Jason Lisle on Apologetics and Science, Honesty in Textual Criticism, More Reformation History

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00:33

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Yes, we were on at this time yesterday. No, it's not going to be a daily thing, but some people think we should do that, but really wouldn't work all that well.

00:45

We've got a lot to get to today. I can't see anything on the screen, so I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be looking or anything like that. So I'm gonna assume we're over here for now.

00:53

Hey, there we go. It's the chewing gum and bailing wire thing.

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But since we do have so much to get to, I want to start off by immediately bringing on our guest today.

01:09

Well, I guess it's been a week and a half now already. I was in Dallas, Texas, and I spoke at a conference with a number of folks.

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Phil Johnson was there, for example, and I think Todd Friel was there. I'm not always 100 % certain that I'm in the same room with Todd Friel.

01:29

He moves so quickly. It's sort of that quantum thing. Maybe our guests could explain some of that to me a little bit later on. But also one of those speaking was

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Dr. Jason Lyle, and Dr. Lyle is, well, let's go ahead and bring

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Dr. Lyle on, let him explain that himself. Let's make sure that Skype is working. And Dr.

01:49

Lyle, are you with us? And so let's talk a little bit about the

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Biblical Science Institute, brand new, and I just, you know, people might say, well, isn't it a little bit strange?

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Aren't you guys competitors? And no, I don't consider ourselves competitors. I think God's people will support what

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God puts upon their hearts, so I don't have any problems with that. How long has Biblical Science Institute been around?

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We started mid -July, so it's very new ministry. Very new, yes.

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And I'm just gonna tell everybody, I think I was one of the first five people to sign up to support

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Dr. Lyle. I believe in what he's doing. Now, obviously, you've written before, so you're gonna be making that material available through the

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Biblical Science Institute, but you also are doing more writing, and you have a book,

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I've pre -ordered it, called Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason. Now, I do have to ask the question, what's with the headless guy with the bow tie?

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I'm a little, this concerned me a little bit, because I'm fairly known for wearing bow ties, but there's someone else that wears bow ties, too.

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So is there a double entendre here? I'm a little concerned, exactly what. Well, our publisher,

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New Leaf Publishing Group, they graciously agreed to publish the book, and they picked the cover, but I liked it.

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And it did remind me of a certain engineer who goes around speaking, well, he's not a scientist, but he plays one on TV, and he claims that the

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Bible can't be trusted because millions of years of evolution. It looked a little bit like that guy, and I thought, that might make a good cover.

04:49

Except you can see the stars directly through where the cranium's supposed to be. Exactly, yeah, he's literally lost his head in this book.

04:57

Yes, I see that. Well, that's not what the book's about, though. Now, how long is the book?

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Oh, I forget the number of pages. It's not super long, though. Well, let's see, in Word, it's 135 pages, but I don't know how that translates.

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That's what I wondered, because when I looked on, I think I looked, I looked someplace, it says something like 400 pages or something.

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I'm like, oh my goodness, that thing is a tome. But then when I looked at it, I was like, no, not quite that big.

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So yeah, all right, so tell us a little bit about it. I mean, what was your, what prompted you to write it?

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Why would people want to be looking and getting it? Yes, years ago, there was a popular meme that had been circulating on the internet, and it was 439 contradictions in the

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Bible. And atheists would just, you know, they'd slap this on their page, and they'd say, therefore, you know, I'm done, you're refuted, sir.

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And I thought, you know, I'm going to go through those and see, are there really any contradictions in the Bible?

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Now, I know as a presuppositionalist, they're not going to be, but nonetheless, some of those deserve to be answered.

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And so what I thought I'd do is to go through each one of those. Now, it turned out a lot of them were duplicates. Some of them were just dumb duplicates where they repeated the very question.

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Some of them were like 17 of the same category of question. So it turned out to be about 420 claims that the

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Bible has contradictions. And I thought, I'm just going to go through and see, are any of these, if you were, I mean, even if you weren't coming at it from a distinctly

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Christian perspective, would a person who's trying to be reasonable and giving the text the benefit of the doubt, would he or she conclude that any of these are a legitimate contradiction?

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I don't think you would. I mean, when you study these in their proper context and you read them carefully, you're going to find that the

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Bible really is fully self -consistent. And so that list has now been refuted, I would say.

06:48

Well, good. Obviously, you're familiar with, in fact, I've got a large tome back here in the background,

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Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Archer. There have been books, but almost all of those were written before the internet and before Facebook memes and all the rest of that stuff.

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And unfortunately, every generation has to keep dealing with these things. I remember the first people, well, probably, maybe when

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I was nine and I was arguing the existence of God with some guys at my mom's work, she worked at a print shop,

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I remember that very clearly. But maybe they had brought up something like that, but I don't remember that far back. But the first people

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I can remember as an adult that were throwing contradictions out at me were Mormon missionaries.

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And so I included a number of examples, such as the

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Acts 9, Acts 22 alleged contradiction, did Paul hear the voice, did Paul not hear the voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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And so that's obviously been something we've had to deal with for a long, long time. And it's interesting to me, many of the leading apologists today won't even touch that subject with a 10 -foot pole.

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I mean, William Lane Craig will not even wander into the field of dealing with the alleged consistency of scripture.

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He actually basically says, there's things that there are contradictions. There are apologists who will actually say that.

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So you're a little bit out of sort of the mainstream in seeking to address these things, because it sounds like you have a presupposition,

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I'm not using that term in any sneaky sense, that harmonizing the word of God, not in an artificial sense, not in a simplistic sense, not in what you see sometimes in some books, but in a meaningful sense, allowing it to speak for itself is how we should start.

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And being, as I teach in a lot of seminaries, I hope you realize that you and I are a little bit on the weird side if we start from that perspective.

08:51

Yeah, and that's one of the things that characterizes this new ministry that I've started, the

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Biblical Science Institute. It's distinctly presuppositional in its approach, which means I take the Bible to be the ultimate standard for all truth claims.

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I mean, it is the ultimate standard. And I don't deny that. People say, well, you're biased. Well, everybody's got a bias.

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The question is, which bias is the best bias with which to be biased? That's the issue. And I have a bias that allows me to interpret data.

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It makes science possible. It makes the law of non -contradiction meaningful, which is the very thing that people try to use against God.

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And yet that law is based on his character, the fact that God doesn't deny himself, the fact that God is sovereign over all truth and so on.

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And so when I went into this list analyzing it, granted, I have a bias, but nonetheless,

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I also have a confidence that God's word is true. And so I expect that when there's an apparent contradiction,

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I expect it's resolvable, maybe not by me even, maybe not without a lot of difficulty.

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Although I gotta tell you, very few of these were difficult. Very few of them did I have to go back to the original text and do a little bit of homework.

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Most of them just hadn't read the text carefully. But I go in with the expectation that these are going to be resolvable at some point because I am a presuppositionalist, because I have confidence in the word of God.

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And that's something that I think when folks are not presuppositional in their approach, when they're evidential, there is a sort of fear that, well, maybe there really is one, maybe

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I better just not touch the issue. Right, yeah, definitely. Well, it's something I've been dealing with for many, many years, back long before the internet.

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Do you know what a BBS was? Oh yeah, bulletin board system. You remember that? You're geeky enough to have been doing that one, yeah, back with the

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TRS -80 and stuff like that, I would imagine, yeah, okay. I know your kind. Well, I was on BBSes back then too.

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And this was back in the day when we ran into a group called Dennis McKinsey and an atheist that had a publication.

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It wasn't even photocopied. It was, what was, mimeographed, mimeographed. Remember those mimeographed machines?

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They'd smell really funny. He would send out a three -page printed on both sides thing on the errors in the

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Bible each month. And you could subscribe to it called Biblical Errancy. And I started subscribing to his stuff and I started just taking apart his arguments and his alleged contradictions.

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And this was, he's gone to the net obviously since then, but this was way back, probably mid -80s, somewhere around in that timeframe.

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And so yeah, this has been something that we've been involved with for a long time and yet every generation needs to be doing it.

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So I'm looking, when's the book supposed to be out? It should be out like this week.

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This week? Good, good, good. I am very much looking forward to that. Now I have in my hand,

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I know you can't see me, but I can see you. I have in my hand another book that obviously goes along the same line that I want you to know, given the disorganization of my personal library, which is a fairly substantial library, took me about 40 minutes to locate where in the world

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I put it, called The Ultimate Proof of Creation, Resolving the Origins Debate.

11:58

And you look a little younger in this picture on the back here, Jason. I was. Have you noticed that?

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I hate to tell you, but there seems to be a little bit of change in the color of your hair up front there.

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Have you noticed that? Yeah, I'm slowly fossilizing over millions of years here as I decay.

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Well, it's a dark background. So you sort of, you look, I don't, it works real well. Anyways, so here you have a little bit longer work, 250 pages, but this is more, if someone looked at this as primarily a creation evolution type thing, that's not really the main focus, is it?

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Right, and you know, it's, not that I was being deceptive, but at the same time, my goal in that book was to expose the presuppositional method to those who are creation scientists, because it is very powerful.

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It is the way in which we should frame our arguments. I don't want to take away from any of the fine work that my creation scientists colleagues have done.

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There's, they've done some amazing stuff. I just wanted to give them sort of a package in which to present their evidence so that they're doing it in the right way.

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And, you know, that basically was my goal was to get the Bonson type thinking into the minds of creationists, because once you get that way of thinking down, it is very powerful, and you're gonna have a confidence in God's word that you don't have if you're just relying on your understanding of evidence, because you never know all the evidence, and you don't ever know if your understanding of it's 100 % and so on.

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You become presuppositional. You have a humble boldness, humility because of who we are, but boldness because you know it's the word of God, and it's gonna stand the test of time.

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And so that was really my goal, and it is, I mean, the title's accurate. It is an ultimate proof of creation.

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It's just not the kind of proof that people are used to when they're dealing with creation versus evolution.

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It's a much more powerful argument than what people are used to. And again, I'm not against arguments from irreducible complexity or things like that.

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There's some good things there, but since those are based on science, which is inductive and therefore rarely conclusive,

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I wanted to give a very powerful argument that shows you that you can know for absolute certainty, you can know that there is an ultimate proof of creation.

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Creation really is true and is what makes science possible. Yeah, very appreciative of that. And it seems like you've been fairly successful.

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I've happened to notice a real increase in interest in that form of argumentation in the creation science community as a whole.

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I'm not gonna, I don't wanna force you to take all the credit for that, but it does seem that some,

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I've been very interested to see that some names that in the past I wouldn't have associated with that kind of perspective have gone, hey, this actually makes sense.

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Of course, the thing is that kind of argumentation, as I say all the time, our theology determines our apologetics and not the other way around.

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And so to use that form of argumentation requires an extremely high view of scripture, an extremely high view of God as creator, as sovereign over his universe and everything that goes along with it, which may be why it wasn't as popular in times past.

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And certainly I'm afraid there are certain people whose view of scripture would really preclude their ability to consistently utilize that kind of argumentation because they've accepted a almost secular view of where scripture came from rather than scripture's own testimony to itself.

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Maybe you're by the back door trying to challenge them to rethink where they may have gone wrong there. Yeah, and maybe not even so back door.

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I mean, I'm pretty upfront about it. I have, the one thing I didn't, the only thing I didn't mention in the book, you won't see presuppositional apologetics in the ultimate proof of creation.

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I didn't use that particular phrase. I was worried there might be a knee -jerk reaction to that, people misunderstand it. And even just like yesterday, somebody posted on my

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Facebook page and they said that presuppositional apologetics is you just state your belief. And that is so far from what the method is.

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It's ridiculous. But I have seen a resurgence in the method.

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I'm very encouraged by that. I can tell the folks who have been thinking presuppositionally, when I look on Facebook and I see some of the interactions there with Christians dialoguing with atheists and creationists versus evolutionists,

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I can tell the ones who have been thinking and reading presupp, because they're winning the arguments, I mean, they destroy their opponent.

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There was somebody who posted on my Facebook page, I think this was a couple months ago, and it was, there was a geology professor,

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PhD in geology, and he was challenging this young lady. She was 14 and she took him to task.

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She destroyed his argument and she did it presuppositionally. And I mean, that really shows you the power of the method when you can take somebody who maybe doesn't have as much knowledge as the geology professor, but she knows her

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Bible, she's standing on it, she's standing on the word of God. And it was very enjoyable for me to see that.

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Not just, I mean, you know, not for the sake of winning arguments, but it's delightful to see people who are thinking scripturally and they're able to reason, they're able to win arguments the way that Jesus did in his earthly ministry.

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Jesus was not the sort of person you wanted to argue against because he was very good at thinking through these issues and using the

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Bible as his ultimate standard, which I think is interesting because he's God. He can say, I'm God and I said so, but he stands on the written word as his ultimate standard.

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And how can we as Christ followers do any less? Yeah, we definitely need to follow our own

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Lord who is the very definition of truth. So you've got the ultimate proof of creation.

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You've got Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason coming out hopefully this week. I now have in my hand a book called

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Taking Back Astronomy, The Heavens Declare Creation and Science Confirms It.

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And this is one of, I noticed that in the Stargazer's Guide, both are heavy books in the sense that they're full color on every page and therefore you have to use glossy paper.

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And therefore, if you toss this at somebody, you could be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.

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They are substantial works. Of course, this is a smaller work. And how would you describe this?

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Is this more of a, I don't know, how would you describe this? Because obviously you've got lots of space in between.

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It's not meant to be some deep tome. Who's your audience with Taking Back Astronomy?

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Anyone who's interested in astronomy and wondering how do the discoveries that we find in space, how do those correlate with the

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Christian worldview? That's really the purpose of it. It is an apologetic book. It's meant to, it argues for the

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Christian worldview. I think it does it in a presuppositional way, but nonetheless uses a lot of evidence and shows how the evidence lines up with God's word.

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And it's divided into a number of subsections where you can see how in the past God's word, when it spoke on astronomy, it was right.

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And today we'd have to agree that the world's spherical, something the Bible implies in a number of places, various things, various things in scripture.

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And then today, well, there's some places where secular astronomers would disagree with the Bible. And yet we'd see when you really understand the evidence that lines up with the

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Bible anyway. And so there's no reason to doubt God's word. And it's just giving people a little bit of the evidence that they can use to have an intelligent conversation.

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I'm all for precept, but sometimes it is good to know a little bit of the actual science that you can go into. So people can say, well, you know, precept may work on paper, but it's very philosophical.

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But when it comes down to the hard data, do you have answers there? Well, yeah, we do. We have answers there and it makes sense.

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It lines up with what the Bible teaches. It's a fun book. It's the kind of book, taking back astronomy, it's the kind of book you read it and then you give it to your secular friend and they read it and you never know.

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It plants some seeds. Yeah, definitely. And it's a very attractive book. So it's something you can give to somebody as a gift and I think it would get read.

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And it does mention the fact, and I did want to mention this, people may be asking, well, why should we listen to this guy?

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Well, there's this thing called a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado, which

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I believe, if I recall correctly, is in that bastion of conservatism known as Boulder.

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Yes? The People's Republic of Boulder, yes. I mean, every time

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I either drive a car or ride a bike through Boulder, it automatically starts turning left.

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I have to fight it. The whole, it's almost like a spin. I'm not even sure how they've managed to do that, but I happen to go up to Boulder.

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I've got a church there that I've been going to, I don't know, for about almost 10 years now or so there in Boulder.

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I've climbed up out of Left Hand Canyon up to Ward. Ward, did you ever go to Ward while you were there? I've been there, yeah.

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Isn't that one of the weirdest little places time forgot? I mean, if you go straight up Left Hand Canyon, there's this one place where there's a

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VW bug and it's like only the top of it is, it's buried next to the road.

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And how does that happen? And the people there are really curmudgeonly and they were doing pot long before it was legal in Colorado and they don't, they're really mad that everyone else is getting to do this now and they don't want anybody to come in there, especially if you're wearing cotton spandex and you're on a bike.

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They do not like you. Let me tell you something, it's almost like they growl. It's really weird. But yeah, Boulder, beautiful, beautiful place.

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I just, when I started doing, I'll just tell you this real quickly. When I started doing almost every

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Sunday after the Mount Evans Hill Climb, I do the Mount Evans Hill Climb. You've obviously been up to the top of Mount Evans, right?

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I have, yep. Highest paved road. Well, using the term paved of some places, that road is a little bit of a stretch to be perfectly honest with you.

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But every year there is a race from Idaho Springs to the top of Mount Evans on bike.

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And I've done that the last three years. So if you can imagine what it's like to just go all out for just under three hours to 14 ,130 feet above sea level, then you know

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I'm even weirder than you thought that I was. But going up there to the top of that particular mountain, some of the people in the church will go with us up there and we'll ride up to the top and take pictures.

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And you're so high there, you can actually start seeing the curvature of the earth, which I'm not sure what the flat earthers do with that.

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Why is it doing that? I don't know. Well, strange. Isn't it weird? Now, have you ever taken your telescope up there?

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I had, not on Mount Evans, but I have taken it up to Estes Park. And boy, wow.

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I would imagine. You get up, the higher you get up, and I didn't have my big one back then, but I took, it was like an eight inch telescope.

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When you take it up on top of a mountain, you're basically, you're almost in space at that point. And the sky is as dark as you can imagine.

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Unbelievable. Up there, a little past Estes, up in the Rocky Mountain National Park. And that was a lot of fun.

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Oh yeah. And sometimes if I didn't want to drive quite as far, I'd just take it up to like past Netherland or there's some places not too far away from Boulder where you can get behind.

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You want to get behind the first range of mountains so you can block the light pollution from Denver, because it does put out quite a bit.

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But we watched one of the lead in a meteor storm back in 2000.

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I forget what the year was, but oh, there's some great viewing around there. Well, I'm looking forward to it. At night, you get great viewing.

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At day, you got great hiking. It was a fun place to live. And yeah, very liberal, but if you can put up with that, the beauty was outstanding.

24:09

Well, I'm blaming you, but I'm trying to put together my Orion 6i reflector.

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It's all your fault. So if I can actually make that work, then we'll think about the big one. But anyways, what

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I do on the Sunday after climbing Mount Evans is I teach that church in Boulder and then we climb up Flagstaff.

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So you know the amphitheater up there in Flagstaff? Yes, we've been there many times. Then we go past it all the way up and the section past that hits 16 % grade, which on a bike is first gear standing with your eyes bulging and it's just, it's ugly.

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I don't know why I do it, but I've done it for three years in a row now and it's just killer. But I love the area.

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And so you, the big question is how do you survive doing a PhD in astrophysics in a context like that?

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Yeah, it may work to my advantage. I'm not a terribly social person. So I didn't interact a lot with some of the, with a lot of the strange folks there in Boulder.

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It's sort of divided. Boulder has two groups of people. You got, and they're very different. You got the new age folks and then you got the academic elites and neither of them particularly like Christians, I've noticed.

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But nonetheless, you know, I was able to find a good church in the area. I found a few

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Christians there. You get, you know, 25 ,000 students when I was there. You're gonna find a few that are solid.

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You know, the thing I've discovered too, in places like that that are very liberal, when you do find some solid

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Christians there, they are really solid because they have to be. I mean, and it's a real bonding experience.

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It's not like when you, I mean, here in Texas, everybody and their neighbors are Christian and they haven't even heard of that there's not

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Christians. I'm exaggerating, but you take my point. In a place like that, when you find a little bit of light in the darkness, it really shines.

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And so there were some really good folks there. And that's the key, I think. You gotta stay in God's word.

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You gotta meet up with other Christians who are serious about studying God's word. They're serious about Christianity.

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It's not just a label they stick on and it's a hobby they do on Sunday. It's their life, as it is for me.

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And you find a few like that and you make them your best friends. And that's the way to do it, in my view.

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That's what I'd recommend to students who are gonna be part of a very secular education. Yeah, I'm not sure which church you went to.

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I know that the church that I've been going to and speaking at regularly, South Boulder Bible Church, Eric Ellis is the pastor there.

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And good folks. And so yeah, God's got his people everywhere. We don't wanna hammer on Boulder too much, but I was only slightly exaggerating when

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I said my bike turns to the left when I'm riding through Boulder, because there is a - Yeah, it's like 90%. Oh yeah.

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I was there when they had the election for Gore and it was like 90 % for Gore. So it's very, very -

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Oh yeah, yeah, it is, it is. Well, one other book real quick. And while looking for ultimate proof,

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I discovered that my purchase of this one in Dallas was a double purchase. Lord's blessing to you there.

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I now have two signed copies of the Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky. This is a much heavier.

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This is a big book. This must have taken you some serious time. Obviously, one of the things

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I need to be studying through greatly myself, because I want to be able to find some of the things that we found.

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We went out, I mentioned it earlier, we went out and did some stargazing. And even though we weren't all that far out of Dallas, there are some places here in Arizona I could go that we could definitely get some really dark skies and clear viewing.

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And in fact, I rode my bike up to the top of Mount Lemmon this past Saturday morning and touched the gate at the

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University of Arizona Sky Center up there. So they have a number of scopes up on the top of Mount Lemmon, though with all the light from Tucson, I'm not really sure how that works, but maybe they're doing some other kind of study.

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I don't know. But this book, free planisphere inside.

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And I noticed with my telescope, I got, what is it? What was the free program that came with that?

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Dark sky, something sky, something. I put it on my other Mac or something like that. There's a lot of stuff out there now.

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So if someone reads your book and then you've recommended to me stuff from my iPhone, iPad.

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You were using something on your iPhone where you just held it up to the sky and it can match up with what's up there and stuff like that.

28:51

We live in a day where you can do more than you've ever done before, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it's amazing what we can do now, especially with digital cameras.

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Because back when I was young, you had to use film. And let me tell you, and I tried it and it was a horrible disaster.

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Trying to take a picture of something with film. You really don't know what you're doing. But with digital cameras, it's easy as pie.

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In fact, you can hold your iPhone up. They make little iPhone adapters. And as long as it's fairly bright, you can take pictures with your iPhone and stuff.

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You use Saturn and you get these wonderful images. There are people that use a webcam. They'll record a sequence, a time sequence, a movie animation of Saturn.

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And what you can do is you can freeze out the scene. You can get really sharp images that way. Deep sky cameras,

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I've got a deep sky camera. It's like 300 and something bucks. And it'll take these wonderful images, color images of nebulae that just 20 years ago, that was hard to do.

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And now it's easy. And now the newer telescopes, they got the computer controls, computer tracking, which makes it a lot easier to compensate for Earth's rotation.

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Back in the old days, you had to line up your telescope just right, you had to do it every night. You had to line it up on Polaris and get it aligned in order to even use the clock drive.

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And so we've come a long way. And what an exciting time that we live in, where you can hold up your phone and it'll identify what you're looking at.

30:17

I mean, I think that's pretty neat. That was pretty amazing. Now, so I'll just tell a personal story real quick here.

30:22

We had seen Saturn. We got a really good shot of Saturn. In fact, you sort of indicated you went a little bit early on that.

30:29

You normally hold that off a little bit later in the evening. But that was before the cop chased us around.

30:35

But still don't know why he didn't like you parking on the grass.

30:41

But anyway, and so we saw Saturn and you could tell I wanted to see if we could track down a galaxy, which we did.

30:48

We saw Andromeda. And you seemed to indicate that given the focal length of your telescope, we were actually only seeing a part of Andromeda, right?

30:58

That it's actually bigger than the image we were seeing, we were sort of seeing the core at that particular point in time.

31:05

And so we had seen some other things. And then the last thing that we looked at, you said you wanted to show us a binary star.

31:15

And so I'm like, I don't know, sort of reminds me of a couple of Star Trek episodes at some point or something like that, you know what

31:22

I mean? I wonder which one, you know? And how would the Enterprise circle just one of the two? And things like that going through my mind.

31:29

It had been a long day. And so you lined up Albireo. Beta Cygni is another name that I've seen used,

31:38

I think for the blue star of the, at least that's what I've seen in some of the stuff I've been looking up. And so I look inside this thing and I am just stunned at what

31:47

I see because it looks from our perspective, mankind had always identified that as a single star until we had telescopes and you're able to distinguish there's actually two stars there.

32:00

But the color contrast between the two was just stunning.

32:07

It was just incredible. In fact, I think I showed on the dividing line when I got back, I showed maybe a

32:13

Hubble image of it or somebody's image of it. And the contrast between the blue and it just, it's gold.

32:20

I mean, it just looks absolutely gold. Maybe it's because of the blue being there, you know, gives it that hue,

32:26

I don't know. But it's just, it was absolutely beautiful through that telescope.

32:35

And so I've looked up some information since then. I've actually seen some argumentation, maybe you comment.

32:41

Some people are arguing that it's an optical double and not a physical double.

32:49

Isn't that something we would be able to determine over time? Yes, but it would take a long time to do it because those stars are far enough apart that if they're gravitationally bound, and I think more astronomers think they are bound than not, but if they're gravitationally bound and therefore genuine binary, the orbital period would be something like 100 ,000 years.

33:09

So they haven't orbited even once since creation. And so it's hard to tell if they're genuinely orbiting together or if they're gonna, if they're just kind of passing by each other.

33:16

Their proximity to each other makes me think it's probably a genuine binary. And I think that's the majority position, but it's hard to know for certain with stars like that.

33:25

I think it's at 430 light years, I think. 430 light years away. Right, was what I was seeing. So, and then have you ever looked into how the name developed?

33:35

I have, yeah, and that's quite a story. It was a really weird story. I mean, misunderstandings in Arabic and all the rest of this stuff.

33:44

You go, well, as you had said out there, these stars, many of them, their names are so ancient and old that no one really has any serious idea of where in the world they came from.

33:54

They've been around forever. And so, somebody in channel just said that I'm such a nerd.

34:01

And I'm like, you have no idea who I'm interviewing if you think I'm a nerd. Not even close, come on, man.

34:11

I'm a wannabe nerd in comparison to Jason Lyle. But anyway, so, no,

34:16

I just, seriously, when we came there, you just sort of out of the blue the first night said, hey, how about after the conference,

34:26

I grab my telescope and we go out and do some stargazing. I'm like, oh, it never even crossed my mind.

34:34

It's like, cool, all right, let's see what we can do. And especially seeing

34:41

El Barrio, I don't know why it was so incredibly captivating.

34:47

I mean, I only saw it for a matter of seconds, literally, because I wanted everybody else to get to see it, too.

34:53

But it was just, I don't know, maybe it's just one of those things where mankind, obviously, has been staring up at the skies since creation itself.

35:05

And for most of creation, had better views than those of us that live in light -polluted cities like I do, unfortunately, in Phoenix, which is, it's even worse than Denver or Boulder.

35:18

I'm like, that's because it's so dusty. So it's just, I don't even know how to measure it, but we had some wind over the weekend, and man,

35:25

Phoenix was horrible. My car was covered in dust the next morning. So I can't imagine how you could have seen almost anything the night before with all that stuff hanging in the air.

35:35

But mankind has been looking up there and looking at these things, and it was not until,

35:42

I don't know when, that someone, because of the invention of a telescope, was able to go, hey, wait a minute, we've always thought, now,

35:51

Alberio is part of which constellation? Cygnus. Okay, Cygnus. So they had identified it as a star, just seen it as a star all along.

36:00

And then all of a sudden, oh, it's actually two stars, and very different stars, as far as their beauty and everything else goes.

36:09

And I don't know what it was, but it just really, really struck me that we live in a day where not only is we're looking outward, you know,

36:19

I love that video that you have. And by the way, folks, if you haven't seen this, are you, have you redone, or are you gonna be redoing the fractal video?

36:27

I'm going to be redoing it. I've done, I have generated some new animations with a better color scheme.

36:33

It'll look sweet. It'll look really nice. Okay, all right. So, because I've sent a lot of people to your fractal video, but you and Bill Gates were in Mortal Kombat during that particular, you know what

36:45

I mean? You even said - You even said that Bill Gates loads anti -creationist viruses on, you even said that during the, because you were fighting with that thing to get it to work.

36:56

So, despite that, it was wonderfully fascinating. And if people don't know what we're talking about, go look up Jason Lyle Fractals on YouTube.

37:05

Some people, not a lot of people know, but some people know that I've been doing fractal art since the 90s.

37:11

Since there was, have you ever seen a DOS, I think it was a DOS -based program called

37:16

Sterling. And it really produced some gorgeous images. It really, really did.

37:22

And so, the fractal bug bit me a long, long time ago. And so, when

37:29

I saw your video, it's like, oh yeah, I've wanted to write on this forever because this is something that is in the very nature of mathematics itself.

37:40

This wasn't created by a computer. This is just simply an element of how creation exists that is just stunning in its, not only in its beauty, but in its complexity and all the things that go along with it.

37:56

I really, and I, now today, of course, there are programs that can do a whole lot more than those old ones did, but fractals are still beautiful one way or the other.

38:05

And I still, every once in a while, I just have to stop and create a new fractal just for the fun of it because they're just so beautiful and I've been doing it for years and years and years.

38:14

So, we've got fractal stuff that is so incredible.

38:20

And then you did that video on, basically on how massive the universe is.

38:28

What was the name? It's a DVD as well? Oh, there's more than one, but the one

38:34

I did for the planetarium is called the Created Cosmos. Created Cosmos, yes, right, right. Okay, yeah. Where you're trying to communicate to people and it's hard because our minds just struggle with the vastness of space to communicate just how massive these things really are, how large those stars are in comparison to our own and everything along those lines.

39:01

At the same time, we're learning all this stuff looking outward, we're looking inward and learning so much about the complexity of life on a tiny scale.

39:14

And it just seems to me that looking inward at, for example, the complexity of life, obviously the intelligent design, irreducible complexity, the complexity of life itself and DNA and RNA and everything that goes along with it.

39:30

And that was more of my science background was the biology side of it. It's a little bit easier to see the fingerprint of God there because we are alive and it's something that we can sort of touch and it's, well, this is happening in my body.

39:48

It's not so distant as light years and things like that away.

39:53

And yet if you have the right biblical mindset, then you can actually see the fingerprint of God in, well, you made a passing comment while we were looking at some of the planets that you sort of speculate as to why one of them, well, it's just a little bit on the wonky side, doesn't follow all the rules.

40:21

It's sort of spinning the wrong, it's not lined up the way it should be, right? Yeah, Venus spins backwards and the planet

40:28

Uranus is tilted on its side. And those are both totally contrary to what the secular model would expect really.

40:35

So the idea being, if you have the mind of Christ, if you look through the lens that is given to us through the one who left the empty grave behind, let's put it that way, talk about having an authority, then you can see things.

40:54

It's not that you are seeing things that your secular compatriots putting their eye to the same telescope aren't seeing, but it's the filter that gives meaning to what you're seeing.

41:08

You can see the beauty that we can see in the fractal or in the cell, but you can see it literally hundreds and thousands of light years away.

41:20

Am I correctly sort of summarizing that? Oh, sure, yeah. And you know, God reveals himself in different ways, in different branches of science.

41:29

And in the biology, you see machinery that's been designed to intricately work together.

41:35

You don't find that in space, not in that way. You don't find machines out in space other than the few man -made ones that we've put out there.

41:42

But you do find different, you find God's glory revealed in different ways. The beauty, the size, the energy, just the amount, just think of the amount of energy.

41:50

I mean, the sun puts out, in one second, it puts out more energy than a billion major cities could use in an entire year.

41:57

And God just has unlimited energy in that fashion. And it's not a problem for him. He spoke that into existence and it leapt into existence.

42:04

But there are a few things, too, even in space that just make you scratch your head. You think, that's just neat.

42:10

How did God think of that? There are moons, for example, that orbit Saturn. Now, we saw a few of Saturn's moons when we were looking at it.

42:17

But there are two that are usually too close to see in a telescope of the size that I've got called

42:23

Janus and Epimetheus. And these two moons, their orbit is real similar in terms of their distance from Saturn.

42:30

The orbital distance is only different by like 20 miles, which is less than the diameter of either moon.

42:38

So they're bigger than 20 mile, which means the orbit of one overlaps with the size of the other, if you think about that.

42:46

And the one on the inside track has to orbit quicker because the closer you are to Saturn, the faster you orbit.

42:53

And so you think, well, wait a minute, we've got a problem here because you've got these two circular orbits basically, and their distance apart is only 20 miles and one of them's moving quicker, which means at some point it would want to try and pass the bigger object, but it can't because the object's bigger than 20 miles.

43:08

So what happens with these two little moons? Why don't they collide? You do the math, even if you started it out, just if you started the inside moon out just a little bit ahead of the outside moon, in four years it will have caught up and should collide.

43:19

So you think, well, every four years these moons should collide, but they don't. And what's going on here? Well, it turns out that each of these moons has a little bit of gravity to it.

43:28

And so when the inner moon, let's say it's Janus, when it gets close to Epimetheus, the gravity of Epimetheus will pull on Janus and that pulls its orbit out and they basically exchange energy and Epimetheus drops in the two moons every four years to avoid collision, they switch orbits.

43:46

It's just wild. There's nothing like that anywhere in space as far as we know, but every four years these two moons avoid collision by swapping orbits.

43:56

And you just see this little windows into the ingenuity of God, even in the realm of outer space, where it's something that, well, yeah,

44:01

I wouldn't have thought of that. What a neat solution. It is, that is amazing. I'm not gonna ask you to comment on my theory here, but I bet it's crossed your mind.

44:16

There's so much out there. I mean, we're talking about, we're talking about other galaxies that have hundreds of trillions of stars and things like that.

44:28

Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe since God created all that, you know, when people say, well, what are we gonna be doing in heaven?

44:37

Well, something tells me there's a lot out there to see that expresses

44:42

God's creativity and beauty. And in fact, there's even planets to be discovered.

44:52

Aren't there, Dr. Lyle? That's right. There are extrasolar planets, planets orbiting around other stars.

44:58

And I was privileged to be able to detect one of those. And how would you know that? Yeah, I was able to detect one of these using the

45:06

Kepler spacecraft. Now, they've made the data publicly available, so anybody can do this, really. But I was looking through the

45:12

Kepler data, and I saw, but basically what the Kepler spacecraft does is it monitors the brightness of thousands of stars simultaneously.

45:20

It measures their brightness very precisely. And of course, it's above Earth's atmosphere, so it can do that. And every now and then, a planet, if a solar system happens to be edge -on relative to ours, the planet will occasionally cross in front of its own star, and that will cause the brightness of the star to dip just a little bit.

45:38

And Kepler keeps track of that. And so what you do is you look for a brightness of a star to dip just a little bit, and then it has to come back up.

45:44

And it's more complicated than that, because stars pulsate, and they themselves can change brightness.

45:49

But you're looking for a very characteristic dip that goes down just a little bit and then comes back up. And you look for multiple passes.

45:55

And so I was able to detect a planet that crosses in front of its star every 200 -some days. I found at least six different times where it had eclipsed its star, came right in front.

46:05

And based on the amount that the star drops, the drop in brightness, I was able to calculate the size of the planet, found it seven times the size of the

46:12

Earth. And it's just very exciting to see this little thing that nobody else had seen before. That's one of the neat things about science.

46:19

When you go into it at the level where you get a PhD, you get to discover something that nobody's seen before.

46:25

And so you have this little, for a few minutes, you have this little secret that is known only to you and God. And of course, you wanna share that with everybody, and then it's not a secret between you and God, but it's neat to be able to see something that no other human being has seen before.

46:40

And it's just neat. It's really very exciting. Very much so. Well, congratulations on that. I remember you mentioning that on Facebook, that you had found that.

46:50

It just seems to me that maybe, I mean, I'm not making it a dogma, but it just seems to me that so much energy has gone into creating all of that that I just wonder if it's always just gonna be way, way out there, or if maybe we have some idea what we might be getting to know more about in the future.

47:13

I don't know. It's certainly a possibility. God certainly has made it something that fascinates us and that our minds recognize as beautiful.

47:23

And so who knows? Certainly, what you just described in your discovery of that planet indicates that you're probably not a big party animal most of the time, and not out there on the social scene.

47:43

Sorry, but wow. When you go to parties, it's, well, let me tell you about what

47:48

I've been doing recently, you know? And you start whipping out these charts and stuff and everybody starts going, hey,

47:54

I need to go someplace other than here. So yeah, that's what happens. So that's why

48:00

I want to be your friend, Jason, is you need some, you know? So that's just all there is to it.

48:07

But then again, maybe there's some more planets that need to be discovered. So just stay, keep working hard.

48:14

So anyways, folks, Biblical Science Institute, at Biblical Science Institute on Facebook.

48:22

Is it Biblical, what's the, is there a straight up website? Yeah, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

48:27

.com is the extension on that. Please check them out. Check out the books that we've been talking about today.

48:35

Support Jason, he needs your support in being able to continue to do what he's doing.

48:41

And I think we need folks who are on the cutting edge. Even when we were in Dallas, I noticed, if you take a stand, there are gonna be people that come after you.

48:53

And sadly, as for some reason, I've discovered in my own life, very often it's religious people that come after you.

49:01

And Jason has his fans as well, just like I do. So pray for him, support his work.

49:10

Look up his stuff on YouTube. There's a lot of good stuff there, including especially make sure to get that one on fractals and watch for the new one.

49:18

Whenever he gets around to getting that one done, I'm gonna be looking forward to that one.

49:24

And I really, really appreciate you joining with us today, Jason. Thank you very much for having me on.

49:29

I really appreciate it. All right, well, we'll be praying for you and thank you very much for your time today. All right, well, thank you indeed to Dr.

49:39

Lyle for joining with us today. And I do hope you'll look up, I didn't show this one real well, but there's the

49:46

Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky and Taking Back Astronomy and The Ultimate Proof of Creation.

49:54

Those are Jason's, some of Jason's books, I think he has. And he has another one coming out, which again, the cover has this guy and he's gesturing and he's got a bow tie, but no head.

50:04

I don't know, it just struck me given how often I wear a bow tie. That's a little bit odd.

50:12

Anyways, after last weekend, I wanna make sure to have the opportunity of having Jason on and making sure that everyone knows about him.

50:22

Now, let me just mention really quickly one more time, next, this coming, the week after this coming weekend,

50:34

October 30th through November 1st, Washington, DC, I will be speaking at least once, possibly twice.

50:45

It's sort of up in the air. But I will be speaking on the two

50:51

Luthers, the subject of why, talk about shifting gears here.

50:59

Why, yeah, yeah, put the clutch in, I'm smelling some smoke here as we're shifting the gears here.

51:09

Why is there such a huge difference between the Luther of 1517 to 1524 and the

51:17

Luther of 1535 to 1546? What happens in that in -between time for basically a shift in view on the part of Luther?

51:32

And what can we learn from that? And why is it that even people on the

51:39

Gospel Coalition website recently have said that we can honor Luther, but we can't celebrate him?

51:46

And what are they talking about? And again, we don't wanna be amongst those that are just doing surface level things, the 500th anniversary that show no real understanding of what actually has taken place in history.

52:01

We want to know and understand in a meaningful fashion what really took place and learn from it and be better servants of Christ in the process.

52:13

And so you can go to events .sovereignnations .com if you want to, there's a link on our website.

52:21

My daughter Summer is going to be speaking there as well. And we were just told today, another speaker has been confirmed.

52:28

I can't, I'm not gonna tell you who it is, but someone quite interesting that is going to be there.

52:34

And like I said, I may be speaking a second time, it all depends, all depends, but you can follow the link on the page and find out about that.

52:46

Now, I announced on Facebook, we're going to have two other topics today. So I'm gonna have to be fairly brief with both if we're gonna sneak it into about a jumbo, long program today.

53:01

We did mega yesterday, so there you go. Two items that we're gonna look at.

53:08

We're gonna finish off with some more Reformation history and looking specifically at the backgrounds, more of the backgrounds again, that give rise to the

53:17

Reformation. I don't even know that we're gonna, we might, no, we're not gonna, we'll get to, we won't even get to Luther until well after October 31st, but a lot of people seem to enjoy it.

53:32

And so we'll get there eventually. But sometime last week, it was,

53:44

I saw on social media the assertion on the part of certain individuals that I again am providing ammunition to the enemies of the faith.

54:03

And what was this about? Well, it was about the fact that when

54:10

David Wood had done his video on Nabeel Qureshi's last words,

54:20

Jesus's last words, Muhammad's last words, that one of the issues that David raised was the quotation from Luke 23, 34.

54:29

And Jesus said, father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. And a

54:37

Muslim apologist who studies textual criticism pointed out the reality.

54:46

And this is a reality. If you grab hold of the

54:51

Greek New Testaments back here, you look at the Nessie Olin text, UBS text, any critical text whatsoever, you will find notation indicating a textual variant at this point.

55:08

And so I simply addressed that and said that in light of the strength of the textual variant, this is something we need to keep in mind.

55:21

And we need to be careful in our utilization of this text in light of the historical reality that early, very early manuscripts of the

55:38

Gospel of Luke, including P75, which P75 and Vaticanus together do not contain that portion of the verse.

55:54

And in light of the textual studies that have been done, we recognize that P75 and Vaticanus are related to one another, but they're not directly genealogically connected in the sense that B is not a copy of P75, but both of them go back to an earlier progenitor.

56:20

It may have been the manuscript from which P75 was copied that then is maybe copied once or twice then becomes the progenitor of B, or maybe only copied once.

56:33

But the point is that the connection between P75 and Vaticanus is earlier than P75.

56:46

So you can rather confidently state that that particular text, which does not contain that phrase, goes back to about 125.

57:00

Maybe if you wanna be really skeptical, 150, but that far back, it's very, very early. And so when you then recognize that Codex Bezekantabrigensis, Codex D, the strange, weird, wonky progenitor of the weird, strange, wonky

57:21

Western text, likewise does not have it. And with D, it's much more relevant in D if it doesn't have something than if it does, because D likes to add weird stuff.

57:38

It's just all there is to it. How many steps Peter goes down after he's freed from jail? Okay, whatever.

57:46

And then Codex Washingtonianus, likewise does not contain this.

57:55

And certain forms, the Syriac, Saharic, Boharic, so in other words, foreign language translations, likewise not containing this.

58:06

What that means is you must deal with the reality of the manuscripts.

58:16

And to hide that reality is not an option for Christians.

58:27

We are wide open with the textual data of the New Testament. We do not hide anything.

58:34

And that must flow from an overarching commitment to want to know what was written by the original authors.

58:44

There may be something interesting to gather from later manuscripts and later variants, and you can start exegeting textual variants all you want, but the overarching drive must be for what was originally written.

59:00

And this gives rise to all of what's going on today. I wanna be commenting in the not -too -distant future on the new

59:08

Tyndale Greek New Testament once I've gotten a chance to do any work with it. And I foresee there's going to be more and more conversation about what's called

59:19

CBGM, the coherence -based genealogical method. The Book of Acts in the

59:28

Odysseo Critica Romaioi was just released, four volumes. I don't have it in here,

59:33

I have it in the other room. Very, very important in my current PhD studies because finally

59:40

I have some CBGM data in regards to P45, because P45 contains sections of Acts, and so one of my primary projects once I finally get back from this last trip, well,

59:52

I've got one shorter trip in December, but this is the last sort of many multi -day trips this year, is diving into that mountain of information found in the

01:00:07

ECM volumes on Acts, four volumes on Acts. I foresee in the future some serious pushback against CBGM.

01:00:24

I have a lot of questions about it. Supposed to tomorrow receive a new book going into depth in that.

01:00:32

Gurian Wasserman have put out a book on that. So lots of work's being done in this area. This is an area of my studies.

01:00:39

The individual who made these accusations trying to tell people I don't have any basis talking about these things.

01:00:47

Of course, this individual has no basis talking about these things, but that's another issue. So I am very much involved in that field, and I have a feeling there's gonna be a lot more discussion about this.

01:01:00

Anyway, the point being, someone would say, well, you're giving ammunition to the enemy.

01:01:08

Well, I've heard that many times. Whenever you get into any meaningful discussion about whether it be textual issues, canonical issues.

01:01:24

I remember the first time I tried to explain to folks some of the canon issues, some of the process by which the canon developed over time.

01:01:35

Oh, there were some people who were just like, you can't talk about that. That might trouble someone.

01:01:41

Or someone might use that against us and things along these lines.

01:01:47

And I'm like, where do you get this idea? If the faith is true, then there's nothing you need to hide and need to hide from.

01:02:00

And if people are troubled to discover something that is truthful about the faith or the history of the

01:02:08

Bible or the history of the canon, history of the church, there's a lot of folks don't think I should even address what

01:02:15

I'm addressing in regards to Luther. Oh, don't talk about why Luther said the things he did about the

01:02:22

Jews, or don't talk about Luther and Fritz Erba. Let's just celebrate

01:02:29

Luther. And it's like, I don't wanna celebrate a cartoon figure. And there's so much to be learned and benefited from by looking at where we can go,

01:02:39

Luther was wrong here. Why was he wrong? In light of how brilliant he was, in light of how much God used him.

01:02:45

If he could be so wrong here, what about us today? Oh, well, that's uncomfortable to people.

01:02:50

People might use that against us. Well, you can't stop people from misusing truth.

01:02:57

You just have to be careful you're speaking the truth. Let me repeat that. You can't stop people from misusing the truth.

01:03:04

You just have to make sure you're speaking the truth. And if you're speaking the truth, if someone misuses it, they will be held accountable by God.

01:03:11

You can't control that. And so I have seen cults and isms abuse the truth over and over and over again.

01:03:23

That doesn't mean you stop speaking the truth. Doesn't mean you start trying to hide things from people.

01:03:29

So for example, in Luke 23, 34, there is a major textual variant.

01:03:38

And as a result, you should be very careful about making large theological points based upon what is truly a highly questionable text.

01:03:53

Now you say, well, that's helping the Muslims. No, it's not. That's true whether I say it or not.

01:04:02

I mean, I'm just astounded that people would say, well, shh, don't talk about that.

01:04:10

Let me give you some commentary. It's interesting. When Dr. Metzger comments on this in the

01:04:18

Metzger textual commentary, he's very, very brief, very short in what he says. He says, the absence of these words from such early and diverse witnesses as P75, BD, W Theta, two different forms of the

01:04:30

Latin. It's too small for me to see what the letter there is, but a form of the Syriac, the

01:04:36

Sahitic Coptic, and certain manuscripts of the Boheric and a few others is most impressive and can scarcely be explained as a deliberate excision by copyists who considering the fall of Jerusalem to be proof that God had not forgiven the

01:04:47

Jews could not allow it to appear that the prayer of Jesus had remained unanswered. At the same time, the

01:04:53

Logion, though probably not a part of the original Gospel of Luke, bears self -evident tokens of its dominical origin and was retained within double square brackets in its traditional place where it had been incorporated by unknown copyists relatively early in the transmission of the third

01:05:10

Gospel. So that's all Metzger says. Says it's very early, and when they use the term dominical origin, they're talking about the high probability that actually does come from Jesus.

01:05:20

Now, I have this on the screen too, but I have to keep scrolling so much, and my mouse thing here is a little loud.

01:05:31

So I'm going to, since I have the printed edition, utilize the old -fashioned paper edition here.

01:05:38

Now, this is the Comfort New Testament Text and Translation Commentary. We used to carry this.

01:05:44

I think it's still in the Amazon bookstore, possibly, maybe. Right, Rich, who isn't listening to me right now?

01:05:50

Yes, it is, okay. Really great book to have. It looks great on your shelf, even if you can buy it in Accordance and other things like that.

01:06:01

He has a much longer commentary, and it's pretty much the same thing that I've said, and so for those who are saying, oh, don't listen to guys, well, okay.

01:06:11

Don't if you don't want to, if you want to be biased and prejudiced and all the rest of the things that these people are. How about just listening to somebody else?

01:06:20

The omission of these words, again, it's the Father forgiveness, they know what they do. In early and diverse manuscripts, the earliest being

01:06:25

P75, cannot be explained as a scribal blunder, but were the words purposely excised,

01:06:31

Westcott and Hort considered willful excision to be absolutely unthinkable, but Marshall can think of several reasons why scribes might've deleted the words, the most convincing of which is that scribes might've been influenced by an anti -Jewish polemic and therefore did not want the text saying that Jesus forgave the

01:06:46

Jews who killed him. This would be especially true for Codex Beze, D, whose scribe has been charged with having anti -Judaic tendencies.

01:06:56

See Eldenep 1962, pages 51 through 62, if you'd like to look that up. However, there are four manuscripts of diverse traditions earlier than D, namely

01:07:05

P75, BW and a portion of the Latin manuscript tradition, which do not include these words.

01:07:12

Thus, D could not have been the first to eliminate the words. The primary argument against excision on the basis of an anti -Judaic polemic is that Jesus was forgiving his

01:07:21

Roman executioners, not the Jewish leaders. The grammar affirms this, in 23 .3, it says,

01:07:26

Estarosan auton, they, the Roman execution squad, crucified him. Then in 23 .34,

01:07:32

Jesus says, aphes autois, forgive them, i .e. the Roman execution squad. Furthermore, Jesus had already pronounced judgment on the

01:07:38

Jewish leaders who would not believe in him, and even worse, who proclaimed that his works were empowered by Beelzebub, the prince of demons,

01:07:45

Matthew 12, 24 through 32. It is easier to explain that the words were not written by Luke, but were added later as early as the second century, for it is attested by Hagesippus and the

01:07:56

Diatessaron. If the words came from an oral tradition, many scholars are of the opinion that they are authentic.

01:08:04

Indeed, Westcott and Hort considered these words in 22, 43 through 44 to be, quote, the most precious among the remains of the evangelical tradition, which were rescued from oblivion by the scribes of the second century, end quote.

01:08:20

Now listen, if you hear what they're saying there, they're saying these are later editions in the second century, but they weren't part of the original, but they've been saved by insertion into second century manuscripts of the

01:08:32

New Testament at various places. But what if the words did not come from an oral tradition about Jesus' life and sayings?

01:08:39

What would have inspired their inclusion? My guess is that the words were added to make Jesus the model for Christian martyrs of offering forgiveness to one's executioners.

01:08:48

Whoever first add the words may have drawn from Acts 7 .60, where Stephen forgives his executioners. Since Stephen's final words parallel Jesus' final utterances, it seemed appropriate to have

01:08:57

Luke 23 .34 emulate Acts 7 .60. Or the words could have come from martyrdom stories, such as the account of the execution of James the just, who is said to have forgiven his executioners.

01:09:07

Thus, it can be imagined that church leaders told would -be martyrs to forgive their executors, because Jesus had done the same.

01:09:21

Contrary to the external evidence and good internal arguments, the words appear in three

01:09:26

Greek editions, the TR, the Westcott -Hort, and the Nestle United Bible Society. And in all

01:09:31

English translations, because they have become so much a part of the traditional gospel text, that editors of Greek texts and Bible translators alike are not willing to excise this classic statement from their text.

01:09:45

The first known person to excise the sentence from the text was the first diarthotos of Codex Sinaiticus, corrector one, who worked on the manuscript before it left the scriptorium.

01:09:56

Evidently, this diarthotos used a different exemplar, which must have antedated the fourth century, which that did not have these words.

01:10:04

A second corrector, several centuries later, expunged the first corrector's deletion marks. Westcott -Hort,

01:10:10

Nestle, all in Nestle United Bible Society, double -bracketed this text to show their strong doubts about its inclusion.

01:10:16

All English versions included, and all with the exception of KJV, which does not have marginal notes, have marginal notes about its omission in various manuscripts.

01:10:26

So here's the question. Was Dr. Comfort giving ammunition to the enemy?

01:10:34

Should he have been quiet about that? Not said anything about it? My critics, there's much to be critical about me about, but sometimes what we find out when we listen to our critics is that they have some really foundational epistemological problems, and some foundational issues in regards to consistency in apologetic methodology.

01:11:06

No, you don't hide this information. You hit it head -on, and you then seek to be consistent in handling every other text where you have similar issues, whether it's the woman taken adultery, longer ending of Mark, issues along those lines.

01:11:27

You do not hide anything. That's not how the

01:11:33

Christian faith should work. All right, now let's put the clutch in again.

01:11:47

So we've gone from stargazing galaxies, presuppositional apologetics with Jason Lyle, to a brief discussion of Luke 23, 34, textual criticism and apologetic methodology in response to certain deeply prejudiced and biased critics.

01:12:11

And now back to the Reformation. At least

01:12:17

I do have wide and varied interests, and maybe that's why you at least get some interesting stuff on the program here.

01:12:29

We had spoken of Wycliffe, and we had talked about the

01:12:34

Lollards, and then we'd sort of run out of time. I wonder how many people noticed that I've changed the bookshelves.

01:12:41

Have you noticed that... It just struck me that so much of what was behind me was heresy.

01:12:50

Well, of course you noticed, that's because I was looking for certain books. But the top shelf now is all my books.

01:12:57

So from here over to here, and I put Dan Wallace's stuff, because I rode my bike by Dan Wallace's house.

01:13:05

Well, it wasn't Dan Wallace's house. I didn't know where it was until I was driving someplace with Emilio, and Emilio said, oh, by the way, see over there, that's

01:13:13

Dan Wallace's house. And the funny thing was, I had ridden by it twice on my bike without knowing it.

01:13:19

So I wrote him a note, and I said, by the way, if tomorrow morning, if you're up before sunrise, and you see a rather odd man riding past the back of your house, waving at you from a bike, that'll be me.

01:13:32

And this started a conversation between us. I didn't know you were here, and so on and so forth. And then the rather dry statement,

01:13:40

I won't be up that early. So I guess Dan is a little bit like Jason along those lines.

01:13:49

Not quite that early morning person like I am. So yeah,

01:13:56

I get it. I was out at sunrise this morning doing a 5K. So I put

01:14:02

Dan Wallace's stuff, and then, of course, the Webster King set over there, Raymond's Systematic Theology. But I need this one for...

01:14:11

This is my first book. There's the first book, Fatal Flaw. Didn't expect that to be my first book, but it's available on Kindle now, by the way, too.

01:14:19

So this is from 1989. That's how long ago. But I have a quote that I have here because the next part of our study is

01:14:29

Jan Hus. Jan Hus, John Hus, 1369 to 1415.

01:14:39

That didn't come out very clearly. Jan Hus was a Bohemian priest in the town of Husanek.

01:14:47

Hus, Husanek, that's where it comes from, means goose, goose town. Jan Goose, John of the

01:14:55

Goose, from the town of Husanek in Southern Bohemia. In the 1390s, he encountered

01:15:02

Wicklow's ideas as they spread across Europe. Remember, they couldn't spread as quickly because this is prior to what?

01:15:11

The invention of the printing press, at least in the West, in the middle of the next century.

01:15:17

In 1391, he was appointed preacher at Bethlehem Chapel and was made director of the

01:15:23

University of Prague. If you go to Prague today, you can go see Bethlehem Chapel and these places and sort of follow the life of Jan Hus.

01:15:32

Remember, one of the pre -Reformation reformers. Most probably due to the influence of Wicklow's ideas, he translated the

01:15:40

Bible into Czech. You always seem to, it seems to be connected with the work of the

01:15:48

Spirit of God amongst the people when there is a desire to translate the scriptures into the language of that people.

01:15:56

And so he does this. He preaches the doctrines of Wicklow, who was very popular in Prague.

01:16:04

And this one always caught me because here's another. Yeah, I do have a lot of varied interests.

01:16:13

They all are somewhat related, though not necessarily all the cycling and running and rowing stuff.

01:16:22

But he also confessed sort of in a sense of confession.

01:16:30

He also confessed to like to play chess. And I love to play chess too.

01:16:36

I don't have time anymore. And to play well, to get better than I once was as a kid, because I was very good as a kid.

01:16:46

I mean, if you're 14, you play 1800 USCF level chess against 60 year olds at 14.

01:16:54

I really got into it as a kid. I would take too much time. You just have to study so many openings.

01:16:59

It's just not really a possibility anymore. And I have numerous chess programs on my iPhone that can crush me with regularity.

01:17:07

So it's not quite as exciting. But anyways, Jan Hus liked to play chess. Theologically, he drank deeply of Wickliffe.

01:17:16

He denied transubstantiation, which Wickliffe had recognized was a modern dogma. And it was.

01:17:23

At that time, it was barely 150, 160 years old as far as dogmatic status was concerned.

01:17:31

Taught justification by faith alone and said that Christ, not the

01:17:36

Pope, is the head of the church. And if you've watched some of the Luther movies, when

01:17:44

Eck goes after Luther at the Leipzig Disputation, this is what he's quoting from.

01:17:52

He's quoting from Jan Hus and specifically saying that Christ, not the Pope, is the head of the church and things along those lines.

01:18:01

As a result of these teachings, he was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 under a promise of safe conduct from King Sigismund.

01:18:09

Now, the Council of Constance was not called about Jan Hus. It was called to heal the schism in the papacy, which we'll talk about here in a moment.

01:18:22

Well, depending on how much time we have. And so they had bigger fish to fry, but he was called before the council since it was meeting, why not?

01:18:32

King Sigismund gives him a promise of safe conduct. And so he comes into town with a small army of supporters and protectors.

01:18:43

So what his enemies did is they just kept putting off dealing with him until many of those supporters and protectors had to go back home.

01:18:51

They had crops to take care of. They had lands to manage.

01:18:58

And so finally that small army is gone.

01:19:04

And so Hus is arrested and brought before the council July 6th, 1415.

01:19:11

He asked repeatedly to be shown from scripture where he had erred, sounds familiar. His entreaties were ignored.

01:19:19

He was forced to sit during his farcical trial, dressed in a black robe, wearing a dunce cap with devils painted on it.

01:19:28

If you want any further evidence of how ridiculously unfair the trial itself was.

01:19:38

Wow, I found this old copy of the Fatal Flaw and I just opened it up and found a business card.

01:19:49

And it is one of my old, old, this would be sometime after 89, but it's got our old phone number, 266 -2537, fax colon area 99.

01:20:08

Oh yeah. Remember that? Yeah, there it is. That was in the back. I hadn't seen that.

01:20:15

It's fun when you find that old stuff and your books go, wow. See when

01:20:20

I last looked at this. But here is the story of his death. It's found in the

01:20:25

Fatal Flaw, which just comes from Philip Schaaf.

01:20:35

Hus was led by an armed guard of 1 ,000 men to the place of his death. Here's Philip Schaaf's story.

01:20:43

It was midday. The prisoner's hands were fastened behind his back and his neck bound to the stake by a chain.

01:20:49

On the same spot sometime before, or so the chronicler notes, a cardinal's worn out mule had been buried.

01:20:56

The straw and wood were heaped up around Hus's body to the chin and rosin sprinkled upon them.

01:21:01

The offer of life was renewed. If he would recant, he refused and said, I shall die with joy today in the faith of the gospel which

01:21:07

I have preached. When Rickenthal, who was standing by, suggested a confessor, he replied, there is no need of one.

01:21:14

I have no mortal sin. At the call of the bystanders, they turned his face away from the east.

01:21:20

And as the flames arose, he sang twice, Christ, thou son of the living God, have mercy upon me.

01:21:25

The wind blew the fire into the martyr's face and his voice was hushed. He died praying and singing.

01:21:32

To remove, if possible, all chance of preserving relics from the scene, Hus's clothes and shoes were thrown into the merciless flames.

01:21:40

The ashes were gathered up and cast into the Rhine River. So there was the end of Jan Hus at the

01:21:53

Council of Constance. And so I ask you to keep in mind the fact that 106 years later,

01:22:07

Martin Luther is riding in a wagon into the city of Worms.

01:22:19

And according to at least some sources, he sees scrawled on the wall in German, Luther, the

01:22:28

Saxon Hus. And this would have communicated to him that even though he had the promise of safe conduct from the emperor, that he was a heretic just as Hus was.

01:22:44

And Luther had admitted by this point in time, he was a Husite. He had not known that when he had started.

01:22:50

Eck had forced him to come to that realization at the Leipzig Disputation. But what would that have communicated to Martin Luther?

01:23:01

But that he was going to his death. And that really is what he was thinking.

01:23:07

That really was what he was expecting as he did not believe that the safe conduct promise that had been given to him would have any more positive effect for him than it had for Jan Hus.

01:23:24

And so there is the Husite heresy, which while somewhat suppressed for a time being, would once again come to the fore in Martin Luther.

01:23:38

Now, it's very, very important. And I only have a few minutes before we wrap up.

01:23:47

And I've said this before, but so much of this is new to so many people that it's important to repeat things and emphasize their importance.

01:23:56

There were many factors that came together in the rise of the

01:24:02

Reformation. And if we don't recognize what they were, we will end up with an inaccurate, invalid view of what took place at the time of the

01:24:15

Reformation. One of the things that happened was a degradation of the power and authority of the papacy itself.

01:24:26

And it wasn't so much due to the pornography way back in the 10th century at that time.

01:24:34

No, this was a much more recent memory. And it's called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. And basically what this was, what it refers to is the papacy had been involved in political activities since the 6th century and before.

01:24:49

At times who the Pope would be was decided by who had the biggest army, or who had the most amount of money, had the most political influence.

01:24:59

By the beginning of the 14th century, the French, the Franks, had gained the upper hand in the control of the papacy.

01:25:09

You've controlled the cardinals, you control the papacy. In 1305, the

01:25:15

Archbishop of Bordeaux was elected as Pope and he took the name Clement V. But he never went to Rome.

01:25:24

Instead, he was the first Avignon Pope, for he moved the papacy to Avignon, France.

01:25:32

So he was elected by the French cardinals, but said, you know, I'm not really big on that Italy thing.

01:25:38

I like things here better. And so move the papacy to Avignon, France.

01:25:44

For most of the rest of the 14th century, no Pope lived in Rome. No Pope lived in Rome.

01:25:53

Clement was succeeded by John XXII, a ruthless, powerful man who was then succeeded by Benedict XII.

01:26:02

Remember, we had Benedict XVI, who's still alive, actually. And Benedict XII began the construction of the papal palace in Avignon.

01:26:15

Benedict was involved in helping France against England in the Hundred Years' War, as was his successor,

01:26:21

Clement VI. Clement was an extravagant spender, even buying

01:26:26

Avignon for the papacy. Hey, I like this city, let's buy it. His successor,

01:26:32

Innocent VI, was equally wasteful in spending money, and he spent a good deal of time working on regaining papal control over Italy, which had been seriously compromised by the move to Avignon, which makes sense.

01:26:45

Now, Urban V was a simple man who wished to see reform in the church.

01:26:51

He returned to Rome in 1367, began rebuilding projects, but eventually gave up the effort and returned to Avignon in 1370.

01:27:01

The next pope, Gregory XI, left Avignon in 1376 and returned to Rome.

01:27:07

Upon his death in 1378, however, Urban VI was elected. However, the cardinals, about 80 % of which were

01:27:14

French, had become accustomed to their privilege and getting to live in France. And upon finding

01:27:20

Urban II independently -minded, they declared his election null and void and elected another pope,

01:27:26

Clement VIII. Armed forces of two popes clashed. Clement retired to Avignon in 1381, marking the beginning of the

01:27:34

Great Schism. France, so now you've got two popes. You've got one in Rome, you've got one in Avignon.

01:27:41

France, Spain, and Scotland supported Clement VII. Italy, the

01:27:47

Empire of the Scandinavian nations, and England supported Urban. Parallel elections continued right into the next century.

01:27:56

With neither side willing to compromise with the other, both popes are involved in anathematizing the other pope, and hence their followers in other nations.

01:28:08

You now have Europe completely split between a two -headed church. Some of the cardinals from both sides met at Pisa in 1409 because they recognized this could not continue on.

01:28:22

Attempted to heal the schism, both popes refused to attend, so the cardinals deposed both popes and elected another,

01:28:29

Alexander V, but neither of the first two popes accepted the third, so now there were three popes after the

01:28:36

Council of Pisa. The council also raised what's called the conciliar issue, that being the idea that a council was superior to a pope.

01:28:47

Finally, in 1414, the Council of Constance was called, which we just made reference to in regards to Jan Hus.

01:28:54

It sat for four years, from 1414 to 1418. We know in 1415 what they did with Jan Hus.

01:29:01

In 1417, a new pope, Martin V, was elected by the

01:29:07

Council of Constance, and the other three agreed to his election.

01:29:14

So you had a healing of the schism, but that healing required a council, and so for a period of time, there is a rise in conciliarism, the view that councils are superior to the papacy.

01:29:29

It seemed for a while that conciliarism had triumphed, but this triumph was short -lived, and soon the popes were again proclaiming their superiority to the councils, and men died who continued to hold to the conciliar position, even though, historically, the papacy had not been able to heal itself.

01:29:46

It required a council to do so. So why is this important? Because the great schism and the

01:29:52

Babylonian captivity shook people's confidence in the divine authority of the papacy. It was not that long ago that they knew that which pope you followed depended upon which nation you were in, and it was clearly driven by politics, and that no one really knew which pope was the right pope, and even to this day, when

01:30:09

Roman Catholics say, oh, we can trace ourselves all the way back, they have to make things up as they go along, as they go through those periods.

01:30:17

Who was the true pope? Nobody then knew. It's ridiculous to say, well, it was this guy.

01:30:23

Well, you know, if you don't accept Avignon popes, there wasn't a papacy for an entire period of time.

01:30:32

So it had shaken people's confidence at that point in time in the papacy.

01:30:39

So that's one of the first things that was necessary, because what is Luther fundamentally saying when he openly rejects the selling of indulgences?

01:30:50

Papal authority is not final. The scripture is. Well, you can't do that when everyone thinks the pope is the final authority in all things.

01:31:02

So that's one of the issues. We will look at the others the next time we get a chance to talk.

01:31:08

We'll look at the fall of Constantinople, printing the Renaissance and other things that were very necessary in bringing about the

01:31:15

Reformation, which we're all talking about. And we'll continue to talk about even after October 31st of this year.

01:31:23

Well, that was a lot of stuff, a lot of different topics. We like doing that kind of program. Hope it's been useful to you.