Thoughts on the Legacy Standard Bible and CBGM, Roman Catholic Topics

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're in the big studio today, mainly because we recorded something in here just yesterday, and I'm hearing myself echoing back there.

I'm not sure what's going on there. But so we were already set up, and so we just decided to go with it.

Not only that, I was running late anyway. So it's been an interesting day.

So I'm considering today to be laid back

Friday, even though it's Thursday. And so I'm a little bit more casually dressed than I normally would be in here, but it is what it is.

I don't know if you saw it. Who can keep up with all this stuff, honestly? But I saw an article from just a few days ago from Australia, where again,

I don't know what has happened in the land down under, but you poor folks, wow.

You see the guy, a bunch of kids were vaccinated. They weren't supposed to be vaccinated.

And he's like, we've done a million vaccinations. There were only a couple of them. Who cares? Get over it.

I mean, just the, wow. I don't know where these folks came from, but I feel sorry for you folks.

You've got a bunch of folks down there that really have the taste for fascism. They really like, we like this power.

We're going to keep it. We're going to keep using it any way we want to. So much for the land of the free there. But speaking of which, government tracking to be mandatory in Australia.

New South Wales is set to follow the Queensland government in making QR code check -ins with COVID safe apps mandatory.

So you want to go out in the world? You get to see from July 12th, it'll be mandatory for all businesses and workplaces to use the

NSW government QR code. Customers, staff, and other visitors will need to use the service

NSW app to check in. So you can go anywhere. You've got to check in.

You've got to let the government know where you are, where you're going, where you've been. They get to know everything about everything you're doing.

Isn't that exciting? Sometime last year, I've mentioned it before. A good friend of mine suggested a book to me.

That I did read. It is certainly not a Christian book. It's from, I think 1975, if I recall correctly.

Titled, This Perfect Day. And it is your, it is a dystopia.

It is 1984. It's Brave New World. It's all of them with its own interesting spins.

And in many ways, I think it's more like where we are now than many of the other ones.

Even though back then, in 1975, could only predict certain levels of technology and things like that.

And the ability to track everybody. But you had these bracelets.

And everywhere you went, if you passed one of these scanners, you just tapped your bracelet.

And it was just, it was bred into you.

That this is what you had to do. And this way, the government always knows exactly where you are.

Exactly how you got there. How long you were there. Everything's controlled. Now what's happened is, in that situation, it's called uni.

A computer has taken over, or at least that's what people are told anyways.

And so what you're gonna do in life is determined by uni. What you can buy is determined by uni.

Everything is determined by uni. And it's not quite the 19, it's not quite the

Brave New World stuff with all the genetic stuff yet and things like that. But the thing that is particularly striking in the story is your treatment.

Where you go into these, obviously these unis places, and you put your arm in and you get a, of course you tap your thing, you tap your bracelet, and you have a specific cocktail designed for you.

And so for example, you have to get permission as to who you can marry.

And then you have to get permission if you're allowed to have children. And the treatment that you get will either allow you or not allow you to even have children.

So there's birth control in it, fertility control for men. And of course, you are controlled as to your docility and your submission to the government by these treatments.

And of course, you're told the primary reason for the treatments is to control disease. So they're vaccines, but they're obviously far more than vaccines.

They are a methodology of controlling the population that is basically designed for each individual.

And so I look at this and I go, it's like they're using these books as a guide.

You know, somebody read that book and said, you know, wouldn't it be just awesome great if we had 100 % knowledge of everything everybody's doing?

We know where everybody is at any one time, we'll be able to tell who is associating with whom and who's even had the opportunity to talk to somebody else.

And we're all in on it. Yay, let's all trust big brother.

And that's what's happening in Australia. So, like I said, I've been to Australia a number of times, loved it, great people.

But man, I don't know what happened to you folks. But, and I'd like to say y 'all need to vote these folks out but I don't, we're in the same boat.

I'm not sure that's even a possibility any longer. Once these folks have power, then once they've tasted it, it's like, we're keeping it.

And then they do what needs to be done, whatever that might involve, whatever that might be.

Such as the Biden regime's domestic terrorism statement recently, which basically is designed to say that white

Christian males are the greatest danger to everyone in the

United States. Meanwhile, set new records last weekend for the number of people shot and murdered in American cities,

Chicago, just clipping along, making Afghanistan and Iraq look like safe places.

Nobody says a word, but it's all white supremacy, right? Yeah, okay. It is hard to live in a world where fantasy is now what's going on all around us.

It truly, truly is. Anyway, so let me see what I've got here.

I thought I had two of these. Oh, no, I got a copy of this.

This is, of course, that's the logo for the

Shepherds conference, the Shepherds meeting get together. This is like legacy standard

Bible, New Testament Psalms and Proverbs from Steadfast Bibles. And very, very thankful to the brother who purchased this for me and sent it to me.

And I haven't had a whole lot of time to be looking at it too deeply or anything like that. But I do just, for those of you who aren't familiar with this, this is coming out of the master's seminary.

It is, my understanding is it's pretty much the 1995 NASB with a few differences.

Inclusive being that, for example, I just opened up to the Psalms. This is Psalm 135.

Oh, house of Israel, bless Yahweh. Oh, house of Aaron, bless Yahweh. Oh, house of Levi, bless Yahweh. You who fear

Yahweh, bless Yahweh. Blessed be Yahweh from Zion who dwells in Jerusalem. Praise Yah.

And of course, I mentioned briefly the fact that there are some people out there, even in the reformed, allegedly reformed world that are literally now saying that Yahweh is

Jupiter or something and is a pagan God. And I mean, we're literally, we've finally gotten to the point where these folks start promoting flat earthism.

I mean, there's just no, there's just, anyway, I'm sure they're going to be writing their articles about how masters is promoting

Jupiter worship or something now. But what was interesting is I decided,

I said, you know what, I haven't checked this and I hadn't heard anybody talking about this. And that is

I turned to Jude and it's,

I would have to have, I would have to have my reading glasses on from the other room to be able to read almost anything here.

But I turned to Jude and I had, right as the music started up,

I was going to look, I'm pretty sure the 1995 NASB did not have the word

Jesus at Jude five. I'm pretty sure of that. I tried to fire up a cordons, windows went wonky and it didn't work and so I gave up on it.

But here's the legacy standard Bible here. Now I want to remind you though, you know, all things that Jesus having once saved a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.

Now, if you're new to the program or it's been a while since we talked about these things, that is up until just under three weeks from now,

I think. Yeah, that's probably the most interesting and important textual reading in the

New Testament that has been directly impacted by something we've talked a lot about in the past. I haven't talked a lot about it recently, but I will be again soon,

Lord willing. And that is something called CBGM, the coherence -based genealogical method.

We've talked about it in the program before. I still want to, in the future, we'll be talking about more, as I said.

But it's a new set of tools. At the very minimum, it is a massive, it's the result of a massive amount of collation work on manuscripts.

It would certainly be the largest database of readings from manuscripts for the

New Testament that's ever been put together. There's no question about that. And basically what

CBGM does is seeks to establish or work within how manuscripts are related to one another on the basis of coherence and the genealogical relationships, dealing with a process where a lot of the intermediate manuscripts are missing.

You might have one manuscript and we might have its grandparent and something like that. But it's very difficult to create what's called a global stemata of all of the manuscripts because so many are missing.

I mean, that's how things were passed down by hand for centuries and centuries and centuries.

Anyway, CBGM data has been available for only a couple, literally a couple of books in New Testament for a while now.

And Jude was one of them. The pastoral epistles had been done a number of years ago.

And the, what's called the Editio Critico Mayor, which is the, it's called ECM.

It's the, it's going to be the standard scholarly Greek New Testament from which then the manual

Greek New Testaments that are used, for example, the Nessie -Aland text, UBS texts that are used in seminaries, Bible colleges, things like that.

They will be based on ECM. And in Jude 5, when they did the book of Jude, we've known for a long, long time that there was a textual variant.

That some, most manuscripts said the Lord delivered a people out of Egypt, but other manuscripts said

Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt. Once CBGM analysis was done in Jude, it said that tool said that the stronger reading that the manuscript, the manuscripts that read

Jesus have more consistency amongst themselves. Their closest relatives also say

Jesus, whereas those say Lord, not as strong. And so the

Nessie -Aland edition, 28th edition adopted Jesus. Now what's interesting is I know that the

NESB 2020 did not. So that's why

I say I'm pretty certain the NESB 95 said Lord, and I'm very certain that the 2020 says

Lord, but the legacy standard Bible has Jesus. And so I'm almost wondering if somebody over there who did that work would be interested in chatting about, will the legacy standard

Bible in the future? Because my assumption is that the translation group, you know, normally it's a translation committee, but this is not really a,

I'm not sure if they're calling it translation committee. I don't know. But whoever is in charge of making these decisions, editorial decisions and textual decisions, the question

I would have would be three weeks from now, this is what I'm all excited about, the gospel of Mark will be released in the

ECM and hence the CBGM data modules will be available for all of us to use across the world.

And in fact, downloadable, there'll be programs you can actually now download to do stuff locally on your own computer and things like that.

I'm gonna have a real learning curve catching up with all the additions they've made. But the point is

I've been waiting personally for Mark to come out for two years.

When I visited Munster, Germany in January of 2019, I was told it was done.

And I think what happened was COVID just really delayed it a whole lot as is the case with everything these days.

You can't even get a license plate anymore. I don't think that's COVID, I think that's called socialism, but that's another issue.

But it's finally coming out. Pre -orders, I think you can start ordering it on the 26th of this month.

And of course we will be ordering it on the 26th of this month, I can assure you. And so the question

I have is, for example, there's a really fascinating textual variant of Mark 1 .1,

whether the son of God is there. And people have already done some CBGM -like studies on that and have come to the conclusion that it probably will say that the longer ending has the better substantiation in the

CBGM data. But will the legacy standard Bible, how are they gonna deal with future editions?

Because you haven't even put out the full Bible yet. All you've got is the New Testament and Psalms. I think they said

Jonah just became available, I think I saw something online about that. John is supposed to come out eventually, it's being done in Birmingham rather than Munster.

And will, given that they went with the

CBGM reading and dated Jude 5, will they do the same thing with Mark and then with John, and then as the rest of the

New Testament is released as the work is ongoing, they'll probably delayed in Munster.

That will be really interesting to know. And same thing with ESV and with other modern translations, where the translation committees are still active.

Will, because what I've heard is, once Mark is out and maybe one more before they will do another edition of Nessie Olin, go the 29th edition from the current 28th.

And if anyone's going, well, wait a minute, don't you have that super awesome post -Tenebrous

Lux, Jeffrey Rice rebind of a 28th edition of the

Nessie Olin, what are you going to do now that this other stuff is coming out?

It's real easy. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Rich said, send it.

Said, nope, I have markers and I will go through and I will mark any of the changes.

And I'll have a special color for it and I'll mark it down in the data. And then

I'll have every, it'll still be nice and up to date, but it doesn't have to be rebound or anything like that in the process.

So that's the plan anyways. I mean, I haven't done that with the pastorals yet, but I need to, well, actually that represented the pastorals

I have to do it next. But anyway, so the question is, will these translation committees make changes in their translation?

Now this is, again, this is not changes in the Bible. You're going to, I suppose it's good that we're talking about this.

Once this comes out in three weeks, I've said for two and a half, three years now, that once Mark comes out, you're going to start hearing about CBGM in the press, whether it's

Christian press or even outside the Christian press, you're going to hear about changes in the

Bible and all the rest of this stuff. And people who just don't know the process whereby we get the

New Testament, they don't understand collating manuscripts and all the rest of that kind of stuff that we've spent so much time in this program discussing in the past, it's real easy for them to use extremely inaccurate language that is extremely misleading.

For example, that reading, Lord and Jesus, those are the two options. We've known about this reading for hundreds of years, if not,

I don't know the first commentary in history that mentions it, but it's been known for a very, very, very, very long time.

So it's not like we're coming along and say, well, we need to change something in the Bible, but you can't change the

Bible. The Bible exists in the body of manuscripts that are available to us.

The issue is the interpretation of that data. And it's a massive amount of data.

That is a good thing. It is a good thing to have a massive amount of data versus having a small amount of data, okay?

There are people who study other books of antiquity that look at us who work with the

New Testament and go, what are you people complaining about? We would love to have a 10th of what you have.

And that's true. There's truth there. But you're gonna start hearing it.

And so let us head that off right here. It's not a matter of changing anything because you see when, if we look at the

New American Standard Bible, when Jude 5 was translated in 1977 initially, well, obviously done probably just a little before that, but 1977 edition of the

NASB. That's my favorite. It's the one I use. The translators who translated that text had in front of them,

Greek texts that had Kurios as the main reading, but they all saw the little symbol next to it.

And they all looked down and everyone who worked on Jude was well aware of the fact that there were a number of manuscripts that said

Jesus. Now they went with the text reading of the Nessie Island 28, but they knew that there were manuscripts that said

Jesus. And what bothers some people, really bothers them.

You can tell when you talk to them, these traditional text people and stuff like that.

What really bothers them is that anyone could look at the data, could recognize these manuscripts say

Lord, these manuscripts say Jesus, and then have the thought in their mind, yes, further light could be shed on this reading in the future.

And most of the time, if you say something like that, someone's like, well, yeah, we might find the original of Jude.

No, we're not going to find the original of Jude, but we could find a very early papyri fragment of Jude that might go back to the early second century, maybe into the first century, that'd be awesome.

That'd be wonderful. That'd be great. We'd want to find something like that. Well, okay, those folks wouldn't.

Those folks don't want anything found anymore. That's the problem with the traditional text position is they don't want anything new found.

They've already got what they want. And anything, if you found a wonderfully preserved fragment of Jude that had

Jesus in it, because that's not the traditional text. That's not the TR reading. To them, that's a problem.

They don't want to have, for the rest of us, we're like, wow, this is awesome. And even the earliest fragment we have of Jude anywhere, because see, the earliest we have right now is

P72. And that's from around 180, 200, somewhere around in there. So I think it'd be awesome.

Most of us think it'd be awesome to be able to push that testimony to Jude back a hundred years. That's a good thing.

Not for them, it's a bad thing because what it read back then doesn't matter.

That's not the issue. We have what we want in the traditional text.

Don't bother us with anything else. And so these folks are, they really struggled to understand why someone could look at this text and go, wow, here's the two readings.

This looks like the strongest reading. So we're going to go with this. We're going to put a footnote in it that says, some manuscripts say this.

And a lot of those folks say, you're just casting doubt on the word of God. No, you're telling the truth about the word of God. You're telling the truth about how

God has transmitted his text to us. It's just the facts. It's just the reality. And then be open to the idea that now along comes

CBGM and maybe, just maybe CBGM can cast some light on this particular variant that we didn't have from other sources.

And in doing so causes people to go, yeah, Jesus seems to be the stronger reading here.

Now, by the way, they're both Orthodox readings. Jesus is fascinating because it would present the deity of Christ in an even stronger way than Lord does, even though Lord presents it because that's who we're talking about in the context if you read

Jude 4. But be it as it may, there are people who just jump up and down and get really upset and angry when we even raise issues like this.

And so I'm gonna be interested in finding out what some of the translation committees are gonna do.

What about the ESV? What about future editions ESV? Because ESV did adopt

Jesus a number of years ago. And so what about Mark 1 .1?

And what about, because like I said, once Mark comes out, once a gospel, Jude, not most people's favorite book of the

New Testament, but once you start, let's say there's a variant somewhere in Mark where the

CBGM changes the consensus reading in the

Nessie -Allen 28th edition. And especially if it results in something that was in the

Nessie -Allen 28th now being put in the note rather than being in the main text.

But if it went either way, you're gonna hear news about it and it will probably be reported to you improperly.

Just on almost any of these things, I'll be honest with you, the number of quote unquote journalists who would have a clue about how to accurately describe

CBGM databases and the process of coherence and all the attestation that is needed.

I don't know of any, I'll be honest with you. I don't know of a one. So just don't jump into panic because I'm gonna tell you something, the information.

I'm not sure where I'm going here, but a couple of weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago,

I warned him, brother Michael, I told you. He'll tell you, he'll tell you.

Michael Brown, I forget how long ago it was.

Some of my favorite crosses, I wanna make sure you can see it there. That's just one of the, that's one of my favorite ones.

That is just a gorgeous turquoise. Anyways, I love turquoise crosses.

Michael Brown announced that he was, oh, hi.

I have a little fun with Rich here. I got up at three something this morning and I climbed

South Mountain and I'm really glad I did. I really, really am glad I did. Haven't done in a long time, but it is hot in Phoenix right now and it is not cooling off.

You know, those of you who up in the Northwest, you had those super hot days, I get it. You guys aren't ready for that, but what you need to understand is we're now in that part of the summer in Phoenix where last night, this morning at sunrise as I was climbing

South Mountain on my bike, the lowest temperature at sunrise that I saw up on the mountain was 87 .8

degrees and it is not a dry heat anymore. Yep, we have something called dew points here.

It was about 64 degree dew point. Okay, that's not New Orleans, but that's a whole lot higher than we're used to.

And so by the time I got done, my computer was reading over 96 for the temperature.

So I'm a little bit fried. I'm glad I did it, double ascent. It was great, it was beautiful, it was wonderful, but yeah, okay,

I'm not gonna have any problems sleeping tonight. Anyways, and then the wife had a flat tire and that throws everything into the hopper.

But Michael Brown announced that he was going to be doing a debate on purgatory with William Albrecht.

Now, I don't know, you probably can't hear

Rich, but even Rich went, oh, and I said, yeah, I know. I immediately contacted

Michael and I said, well, I wouldn't have suggested that as the best use of your time, to be perfectly honest with you, but okay, you're going to encounter a level of isogetical authoritarianism that you probably have just, you probably haven't run into it before.

He's like, really? And I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. So the debate took place, what about two weeks ago now?

Something like that. And I listened to the opening statements and then

I started listening to part of the cross -examination. I eventually just gave up on it.

It was just too painful to listen to. Part of this was because a couple of weeks earlier, and I apologize for this,

I was going to, what I'll try to do, and I won't be able to do it when

I first blog today's program, I'll try to remember when I get home tonight. And if you guys see this, contact me on Twitter like you have, and remind me if I forget, because I got a lot in my mind right now.

I will try to link to the videos that two brothers did, one from Australia, where they went through a video presentation that William Albrecht did with this priest friend of his.

I guess they've written some books together even, on transubstantiation in the

Bible. Now, I listened to the second one of their two videos.

I, for some reason, I downloaded it, converted it to MP3, I had it in Dropbox, and so I was driving around and said, hey, let's listen to this.

I don't even know how to begin to explain this, and I really seriously considered taking the time to go through and to create a graphic showing the thought process that these guys went through to come up with their interpretation of John 6.

The only thing I can liken it to is if you take

Gail Ripplinger's New Age Bible versions, and you give someone,

I don't know, a couple bottles of scotch, have them drink them first, and then repeat

New Age Bible versions. It is, it's really difficult to explain how convoluted, and how you can make connections out of anything.

I mean, it's literally, well, you know, they have good gold in Arabia, and we know that you can find this in Arabia, and that in Arabia is this color, and this seed is that color, and that's similar to the color of manna, and therefore,

Jiz is the manna, and you're just left sitting there stunned, because you, you know,

I've talked to thousands of Mormon missionaries. Not a one of them was ever this whacked out. Not a one of them.

What was ever this wild in the connections they made, and the utter irrationality.

Now, this priest guy sounds really sharp, and he's reading from the Greek Septuagint, but he's making connections that could prove absolutely anything, anything at all, and yet then saying, so we clearly see, this is this video.

The only reason I even found out about this video. Have I told you about this? No. The only reason

I found out about this video is it was presented on Sam Shamoon's channel, and Sam's the one that introduces them, and then he's not involved with the rest of it, but he's the one putting this stuff out.

Stuff that Sam, if a Muslim said anything like this, he would, but there you go.

And so, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just gonna stop now.

Okay, all right, all right. I've told Rich I don't like the side angles, so he just keeps trying to sneak them in there, and I'm just like, nope,

I can see what's going on, so we're not gonna let that happen. Anyway, so this is

William Albrecht, and to say that he is the king of eisegesis is to be very, very kind, and if you don't know what eisegesis is, it's reading into the text something the original authors never intended, could have never intended, very frequently it's anachronistic, and it's what you get when you sit in the 21st century and you have

Roman Catholic, this guy is so much more Catholic than the Pope, it's not even funny, you have

Roman Catholic lenses surgically implanted over your eyes, and so when you look back at the

Bible, you just make all the connections you need to make to turn it into something that's supportive of Roman Catholicism.

So all of that to say that as I listened, if you listened to the debate between Michael and William, Michael said, look, my folks were very, very specific about this, the debate is on whether this is a biblical teaching, and I think he had the understanding that they were going to limit themselves to what they agreed was scripture, not to second

Maccabees or whatever else, and was gonna be looking at early church fathers like that, well, of course,

Albrecht's entire presentation was that, and so it really got bogged down with, no,

I didn't say I was gonna do that, no, that's off topic, no, I won't talk about that, and that's why I stopped eventually even listening to it, it was just so painful to listen to, but Albrecht's opening statement over and over and over again was the universal teaching of the church, every single church father, oh, from the beginning, every single church, it was astonishing that anyone could actually, especially on a subject like this, where serious historical

Roman Catholic scholarship recognizes the development of the doctrine of purgatory over time, the fact that you have to have this element develop and this element develop and this element develop, and then they're brought together at this point in time, and this person's gonna connect these two things, and this person connect these, and eventually in the second millennium, you end up with these threads coming together, and you get the doctrine of purgatory as it is believed today, that's what serious scholars recognize, and that's why

Newman did the development hypothesis, and because he recognized that that's the same thing with the papacy, it's the same thing with transubstantiation, it's the same thing with, and the

Marian dogma is, oh, good grief, well, I already knew that if anyone in the early church had a cat named

Mary, William Albrecht would find in that evidence of the immaculate conception of Mary, okay?

That is seriously how ugly disconnected from serious history this guy's assertions are, any word, any phrase, anything, will be just connected together, and boom, here's your evidence, that's a sad reality, but here, doctrine of purgatory, same thing, and so unanimous teaching and all the rest of this stuff, and it's just laughably not true.

I was thinking, I was sitting there, I was thinking about this book, Jacques Le Goff, I don't remember,

I know I had this on my desk in the debate with Stravinskas, this is a 1984 edition of it, been around a long time, but very lengthy analysis of the sources and the development over time, it's called

The Birth of Purgatory, and there's so many others where you, serious

Roman Catholic apologetics tries to say, well, we see markers, we see indications, even if we don't have, just not gonna say, oh yeah, everybody back then was teaching this, because the evidence just isn't there, but these guys, no, it's like, this is from the beginning, and then the arguments he was making in regards to by fire, and it was just, it was pitiful, it was just so hard to listen to, well, it sort of reminds me of this, to be honest with you, because the next little section,

I actually need to see if I can, yeah, drag this over here, and there we go, hey, the next little section of our

Trent Horn response, we haven't forgotten about all these things, we've got a lot of irons in the fire, and I'll be honest with the trip

I've got upcoming, I'm preparing far earlier for it, because I have to, because of the means by which

I am doing the traveling, a couple of years from now,

Lord willing, this will all be second nature to me, and I'll have everything just set up, and just know how to jump in and go, but this will be my first, well, this trip will be 3 ,800 miles, 21 or 22, actually, 22 days, never done anything like that before, and so keeping me busy with all sorts of other stuff, so, but I hope to remember that whatever we're working on on the dividing line,

I'll have it on the cloud, so that wherever I am, I can pull it in and we can look at it and stuff, so we've been looking at the

Trent Horn presentation for quite some time, and I was reminded that really,

Roman Catholic apologists can't avoid making these kinds of wild claims, or abusing church history, it's funny, because he's talking about Protestants abusing church history, distorting the early church fathers and things like that,

I wanna, we've talked about this before, you may be new, so maybe this will be helpful to you, especially if you have a

Roman Catholic family members and things like that, but a couple of years ago,

I remember, and then again, it was only a few months ago, I read through portions of the

Ascension of Isaiah, we did story time with Uncle Jimmy, and we looked at the

Protevangelium of James, and in fact, I should have grabbed the Gnostic Gospels text, it's in on the desk in the other studio, but we read through portions of these things to remind us once again, of the nature of these sources, the nature of these materials, that they are clearly unorthodox, they are clearly not based upon a

Christian worldview, that they are clearly influenced by forms of proto -Gnosticism, early

Gnosticism, all the way up to full blown Valentinian Gnosticism, if you're not familiar with what

Gnosticism was, it was the greatest enemy of the Christian church, beginning at the end of the first century, even into the first century, if you're looking at the earliest forms and being warned against in Colossians, and first John and things like that, but certainly the biggest enemy of the church in the second century, and it is a worldview utterly disconnected from that of scripture, because one thing that must be understood, is that the

God of the old Testament, is the God of the new Testament, and people who, why do you see such a big difference?

No, that means you have badly misread both testaments, the emphasis of the new

Testament is, this is a continuation of the God of Israel, this is Yahweh revealing himself in the person of Jesus Christ, and as such the worldview of the creator

God, making all things central to the Christian faith, Gnosticism denies that, and so you have a dualistic system within Gnosticism, and this is plainly seen in these sources, and you have this idea of Jesus, basically beaming in to the world, he beams out of Mary, there's a bright light, and when does the light fades, there's a baby, so no birth, there couldn't be because in Gnostic thought, that would make

Jesus a part of the fallen physical order, and so we've pointed out, if you believe, in the perpetual virginity of Mary, what

Rome teaches, it's a perpetual virginity of Mary, that is that she remains a virgin, physically in the giving of birth, which means the child does not leave her body, in a normal process of birth, if you believe that,

I don't know how you maintain the idea, of the necessity of Jesus being the

God man, to bring about redemption, by a sacrificial death, because how is he truly human, if he appears in bright light, and is beamed out of his mother, but this is what you face, and so in Trent Horne's presentation, he had put up a graphic, where an evangelical said, there's just no evidence of this belief, now listen to what he says, and we'll need to make sure the things on here, listen to what he says, when he starts talking about the evidence, from the early church, but we do have evidence though, that points in the trajectory of understanding, that Mary was protected from sin, throughout her entire life, and very early evidence, we have the ascension of Isaiah, and the odes of Solomon, early

Christian documents from the first century, that describe Mary, having a pain -free childbirth, and if you remember in Genesis chapter three, one of the curses of original sin, is pain in childbirth, so if someone is spared, from the pain of childbirth, it would naturally follow, that they were spared from the curse, of original sin, likewise the church fathers,

Irenaeus is one of them, compared Mary to Eve, who was also created, without original sin, and I cannot stop it,

St. Ephraim the Syrian, writing the fourth century, says there is no flaw in thee, and no stain in thy mother, you see the

Eastern fathers, talking about Mary being pure, being incorruptible, Can you cut off the audio? Okay, we'll just cut off the audio, and cut off the video eventually, sorry about that, that has never,

I've never tried to do this before, move it over to there, and obviously that doesn't work, so what

I have to do, is now I have control of it, and now I've turned it off, or I tried to,

I love windows, it's just, we now know, that Bill Gates is the

Antichrist, so, we now have evidence, plainly, that this is all a conspiracy, he's buying up all the farmland, in the

United States, and he did this to us, from the beginning, so, try to go back here a little bit, there we go, and what

I will do, is I do know how to fix this anyways, connect, change projection mode, and duplicate,

I'm sorry? What's that Rich? Well, I didn't want to have, the stuff that I was reading, sitting up on the screen, it should be able to do that, but like I said, it's

Windows, so notice what is here, the ascension of Isaiah, the odes of Solomon, attest to Mary's pain free birth, now,

I really, I really, really, really, really wonder, do

Catholic apologists, I've got the echo coming back again, do Catholic apologists really, want to go here?

Do they really, I mean, if they know, the nature of these sources, if they know what they say, if they know their background, if they know out of what they're coming, do you really want to stand there, in front of your audience, and say to them, go look at this stuff, go look at this material, because there's going to be a lot of them, that are going to go, wait a minute, this material is plainly ahistorical, well, but it's an indication, okay, but it's an indication, it comes from what?

Why would these sources, say this?

Why would these sources, want to say that Mary had a pain free birth?

Well, because Jesus didn't really have a physical body, because they're

Gnostic, they're dualistic, so, that's not what

Rome down the road, is trying to do in regards to Mary, and perpetual virginity, and immaculate conception, and all the rest of this kind of stuff, or the whole complex, and eventually bodily assumption, stuff, bodily assumption unknown, in the early church, just plain unknown, and the first times it shows up, it's in stuff that the

Pope says is heretical, he didn't say that that was heretical, he basically said that the work itself was heretical, which is hardly a high endorsement or something, but the point is, this is plainly, not the faith of the early church, but if you're a

Roman Catholic, you've been told that it is, and therefore you have to believe it, I just,

I don't understand, when I, when we look at Gregory, okay, we've been looking at Gregory's confession of faith, have

I not over and over again said, you need to let the early church fathers be the early church fathers, you need to let them be who they were when they lived, so you can ask questions of them, that they never, it's unfair, they never even talked about it, it wasn't even an issue in their day, so don't try to drag them in, and there seems to be a lot of folks who have the idea that if you find a great deal of benefit in what

Gregory said about his confession of faith as to who Jesus was, that must mean you agree with everything

Gregory said, no, that is a childish way of dealing with historical sources, it's infantile,

I see it all the time, but it's infantile, you have to get to the point of maturity to be able to go,

I can look at what this person said, and I can gain great benefit from this person's work in this area, over here,

I think that his conclusions in this subject are erroneous, it's possible that he had not, he was unaware of this fact, and this fact, and this fact from New Testament studies, and things like that, that hadn't been done in his day, or whatever else, but you have to be able to take the good and the bad, for a lot of people, no, if you find someone who's orthodox on this subject, then everything, the problem is that creates massive contradiction, massive contradiction, you're going to find almost no two early church fathers that agreed on every single thing, and so anyone who deals with the church fathers in a meaningful fashion, has to allow that level of freedom, and analysis of what they're saying, and so, notice this statement here as well, oops, went the wrong direction, well,

I can't get it to a point, where it doesn't have him in the background, church fathers compare

Mary to Eve, who was also without sin, now think about that for a second, church fathers compare

Mary to Eve, who was also without sin, well, she wasn't without sin her whole life, was she?

Eve fell, didn't she? Eve was deceived, wasn't she? As soon as you start doing the parallel equals identity stuff, it falls apart, and I've told the story many times of going out on the bike ride, and I was listening to Jerry Matitix, run through this list of alleged parallels between Mary and Eve, and between Mary and the

Ark of the Covenant, and it sounded so good, when you don't have a

Bible in front of you, and it's just being thrown out, rat -a -tat -tat, rat -a -tat -tat, rat -a -tat -tat, it just, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, sounds so good, until I got back, got cleaned up, sat down in front of an old, oh,

I'm not sure if it was even a Pentium back then, it might've been, and started, put the cassette tape, start, stop, look it up, start, stop, look it up, every single one was flawed, it was either just completely wrong information, or obvious problems, or something that was missed that creates a new parallel that would demonstrate something about Mary you don't want to prove about Mary, whatever.

Have you noticed something else? I just struck something, see Mary up there? She looks like she's from Europe to me, don't you think?

Isn't there a little bit of, I mean, wasn't, isn't that the same issue of the white Jesus versus Jewish Jesus?

Interesting. Gotta be woke around these days, you know? Anyway, so you have to take the time to listen carefully and to analyze, and when you do, wow.

And then, I don't know why this is doing it this way, oh, that ain't gonna help.

So you've got Ephraim the Syrian, notice the being hymns, there is no flaw in thee, and no stain in thy mother.

So, what you want to, what they're trying to do with something like that is, oh, see, there is no stain in thy mother, therefore she was immaculately conceived, and she was sinless in her life.

Well, maybe someone by then had dreamt up something like that, but maybe not.

I mean, utilizing flowery language of people, you know,

I mean, today someone says of, well, the NBA finals,

I guess, are going on right now, I wish I could be excited about them, I live in Phoenix, and I was here in 93, and it was exciting in 93, because the

NBA wasn't run by the Chinese Communist Party in 93, so you could actually get excited about things, but it is now, so I could really care less, but it's like someone saying, such and such a player, because I know the name of one player on the

Suns, Chris Paul, I think. Okay, I've heard that name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not even sure where I know him from, but Chris Paul, that's the only person

I know, sorry, that's sad, but remember Charles and Kevin Johnson and Dan Marley, yeah, that was a different time.

Anyway, that'd be like saying, Chris Paul had a perfect game. Well, wait a minute.

Actually, he had a turnover, he missed 35 % of his shots, he missed two free throws.

It wasn't actually perfect, and a person would go, duh, I know that that's not what a perfect game means.

I was saying is he was dominant, he came through in the clutch, da -da -da -da -da, but as long as you have a context that you're willing to import into the words, then ah, here was someone who was claiming that Chris Paul hit every shot and never missed one and never had a foul, and no, that's not what they were saying, was it?

No, because this kind of exalted language, very, very common, very, very common indeed.

So anyways, this is how you mess with church history, and you read things into church history that just weren't there to begin with.

Anyways, I went over time a little bit. Let's just put it this way, they're gonna have the car done a certain time and I gotta have the wife there on time, you know what

I mean? That's how it is. You do things on time. So anyways, we will continue in this review and continue with our response.

I had Jimmy Akin queued up here, never got around to it because I spent so much time talking about some other things, but I thought the CBGM stuff was important, even though that was not on the list at the start.

It ended up taking up 20 minutes of the program. That's sort of how it works. Thanks for watching the program today. We'll see you next time on The Dividing Line.