma.
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And thus the apologetical strategy is to disallow any argument that cannot fully prove the secondary character of a piece of text.
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Mere probability results from the dreaded anxiety of uncertainty. So mere probabilities are no good.
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If we cannot prove the text secondary, we are supposedly entitled to go on regarding it as certainly authentic, innocent until proven guilty.
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God forbid the scholarly guild should end up with, and then there's with Winsome Monroe's seeming agnosticism, until such time as the entire epistolary corpus is examined, not merely for isolated interpolations, but to determine its redactional history, most historical, sociological, and theological constructions on the basis of the text as it stands should probably be accepted only tentatively and provisionally, if at all.
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Now what does all that mean? I mean, there's some scholarly speak in there.
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Let's do the proper thing and make sure everybody understands it. I'm one of those folks that believes very firmly in demythologizing scholarship and the fact that it is my experience that some of the best thinkers are people who have not had their thinking process corrupted by higher education.
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And so what is he saying here? Well, the argument he's attempting to put forward here is he's basically saying is that the academy or the magisterium or the majority of scholarship today has some vested interest in disallowing redactional criticism of the
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New Testament. What is redactional criticism? Oh, I just saw someone on the channel asking why
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Thinker was banned. That's one of the longest stories on the planet.
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But anyway, why would such a theory be put forward?
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Well, he's obviously coming at this from the Jesus Seminar perspective. I mean, this article is on infidels .org,
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okay? It gives you an idea of where it's coming from. And the idea that New Testament scholarship, which, by the way, is a tremendously varied and wide spectrum of belief with very, very, very few people in that entire spectrum that would be anywhere near even contemplating such a conspiracy as the writer here is seemingly suggesting.
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But the idea is, well, you know, we really wouldn't have anything to do if we just admitted that we can't know what any of the text really is all about.
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That all of the text is uncertain. Now, of course, I immediately stop and say, wait a minute.
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Upon what basis is this kind of an overarching allegation of redaction and corruption being based?
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What evidence is being put forward? There isn't any. Basically, what
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New Testament scholarship is saying is, look, unless you can demonstrate that an interpolation has some foundation in something that we can put our hands on, we can examine it.
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The New Testament text has such ancient credibility, such ancient witnesses involved in it, that to assume that it was corrupted in the second century without any evidence of that surviving into the third is in and of itself a massive leap in assumption that has no basis.
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It has no foundation in reality. And so that makes perfect sense.
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And this is what he's arguing against. And of course, what he's then in this quotation saying is the most radical form of criticism.
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And that is, you know what? Until you've examined everything for every possible interpolation, how do you examine that?
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Well, the problem is there is no way to come up with final rules for how you look for something like an interpolation, an insertion.
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Those of you who've listened to the Malak debate, Hamzah Abdu 'l -Malak and myself on the subject of the deity of Christ, remember that's the terminology that he used.
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Any passage that teaches the deity of Christ has been interpolated. It's been thrust into the text at a later point.
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Well, of course, the question then becomes, well, what happens when the manuscripts that do not have the interpolation are preserved over time?
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I mean, there were manuscripts, papyri manuscripts of entire books, whole sections like P46 of Paul's writings and things like that that disappeared from public view.
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They were lost to transcription. No one had control of them. No one could change them. And when they come to light thousands of years later, if the theoretical reconstruction of the 2nd century transmission of the
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New Testament text was true, we would find, every time we find new and earlier manuscripts, it would create all sorts of havoc.
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We would have 1st Corinthians with all sorts of blocks of text missing or blocks of text inserted or blocks of text we've never seen before.
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This would be all over the place. But that's not what we find. What we find, we find earlier and earlier manuscripts is the same text.
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And what scholars have said is, folks, given this evidence, the theories of 2nd century corruption simply don't have any foundation.
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And you can see how relevant that is to Guy's article from last week as well, we'll go back to. It's the exact same kind of situation.
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If these alleged corruptions took place, evidence would exist, just like there's evidence that demonstrates the corruption of the text of the
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Book of Mormon, which is only 170 some odd years old. The evidence is very, very clear when you compare the printer's manuscript with the early editions and so on and so forth.
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There's documented evidence, but that's not the kind of evidence that you can produce here.
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And so Price goes on and he makes the, well, let's just look at some of the things.
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William O. Walker Jr. has suggested that contrary to those opinions just reviewed, in dealing with any particular letter in the corpus, the burden of proof rests with any argument that the corpus or indeed any particular letter within the corpus contains no interpolation.
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Talk about circular argumentation. I mean, that is just absolutely... In other words, throw up your hands, ignore all documentary evidence, and just assume that any text that you encounter has been massively edited, even if that would have created an entire situation of massively edited text when the text does become seen in the middle of the 2nd and the 3rd century.
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Just ignore all that stuff. Let's try to get rid of these texts any way we can. Among the reasons advanced by Walker is the fact that, quoting
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Walker, the surviving text of Pauline Letters is a text promoted by the historical winners in the theological and ecclesiastical struggles of the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
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Stop for a moment. Baloney! Someone doesn't know their church history.
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In fact, you can recognize that, you know, even if he's talking here about Marcion or something like that, the fact of the matter is, and this is where your church history is important to your defense of the biblical text, what happened after the
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Council of Nicaea? Those of you who have read my article at the CRI website on what really happened at the
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Council of Nicaea are responding right now. And of course, I can't hear you responding because that's the nature of webcasting.
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But you know what happened immediately after the Council of Nicaea. For decades, you have the
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Arian resurgence. Jerome described it as the world woke up and groaned to find itself
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Arian. That's when Athanasius kept getting kicked out of his church by the powers that be.
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Well, did that result in some wholesale editing of the text of Scripture? Those were the winners at the time.
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No, it did not. And so the idea that there was this massive ecclesiastical power that could make these changes, which is normally the theory promoted by someone like the
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Mormons and John Gee, but here being promoted by atheists and skeptics, just simply isn't the case.
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They did not have the ability not only to control the text of their day, but they didn't have the ability to go back and obtain the text that had already been stored for posterity, normally by disaster, earthquake or whatever it might be.
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So I go back to reading from Walker here. In short, it appears likely that the emerging
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Catholic leadership in the churches standardized the text of the Pauline Corpus in the light of orthodox view and practices, suppressing and even destroying all deviant texts and manuscripts.
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Thus it is that we have no manuscripts dating from earlier than the third century. Thus it is that all of the extant manuscripts are remarkably similar in most of their significant features.
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And thus it is that the manuscript evidence can tell us nothing about the state of the Pauline literature prior to the third century. What an incredible statement.
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First of all, it admits, you know what? When the text comes into view far earlier than any other work of antiquity, when the text comes into view in regards to the manuscripts of the
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New Testament, it is remarkably pure. But you want to know why? We have to come up with a conspiracy theory to explain why.
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And it was those nasty Christians. You see, they destroyed everybody else's text.
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Let's not mention the fact that what is the state of the church in the second century, folks?
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Here's again, you got to know church history. This is where it's so good. What were they doing during this period of time?
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They're hiding. This is the period of the greatest imperial persecution of the
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Christian church. And here we have these scholars suggesting that in the midst of their being fed to lions and whipped and tortured and imprisoned, that somehow they had the ability to be running around, gathering up manuscripts and editing and destroying variant manuscripts.
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Just, I'm sorry. I just, you know, these folks teach at universities.
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And it just makes me sit here and scratch my bald head at how in the world, you know,
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I feel for people who spend their money to get this kind of education.
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He goes on, this is back to Price now, after the quotation from Walker. With seems to think it unremarkable that all textual evidence for the third century has mysteriously vanished.
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Well, it hasn't mysteriously vanished. We have Irenaeus. We have Ignatius. It hasn't mysteriously vanished.
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That's, and of course, we're only talking about New Testament here because we're talking about Paul in regards to the first Corinthians, but it hasn't mysteriously vanished.
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There are elements of it. We're talking about actual manuscripts that have been passed down to us.
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But according to Walker, the absence of the crucial textual evidence is no mystery at all. It was a silence created expressly to speak eloquently to the apologetics of Wyss and his brethren.
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Today's apologists to the new textus receptus are simply continuing the canon polemics of those who standardized, censored the text in the first place.
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And I'll stop there because, as we've already said, that is absolutely, positively ridiculous.
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No material is a, they can't bring forward anything here. And it stands completely and totally against the condition of the text as we see it when it comes into existence.
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The idea that the persecuted Christian church of the second century had the ability to make all those other manuscripts disappear is so ridiculous.
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We might as well throw these folks in with the folks that don't think we ever landed on the moon. But this was all shot in Hollywood someplace.
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This is the level of thinking that is involved here. And now we go back to John Gee's article and it's the same stuff.
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It's the same material. And I'll be looking at that just a moment. I'm looking at the clock and noticing that we really need to get that computer fixed out there,
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Mr. AOMN person, because people want to hear your voice and the voice of others doing these commercials.
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They don't want me doing it. And I've actually discovered that a break, you know, you get a drink, you take a breath, it makes the hour a whole lot easier.
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That's why people have commercials. And we don't have commercials anymore. So we need to get our commercials back.
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We need to fix that. Anyway, the only thing
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I have to mention commercial -wise is we finally have after, well, I don't know, a year of not having or I'm not sure how long it's been, but the
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Christian message tract is back in print. And some of you have seen the Christian message for two years.
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The Christian message tract, which is our, I wouldn't call it our response to The Four Spiritual Laws.
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It is the basic gospel tract that I have written and that we utilize. And it certainly has more text to it than The Four Spiritual Laws does.
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But it presents just a little bit more than that particular tract does as far as the message of the faith.
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And it is now back in print. I don't know if we have a graphic of it or something like that on the website.
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But those of you, those of you who, can we use? Well, never mind.
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Those of you who have... Can we do what? I was just wondering what, never mind.
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That's fine. We'll put a graphic of it up there. And we'll invite everyone to pick up their copies.
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I don't know what it costs. I haven't looked at it. Ah, but there's both. There's both prices.
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Ten cents each. Oh, well, we made it simple. Oh, okay. We've charged 10 cents each for our tracts for 15 years.
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We used to have both prices. And I know that. That's true. Okay. That's all I was talking about. We did have both prices.
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Yes. Well, that was how we, you know, things cost more these days. I'm well aware of that. Yes, this is true. Anyway, the
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Christian message tract, the basic gospel tract from a Reformed perspective, which even mentions things like the
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Trinity and the sufficiency of Scripture and things like that. Yeah, I think it does say some place that Jesus Christ specifically died to save his people.
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One of our non -Reformed friends from England was asking about that. Anyway, that's available on the website and available to fulfill orders now, because I don't know if we just took it down off the website for two years or just what, but it'll be up there.
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So take a look for that on the AOMN .org website. 877. Voice is going to give out.
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877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. 877 -753 -3341.
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Going back to the John Gee article under the subtitle, Accusations of Corruption.
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We read, if comparison between the beginning of the second century and its end shows that Scripture has changed, a closer look at the
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Christian office of the second century shows that they were aware of this change. And I mentioned last week a citation of 2
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Peter 3 .15 -16, which, of course, has nothing to do with the perversion of the text of Scripture whatsoever.
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In fact, what follows the citation, this mis -citation, has no contextual relationship whatsoever to the idea of changing
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Scripture. But we read, the most sacred teachings of Jesus were not committed to writing. And the citation for that one is 2
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John, I'm sorry, 3 John, verses 13 -14.
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Remember, from the perspective of Mormonism, there's this constant desire to emphasize the idea of the secrecy of the temple and things like that.
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Well, what does 3 John actually say? Well, let's look at it. 3 John 13 says,
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I had many things to write to you, but I am not willing to them to you with pen and ink, but I hope to see you shortly, and we will speak face to face.
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Now, let's go back and see. Notice what is said here. The most sacred teachings of Jesus were not committed to writing.
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So, we're assuming that at the end of John's life, having probably already written the
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Gospel of John, maybe even the Revelation of John, John writes to his audience a very brief note and says,
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I have many things to write to you, but I'd rather tell you in person. And that means that the most sacred teachings of Jesus were not committed to writing.
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Can you say, I said Jesus? Can you say this is why Mormon scholars won't engage in exegetically based debates?
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I mean, that's just a ridiculous way of understanding 3 John, just as it was ridiculous use of 2
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Peter 3, 15 through 16. But then we have the assertion, but reserve for a close few.
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And then we have the parables, as if this is a fulfillment of that. And there certainly is an element of the fact that God's truth is for God's people, but that has nothing to do with temple ceremonies and signs and tokens of the priesthood borrowed from the masons.
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That is a gross, eisegetical insertion into the text of Scripture itself.
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So anyways, then we have a citation from Ignatius. And again, you try to read this from an
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LDS perspective, and it's really hard, especially when you realize that none of these people believe what
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Mormons believe about God, about salvation, temples, priesthoods, and all the rest of that stuff.
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But, you know, they're trying to read into that. But they just go on with all this stuff about, well, you know, there's these secret gospel of Mark and things like that.
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And as you see these desperate, you know, the Valentinians, the Gnostics, changed the
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Scriptures, quote, by transferring passages and dressing them up anew and making one thing out of another. Okay, we know about Marcion, we know about what he did.
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What does that have to do with the actual text? Again, if those texts were widely distributed and used amongst
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Christians, we'd have evidence of that. All we have evidence is Irenaeus and others mentioning the fact that Marcion had a different canon, and he altered the text.
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There's no question Marcion did that. That's why Christians wrote against Marcion. So we have evidence of exactly what his beliefs were and what his changes were.
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So that's a challenge to the basis for saying, well, many plain and precious things have been removed from Scripture, and we don't know where they went.
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You know, it amazes me that someone who believes in golden plates and Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics taken back to heaven would utilize this kind of standard.
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It doesn't seem overly wise to me. Again, Tertullian talks about, he claimed there was proof of the gospel, having become, meanwhile, adulterated.
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Of course, he was, at that time, talking about the fact that he was a Montanist and things like that.
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But he upholds a few things. Again, talking about Marcion, nothing new about that. And he just leaves this Marcion stuff, the fact that there is one
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Gnostic heretic that all the Christians wrote against. Therefore, somehow, the text of Scripture has been changed. And then he talks about methods of corruption.
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And he points to a well -known example of corruption.
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That's when Rufinus, in translating Origen, altered things to try to clean them up theologically, as if that somehow means that scribes, in copying the
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Scriptures, did the same thing. Now, Rufinus is long after the time we have entire texts of the
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New Testament. And so he's having to read this concept back into the second century as if somehow this is somewhat relevant to the issue.
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And in the process, he is not providing any meaningful documentation of what he's saying.
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He's not illustrating any of this, which you, again, would be able to do if the manuscripts that appear at the beginning of the third century are at all representational of this change that took place in the course of the history of the text.
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Then he has a section on motivations for manipulating the text. And I guess he, you know,
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I'm not sure what the point here is, but he does quote from Nephi and says,
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After the book hath gone forth from the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book.
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Well, of course, the problem is, what is this great and abominable church? According to Nephi, there are only two churches, the church of the
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Lamb and the church of the devil. So I guess it's whatever church somehow didn't still have a priesthood authority.
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Why God was unable to continue the priesthood authority is another question you want to ask of the
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LDS people. But he writes, What motives did second century individuals and groups have to change Scripture? Clement of Rome wrote his epistle at the beginning of the second century at the request of leaders in Corinth to settle a dispute they were having.
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Clement accused the individuals at Corinth of pride and sedition and setting themselves up as leaders and usurping the authority that was not theirs.
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That's true, because there had been a rebellion at Corinth, and when you read the Corinthian correspondence, that doesn't really shock you a whole lot.
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Toward the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria notes that the Carpachrations changed
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Scripture to sanction their own homosexual and other immoral practices. Well, isn't that strange? We still have all the passages on homosexuality condemning homosexuality.
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I wonder how that happened. Irenaeus claims the Valentinians endeavored to adapt with an air of probability to their own peculiar assertions.
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The parables of the Lord, the sayings of the prophets, the words of the apostles, and other schemes may not seem altogether without support. Well, whether that means they were actually changing the text or interpreting the text improperly is a completely different issue.
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Tertullian says that writings that strongly go under Paul's name were forged by a presbyter in Asia to give a license for women's teaching and baptizing.
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Well, where do we have that today? Is that somehow an issue in regards to the New Testament? Not at all.
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Changes in the text and the motivations to alter the text's Scriptures, both canonical and non -canonical, in general, match those that Nephi gave.
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And then you have the quotation. Well, the big issue, obviously, is the issue of the manuscript evidence.
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And as I mentioned last week, he does attempt to discuss that. He attempts to say, well, you know, the manuscript evidence isn't nearly as great as you would like to think.
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And, of course, he includes cheap shots at people in the process here that, again,
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I mentioned last week, the fact that it seems if you're involved with farms, you cannot help but use ad hominem attacks upon your opponents.
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Remember, their use of Metcalfe is butthead in a published work that they did. They just, you know,
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I'll let you judge what that says about their motivations and perspectives.
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But he points out that of the manuscripts we have, for example, 341 unsealed manuscripts, about 10 % date before the time of Constantine, only one date to the 2nd century.
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Well, congratulations. But, but, what he doesn't mention is that many of those older manuscripts are copies of very ancient manuscripts.
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That is why you can't simply look at the date or the form of a manuscript and, for example, look at a minuscule manuscript over against an unsealed text and say, well, obviously the unseal is of greater value.
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Any unseal is of greater value than a minuscule text because it's older. That's not necessarily the case. If that minuscule text was a careful copy of a very ancient unsealed text that no longer exists, it may have a greater textual value than an unsealed text that is older or less well copied than the unsealed text from which the minuscule was copied.
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And so you can't just simply make these simplistic assertions and throw them out there as if, well, as long as, you know, we only have a certain number of this kind of text, then the manuscript evidence really isn't there.
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And all through this very short section of manuscript evidence, which, again, if you just took out the cheap shots at Christian apologists, would only be one paragraph, he doesn't even attempt to deal with the reality.
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And fact doesn't really give much evidence that he's even aware of what the reality is. And that is the tenacity of the
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New Testament text. The tenacity of the text, and that is when there has been a disruption in the flow of the text, that is a textual variant.
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Some person's copying it. Remember, we've used the example in the past, 1 John 3 .1. Because of the error of Homo Etelyuton, similar endings, a section of the text is inadvertently dismissed.
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It is deleted by a copyist error. When that kind of a disruption takes place, evidence of the disruption continues to exist in the manuscript stream.
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Readings don't disappear. That's why we can know why we have the original readings, even in places where there's variants.
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We know that one of those variants is the original reading, because readings don't disappear. The manuscript stream gives us evidence of when there has been a disruption in it, sort of like when you throw a rock into a brook, there is a resultant, not only splash, but then as it sits there, it changes the surface of the water flowing over it.
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There is a change in the flow of the stream. Well, it's similar over time with the manuscript tradition as well.
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And what Guy does not deal with, and I don't think that he can, because he's in the exact same situation. He's in the exact same situation.
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As Price was in the article we looked at earlier. And that is, you are left with pure supposition without evidence.
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And in fact, it goes against evidence. You have to explain how it is that a persecuted, powerless, martyr church that is simply seeking to stay alive, simply seeking to survive during that very same century, could somehow have so much power, so much organization, so much ability over so many people, over so much a geographical area, that they could somehow engage in this kind of redaction criticism, editing of the text, insertion of materials, deletion of materials.
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And notice, it is an interesting, Price is arguing that 1 Corinthians 5, 3 -11 is inserted, whereas the normal argument of the
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Mormon is a bunch of stuff that supports our beliefs was deleted, had been removed. But whatever your ultimate purpose for attacking the text of the
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New Testament, you have to explain how it is that when we begin to see
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P66, P75, P46, P52, these papyri manuscripts, not only are they from different authors, different places, and hence are distributed all over the place, but they all give us the same text.
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They don't give us any of this evidence that would be so obvious if wholesale editing, corruption, redaction, interpolation, whatever it might be, has actually taken place.
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Guy doesn't even try to address that, probably because he's well aware of the fact that his readers, at the website that his article is posted at, aren't aware of that.
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So why even raise the issue? So it's a fascinating thing to note, and it's fascinating to read these great scholars.
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And there's no question of their scholarship, if what you mean by scholarship is your ability to utilize resources.
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But here you have a real example of where we need to make a differentiation between good scholarship and bad scholarship.
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And I'm not saying that these people cannot do study, but there's an element that goes beyond the ability to do study, and it's the ability to produce conclusions that are actually based meaningfully upon the evidence.
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And folks, all the training in the world is not going to change the heart of man to allow him to handle the text of scripture, the history of scripture in a fair way when he remains in rebellion against its fundamental teachings.
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And so here you have Mormons, who think God's an exalted man, and you have atheists, who don't think
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God exists at all, and the gospel's a joke, both twisting the reality, twisting the facts, using their scholarship to dredge up facts, and then putting them together in inconsistent, irrational ways to form an attack upon the scriptures themselves.
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It is fascinating. I remember, oh man, it was so long ago that I was thin and had hair.
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I remember when I first recognized so clearly this element of the battle.
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Really, there is a dividing line. We call this program the dividing line. Here is one of the big dividing lines.
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In fact, if I would say that there are two big dividing lines, one is the soteriological issue of monergism versus synergism.
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That's a huge dividing line, because it divides, I would say, the divine faith from a human faith.
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Divine religion from human religion. It's either monergism, all to the glory of God, soli deo gloria, or synergism.
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There's always a way for man to stick himself into that system. He can do it in a small way, in a big way, but it's what unites all of man's religions.
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That's one dividing line. Then there's another dividing line, and that dividing line is over the scriptures, and whether one will subjugate the scriptures to the authority of man in some way.
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And again, just as in synergism, there are different levels of synergism.
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There's different levels of human cooperation. There's different levels by which man seeks to insert himself into God's grace and into controlling
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God's grace. So there are different levels that people will go to to subjugate scripture to an external authority.
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There is the level of the Roman Catholic, the conservative, traditionalist
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Catholic that will say scripture is inspired and inerrant, but it is not enough in and of itself without the interpretive authority of the magisterium of the church.
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Even your knowledge of its readings and its canonicity dependent upon the church.
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Then you go all the way away from that to Mormonism, much more radical attack upon scripture.
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Why? Because you have to make room for man's writings. The Book of Mormon, Doctrine, Covenants, Prophets, Great Price.
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Obviously, you're not going to use the same standards because if you try to use the same standards for the Book of Mormon, any one of those people at farms would have to deny it instantly.
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But of course, they don't do that. And since they won't come out and actually debate, then no one can point that out in a very clear way.
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All the way out to atheism, which, of course, is just simply seeking to deny any relevance whatsoever for the scriptures and to deny any form of religious faith at all.
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They are all united in being on the other side of that dividing line in reference to the authority of scripture, in reference to the history, the preservation, the inspiration.
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All those elements, all those groups, they're over on the other side.
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Those are two major dividing lines. And in fact, as it came out in my discussions of New Perspectivism over the weekend, that dividing line's relevant there too.
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Because the worldview and the scholarly milieu and the writings out of which
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New Perspectivism has come are not those initial writers do not believe in the inerrancy of scripture.
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And they do not believe that you have to take into consideration the entirety of scripture in coming to conclusions on, for example,
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Paul's view. Because Paul may well have contradicted Paul, Peter, John, and Jesus all in the same shot.
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Many of those earlier writers whose works became foundational for New Perspectivism were so far to the left in their view of scripture, they had no problem dismissing entire passages of the
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Gospels, for example, in regards to the Jews while creating their view of first century Judaism.
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The very New Testament text can be altered when it does not fit with your particular theory.
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So all of these things, again, point us to the importance of what is really foundational.
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What are the dividing lines? What are the things that are absolutely non -negotiable? And what are the things that are at the bottom?
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They're the ones that give rise to all these other things. I think a lot of Christians are really confused apologetically because they look out and they see all these different movements and they go,
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I could never know all these things. I could never deal with all this stuff. There's just too many movements out there.
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There's too many individual things. But in reality, folks, and this is something I've learned a lot in debate, you have to listen to the arguments and see what the foundation is.
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What is the foundational error giving rise to a whole group of errors?
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And the foundational errors in many of these things that we face today have to do with the view of Scripture, maybe the humanistic presupposition that God can't speak,
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God can't give revelation, whatever the presupposition might be. But it comes to the nature of Scripture.
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It's inerrancy. It's inspiration. It's authority. And then in satirological errors, it goes down to having a biblical theology, the sovereignty of God, and a biblical anthropology, a doctrine of man.
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All of these things then give rise to all of these different movements and isms.
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And so don't throw up your hands in defeat and say, there's just too much stuff out there.
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In reality, if you will stay focused upon the foundational issues and see how these errors arise out of twisting those foundational truths, it can really help to simplify the apologetic task that is before all of us.
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Because the day may well come for many of us, and in light of what happened only last week in the passing of legislation in the
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Parliament of Canada, one could make a very strong argument that if you're listening to us in Canada, and I do a study on Leviticus 18 and 20, you may be breaking the law.
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The day may come when you may need to be doing apologetics without recourse to others to help you.
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And so in your preparation to do so, keep in mind, start with the foundations. People say, what do
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I need to study? Where do I start? Start with your own faith first. Start with your own foundational faith first.
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See how everything relates there. And then you'll be able to recognize where problems and errors arise because you know your faith so well.
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That is my recommendation. Well, thank you for listening to The Dividing Line today. And I am so thankful that Stephen Luker and Straitgate are back with us.
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And so this program will be archived. And I thank good old, the old furby man in Canada, the
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Nova Scotian crazy person for helping us through this crisis, not only making
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The Dividing Line available all the time live, but also in archiving those programs as well.
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And thank you for listening, all of you all across the United States that I get to meet when I travel.
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I'm glad this program is a blessing to you. Be back again Thursday evening, 4 o 'clock Mountain Standard Time.